Edition #81: Longform Profiles
This edition features the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever, Richard Price's street life, the $4 million girlfriend experience, and more.
Spotlighting outstanding longform stories and the journalists who bring them to life. Did you receive this email from a friend? Subscribe here.
☄️ Inside the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever
Robin George Andrews | MIT Technology Review
If the asteroid did in fact hit such a metropolis, the best-case scenario was severe damage; the worst case was outright, total ruin. And for the first time, a group of United Nations–backed researchers began to have high-level discussions about the fate of the world: If this asteroid was going to hit the planet, what sort of spaceflight mission might be able to stop it? Would they ram a spacecraft into it to deflect it? Would they use nuclear weapons to try to swat it away or obliterate it completely?
⛏️ Dangerous mines: A death at the bottom of the EV supply chain
Tawanda Karombo, Kimberly Mutandiro | Rest of World
In a country rich in minerals but long plagued by widespread allegations of mismanagement and corruption, individual mining — with and without permits or licenses — is commonplace. Up to 1.5 million Zimbabweans are estimated to be involved in small-scale mining, with only around 15% holding permits. Some people mine informally on undeveloped land or in disused mine sites. Others, like Vivito, illegally enter corporate or government-run mines.
📺 How a Show About Truly Terrible People Became the Defining American Sitcom
M.H. Miller | The New York Times
“Always Sunny” stood out to me immediately as the greatest sendup of a time when the bad guys kept getting away with it and the ignorance of an American culture that was happy to let them. Being so young, I didn’t know at the time that this would remain an evergreen topic 20 years later. Nor did I realize that “Always Sunny” would become — as it begins its 17th season this month on FX — the longest-running live-action sitcom ever to appear on television by a fairly wide margin.
🚢 How I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor
Eve Lazarus | The Walrus
The ship was thrown into darkness before most of the sleeping passengers could even grasp what was happening. Those who had managed to leave their cabins were left groping around in the pitch dark, trying to find a way out, clawing their way up the tilting stairs. Because they had boarded the ship mere hours earlier, they were unfamiliar with the ship’s layout. In just thirty seconds, the Empress had taken on almost half her own weight in water. After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms were flooded with the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools of water.
💻 The Men Behind Deepfake Pornography
Max Hoppenstedt, Marvin Milatz | DER SPIEGEL
Naked pictures generated with the help of AI are a new and often overlooked form of cyber-mobbing, says Al Adib. "Such AI images can be extremely dangerous to the psyches of young people,” says the doctor, who leads several women’s health practices in Spain. "The thought immediately occurred to me: There have already been cases where victims of cyber-bullying have killed themselves out of desperation," Al Adib says, recalling her shock upon seeing the fake naked pictures of her daughter.
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🕵️♀️ Nobody Suspected Police Shielded a Killer Until the Dead Man’s Sister Dug In
Valerie Bauerlein | The Wall Street Journal
Foley, 37, didn’t believe it. But Horry County police and state prosecutors did. The two men claimed self-defense under South Carolina’s stand-your-ground law. Spivey, who had been drinking beer and whiskey that afternoon, was waving his pistol out the window of his black Silverado when the men went after him, weaving through traffic to keep up. No witness saw who fired first, leaving police to rely on the shooters’ word.
