Edition #110: Longform Profiles

This edition China's crystal capital, the world's most powerful literary critic, the most violent prison in America, and more.

Spotlighting outstanding longform stories and the journalists who bring them to life. Did you receive this email from a friend? Subscribe here.

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Credit: Derreck Johnson

🔨 The Handyman

Alexander Sammon | Slate

Jornaleros, the day laborers—guys who did construction, demolition, landscaping, whatever—began filling up the back of aisle one, leaning up against parked cars, sitting on the curb, nearest to the street. One arrived on bicycle. Just two or three at first, then six. They scanned the lot for potential hirers, jumped at the sign of a car driving slowly through the aisles. Troques drove in too, pickups with tools piled in the bed, and they parked in the back, in aisle two and aisle three. A red one, then a white one, then another white one. They gave each other space. They had phone numbers painted on them and they advertised those services: hauling, or “houling,” or “haulling.”

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💎 How China’s ‘Crystal Capital’ Cornered the Market on a Western Obsession

Louise Matsakis, Rachel Zheng | WIRED

Liu is the first to admit that none of this is normal. “I grew up in a village where almost every household was impoverished,” he says. “It feels unbelievable that crystals could make you rich.” But stories like his are common in Donghai. Nearly everyone we spoke with, from cab drivers and young entrepreneurs to livestreamers and longtime traders, described it as a place defined by surges of opportunity followed by sudden crashes, where information travels fast and margins can evaporate overnight. People are constantly rushing to buy and sell the shiniest new thing, often only to realize the market has already shifted and someone else caught the wave first.

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🏔️ Kílian Jornet on What We Can Learn From Pushing Our Bodies to Extremes

Lulu Garcia-Navarro | The New York Times

Jornet, 38, is a professional ultramarathoner and mountaineer whose life’s work is literally to run — or ski — up mountains. Even in the world of elite athletes, he is exceptional. Jornet holds the fastest known time for scaling Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. He’s climbed Everest twice, in the span of a week, and he did it with no supplementary oxygen or support. His VO2 max (a key indicator of aerobic endurance) is one of the highest ever recorded; his stamina has been studied by researchers; and he has pushed the limits of what is considered physically possible.

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🎰 On Tilt

Jasper Craven | Harper’s Magazine

Four years later, I have wagered more than $18,000 on FanDuel. The story of my spending, and burgeoning football fandom, is freakishly conventional. Really, it was FanDuel that gave me a reason to watch football. Here was a means to instantly and seamlessly experience risk, feed my ego, and even find something like occasional redemption. Sometimes, if I lose more than $100, I place a bigger bet to make up for it. This phenomenon is called “chasing your losses,” and in large doses, I’m told, it can signal a problem.

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🏭 The Sins on the River Road Cannot Be Erased

Lex Pryor | The Ringer

The facility would go on to process neoprene, a popular rubber substitute that produces a colorless by-product called chloroprene. Since 1999, the International Agency for Research on Cancer has considered chloroprene a human carcinogen: It substantially increases the risk of cancer in the liver, lungs, and digestive and lymphatic systems, among other side effects. Through air vents, the Reserve plant disposed of more than 115 tons of the chemical yearly by the mid-2010s.

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🎼 If You Think This Instrument Is Hard to Play, Try Building One

Jesse Green | The New York Times

With its collection of oddballs doing oddball things amid a dense canopy of oddball tools, the workshop felt more like a family hardware store after a twister than a sensible instrument manufactory. I found it hard to believe that anything as beautiful and persnickety as an oboe ever escaped its chaos until the operations manager, who also sells real estate, grabbed an instrument from the desk of a finisher and tossed off a test run of sweet, gorgeous Bach.