Hi 👋 

We’re back again with another reading list of some of the best longform journalism across the internet ✨

And if you’ve been paying attention—unlike me—you probably noticed that I sent my usual Monday reading list on Saturday. I was too excited to have finished writing the newsletter up and got too trigger-happy with my mouse clicks. Didn’t even realize that I scheduled it incorrectly.

In any case, I hope you still enjoyed the list!

And to make up for my oopsie, here are four more reading recommendations for this Monday.

Happy reading and see you again next week!

The Longform List

From an engineering standpoint, the kidneys are a physiological marvel. Even the world’s most advanced dialysis machines only recapture a portion of the kidney’s biological activity. The complexity of the fist-sized organs — along with the life-threatening complications when they fail — never ceases to amaze Danovitch. As a UCLA nephrologist, he helped hundreds of patients receive new kidneys and watched hundreds more die while waiting for a transplant. But Danovitch draws the line at compensating donors.

“It’s payment. It’s money,” he told me. “And it’s a disaster.”

"My teacher was the final boss of butch lesbians. That's the only way I know how to describe her," Ferguson, now a 23-year-old co-founder of an independent animation studio, said. Their teacher loved competition and was beloved by her students, exactly the archetype to stop at a conference booth and believe in a quirky new cup-centric educational trend.

Rachael Nedrow, now a 29-year-old product manager at Amazon, first saw the sport while scrolling YouTube when she was 11. She pulled paper cups from the kitchen drawer to try and mimic the movement.

Both became obsessed, quickly. Though for different reasons.

The pandemic accelerated growth in online shopping, and therefore in returns, by several years. Quarantined lawyers bought fewer neckties but more sweatpants and bedroom slippers. People who were suddenly forced to work from home ordered desks, chairs, and computers. In 2021, UPS delivered a huge unassembled storage unit to my house. It was actually meant for a neighbor, but I opened the box because I, too, had ordered a huge unassembled storage unit. (Like many people, my neighbor and I had decided that COVID had given us an opportunity to organize our swelling hoard of household crap, including household crap we’d bought because of COVID. I texted my neighbor, and he drove over and picked up his box—no return necessary.)

Pre-pandemic, a common shopping strategy was to study possible purchases in a regular store, then save a few dollars by ordering from Amazon. When in-person shopping became difficult, the best way to compare products was to order multiples and send back the rejects.

The CBS show, narrated by Walter Cronkite, began at ten p.m. A minute before that, the Sinatra family, having finished dinner, turned their chairs around and faced the camera, united for whatever disaster might follow. Sinatra's men in other parts of town, in other parts of the nation, were doing the same thing. Sinatra's lawyer, Milton A. Rudin, smoking a cigar, was watching with a keen eye, an alert legal mind. Other sets were watched by Brad Dexter, Jim Mahoney, Ed Pucci; Sinatra's makeup man, "Shotgun" Britton; his New York representative, Henri Gine; his haberdasher, Richard Carroll; his insurance broker, John Lillie; his valet, George Jacobs, a handsome Negro who, when entertaining girls in his apartment, plays records by Ray Charles.

And like so much of Hollywood's fear, the apprehension about the CBS show all proved to be without foundation. It was a highly flattering hour that did not deeply probe, as rumors suggested it would, into Sinatra's love life, or the Mafia, or other areas of his private province. While the documentary was not authorized, wrote Jack Gould in the next day's New York Times, "it could have been."

Immediately after the show, the telephones began to ring throughout the Sinatra system conveying words of joy and relief—and from New York came Jilly's telegram: "WE RULE THE WORLD!"

Thanks for reading! Please, please reach out if you have feedback, suggestions, or questions. Alternatively, you can fill out this super quick survey form. I promise it won’t even take five minutes of your time, and it’ll be a HUGE help!

ALSO: I know some of the stories I recommend might be behind paywalls, and maybe I can help you with access to those. Send me a message and let’s see what we can do 😊

Until next Monday! 👋