The Highlight’s best reads of the year
These stories have a remarkable richness not in spite of the pandemic, but because of it.
An illustration from “The Haunting of Girlstown.”
Illustration by Will Staehle for Epic and Vox
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The Highlight was young, not even a year old, when the coronavirus pandemic descended in the spring. If we had been padding along unsteadily, looking for footing like any ambitious toddler, our balance was entirely shaken by the seismic developments of 2020: the lockdowns and masks, the bizarrely mysterious and gravely dangerous virus, a summer of protests and the retaliatory federal response we felt in the rattling of our windows, a democracy and an election so fragile that some sounded alarms of an impending coup.