This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
In this week’s edition:
- Cul-de-sac chaos in California’s most exclusive zip code
- An examination of “genius” and a nuanced portrait of a biographer
- The harrowing reality of finding food in Gaza
- Found suitcases and the forgotten lives of psychiatric patients
- An entertaining Oscars dispatch from the cheap seats
1. The Squatters of Beverly Hills
Bridget Read | Curbed | March 12, 2024 | 6,005 words
When I first started reading this piece, I wasn’t sure whether to be appalled or amazed. Last September, realtor John A. Woodward IV listed 1316 Beverly Grove Place for just under $5 million. When the pool guy asked whether the new owners might keep him on, Woodward knew something was up—no one had bought the house. Raucous parties complete with thumping bass were said to take place five nights a week. Jittery, glassy-eyed partygoers spotted in daylight signaled debauchery. Unsatisfied with a “suggested donation” as the price of admission, the cons started to rent out rooms in the mansion they didn’t own. LeBron James—who lives nearby—was among a growing number of concerned neighbors. Who was living at this Beverly Hills property? For Curbed, Bridget Read spins a cinematic story of deception and intrigue worthy of a blockbuster movie. This piece features multiple grifters experienced in a variety of scams, and Read does a terrific job unraveling the twisted tale for gobsmacked readers incredulous at the perpetrators’ audacity. “The latest accused fraudsters to take up residence were louder, more obvious, and more desperate than their predecessors,” she writes, “but the mansion had long been in the possession of people who got it by lying and stealing.” Let’s hope The House of Deception eventually comes to a movie theater near you. Maybe they can get Quentin Tarantino to direct. —KS
2. A Bullshit Genius
Oscar Schwartz | The Drift | March 12, 2024 | 6,077 words
When Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk was released last September, the response was as predictable as it was divided. Musk had bought Twitter more than a year into Isaacson’s reporting and writing process, completing his transformation into an ideological lightning rod—and all but guaranteeing that the book’s reception would simply be a microcosm of the fractured public opinion about Musk. But Oscar Schwartz’s fascinating Drift essay makes clear that that initial spate of discussion overlooked Isaacson’s own intellectual (d)evolution. Schwartz traces the biographer’s life not just through his book projects, but through his employment history, teasing out connections and creating a nuanced portrait. As Isaacson moved from Henry Kissinger to Benjamin Franklin to Albert Einstein, his CV evinced an increasingly blinkered neutrality and credulous techno-optimism; by the time he chronicled the life of Steve Jobs in 2011, he had perfected the art of conflating personal flaws with genius. That embrace of the founder myth suffuses Elon Musk, Schwartz’s analysis of which is both surgical and undeniable. (It also doesn’t happen until more than 4,000 words into the piece, making for some deliciously delayed gratification.) “Like Vasari to the house of Medici,” Schwartz writes, “Isaacson has tied his name to the house of Palo Alto. He is unable to unveil its darker truths without implicating himself.” Schwartz has no such ties and no such compunctions. And readers are better off because of it. —PR
3. My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza
Mosab Abu Toha | The New Yorker | February 24, 2024 | 2,259 words
Ninety-three percent of the population in Gaza, more than two million people, are experiencing “crisis,” “emergency,” or “catastrophe” levels of food security. This dire statistic sounds abstract and unemotional on paper, but in this heartbreaking essay, Mosab Abu Toha—who fled Gaza with his family in December—describes what that looks like for his loved ones who remain there, including his parents and brothers. Toha recounts speaking to his mother, looking weak and pale on his phone’s screen, who tells him she’s scouring the ground for edible plants—while military drones buzz in the background. He listens to his brother’s messages and reads updates about how hard it is to find food: how they’ve mixed bits of grain with rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed; searched for sacks of flour in the rubble of their family’s destroyed home; paid $95 for a small plate of uncooked rice and raw beef; and, after his wife gave birth at a hospital while bombs fell around them, received just one syringe of milk before being asked to leave. Reading Toha’s piece, I’m reminded of a profile we published recently about a Palestinian American chef in Arkansas whose family has run a bakery in Gaza for over a century. While these two stories are very different, both explore the meaning of food in a time of war, and how families connect across borders through their memories around the table. Now in Egypt, Toha writes: “As I eat simple meals of chicken, rice, salad, and olives with my family, I think of the hunger in my homeland, and of all the people with whom I want to share my meals. I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters. I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again.” —CLR
4. Tales From an Attic
Sierra Bellows | The American Scholar | March 4, 2024 | 7,526 words
I know several New Yorkers, myself included, who have had a dream in which they find a secret door in their apartment leading to a large room they didn’t know they had access to. In the dream, the discovery of extra space in a notoriously cramped metropolis is euphoric, transformative. Sierra Bellows describes what to my mind is the equivalent experience for a nonfiction writer: finding a door that opens to reveal a trove of stories waiting to be told. The door in question was in the attic of the now-shuttered Willard Asylum for the Insane, and the trove was hundreds of suitcases that belonged to the institution’s patients. One held a vanity set; another held books; one contained only a toothpick. When Bellows learned about the suitcases, through photographs shot by Jon Crispin, she was struck by the mysteries and possibilities they contained. “Whereas I had previously imagined life in a psychiatric hospital to be filled with moments of high drama and suffering, I had not considered the quotidian aspects,” Bellow writes. “I wanted to see more. I wanted to know more about the lives of [the patients].” But her essay isn’t strictly an illumination of what she learned about the people institutionalized at Willard. It also wrestles with questions of privacy, agency, and historical memory. And it contains a passage about the human impulse to understand lived experiences other than our own that was so arresting I texted it to my husband before I’d finished reading the piece: “Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life,” Bellows writes. “That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.” —SD
5. ‘All These Normal People, Packed Into a Human Lasagne’: My Glamour-Free Night at the Oscars
Stuart Heritage | The Guardian | March 11, 2024 | 1,908 words
This year was my first time watching the Oscars live. Partly due to being in the same timezone, and partly—I’ll admit it—because I wanted to see Ryan Gosling sing “I’m Just Ken.” (It did not disappoint.) During the show’s many pans to the audience, I noticed the eye-popping frocks, the clapping dog, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie sweetly holding hands, and, now and then, up above the glitzy auditorium, hints of faces peeking down from the ether of the mezzanines. A glimpse into the shadow world. Although vaguely surprised that the audience above the shiny people was so vast, my concentration whipped back to a naked John Cena. Stuart Heritage returned me to the heights with this delightful piece for The Guardian. Only the A-listers saw Al Pacino up close as he skipped all the nominees to quickly growl Oppenheimer for Best Picture. (He probably had to get back to that new baby.) Up above, it’s a whole different crowd. I am a sucker for a bit of irreverence, and I thoroughly enjoyed Heritage’s take on spending the Oscars with “the normal people.” In the mezzanines, Heritage joins other press members, crews from nominated departments, and friends and family of nominees. Initially, sitting beside a woman mindlessly scrolling through red carpet selfies, he is unimpressed by this version of the Oscars, but as he begins to recognize the groups of people championing particular films, his view shifts. For these people, the stakes are high. Heritage muses, “It might lack the star wattage of the lower levels, but there is something beautiful and human about going through it surrounded by people who are invested in the outcome.” This essay is a lovely reminder of the hugely collaborative effort behind the films, and what they mean to those who don’t make it to the floor of the Dolby Theatre. A reminder that made this my favorite piece of Oscar coverage. And don’t worry—Heritage doesn’t leave without a celebrity encounter (by getting in the wrong lift). I’ll let you read to find out who. —CW
Audience Award
S’more! S’more!
Adam Rogers | Business Insider | March 3, 2024 | 2,922 words
“This is the story of the Theranos of marshmallows” is an undeniable line. Irresistible, even. So what if the parallels are tenuous? Adam Rogers’ tick-tock about the rise and fall of Smashmallow might lack the manipulation and villainy of Silicon Valley’s Potemkin startup, but the lesson at its core is the same: scale at your own risk. —PR
from Longreads https://ift.tt/skNz6nY
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/WzB37ef
