This week's top 5 long reads

The roller coaster of losing health.Analyze the film zone of interest. A rare scammer. Calculation of love and genetics. He recalls a dark childhood. The first edition in 2024 includes all that and more.

tom scocca | new york magazine | January 2, 2024 | 6,677 words

It can sometimes feel like medical mystery stories are everywhere. Long new coronavirus. A rare disorder. New York Times' The very popular “Diagnosis” column. It's a genre unto itself, and we now know its beats: beginnings, setbacks, revelations, and endings. But Tom Scocca's own experience shows no such arc. From the moment he notices the symptoms, at first they are harmless, but they do not last long, and only uncertainty is his constant. “I told this story over and over again, to different doctors, until it sounded almost like a coherent story,” he writes.the do not have Of course, it's a consistent story. Despite what similar stories might suggest, that's not how things work. But Scocca addresses this contradiction head-on in his understated, even ironic prose. Then I started delivering rice. ” His illness took hold during a period of professional hiatus, where financial fears lurk in the background, made more dire by each new physical problem. He finished his recruitment before going to his ER. He is interviewed by phone a few hours after waking up from the muscle biopsy. All the while, his body betrays him in novel and disconcerting ways. That doesn't mean he can't find some relief. he does it What he doesn't find are answers, and that's exactly what makes this work so unsettling. “What disability advocates have been saying all along,” he writes, “is that it is usually not universally accepted. It means that they are the same living human beings.”PR

Giles Harvey | New York Times Magazine | December 19, 2023 | 4,710 words

I have seen zone of interest, the movie featured in this article has now been released twice. It's a hypnotic and disturbing masterpiece. For those who don't know, this movie is about the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hess, who lived in a house that shared a garden wall with the camp. Director Jonathan Glazer never lets the audience see what's going on inside the camp. God, Can you hear me? I decided instead to focus my lens on the everyday existence of Hess, his wife, and their five children. The effects of this bifurcation of sight and sound are extraordinary, as author Giles Harvey explains in this essay. “While the average viewer is unlikely to see themselves in the guise of a CEO in a death camp, a family that sleepwalks through their lives, ignoring the suffering around them, feels more familiar.” “Maybe,” Harvey wrote. “To a greater or lesser degree, we all ignore and deny the pain of others, especially when that pain is inflicted by our own governments on specific enemies.” It's fitting that it's the subject of one of the best pieces of film criticism I've ever read. Harvey takes stock of the situation from philosophy, history, and conversations with Glaser and his team. zone of interest Both in the Holocaust film canon and in our current moment. See Trumpism. See also: Gaza. “When I first started working on this, I really couldn't understand how society could submit to such a horrible idea,” Glaser told Harvey at one point. “While making the film, it became blindingly obvious.”SD

Chris Walker | 5280 | December 29, 2023 | 6,863 words

While browsing through the links I had missed while on vacation, this colorful illustration by Andre Carrillo caught my eye. 5280 This story caught my eye. I would be happy if you clicked on it. There weren't many stories that grabbed my attention during the post-holiday coronavirus chaos, but this piece by Chris Walker about a con man named Aaron Clark was easy to read and I enjoyed it. Clark was a rising star in Colorado technology in 2020, an up-and-coming Black businessman with the potential to spark change at a time when companies are pledging to invest more in DEI initiatives. But as with any business, the only thing Mr. Clark brought to the table was financial turmoil. As Walker traces the breadcrumbs of this mysterious man's past, he discovers a history of business fraud in Nairobi's emerging tech community, both in California and beyond, and a man who has a habit of disappearing and changing identities to start anew. . But why would someone with the ability to make a real impact resort to this? “In important respects, he never fits the classic con artist mold,” Walker writes. Ultimately, Clark's deception has sown mistrust in Colorado's startup world, which now has difficulty getting buy-in from Black entrepreneurs and DEI consultants and attracting investors. A story of strange sadness. —CLR

Krishika Vallagur | Harper's Magazine | August 1, 2023 | 8,133 words

I missed this piece when it was first published harpers in August, but luckily it caught my attention afterwards. guardian An edited version was published in December. Nkechi and Subomi met at work. They first spoke while doing community service together. They first went for drinks at a dive bar, and a few days later Nkechi revealed his genotype for the first time. From the beginning, they knew they didn't need to go on a “no business” date. Subomi had two copies of her S gene, which has abnormal hemoglobin, and suffered from sickle cell disease. Nkechi was a carrier, she had one abnormal S gene and one normal her A gene. He had a 50% chance that their children would contract the disease. Opening with their love story, Krishka Varaguru instantly draws you into a world where shared genetic screening is commonplace and social norms against dating two people with the sickle cell gene are reinforced. Perhaps that's to be expected in a society where nearly 6 million people carry the disease (Nigeria is the sickle cell capital of the world). But what if love happens “like a coconut falling on your head while you're walking down the street”? Valagur meticulously digs into the people behind the statistics, speaking to many people who have the disease, including those who are single, married, separated, parents, and those without parents. But Nkechi and Subomi's story is a consistent one, and their investment in the story best illustrates how devastating genotypic calculations can be. —C.W.

NC Happe | Guernica | December 11, 2023 | 5,021 words

It can be tempting to blow off the dust of your old self and reinvent yourself in a strange place. NC Happe talks about moving to Canada in this beautiful, but sometimes difficult read. Guernica, she recalls her childhood in Minnesota and her father's dark moods and explosive temper, along with the casual and sometimes invited violence on the playground. The cinematic details make this essay an absorbing read. You can hear the sound of a dying deer and imagine its untimely death. You can feel the author's chapped, dry lips. You can taste the copper when it bleeds. “I realized that violence runs in the blood of everything, everywhere,” she writes. “For me, I had to leave the country to learn this. For the doe I had in my childhood, it was as simple and silent as jumping a fence.” Through this thoughtful piece, Happe shows us that while we can sometimes jump the fence and leave home, we may be surprised at what we can't leave behind. —K.S.

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