Edition #27: Longform Profiles
This edition features the Police Commissioner who buried cases, Google's secret weapon, the Queen of cookbooks, life as an abortion doula, Ecuador’s risky war on narcos, and more.
Longform Profiles: Depth over distraction. Cutting through the noise with weekly longform profiles that matter. Did you receive this email from a friend? Subscribe here.
🚓 New Yorkers Were Choked, Beaten and Tased by NYPD Officers. The Commissioner Buried Their Cases.
Eric Umansky | ProPublica, The New York Times
While commissioners can still choose to impose significant punishment after retaining a case, they often don’t. In 40% of the cases that Caban has retained, he has ordered no discipline. In the cases in which he has ordered discipline, it has mostly been light, such as the loss of a few vacation days. The most severe punishment, ProPublica found, was docking an officer 10 vacation days for knocking a cellphone out of the hand of someone who was recording him.
🏀 When My Father Talked About Larry Bird
Jeremy Collins | Esquire
Your dad pointed beyond Bird to the unfinished project of America. It wasn’t a lesson you wanted. It required vision. To see the whole floor. To recall the game’s one time greatest player, who hitched home after twenty-four days at Indiana University to work as a garbage man. You didn’t want a lesson. You wanted to beat your old man in one-on-one and he would not, under any circumstance or weather, yield.
🌑 The Case of the Missing Chacmools
Geoffrey Gray | Alta
The cult was a business, too. The chacmools ran their own company, earning payment for teaching Castaneda’s methods and ideas in workshops and selling his books and T-shirts. While Castaneda and the witches were busy generating revenues, he claimed to be gathering enough energy to cheat death and live forever.
💼 The Hidden Life of Google’s Secret Weapon (🔒 paywall link)
Brody Mullins | The Wall Street Journal
He was a law professor who became one of the most influential yet little-known figures of the tech era, leveraging positions in academia and government to shield deep-pocket clients. For more than a decade, Wright kept antitrust regulators at bay while America’s top technology companies amassed economic power not seen since Standard Oil, AT&T and other behemoths dominated their industries in the 20th century.
🍽️ My Lunches with Judith Jones, the Queen of Cookbooks
Sara Franklin | Taste
Spring arrives in earnest, and Judith and I meet every two weeks for an interview. We begin, always, by improvising lunch. I am with the queen of cookbooks, but we prepare our meals without a recipe in sight. Judith always presents me with some starting point, and from there, we jump off together. Once it was a half-eaten roast chicken, which we picked for chicken salad and punched up with ingredients from the fridge and shelves: crème fraîche, celery, toasted almonds, and dried tarragon.
🎬 How Ebon Moss-Bachrach Gave The Bear Some Teeth
Jason Diamond | GQ
Some people take a while to figure out who they’re going to be—like me, hanging out in that park all those years ago, thinking I was Johnny Thunders by association. Moss-Bachrach seems like he’s always just known. The work was what mattered back when he lived up in that top-floor apartment, starting his family, and the work is what matters now, and it will as long as people keep asking him to do it. His future career prospects are undoubtedly better than they were back then, but that’s never been what it’s about.
Meagan Jordan | Rolling Stone
Birth work, especially within Black communities throughout the South, has a deep history that’s rooted in the practices of the first Africans who came to the Americas — many of them enslaved. Black midwives and doulas were a source of spiritual, emotional, and physical support, and they were respected across racial lines in their communities. Williams’ own great-grandmother, Polly, was said to be a “baby catcher.”
🍤 Forrest Gump Turns Thirty: An Oral History of the Unexpected Blockbuster
Monte Burke | Garden & Gun
Marlena Smalls, head of Beaufort’s Hallelujah Singers, who played the mother of Bubba Blue: I don’t think the average person understands the magnitude of what happens when a film crew comes to your town. Paramount created a city within a city. They had their own electricians, water folks, construction crew, billing department, everything. I found that so fascinating, because you don’t think about the care and preparation that go into it all when you sit down to watch a movie.
🌍 The Scientist Who Sees Our Chaotic Future
Will Dunn | New Statesman
For Farmer, an economy is humanity’s great emergent phenomenon, the means by which we as a group enjoy resources many thousands of times greater than if we were all going it alone. But this has also become our greatest risk, as the power it affords us leads to a more unstable world. This is what makes complexity economics necessary, he says – it can help us to make better predictions, and better decisions, when doing so has never been more important.
🏈 Pat McAfee and the Threat to Sports Journalism (🔒 paywall link)
Devin Gordon | The Atlantic
McAfee is an athlete, not a reporter, and when it comes to stuff like accuracy, he’s careful to set the bar very low. He has become the epitome of athlete encroachment on terrain historically controlled by nonathlete journalists, and to put it mildly, the journalists are not happy about it. McAfee couldn’t care less.
🥛 Big Milk Has Taken Over American Schools
Kenny Torrella | Vox
Dairy’s stranglehold on school food began some 80 years ago and has only tightened since. It was built on the outdated idea that cow’s milk is essential for children’s health — an idea that has had immense staying power due to a vast and deep-pocketed marketing, lobbying, and research machine.
Simon van Zuylen-Wood | New York Magazine
Bushnell stopped outside the Israeli Embassy and set his phone down in a way that suggested it was affixed to a small tripod. He raised a metal water bottle, which was dark blue and decorated with stickers and his name, and doused his head with liquid. For about 15 seconds, he tried to ignite the hem of his pants with a lighter. Somebody off-camera asked, “Sir, can I help you?”
🌵 The Texas Ranger Who Helped a Serial Killer Go Free
Jessica Goudeau | Texas Monthly
If we think of the Texas Rangers as courageous men who will do what is right no matter the cost, then Uncle Frank failed to live up to the myth I evoked for my Tennessee classmates many years ago. Uncle Frank may have recognized the terrible wrong that Vail Ennis did to the Rodriguez family, but he did not stand up for his beliefs.
💻 He Trained Cops to Fight Crypto Crime—and Allegedly Ran a $100M Dark-Web Drug Market
Andy Greenberg | WIRED
For nearly four years, according to the US Justice Department, 23-year-old Lin ran a dark-web drug market called Incognito that authorities say enabled the sale of at least $100 million worth of narcotics, ranging from MDMA to heroin for cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and monero. That was before Lin's alleged theft of his own users' funds earlier this year and then his arrest last week by the FBI in New York's JFK airport.
🩺 The Doctor Tom Brady and Leonardo DiCaprio Call When They Get Hurt
Zach Helfand | The New Yorker
Many have described their bond with ElAttrache as a singular relationship. “It was the first time I ever felt, in the football business, someone being completely honest with me,” the receiver Odell Beckham, Jr., told me. ElAttrache often becomes a fixture in his patients’ lives. He did Tom Brady’s knee surgery in 2008, then regularly flew to Boston during the rehab. Brady now considers him a best friend. ElAttrache was one of Kobe Bryant’s few confidants.
🛒 Walmart Ceo Doug Mcmillon Keeps Fending Off Amazon for the Top Spot On the Fortune 500. Can He and the Mega-Retailer Continue their Streak? (🔒 paywall link)
Phil Wahba | Fortune
Building a contemporary Walmart has also sometimes meant reluctantly wading into the culture wars. That’s a particularly perilous task for a company where some 150 million Americans shop every week, representing pretty much every demographic and political orientation in the U.S. Here, McMillon’s gift for congeniality has proved helpful; he has routinely avoided grandstanding, or shaming those who disagree with him.
🎤 Roc Marciano Is Ready For His Flowers
Thomas Hobbs | Stereogum
Even when I was hustling, creativity was still a big part of my life. Expressing myself through creativity, whether it be fashion, music, or break dancing, was everything. When you grow up in the projects, you grow up so close to other people. All your friends live right next door. Some are underneath you, and they’re also parallel to you across the hall. So it feels like you’re always on top of people, you know? It means you notice the differences between you and other people a lot more than the average person does: and yes, I always knew I was special.
🇦🇷 Javier Milei’s Radical Plan to Transform Argentina
Vera Bergengruen | TIME
While Milei vowed the “political caste” would bear the brunt, his austerity measures have pummeled ordinary Argentines. The annual inflation rate is still nearly 300%, among the highest in the world. Many Argentines have been forced to carry bags of cash for even small transactions; some stores have given up on price stickers entirely. Milei’s moves—cutting federal aid, transport and energy subsidies, and getting rid of price controls—have caused living costs to spike. More than 55% of Argentines are mired in poverty, up from 45% in December.
📺 The Future of Streaming (According to the Moguls Figuring It Out) (🔒 paywall link)
James B. Stewart, Benjamin Mullin | The New York Times
Rarely do these executives speak so candidly, on the record, about the challenge in front of them. And the meetings on the yacht aside, rarely do executives in that stratosphere get together to discuss strategy. Not only are many of them fierce rivals — Mr. Roberts famously drove up the cost of Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets by bidding against Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger — but meetings among direct competitors might attract unwelcome attention from antitrust regulators.
🚨 Ecuador’s Risky War on Narcos
Jon Lee Anderson | The New Yorker
We shook hands, and I asked how he was doing. “Surviving,” he said. He didn’t mean this in the ordinary, mildly ironic, getting-through-the-day way. A week earlier, he explained, a dozen hit men had been intercepted crossing the border from Colombia, apparently sent by drug traffickers to kill him. Four of the would-be assassins had been killed in a shoot-out with Ecuadorian security forces.
🎸 Fred Armisen’s Not-So-Secret Punk Rock Life
Nate Rogers | The Ringer
To Armisen, his demeanor and love of punk aren’t mutually exclusive. “If you think of what the classic punk bands look like, there is something wispy and kind of gentle,” he says. “Even though they’re going like this”—here he snarls—“I’m like, ‘Ah, you’re sweet.’” He says it’s not like he doesn’t have a darker side in his head, like the rest of us. “But then when I actually talk,” he says, “it just comes out quieter. Maybe I just don’t have a very loud voice.”
🎒 They Took Part in Apache Ceremonies. Their Schools Expelled Them for Satanic Activities
Nicolle Okoren | The Guardian
When Caitlyn was in fifth grade, she was given an F on an art project for drawing the White Mountain Apache crest and including an eagle feather. An “A” student, she was devastated to be chastised this way. As Caitlyn remembers it, her teacher smiled and explained that this kind of project wasn’t allowed because it denoted “pagan worship”. Her father was furious but the family couldn’t do anything about it. It was what the girl and her family expected from the white people who worked on the reservation.
🦀 The King Crab Kings (🔒 paywall link)
Andrew S. Lewis | Bloomberg
The crab’s popularity with wealthy diners started to change things for Bugøynes. Its numbers would need to be controlled to prevent it from spreading west and chewing up Norway’s primary fish stocks, but for the locals here, perhaps it could take the place of the old cash crops. The Norwegian government established an experimental crab fishery in the region in 1994 and permitted commercial fishing of the species about a decade later. The desperate village, as well as others in the region, began to eke out a living catching crab instead of fish, alongside a much bigger Russian industry.
📱 Inside Snapchat’s Teen Opioid Crisis
Paul Solotaroff | Rolling Stone
The folks compounding those pills weren’t pharm-school grads. They were cartel adjuncts or lost-soul dropouts with a storage unit and a pill press. And whether their fentanyl came from Mexico or directly from China, they were everywhere and nowhere at once: invisible on the street but ubiquitous online; and many were hawking poison disguised as pharma drugs over Snapchat.