Edition #73: Longform Profiles

This edition features Russia's ghost detainees, hardcore VR ravers, Haliey Welch, a.k.a. Hawk Tuah, the crypto racket, 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: Philip Cheung

👮‍♂️ Inside the Battle for the Soul of the LAPD

Paul Solotaroff | Rolling Stone

After years of warfare in open court — Rice, an attorney and civil rights activist, had spent decades suing men like Beck for their “blue grip” suppression of the poor — they’d come to a hard-won truth: Shock-and-awe policing didn’t work. Far from making Los Angeles safe, it wreaked war without end between cops and gangs, and turned Watts and Compton into domestic kill zones, forever blighting the lives of the kids raised there.

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⛓️ Russia’s ‘Ghost Detainees’: The Investigation That Cost Viktoriia Roshchyna Her Life

Phineas Rueckert, Tetiana Pryimachuk | Forbidden Stories

In the summer of 2023, Viktoriia had traveled to Zaporizhzhia, in Russia-occupied Ukraine, to report on the treatment of Ukrainians in Russia’s ad hoc prisons. Her trajectory in the intervening months remains unclear, in spite of her anguished family’s search. The journalist disappeared in August 2023. For more than a year, she was shuffled between at least two informal detention centers and a Russian prison, before the announcement of her death in captivity in October 2024.

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🌳 How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree

Matthew Ponsford | Noema Magazine

Today, just about everyone who works with these gnarled survivors agrees that keeping them going is critical for the health of the forest overall. As the ancients die, the many species that live and depend on them must move to survive. Most of the available oaks in the surrounding landscape are inhospitable: nearly identical in size and only a century or two old. “Boring trees,” said Harris. “Featureless trees.”

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💊 60-Hour Dance Sessions, Simulated Sex, and Ketamine: Inside the World of Hardcore VR Ravers

Mattha Busby | WIRED

“If you're not able to self-moderate and police yourself, it’s endless. You're not going to win; you're not going to see the end of the party.” O’Rourke is one of many who may struggle with the fantastical, escapist allure of having access to a nearly nonstop, wild metaverse party from the comfort of their own homes. Especially when he normally doesn’t have plans with friends in the real world.

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📱 Evangelism and Erewhon: They came to L.A. for the Hollywood dream, then shot to Bible stardom

Deborah Netburn | Los Angeles Times

As even devout Christians spend less time in the pews and more time on social media, Christian influencers like Halili and Reitsma, with no formal training in ministry, have become unlikely religious authorities to a fan base larger than that of many of the nation’s most popular preachers. Call it a two-microphone megachurch speaking to the nation’s evangelical tween and teen girls.