This year, Guardian feature writers went above and beyond to capture the essence of a year that left many on their knees. Political certainties were thrown out of the window, threats to our democracy found a new base, and inequality just grew and grew. But on the plus side, incredible stories were told.
My month with chemtrails conspiracy theorists
“I relocated to a farm in California’s Central Valley in January in an attempt to escape my coastal bubble,” Carey Dunne emailed me last March. Soon after her move, Dunne was shocked to discover her otherwise lovely hosts were conspiracy theorists.
Dunne’s talent resides in humanizing her subjects, while weaving an extraordinary political context through the background of her piece – from Trump to fake news, all the way to rural isolation.
“Facebook made a believer out of Tammi. When she moved to Lincoln in 2012, she’d never heard of chemtrails. Three years later, a post about a Facebook group called Sierra Nevada Geoengineering Awareness popped up in her newsfeed. Thinking it was related to agriculture, she joined the group.
The group’s 500 members post constantly about “aerosol attacks”, “toxic silver skies”, “mad men playing god with our weather, blocking our life-giving sun”.
Tammi became “obsessed”. “I was taking pictures, videotaping the sky,” she says. “And I was like, I wish I didn’t know, because now that I know, it’s really making my heart sad.”
In early January, Tammi felt cautiously optimistic about how the Trump administration would affect organic farmers. Born in Canada, Tammi isn’t a US citizen, but given the option to vote – despite thinking Trump is “a prick” – she “probably would’ve picked him”. Given her environmentalism and hippie-dippy aesthetic, this shocked me.”
Buying a $500 house in Detroit: bidding on the soul of my city
Drew Philp was only 23 when he bought a shell of a Detroit house at an auction. He then spent years making it livable. In the process, he quickly realized that Detroit was “just America with the volume turned all the way up”.
It’s certainly not a feelgood story, but Drew’s writing is not bleak, either. It just asks us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves some tough questions.
Just a few years earlier, at age 23, I had purchased an abandoned house in Detroit from a live auction for $500, less than the price of a decent television. It had been empty for more than a decade and was still a shell, its bones exposed, anything of value stolen long ago.
The structure was filled with trash and had lived a hard life: two monstrous stories of no doors or windows, plumbing, or electricity – nothing. The backyard was a literal jungle, the porch needed to be ripped off and done again, the front yard looked like it wanted to be cut with a scythe.
When I bought it in 2009, a white kid in Detroit was strange. Most people, white and black, were moving out. By this time I’d been working on the house for five years.
Both my house, and the neighborhood, were starting to feel like home. But during those years I’d lived in the city, a massive change had begun, Detroit was growing, shifting, molting. Old grudges clashed with new ideas and nowhere was America’s fight for its soul more clear than in what was the Motor City.
For 18 years, I thought she was stealing my identity. Until I found her
If you like great storytelling, you’re in for a treat on this one. What happened when Lisa Selin Davis finally found her “identity thief” after 18 years? Get ready for twists and turns, suspense, and a great ending.
The Department of Motor Vehicles told me that I wasn’t the victim of identity theft; there was simply another Lisa S Davis with the same birthday in New York City. Our records were crossed. When cops run a license, they don’t check the person’s address, signature, or social security numbers. They check the name and the birthday, and both the other Lisa S Davis’s and mine were the same. We were, in the eyes of the law, one person, caught in a perfect storm of DMV and NYPD idiocy.
When I visited the board of elections office in downtown Brooklyn, they told me the same thing. Lisa S Davis and I: we were one.
I cajoled the DMV into giving me her middle name. From her profile picture on Facebook, I could see she was tall, African American, with high cheekbones, well-toned arms and a huge smile. I am short, white, decidedly untoned and predisposed to frowns – clearly we were not the same person. I sent her a note on Facebook: ‘I’d love to talk to you about this, to see if our records have gotten further mixed up and how to undo it. You may have had some of the same troubles.’
Under siege by liberals: the town where everyone owns a gun
Lois Beckett started reporting on this story thinking it was going to be an interesting case study on gun culture. Two days into her reporting trip, she phoned me with a much bigger picture. “This is not simply a story about guns,”, she said. “This place is the symbol of the wide gulf between rural America and big cities.” She was right.
Nucla became nationally famous when it passed an ordinance requiring every household to own a gun five years ago – a move that is still wildly popular among residents. But past Nucla’s one minute of fame, locals worry about their beloved home becoming a ghost town.
In September, in the wake of a lawsuit from an environmental group, Nucla’s major employer, the local coal-fired power plant, announced that it would be shutting down in 2022. In total, about 80 jobs were at risk – a huge number in a town whose population, according to the 2010 census, was only 711 people.
For locals, this decision was a death knell brought on by liberals who live in big cities.
Liberals fighting against the mining industry are good at telling them no, residents say, but don’t present them with any alternatives – not ones that come with real salaries. Richard Craig, a former Nucla town board member, recalled a comment by a member of an environmental group saying during one of the contentious hearings: “Well, I don’t see why they don’t want to go live in the city.”
“It’s almost like – I hate using this word, it’s being used so often – it’s almost like a conspiracy: ‘We need to move everybody out of rural areas and go live in the cities and suburbs,’” Craig said.
What happened when Walmart left
Here’s a simple question: what happens to a small rural community when one of its big arteries – in this case, Walmart – shuts down? Ed Pilkington traveled to West Virginia to find out – and the answers were devastating.
“When Walmart left town, it didn’t linger over the goodbyes. It slashed the prices on all its products, stripped the shelves bare, and vanished, leaving behind only the ghostly shadow of its famous brand name and gold star logo on the front wall of a deserted shell.
The departure was so quick that telltale signs remain of the getaway, like smoldering ashes in the fireplaces of an evacuated town. Notices still taped to the glass entranceway record with tombstone-like precision the exact moment that the supercenter was shuttered: “Store closed at 7pm, Thursday 28 January 2016.”
Ten years. That’s all the time it took for the store to rise up in a clearing of the lush forest of West Virginia’s coal country and then disappear again, as though it had never been there.
But for the people of McDowell County – proud country folk laboring under the burdens of high unemployment, low income and endemic ill health – even such a fleeting visit to this rural backwater by the world’s largest retailer had a profound impact. Both in the arrival, and in the hasty leaving.”
America’s midlife crisis: lessons from a survivalist summit
Many journalists wrote about the survivalist movement this year, but perhaps no one did it better than Stephen Marche. He spent a few days with “preppers” (people preparing for emergencies by stockpiling food and water, as well as focusing on self-defense training) and came away with one solid observation: the growth of the movement is a symptom of a much bigger malaise.
The piece is also, at times, funny as hell. It has one of my favorite line of the year:
“That’s the real fantasy of the gun – that you will someday be in a situation of complete moral clarity, rather than stuck in this muddy welter of decisions otherwise known as everyday life. There will be bad guys and good guys and you will know the difference, and you will be able to act with the ultimate consequence. There comes a time in the life of men and women and countries where the fantasy of just blowing up everything and starting over becomes nearly impossible to resist.”
Design by Sam Morris and Francisco Navas
