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In this week’s edition:
- The magic of Formula 1 racing.
- Bonding with cruel humor.
- A thoughtful portrait of Mexico’s mezcal industry.
- AI: the good, bad, and downright creepy.
- Swimming in the sea with Kate Winslet.
1. Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain
Kate Wagner | Road & Track | March 1, 2024 | 5,474 words
I can’t claim with 100% certainty that this is the first time Longreads has ever recommended a piece that doesn’t actually exist, but 99% is good enough. In case you missed the media scandal of the week, Road and Track published this piece, then immediately nuked it. Pulled it right off the site. (Hence the fact that this writeup links to an archived version via the Wayback Machine.) Why did they do it? Hard to say. The editor in chief claims it was assigned before he became EIC, and he would have killed it in utero had he known about it. Either way, you won’t find a better example of the Streisand Effect this year. The premise was simple: R&T sent Kate Wagner—who cycling fans may know from her newsletter Derailleur, and others might know from her blog McMansion Hell—on a press junket to a Formula 1 race in Austin, Texas. This was, as Wagner reminds the reader about fiftyleven times, a setup for culture shock. Wagner is used to abiding strict ethical guidelines while covering professional cycling; the petrochemical company funding the junket sent her first class to Austin. Wagner’s a socialist; the F1 paddock is a scene of ultrawealth. The ironic juxtapositions continue. But it’s really the piece’s gonzo approach and Wagner’s unrelentingly crisp descriptive writing that makes the piece work, even after the me-versus-them stance wears thin. “The unfurling of the apparatus of the setup, groups peeling back one by one until there are only these alien cars, these technological marvels kissing the ground,” she writes of the pre-race flurry. “Before the heartbeat, they respirated.” She applies this where, at least for a car magazine, it really matters: the cars, the racing, the racers. Had this story been only an eat-the-rich critique, sure, it may still have gotten a flurry of attention. But what makes it a great piece, a memorable piece, is how Wagner gets inside the magic of spectacle. —PR
2. Laugh Riot
Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books | March 2, 2024 | 4,359 words
A few years ago, I wrote a book about white nationalism, which necessitated spending a lot of time in the worst corners of the internet, reading and listening to the worst people spewing the worst things. This content was laced with humor that functioned both as a delivery system and as weak moral cover—it’s just a joke! lighten up!—for abhorrent ideas. I think often of a line journalist Joseph Bernstein wrote, which I quoted in the book: “What does a racist joke do except create the cognitive distance necessary to do harm, dissolve the bonds of moral obligation?” Bernstein is right, but as this new essay by Fintan O’Toole shows, cruel humor also creates bonds: it invites people willing or even eager to laugh at its punchlines into a community of like minds. O’Toole centers his analysis on Donald Trump, considering why the disgraced ex-president’s supporters find him funny. “His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun,” O’Toole writes. “He makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.” (O’Toole then quips, “For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis.”) Trump has been honing his act for decades, “flirting with the unsayable” to see how wide he can make the Overton Window; in doing so, he’s offered his “listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion.” But as O’Toole warns, “What is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. . . . The in-joke becomes the killer line.” Even if you’re not laughing with Trump—which is to say, if you have a moral compass—don’t make the mistake of laughing at him either. —SD
3. The Last Days of Mezcal
Rowan Jacobsen | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 20, 2024 | 4,228 words
The agave plant, a striking succulent that grows in Oaxaca and other parts of Mexico, “blooms just once in its life, slowly storing sugars in its heart for 6 to 30 years,” writes Rowan Jacobsen. Its flower stalk, a quiote, rises when ready, alerting bats to its nectar. After the agave flowers, it dies. The way Jacobsen describes this slow, once-in-a-lifetime act is beautiful, and he applies this same respect and care to his reporting on the country’s mezcal production as a whole. Mezcal’s allure is in its artisanal nature and the centuries-old, small-batch, single-village methods of the region’s producers; the spirit is often considered the anti-tequila. That authenticity, of course, is what corporations want to capitalize on, and if the growth of the tequila industry is any indication, the global demand for mezcal could devastate the region’s villages, small businesses, and landscape. Enriched by Ruben E. Reyes’ gorgeous photographs of the Oaxacan landscape and portraits of mezcaleros, Jacobsen’s snapshot presents Mexico’s mezcal industry in the shadow of Big Liquor and the threat of “tequilization.” What is the future of the family-owned distilleries that remain in the region, and of the agave plant itself, which has thrived and supported ecosystems and Indigenous Mexican ways of life for thousands of years? —CLR
4. Memento Mori
Tamara Kneese | The Baffler | January 8, 2024 | 3,360 words
I spotted the Alexa while touring our rental, pre-lease. On move-in day I unplugged it. A spy—in the bedroom, no less? Creepy++! Amazon’s Alexa has been recording everyone’s conversations for years. Now, as Tamara Kneese reports for The Baffler, Amazon has used our personal and not-so-private family banter to train AlexaLLM, their “signature large language model,” to offer our disembodied voices to our loved ones after we die. All of a sudden, it seems we are all living in these lawless, Wild West gold rush days of AI, when everything ever committed to byte or pixel is being fed back to us in increasingly disconcerting iterations. To be fair, Kneese shares examples of the good that AI can do, such as Stephanie Dinkins’ oral history project, Not the Only One, which is a “a voice-interactive AI entity designed, trained, and aligned with the concerns and ideals of people who are underrepresented in the tech sector.” As we race toward our collective, uncertain, AI-dominated future, I try to take a balanced view of what’s to come. I am here for AI that breaks down systemic barriers for marginalized communities. I am here for AI that is a genuine benefit to humanity. What I have trouble reconciling is how AI—begat by hopelessly flawed, biased, and prejudiced human beings—will somehow transcend our collective flaws and inherent biases toward creating more equitable future for all. I think I’ll leave Alexa unplugged for now. —KS
5. Kate Winslet Pushes Her Characters, and Herself, to the Edge
Susan Dominus | The New York Times Magazine | March 3, 2024 | 4,947 words
I was an early fan of Kate Winslet, with her unnerving performance as Juliet in Heavenly Creatures and her winsome portrayal of Marianne opposite Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility. Then came Titanic. A film that launched her career into the stratosphere (and made my mother insist I take a whistle with me for any seafaring). But despite her fame, Winslet always came across as down to earth, and Susan Dominus’s lovely profile proves this to be very much the case. Known for not being precious on set, Winslet illustrates this to Dominus by being interviewed for hours in a chilly beach hut on the English coast (Winslet’s idea). I chuckled when, in response to Winslet noting she would never say on set, “I’m cold, I have to stop,” Dominus wrote, “I’m cold, I thought to myself. I have to stop.” I was also amused when Dominus got caught out by her own platitude; when she idly mentions she wishes she could have gone into the sea, cold-water swimming fan Winslet brings her back the next day to do just that. There are other tidbits thrown in—the half-eaten bowl of oatmeal Dominus spies among the detritus in Winslet’s car, the pastries she eats while expressing horror at Ozempic—that offer just as much insight as the interview itself. Not to say what Winslet recounts isn’t compelling: becoming a famous woman in the ’90s era of waif-like chic was nothing short of harrowing. But, it’s the small asides that make you come away from this piece feeling you know Winslet a little better. I’d happily swim in the sea with her, however cold. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the story our readers loved most this week.
‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’
Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Daniel Boguslaw | The Intercept | February 29, 2024 | 6,445 words
In December, The New York Times published a front-page story alleging that Hamas had committed systematic sexualized violence on October 7. The piece, which was written by a Pulitzer Prize-winner and two Israeli freelancers with very little journalism experience, has since come under scrutiny. The Times’ flagship podcast, The Daily, even shelved an episode about the story because of serious questions about the reporting. In this damning dissection, Intercept journalists lay bare the decisions that led to the story’s publication in the first place, some of which one of the freelancers, Anat Schwartz, articulated in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news. —SD
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