For many, the time just before and right after the New Year brings an imposed calm, or at least a welcome slowing-down, with fewer hurried work emails from fewer folks in the office. And of course, there is vacation. So, what better time to indulge in one of 2016’s best long reads about water. A “long read,” sometimes seen in compound form as “longread,” is just a newfangled term for oldfangled in-depth narrative journalism. Often literary in style, a long read invites us to bypass the brevity of tweets, status updates, and click-bait headlines for a close and considered examination of something that compels us. As water librarians, compelled by water in all its manifestations and tangential relations, we curated a list of some of our favorite pieces of the past year (ok, that’s only partly true, but who can resist Joan Didion’s gorgeous 1979 meditation on California’s vast water engineering infrastructure, or Bryan Curtis’s wonderful reporting (2014) in the regrettably defunct Grantland on the history of the American water park).
Dive into our finds—many with stunning photography and visualizations, including a virtual water slide!—on everything from the bold surfers on the shores of Lake Superior to the water speculators of Wall Street; from crowdsourced cloud science to scientific gaps in understanding the Flint water crisis; from a survivor in the Chesapeake to endless searching in a tsunami-ravaged sea; and from the big business of bottled water to the looming disaster of the Mosul Dam in the Middle East. Time spent with these longreads—and maybe a hot tea or toddy—showcases how our finest journalists admirably contend with one of our most complicated resources and fascinating landscapes.
Surfer Magazine │The Other North Shore │ by Justin Housman, photographs by Grant Ellis (July 21, 2016)
New York Times │The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of) Rattled the Scientific Community │by John Mooallem (May 4, 2016)
The New Yorker │ A Bigger Problem Than ISIS? │By Dexter Filkins (January 2, 2017)
The Guardian │ Liquid Assets: How the Business of Bottled Water Went Mad │by Sophie Elmhirst (October 6, 2016)
Grantland │ The Wet Stuff │ by Bryan Curtis (September 10, 2014)
New York Times │ “I Have No Choice But to Keep Looking” │ by Jennifer Percy (August 2, 2016)
ProPublica │ Liquid Assets: A maverick hedge fund manager thinks Wall Street is the answer to the water crisis in the West │ by Abrahm Lustgarten (February 9, 2016)
Washington Post │ ‘You Are Not Going to Die Out Here’: A woman’s terrifying night in the Chesapeake │ by John Woodrow Cox (June 29, 2016)
Undark │ The Terrifying Unknowns of the Flint Water Crisis │by Steve Friess, visuals by Jeffrey Sauger (November 28, 2016)
From Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979) │ ESSAY: Holy Water │reprinted on pbs.org