Top Authors Share Their Must Reads

Katie Baker: “No matter what Jamie Lauren Keiles writes about—credit card miles; summer camp; Adam Sandler, or a journey to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally—their work never fails to make me feel like I’m a tween again, lying on my bedroom floor, devouring some vivid, brilliant, and also highly informative slice of life in a magazine and thinking: ‘It would be SO COOL to write like that.’ With a keen eye for absurdity (and bullshit) and a generous capacity for both explaining and understanding humankind, Keiles is a writer who brings depth to the silly and lightness to the self-serious. And Sturgis is definitely both.”

Weiyi Cai: “It’s always heartwarming to see an emotional and uplifting piece of journalism. The raw emotion displayed in this story is one of the most beautiful things I encountered this year; it made me laugh and it made me cry. It’s so simple and straightforward, yet so powerful. It reminded me that despite all the horrible things that can happen around us, these human connections and love are what keep us going.”

Cody Cassidy: “Though I could go in a million directions, one story that I haven’t been able to get out of my head was The Atlantic’s ‘One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps’ by Tahir Hamut Izgil. The beautiful writing and the tragic details Tahir delivers about a crisis where specifics seem so hard to obtain personalizes the plight of the Uyghurs in a way I haven’t otherwise seen. It provides a face to a story often reported with numbers, which may be why I’ve found myself thinking of his article often in the months since I read it.”

Tom Chatfield: “A neuroscientist and novelist, Hoel’s writing crackles with urgent ideas, and this essay is no exception. It explores the anxiety of influence via AIs creation of ‘a deep fake of meaning itself’—and gave this author shivers.”

Monica Chin: “I think it’s a great reflection on the forms that discourse took in the early 2010s, and the ways in which young internet communities navigated the new cultural mouthpieces they’d never had before. I find myself thinking about this story a lot as I listen to today’s debates about ‘cancel culture’—it does a great job highlighting the nuance that I wish more of those conversations had.”

Mitchell Clark: “Generally true crime isn’t my thing, but there was something gripping about this story. Even though there’s no real answers, the writer talking to the lost ranger’s wife and going through all the details of his life that wouldn’t seem odd had he not disappeared was compelling.”

Saundra Dalton-Smith MD: “In a culture where there are many opportunities to become distracted, this article by Nir Eyal provided a fresh perspective on how to stay focused with a simple and doable action plan.”

Jordan Ellenberg: “The Bangles are one of the few bands on whose greatness I and my teen/tween children can agree. But they don’t have the same accumulated written records as more canonical acts of the 80s like REM or U2. Chris O’Leary gives them the full longform treatment they’ve always deserved.”

Justin Elliott: “This was a humane, beautifully observed portrait of Daniel Hale, who blew the whistle on the U.S. drone assassination program. The piece memorably captures his courage along with the messy realities of the leak and striking apathy of much of the public.”

Jason Fagone: “This is a profile of a ’90s band, Sublime, that never meant much to me when I was young, but I couldn’t put the story down. The energy of the writing is relentless, and Weiss takes this maximalist approach to music writing that I just love—there’s so much detail here, and sadness, and joy.”

Robert Faturechi: “An astonishingly damning and well-supported investigation of a drone strike gone awry—somehow reported out less than two weeks after the event in question.”

Andy Greenberg: “An absolutely crushing portrait, on both a personal and societal level, of authoritarianism, bureaucracy, racism, and surveillance in modern Xinjiang, very possibly the worst human rights crisis in the world today.”

Karen Hao: “This is one of those pieces I wish I had reported. The level of detail that Stroud was able to excavate about a controversial predictive policing practice in Chicago and the impact it had on one man gives us a whole new level of understanding about how these technologies, meant to keep communities safe, actually endanger them. The writing is also brilliantly executed. It’s a tale that haunts you for a long time.”

Chris Hoffman: “Much has been written about the end of the war in Afghanistan, but it’s rarely this visceral. U.S. Army veteran and journalist Laura Jedeed’s reflection on her time in Afghanistan is a must-read for anyone who wants to face the reality of what the Afghanistan conflict was.”

Graham Isador: “Mike Abrusci writes emotionally raw and tragically funny essays. This piece on the tension of city life post-pandemic made me laugh and knocked the wind out of me.”

Whizy Kim: “I think a letter is the most intimate kind of writing, and these letters written by people incarcerated during the pandemic let us, if only briefly, share in the grief and anguish they feel. It’s harrowing and heart-rending to hear their voices, their own words, on a system that’s frankly too cruel to capture in words.”

Elizabeth Kolbert: “Airplane travel is incredibly carbon-intensive. Getting the fossil fuels out of flying is key, but as Verhovek lays out in this fascinating piece, the challenges are steep.”

Robert Kolker: “This one made my heart stop, and then start and stop again, and again, and again. Here is a family catastrophe with an astonishing coincidence—a father’s expertise strangely in tune with the injury his daughter sustained. The story is a perfect mingling of medicine and technology and brain science and the human condition. Most of all, I love how sensitive and intimate it is—how the writer never loses sight of the people involved. In his hands, this is no case study—it’s life.”

Jasmine Mithani: “Taylor Moore is an excellent reporter who spent months untangling this complex story around a cultural institution very dear to many in Chicago, deftly weaving a cohesive narrative from dozens of interviews and all sorts of documents. The result is a thorough, empathetic investigation that centers the experience of those harmed while touching on accountability, gender, and stardom in the city’s youth poetry community.”

Rani Molla: “The scope and execution of this piece make me at once incredibly inspired and incredibly jealous. It’s all around a really clever way to consider the future of the office.”

Kira M. Newman: “This essay about the immigrant experience vividly transports you into a story of the dollar store that might be very different from your own (at least, that was the case for me). It offers a counter-narrative to the stigma of this iconic institution.”

Laine Nooney: “Dashingly written and scrupulously researched, this long, long, long read is a whirling travelogue through the financial infrastructures propping up the 2019 Dota 2 esports championship, held in Shanghai that year. Come for the phenomenally deep read of esports in a Chinese context, stay for the poop emoji in the footnotes.”

Devon O’Neil: “The story resonated because I too live in a mountain town within driving distance of a major metropolitan area, and we experienced much the same phenomenon: swarms of people unlike anything many longtime residents had seen before. But it’s not as simple as just bemoaning their presence; the trend is a symptom of a changing world, and you have to live with it and adapt. This story showed how hard that is to do, while delivering color and balance to a nuanced subject.”

Daniel Riley: “Koerner has an incredible nose for finding stories that contain most of the elements I love the most: international intrigue; American politics and statecraft; murder and manhunts; Mexican hotels—and Mexican hotel breakfasts; skyjackings; Lambretta scooters; the South of France in the sixties; and the seventies as both subject and character. More than the ingredients, though, it’s how Koerner cooks this one: It’s a structural marvel—and the sort of piece that reveals its recipe of research and reporting only once you read to the end. It’s like Argo in the desert.”

Kaleigh Rogers: “So many reporters got into this business because we loved writing. I know that was the case for me when I was three years into an English/Creative Writing degree and suddenly realized I couldn’t pay bills as a poet. Through interviews with artists who have unexpectedly found success in their craft, Bull manages to articulate a near-universal tension among creative industries: can your work be a pure creative outlet when you have the pressure of making a profit hanging over you?”

Emily Stewart: “I find myself bringing up the story of the fake helicopter startup spokesperson in conversation at least monthly. Just a beautiful example of a ‘What’s up with that guy?’ gem that entirely delivers.”

Melody Wilding: “As someone who identifies as highly sensitive, this article spoke directly to me. It’s refreshing and empowering to consider that something once regarded as a weakness can in fact be our biggest strength.”

Alissa Wilkinson: “Simran Hans writes about the easy possibilities for ‘story’ to be co-opted and commodified, and why nonfiction film would benefit from thinking more about form.”

Ed Yong: “Marion Renault delivers an utterly heartbreaking look at the alienation that vaccinated people in a largely unvaccinated rural community are experiencing. I love how deftly Renault weaves together matters of faith and science, and how much intellectual breadth and emotional depth she brings to her writing.”

Joe Zadeh: “This is a beautiful meditation on the wonders of slime mold: a single celled puddle-like organism that has no brain or nervous system, yet can solve mazes, learn patterns, and keep time. It’s a sobering reminder of how our belief in human exceptionalism has tainted our view of the natural world, and it sent me hurtling into a wormhole of further reading about the untapped intelligence lurking inside things we ordinarily dismiss.”