Sunday, January 26, 2025 — Issue #474
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My Cat Mii by Mayumi Inaba for The Paris Review
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Today we're excited to re-introduce the 10th and final returning guest editor as we close out the celebration of The SLR's 10th anniversary!
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Elaina Plott Calabro is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, she covered politics and the 2020 election for The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine. She is currently at work on a book about the relationship between former Alabama Governor George Wallace and Frank Johnson, the federal judge who regularly upended Wallace’s segregationist agenda, for Penguin Press. She was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a fact she consistently excels in finding reasons to mention. This is Elaina’s second time behind the wheel of The SLR.
And now, The SLR is all Elaina's...
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It’s been five years, almost to the day, that I last had the privilege of guest-editing this newsletter. Earlier this week, I dug up that first go in search of inspiration, to see how my younger self had chosen to make use of this intro space. It was a happy enterprise at first; I had only a vague recollection of what I’d written then, and as I searched my inbox I thought about that Joan Didion line, about the value in checking in from time to time with the people we used to be. I regretted this particular visitation almost immediately, however. On February 9, 2020, I was 26 years old and getting ready for a dive trip to Belize; in a few days, “barring disaster,” I’d written, I’d be halfway to receiving my open-water certification. No exclamation point, but I can hear one all the same.
Like so many others, I tend to delineate my life now in terms of the pandemic; there is before the novel coronavirus, and there is after. The precise inflection point looks different for everyone, I suspect, and here on the screen, suddenly, was mine: a last dispatch from a pre-lockdown world, almost eerie in its cheerful oblivion. Within 16 hours I would be queuing for customs in Belize, not inside the airport but on the tarmac, where a uniformed man stood by to ask each of us, one by one, if we had traveled recently to China. The before, as I was eventually to understand, had been over for some time.
All this to say that I’ve been thinking a lot this week about change: the trivial and biblical ways it announces itself, the versions of ourselves we keep and discard in response to it. In this edition you’ll find writers grappling with changing cities and deserts and window treatments—embracing change, lamenting it, and, in some cases, exploring our increasingly efficient ability to ignore it. Happy reading, and I can’t wait to hear your favorites.
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By Dylan Levi King for The Baffler
There is no better feeling than to read the first sentence of a story and know, all of ten words in, that you’re in good hands. The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. It sounds like an incantation because it all but is one: Repeat it enough, as the English-speaking press has these past few years, and perhaps Tokyo indeed becomes the neon-edged 80s dream sequence Americans insist it is. Or perhaps it doesn’t, and the tourists continue to come anyway. After nine years living in Japan, Dylan Levi King considers the capital’s “race toward peak tourism,” the indignity and sorrow of a citizenry increasingly forced to exist in the margins of a visitor’s nostalgia. It’s a sympathetic position, sure, but nothing about this piece is predictable.
“[E]veryone is looking backward,” Levi writes at the emotional swell, not just the tourists of Japan but officials and guest workers too; their country was once a “miracle,” after all, and perhaps it is easier to think on this than the “promised renewal” that never came. It’s been a long time since I’ve read an essay this long with so gorgeous a payoff.
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By Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
“And then you scroll”: my favorite line in this piece on the “acutely disorient[ing]” nature of the modern information ecosystem. When Charlie Warzel logs onto social media for updates on the fires ravaging LA, the algorithm jerks him from poignant glimpses of the evacuee experience to skincare ads and back again. Describe the sequence of content plainly, and you’re left with something like the ramblings of an over-served conspiracy theorist, which, of course, is precisely Warzel’s point: “The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a ‘land grab’; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you ‘crush’ Dry January.” Warzel proceeds to explore what, in this internet, a “true technological public good” actually looks like.
> The Sunday Q&A: The Times: Bill Gates: Trump, Musk and how my neurodiversity made me
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By Thomas Fuller for The New York Times
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
A gripping piece that charts the near-catastrophic efforts of LA County’s most experienced fire pilots to contain the blaze in Eaton.
> Rolling Stone: View source
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