The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

An unjust police killing. Nature reclamation in the fossil fuel era. Surviving a bear attack. The underbelly of the antiquities trade. And for a well-earned dessert, the legacy of the world’s first breakout video game.

1. Police Killed His Son. Prosecutors Charged the Teen’s Friends With His Murder

Meg O’Connor | The Appeal & Phoenix New Times | March 14, 2023 | 7,576 words

It’s been nine years since Laquan McDonald was killed by police in Chicago, shot in the back while walking away. It’s been seven years since Philando Castile was killed by police in the Minneapolis suburbs, shot while his empty hands were raised during a questionable traffic stop. And it’s been four years since Jacob Harris was killed by police in Phoenix, seconds after he emerged from a car, his back turned. You’ve likely heard less about Harris’ death than you have McDonald’s and Castile’s, but Meg O’Connor’s thorough investigation makes clear that you won’t forget it. The gross miscarriages of justice are plentiful: the circumstances of Harris’ killing and the shifting police statements around it; the money and valuables police took from Harris’ father’s home before informing him his son was dead; the fact that Harris’ friends are currently serving decades-long prison sentences for his death, while the officers who pulled the trigger (and unleashed an attack dog on his prone body) walk free. We’ve heard far, far too many names like McDonald’s and Castile’s and Harris’ over the past decade, and nothing makes me think we won’t continue to hear many more. That’s what makes this sort of journalism so necessary — not because it can bring these young men back to life, but because it makes brutally clear how unjust their deaths are, and how broken policing is. —PR

2. What Survives

Lacy M. Johnson | Emergence Magazine | March 9, 2023 | 3,724 words

We’re starting to see the massive environmental repercussions that the fossil fuel industry’s surge has wrought on coastal areas of the United States. At Emergence Magazine, Lacy M. Johnson reflects on the Baytown Nature Center, a portion of land restored after oil drilling and water extraction caused the land to sink, making the executive Brownwood subdivision vulnerable to storm surge flooding with more frequent and violent storms caused by global warming. As Johnson catalogues the decades of destruction in disappearing land and animal habitat — all in a bid to fuel vehicles and serve an ongoing war effort with the petroleum-based building blocks of explosives and rubber — you have to wonder, is it really worth it? If you ask Johnson, the answer is no: “It’s normal to want to repair what’s broken, folly to repair what breaks us and keeps on breaking.” P.S. For a Louisiana perspective on fossil fuel, havoc, and the human cost of repeat devastation, read “Great American Wasteland” by Lauren Stroh. —KS

3. The College Wrestlers Who Took On a Grizzly Bear

Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | March 10, 2023 | 5,900 words

I have never seen a grizzly bear, but I have seen its tracks: Impossibly huge imprints squelched deep into the mud, tips of long claws cutting in even further, an echo of the power that passed before. Ryan Hockensmith’s piece made me all too aware of what it would be like to encounter that paw firsthand with his chilling, graphic description of a grizzly bear attack on junior college wrestlers Brady Lowry and Kendell Cummings. Although Hockensmith does not shy away from the horror, he leaves plenty of room for the other aspects of this story, whether the friendship behind Cummings’ act of bravery or an understanding of the bear’s actions. (As he sets out, she was likely just protecting her cubs, with the young men fairly blaming themselves for being “in its house.”) The piece details the months following the attack as well, becoming a testament to the boys’ resilience, Hockensmith tracing their road to recovery without overindulging in sentiment. I came out of this gripping feature with great respect for Cummings and Lowry. —CW

4. Crime of the Centuries

Greg Donahue | New York | February 13, 2023 | 5,508 words

The uber-wealthy never cease to amaze with their shamelessness. Case in point: Michael Steinhardt, billionaire investor, noted philanthropist, and, ‘twould appear, someone who for much of his life had exactly no problem buying stolen art. A lot of it. Steinhardt amassed one of the biggest private antiquities collections in the world, including an array of “fresh” objects, straight from the earth and unlikely to pass through above-board trade on their way to Steinhardt’s Upper East Side penthouse. “Steinhardt bought an object so fresh it had to be cleaned by the dealer in a hotel bathtub before being delivered to his apartment,” journalist Greg Donahue writes. The guy once kept a stone skull dating back to 7,000 B.C. on a side table in his living room — we know this because the object appears in real-estate listing photos saved by the Manhattan district attorney’s office that investigated Steinhardt. Wild. “As an investor, mastering risk had brought him wealth and prestige,” Donahue points out, placing Steinhardt’s shady dealings in the context of his wider existence. “Why should antiquities be different?” The piece also subtly raises the question of whether the antiquities market is beyond repair. Steinhardt might be among the worst offenders, but he’s also a symptom of the market’s problematic status quo, shaped as it is by privilege, greed, and colonialism. —SLD

5. ‘It Changed the World’: 50 Years On, the Story of Pong’s Bay Area Origins

Charles Russo | SFGATE | March 9, 2023 | 2,809 words

Charles Russo tracks the beginnings of the modern video game industry, which has its roots in a “scrappy Silicon Valley startup” now known as Atari. Its founders, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, had previously created the world’s first coin-operated video game, a futuristic yellow machine called Computer Space. Under Atari, they developed Pong, a simple yet engrossing arcade game that became an instant hit with the American public when it was released in March 1973 — and is now a beloved classic. This is a delightful dive into the video game industry’s “big-bang moment,” accompanied by fun images from the ’70s. My favorite is a photograph of a massive retro Atari arcade game at the Powell Street BART station in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by people with bell-bottoms. —CLR

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And the Audience Award Goes to…

The Haunted Life of Lisa Marie Presley

David Browne | Rolling Stone | March 10, 2023 | 8,295 words

In this piece, David Browne gives a respectful account of the frantic life of Lisa Marie Presley. Although there is some attempt to analyze how growing up in the spotlight affected her, this is more of a faithful narrative of her world and tragic death. —CW

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Crimes of the Centuries

All roads lead to Michael Steinhardt: That’s what Matthew Bogdanos of the Manhattan district attorney’s office learned when he started investigating the penetration of the black market for antiquities into the New York art scene. Steinhardt was a prominent New Yorker, a billionaire with his name on buildings and schools, one of the founders of the Birthright Israel program. He also had a massive collection of antiquities and didn’t care about the provenance of the ancient objects that filled his penthouse apartment:

Determined to be more than another dilettante, Steinhardt built up a library of reference books on antiquities and subscribed to archaeology magazines. He scoured catalogues from Christie’s and Sotheby’s and developed fast relationships with prominent dealers. “He struck me as someone who has a fine eye,” said Aboutaam, that is, an innate sense for which objects held particular significance. Before long, he was spending millions of dollars a year on bronze figurines and Roman mosaics, terracotta idols and stone skulls.

At the time, the antiquities trade was almost entirely unregulated. Fake artifacts were common, as were unscrupulous dealers who had developed numerous methods, including straw purchases and forged paperwork, to skirt patrimony laws designed to keep cultural property from being smuggled out of its country of origin. In 1973, John D. Cooney, a renowned curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, told the New York Times that “95 percent of the ancient art material in this country has been smuggled in.” Anybody who thought otherwise, he added, would have to be “naïve or not very bright.”

Steinhardt was unconcerned. “My overwhelming motivation in buying ancient art was their aesthetics,” he once said in a deposition. “And aesthetics had almost nothing to do with provenance.” He boldly admitted that he would buy pieces that were “fresh,” i.e., taken straight out of the ground, and said he was willing to accept the risk that those purchases might have broken the law. As an investor, mastering risk had brought him wealth and prestige. Why should antiquities be different?

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Beyond Borders

In 2016, The New York Times released a stunning short documentary called The Forger. Featuring shadow puppets, it told the story of a teenager who, during Germany’s occupation of France, manufactured fake identity papers en masse to save thousands of Jews. Later, he would use his unique skills to aid resistance fighters in Algeria, opponents of dictatorships in Greece and Spain, and anti-colonialist forces in Africa and Latin America. For decades he worked publicly as a photographer and kept the story of his forgeries secret from almost everyone he knew.

The man’s name was Adolfo Kaminsky, and he died earlier this year at the age of 97. Adam Schatz has written a remembrance of his remarkable, complicated life that is well worth your time:

As word of the Paris forger’s abilities spread in Resistance networks, the laboratory on the rue des Saints-Pères began to receive as many as five hundred orders a week, from Paris, the Southern Zone and London. On one occasion, Penguin told Kaminsky that a raid on Jewish homes in the Paris region was imminent, and they needed papers for three hundred Jewish children in three days. This meant nine hundred documents, and seemed impossible. But Kaminsky calculated that he could make thirty fake documents an hour and refused even to take a nap until they were done: if he slept for just an hour, he reckoned, thirty people would die. One of his colleagues had to remind him that ‘we need a forger, Adolfo, not another corpse.’ After the Liberation of Paris, he joined the French intelligence services, making papers for the Resistance members who were parachuting into Germany to track down concentration camps before the Nazis destroyed evidence of the extermination. ‘Everything a man keeps on himself, in cases of capture, can save his life,’ he said. ‘I had a week in which to invent for everyone a credible past and to create the proofs of it.’

Simply to offer to make papers for someone – Kaminsky paid house calls to many Jewish families, urging them to accept his help – was to put his life in a stranger’s hands. His warnings to Jews about the extermination camps were sometimes met with disbelief, even anger. In his memoir he remembers visiting Madame Drawda, a mother of four, who insisted she had no need of false documents since her family had been French for several generations and, in any case, all the talk of death camps was ‘Anglo-American propaganda’. Then she threatened to call the police. Over the course of the war, several of Kaminsky’s colleagues were murdered by the Gestapo, including Penguin, who was caught driving thirty children to safety in Switzerland. To avoid detection, Kaminsky learned to ‘transform myself into a shadow’.

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Into the Abyss: An Extreme Sports Reading List

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In 2012, Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner stepped from a tiny platform into empty air, 24 miles above the ground, an audience of 10 million people watching live via social media. Video of his ensuing jump, during which he became the first human to break the sound barrier before parachuting safely to earth, has been viewed hundreds of millions of times. It’s little wonder: The record-setting feat epitomizes the allure of that ever-growing category known as extreme sports. Athletic talent is one thing; exercising it at the very fringes of human capacity is quite another.

Every kid who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s remembers Evel Knievel in his star-spangled jumpsuit, thrilling us all with death-defying (and bone-crushing) stunts — but hundreds of years before Knievel revved up his motorbike, Hawaiian divers were leaping feet-first from massive crags in lele kawa, or cliff diving. Further back still, the medieval sport of jousting frequently resulted in injury or death despite its many safety-minded rules; in ancient Greece, athletes fought in the deadly mixed-martial-arts of pankration, a combat in which biting and gouging were the only two methods you couldn’t use to disable your opponent. From Minoan bull-leaping to the Algonquin ball game of pasuckuakohowog, in which hundreds of competitors risked life and limb on the same field, humans have long engaged in (and watched) the riskiest contests imaginable. 

In modern times, the appeal of extreme sports can be attributed to twin factors: social media allowing for easy transmission of eye-catching escapades to a global audience, and new technology making even the most challenging of pursuits considerably safer. Bungee jumping, for example, has its origins in the 1980s, when New Zealander Henry van Asch and a fellow Kiwi friend came up with the novel idea of hurling yourself off a bridge attached to an elastic rope. Back then, such an endeavor appealed to a small group of adrenaline-chasers willing to risk their lives for the thrill. Nowadays, bungee jumping is statistically as safe as skydiving and is widely viewed as a relatively low-risk activity for any pleasure seeker.  

Not everything is purely a matter of proper safety measures. Ultra-endurance races, combat sports, and other activities earn their “extreme” moniker through the sheer danger that can befall an untrained attempt. Yet, the popularity of extreme sports continues to rise. Whether that’s a reaction to COVID-induced inactivity, a rebellion against the mundanity of desk jobs, or something else entirely can’t be answered, but these articles go some way toward exploring what leads us as a species to seek out our own physical and mental limits.

More Like a Suicide Than a Sport (Ed Caesar, The New York Times Magazine, July 2013)

Hurling yourself from tall places is a high-risk, high-reward pursuit — physically, if not financially. BASE jumping differs from parachuting in that it involves launching not from an airplane, but from a static object. (BASE stands for the four officially sanctioned objects: Buildings, Antennae, Spans, and Earth itself.) Unlike the other activities on this list, it’s a sport with a decidedly illicit frisson. While there are official competitions held around the world and numerous places you can go to learn from the experts, BASE jumping still often hinges on illegal entry into skyscrapers or building sites. In 2009, Hervé le Gallou, the subject of this piece, employed subterfuge to enter the Burj Khalifa, then under construction, and threw himself from the 155th floor.

Dreams of flying date back to Greek mythology’s story of Icarus, and surely much further. Many BASE jumpers, particularly those who employ wingsuits designed to enable the wearer to glide for long distances, seem blind to that particular cautionary tale, with one in every 500 flights ending in death. We’ll never know exactly what went wrong with le Gallou’s flight that made him a numerator in that grim statistic. It’s a poignant tale, particularly when taking account of le Gallou’s former girlfriend’s desperate search for answers. Once more, we find ourselves cycling back to the question of why reasonable people do this.

Raoul jumped first, and then Woerth. Having completed their flights, they waited in the valley for the others. Le Gallou jumped third. His flight started well, according to Brennan and Frat. He banked high over the rocky outcrop and then dropped out of sight. The two Americans jumped fourth and fifth. When they landed in the valley, after flights of more than a minute, they asked about Le Gallou. Neither Raoul nor Woerth had seen him.

In Deep: The Dark and Dangerous World of Extreme Cavers (Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker, April 2014)

Of all the extreme sports, it’s caving, or spelunking (derived from the Greek word “spelaion,” or “cave”), that I find hardest to understand. To turn your back on the sun and worm your way into ever colder and darker places seems like a deliberate act of self-destruction. Squeezing through narrow rock fissures, wriggling on their bellies like a snake along passages less than a foot high: With every inch, cave divers propel themselves farther from safety. Part of the thrill surely comes from the danger. Many a caver has died from flash floods, or worse, wedged into an unseen drop or kink, their bodies never to be recovered. In such cases, the cave in question is transformed into a somber memorial — at least until the boards erected to prevent more tragedy are torn down by the next wave of fearless explorers.

This piece offers a gripping account of Polish caver Marcin Gala’s epic journey into the previously unmapped Chevé cave system, in which the author asserts that such places represent the last unknown earthbound areas left to humankind. Clearly, however, something else is at play. For tens of thousands of years, humans have been drawn to the depths. They came in search of refuge from predators and the elements, but clearly recognized these as sacred places, leaving behind markings of fierce beauty. Reading this article stirs something primal in the soul.

The truth is they had nowhere better to go. All the pleasant places had already been found. The sunlit glades and secluded coves, phosphorescent lagoons and susurrating groves had been mapped and surveyed, extolled in guidebooks and posted with Latin names. To find something truly new on the planet, something no human had ever seen, you had to go deep underground or underwater. They were doing both.

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How Becky Lynch Became ‘The Man’ (Molly Langmuir, Elle, April 2021)

To some, it’s a bizarre carnival show, a theater of the absurd, the appeal of which is hard to fathom. For millions of fans worldwide, though, WWE is the epitome of popular entertainment — a never-ending, real-life soap opera full of bombastic bravado and comic-book violence. WWE is fast, loud, brutal, and fake. The outcomes of fights are predetermined, but the fights themselves are semi-improvised, and require a level of strength, technical ability, and agility that you can’t help but appreciate. Accidents and injuries are far from uncommon, and the fitness and resilience needed are high. If the male side of pantomime wrestling is contentious, the world of women’s WWE is even more so. It’s an arena in which Irish superstar Becky Lynch, known by her moniker, “The Man,” has battled her way to the top.

Women’s WWE has a less-than-glorious past, with female fighters often relegated to a titillating sideshow, pressured to wear skimpy outfits and even perform simulated sex acts in pursuit of a pink butterfly belt. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising when you consider that the sport has historically been overseen by men, for men, with the majority of fans falling into the working-class, white male, category. Fighters like Lynch have fought hard to overcome this, and the landscape is changing, even if male viewers still make up two-thirds of the audience. These days, the WWE takes women’s wrestling much more seriously and appreciates its growing female fan base. This exciting peek into the world of female WWE makes for an illuminating read.

It was 3:30 a.m. by the time she made it back to the Brooklyn Marriott. Rollins had a bottle of her favorite tequila, Don Julio 1942, at the ready, and she had a drink. Some people thought the match’s ending hadn’t been sufficiently cathartic, but Lynch had done what she came to do. Twenty-one minutes into a fight that left Flair crumpled on the ground and Rousey’s legs covered in bruises, Lynch brought Rousey into a quick roll-up and the bell rang. A moment later, she hoisted the belts she’d won overhead, teary-eyed.

Secrets of the World’s Greatest Freediver (Daniel Riley, GQ, September 2021)

My first exposure to the world of freediving came, as I suspect is true for many others, through The Big Blue, French director Luc Besson’s 1988 film. It’s a beautiful, if eccentric, tale of fierce rivals whose chosen sport is deceptively simple: to see who can dive the deepest on a single breath, then return to the surface without, as the author of this piece memorably puts it, “passing out or dying.” Besson’s movie took inspiration from two legendary figures of the sport, Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca, both of whom retired from competition in good health. In fact, surprisingly, modern freediving is far less dangerous than cycling or running. Diving unaided down to depths of over 100 meters, however, is anything but safe and easy.

The thrilling piece presented here centers on 34-year-old Russian freediver Alexey Molchanov, a superman of the sport, whose holistic approach to diving makes for fascinating reading. Present here, too, is a tragedy more heartbreaking and incredible than any found in the movies. In 2015, Alexey’s mother, Natalia, herself a freediving pioneer and record holder, disappeared on her final dive — a demonstration to students — off the coast of Ibiza. Her body has never been recovered. Alexey, who was trained by his mother, continues to freedive competitively. For him, as was the case with Natalia, the act is far more than a simple sport; it is an exercise in meditation and a powerful tool for self-examination.

Once Alexey emerges, he has 15 seconds to meet the surface protocol. He must show the judges that he is okay (by flashing an okay sign). He must keep his airways above the water. He must flash the tag he grabbed at depth. And he must not pass out. He can cough up blood from a torn lung. He can produce pink foam or his lips can turn blue. But if he meets protocol, the dive is good.

Inside the Pain Cave (Mirin Fader, The Ringer, August 2022)

For most of us, and even for elite athletes, running a marathon seems like a daunting prospect. Not for Courtney Dauwalter. Wearing baggy basketball shorts, Dauwalter regularly tackles ultramarathons — courses four or even eight times the standard 26.2-mile distance. She seems happy and bubbly, but inaction makes her antsy, even if just for a day or two. Maybe this hints at the obsessive side of extreme sports, an adrenaline addiction that demands feeding. Inarguably, for Dauwalter, extreme running is an activity inseparable from her sense of self.

Her achievements are incredible. At 37, she’s won nearly everything there is to win, setting records in the process, and has competed all over the world. Most impressive, though, is the mental strength Dauwalter displays. This is a woman who doesn’t just crave challenges — she requires them. Reading this article provides a tantalizing glimpse into her psyche, and it’s not hard to understand the satisfaction, even tranquillity, that arises for her during and after a race. For Dauwalter, the “pain cave” is a hypnotic, familiar, and even reassuring world. It may be a place few of us would desire to visit, but it bears out the new spin on an old adage: There’s value in taking yourself out of your comfort zone.

Sometimes, to ensure that her brain is still working, she recites mantras or tells herself jokes or thinks of song lyrics, or dreams of the brownie toppings she’ll have on her ice cream — after she finishes her nachos — once the race is over. If she has been racing for more than a day, she occasionally forces herself to take a one-minute power nap off to the side of a trail. Sometimes, though, she is so amped she can’t power down, so she powers forward, even if that means, as unfathomable as it seems, nodding off while jogging.

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Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Carolyn Wells

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Police Killed His Son. Prosecutors Charged the Teen’s Friends With His Murder

Four years ago, Phoenix police officers shot 19-year-old Jacob Harris repeatedly, killing him. Yet, that horrific tragedy was just the first in a series that has unfolded since January 2019: Harris’ friends sit in prison, forced into a plea bargain for a death that another man caused. In a searing piece of investigative reporting, Meg O’Connor lays out the many infuriating aspects to Harris’ murder. Make no mistake: This is crucial, urgent journalism.

Law enforcement officials in Phoenix—including Kristopher Bertz, the officer who killed Jacob Harris—have justified the shooting by saying they feared Harris intended to shoot them. But records obtained by The Appeal show that multiple officials have made inconsistent or false statements about the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Even Bertz’s own accounts of that night have differed slightly. Aerial surveillance footage of the incident shows Harris running away. And a judge in the criminal case against Harris’s friends has stated unequivocally that Harris did not turn toward Bertz.

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Denied by AI: How Medicare Advantage Plans Use Algorithms to Cut Off Care for Seniors in Need

This STAT investigation at the intersection of artificial intelligence and medical care is frightening and infuriating. Casey Ross and Bob Herman have found that health insurance companies are relying on AI to make crucial decisions about patient care and coverage. One such company, NaviHealth, uses technology called nH Predict to generate algorithmic reports that assess a patient’s mobility and cognitive capacity, and predicts their need for care, their length of stay, and their discharge date. It’s a slick and shiny product, but as Ross and Herman report, it’s an unregulated algorithm “under the guise of scientific rigor” — its “suggestions” leading to the delay or denial of care for patients and ultimately favoring health insurance companies.

Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient’s treatment. The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations.

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How a ticket from Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls debut became priceless

Here is a lyrical feature about Mike Cole, a guy in Connecticut who turned out to have a one-of-a-kind item: the only ticket — not a stub, the whole ticket — known to survive from Michael Jordan’s debut with the Chicago Bulls. Jordan’s showing was inauspicious: He fell on his back on his first-ever dunk attempt in the NBA. But then he became one of the greatest, best-known athletes on earth, making the ticket Cole had tucked in a box of sports memorabilia worth a whole lot of money:

That it ever had any real value before last year was a different kind of conversation altogether, one about his father, old games and the reasons people hold on to anything at all. His dad was a D.C. lawyer; pretty much the only time they hung out was when they attended events together. Cole left home to attend Northwestern, and as a surprise, his dad had called a friend in the Bullets’ front office and had him leave Mike two tickets at will call to Jordan’s first game. All these years later, Cole hated the idea of letting any of his tickets go, of giving them to someone else who couldn’t understand and hadn’t actually been there.

“Every ticket can tell you a story,” Cole says. “I’m someone who’s about relationships and experiences. And that’s what tickets are to me.”

But then, that winter night in 2021, he saw the news story on TV: Ticket stub from Michael Jordan’s NBA debut sells for $264K. Cole’s ticket in the basement wasn’t a mere stub; it was unused, untorn, a complete ticket in good condition. A few weeks later, an armored truck came around the stop sign at the end of the street outside of his house, his neighbors and friends watching in stupefaction, his wife, Kristen, bundled against the cold so she could take a commemorative picture of Mike letting the ticket go to auction. Still, even as appraisers and investors hyperventilated at his discovery, the first ticket of any kind likely worth a million bucks; even as Cole was promised the moon from auction houses seeking his business and hyping its value; even as he stretched his arm to give the ticket to a man wearing a bulletproof vest and a Glock on his waistband bound for Heritage Auctions in Dallas, he wasn’t totally convinced parting with it was the right thing to do.

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