'Red with the blood of these turtles.'

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Hi 👋 

Another Monday with TLR and the best longform stories curated from across the Web ✨

This one is a bit special because it’s our last full list for this year 🥳 I’m taking a quick break next week, and will use the time to recalibrate myself and what I want for this newsletter.

So let me take this moment to say thank you for reading along with TLR this year and see you again next year! Happy holidays—make it a restful, fruitful, fun one! 🍾

As always, if you missed last week’s email, feel free to give that a read. Otherwise, here are a few choice picks:

• The Dial Inside Germany’s Taxpayer Funded Neo-Nazi Networks

• Curbed The Battle of Fishkill

• Outside 19: The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire

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!

It’s not every week that we can lead with an environment story, so I feel really fulfilled that we can do that this week.

The blurb for this piece kind of gives it away, honestly, but the piece still delivers a painful emotional punch. It starts off innocuously enough: With a writer parachuting into a world he doesn’t completely understand, drawn by the allure of thousands of turtle eggs hatching and making their way to the sea. There’s a junket-like state-sponsored lab tour, a skeptical activist, a disbelieving press, and a grim realization of the bloody truth that Escobilla hides.

The story is told in the first-person, a piece of experiential journalism that really takes the leader along on a journey from sheltered naivete to depressing realism. I don’t necessarily appreciate how the reporter was so easily swayed by a press event—really? no skepticism at all?—but I do love how the piece highlights the messiness of climate justice and how the media should see its role in the movement. The both-sides-ing of catastrophe is unacceptable.

Philips Kept Complaints About Dangerous Breathing Machines Secret While Company Profits Soared | ProPublica, Free

If you needed another story to prove the evil greed of industry, this one is definitely it. Great investigative work here by ProbPublica, which uncovered that the company definitely knew of the health risks (many of them severe) posed by their CPAPs, but didn’t do anything about it. Not only that, they pushed the product and used the pandemic to blow their sales up even further, all the while bragging to investors and peers that their business was doing great. Worse, still, is that none of these are treated as gross crimes.

The Fit Man's Heart Threat | Men’s Health, Free

This story does a good job of applying a science lens to something that a broader section of the readership will understand, and it does so in a way that isn’t condescending and without overly simplifying the concepts. That’s something that even the most seasoned science writers struggle with.

Another thing that this piece does better than most science stories is that, without reservation, it dives into a key tension in science-driven policy: Are the broader public health benefits worth risking a few people over? For those who live in the U.S., I’m sure that’s top-of-mind for you guys at the moment.

The Accidental Terrorist | The Atavist, $

Fascinating story. Truly the types of scoops that journalists dream of. A California accountant starting a rebel group in Cambodia to stand up to what he believes is a dictatorial government? Wish I could find a story like that. Great prose, too. Nothing elaborate, but really gets the job done in a quiet, smart way.

Just one gripe: The headline explicitly labels Chhun as an “accidental terrorist” when he is not—his actions were completely on purpose, driven by hubris and fatal naivete.

The Secret Algorithm Behind Your $20 Burger | The Lever, $

Again another industry piece, and again it points to the supreme greed of businesses, resorting to all means at their disposal to keep margins high. What that means for you and me is that prices—of meat, in this case—will increasingly be unaffordable while wages (supposedly the reason they’re raising their prices) stay stagnant. But now, in the age of AI and Big Data, these businesses are supercharging their greed with algorithms and predictive models and numbers. Kinds of leave you feeling hopeless, doesn’t it?

Prisoner of Conscience | GQ, $

Hmm. Kind of torn about this one. Looking at it from a journalist’s POV, this is a great scoop. Having the Abu Ghraib whistleblower speak so directly, so candidly to you that you’re able to write a piece like this? Some of us can only ever dream of that.

But as a person concerned about human rights and democracy? This feels… icky. Why is this plaything of the empire, who willingly signed up to be flown into a foreign country with the express knowledge that they will be killing and ransacking and destroying, being given such a platform? And why does this piece so glibly look over the deaths and abuses at Abu Ghraib? Isn’t that the entire point of the controversy? Why is there so much focus on the inter-personal drama and tensions of these soldiers? It feels like a glorified high school TV show.

And I guess with all of that said, I guess that also changes my view of this story as a journalist: This isn’t the type of story I’d necessarily be proud of. It feels like the writer and the editors and the producers were all too concerned with the micro of the story—the setting, the details of the events, the syntax—that they completely forgot to look at the macro. No social context, no historical lens. Largely just an empty retelling.

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A compelling story, for sure. But you might need to keep reminding yourself throughout—as I did—that this is Bloomberg, a business-focused publication. And so necessarily, the piece will revolve heavily around those and similar themes, not the more socially relevant, historically grounded aspects of this story.

That might be an important nugget to keep in mind because at many points in the story, I found myself thinking 'why the hell does his POV matter?’ or ‘is there not a character in this story who isn’t egregiously self-centered?'

In any case, for what it tries to do, this story is stellar. I know because even if the overt focus on money was off-putting, I was still so deeply enraged by the story. A major global bank that considers a poor country’s treasury as an income-generating project? Careerists taking advantage of people’s ignorance? The sneering, condescending way these Western bankers look at their African peers? The complete disregard for the actual human and social ramification of such greed?

I know, I know—these are the pillars of our modern capitalist economic system (propped up by politics and law, as was the case in this story, too), so I shouldn’t really be surprised. That doesn’t mean I can’t still be very, very angry at it.

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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! 👋