Riga Balsam - 2018. The best texts of the year in English according to Meduza

As usual on New Year's holidays, Meduza talks about the best journalistic texts published over the past 12 months - those that have not lost their relevance and are not a pity to spend time on during the holidays. the texts published in Russian We have already listed - now let's turn to those that were published in English in 2018: here are a dozen of those that we especially remember. About many of them, we made materials with a detailed retelling - they can be used if you are not very fluent in English.

How in Japan they rent relatives and friends

Elif Batuman, The New Yorker

Japan is famous for its unexpected commercial offers - but this is perhaps the most surprising: here you can rent a spouse, daughter, or, for example, a front boss. Relatives and friends will behave like real people (with the exception of physical intimacy) - share warmth, cook food, talk about their affairs. The boss can be used to make a dissatisfied client take his soul on him. The people who provide such services also perform ceremonial divorces and organize clubs where Japanese men can cry; all of which are in demand. There are absolutely heartbreaking cases - for example, the text tells the story of a woman who hired a father for her daughter so that she would not be persecuted at school as fatherless; 10 years have passed since then, my daughter is already 20, and she still does not know that dad is not real.

The American writer Elif Batuman explored this strange industry from all possible angles (except that she herself portrayed someone's wife), and her text is not so much a material about a curiosity as a meaningful and deep reflection on how relationships between people and whom we consider our relatives. That case: if you are determined to read one long journalistic text from last year, read this one.

Why the war in Yemen is the main humanitarian catastrophe of our time

Robert F. Worth, The New York Times

We are used to the fact that the most terrible war in the world is now going on in Syria. In fact, this may not be the case - in Yemen, located on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, things are even worse. There is a civil war going on with no end in sight; there is a serious threat of mass starvation; and before all this, few people care. The text in The New York Times details the extent of the disaster - and at the same time explains its causes: it's not only religious differences between different Islamic factions, but also that the war is actually going on between Saudi Arabia (and to a large extent the United States) and Iran. Separately, we note a very powerful visual range - an article in The New York Times should not only be read, but also watched.

How Johnny Depp lost his friends and made everyone hate him

Stephen Rodrik, Rolling Stone

Sic transit gloria mundi: an impressive chronicle of 72 hours spent with perhaps the most famous actor in the world, from which it turns out that Johnny Depp is not doing well. He divorced his wife badly; quarreled with relatives; in Hollywood there are many claims to him; years of using various substances are taking their toll - and he has also almost spent all the hundreds of millions of dollars earned in his career, either because he spent money unwisely, or because he hired unscrupulous managers. An instructive story about the fact that wealth, fame and happiness are not synonymous at all.

Why did Antarctic explorer Henry Worsley die?

David Grann, The New Yorker

On January 24, 2016, Henry Worsley, a 55-year-old Briton who tried to become the first person to cross Antarctica alone, died in a Chilean hospital. The great American journalist David Grann is the best in the world to tell the stories of amazing people who have chosen something incomprehensible and unattainable as their calling; this text is no exception: as always, Grann not only brilliantly recounts the adventures of Worsley (an interesting read, even when you know the sad ending in advance), but also explains what is in the head of the protagonist. The journalist discovers stories in Worsley's life about the search for the figure of his father, and about overcoming, and about an inexplicable craving for the endless icy desert.

Reading this text now, it is worth remembering that at the end of 2018, two people tried to do what the British failed - and finally succeeded . One of them became interested in Antarctic travel thanks to Henry Worsley.

How and why people transplant other people's faces

Joanna Connors, The National Geographic

In 2014, 18-year-old Katie Stubblefield got so bad that she took a hunting rifle, went to the bathroom and shot herself in the face. It didn’t work out to kill herself - but both the physical and psychological health of the girl was completely destroyed: she spent the next three years almost completely in hospitals, where doctors saved her head, brain and soul. As a result, it turned out that the only way to make Stubblefield's life at least somewhat normal is to transplant someone else's face into her: there are only a few dozen such operations in the world so far. The donor was a 31-year-old girl who died of an overdose; the operation lasted 31 hours; now Cathy is starting her life over again—and wants to go to college to be a psychologist. The text and photographs in The National Geographic capture the story of a stunning medical success in all the uncomfortable detail - hard to watch, but mesmerizing.

How an unknown Russian girl convinced the whole of New York that she was rich and famous

Jessica Pressler, New York Magazine

A beautiful and outgoing woman, Anna Delvey lived in a New York hotel in a $400-a-night suite, made friends with the Silicon Valley rich, artists, and celebrities, dined at expensive restaurants, giving hundreds of dollars in tips, and flew private jets on holidays. around the world and was going to use the money left to her by her wealthy parents to open a huge space in New York for exhibitions, parties and shops.

And then it turned out that she was an impostor, her name was Anna Sorokina - and she had been deceiving banks, hotels, partners and friends for years. A well-constructed story of deception - despite the fact that everything is revealed in the title, somewhere in the middle you stop believing that the girl succeeded in such a grandiose forgery; this is where everything is revealed. The late Tom Wolfe would probably have liked this story very much - because the material is not so much about one particular fraudster, but about a modern elite society, in which the ability to splurge gracefully turns out to be the main skill.

How a Ukrainian man pretended to be an American teenager

Daniel Riley, GQ

David Grann's text about the Frenchman Frederic Bourdain, who pretended to be a homeless teenager all his life, and once even convinced an American family that he was their missing son, is one of the best journalistic materials of the last decade (if you haven't seen it, be sure to watch the documentary based on it movie).

This story is slightly less ambitious, but more tragic: Ukrainian Artur Samarin came to a small town in Pennsylvania on a student exchange program - and realized that he wanted to stay in the United States. His new friends promised to adopt him - but only if he lowers his age so they can receive benefits for him. So the 19-year-old Ukrainian turned into a 14-year-old American - and Samarin played this role brilliantly: he became the favorite of his classmates, was successfully interested in astrophysics, and received offers from good colleges. And then he was discovered, arrested and deported - and now Samarin studies in Kherson and sees Pennsylvania in his dreams. It is difficult not to feel sympathy for the hero of the text: in the end, he was simply pursuing that same American dream in his own way.

How an innocent American teenager was imprisoned for murder - and how he was released

Sean Patrick Cooper, The Atavist Magazine

In 1990, in a small town in Missouri, unknown people attacked a married couple of farmers - the husband survived, the wife died; nothing was missing from the house. The family of the murdered woman soon began to suspect that a 16-year-old teenager, the eldest son of the family who lived in the house opposite, was responsible for the incident; in the end, he was accused of murder - and imprisoned, although there was little evidence, and the accused categorically refused to admit his guilt. The jury delivered a verdict of “guilty” twice, but ten years later local human rights activists took up the case, began to sort it out, and eventually succeeded in overturning the verdict.

A typical American story of injustice, which is very similar to the TV series “Making a Murderer” in terms of collision: here is the irresponsible behavior of the police and prosecutors, and the feud between the families of the murdered and the accused, and the painfully slow work of the judicial system. This text is different in several ways. Firstly, it is exclusively written - although there are many such plots, and not come off. Secondly, there is a happy ending here - an innocent person eventually goes free and somehow tries to leave behind 17 years spent in prison. And thirdly, it seems that the real killer was found here - but we will leave the outcome of this intrigue for those who read the material.

What porn can teach teenagers

Maggie Jones, The New York Times

Your kids watch porn—or will. This is an objective fact of digital reality, which, obviously, somehow affects people’s sexual behavior, although it’s hard to say exactly how: the data in The New York Times material rather simply confirms things that are already clear (all teenagers watch porn, even if their parents think otherwise - and their tastes are not too different from the tastes of adults).

Instead, the text talks about a social experiment, the Boston “porn literacy” circle, in which scientists and activists discuss with teenagers from the most vulnerable sections of society how what they see in porn correlates with reality. It is important that these are not so much lectures as seminars - and no one evaluates students' opinions about anal sex or prostitution on a “right / wrong” scale. Another thing is that the text does not raise the question of how appropriate the position of teacher authority is when it comes to sex, and to what extent teachers still impose their vision of the problem on students; However, nothing prevents the reader from thinking about this.

How Pablo Escobar Became a Tourist Destination

John Lee Anderson, The New Yorker

In the 1980s, Colombian Pablo Escobar hooked all of America on cocaine and created the most powerful drug cartel in history. Its turnover was comparable to the GDP of large countries, and Escobar himself influenced the politics of his country - sometimes through corruption, sometimes through violence. In the early 1990s, with the help of the United States, the Escobar cartel was defeated.

If you've watched Narcos (or a few other Escobar movies and TV shows that have been released in recent years), you probably want to see with your own eyes Medellin, the private estate prison where Pablo was imprisoned, and other places of his military glory. There are thousands of such people, they go to Colombia exactly for this purpose, and there is someone to meet them: Escobar's former accomplices and relatives, who served time in prison and were released, now earn money by leading excursions and without any noticeable repentance talk about their crimes. The material about this amazing industry raises many interesting questions about how historical memory works in the era of global capitalism; the Netflix series Dark Tourist is partly about the same, but the text in The New Yorker is much more thorough and detailed.

Why we are still experiencing the consequences of the 2008 crisis

John Lanchester, London Review of Books

A detailed explanation of why the modern world, with all its Trumps, Theresa May, anti-migrant sentiment and a right turn, is a direct consequence of the 2008 economic crisis. According to Lanchester, the political changes in the Western world in recent years are, in fact, the reaction of voters to the fact that they themselves have become poorer, and the perpetrators of the collapse have not really been punished. on Meduza There was also material about the fact that we live in a world where the consequences of the catastrophe are still being felt - but in the London Review of Books everything is more detailed. And more ideologically: of course, this is a very leftist text - but it can also be interesting to argue with its arguments.

How an ex-cop stole millions from McDonald's

Jeff Meish, The Daily Beast

In Russian McDonald's, Monopoly seems to have appeared only now - in America, fast food used the game for advertising back in the 1990s. And at the same time I encountered a scam: a certain "Uncle Jerry" cashed in coupons that allowed him to win big prizes, relatives, acquaintances, members of the organized crime group and random people. The casket opened simply - the "uncle" turned out to be the security director of the company that produced coupons. However, the main thing in this story is not who is to blame, but an outstanding gallery of characters: from the main character to the jovial Italian mafia and the persistent FBI agent. Not surprisingly, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon bought the rights to this story for a million dollars .

How a provincial pensioner outsmarted the lottery

Jason Fagon, Huffington Post

Gerald Selby has always loved to solve riddles. Once, in retirement, he studied the terms of the new Michigan State Lottery - and found that its rules are designed so that on certain days the chance to win is greater than the chance to lose. This means that you can earn money on the lottery, especially if you buy tickets in bulk; especially - if hundreds of thousands. As a result, Selby made millions of dollars for his family and friends, and when Michigan canceled its lottery, he began to travel to Massachusetts and play there - and found that two groups of students from MIT acted exactly the same way.

Very charming material - primarily thanks to the main character: a good-natured and lively American man who loves to bring every case to the end.

If you're interested in lotteries, there's another good story in The New York Times about a system administrator who silently changed the lottery code and because of this also won a lot of money (but then, of course, paid the price).

Why You Shouldn't Help Orphanages in Third World Countries

Tina Rosenberg, The Guardian

Almost any charity by default seems like a good deed - what could be wrong with a Western student or retiree coming to work in an orphanage somewhere in Cambodia or Sri Lanka for several months? As it turns out from this material, there is a lot of bad: in many poor countries, such shelters essentially become business projects of their founders - they earn on donations and do not care too much about children, who, moreover, have completely destroyed all attachments, since compassionate foreign guardians are all time are changing. And in general: in rich countries, they try to minimize the number of orphanages, since it is definitely better for children to grow up in families, while in poor countries their number is growing. It is not a fact that this whole agenda is relevant for the Russian reader, but the text at least tells about an interesting social paradox.

How a husband was imprisoned for killing his wife because of small spots on a flashlight

Pamela Koloff, ProPublica

Another story about a mysterious murder, a small town, a broken family and egregious injustice. In October 1985, a local elementary school teacher was murdered in the Texas town of Clifton. Her husband, the director of another school, was at the time at a conference in Dallas, a few hundred miles from the city. This did not prevent a private detective hired by the victim's brother, and then the police, to blame him for the murder. The main evidence in court was a flashlight found in the man's car with several stains - the prosecution stated that these were blood stains, and a blood stain specialist testified that their pattern suggests that a person with a flashlight was present at the murder.

Of course, the husband was imprisoned; of course he denies everything; Of course, after many years there were activists and journalists who decided to fight against the obvious injustice. (So ​​far, nothing has worked - even after the release of this extremely convincing text and public attention to this case, the judge denied the defense to order a new trial.) An important dimension of the material is that it exposes all American police bloodstain analysis science, based on which thousands of people are imprisoned.

spoke about the materials selected by the editors of Meduza Alexander Gorbachev

Announcement photo: Shutterstock.com