Edition #60: Longform Profiles

This edition features a snowboarder's path from Olympic athlete to drug lord, Trump's China plan, how Big Meat silences its critics, 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: Vincent Tullo

🖋️ Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro

Chris Heath | Smithsonian

On March 25, 1975, following the success of The Power Broker, Caro’s publisher, Knopf, announced that Caro would be writing a three-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Installments were expected every two years beginning in 1977. Its first volume eventually appeared in 1982. By 1990, when the second volume was published, Caro was explaining that the undertaking would actually require four volumes. Before the fourth book appeared in 2012, he let it be known that there would now be five. He has been researching and writing this fifth and final volume ever since. That is the work that Caro, 89, is so keen to resume.

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🔫 Sex, Drugs, and Murder in Tech Land

Michal Lev-Ram | Esquire

Lee’s violent death sent shock waves through the world of Big Tech and drew national attention. The case made headlines not only because it involved the killing of a tech entrepreneur but also because it seemed to capture the gloomy zeitgeist of the moment. San Francisco, a city once brimming with innovation and optimism, was now viewed by many inside and outside of the tech world as being in a “doom loop” fueled by open drug use, rampant crime, lenient law enforcement, and spiraling homelessness.

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🎬 How Mikey Madison Charmed Hollywood

Molly Lambert | GQ

But Madison has been on the grind since her teens. “Lots of people have no idea who I am,” she tells me. She has barely been able to process her own sudden rise, which she feels will make more sense in the rearview. “A lot of it feels surreal,” she says. “But I think I'm so much just in my own world that I'm taking it in at a slower pace, and then I'll have a realization later of like, ‘Wow, I actually did that.’”