Edition #124: Longform Profiles

This edition features the Ethiopian running secret, Barack Obama in the age of Trump, twins who have different dads, 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: Getty Images

🐒 David Attenborough and the Voice That Revealed a Planet

Danny Chau | The Ringer

Attenborough crawled into the hole, but only partially. The most trusted voice of our time could be heard on Gunton’s headphone monitors, but instead of Attenborough’s immortal timbre, the only utterances coming through were a procession of discomforted grunts and yelps. “Ooh, oww!” **The soldiers had descended on him. Still, he persevered, delivering his piece about the termites’ bespoke AC unit. Unfortunately, he hadn’t crawled deep enough to come into the lighting. The camera operators only saw Attenborough’s feet twitching. The shot was a disaster. He was pulled out of the hole. His clothes were covered in mud, his body was covered in bites, his hair was mussed, his shirt was torn. Gunton walked over to Attenborough sheepishly. “David, I’m sorry, but you didn’t come into the light,” Gunton said. “You’re going to have to do this again.”

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🥇 The Ethiopian running secret

Michael Crawley | Aeon

In 2025, athletes from Ethiopia and the nearby East African nations of Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Tanzania filled 69 and 74 of the top-100 spots in the World Athletics marathon rankings for men and women, respectively. This is an extraordinary level of dominance, with few parallels in global sport. In these countries, distance running expertise is seen as something that is intuitive, learnt from others, honed through experience, and deeply dependent upon a group training dynamic. Increasingly, though, this approach goes against the grain of cutting-edge sports science, which advocates the monitoring of an ever-increasing number of physiological variables and individualised, precisely engineered training.

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🇺🇸 Barack Obama Considers His Role in the Age of Trump

Peter Slevin | The New Yorker

Trump’s recklessness has drawn Obama to work in politics “more than I would have preferred,” he said. He has campaigned around the country in each election cycle since leaving office. He has hosted fund-raisers and recorded dozens of video ads and robocalls. When he talks about his role in helping to oppose Trump, he argues that his influence should be gauged not only by the number of speeches he gives or by his appearances in legacy news outlets but also by the audiences he reaches in other ways. He markets Netflix projects that carry messages of liberal uplift. He has met with numerous podcasters and influencers.

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🧬 ‘It’s super weird, super odd, super rare’: meet the twins who have different dads

Jenny Kleeman | The Guardian

Lavinia and Michelle aren’t identical twins. They share the same striking eyes, but the lower halves of their faces are different. Their personalities differ, too: Michelle describes herself as a “homebod”, an introvert who would prefer to mark her birthday with a candle on a sponge cake, whereas Lavinia, the self-proclaimed “exuberant” twin, wants to make a night of it at a Cuban cabaret show. They’re speaking to me separately from their homes in south London. They exchanged cards, gifts and hugs earlier this morning, when Michelle was on the school run with her son.

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💰 The NBA Player and the Gambler Who Needed Him

Jay Bulger | New York Magazine

As the game started, McCormack placed his bet: $8,000 that Porter would fall short of his rebound line. It was modest compared to Mollah’s, an audacious $80,000 six-leg parlay, betting the under on his rebounds, three-pointers, steals, blocks, assists, and total points. If everything went as planned, it would all amount to a roughly $1.2 million payout. They sat at the table to watch as the game began. Within his first minute of play, Porter made two rebounds. The ball came right to him. “I was shook,” McCormack said. He worried that Porter couldn’t help but get more rebounds. But then he missed a shot, and the quarter ended. When the second quarter started, he wasn’t on the court. He claimed he was ill and sat out the rest of the game.

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🗞️ My Role as a ‘Complicit’ Journalist

Michael Scherer | The Atlantic

No act has a single cause, and all of those suspects appear to have been mentally unstable to varying degrees. But their ideologies also appear to have been nurtured by the technologies we use to distribute and process political information, which isolate us from one another and push us to more extreme conclusions. Modern democracies function on the relatively recent idea that the violence that historically accompanied power transfer should be replaced with individual rights and open elections. These alleged assailants concluded that this idea no longer held, a conclusion that I observe as a growing feature of the online discourse, which routinely casts real policy difference and character judgment in apocalyptic terms stripped of critical nuance.

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