Edition #79: Longform Profiles
This edition features Texas' strangest cold case, the steroid Olympics, the novel-reading man, old money fantasy camps, and more.
Spotlighting outstanding longform stories and the journalists who bring them to life. Did you receive this email from a friend? Subscribe here.
🕵️♂️ It Was Already One of Texas’s Strangest Cold Cases. Then a Secretive Figure Appeared.
Peter Holley | Texas Monthly
Though I didn’t know it at the time, I would soon learn that there was something about Jason’s case that transcended the lurid intrigue that tends to drive interest in viral crimes. It wasn’t just the unusually perplexing conditions surrounding his disappearance, the bizarre twists of the ensuing investigation, or Jason’s playful and endearing personality. Like a haunted house that gradually causes its occupants to lose their grip on reality, there was something about Jason’s story that tended to warp its adherents over time, turning ordinary curiosity into obsession and everyday reality into a fantastical world of mystery, discovery, and drama.
🎩 Inside Tuxedo Society, the Old-Money Fantasy Camp Where Would-Be-Aristocrats Pay to Cosplay
Alessandra Schade | GQ
The club, founded by a trio of devilishly good-looking Casanovas with carved jaws and svelte bodies—Gabrielle Bonini, Riccardo Capotosti, and Filippo Pignatti Morano di Custoza—offers its members access to meticulously planned trips to the world’s premier luxury locales. A membership will run you a cool 6,000 euros annually; the trips range from 5,000 to as much as 60,000 euros per person.
📣 Is Mark Cuban the Loudmouth Billionaire that Democrats Need for 2028?
Max Chafkin, John Tozzi | Bloomberg
Like Trump, Cuban is a billionaire with decades of experience playing a rich guy in the press. Trump did so first at 1980s hotel openings; for Cuban it was on the sidelines of games played by the Dallas Mavericks, the basketball team he bought in 2000 and then transformed into a perennial playoff contender. Like Trump, Cuban eventually took his shtick to network TV, starring, like Trump, in a prime-time reality show that was, like Trump’s show The Apprentice, produced by Burnett.
💉 The Definitive, Insane, Swimsuit-Bursting Story of the Steroid Olympics
Amit Katwala | WIRED
Its founder, Aron D’Souza, is a slick-talking Peter Thiel acolyte who believes throwing off the shackles of drug testing can help push humanity to the next level. Enhanced, the company behind the Games, has secured millions from Thiel, Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital, and others, and praise from the likes of Joe Rogan. But the reaction from the sporting establishment has been split between horror over the health implications and skepticism over whether the event will ever actually happen.
🇬🇧 What Keir Starmer can’t say
Tom McTague | New Statesman
Every prime minister approaches the job in their own way, shaped by their own particular foibles. Many of the most able and hard-working in recent years have become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task in front of them, morphing into caricatures of their own worst selves in the process. Theresa May and Rishi Sunak suffered this fate. Others were preternaturally unsuited to the responsibilities of high office: Liz Truss. Starmer does not sit in either of these camps. Not yet at least.
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♠️ How a Vegas Billionaire’s Plan to Bring Casinos to Texas Went Bust
Forrest Wilder | Texas Monthly
Over the next two and a half hours, he tried to convince the crowd that they had it all wrong. Sands wasn’t the problem; it was the solution. Texas, he said, was the “largest illegal gaming market in the world,” with an estimated $53 billion in illicit gambling. Texans were playing slots on video terminals in convenience stores and placing illegal bets on sports on their phones. This unregulated market yielded no revenue for the state and preyed upon the vulnerable.
