The Paris Review

Staff Picks: Sapphics, Scandals, and Skies

Richardson Bay as seen from Ring Mountain, Tiburon, California. Photo: Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)).

In the May issue of , about a community of people called anchor-outs, who live “on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels” in California’s Richardson Bay, “doing their best, with little or no money, to survive.” The story is compelling, the prose unfussy and clear—and the photographs, by Therese Jahnson, are the perfect complement—but there is more going on here. The real miracle is how the article resists, gracefully yet firmly, the temptations of this kind of reporting, the very real traps it could have fallen into. It would be easy for an outsider

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