Edition #75: Longform Profiles
This edition features the Amazon's destruction, jihadist training grounds, a professor's final gift, a fantasy football millionaire, and more.
Spotlighting outstanding longform stories and the journalists who bring them to life. Did you receive this email from a friend? Subscribe here.
⛓️ The Unbearable Darkness of Jail
Ivy Scott, Brittany Hailer, Daja E. Henry | The Marshall Project
Bringing sunlight and fresh air into jails often takes a back seat to other pressing issues. But a lawsuit in San Francisco suggests forcing detainees to live in the dark could violate their constitutional rights. In 2021, a group of men awaiting trial at two California jails sued the city and county of San Francisco for being confined without fresh air and sunlight.
🎬 'Everything Could Have Been a Huge Disaster': Nathan Fielder on Making 'The Rehearsal' Season 2
Stephen Rodrick | Rolling Stone
Fielder’s intricate and sometimes inconceivable work reminded me of Brian Wilson’s Smile session where the mad genius played his piano in a sandbox. The key difference being Fielder actually finished his masterwork. The chef’s kiss in the season finale is the reveal that Fielder spent two years getting his pilot license and was eventually approved to fly a 737.
Dom Phillips | The Guardian
When I set out for the Javari valley in 2018, I wasn’t thinking about how the Amazon might be saved. I was thinking about how it was being destroyed. I had been living in Brazil for over a decade and was increasingly drawn to stories from the Amazon – a vast basin, twice the size of India, that surrounds the Amazon river and encompasses swathes of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname.
🥗 ‘It’s, Like, This Little Cult of Being Skinny’
E.J. Dickson | The Cut
During her time in the Skinni Société, Emma’s life became dominated by a single obsession: food — and how to avoid eating it. She frequently felt weak and exhausted. At one point, she said, she had been on the treadmill at the gym for a minute when she had to get off; she was lightheaded and drenched in sweat. Every time she opened the app, she saw a new video or message from Schmidt urging her followers to “eat clean, feel light” or to chug water or green tea to trick their bodies into ignoring hunger cues.
Karl Ove Knausgaard | Harper’s Magazine
There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things.
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