Longform’s Best of 2020

December 22, 2020 8:01 AM

Longform has released its top ten articles of the year, including My Mustache, My Self by Wesley Morris (NYT/Archive.is); On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic by Jesmyn Ward; The Last Children of Down Syndrome by Sarah Zhang; and The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd by Aymann Ismail.

A few articles have already been covered on Metafilter:

• How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda by Jiayang Fan
• The Internet of Beefs by Venkatesh Rao
• The President’s Taxes (NYT)

posted by adrianhon (3 comments total)

Thanks, adrianhon. Read the heartbreaking, powerful piece by Jesmyn Ward just now.

Witness that my state, Mississippi, waited until 2013 to ratify the 13th Amendment.

Witness that Mississippi didn’t remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag until 2020.

Witness Black people, Indigenous people, so many poor brown people, lying on beds in frigid hospitals, gasping our last breaths with COVID-riddled lungs, rendered flat by undiagnosed underlying conditions, triggered by years of food deserts, stress, and poverty, lives spent snatching sweets so we could eat one delicious morsel, savor some sugar on the tongue, oh Lord, because the flavor of our lives is so often bitter.
posted by Bella Donna at 9:00 AM on December 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

Thank you for this! I hadn't read many of these before. That Down syndrome article, oof.
posted by Anonymous at 4:31 PM on December 22, 2020

amazing selection of writing that says things so well, it is hard to comment on them. oof. ditto. i think The Atlantic has printed so much phenomenal writing this year, i'm never disappointed.
posted by th3ph17 at 4:20 PM on December 23, 2020