Hello and welcome back! Thanks as always for making the time to read worthwhile journalism—and for your support of The Sunday Long Read. We've got big things ahead. But for now, it's time to get reading!
Enjoy,
Don and Jacob
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By Noah Hawley for The Atlantic
~10 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
Back in 2018, TV showrunner (“Fargo,” “Alien: Earth”) and novelist Noah Hawley and his family spent a weekend cavorting among the obscenely wealthy at Jeff Bezos’ Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. “Even the weather felt expensive,” Hawley writes, “and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.”
Without spoiling too much, the gilded-boondoggle weekend didn’t end as promising as it began: “My wife broke her wrist slipping on wet grass, and both children and I came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. This is not a joke. One of us went home with her arm in a sling; the other three developed itchy, painful red blisters all over our faces and extremities. If you’re looking for a sign from God as to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two.”
A captivating essay about how the world’s wealthiest men have taken flight from rules and consequences. We bet you’ll enjoy Hawley’s eat-the-rich romp in Bezos’ VIP hideaway as much as this diabolically delicious performance in “Fargo,” season 1.
> The Lever: The New Democratic Machine – And The Billionaires Behind It (Email required)
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By Atul Dev for The Guardian
~25 minutes
Lawrence Bishnoi is among India's most recognizable celebrities. Though he has been inside a high-security prison for more than 10 years, his gang reportedly stretches all the way to California. This stunning profile is also the story of a country figuring out what it wants to stand for—and against.
> The New Yorker: A Chernobyl Widow’s Tragedy, Forty Years Later [$]
> The Boston Globe: Archive photos from the Chernobyl disaster site [$]
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By Ginia Bellafante for The New York Times
~5 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
Finding someone you know is a serial killer is startling enough. Now imagine you dealt with him on your co-op board or worse: he was in your own home! Columnist Ginia Bellefante name-drops actress Amy Ryan in this reconstruction of their now-grim encounters with Rex Heuermann.
> The Toronto Star: The story of Camelott Hamblett and why he’s spent two decades locked in a room alone at this Ontario psychiatric hospital
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By Brett Popplewell for The Walrus
~30 minutes
Remember the “Greenland Crisis” of … 2026? The locals certainly still do. Brett Popplewell blends on-the-ground reporting with dramatic history lessons to show how Greenlanders have dealt with U.S. pressure (not to mention melting ice).
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By Mark Binelli for The New York Times Magazine
~25 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
How is it possible that Michael Jackson "might be worth more dead than alive?" Mark Binelli masterfully tracks the courtroom drama and creative decision-making that have made the King of Pop an icon once again. "His permanent absence might be the ideal path to staving off irrelevancy, given his habit, when alive, of reminding people of everything that made them uneasy about him," Binelli writes.
With the release of Michael, MJ has ascended into the realm of IP.
> The New York Times: They Were Michael Jackson’s ‘Second Family.’ Now They Say He Abused Them. (Free for SLR Readers)
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By Ej Dickson for WIRED
~10 minutes
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By Alexander Sammon for Slate
~30 minutes
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By Shelly Kittleson for The Atlantic
~15 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
"Bravery" doesn't begin to describe Shelly Kittleson's response to being abducted off the street in Baghdad. "Harrowing" hardly explains the experience of reading about what happened next.
> The Atlantic: On Losing a Daughter (Free for SLR Readers)
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By Melanie Walsh for Los Angeles Review of Books
~20 minutes
David Foster Wallace’s opus “Infinite Jest” was published 30 years ago. As Melanie Walsh explains, the 1,079-page novel is “the perfect parable for reading in the internet age.” In 2003, Wallace spoke presciently about why reading feels so difficult in an easily distracted era, and this was before the invention of the smartphone and the advent of a nation of doomscrolling addicts.
“Reading requires deep attention, and managing one’s attention in a media-saturated, ultra-entertaining historical moment is one of the primary fixations of Infinite Jest,” Walsh writes. “This idea is staged through the sheer size of the book itself. Can the reader sustain their interest across a thousand difficult pages, especially as media like TV or TikTok promise to deliver a quicker dopamine hit?”
> Aeon: The role of literature as the key to personal freedom
> Bloomberg: People Are Paying $1,000 to Read Among Strangers (Free for SLR Readers)
> Sydney Review of Books: How to Begin
> The Baffler: The Profession That Does Not Exist
> The Contrarian: Dianna Russini and America’s Fascination with Sports Personalities
> Sportico: For Those Keeping Score, an Ancient Baseball Art Lives On
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By Evan Moffitt for The Observer
~10 minutes
On Santa Monica Boulevard, Elon Musk’s 24-hour diner “resembles a cartoon spaceship, round and chrome and gleaming,” writes Evan Moffitt, a Brit who grew up in LA and returns to find the modernized city barely recognizable, with its “tiny delivery robots that resemble mini-fridges with wheels” and “driverless Waymo taxis… you can’t go far without seeing one of their round LiDAR sensors spinning like a child’s propellor hat.”
> GQ: My life as an Energy-Drink Guy
> New York: The After-School Special [$]
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By Patricia Mazzei for The New York Times
~5 minutes
Florida’s attorney general is investigating ChatGPT, and the company that makes it, OpenAI, after reviewing messages between the chatbot and the man accused of killing two people at Florida State University last year. “My prosecutors have looked at this,” attorney general James Uthmeier said, “and they’ve told me if it was a person on the other end of the screen, we would be charging them with murder.”
> The New York Times: ‘Donnyland’? Ukraine Proposes Naming Part of the Donbas in Trump’s Honor. (Free for SLR Readers)
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By Yusuf Khan for The Wall Street Journal
~5 minutes
Corporate climate reporting is a fairly dry topic for most readers, but the important thing to know is that it actually happens. Many large companies voluntarily measure their carbon footprint. Why? Aside from PR, there are two main reasons. One, finding ways to cut emissions often saves money, and two, someday in the rosy future, regulations will require it. Best to be ahead of the game when that happens. However, there are disagreements about exactly how to measure many types of emissions, notably those that come from electricity a company uses. It’s complicated but this article gives you a great quick understanding.
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Making all our picks available to you for free is a top priority of ours. We’re currently able to routinely offer free links for several publications and are reaching out to additional publishers as well. In the meantime, we try to avoid highlighting more than a few pieces parked behind hard paywalls each week (those stories are marked with a [$] symbol). If you have additional thoughts on how we can improve your reading experience, we’re all ears.
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How You Can Support The SLR...
The Sunday Long Read exists to celebrate journalism worth reading. Our mission is to highlight the most educational, interesting, and downright entertaining writing available on the web and to help people find a bit more time in their lives for in-depth reporting.
If you believe in those goals, please consider supporting the team as an SLR Member. Your support allows us to share The SLR for free each week, fund rising writers, and fight clickbait culture. SLR Members also get:
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By Patrick Radden Keefe for The New Yorker
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By Amy Chozick for The New York Times
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
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By Melanie Mason & Jeremy B. White for Politico
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At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.
From What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat by Noah Hawley for The Atlantic (Free for SLR Readers)
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“Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth. Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.”
—a ”Labour insider”
From Fatal flaw: Keir Starmer’s leadership vacuum threatens to swallow him up, by Tim Ross, Esther Webber & Dan Bloom for Politico
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By Annie Roth for The New York Times (Free for SLR Readers)
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By Michael Kruse for Politico Magazine
~20 minutes
Perhaps the youngest classic I’ve ever elevated here, it’s only appropriate that its ascension comes during Easter season in a newsletter that publishes on Sunday. My former colleague and pal Michael Kruse, a bone daddy of the feature form, charted Donald Trump’s deepening exploitation of the sacred for political purposes, something that has escalated in recent weeks as he has gone to arguing theology with the pope and presenting himself as an object of holy adoration. Trump always meddled with the divine, but as Kruse points out, he blossomed into a messianic figure after his 2024 assassination attempt. I await a Kruse sequel in which he asks the question that gnaws at me: “Does Trump Actually Think He’s Satan?”
Classic Bonus: In 2013, the Pew Research Center’s Rich Morin plundered the political pantheon to round up the most self-worshiping U.S. presidents.
Jack Shafer considers himself an archon who would be a brilliant subject for a future Kruse profile.
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SLR Members can access all 400+ of Jack's Classics picks via our members' archive.
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How many times have you been in someone's living room, the group big and small enough to "say your name and your affiliation and _________"?
How many times has Gloria Steinem's living room contained such a gathering, and who could possibly remember all the boldface and unfamous names in such circles?
I'm still pinching myself about being in that living room last week, part of three generations of support for the Senatorial candidacy of Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan.
We were there to give her money and to organize on her behalf.
I wish you could have been in that room too, because, like me, you might have found yourself sitting next to The Elizabeth A. Sackler of The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (OMG home of The Dinner Party), looking at Jane Fonda and Gloria Herself, the legend at 92, still a feminist force with political power.
You would have heard Peggy telling her story, or should I say, telling her stories.
She has so many, from her Indigenous identity (she introduces herself by her other name and her lineage) to how she's been working to protect the people of her state from ICE intrusions into their lives.
Minnesota has given us the concept of "neighboring," caring for and protecting the people who are our neighbors.
What would happen if there was a national movement to practice the art of neighboring?
When we went around that living room introducing ourselves, we were asked to say what's giving us hope.
I said "SUFFS on tour," but the bigger answer is, Gloria Steinem's living room is giving me hope right now.
It's proof that the power we want is ours for the organizing.
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Ruth Ann Harnisch has been the publisher of The Sunday Long Read since 2023.
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HIGH HOLIDAY
Weed worshippers flock every April 20 to San Francisco’s “Hippie Hill,” a grassy slope in Golden Gate Park that has been a hub for drum circles, hanging out and cannabis use for more than 60 years. That’s where AP photographer Jeff Chiu found Debbie Harms from Ogden, Utah, blazing away in her daisy sunglasses to celebrate the 420 pot holiday, an unofficial global gathering reportedly first lit into existence by a group of Marin County, California, high school students in 1971. Since then, 40 states have legalized medical marijuana and 24 are now OK with recreational use, turning the rebellious fringe lifestyle into a modern multi-billion-dollar industry. While there were plenty of other celebrants on the scene, Chiu’s decision to go tight on Harms’ aging hands cradling a lighter, with her tie-dye attire and wrinkled pucker filling the frame, told the story in one blunt shot of a counterculture movement turned mainstream within a single human’s lifespan.
Patrick Farrell is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner for Breaking News Photography for The Miami Herald, where he worked from 1987 to 2019. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Management at the University of Miami School of Communication.
Jodi Mailander Farrell has worked as a Miami Herald reporter and editor, as well as an adjunct writing instructor in the School of Communication at the University of Miami.
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By Bsrat Mezghebe
Between this and Baalu Girma's Oromay, I've recently found myself immersed in stories from that part of the world, and concerning the same period of time: Ethiopia's attempts to suppress what they considered a rebellion by those fighting for Eritrea's independence, in the 1970s. Unlike Oromay, however, I Hope You Find What You're Looking For is a story about a family—how it's made, how it keeps secrets, and how those secrets won’t stay hidden forever.
The novel switches between the points of view of two women and a girl: the young girl is just starting to figure out her identity; her complicated and unforthcoming mother, Elsa, carries heavy and painful secrets; and her other “mother” just wants the best for her family, but also finally has a chance to make her own dreams come true. Elsa’s a hero on at least two levels: she’s a former freedom fighter, but has also overcome so much to raise her daughter, including leaving a country at war to make a new life as a migrant. The tension in the novel is between the girl's two mothers, between mother and daughter, and others; between the past and present; memory and protectiveness; wanting more, and making the safe choice. All of these elements give weight to the story.
Mezghebe immerses the reader into Eritrean history and Eritrea's immigrant community in the US, with its rhythms and customs—good, less good, and hilarious. It's a tale well told, well paced, and full of softness.
Jacqueline Nyathi has loved books for as long as she can remember, and writes about them for The Sunday Long Read, The Continent, Strange Horizons, and others. You can find out more on linktree here.
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Forms of Communication, Ranked
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Face to face
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Phone (talking to each other)
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Letter writing
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Email
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Texting
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Social media
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Jake Goldwasser is a cartoonist for The New Yorker and elsewhere. You can follow his work on his website and on Instagram.
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By Jay Katsir for McSweeney’s
~5 minutes
6. Ump
A strict, selfless upholder of sacred baseball traditions, including being drunk at 10 a.m.
> The Onion: Michael Rapaport Gives Knicks’ Celebrity Row Bedbugs
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Enjoy the best longform journalism.
Every Sunday. Since 2014.
Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief: Don Van Natta Jr.
Co-Founder, Managing Editor: Jacob Feldman
Publisher: Ruth Ann Harnisch
Deputy Editor: Étienne Lajoie
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Editor, Production: Veronica Dickson La Rotta
Editor, Production: Atreya Verma
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Editor, Original Content: Kiley Bense
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Staff Curators: Jack Shafer (Classics), Patrick Farrell and Jodi Mailander Farrell (Photos), Jo Piazza (Podcasts), Jacqueline Nyathi (Books), Bob Sassone (Rankings)
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Contributing Editors: Daisy Alioto, Bruce Arthur, Nick Aster, Jody Avirgan, Mike Barnicle, Alex Belth, Sara J. Benincasa, Jonathan Bernstein, Archie Bland, Sara Blask, Greg Bishop, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Julie K. Brown, Maria Bustillos, Matthew Campbell, Graydon Carter, Steve Caruso, Kyle Chayka, Kit Chellel, Chris Cillizza, Doug Bock Clark, Anna Katherine Clemmons, Stephanie Clifford, Rich Cohen, Jessica Contrera, Jonathan Coleman, Pam Colloff, Ruby Cramer, Pete Croatto, Kim Cross, Bryan Curtis, Seyward Darby, Noah Davis, Esmé E. Deprez, Bronwen Dickey, Maureen Dowd, Charles Duhigg, Brett Michael Dykes, Geoff Edgers, Kate Fagan, Jason Fagone, Jodi Mailander Farrell, Maria Fontoura, Hadley Freeman, Elaine Godfrey, Lea Goldman, Michael N. Graff, Megan Greenwell, Bill Grueskin, Justine Gubar, Maggie Haberman, Erika Hayasaki, Reyhan Harmanci, Justin Heckert, Virginia Heffernan, Stuart Heritage, Matthew Hiltzik, Jena Janovy, Bomani Jones, Chris Jones, Peter Kafka, Jay Caspian Kang, Mina Kimes, Peter King, Jordan Kisner, Paul Kix, Dan Kois, Steve Krakauer, Michael Kruse, Tom Lamont, Edmund Lee, Chris Lehmann, Will Leitch, Steven Levy, Jon Mackenzie, Alec MacGillis, Glynnis MacNicol, Drew Magary, Erik Malinowski, Jonathan Martin, Betsy Fischer Martin, Jeff Maysh, Jack McCallum, Soraya Nadia McDonald, Susan McPherson, Ana Menendez, Kevin Merida, Katherine Miller, Heidi N. Moore, Kim Morgan, Diana Moskovitz, Eric Neel, Kevin Nguyen, Joe Nocera, Olivia Nuzzi, Richard Pachter, Ashley R. Parker, Dave Pell, Anne Helen Petersen, Elaina Plott, Joe Posnanski, Julia Preston, S.L. Price, Christine Pride, Nausicaa Renner, Melanie Renzulli, Jesus Rodriguez, Jennifer Romolini, Phil Rosenthal, Julia Rubin, Luke Russert, Albert Samaha, Bob Sassone, Noah Schactman, Bruce Schoenfeld, Michael Schur, Alex Segura, Joe Sexton, Lucy Sexton, Ramona Shelburne, Jacqui Shine, Alexandra Sifferlin, Rachel Sklar, Dan Shanoff, Harry Shearer, Ben Smith, Deborah Sontag, Alex Spence, Elizabeth Spiers, Jesse Sposato, Rainesford Stauffer, Adam Sternbergh, Matt Sullivan, Louisa Thomas, Wright Thompson, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Pablo Torre, Ian Urbina, Kevin Van Valkenburg, Krithika Varagur, Nikki Waller, John A. Walsh, Charlie Warzel, Jon Wertheim, Seth Wickersham, Karen Wickre, David Wolf, Brad Wolverton, Dan Zak, Dave Zirin and Edward Zwick
Editor in memoriam: Lyra McKee 1990-2019
Header Image: Illustration by Tim Enthoven
You can read more about our staff, peruse past editions and contact us (we'd love to hear from you!) on our website: sundaylongread.com. Help pick next week's selections by forwarding us your favorite stories by email.
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