A Year in Reading: The Wounds That Bind

Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.

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I’ve had a lot of big feelings this year. This is due in part to the hormonal tides of pregnancy—as I write this, I’m three weeks shy of my due date. But as my beloved, ever-patient Longreads colleagues know, I’m predisposed to big feelings whether I’m growing a tiny human or not. Hence my tendency to pick stories that hit a nerve: ones that make me angry, ones that make me cry, ones that lodge themselves in my brain and refuse to let me be.

This should all be the topic of a therapy session, or five. However, I also look to great writing to help me understand myself. To that end, I found something of a Rosetta stone for my approach to Longreads curation in one of the first pieces I picked in 2024. Published in Jewish Currents in January, Sarah Aziza’s essay “The Work of the Witness” is about the “livestreamed genocide” in Gaza. Aziza is interested in finding meaning and even purpose in the act of witnessing horror. In Arabic, she explains, “the verb to witness comes from the root شهد . This is also the source of the much-maligned word شهيد, shaheed, which means, literally, witnesser, but is often translated as martyr. . . . To be a witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.” She continues: “We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.”

So I allow myself to be cut. I even seek out the experience. I’ve found it this year in other stories about the war in Gaza: “The Road to 1948,” a wide-reaching historical discussion about the years preceding the Nakba; Yuval Abraham’s jaw-dropping investigation of Lavender, the AI system that Israel uses to select bombing targets; and Jenny Kleeman’s feature about post-mortem sperm retrieval from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, an unforgettable story that forces readers to consider what the dead ever owe the living. I’ve been cut, too, by the fact that John Woodrow Cox’s intimate reporting on the groundbreaking prosecution of a school shooter’s parents is necessary work, thanks to America’s toxic gun culture; by Sharon Lerner’s profile of a scientist who readily admitted that she didn’t want to believe the company she worked for was “poisoning the public” with forever chemicals; and by Mark Warren’s devastating story about an Alabama pastor whose life was destroyed by the ballooning scourge of right-wing media.

Reading these stories was never about inviting pain, frustration, or dismay for the sake of it. Nor, I suspect, was that the case for the writers who crafted them. As Aziza suggests, witnessing is about opening ourselves up to possibility. As readers, as writers, as people, witnessing means nurturing our sense of curiosity, wonder, and justice—the essential tools for correcting the world we’ve been saddled with. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to think about the world, though, as a burden to bear. Instead, we can channel Aziza. What a privilege it is to be in the world, to spend a lifetime with its mysteries, and to have the capacity to leave it with marks of our own.

If I sound like a bleeding heart, so be it. I’ll keep letting the stories I share dig their edges into me. Maybe, in reading them, you’ll do the same. In between I’ll find pieces that make me laugh until my overgrown belly hurts—Julian Lucas’s profile of the inimitable Cole Escola comes to mind—and others that offer a sense of purest hope about the human condition. I’ll leave you with a quote from another favorite read this year. “When you know someone else intimately, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life,” Sierra Bellows writes in an essay for The American Scholar about the experience of trying to understand the existence of others. “It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.” —SD