The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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The true price of nuclear power. The nation’s longest-imprisoned man. A man takes on a stealthy global scourge. Competitive eating’s colorful characters. A filmmaking legend’s younger years. All that and more in this week’s installment. Read on!

1. The Atomic Disease

Rachel Greenley | Orion Magazine | August 1, 2023 | 3,504 words

Despite medical science’s many advances, anyone who has ever supported a loved one through a catastrophic illness knows that science has much farther to go. Where you need answers, often there are only questions. For Orion, Rachel Greenley considers America’s love affair with nuclear bombs and nuclear power—a race for supremacy in the name of war and science that has killed countless, both directly and indirectly, as those who live downwind and downstream endure water and soil contaminated by toxic waste and the cancers that ensue. “It’s clear as thirst when life leaves a body,” she writes. “The heavy vessel left behind is void of the personality and warmth that brightly colored the world. My world…He was thirty-five years old.” It’s not that Greenley doesn’t believe in science; rather, as she so poignantly notes in this gripping essay, she cannot trust fallible officials in charge of managing nuclear projects and disasters, those who deflect concern and downplay the danger of a threat that cannot be seen with the naked eye, one that may have taken her husband and the father of her children. Is ignorance to blame, or ambivalence, or perhaps a combination of both? For Greenley and so many others, it’s a question that deserves to be answered. —KS

2. Frank Smith Was Locked Up for Eight Decades. At 98, What Would It Mean to Be Free?

Annalisa Quinn | Boston Globe Magazine | July 5, 2023 | 4,693 words

Sometimes a passage in a story hits me in the solar plexus. It hurts, but it’s also a gift, because the pain means that what I’m reading is very, very good. In the opening of Annalisa Quinn’s story, we meet a man named Frank Smith on the verge of his execution—the eighth time the state of Connecticut has tried to kill him, and the second time it came close enough to doing so that prison staff shaved his head, before the Board of Pardons and Paroles decided at the last minute to spare him. Then we learn that this all happened in 1954, and that Smith was only recently paroled; at 98 years old, he is likely America’s longest-serving prisoner. The passage in question comes later in the piece, when Quinn asks an administrator at the secure nursing home where Smith is now housed if talking about his life, including the eight times the government tried to end it, might upset him. The administrator assures her that it’s fine. “But in our conversations,” Quinn writes, “he would return again and again to the electric chair, still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear all this time later. ‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’” I can’t wrap my head around what it means to carry that kind of fear for so long. But I know that no one should bear that burden. —SD

3. The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure

Amit Katwala | Wired | August 22, 2023 | 4,403 words

Every year, the elementary schools in my area would take students on field trips to a preserved one-room schoolhouse; we’d drink from a well, substitute our usual classes with teachings from McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer, and glumly play with the saddest collection of 19th-century toys you can imagine. It was on one of those trips when I realized I had no godly idea what the teacher was writing on the chalkboard. So: glasses at age seven, contact lenses at 13, and a life spent with high myopia. But I had no idea I was a trendsetter until I read Amit Katwala’s fascinating Wired feature. Nearsightedness has swept the globe, but it’s particularly endemic to East Asia. In China, South Korea, and Taiwan, 90% of young adults are myopic. It’s the leading cause of blindness in those countries, and represents a very real (if very slow) public health threat. Enter eye surgeon Pei-Chang Wu, whose journey of discovery serves as the spine of the piece. This is a mystery story, as all good science writing is, and Katwala gives Wu’s search the perfect balance of history and specificity so that lay readers like you and me can appreciate its evolution without being conversant in cyclopegic autorefraction. (By the way, I highly recommend saying that phrase out loud. It makes you feel very smart.) Wu’s ultimate solution, as so many do, has a healthy dose of common sense to it, but that’s kind of the point—and, as Katwala’s kicker makes clear, it’s also a bit of a panacea. Before you take his advice, though, read the piece. It’s worth the eyestrain. —PR

4. Everything You Never Knew About Competitive Eating

Jamie Loftus | The Takeout | July 14, 2023 | 3,483 words

I didn’t know I needed to consume 3,500 words on the world of competitive eating until I read Jamie Loftus’ piece in The Takeout. As a reader, you feel like Loftus has handed you a bib and after a few paragraphs, you’re ready to tie it on and take your seat at the table as she introduces us to the fascinating characters (with surprising causes) who inhabit the world of Big League Eating. You’ll get to meet “Megabyte” Ronnie Hartman, a.k.a. “The People’s Hot Dog,” a military veteran and indie pro wrestler who uses his plate—er, platform—to advance the cause of veterans’ rights. Then there’s Mary Bowers, a Korean American project manager for the Department of Homeland Security who hand-crafts food-themed outfits and uses her profile to highlight human trafficking. (Mary learned that she was kidnapped as a child and illegally trafficked out of South Korea.) What I loved most, though, is that in addition to the warmth and respect they have for each other, Hartman and Bowers both champion gender inclusivity at the competition. “It doesn’t matter what your pronouns are,” says Hartman. “Once you step on that stage, you’re an eater.” Come for the carnival atmosphere, stay for the camaraderie. —KS

5. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Werner Herzog | The New Yorker | August 21, 2023 | 3,482 words

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Every Man From Himself and God Against All, Werner Herzog reflects on his time spent in Pennsylvania’s westernmost city. I’ve watched Herzog’s films, but this was my first experience of him conjuring pictures from a page. Unsurprisingly, he is very good at it: a keen eye for detail, astute character observation, and the ability to tell a good yarn make this a riveting piece. His prose knocks up another notch when he meets the Franklins, a family that takes him in during his studies at Duquesne University. His love for them is apparent in the warm descriptions of the hustle and bustle of the busy household, complete with twins, grannies, a dog, and a failed rock musician named Billy, who would only emerge from bed in the afternoon, “stark naked, stretching pleasurably.” Throughout, Herzog notes inspiration for his films—fascinating tidbits that included the dancing chickens in Stroszek deriving from a hallucination while traveling from Mexico with hepatitis. He can’t resist a bit of name-dropping and grandiosity, as might be expected, but these well-crafted scenes more than compensate.  —CW

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Audience Award

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What Happened to “Wirecutter”?

Charlie Warzel | The Atlantic | August 22, 2023 | 2,290 words

Those looking for unbiased, trustworthy product reviews once had an easy first step: Check Wirecutter. But as Charlie Warzel points out, it’s not so simple anymore. Between its parent company growth expectations, the increasing influence of product discussions on Reddit and other social platforms, and SEO chicanery, Wirecutter often feel a little bit … less. But with a pleasingly meta approach, Warzel tries to answer his own question. Is the result definitive? Impossible to say. But such is true of any product review these days. —PR

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Canada in the Year 2060

This is a brutal—but necessary—read about the harsh reality that climate change is bringing. By systematically laying out different ways the country will be affected, Anne Shibata Casselman provides a thorough look at Canada’s future, with just a glimmer of hope in how we could improve these outcomes.

Across the region, roads buckled, car windows cracked and power cables melted. The emerald fringes of conifers browned overnight, as if singed by flame. Entire cherry orchards were destroyed, the fruit stewed on the trees. More than 650,000 farm animals died of heat stress. Hundreds of thousands of honeybees perished, their organs exploding outside their bodies. Billions of shoreline creatures, especially shellfish, simply baked to death, strewing beaches with empty shells and a fetid stench that lingered for weeks. Birds and insects went unnervingly silent. All the while the skies were hazy but clear, the air preternaturally still, not a cloud in sight. The air pressure was so high they’d all dissipated.

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The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Werner Herzog gives a fascinating account of the time he spent in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Larger-than-life characters and unwise adventures keep you gripped with every word.

There were occasional bizarre scenes. The mother fed her son as if he were a little kid. More precisely, she made him eat green Jell-O, and she started to think of me as someone who might also benefit from it. I ate it uncomplainingly. This motif surfaced many years later, in my film “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done,” where the protagonist, played by Michael Shannon, is covered in Jell-O by his mother, as if it were war paint. He ends up playing the part of Orestes in a theatre production, failing to keep performance separate from reality, and killing his mother with a stage prop, a Turkish sabre.

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The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure

The best science journalism doesn’t read like science journalism at all; it reads like a mystery. And Amit Katwala’s latest Wired feature, which chronicles how a Taiwanese eye surgeon set out to solve his country’s decades-long slide into severe nearsightedness (and ends on one of the more charming kickers I can remember), knows no good solution comes without sleuthin’.

In 1999, the government convened a group of experts in medicine and education to try and fix the problem. Jen-Yee Wu, who worked at the Ministry of Education and had done his doctoral thesis on eyesight protection, was asked to write a set of guidelines for schools to address nearsightedness. Later that year, he published a thin green book full of advice for teachers. It paid careful attention to desk height (to keep texts the right distance from the eyes) and room lighting, and advocated eye relaxation exercises, including a guided massage of points around the eyes and face. The book also advised giving children more space in their notebooks to pen the intricate characters that make up written Mandarin. And it formalized the 30/10 rule: a 10-minute break to stare into the distance after every half hour of reading or looking at a screen.

None of it worked. Nearsightedness rates continued to climb because, as it turned out, Taiwan, and the world, had been thinking about how to address myopia completely wrong.

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What Happened to “Wirecutter”?

Those looking for unbiased, trustworthy product reviews once had an easy first step: Check Wirecutter. But as Charlie Warzel points out, it’s not so simple anymore. Between its parent company growth expectations, the increasing influence of product discussions on Reddit and other social platforms, and SEO chicanery, Wirecutter often feel a little bit … less. But with a pleasingly meta approach, Warzel tries to answer his own question. Is the result definitive? Impossible to say. But such is true of any product review these days.

Ultimately, Wirecutter’s mission to “tell you what the best particular product in a category is at any given moment” has become a herculean, if not impossible, task; the internet is too big, and it’s filled with too much stuff. And, as many online shoppers learned during the height of the pandemic, purchases don’t always follow the cold, rational logic of a Wirecutter recommendation. We panic-buy; we impulse-buy; we buy to fill a hole in our lives. “The ideal review is that you test everything and then there’s one product that works well for most people,” a former Wirecutter editor, who asked to speak anonymously because they still work in media, told me. “But who is ‘most people’?”

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Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

At this point, nothing more needs to be said to describe Elon Musk’s seeming personality shift over the past two decades—but particularly over the past five years. Why that’s happened is a more interesting topic, and one that Ronan Farrow delves into deeply in this well-sourced, well-reported exploration of the entrepreneur’s increasingly influential role on the global geopolitical stage.

National-security officials I spoke with had a range of views on the government’s balance of power with Musk. He maintains good relationships with some of them, including General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since the two men met, several years ago, when Milley was the chief of staff of the Army, they have discussed “technology applications to warfare—artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and autonomous machines,” Milley told me. “He has insight that helped shape my thoughts on the fundamental change in the character of war and the modernization of the U.S. military.” During the Starlink controversy, Musk called him for advice. But other officials expressed profound misgivings. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told me. “That sucks.”

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Frank Smith Was Locked Up for Eight Decades. At 98, What Would It Mean to Be Free?

He’s likely the longest-serving prisoner in the United States. The state of Connecticut tried to execute him eight times. Now he lives in a secure nursing home, struggling to stay in the present and live with the past:

Even now, Smith seems to live perpetually in the time of his trial. He has mild dementia, and doesn’t always recall what he did a day ago. But he remembers his public defenders, members of the jury, who said what and when. He can’t stop replaying these details for anyone who will listen. It’s a habit he’s apparently maintained for seven decades. In 1953, a death row chaplain told the Courant he spent the long night before one of the aborted executions with Smith. Even on the verge of death, the chaplain said, “He kept going over and over his case.”

All these years later, he’ll say to me:

I’m in here on no evidence at all.

They never had a case against me.

I’m innocent under Connecticut law.

I asked one of the nursing home administrators if my visits were too upsetting, bringing up terrors from a lifetime ago, making Smith relive the days before his scheduled executions.

No, she told me. Being listened to “is happiness for him.”

But in our conversations, he would return again and again to the electric chair, still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear all of this time later. “It cooks you,” he would repeat, folding into himself. “It cooks you.”

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At His Majesty’s Pleasure

Poundbury seems to be a bizarre place: King Charles’ vision of how English towns should be. Jimmy McIntosh heads there for the coronation with high expectations but leaves unimpressed. A quirky little essay about a quirky little place.

Much has been written about the first foray into town planning of King Charles III, né His Royal Highness Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, Prince of Wales. It’s either a utopia or a twee hell, depending on who you read. But here’s the top line: the genesis of Poundbury came about in 1987, when West Dorset County Council decided to expand westwards into the fields from the county town of Dorchester. The land had been, since the reign of Edward III in 1337, Duchy of Cornwall land, but rather than sell up to the council for a generous price the Duke of Cornwall, Charles – who had long had an interest in urban development and architecture – agreed to work with them to build his vision of England: a return to tradition, a reaction against estate modernism, the wet dream of a thousand Quinlan Terry fanboys and internet edgelords.

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Gwyneth Paltrow Put Her House Up on Airbnb. And Thus, a Quest Began.

A fun look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s rather ridiculous offer to AirBnB her guest house. Jodi Walker strips this down to the publicity stunt it is and has a great time analyzing how she can make the stay hers.

Because if it looks like a contest and quacks like a contest, it’s probably a publicity stunt. But still, if at the end of that publicity stunt—and at the end of whatever technical nightmare stands between me and the Goop House—is my getting to talk about natural wine and odors with Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, Brad Falchuk … well, quack quack, bitch, let’s go.

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Court and Sparks

Now that Bookforum is back from the dead, it’s seemingly pushing legacy content through its RSS feed—which means lovely surprises like this Ross Gay essay about basketball (and the bellicose posturing that’s such an inextricable part of the game) from the Summer 2022 issue. My favorite poet, my favorite sport. Not a bad way to start a week.

He was also talking shit the whole time. I don’t know what he was saying—I mean, I can guess, ballpark—but his shit-talk reached its embodied zenith when he ripped their point guard at the top of the key and, sailing to the other basket and taking his last dribble, looked back at the kid chasing him and held the ball on a platter, like You looking for this, like, Not today, before laying it in. The refs kept getting on him, and getting on us to get on him, for all this jawing, this flamboyant chatter, but he couldn’t stop, I remember watching and giggling and thinking, He can’t stop, he just can’t stop, for he was elated, and his elation was elating, and Lord let me best as I can never be the asshole rips the wings off an elated kid.

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