Edition #114: Longform Profiles

This edition features one of the world's most feared fighters, the Rolex college, Big Sur Holy Weed, 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: Jackie Kursel

⌚️ Rolex Opened a College—and It’s as Selective as Harvard

Andrew Zaleski | GQ

Over the past decade a seismic shift has created a growing demand for watch repair—and, in turn, for competent repair people. A historic stock market run (and a new-moneyed class of crypto capitalists) minted a contemporary order of very rich people, and when the pandemic briefly turned off many of the ways those people spend money, a lot of them got into watches. It’s estimated Rolex now sells over a million watches a year for the first time in its history (while pulling off the remarkable trick in the luxury business of making its product seem rare). Meanwhile, the secondary watch market is flourishing thanks to improving e-commerce platforms and a growing hobbyist culture. Yet there are fewer than 2,000 watchmakers in America capable of mending a timepiece, let alone a luxury one.

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🏆 Lords of the Ring

Joshua Hunt | Harper’s Magazine

The following month, Hoshoryu would be competing in the grand sumo tournament in Nagoya, where he would face one of the first serious threats to his supremacy. That challenge would come from a Japanese rikishi named Onosato, who had been made sumo’s seventy-fifth yokozuna that May, just three weeks before my trip to Shimosuwa. His promotion provided Hoshoryu with a worthy adversary, and it gave fans, for the first time in almost seven years, the chance to see Mongolian and Japanese yokozuna enact the defining cultural rivalry of twenty-first-century sumo.

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🕵️‍♂️ A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them

Shaun Walker | The Guardian

It is the story of a spectacular intelligence success, but also one of several intelligence failures. First, for the CIA and MI6, who got the invasion scenario right but failed to accurately predict the outcome, assuming a swift Russian takeover was a foregone conclusion. More profoundly, for European services, who refused to believe a full-scale war in Europe was possible in the 21st century. They remembered the dubious intelligence case presented to justify the invasion of Iraq two decades previously, and were wary of trusting the Americans on what seemed like a fantastical prediction.

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🎤 Larry David Agreed to Interview His Daughter Cazzie. She Had Other Ideas.

Larry David | Interview

I was lost in my 20s. First of all, half my 20s were spent without having the slightest idea of what I was going to do with my life. I was collecting unemployment, I was driving a cab, I was a private chauffeur. And then I got into standup. So the second part, at least I had a goal.

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💰 Inside the Gay Tech Mafia

Zoë Bernard | WIRED

Last spring, at a venture capitalist’s party in Southern California, a middle-aged investor complained to me at length about how he was struggling to raise his new fund. The problem, he explained, boiled down to discrimination. I took him in as he spoke. He had the uniform down cold: a white man with a crew cut, wearing a tasteless button-down stretched over mild prosperity, and a fluent conviction that AI was, thank god, the next big thing. He looked exactly like the sort of man Silicon Valley has been built to reward. And yet here he was, insisting that the system was rigged against him. “If I were gay, I wouldn’t be having any trouble,” he said. “That’s the whole thing with Silicon Valley these days. The only way to catch a break,” he claimed, “is if you’re gay.”

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⌚️ A vintage watch broke auction records. Then the rumours started

Emma Irving | 1843

The Speedmaster ultimately sold for SFr3.1m: more than 25 times its upper estimate. Another Speedmaster with a tropical dial in the auction, which Davidoff considered superior because it was “just a pristine, untouched example”, sold for a mere SFr101,000; three others sold for considerably less. To this day, the 1957 Speedmaster Broad Arrow remains the most expensive Omega watch ever sold at auction. “That result pretty much confused everybody. It made people suspicious,” said Davidoff. “I couldn’t believe it was real.”