The horrific trafficking of intimate partners. An homage to Pitchfork. Memories of a childhood spent in a Kentucky kitchen. Risking lives for extreme skiing. And why we need to calm down about UFOs.
Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan | Cosmopolitan | January 30, 2024 | 3,899 words
When someone first suggested that her boyfriend might be trafficking her, Kayla Goedinghaus was incredulous. She was being abused—beaten, drugged, denied money—but trafficked? In time, as Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan detail in this gripping story, Goedinghaus came to understand the truth about her situation, which was far from unusual. "As of 2020, an estimated 39 percent of sex-trafficking victims in this country were brought into it by intimate partners," Johnston and Quinlan write. "Through physical force, manipulation, or fraud, those victims are compelled to engage in sex acts for the trafficker's benefit. That could mean posing for nudes he secretly sells to cover his gambling debts or sleeping with random men off the street so he can score drugs or letting the landlord watch sex acts through the bedroom window as a form of rent payment." In Goedinghaus's case, her boyfriend, Rick, was peddling her as a commodity among his friends, who allegedly included powerful men such as Trammell Crow Jr., an heir to a massive real-estate fortune (and brother to Harlan Crow, the conservative donor who's been bankrolling Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's lifestyle for years). This piece, then, serves as a corrective to widespread assumptions about trafficking, including who perpetrates it and who is hurt by it. Narratively speaking, the story's crux is an unlikely friendship. Before Goedinghaus, Rick trafficked his ex-wife, Julia Hubbard, and the two women encountering each other changed everything—indeed, it made this feature possible. "Setting eyes on each other for the first time," Johnston and Quinlan write, "Julia and Kayla were zapped with an eerie sense of mutual recognition, as though they were standing on opposite sides of a looking glass: Kayla as the new Julia and Julia as the former Kayla. They even looked alike." —SD
Dan McQuade | Defector | January 31, 2024 | 2,944 words
I've always loved music. I grew up recording music videos set to New Edition, Salt-N-Pepa, and Bel Biv Devoe on VHS with my cousins, and listening to '80s hip-hop in the tiny back seat of my older brother's Porsche 914 convertible while he and a friend "cruised for babes." Bay Area radio stations LIVE 105 and KOME taught me about grunge and alternative rock, and my first underground rave opened the door to a whole new world. In the '90s, I wasn't yet reading about music online, still relying on my local Tower Records to discover it: as a customer, combing through new releases and reading issues of Urb and NME, and later as an employee, obsessively organizing its modest "Dance/Electronica" selection and getting recommendations from my coworkers. But I don't know much about music; I have no formal music education (except for a brief dalliance with the violin) and have certainly never felt confident enough to write about it. So I was drawn to Dan McQuade's thoughts on Pitchfork, the music publication Condé Nast announced would be folded into GQ. Right at the start, McQuade states that he, too, doesn't know much about music. But Pitchfork, especially in its early years, helped to fill in the gaps. His writing resonates with me: it's personal, funny but not snarky, and comes from the heart. He reflects on how Pitchfork's reviews had influenced him, particularly those of music critic James P. Wisdom. How the site had been a champion of electronic music since the '90s. And how, in a very '00s bloggy way, it was an outlet for people to review music but also to express themselves in the process, freely and irreverently, about things they cared about. "Pitchfork not only gave me bands to listen to, but told me how I might think about them," he writes. Wisdom also puts it nicely, saying that "contextualizing and humanizing how we find and explore music is valuable." A lovely essay and stroll down memory lane, with links to fun archived reviews. (And +1 for the playlist inspiration: I now have Moby on rotation nonstop.) —CLR
Crystal Wilkinson | Oxford American | January 23, 2024 | 3,409 words
In this wonderful book excerpt from Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson serves up memories of her childhood in Black Appalachia, spent with Granny Christine in their Kentucky kitchen. This piece is more than mere memoir; Wilkinson reflects on roots that run deep and close, the hefty domestic contribution women make, and preservation as a labor of love. For Wilkinson, recipes transcend ingredients and instructions to prepare a dish. They're stories imbued with wisdom and experience handed down and across generations from ancestors that remain present in spirit, supervising each new iteration of Granny's jam cake. "In the corner of my grandmother's kitchen, spirits shimmered near the bucket of well water, hovered over the olive refrigerator, floated above the flour sifter, and glided around the coal-burning stove," she writes. Granny Christine's cake recipe—written in "her perfect cursive" and reproduced in full in the piece—is an incantation that conjures home for Wilkinson: "3 sticks of butter, 2 cups sugar, 2 cups flour, 6 eggs …" Take the time to whisper that recipe to yourself and feel full, emotionally. Needless to say this piece was deeply satisfying; I savored it from beginning to end. —KS
The Guardian | Simon Akam | January 30, 2024 | 5,932 words
I love to ski. Well, I love to ski on a nice clear day, on a nice clear run. Anything too steep or too icy, and I am edging down that slope inch by inch, brow deeply furrowed, sweat beading, pole dragging behind me (as if that would stop me). I am in awe of people like Jérémie Heitz, who can sweep down an impossible cliff face with such grace it becomes poetry, poles firmly up front and part of a fluid, gliding movement. Heitz's specialty is at the extreme end of professional freeriding—his descents are so steep the gradient is twice that of some "expert" ski resort terrain. Simon Akam describes these icy peaks so vividly I could feel my heart pounding in my mouth as "Heitz slid sideways down the first few meters, made a turn, and then cut down onto the highest grey smear of ice." He is committed to his reporting—even skiing with Heitz and completing some terrifying runs himself. But this piece is more than a litany of daredevil feats: it's a reflection on the nature of extreme sports and the sponsors who support them. Heitz has lost 20 friends—normal in this world. Can that ever be worth it? —CW
Nicholson Baker | New York | January 31, 2024 | 6,751 words
Close Encounters of the Third Kind filled me with wonder as a kid, and an '80s childhood provided no shortage of material to keep that wonder alive: Flight of the Navigator; The Last Starfighter; E.T. But despite being primed to believe, I've never been able to fully accept any of the countless UFO sightings and reports that have emerged over the decades. I never knew why, only that it all felt … vague. And then I read Nicholson Baker's lively, informed takedown in New York. Oh, I thought. Duh. Regardless of where you land on the believer spectrum, there's a lot to like here. (Well, maybe not for the full-throated evangelists like Avi Loeb, who claims skeptics and critics "behave like terrorists.") Baker's stance is clear from the get go, but his fiction career serves him well, leavening his skepticism with crackling phrases like "wiggy-sounding." He's dismissing, but not dismissive, which can be a tough needle to thread. He reports generously, not simply combing through archives but connecting with many of today's ufology luminaries. None of that, though, shakes his well-grounded thesis: our entire flying-saucer mythology is derived from Cold War weapons research, carried out via high-tech balloons. Sure, I'll still wonder about what might be out there—hell, it's logically impossible to think we're the only sentient lifeforms around—but until there's something a little more undeniable, I'll be living on Baker Street. —PR
Audience Award
The piece our readers loved the most this week is ...
Leslie Jamison | The New Yorker | January 15, 2024 | 7,126 words
In this excerpt of her forthcoming book, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison recounts the early months of her daughter's life. During that period, Jamison juggled a book tour, a teaching career, and the demands of a newborn—amid the growing realization that she wanted to leave her marriage. —KS
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