'I have 19 confirmed fatalities.'

PLUS: The pancake wars and a doomed space mission.

December 15, 2025

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Hi 👋 

Time for another TLR, where we read some of the best longform journalism from across the Web ✨

Welcome to the penultimate edition for this year! We’ll have one more list next week, but the week after that it’ll be a wrap up of what we read in 2025. It’ll give me a chance to take a quick break, too. Heaven knows I need it.

As always, feel free to check last week’s email if you missed it. Here are some choice picks:

And please let me know what you think of the list this week by voting in the poll below.

Happy reading and see you again next Monday!

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19: The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire

Through interviews with family, colleagues, and the lone survivor, a former hotshot pieces together their final hours—and the fatal choices that will haunt firefighting forever.

I believe I’ve shared just a handful of fire stories this year (maybe ever) but all of them have been incredible. This one is no exception and, in many ways, stands out from the rest. The writer does a great job not just of building tension (you don’t quite know when the climax will come, and how hard it’s going to hit), but also of making you care about this group of men who risk their lives to keep communities safe and standing.

The piece also brings you into the world of firefighters—the history, the politics and competition, the brotherhood—without being boring. Definitely not a light read but I thoroughly enjoyed.

As someone in biopharma media, I am a strong believer of health being a core human right. No matter the type of human you are (which is a preposterous phrase to begin with). Clearly, some people don’t believe the same thing: Not just the politicians and other influential factions who would deprive teens self-actualizing care, but also spineless hospitals and doctors who won’t even protect their patients.

Another health one, this time a tiny bit more positive. Still a lot to be incredulous about, though: The slowness of the healthcare system, the callousness of the doctors, the unwillingness of public institutions to provide rehab. Just the overall lack of compassion and humanity. There are some gains to celebrate, for sure, but there’s still so much left to fix.

I’ve always believed that Germany, for how horrific its history is, got off very lightly. The country enjoys a relatively privileged position not just in the popular imagination, but also in the overall economic order (if it had been a brown country, things would be much different). This story vindicates that, and just strengthens my conviction that there is still some reckoning that needs to be had over Germany.

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The Girl in the Picture

A sketch artist and a grieving mother set out to solve a cold case. The more they dug, the more terrifying the truth became.

Another classic crime story from The Atavist, which you should know by now is a reliable source of top-notch longform stories.

Here, the writer follows the mysterious disappearance of a girl who, according to her adoptive family, just up and left. There was a lot of hand-wringing about how she was a troubled teen, jealous of her younger sister who was belonged, in a biological sense, to their parents. She was never found. The pieces of the story fit, but only tentatively—and years later, the case was revived by a sketch hobbyist, who eventually teamed up with the missing girl’s biological mother. The mystery that they unwound is grotesque and violent and tragic.

What makes this story shine for me is the writing. Excellence of research is a given for The Atavist. But the prose here felt cinematic. The writer had a great way of introducing new plot lines and made sure that she didn’t leave things hanging if they didn’t need to be—it was easy to imagine the entire thing out as a TV series.

Pretty interesting angle—forging ties between the massive displacement of people caused by conflict and by the climate catastrophe. The writer says it well, though I wish it had been given more space (see: word count).

The genocide in Gaza, the violence in Los Angeles, the slow deterioration of ecosystems across Pacific Island nations. These are intentional acts of violence connected by the deeper truth that climate justice has never just been about emissions data and temperature targets—important though they are. It’s about power; about who is protected, and who is left behind.

I’m not the biggest fan of New York Magazine (which owns Curbed). But I have to admit that sometimes, they find the most interesting people stories out there. This is one of those. And while I can’t exactly sympathize with any of the people in this piece, I was still entertained as hell.

This magazine is really growing on me. I’m still not quite comfortable with the short story format, and it still gives me some whiplash to go from journalism—grounded, rigidly structured—to the near-boundless form and sometimes poetic prose of fiction. But it’s definitely its own type of satisfying. And as someone who was raised in large part by his grandparents, I loved this story deeply.

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