Edition #77: Longform Profiles

This edition features the Mozart of the attention economy, the death of a whale, Hollywood's succession wars, 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: Kristian Thacker for The New York Times.

🔫 The Quiet Unraveling of the Man Who Almost Killed Trump

Steve Eder, Tawnell D. Hobbs | The New York Times

Now, nearly a year later, with Mr. Trump in his second presidential term, much of the world has forgotten about the 20-year-old who set out to murder him. Mr. Crooks — who also killed a bystander and wounded two others before being shot dead by the Secret Service — had kept to himself and seemed to leave little behind. His motive was a mystery, and remains the source of many conspiracy theories.

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💸 “We’ve Been Sold a Story That Isn’t Remotely True”: How Private-Equity Billionaires Killed the American Dream

Issie Lapowsky | Vanity Fair

The one stat that’s really lodged in my brain is that 20% of companies acquired by private equity enter bankruptcy proceedings within 10 years, compared to 2% of other types of other companies. There is this narrative that the private-equity industry is made up of, essentially, superheroes who can come in and save struggling companies, and the data just shows that it is the opposite.

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📱 ‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star

Mark O’Connell | The Guardian

He is, simultaneously, a gifted algorithm-charmer, possessed of arcane knowledge as to attention and engagement, and a guy who is just hanging out, amusing himself and his friends (and his hundreds of millions of viewers). His most effective videos exhibit a fanatical clarity of purpose, as though he had taken the form of the YouTube video and squeezed it for its essential oil of entertainment, discarding as so much useless husk everything that cannot immediately be rendered down into pure content.

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🤖 Demis Hassabis Embraces the Future of Work in the Age of AI

Steven Levy | WIRED

Now Hassabis is doubling down on perhaps the biggest game of all—developing AGI in the thick of a brutal competition with other companies and all of China. If that isn’t enough, he’s also CEO of an Alphabet company called Isomorphic, which aims to exploit the possibilities of AlphaFold and other AI breakthroughs for drug discovery.

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🎥 Michael B. Jordan Did the Impossible

Zak Cheney-Rice | Vulture

At 38 years old, Jordan is young, Black, charismatic, vaguely political but not divisively militant — an ideal assuager for the terminally image-conscious film industry’s post–George Floyd anxieties. When we talked, he was only marginally aware of any Sinnersbacklash: “I didn’t read the articles or know who wrote them.” Between promoting Sinners and prepping for Thomas Crown, Jordan confessed, “I haven’t really been out in the world.”

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