Hi 👋 

Another Monday, another reading list of the best longform journalism across the internet✨

Had a great restful weekend, during which I forgot that I had an unfinished draft of The Lazy Reader. So now I’m cramming and hoping to be able to pump this out in time, and without cutting too many corners. Writing-wise, of course. The reads here are always great 😌

If you missed last week’s email, here are a few choice picks:

• A case for armed struggle.

• The last moments of a doomed ship.

• Detective Google Search.

As with last week, 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!

PS - Thanks again to 1440 Media for supporting this week’s edition! Please, please consider clicking their ad after the fold below. It’s free, easy, and realy helps me out!

Story in Spotlight

I’ll be upfront: This piece doesn’t have the most breath-taking prose, nor is it the most compelling, arresting narrative. But it does, in my opinion, raise the most important point.

Which is that statistics as we know it today, and as it has become the de facto basis for scientific proof, is has a very eugenicist core. And not just that statistics was created by three of the most vile eugenicists in history (to forward their classist, racist ends, no less), but also that the very concept of it has eugenicist color.

After all, the idea that there is a normal distribution of people, crowding around a median man, very easily lends itself to supremacist thinking. Because what does that mean when the Bell curve of society deems me to be in its long tail? What does that make me?

I’ve gone through years of scientific study and never realized how slippery that slope is. Very shameful.

There’s really nothing special about the writing in this story. Prose is fine, if a bit long-winded and hard-to-follow at times. Research is much better, though, with the writer digging deep into historical material that I can only imagine was hard to access and even harder to make sense of. There is an impressive level of mind-mapping going on here, evident in how the structure manages to keep you afloat despite the flood of historical material.

Not too long but difficult to read. Maybe 45 minutes of focus. 

The Longform List

The Balloon that Fell from the Sky | The Atavist, $

Ahh The Atavist. Always, always a solid source for top-tier longform journalism about a compelling but iexplicabl under-reported story. This one is no different: The writer unearths a tragic ballooning incident that sparks heated geopolitical questions and raises existential concerns about the hobby of ballooning itself. I’m not sure there’s really a grand lesson to be drawn from this story—it’s just one hell of a narrative, and one hell of a reading experience.

Starved in Jail | The New Yorker, $

This one, I’m fairly sure, does have a grand lesson that it tries to get across. And it does this by trying to make you really angry (or at least, that’s how I felt). Prisons across the U.S. pay millions per year to private contractors who, in turn, are supposed to make sure that people in jail are treated humanely—fed, bathed, given appropriate care. For a developed nation (and one that likes to brand itself as a bastion of human rights), that should go without saying. But as this story uncovers, that’s not the case for an alarming number of prisons across the country, and hundreds have already died from neglect.

The New Yorker doesn’t usually do hardcore investigations, but this story proves that they should do these more often.

The Longest Night | GQ, $

Another one of those classic GQ features, probably one of the pieces that really served as a blueprint for the longform subgenre on maritime incidents. It’s clear why. In many ways, this story hits all the beats of this archetype: A complacent crew, an inexplicable incident, the chaos and the panic—the panic here is especially compelling, I have to say—and an against-all-odds rescue.

The writer delivers so well on these that even if many of the outstanding questions remain unanswered (What caused the leak? Who was responsible for it? How the hell did those men survive for that long in the freezing water?), you go away feeling like it almost doesn’t matter. The story is satisfying even if it leaves some threads hanging.

A Wild Plan to Avert Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise | The Atlantic, $

Admittedly, I’ve been trying to distance myself from The Atlantic of late. It just doesn’t feel like their journalism is as good or as level-headed as it used to be. Sometimes it feels like they’re trying to provoke you into clicking. That’s the type of skepticism that I went into this story with.

And I’m glad. While this story doesn’t necessarily provoke you into anything, I also feel like it hyper-focuses on a still-relatively-niche corner of environmental science. And it puts too much stock into a techno future that may or may not be helpful at all to the climate crisis. This is a solid read nevertheless, but I think it would have been better if it leaned into that tension a bit more.

Death, Sexual Violence and Human Trafficking: Fallout From U.S. Aid Withdrawal Hits the World’s Most Fragile Locations | ProPublica, Free

Relatively short story for our fare, but with a lot to unpack. Of course, it’s tragic and deplorable and incredibly infuriating that millions of people the world over will now have to go hungry because of the decision of a few men, but I think the real story runs deeper than that. (Which unfortunately this piece—or any piece that I’ve seen, for that matter—doesn’t explore.)

For people in the U.S., maybe the pulling aid is about soft power, about the threat of terrorism, about benevolence. But for those of us living in these so-called “fragile” locations, there’s all of that plus the question of independence, over-reliance, foreign influence, fiscal control, indebtedness, cultural erasure, colonialism, and so, so much more.

Brandon Sanderson Is Your God | WIRED, $

Was honestly a bit leery about even reading this profile, because I wasn’t convinced that there’s anything else that anyone online could say about Sanderson that hasn’t already been said. The writer is all too aware of this, as well, and was miraculously able to draw something new and unique out of Sanderson. This honestly would have been a pleasant, light read with a nice, profound payoff—if only it weren’t dripping with condescension against nerds at every turn.

I know the writer probably meant it as a self-deprecating joke, especially since he considers himself as also a reader of the fantasy genre, but it doesn’t translate. There are moments, too, that he sounds very elitist about what fantasy is, which I found to be off-putting.

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Bonus!

This might be a controversial piece (and a controversial take), but Obama isn’t the president that he is often made out to be. And lest people accuse me of being a hyper-conservative: No I’m not. I’m quite the opposite, actually. I’d like to think of myself as sitting somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum—but I’d also quickly argue that these distinctions are reductive rather than productive.

In any case, this is a good starting point. Tom Junod, in all his brilliance, writes something between an open-letter to Obama and an investigative piece, laying in out impressive detail how war-hungry the Obama administration is—despite maintaining a polished pacifist image. I guess that’s how he won that Nobel prize despite being the most bloodthirsty U.S. president on record.

Just some quick nitpicks (not something I thought I’d say of anything from Tom): The piece focuses on the gap between Obama’s policies and his public proclamations, but it glosses over the lies that must have been told to maintain this disconnect. I know all governments lie, but the depth of deception here is astounding.

There’s also this subtext (which wasn’t even subtle at all) throughout the piece that much of the problem with Obama’s Lethal Presidency is that it ended up killing two American citizens without the appropriate due process. And I guess that angling makes sense for Esquire, an American publication that speaks to an American audience, but to thousands of readers outside the U.S. (myself included), this feels like a blunt way of telling us we matter less.

Yeah sure it’s sad that you’re being bombed back to the stone age. But it’s Obama. I’m sure he has very good reasons for doing it. It’s a necessary sacrifice. We’re keeping thousands more safe from terrorists. Don’t start a war you can’t finish. We’re doing it to liberate you guys! You should thank us. And the absolute kicker: We’re doing this to fight for human rights.

I digress. Sorry: This is a great piece but I just couldn’t shake the frustration over that subtext. Years upon years of being told that the imperial project is for our good ultimately. Anyway, I hope this story sparks in you an interest in what that U.S. government is doing rather than what it is saying.

Long. Very, very long. I took 1 hour and maybe 20 minutes.

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! 👋