“A slightly messy response to the dispiriting cleanness of modern life.”

Longreads’ year-end collection highlights overlooked nonfiction: Nick Paumgarten on a microlight pilot leading endangered ibis birds 1,700 miles across Europe, Alec Nevala-Lee on the Clock of the Long Now being built in West Texas to keep time for ten millennia, and Tony Ho Tran’s family return to Vietnam fifty years after the war. Ten stories that “refused to let us go.”