Young immigrants who have been separated from their parents find a home at the Children’s Center in Galveston. Jessica Weisberg, who began reporting this story in March 2015, meticulously and beautifully tells their stories.
Stephen Rodrick spent a year reporting on America’s alarming suicide epidemic, dominated by white men who are fueled by poverty, isolation and easy access to guns and account for 70 percent of all cases. Most of those suicides, roughly double the national rate, occur in Montana, Wyoming and Alaska, followed by New Mexico, Idaho and Utah.
“Last summer, I began a 2,000-mile drive through the American West, a place of endless mythology and one unalterable fact: The region has become a self-immolation center for middle-aged American men,” Rodrick writes. “The image of the Western man and his bootstraps ethos is still there, but the cliche has a dark turn—when they can no longer help themselves, they end themselves.”
Combating climate change is all well and good, until you want to dump "a hundred tons of iron dust in the middle of the ocean," not far from Canada's western shores, it turns out.
Protecting this planet might require bold intervention, but what should we do if we can’t all get on the same page? This story—half profile of alleged “rogue geoengineer,” half big-picture thinkpiece—goes there.
“I knew his role in the invasion meant a great deal to him,” writes Barry Svrluga about his grandfather, William J. Svrluga Sr., described as a father, golfer, husband, engineer, grandfather, Cubs fan, cheapskate, retiree. In 2003, Barry Svlurga and family went back to Normandy with William for a visit. “But I never saw his haunting, heartbreaking diary until after he died.”
The Billboard By Kathy Dobie for The California Sunday Magazine (~40 minutes)
After Stephanie Montgomerie says she was raped at the strip club where she worked, she told her manager and the police. They did nothing. That’s when she decided to tell her story as big as she could.
Join Lili Anolik for a journey back to the autumn of 1982 (feels nice, I was also a college freshman then) to lovely Bennington College, “arty, louche and expensive,” where future Gen X literary stars Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem and Bret Easton Ellis were among the druggies, heirs, rebels and posers.
Project: Phenom By Chris Ballard for Sports Illustrated (~25 minutes)
Everyone will react differently to this story of a 13-year-old soccer superstar, but one thing we can all agree on: Chris Ballard has scored again.
Over the past four years, associates of celebrated ’60s and ’70s artist Peter Max, now 81 and suffering from advanced dementia, kept churning out his valuable work for sale, mainly on cruise ships, though the art wasn’t by him. This deeply reported story by Amy Chozick gets much wilder from there.
Outlaw Country By Emma Marris for The Atavist Magazine (~50 minutes)
Klamath County, Oregon is the perfect place to go if you just want to disappear—and the worst place to be if someone threatens your life. This outstanding piece, by Emma Marris, is about a bitter feud in an enclave of libertarians and it raises this question: What happens when someone who’s opted out of the social contract needs help from the state?
The Gig Is Up By Rosalind Adams for BuzzFeed News (~30 minutes)
A Lyft driver with a criminal record was charged with rape. But why was he behind the wheel? Rosalind Adams reports that the world’s largest background check company that screens job applicants for thousands of companies is prone to errors, employees there say, and that allegedly led to serious harm.
As my ESPN colleague Baxter Holmes reports in this outstanding piece, the dysfunction of the LA Lakers is far worse than anyone knew with difficult consequences for some of the team’s employees.
Meet Gabriel Zucman, a 32-year-old French economist who you don’t want sleuthing through spreadsheets if you’re a 0.1-percenter with some of your wealth hidden in offshore bank accounts.
We love this wide-ranging, heartfelt conversation with Keanu Reeves by Hadley Freeman, an SLR contributing editor. And, yes, Keanu is proving himself to be something of a philosopher-king.
"To be unwelcome in a place, yet not allowed to leave—it was almost laughable. This is what it is to be an immigrant, I thought: perpetually straddling the border between belonging and not," Raksha Vasudevan writes in this adventure into American myths.
You have three options: You can trust Google, or not use Google services at all. In this piece, David Nield focuses on that third option—limiting the information Google can collect about you.
Access is so tightly controlled in the U.K. that it’s almost impossible to write about sports there. Is that the dark future awaiting American sports coverage?
“I chose life,” says Amanda Eller, a 35-year-old Hawaiian yoga teacher who disappeared on a Maui trail for 17 days before her rescue that made national news. This piece, by Breena Kerr and Alex Horton, pieces together Eller’s dramatic rescue by a tireless team of volunteers better than any other account we’ve seen.
Behind the scenes of Donald Trump’s Wikipedia page, one of the most popular pages on the Internet, editors are fighting a petty, cutthroat war over practically every word.
In the summer of 1992, my family gathered in central Minnesota for my grandfather’s 70th birthday. We were there to celebrate William J. Svrluga Sr. — father, golfer, husband, engineer, grandfather, Cubs fan, cheapskate, retiree. Seven of us joined in the celebration: Bill Sr.’s wife, Ruth, my grandmother; his two sons, my father, Bill Jr., and my uncle Dick; their wives; my younger brother, Brad, and me.
At one point, maybe between the walleye and the turtle cheesecake, the conversation hit a lull. Uncle Dick filled it. “Okay, Dad,” he asked. “What are you most proud of in your life?” I think I half expected my grandfather to say the time he shot even-par 72. What could be better than that? This was chitchat, brag-about-the-family stuff, set up on a tee. Instead, he knocked us over with his response. “D-Day,” he said.
I remember it as both matter-of-fact on his part and jarring to the rest of us. Why, if D-Day had been so important to him, had we never heard about D-Day? We knew he had been there, part of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Right then, it became apparent how little else we understood. As the 75th anniversary of D-Day approaches, I’m again aghast that I thought he could have answered anything else.
When my wife, Lizette Alvarez, and I joined The New York Times in the summer of 1995 at the age of 30 (we were the first married couple hired at the same time by the Grey Lady—but that’s another story), the pressure to excel was intense. The hazing also wasn’t much fun (again, another story). By mid-autumn, we were completely frazzled by the 80 hour work weeks and our collective unease that we weren’t getting much traction at the nation’s top newspaper. Plus, it felt as if we hadn’t smiled in weeks.
Late one Friday night, I returned home from the Times newsroom to our Upper West Side apartment to find Lizette sitting on the floor of our apartment, smoking and sipping whiskey. Playing on our small TV was our well-worn VCR copy of “Young Frankenstein,” the hilarious, ingenious 1974 Mel Brooks-Gene Wilder co-creation that’s probably our favorite film comedy. The scene, in black and white, was a dark train platform, where Gene Wilder was trying to plant a goodbye kiss on Madeline Kahn. “I need to laugh,” Lizette said. And so we both watched, and it helped, with everything.
The irritating thing about interviews with famous people is that they've been interviewed so many times their anecdotes and insights start to go stale from the retellings. This 35-year-old interview with my least favorite Beatles has some juice to it even though wife Linda keeps adding her two cents. Here's Paul on his Japanese jail stint: "It was hell. But I only remember the good bits. Like a bad holiday. The thing is, my arrest was on every bloody TV set. The other prisoners all knew who I was and asked me to sing. I didn't have any instruments, but the world's press would have loved to have had cameras rolling as I was going drums with hands. Well, I'd seen Bridge on the River Kwai. I knew what you had to do when you were a prisoner of war! You had to laugh a lot and keep cheery and keep yourself up, 'cause that's all you had. So I did a lot of that."
Classic Read curator Jack Shafer writes about media for Politico.
If you’ve been reading my little plugs for a while, you’ve perhaps noticed that I’ve plugged everything that Dan Taberski (Missing Richard Simmons, Surviving Y2K) has made so far. Well, he just keeps getting better and better. Nothing has quite gotten me worked up quite like the final two episodes of this series. It’s important and brilliant work.
Sunday Pod curator Jody Avirgan is the host of FiveThirtyEight's politics podcast and is heading up the new "30 for 30" podcast documentary series from ESPN.
Some photographers can invoke emotion in a single shot. For Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald Photographer Carlos Guerrero, it happened on a regular basis, but most memorably on Aug. 24, 1992, when he photographed a stunned Harold “Tex” Keith standing in ankle-high water in a Florida City trailer park. In one arm, Keith cradled a pile of soaked clothing, his only possessions left by Hurricane Andrew, which also demolished the Comfort Inn where Guerrero had spent the night with two reporters. Guerrero, 62, died May 26 when his heart failed him. His uncompromising eye for all things Miami left us a stellar 30-year portfolio of images that documented South Florida and the many stars who passed through it. They included Muhammad Ali, Celia Cruz, John Travolta and Jennifer Lopez, who Guerrero – always angling for the best shot – once implored, “JLo, show me your magic.” Thank you, Carlos, for always showing us yours.
Patrick Farrell, the curator of The Sunday Still, is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner for Breaking News Photography for The Miami Herald, where he worked from 1987 to 2019. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Management at the University of Miami School of Communication.
Watch this. Talk about it. Some fascinating women fight the stigma and talk tampon mules and the serious struggle to shoulder the financial burden of menstruation.
The Long View curator Justine Gubar is an Executive Producer at Bleacher Report and the author of Fanaticus: Mischief and Madness in the Modern Sports Fan. Reach out to Justine at justinegubar@mac.com if you have a suggestion for next week's Long View.
On May 1, 2019, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a 75-page brief positing, among other things, that "[t]he individual mandate [in the Affordable Care Act] is unconstitutional because Congress eliminated the tax penalty on which the Supreme Court's savings construction rested." The legal filing was made in a case initiated by Texas and a number of other states. The case is currently pending at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
Sunday Esoterica curator Ryan Rodenberg works as a professor at Florida State University, where he teaches research methods and sports law. He writes a lot of academic articles and some mainstream pieces too.
As much as any record I've listened to this year so far, Young Enough by Charley Bliss is likely the most addictive. The second album from the Brooklyn power-pop outfit offers the bubblegum sweet pop-rock perfection of Weezer and the Go-Go's to go with the swelling anthem power of the Killers or Metric.
Young Enough is the follow up to then group's 2017 debut album Guppy, and has rightfully won a number of critical praises. Pitchfork awarded the record an 8.0 out of 10, with critic Quinn Moreland noting "the Brooklyn band’s second record is bigger and darker, amplifying their ’80s new-wave sparkle into ecstatic triumph."
Kelly Dearmore is a Dallas-based journalist whose work has appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Paste, American Songwriter, the Dallas Observer and Lone Star Music, among other fine outlets.
Over at Vulture, comics/culture reporter Abraham Riesman takes a look at the "evil Superman" trope, through the lens of director David Yarovesky's new film, Brightburn, which takes cues from Superman's legendary beginnings with an important twist - gone is the Krypton-born/farm-raised Clark Kent, replaced by a less morally forthright, sociopathic protagonist. Riesman, who's working on a much-anticipated biography of the late Marvel mastermind, Stan Lee, runs down the many times we've seen the Superman mythology go bad - including the ones that worked and the ones that fell short. Most interesting is Riesman's well-researched take on what these stories mean and say about us as a culture, and the impact "evil Superman" tales have on us still.
Alex Segura is an acclaimed author, a comic book writer written various comic books, including The Archies, Archie Meets Ramones, and Archie Meets KISS. He is also the co-creator and co-writer of the Lethal Lit podcast from iHeart Radio, which was named one of the Five Best Podcasts of 2018 by The New York Times. By day, Alex is Co-President of Archie Comics. You can find him at www.alexsegura.com.
Founder, Curator: Don Van Natta Jr. Producer, Curator: Jacob Feldman Producer, Curator: Étienne Lajoie Senior Recycling Editor: Jack Shafer Senior Long View Editor: Justine Gubar Senior Photo Editor: Patrick Farrell Senior Music Editor: Kelly Dearmore Senior Podcast Editor: Jody Avirgan Senior Editor of Esoterica: Ryan M. Rodenberg Senior Originals Editor: Peter Bailey-Wells Sunday Comics Editor: Alex Segura
Digital Team: Nation Hahn, Nickolaus Hines, Megan McDonell, Alexa Steinberg Podcast Team: Cary Barbor, Julian McKenzie, Jonathan Yales Webmaster: Ana Srikanth Campus Editor: Peter Warren
Contributor in memoriam: Lyra McKee 1990-2019
Contributing Editors: Bruce Arthur, Shaun Assael, Nick Aster, Alex Belth, Sara J. Benincasa, Jonathan Bernstein, Sara Blask, Greg Bishop, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Maria Bustillos, Chris Cillizza, Anna Katherine Clemmons, Rich Cohen, Jonathan Coleman, Pam Colloff, Maureen Dowd, Charles Duhigg, Brett Michael Dykes, Geoff Edgers, Hadley Freeman, Lea Goldman, Michael N. Graff, Maggie Haberman, Reyhan Harmanci, Virginia Heffernan, Matthew Hiltzik, Jena Janovy, Bomani Jones, Chris Jones, Peter Kafka, Paul Kix, Mina Kimes, Peter King, Michael Kruse, Tom Lamont, Edmund Lee, Chris Lehmann, Will Leitch, Jon Mackenzie, Glynnis MacNicol, Drew Magary, Erik Malinowski, Jonathan Martin, Betsy Fischer Martin, Jeff Maysh, Jack McCallum, Lyra McKee, Susan McPherson, Ana Menendez, Kevin Merida, Heidi N. Moore, Eric Neel, Joe Nocera, Ashley R. Parker, Anne Helen Petersen, Jo Piazza, Joe Posnanski, S.L. Price, Jennifer Romolini, Julia Rubin, Albert Samaha, Bob Sassone, Bruce Schoenfeld, Michael Schur, Joe Sexton, Jacqui Shine, Rachel Sklar, Dan Shanoff, Ben Smith, Adam Sternbergh,Matt Sullivan, Wright Thompson, Pablo Torre, Kevin Van Valkenburg, Nikki Waller, John A. Walsh, Seth Wickersham and Karen Wickre.
Header Image: Jon Ferrey
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