Edition #103: Longform Profiles
This edition features America's longest-tenured workers, the greatest generation, the snail farm don, and more.
Spotlighting outstanding longform stories and the journalists who bring them to life. Did you receive this email from a friend? Subscribe here.
🎥 Chloé Zhao Has Looked Into the Void
Michael Schulman | The New Yorker
The natural world has been a big part of every film I’ve done, and I can now, in my forties, look back and say the reason is because I have always had a deep fear of death, and that drives my creativity. When you are afraid to die, you are not able to live fully. I know that deep inside. At night, when the light goes off, I lie there—I know I am not living my life fully, because I’m so terrified. I don’t feel safe in this world. When you go into nature, you develop a very embodied spirituality that is not reliant on anyone else. It’s a safety that you feel when you become one with your surroundings. All of our great prophets go into nature to come back with a message. So that’s part of working on my own shit.
🛠️ What America’s Longest-Tenured Employees Say About Work—Then and Now
Chip Cutter | The Wall Street Journal
The key to longevity: Porter says, “I just try to stay busy. My mom said, ‘You stay busy, you have a chance to keep that dirt off your head.’ And that’s what I’ve been doing, staying busy.” Wright says, “One day I’m going to wake up and say, ‘I’m not going in there no more.’ ” His doctor advised that he keep working as long as he is able to climb the plant’s stairs. “If you sit down, you’ll be on the couch,” Wright says. “Your body’s going to lock up on you. Keep moving, whatever you do. Don’t sit down. Don’t lay on that couch.”
🐄 The strange Wild West tale of the first cow-buffalo hybrid
Bill Gourgey | Popular Science
The years-long massacre of buffalo, also known as bison, followed by the blizzard carnage of cattle prompted Jones, a reformed buffalo hunter who once boasted of shooting buffalo by the thousands, to attempt to preserve one species while creating a new one. In 1886, Jones set out to wrangle as many remaining buffalo as he could. His ranch in Kansas—and later in other states—soon held the largest private herd of buffalo in the United States.
🎶 Dijon Had a Miraculous Year. He’s Not Finished Yet.
Paul A. Thompson | Pitchfork
Dijon Duenas is the rarest sort of popular artist: one committed to pushing formal boundaries in a way that makes him and his audience sincerely uncomfortable but who seems to get more famous the less he compromises. His second album, Baby—a meditation on heredity, shredded and reconstituted in a $10 DJ program—was released to rapturous acclaim in August. The record happened to come out squarely between a pair of LPs from megastar Justin Bieber that are composed largely of sessions with Dijon and four months after he appeared on Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE.
🧠 Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?
Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker
But, in his journal, Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work: he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.” He tried to reassure himself that the exaggerations did not come from a shallow place, such as a desire for fame or attention. “The impulse is both ‘purer’—and deeper,” he wrote. “It is not merely or wholly a projection—nor (as I have sometimes, ingeniously-disingenuously, maintained) a mere ‘sensitization’ of what I know so well in myself. But (if you will) a sort of autobiography.” He called it “symbolic ‘exo-graphy.’”
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🏝️ Rosie O’Donnell’s life in exile
Geoff Edgers | The Washington Post
If only she could stop thinking about him. Every day, whether she’s been at the pub enjoying a pint or shopping with Clay for a thrift shop sweater, O’Donnell still finds herself going online. She will post upward of a dozen links about Trump, ranging from videos showing him nodding off in the Oval Office to articles critical of his actions. She can’t resist.
