The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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1. A Child Star at 7, in Prison at 22. Then She Vanished. What Happened to Lora Lee Michel?*

Stacy Perman | Los Angeles Times | May 19, 2022 | 10,548 words

Barbara Wright Isaacs has been looking for her sister, Lora Lee Michel, for nearly 55 years. What makes her disappearance particularly baffling: Lora Lee once had the eyes of the world on her. In the ’40s, she appeared in films alongside Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, and Olivia de Havilland. So what happened? Stacy Perman finds out in this meticulously researched piece for the Los Angeles Times, brought to life with photos and film clips of the adorable, precocious child star. Beginning with the well-known half of Lora Lee’s life, the story races along at whip-cracking speed, twisting and turning, before culminating in a high-profile custody battle between Lora Lee’s biological and adoptive mother. When Lora Lee leaves Hollywood for Texas, aged 10, things become hazier, forcing Perman to resort to her own research. By tracking down dozens of individuals and public records, she finds, as she writes, “a woman lost in a maze of short marriages and perpetual misfortunes.” Perman takes Lora Lee’s sad tale back to Wright Isaacs. It’s not the story she had hoped for, but still closure on what happened to her sister. I was impressed by Perman’s dogged determination to find answers for this family — and more impressed that she did. —CW

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2. Two Weeks in Tehran

Azadeh Moaveni | London Review of Books | October 21, 2022 | 3,516 words

Over 200 people have been killed since September 16, 2022, when Iranians took to the streets to protest the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in suspicious circumstances after being detained for not wearing her hijab to government standards. In this piece at the London Review of Books, Azadeh Moaveni recounts a hastily erected government billboard depicting notable Iranian women, all wearing a hijab under the slogan, “Women of Our Land.” The billboard was removed just as quickly as it appeared after several of the women featured rebuked the government and demanded their images be removed. The government had gone so far as to feature Nooshin Jafari, a photojournalist currently serving a prison sentence for “insulting state sanctities.” Despite the short-lived government propaganda campaign and amid ongoing protests and clashes, change is happening in Iran. “Morality policing lies in ruins. No one knows what senior politicians are hearing from their wives, sisters and daughters, but never have the Islamic Republic’s political elite and its most dogmatic constituencies looked so divided at a time of crisis.” —KS

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3. Eminem Found Himself in “Lose Yourself.” Will We Ever Let It Go?

Jake Kring-Schreifels | The Ringer | November 3, 2022 | 4,500 words

I really wish this piece had come out any other week. Days ago, Atlanta rapper Takeoff — who as a teen helped create Migos’ trendsetting triplet flow — was fatally shot at the tender age of 28. He’s the artist we should be discussing right now; he’s whose influential work we should be remembering. There have been some wonderful pieces already published praising him, and hopefully, the longform elegy he deserves will be published in the coming days. So it feels fraught, to say the least, to instead recommend this long Ringer feature detailing the creation and legacy of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” But anniversaries gonna anniversary, and if you thought The Ringer wasn’t going to commemorate the 20th birthday of Eight Mile and its soundtrack, you haven’t been paying attention. And truthfully, Jake Kring-Schreifels reported the hell out of this thing, tracing the song’s evolution from Eminem’s metanarrative writing approach to its Oscar-worthy musical construction, while also illustrating its seismic impact. We’ve heard it in sports arenas for 20 years now, and will likely be hearing it for at least another 20; until then, this is a fascinating look at how an anthem happens. —PR

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4. Swamp Boy

Kris Newby | Now This and Epic Magazine | October 27, 2022 | 7,784 words

Fourteen-year-old Michael suddenly starts to experience inexplicable psychotic episodes. He tells his father he’s the son of the devil. He claims his tabby cat is possessed by demons. Believing he’s no longer human, he says he’s becoming “Swamp Thing,” a green monster on one of the posters on his wall. As his condition worsens, Michael is diagnosed with schizophrenia multiple times, but his father refuses to accept the diagnosis, believing that there could be another trigger to his son’s mysterious illness. In a riveting piece that’s illustrated with comic book art by Mado Peña, Kris Newby retells this family’s hellish 18-month journey to uncover the cause. —CLR

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5. A Touch of Moss

Nikita Arora | Aeon | September 8, 2022 | 4,549 words

This beautiful essay is a letter of recommendation to go out and touch moss. Yes, the soft green stuff growing on walls and rocks and trees, patches and carpets that grow at a glacial pace, that harken back to an ancient, pre-human world. But Nikita Arora isn’t recommending that readers commune with moss because it’s good for the soul to connect with nature — that’s too pat, too easy. Rather, Arora urges a reimagining of what it means for humans to touch the world around us. “Touch” comes from toche, French for “blow” or “attack,” and as Arora elucidates, the ability to touch has often been an extension of power and its attendant violence. “Perhaps the apparent superficiality of touch is the fiction,” Arora writes. “The histories (colonial, racial, elitist) of human relationships with the nonhuman may have whitewashed and pigeonholed touch and its potential for radical reciprocity and for reckoning with the past and the present.” —SLD

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A Touch of Moss

An essay about the importance of touching nature, and with it the realities of time and history — including the ugly and inconvenient:

Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being – to the inevitability of others, both human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies.

That touching nature could bridge interspecies borders makes sense intuitively. And is there any being in the plant kingdom that embodies touch more than moss and its family, the bryophytes? Moss is touch. It doesn’t poke the skin of the being it touches. And it takes practically nothing from the host it is in contact with: moss is no parasite. Yet it softens trees, prevents soil erosion, and shelters animals too small for us to notice. It is continuously in touch with Earth and all its beings, including us. Inside a rainforest and on the city pavement, moss beckons us. Moss isn’t everywhere and nowhere; moss is here.

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The Spy Who Saved Me

Robert Barron used to work for the CIA, where he helped transform people beyond recognition. Now he makes prosthetics that do exactly the opposite:

His gifted hands move with remarkable precision. Each brush stroke is calculated. Each piece he sculpts is meticulously crafted, and sometimes re-crafted, to reach perfection.

Some of the tools he uses seem wildly out of place: two pasta rollers, orange peels, and dozens of large-gauge syringes filled with fluids of various colours. That’s what it takes to make this art imitate life.

Barron’s medium of choice is silicone.

His finished pieces will be worn as facial prosthetics by people who have been visibly disfigured through birth defect, disease or trauma — people like Steve Butler.

“I mastered the technique of making silicone look like skin,” explains Barron as he picks up the half-face with the moustache.

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Silicon Valley and the Rent-to-Own Trap

Inside the rent-to-own startup that’s putting aspiring homeowners in financial jeopardy:

Old-fashioned as it may seem, the association between homeownership and the American dream has endured—and with good reason. Homeownership remains the primary driver of wealth creation in the U.S. Conversely, Americans who rent have just one-fortieth of the household wealth that homeowners enjoy, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Soaring home price appreciation is further exacerbating this inequality—along with the wealth gap between white households and households of color, who are less likely to own.

The customers whom Divvy targets have been living in the shadow of these trend lines. They may not have good credit scores, steady employment histories, or 401(k)s, but they are well aware that their ability to retire depends on their homeownership status. When Divvy appears in a Facebook ad and offers them a chance at safety and security, they often stretch their finances and take a gamble. For half of Divvy customers, according to the company, the bet pays off, and they become homeowners. But others find themselves in over their heads. They deplete their emergency funds and borrow from family in order to cover Divvy’s down payment fee. While paying top-tier rental rates, they struggle to find the extra cash to cover surprise maintenance bills. If they want or need to exit their contracts early, they lose essential savings. And, as pandemic protections for renters expire, they face eviction in increasing numbers.

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Eminem Found Himself in “Lose Yourself.” Will We Ever Let It Go?

On the [checks notes, sighs] twentieth anniversary of Eight Mile, Jake Kring-Schriefels dives deep into the construction of its most lasting imprint—a soundtrack single that sat atop the charts for months and found eternal life as a sports-arena anthem. To quote the song, there’s no Mekhi Phifer, but Jake Kring-Schreifels pulls together the producers and musicians who helped make it happen. As good a songwriting feature as you’re likely to read.

Well before the movie was released, Martin remembers hearing a rough version of the song for the first time with a group of people. “It was a combination of the script and Marshall’s actual tale,” Martin says. “I was like, ‘What the fuck, are you kidding? How did you put that together?’” When Fenelon listened to the song before the final mix, she had a similar reaction. “It’s one of those moments—and it doesn’t happen very often, even though I was in the music business—where the hair stands up on the back of your neck,” Fenelon says. “You just know that this is going to be a huge song.”

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The Problem With Canon

When you’re a kid, sequels are fun. Easter eggs are mindblowing. The fractal unfolding of a fictional universe across ever-more-specific installments — each one informed by that universe’s previous incarnations — can feel like an infinite promise. But what starts as a thrill can curdle into obligation, as Westenfeld is the latest to point out. So how to undo the burden? Reject fealty.

Canon has a big problem, and the call is coming from inside the house. It’s not hard to see how this obsession with canonical fealty has hamstrung Marvel and Lucasfilm, two franchise juggernauts whose every innovation is punished by a fan meltdown. When storytellers are held hostage by their own audiences, it undermines their ability to do what artists do best: explore, revise, play. This is the problem with storytelling in the age of the mega-franchise—all too often, the impulses of abiding canon conflict with the impulses of making art. 

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A Child Star at 7, in Prison at 22. Then She Vanished. What Happened to Lora Lee Michel?

A riveting story of a child star who went off the rails. Told by Stacy Perman with great sensitivity and care, the full story of Lora Lee Michel is finally pieced together.

Soon, I was watching Lora Lee’s films, excavating archives, sifting through old movie magazines, reading newspaper clippings, obituaries, county clerk records, letters and court filings. Like an anthropologist, I began tracing genealogy reports and tracking down anyone who crossed paths with her, trying to understand what they might tell me about who Lora Lee Michel was and what happened to her. Eventually, I discovered the many hidden threads of her life. 

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