Here's a ghost story for you: For years, I've been haunted by a project I thought was dead. In ancient times (I mean, Obama was president), I did hours of interviews and wrote a few drafts. But the magazine that was supposed to publish it decided to pull the plug. And then my audio files were corrupted, somehow reduced to hours of mournful hissing. The news cycle and the world moved on. The project sank beneath the soil of more pressing creative concerns.

Years passed, and this project haunted me. I had missed my chance! Squandered my time! Whenever I felt devoid of good ideas—a feeling that loves to creep into my body at moments of creative insecurity—I thought of this project specifically. I had once had at least one good idea, and I'd failed to follow through it. I let it get buried. 

I recently decided to exhume this long-dead project. As I re-examine it and start asking questions again, it's lurching forward with some truly surprising momentum. My old scribbled notes are familiar and strange at the same time. Turns out that it was indeed buried, but it wasn't really dead. It was just waiting for the right time to be reanimated.  

A summary of the revelations in the Facebook document leak, including how the algorithm prioritized anger over love. A beautiful, difficult essay about depression and suicidal ideation: "How much does my fear of owning this darker voice hinge on a cultural insistence that it’s unhealthy, even unnatural? What if I’m all of it?" Inside the movement to reinvestigate hundreds of Jim Crow-era killings. A great interview with writer and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the future of the left. Two leading scholars discuss the complex relationship between Black and Native people. How eavesdropping and posting about it on social media is creating a surveillance state. How Amazon is shaping the literary landscape. On James Bond,  paternity leave, and what parental sacrifice really looks like. Why we need to stop with reductive narratives of Haitian "resilience" and "impoverishment." A critical look at the articles alleging an "illiberal left" that's quashing free speech, and how the coverage fits the pattern of past moral panics. The real life art dealer behind Wes Anderson's French Dispatch. What happens when your favorite not-popular thing suddenly goes viral? A New Yorker goes to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. An ode to the bygone days of blurry, poorly lit photographs. Free the nippleless! Mary Ruefle does not own a computer and has no writing routine. How to choose a Halloween costume. 

The pie chart is brought to you by paying members, who each kick in $15/year—that's a mere $1.25 per month. Can you afford to join them? Please consider it!

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Belly of the Beast, a documentary about involuntary sterilization at Central California Women’s Facility, the world’s largest women’s prison. Self-portraits by Clifford Prince King. Mona Chalabi's new podcast, Am I Normal?, which uses data to illuminate some of life's murkiest questions.

Honoring this newsletter's annual tradition, it's pumpkin dance time.

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This is the seventh in a 12-part essay series by Nereya Otieno, one of this newsletter's 2021 writing fellows. Click here to read previous installments. Read on to find out how Christopher Nolan prepped Nereya for a pandemic—or you can have her read it aloud to you. -AF

By Nereya Otieno

Let’s begin with me turning into a weeping heap.

There is a scene about halfway through Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in which Matthew McConaughey’s character, Cooper, is viewing video messages left by his family. Why? Cooper (spoiler alert) is on a secret exploration mission that is taking him further into space than any Earthling has gone and safely returned. His time in space has felt like weeks or months to him, but decades have passed on Earth. Cooper’s eyes shimmer, squint, tear up, and erupt into full-blown sobs while watching messages from his kids. His teenage son is suddenly a married father of two and his daughter, aged 10 when he left, is 33 and still traumatized by him choosing a space adventure over being present in her life. She all but tells him so via a grainy screen, her tears betraying the coldness she wanted to convey. At the end of the 4-minute scene, McConaughey’s Cooper is a shaking, emotional wreck. 

And so was I. 

In the wee hours of that same day, some 16 hours prior to going to the movie theater, I had spoken with my mother via Skype. I called at 4am Copenhagen time so that I would reach her at 7pm California time—when her workday was over and a bit of relaxation had been had and maybe my Dad was home, too. I, like Cooper, was familiar with space-time negotiations. At this particular point, I hadn’t been home in almost three years. Hadn’t hugged my mother or smelled her in almost three years. I’d seen my father once because I was able to meet him on an international trip my mother couldn’t join, but I was talking to her and not to him on this Skype. It was she who asked me, through my own grainy screen, when are you coming back? and mused I wonder when I’ll see you again. At one point she said, I never thought I wouldn’t see you for this long. 

She didn’t guilt me the way Cooper’s daughter did—she has always been incredibly supportive of my decisions—but there was no denying that I’d chosen my own adventure over being in her life. And I, again like Cooper, had no idea when I’d be back. I didn’t have the money for a ticket home, and every opportunity to leave seemed to coincide with work picking up. When I watched that scene, replete with Danish subtitles underscoring my truth, I felt the weight of my absence for those I’d left. I recognized the pain and uncertainty I’d unearthed while doing something for my own benefit. I never thought that odd constellation of uncertainty, pain and benefit would prepare me for a pandemic six years in the future.

Read the rest here.

You can listen to this essay in audio form, read previous installments in this series, and sign up to get the rest delivered directly to your inbox.