Amidst all the other cases of rage, one of the times I got the angriest in 2019 was when I found out, thanks to one of those free libraries, that David Books edited a Best American Essays some years back. One of the best experiences I had this year was teaching Creative Non-Fiction for the first time, and near the end of the semester I sent students lose on longreads and longform to search around on topics of interest to them, and it made me think about the categories that fall under this term, which I’ve used to group these reads. Whether there is more great writing, especially in left magazines, now than at some other time I can’t say, but I can’t think of a year when I read so many amazing essays and articles. Not all the ones on this list are from 2019, because that’s not how I read. I tried to take no more than one or two from any given publication, since there are so many wonderful ones out there right now.
Personal Narratives:
Prachi Gupta, “Stories about My Brother” for Jezebel. It’s not enough to say this essay is “about” how masculinity killed the author’s brother, even as he blamed feminism for his unhappiness, or about the courage it took for the author to look for answers about who he had become, but in any case it’s worth an infinite number of thinkpieces about incels, and would be heartbreaking even if it weren’t beautifully and smartly written, but it is those things also.
Walter Johnson, “Guns in the Family” for Boston Review. This was in Best American Essays, thankfully not edited by David Books this year, but I don’t know how many people read it, but my students did, which was a little unfair since it draws on a scholar’s lifetime of insight along with his experience growing up with guns. The scene about trading stories about his rural background in exchange for yucks in grad school I’m sure will resonate with many.
Righteous Rage:
Rhonda Lieberman “Painting Over the Dirty Truth” for The New Republic. Come for the bitter truth about who is funding your favorite museums (Kander may be gone but the Kochs and Sacklers remain!), the craven uses of “woke” art to cover a multitude of sins, and stay for the best use of a Soprano’s reference you didn’t know you needed because in your mind it’s still the start of the 2010s, not the end.
Lizzie Presser, “When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested” for Pro Publica. Alternative title: “I tremble for my country when I remember God is Just.”
People’s Histories: (lots of these because they are probably my favorite thing to read)
Heather Ann Thompson, “How a Series of Jail Rebellions Rocked New York – and Woke A City” for The Nation. Fascinating, heartbreaking and timely story I knew next to nothing about despite my immersion in the literature of protest during this time – how prison rebellions went far beyond Attica.
Kathryn Schultz, “The Many Lives of Pauli Murray,” for The New Yorker. A few folks know my dream book project would be something like Sharp, but for feminists: a series of profiles in which political life is not opposed to individuality but the very thing that makes self possible. Murray is a case in point, as is Schultz’s masterful accounting of Murray’s many lives, pioneer legal work, complex gender identity and final fascinating turn as an ordained minister.
Sarah Jaffe, “The Road Not Taken,” for The New Republic. From today’s plant closings, a look back at what happened when autoworkers decided they wanted to struggle not just for better working conditions but for jobs that didn’t suck. I gave it to my students because such a thing is so hard for them – for so many of us – to imagine.
Emily Bass, “How to Survive a Footnote,” for n+1. Fascinating account of the struggle for Global AIDS justice, which affected millions of people but is a literal footnote to the Oscar nominated (wonderful) documentary about ACT-UP and a parable about the activism of generations (her case mine) that slip through our narratives – worth 10 think pieces on why there are no Gen X socialists.
Isaac Brosilow, “The Skokie March That Wasn’t”for Jewish Currents. Why the famous Nazi march through Skokie never actually happened, what happened instead, and why it’s about segregation and race and divisions in the Jewish community and how to fight fascism, not just the ACLU and free speech. Also featuring a cover photo of my badass uncle as a handsome young thing.
Profiles:
Rachel Kushner on Ruth Wilson Gilmore for The New York Times Book Review. I’m fascinated by the fact that this piece, by a novelist, does such a better job of presenting the ideas of a truly radical thinker than most profiles written by “serious” political folk. With its ability to dramatize a scene of Gilmore engaging the regular arguments against prison abolition that she’s heard a million times, it’s rare profile of a thinker that cares about how thinking and changing minds actually happens.
Sarah Marshall on Tonya Harding for The Believer. I discovered Marshall’s You’re Wrong About podcast this year which took me to this piece about class, media spectacles and what it means to be just about the best in the world at something and have that not be enough.
Takedowns. I write a lot of reviews, but usually of things I like or want to write, and I’m conflict adverse and not very clever, so my admiration of a righteous take down is as strong as my conviction I’ll never write one (though this I guess came close). These two both manage to be hilarious and enjoyable while also showing how the badness of the books in question show something important:
Kate Aronoff on Jonahtan Safran Foer and the sad climate boys for The Nation. I’m an English Professor who writes about politics, so I like to think novelists are capable of saying something about the world, and the last thing I wrote this year, was about that. But boy, when they get it wrong, do they ever. Remember when John Updike wrote a 9/11 novel, because the world suddenly – suddenly! – was dark and confusing and bigger than which neighbor you were fucking? When it comes to climate, Aronoff shows, such things are not just silly but a wasted opportunity – we do need new ways of telling stories, and it’s maybe too simple to say well to do accoladed authors who just discovered things are like, really, really bad, aren’t the ones to do it, but there it is.
Tobi Haslett on Thomas Chatterton Williams: Y’all know about Haslett, right? No? Going to end by letting him begin: “Something is happening out there in the dark fields of “the discourse.” Incoherence is now a virtue. Rather than irony, modesty, discernment, ambivalence, or the mental sprightliness needed to parse conflicting views, a proud refusal to make solid arguments may be the cure for our divided times. Incoherence strikes a blow to partisan bickering and campus groupthink. Incoherence recoils from “tribes.” If an opinion sounds half-baked, or a claim brashly obtuse, it’s simply plowing through your pieties and wrenching open your padlocked mind. Incoherence is courage, incoherence is pluralism, incoherence is an ideological opera full of swordfights and forbidden love. Incoherence thrills and exhausts people; in this way, it resembles thinking.”
Read the whole thing; happy New Year of reading to all.