2019 In Journalism
Below is a journalism recap Benjamin and I put together, in hopes of capturing some of the beautiful writing and reporting the year brought us.
Hello world! This is Benjamin. And this is Armi. Welcome to our wonderful world of beautiful writing and endless curiosity. Some of you may know one of us, and some of you may know both of us, but we hope that in reading the pieces we have selected and our reflections on each of them, you will get to know the both of us a little bit better.
We know, we know, it’s 4 months late, but be honest, did you really expect any less from us? A couple of years ago when we started sending longform journalism back and forth, we had no idea that it would transform into this project. . .But there’s a very simple reason behind why we’re doing any of this – there are few things that bring us as much joy as a deep dive into horseshoe crabs, a cover story that seamlessly blends data visualization with narratives, or a heart-wrenching personal essay on loss. Not to mention this naive belief that more than just the two of us remain endeared by the humanity we encounter in everything – from the mundane routine of a public servant to cutting-edge AI (a sneak peek for y’all ;) . Thanks for validating that belief.
And if we’re being honest, our shared passion for great journalism is the prime reason we became friends in the first place – a whimsical stroke of serendipity that I’m sure surprises none of you who know the both of us . Over the past two years, as we’ve meditated and karaoked, taken a class on The Pursuit of Happiness and graduated from college, been through joy and loss and at least one shelter-in-place order together – we have, all the while, been swapping stories, reflecting on the words that ignite our souls and the narratives that stir our hearts.
Below are twelve articles that have both moved us and withstood the test of the insane news cycle we live in – ten were authored in 2019, while two others, dug up from the archives, we hope provide some comfort to match the anxious times we live in today. More on that later. The reactions and pieces below represent not only a year of reading and debate about hundreds of articles, many of which rightfully deserve incredible accolades, but also our own thoughts, emotions, and desires. We have placed a piece of ourselves in this project and we hope that, as you read, you might see us, and find a piece of yourself, too.
This is just the first of many collections that we hope to send in the coming months and years. If you have an article you think would be great, if you have a question, if you want to talk about a piece, if something moves you, if someone you know wants to join the list, or if you just want to say hi, never hesitate to reach out to us by LinkedIn, Handshake, or Bloomberg Terminal (Armi is on there more than I am). Kidding. (Tbh those are my three most frequented platforms so fire away) . We are always around by social media, text, and email, and happy to talk.
We hope you curl up with a cup of tea, some cookies (I prefer Hit, Benjamin prefers Biscoff) and start reading. We hope these pieces connect with you as much as they did with the two of us.
The Best of 2019*
*If you ever find yourself running up against paywalls, you can use Outline to read many articles for free; note this does not work for i) NYT; ii) WSJ; iii) Bloomberg features; iv) some New Yorker articles. Happy reading!
Mister Rogers’ Enduring Wisdom
I first met him 21 years ago, and now our relationship is the subject of a new movie. He’s never been more revered—or more misunderstood
Tom Junod
For those of you who don’t already know, Tom Junod is to me what Beyonce is to most people – a brilliant, artistic, creative soul whose words carry the weight of revelation and whose writing can do no wrong. 22 years ago, Junod profiled Fred Rogers in Esquire; last fall, as a film adaptation documenting Junod’s relationship with Mr. Rogers was released (see: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, starring Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers), he wrote this reflection piece. In it, Junod muses on the ‘peculiarity of [Mr. Rogers’] goodness’, his unyielding focus on how to communicate with children as adults, and the meticulousness with which he kept notes on the people he loved – weaving a poignant, honest meditation on how hate is inevitably more viral than love, and that it takes a truly heroic soul to keep fighting the small, earnest, good fight, even whilst knowing that the outcome is frozen. And of course, there is a flash of classic Tom Junod and his heartbreakingly-good writing that comes out when he is recounting watching a screening of the movie, and seeing Matthew Rhys play him on-screen:
They were the same watchful eyes I’d seen when I met him in person, so dark they were almost black, but now they were brimming with something recognizable, at least to me—hurt, hope. It wasn’t that he was me; it was that he had something of mine, as though he were a pickpocket, or as though I’d gone to Ancestry.com, stumbled on the page of some distant cousin, and discovered that we were born in the same hour of the same day.
You did it again, you beautiful bastard, you did it again.
So often, the signals flash, telling us how to feel. Anger at injustice, frustration at stagnation, desire for happiness, dare I say joy, and despair in accepting we can never achieve it. Tadepalli characterizes these false dualities, the boulders of our Sisyphean lives, more eloquently and accurately than I have ever read before. In an age where people demand anger and self-care in the same breath, I think we too often replace living with the temporary illusions of what makes us feel alive. We thrive and oversatisfy ourselves on becoming the enemy's enemy, on fighting our own, personal "good" fights. As I make my way through adulthood, I find myself returning to this idea that
work has to be put in... to not constantly work toward happiness; to not get so caught up in our own future satisfactions that we miss the ones that come to us now.
I wonder -- what if, one day, Sisyphus left his boulder for a glass of Canyon Road Cabernet (2017) and sunbathing in the fires of Hades...
These shootings broke my heart. And Sean Flynn’s emotional, moving exploration of multiple narratives in the aftermath of the shooting shows us both bravery and grief, love and loss, all in tandem.
Farid does not tell anyone at his home that night that she is dead. He does not explain that she got the women and children out of Al Noor, which he knew she would, or that he suspects she went back inside to find her husband, a fact that he eventually will know for certain and that will not surprise him at all.
But in the quiet hours before dawn, after everyone has left, the sadness is overwhelming, and he weeps in the dark.
Although the piece reads like an extended journal entry, Hylton seamlessly bounces across timelines and stories to weave a personal narrative filled with the implications men face when we buy into a toxic system, and continue to pervade it across generation after generation. The matter is not one of implicit or explicit acceptance, but rather, purely, that we have been so utterly conditioned so as to return, without question, to the foundations of a false ideology.
Masculinity is a religion. It is a compendium of saints: the vaunted patriarch, the taciturn cowboy, the errant knight, reluctant hero, gentle giant and omniscient father. Like Scripture, each contains a story of implicit values... It offers an easy escape from the necessary struggle of self-reflection and replaces the work of interior discovery with a menu of prefabricated identities.
About a year ago, I watched Oscar Schwartz’s Ted Talk about whether a machine could write poetry. I then went to his experimental website, where one can try to guess after reading a poem whether a human or computer wrote it; I visited the leaderboard (crafted from those data points from people guessing) and read what were, according to people’s guesses, the ‘most human-like computer poems’. And my jaw dropped. The poems were tragic. Artistic. And above all, felt so human. I was deeply unsettled; I had always felt that language, and poetry especially, was a rare domain that could not be quantified or codified or even understood fully by the human brain, much less an algorithm. Schwartz’s Turing test forced me to reconsider.
Similarly, I felt my jaw drop whilst reading this experimental piece on GPT-2, a predictive writing software created by OpenAI. John Seabrook pushes the reader to wrestle with the implications of uncannily smarter technology infiltrating one of the most notoriously fickle human domains -- language. Through an exercise with OpenAI in which they calibrated GPT-2 with the entire digital archive of the New Yorker for the sole purpose of this piece, Seabrook weaves GPT-2’s predictive writing into the fabric of his own piece; each time you press tab at the end of each section, watching the letters written by GPT-2 unfold, the very real possibility of losing our creative domains to something we do not understand becomes ever more prominent. And the biggest fear, as Seabrook ponders near the end, is not in the grandiose loss of agency, but in the ordinary realm of thought.
Some of the A.I.’s next words might seem superior to words you might have thought of yourself. But what else might you have thought to say that is not computable? That will all be lost.
Calvert guides us through a question that we don't often care to ask - what if we, humans, cannot staunch the flow of disasters that we set in motion? What if we really are doomed? In a journey from what he considers a misdirected ecological movement through 20th century poetry and social injustice, Calvert's answer lies somewhere in the intersection of fairness, balance, and beauty; more importantly, the answer lies, all things be damned, in us. Poignant and thought-provoking, I hope that Calvert's words ring even truer in the crisis we now face, together - that the inevitability of our own downfall
is no cause for despair; it is a reminder to be meaningful, to be makers instead of takers, to be of service to something — beauty, justice, loved ones, strangers, lilacs, worms.
Stay beautiful. Oh, and please, for crying out loud, read the poems placed in the article. Really. Shia LaBeouf-level just do it. Give Jeffers the credit his log-cabin-haulin ass deserves.
India has always held a curious place in my heart. Although bereft of a claim to the country by a generation, my mother tongue (Urdu) originated in Northern India and the heart of Urdu literature and poetry has historically resided there. My grandmother grew up in Agra, and when I was a child, she would sit me on her lap and regale me with tales of ghosts and fairies and wise men, all set in the city she grew up in, with the famous ivory-white domes shining resplendent in the backdrop. And so it is both with a heavy heart and a strange sense of distance that I see what has swept a nation of people of whom many are so like me – nativist sentiment, revisionist history, a bloody, brutish crackdown in Kashmir, and most tragically, large swaths of anti-Muslim and anti-Urdu sentiment.
This New Yorker story is utterly shocking, reviling, mind-blowing, and urgent. Dexter Filkins, in following the investigations of Indian journalist Rana Ayyub, has written what is required reading for anyone looking to understand the chaos and discord that have ravaged India so heavily in the past year, as well as getting a holistic sense for what Modi’s actual worldview and appeal are framed by.
There's a content/trigger warning with this one, as it details sexual assault and rape. However, the piece itself is a critical sliver of a very dysfunctional justice system, quantifying the lack of basic attentiveness to such a pervasive and destructive crime (that feels like too light of a word), as well as the injustices of, at best, apathy and, at worst, destructive systematic disbelief. I doubt this topic is earth-shattering news to a lot of people; however, the article pulls together personal narrative, quantifiable statistics, and processes such that I'd consider it a necessary, baseline reading to grasp, from multiple perspectives, the America that we live in today.
The most beautifully written political piece I’ve read in years. Robin’s astute analysis of the Obama years, woven through a reflection on the Obamanauts’ memoirs, pivotal Administration moments, and a razor-sharp understanding of Obama’s worldview, lays bare the gap between the vision 44’s rhetoric inspired and the reality that it intended to operate within. This isn’t David Foster Wallace’s profile of John McCain, but it begins to approach that asymptote of eloquence. I missed Corey Robin speaking at NYPL in the fall but alas, next time!
“Yes we can” was a sonorous but empty phrase: yes we can what? When Obama got concrete, he might stay in that register of grandness—there was that moment when the rise of the oceans would begin to slow, and so on—but more often than not he opted for unapologetic avowals of smallness.
The failure begins with a misunderstanding of Obama’s radical-sounding rhetoric. To his most hopeful followers, Obama’s unique gift was being able to turn soaring statements of principle into simple truths of politics, marrying a national inheritance of social movements from below to a plainspoken pragmatism from above... There was something to that view, but it never reckoned with the fact that Obama’s radicalism was, from the very beginning, bound up with a narrow notion of what politics was about.
Obamanauts lies at the intersection of incredibly well-crafted, prosaic criticism and a pragmatic understanding of the political forces at play during the Obama years. We say hindsight is 20/20, and yet somehow we remain blinded to the shifting realities in the 8 years of America's first black president and caught in the projections we placed on the man himself. Robin questions whether the Obamanauts were, even still are, for the most part, still blinded. To compete with Armi - I almost had an in-person meeting with Valerie Jarrett in the fall but alas, next time!
The love for people like Art Allen that I have gained after this article can only be described as a combination of inspiration, respect, and a life-long desire to have the same spontaneous dry humor exhibited by a perfect example of an influential, and often invisible, hero. Portrait of an Inessential Government Worker is the quintessential model of finding the most incredible stories in the most mundane of environments, piecing together the importance of those who work behind the scenes to improve a painstakingly resistant system, save countless lives, and remain humble innovators forging a path to a better future. Beautifully written and incredibly well-crafted, I would consider this a timeless piece worthy of returning to any time.
This is – dare I say it? – my favorite piece of journalism published last year. Michael Lewis (of Moneyball fame) profiles Art Allen – the only oceanographer employed by the US Coast Guard’s Search & Rescue division. Deemed an ‘inessential government worker’, Allen was sent home during the 35-day government shutdown in January 2019. Lewis traces Allen’s path to the Coast Guard and his subsequent development into an authority on search and rescue, crafting an inexpressibly human portrait that demonstrates the true value of journalism – finding a beautiful story in the most ordinary workings of life. I felt the same way after reading this that I did after watching The Last Black Man in San Francisco; wistfully sad yet soulfully nourished.
From the Archives
These are strange, unprecedented times we live in...Federal Donuts is closed, Ben cannot go to the gym anymore (tears, too real), and every Trader Joe’s in Manhattan feels like the set of I Am Legend. It has been a worrisome, trying month for everyone, and we earnestly hope you all are eating well, staying home, and hydrating plenty.
As our reality becomes increasingly surreal, it is difficult not to feel somewhat disoriented, a little worried, and a tad bit lonely -- emotions we and possibly all of you may have felt over the past few weeks. It is in that state of mind that we found ourselves revisiting these two articles in particular. And while these two works seem particularly attuned to our current reality, we believe that both of them are truly timeless explorations of grief, loss, connection, and what it means to be human.
Both of these are stories from the archive that we love. We hope you love them too.
In 52 Blue lies not only an exploration of the human emotion we call loneliness, but a vast expanse of imagination paralleled only by the solitary whale that inspired the piece. Jamison guides us through an emotional journey of isolation, anthropomorphism, and the incredible story of a whale that breathes fresh our inextricable need for the comfort of connection and the frustrations of deification. I could wax poetic about this piece for longer, but just read the piece. Read and find yourself, as I did, searching for meaning in a whale traversing the ocean, singing its own melody for whoever is listening.
These letters came from the heartbroken and the deaf, from the lovelorn and the single; the once bitten, twice shy and the twice bitten, forever shy—people who identified with the whale or hurt for him, hurt for whatever set of feelings they’d projected onto him. A legend was born: the loneliest whale in the world.
Maybe desire and demand are just the same song played at different frequencies. Maybe every song is a healing song if we hear it in the right mood—on the heels of the right seven weeks, or the worst ones, the ones lost to us forever.
Leslie Jamison’s expose eases you into the world of 52 like Pachelbel’s Canon – steadily, calmly, and with all the heart and soul in the world behind it. It is in reading 52 Blue that one has that rare experience of exploring loneliness, especially one’s own loneliness, and not feeling alone for it.
The extent to which Jamison creates an immersive storytelling experience cannot be understated – from tracing the history of the Whideby Island Naval Air Station to filling in the stories of so many devotees, each additional fragment contributes a soft richness to the tale. Add to that her own meanderingly beautiful commentary, and you have a story that will both make your heart ache and your soul feel less alone – a small comfort in these trying times.
We have tuned our hearts to a signal that no longer exists. Which means there is no way to find what we’ve been looking for, only—perhaps—to find what that thing has become.
Often, we decry the lack of mental health support without considering that, for millions of Americans, it's not just mental health structures that are inadequate - it's the entire system, top to bottom, of psychiatry, healthcare, suicide prevention, and recovery. Cherkis weaves personal stories, scientific studies, and narratives that made me smile, laugh, tear up, and feel those little twists in my heart, that ache, when the piece brings me back to somewhere in my own memory. It's a beautiful encapsulation of history, humanization, stagnated progress, and a reminder about how much it means to feel like someone cares, even in the smallest things.
For those of us who don't struggle intensely with mental health, I hope this article reminds you that we all have the power to actively help, to support people when they reach out, to be that friend who willingly enters the darkness to lead someone towards light. For those of us who do struggle intensely, I hope this is a reminder that, especially on the hardest days, you are not alone, no matter how difficult that might be to believe. This crisis will never have a permanent solution, and yet it remains one that provides us with the opportunity to change lives, one person, one day, at a time.
I cried the first time I read this.
It was so obvious, so simple, in the myriad of ways we love and support one another, in every gesture we make to say ‘hey, I care’, in all the steps we take to bridge the gap between reality and interpretation in the minds of our loved ones who are hurting – that of course! Of course what we need is remembrance! At the end of the day, it is about knowing that you are not alone, that it is not just you running into echoes of yourself in your mind, sending out cries for help like paper airplanes into the night sky. And the hope that, if that is made known to you long enough, earnestly enough, consistently enough – that one day you will believe it again.
Let us imagine that every small act of kindness we undertake to be a droplet of water; each person we come across, whether for a lifetime or an instant, a part of the garden; and every day, the landscape shifts. We cannot always know where the land is parched, but we can elect to give on the days we can.
How many times has a small thing taken a day from bad to unbearable? A missed train, a broken shoelace, a snapped guitar string...And how many times has a small occurrence saved you? A morning text, a child’s laughter, the sun hitting the roof outside your window just so...Now imagine how many times your spirit has been saved by the most innocuous of signs – without you even being aware of it. Those signs need not always be good fortune; we can be purveyors of the light in each others’ lives. But we must choose to do so. We must choose every day.
