Sunday, May 17, 2026 — Issue #534

Hello and welcome back! We've got some great reads to share today—including our latest SLR Original—but first, some exciting news!

Starting in June (in time for the World Cup), we'll be sharing the web's best sports stories in The Lineup, our latest spin-off newsletter series. The Lineup will be curated by Esquire Classic editor Alex Belth, with help from LJ Rader of ArtButMakeItSports fame. You can check out their beta edition here and subscribe now to ensure you're there from the jump!

Next week, there will be no standard SLR during Memorial Day Weekend, but we'll have our latest bonus issue for our paying supporters. That makes now a great time to become a member. Starting at $5/month, you'll get early delivery of the newsletter every week as well as extra editions throughout the year—and our unending gratitude.

Along with Publisher Ruth Ann Harnisch, our members allow us to keep The SLR free, spreading the word about valuable reading in contrast to the carnival that has overtaken the rest of the internet. If you've gotten something out of this newsletter—if a couple stories today make you a bit wiser or feel slightly more connected to what's around you—we'd greatly appreciate your support!

And to our current members: thank you for sticking with us, and with these stories. Now let's get reading!

Enjoy,
Don and Jacob

   The ICE Surveillance Firm With Missing Executives and Phantom Clients

By Katya Schwenk for The Lever

~10 minutes 

Email required

A damning investigation, with receipts, by The Lever’s Katya Schwenk: An ICE vendor that tracks immigrants appears to have “used stock photos, unverifiable executives and questionable claims to market itself.”

   Inside Jack Schlossberg’s Chaotic Campaign to Revive Camelot

By Nicholas Fandos for The New York Times

~10 minutes

Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers

A deep-dive inside Kennedy heir Jack Schlossberg’s chaotic, staff-churning campaign to represent most of Manhattan in Congress. A typical day in the life of the zig-zagging campaign: “Forget dialing for dollars – Mr. Schlossberg said he needed a nap,” writes Nicholas Fandos. “He then effectively disappeared for the day, leaving his team reeling.”

> The Atlantic: Democrats Might Actually Win Iowa (Free for SLR Readers)
> Current Affairs: Louisiana Shows What Happens When Democracy Crumbles
> The Free Press: China vs. God: Ezra Jin and Beijing’s War on Christianity

   Christopher Nolan Has Been Dreaming of The Odyssey for More Than 20 Years

By Eliana Dockterman for Time 

~20 minutes 

Let The Odyssey hype begin!

> The Atlantic: The Most Surprising Part of Stephen Colbert’s Late-Night Run (Free for SLR Readers)
> The Ringer: David Attenborough and the Voice That Revealed a Planet
> WIRED: I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI [$]

   At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing.

By Frank DiGiacomo for The Hollywood Reporter

~25 minutes

A decade after billionaire Peter Thiel killed off Gawker, the witty, take-no-prisoners digital blog whose many talents still blaze bright, Frank DiGiacomo measures Nick Denton’s snarky site’s booming legacy against Hollywood’s upcoming, sideways portrait.

Gawker “could be withering, puerile and gratuitously nasty,” writes DiGiacomo. “But, at its best, it rebelled against media piety and the growing, often indiscriminate power of the digital world and the hubristic entrepreneurs who were shaping it. As print and television media fumbled their way online, Gawker used the internet to pull back the curtain on celebrity, mainstream media, politics and creeping commercialism.”

> Matt Pearce: You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried

   The 2026 Summer Reading Guide

By Staff for The Atlantic

~15 minutes 

Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers

It's warming up outside, which means it's time to hit the park, with a paperback in tow.

> The New Yorker: It’s Possible to Learn in Our Sleep. Should We? [$]

   They knew they were dying soon, so they threw a party

By Sydney Page for The Washington Post

~10 minutes

Email required

“Funerals of all kinds are becoming a lot more like weddings,” a D.C. death doula tells Sydney Page. 

> The New Yorker: How Reading With My Dying Mother Revealed Her Life [$]
> The San Francisco Standard: A dying mother. A lost daughter. And a city pushed to its limit
> Time: Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Died From Lung Cancer in 2024. Her Family Is Trying to Find Out Why
> The Atlantic: I Remember America Before the Measles Vaccine (Free for SLR Readers)

   Consider The Sister

By Lindsey Adler for the small bow

~25 minutes

We love this thoughtful, empathetic look at Amy Wallace, the revered novelist David Foster Wallace’s sister who has devoted the past two decades to protecting who her brother was. She has also pushed back against how much of the world prefers to see him—as a confounding puzzle or a convenient prism.

   ‘10 minutes of nirvana’: 52 writers on the best sandwich of their life

By Staff for The Guardian 

~30 minutes

Is it lunch time yet?

> The #SundayLR List: The Guardian: 100 Best Novels
> The #SundayLR List: Time: The 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century

   Ted Turner, Entrepreneur of His Age

By Thomas W. Hazlett for Reason 

~5 minutes

Now this is one helluva way to be remembered: “Ted Turner, who just graduated from this earthly academy at age 87, was a bon vivant, Playgirl's man of the year, and a public embarrassment.”

> The Remembrance: The New York Times: Philip Caputo, Who Wrote Blistering Vietnam War Memoir, Dies at 84 (Free for SLR Readers)

   Inside the Battle for Bigger and Bigger Balls

By Arielle Domb for Men’s Health 

~10 minutes

“What are we doing? What’s going on?” (See The Fan Letter below)

> VICE: A Man Lit Himself on Fire and Pulled a Car With His Penis. Here’s Why He Did It.

> BBC: How a man was convicted of biting a policeman with someone else's teeth

    New York Is Working on a Blueprint for Greener Buildings

By Clara Hudson for The Wall Street Journal 

~10 minutes

NYC has been studying the carbon impact of construction materials like steel and concrete for years. The goal is to create better building standards and reduce emissions. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has inherited these efforts at an opportune time to continue showing the unique opportunity cities have to cut emissions in the absence of strong federal leadership.

> Floodlight: Trump officials, billionaires and the quiet reshaping of America's public lands
> National Geographic: Lessons of a landslide detective
> Streetsblog: Congress Gave States Enough Money to Fix Every Road in America; Some States Set It On Fire Instead
> Slate: How You, Yes, You, Can Make a Difference When It Comes to Climate Change—and Just About Anything Else [$]
> The New York Times: Climate Change as a 2026 Campaign Issue

   Kash Patel's Personalized Bourbon Stash

By Sarah Fitzpatrick for The Atlantic

   The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

By Jon Greenaway for Current Affairs

   The Last Days of Butter Ridge

By Eli Saslow for The New York Times

“What are we doing? What’s going on?”

The Tucker Carlson impression by “Saturday Night Live” newcomer Jeremy Culhane isn’t just hilarious; it has managed to introduce pitch-perfect catch-phrases for this American moment. My wife and I now deploy these high-pitched questions to punctuate our conversations about any confounding thing in public life, like, say, the absurd trend of young idiots drag-racing their souped-up sports cars on Florida’s Turnpike (I drove by a pair of upside-down crashed sports cars the other night). 

And after reflecting on some new stupid development, friends and I have begun saying, “That’s the rule... That’s the goal now” (To any cultural trend or outrage that has inexplicably become popular, another pal keeps saying to me: “And I have to be… attracted to this?”). 

Sure, there is controversy that Culhane is echoing a viral, better-honed Tucker Carlson impression, but the writing and delivery of Culhane’s first two “Weekend Update” appearances as Carlson are irresistible and have made the SNL rookie a breakout star. Culhane, searching for SNL-worthy material, had nearly forgotten he had done Tucker Carlson a couple years ago. But, lucky for us, he remembered in time for the homestretch of SNL’s 51st season, whose finale, featuring Will Ferrell and Paul McCartney, aired Saturday night. -DVN

If you want to contribute a Fan Letter, please send to editors@sundaylongread.com

Ted Turner, who just graduated from this earthly academy at age 87, was a bon vivant, Playgirl's man of the year, and a public embarrassment. He made billion-dollar deals when, you know, a billion was a really big number. He sailed the seas as a champion of the yachting crowd, winning the 1977 America's Cup aboard the Courageous. He married a beautiful actress, made her do the politically incorrect Tomahawk chops to cheer his Atlanta Braves, and cycled through the ideological spectrum from Randian to Mouth of the South to globalist U.N. benefactor to environmentalist rescuing bison. Jane Fonda, his third wife, deemed him a "romantic swashbuckling pirate" and "my favorite ex-husband." 

From Ted Turner, Entrepreneur of His Age by Thomas W. Hazlett for Reason

“All of this nonsense is only going to last three to five more years, because in the future, people will stop trusting what they see on social media…. You’ll have to start distributing your content toward AI agents and then they’ll teach humans what they want.”

—Joe Lim
 
From The Feed is Fake by Lane Brown for Vulture [$]

   The Perils of Pearl and Olga (1953) [$]

By St. Clair McKelway for The New Yorker

~35 minutes

One of the writers who shaped the voice of The New Yorker, St. Clair McKelway spent nearly half a century at the magazine as an editor and writer, frequently turning out splendid crime pieces like “The Perils of Pearl and Olga” for it. A true-life film noir in print if ever there was one, you can imagine it being optioned by Billy Wilder as a sequel to Double Indemnity. The piece brims with youthful naivete, psychological manipulation, deranged jealousy, betrayal, and sordid violence. 

Classic Bonus: I was initially impressed by McKelway’s $10 name and then became doubly impressed when I started to read him. When McKelway died in 1980, Mr. Shawn gave him a Viking’s sendoff, praising his range as a writer, editor, and critic. I discovered McKelway in my youth when prospecting old New Yorkers where I discovered his massive profile of Father Divine in 1936, which he cowrote with A.J. Liebling. 

When his wordcount grows large, Jack Shafer imagines himself role-playing as St. Jack Shafer. 

He's famous enough—especially among media, political, government, and business insiders. I knew him long before he wore this level of fame like a second skin.

Something’s going on, and his family has chosen to share the lowdown with a circle of people who can be trusted to keep their (BIG) mouths shut.

By invitation only, the family is using CaringBridge.org to get the word out. CaringBridge is a free-to-use nonprofit service allowing people to control private information.

Started almost 30 years ago by someone who thought there must be a better way to share health updates, now it’s expanded. You can use CaringBridge.org to ask for help with other needs, not just health expenses.

Someone I know used it to tell her world when the family house burned down. She did not want to repeat the story over and over and over as well-meaning friends reached out. She continues to tell the story as it evolves, on CaringBridge.

And that famous guy? His family reports he really loves reading all the good wishes and expressions of affection that people are leaving on his CaringBridge page.

I think I’ll send him a cheerful message right now, telling him to read the Publisher’s Message in this week’s SLR.

Ruth Ann Harnisch has been the publisher of The Sunday Long Read since 2023.

HELLO, AMYLOU

Just one year ago, a baby girl named AmyLou Martin was born in American Fork, Utah – an emotional moment made more achingly extraordinary because her father, Tanner Martin, witnessed her entry into the world after being diagnosed with colon cancer at the age of 25. Forty days later, the new father died, part of a concerning trend of cancer rates rising among young people. Photographer Jahi Chikwendiu, formerly of The Washington Post, spent weeks documenting the lives of the tragic young family, humanizing the disturbing medical pattern through intimate photos that were recognized earlier this month with the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. By demonstrating great skill and sensitivity, Chikwendiu earned the trust of Shay and Tanner Martin during an extremely vulnerable time. The story– “He’s Dying. She’s Pregnant.”– drew readers into the confusing world of expectant parents shopping simultaneously for a bassinet and a casket while a dad-to-be held on for his final wish.

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. 

Radio 831—A Romance Podcast (Apple | Spotify)

This new show is the smart-girl group chat of the modern romance world. A space which is growing ever more influential by the day. Hosted by romance scholar and BookTok fave Sanjana Basker alongside writer and pop-culture obsessive Tyler McCall, the weekly podcast gives romance the same serious treatment as we already give politics, men’s professional sports and prestige dramas. Well deserved. The hosts debate literary tropes, unpack why certain subgenres explode online, obsess over adaptations and discuss classics through a romance lens.
 
The show comes out of 831 Stories, the romance-focused entertainment company founded by my friends Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, which has been building a full fandom ecosystem around romance readers. It’s a delicious and educational escape. You’ll learn something new in every episode, while also feeling like you just went on a walk with your two best friends.

Jo Piazza is the author of many bestselling novels including Everyone is Lying to You and The Sicilian Inheritance and is the host and executive producer of a true crime podcast by the same name, as well as Committed and Under the Influence.

Life During Wartime, by Talking Heads

Sparaboom roams about the universe with cheap ballpoint pens and overpriced Moleskines.

   Math Problems for Moms

 By Sara White & Lindsey Smith for McSweeney’s 

~5 minutes

“One of your children must be at soccer practice at 4 p.m.; the other has their piano lesson at 4:30 p.m.; and you have a mammogram booked for 4:45 p.m. Will you make it back to pick up your kids from their respective lessons before 5:30 p.m.?

ANSWER: Yes, because you had to take an urgent Zoom call from your boss about the teriyaki chicken you left in the office fridge three weeks ago. You’ve now missed your appointment, but don’t worry, it will only take two years to book another one.”