The Sunday Long Read

06/09/2024

As students across the country return to school, Alec MacGillis checks up on the million kids no longer in public schools, and the many buildings shuttered as a result.

Full story: https://bit.ly/47eVkgM
✏️: Alec MacGillis
📸: McFadden for The New Yorker

05/09/2024

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele—self-branded as the “world’s coolest dictator”—sits down for his first interview with a foreign reporter in three years. After suspending key civil liberties to round up alleged gang members, Bukele is seen by some as a miracle worker while others worry about the spread of his "mano dura" policies.

Full story: https://bit.ly/3Xu0v9y
✏️: Vera Bergengruen
📸: Christopher Gregory-Rivera for TIME

04/09/2024

Why do so many people—all around the world—feel lonely today? And is restoring old social traditions really the solution, if it’s even possible? Somehow, Matthew Shaer finds answers to these questions that are at least a little bit hopeful.

Full story: https://nyti.ms/3Mvg5LL
✏️: Matthew Shaer
📸: Max Guther. Concept by Alex Merto.

03/09/2024

We had a member special edition of SLR this week but we couldn't resist sharing a few of our most clicked stories.

Deep in recent finance reform bills are provisions created to encourage people who spot financial wrongdoing to speak up by paying tipsters a share of penalties collected by the government.

To Richard Overum (no, not his real name; yes, a ph***ic joke) those lines might as well be buried gold. He has hunted for targets online, often starting with yacht photos on social media, and exposed criminals to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Now, he let Gordy Megroz contribute to a recent Oceans-esque ploy for more legal spoils.

Full story: https://bit.ly/4dQVaPw
✏️: Gordy Megroz
📸: Weston Wei

31/08/2024

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“​​Here's a fun party game: get all your friends together, and try to agree on a single worst song ever.” But make sure to apologize in advance, because some all-time bad earworms could take days to shake off.

✏️: Walden Green & Dirt contributors

Listen at your own risk.

30/08/2024

Your inbox may be feeling a little lonely on Sunday. We're pausing our regular scheduled programming for Labor Day, BUT we will be sending a bonus edition to SLR paying members! Join for just $5: https://bit.ly/3yW5xlP

30/08/2024

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I bet the leaders of the august Washington Post never thought they’d run a story with these paragraphs leading the piece:

Mayoral candidate Victor Miller, a bespectacled librarian with an AI obsession, stood between an American flag and a Wyoming flag, preaching what he sees as the untapped potential of artificial intelligence in government.

Full story: https://wapo.st/4dWsfJp
✏️: Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff & Jenna Sampson
📸: Dalbert Vilarino for The Washington Post

29/08/2024

We’re going to wake up one morning in this country with the news of a burgeoning, exploding militia, somewhere, and wonder, “How’d this happen? Where did this come from?”

Thanks to Josh Kaplan, we get a view into the militant, mostly ragtag AP3 militia, with member fury based on so many beliefs that either may be or almost certainly are incorrect.

Full story: https://bit.ly/4fWmFs9
✏️: Joshua Kaplan
📸: Richard Chance for ProPublica

29/08/2024

Madeleine Newell, a 1903 Smith College graduate, was thrilled in 1912 to be in first class on the Titanic, after a three-month vacation through the Middle East and France. In her diary, she mentioned nothing about the trip.

Some 112 years later, her great-niece, Sandy Madeleine Sweeney Gallo, tells the haunting tale of Madeleine Newell surviving the sinking. Her father, Arthur Newell, did not.

Full story: https://bit.ly/4745Szn
✏️: George Spencer
📸: Najeebah Al-Ghadban

29/08/2024

Edralina Diezon, a 69-year-old Filipino housekeeper living in Maui when the big fire struck a year ago, hid for two days to avoid being killed in the fire, or swept away by the ocean.

Erika Hayasaki barely needs a single adjective in this devastatingly sad story of Diezon trying to make her way in Hawaii in the fire’s aftermath to tell this tragic story. The events themselves are enough to slap the reader in the face.

Full story: https://nyti.ms/3Z1CmbI
✏️: Erika Hayasaki
📸: Portia Marcelo

28/08/2024

NFL games used to be the province of over-the-air TV, just the way Congress liked it. Now, of course, you need some combo platter of either cable or a service like YouTube TV… and you need Amazon Prime, Netflix and NBC’s streamer Peacock.
Then there’s ESPN+, NFL Network, and the Red Zone channel. It’s dizzying.

The upcoming football season is a sign of the new world on sports TV to come. It’s all streaming & it’s not cheap.

28/08/2024

How is it possible that a rodeo rider named Cassio Dias was stomped so severely by an angry bull that five spinal fractures resulted … and that he still rode a bull in a big-league contest the next week? We're not sure, but Lauren Larson does a good job explaining it.

Full story: https://bit.ly/4dEKao5
✏️: Lauren Larson
📸: Brian Finke

28/08/2024

Peter King's nephew studied the future of mass transportation in college. King asked him recently, when a spate of delays on the nation’s rail system, Amtrak, made East Coast travel nightmarish, whether he thought it’d ever get better. “I doubt it,” he said. “The oil companies don’t want trains to work. The auto companies don’t want trains to work.” So simple. So correct.

Full story: https://nyti.ms/3Z29Uqc
✏️: Patrick McGeehan and James Glanz
📸: Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

27/08/2024

The Chronicle’s opinion columnist and cultural critic wades into just another piece of what’s diminishing city life by the Bay: diners making reservations, then stiffing restaurants.

Full story: https://bit.ly/3XkJKOb
✏️: Soleil Ho
📸: Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

27/08/2024

You don’t have to have to be someone of a certain age to have heard of the Chicago 7. And while the Democratic National Convention was happening in Chicago, POLITICO dropped a true gem on the last person alive from the Chicago 7–Lee Weiner, who lives a few long fungoes from the spring home of the Toronto Blue Jays in sleepy Dunedin, Fla.

Full story: https://bit.ly/4g1oQdX
✏️: Jasper Craven
📸: Gabriel Burgos for POLITICO

27/08/2024

Mark Dent just might be a genius. Now this is journalism!

Toilet paper was getting smaller. He just knew it. He went on eBay and found an unopened package of Charmin, bought it, and compared toilet paper produced 32 years apart. What he found was toilet paper shrinkflation.

Full story: https://bit.ly/4dZ1fZS
✏️: Mark Dent

27/08/2024

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Michael Oher, 38, tells his side of “The Blind Side” story for the first time, eight years after his eight-year NFL career ended.

Full story: https://nyti.ms/3AIaJu3
✏️: Michael Sokolove
📸: Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times

26/08/2024

☀️ The Sunday Long Read: Peter King, Blind Side, Toilet Paper

Dive in to this week's SLR: https://bit.ly/4g1oQdX

24/08/2024

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A heartfelt plea tweeted or Xed or whatever by the world’s wealthiest person:

All I want is for you to be nice to me. Please be nice to me. Please be my friend. Will you be my friend? You can even just pretend to be my friend, if you want. Please.

Have a laugh: https://bit.ly/3yLbm5k

23/08/2024

A solid piece of investigative reporting by Garrett Shanley, a student journalist at the University of Florida.

Ben Sasse, the former university president, tripled his office’s spending by channeling millions in university funds into high-paying positions for his Republican Party allies and secretive consulting contracts.

Let’s always celebrate speak-truth-to-power journalism published by student newspapers!

Full story: https://bit.ly/3WUPcWi
✏️: Garrett Shanley
📸: Garrett Shanley | The Independent Florida Alligator

23/08/2024

Sure, this wild story is now infamous but it shouldn’t matter if you appreciate a damn good true crime caper, as we do.

In this fast-paced, details-rich excerpt of their new book, McMillions, James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte tell the story of a pair of unlikely underdog FBI agents who brought news of the $24 million fraud to McDonald’s executives.

Read more: https://bit.ly/3YJpLtw
✏️: James Lee Hernandez & Brian Lazarte

22/08/2024

A son brings his dad, a former lawyer suffering from dementia, back to work for one more case. We don’t want to spoil any other surprises in store, except to say: bring tissues.

Full story: https://bit.ly/4dL8Lal
✏️: Andrew Bloomenthal
📸: Ethan Gulley

22/08/2024

Tajja Isen explores the growing sense that the publishing industry is “inhospitable to minoritized writers.” That extends to design choices made for book covers. Is it true that “diversity doesn’t sell?”

Full story: https://bit.ly/46PW5wK
✏️: Tajja Isen
📸: Frenchfold / Bruce Martin/Alamy Stock Photo / Richard Horvath/Unsplash

22/08/2024

A medical mystery story: Canadian doctors have identified similar symptoms in dozens of patients. As Greg Donahue explains in this deeply reported piece, the still-confounding scientific puzzle has now become “a political maelstrom.”

Full story: https://nyti.ms/3X7Z14t
✏️: Greg Donahue
📸: Brendan George Ko for The New York Times

21/08/2024

It isn’t easy starting a professional sports team anywhere in America. But in Oakland, California? The city that the Raiders and Warriors have abandoned and the A’s are high-tailing it for the Las Vegas strip after making a pit stop at a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento, of all places?

Two buddies in their mid-40s, Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel, set out to do just that by creating the Oakland Ballers. Dan Moore takes us inside this remarkably bold (and possibly remarkably dumb) gambit. And this thing wasn’t just going to be difficult; the clock was ticking:

Full story: https://bit.ly/4cuDac6
✏️: Dan Moore
📸: Getty Images/Ringer illustration

21/08/2024

Take a trip to the ‘Napa’ of tomatoes, where Heinz has been perfecting its seed recipe for more than a century, and doing everything it can now to keep up with rising temperatures. Would it be too much to call this story “juicy?”

Full story: https://bloom.bg/4fNdiel
✏️: Deena Shanker
📸: Jason Henry / Bloomberg

21/08/2024

The headline makes this story sound like some sort of joke. It’s not. Instead, Rowan Moore Gerety has taken an exhausting—and fairly frightening—look at an environmental crisis playing out across the U.S.-Mexico border, leaving countless Californians sick. The situation is also “a reminder that both sides of the border constitute a single place.”

Full story: https://bit.ly/3AuQvUs
✏️: Rowan Moore Gerety
📸: Gregory Bull / AP Photo

20/08/2024

What are family members of now-famous victims doing traveling to CrimeCon—a gathering for thousands of true-crime aficionados? They're certainly not there for the money (guest appearances are uncompensated). Instead, the answer Luke Winkie comes across in this empathetic field report from a truly American event is surprisingly powerful.

Full story: https://bit.ly/46OAtkt
✏️: Luke Winkie
📸: Illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.

20/08/2024

Last week, we partnered with the folks at Tangle, a nonpartisan media organization that shares the best arguments from across the political spectrum to get you out of your news bubble.

Check out this in-depth analysis on the way US presidential elections work, why they run that way, and how they might change.

Full story: https://bit.ly/4cshayF
✏️: Isaac Saul, Will Kaback, Ari Weitzman & Sophia Downs
📸: Unseen Histories / Unsplash

20/08/2024

“In the end, he was alone.” That’s the lede on this outstanding, moment-by-moment “tic-toc” of President Biden’s extraordinary (and better-late-than-never) decision to pull the ripcord on his re-election campaign.

Full story: https://nyti.ms/3SVPhYJ
✏️: Michael D. ShearKatie Rogers and Adam Entous
📸: Eric Lee/The New York Times