“None of this is normal, yet we treat it as if it is,” wrote Sam Keck Scott in his Longreads piece on the disappearing tiger salamander population in California’s Sonoma County. “And it isn’t just Northern California that’s changed — the entire planet has. All the way down to the fish in the sea.”
In her reading list “Low Country, High Water,” Spencer George ponders another crisis — water rise and a drastically changing coastline in the American South. “How do you cope with that reality? How do you love a place that is sinking?” she asks. “I spent my entire life waiting to leave the South, thinking I would only find happiness away from here, but now that it is disappearing I find I cannot look away. I am desperate to find ways to archive my home. To preserve it.”
Gathering perspectives that range from bleak to hopeful, the writing we’ve published and recommended on the climate crisis, wildlife conservation, and other topics is at once urgent yet reflective. This week, in time for Earth Day on April 22, we encourage you to dive into our favorite Longreads essays, reported features, and reading lists, as well as favorites the editors have selected from across the web.
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I came away from this essay by Merritt Tierce feeling … many things. A bit of confusion. Some unease. Unexpected mental fatigue. Tierce makes interesting observations about her and our Very Online lives, and the relationships we have with our phones, the internet, and one another.
The feeling of the internet has become such a feeling, a feeling of continuous vulnerability, and you can’t turn it off, it never ends. Even if my phone is off, is elsewhere, even if my computer is in a different country, the internet is there wherever I am, because it’s in me now. I’m talking about the lingering psychic, psychological, and physiological connection that I can no longer shut off, that has changed my mind. It manifests as a minor but noticeable discomfort, a permanent buzzing in my mind, like a leaf blower that never moves on down the street. Or consider the feeling of having your mouth stuck wide open at the dentist’s, or your breast smashed by the mammographer, or your legs spread for whatever consensually chosen activity you’d like to imagine; you may want what’s happening, you may have voluntarily paid for it or requested it, for reasons that fall along a spectrum from necessity to deep desire, but part of your original want includes the assumption that the experience will end, you will be able to relax your jaw and have your boob back and curl up into a ball.
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John D. Lawrence’s movie-star good looks were wasted on playing extras in films such as 1939’s Of Mice and Men. Did his desire for fame lead him to create a quest for fortune in the “The Americana Treasure Map,” a guide to several hidden troves located across the Western Hemisphere? Daniel N. Miller goes on a hunt for the man behind the map.
Maybe Lawrence just loved mysteries and learned how to hone his fictions in Hollywood. Or maybe he really knew something about treasure. Either way, visiting Mt. Kokoweef hadn’t settled the matter.
Still, Lawrence had mapped 62 other locations scattered across the Americas that were potentially hiding vast riches.
But my hunt ended here.
Because there was a chance that knowing more of John D. Lawrence’s story might diminish it.
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This article, from the forthcoming The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, captures just how heartfelt Monica Pott’s exploration into small-town America is. By focusing on the women she grew up with, a story that is the same across many places in America becomes deeply personal — and thus resonates.
The first time Vanessa had sex, she asked her boyfriend to stop, and he didn’t. Later, with other boys, Vanessa sometimes felt like she couldn’t say no to their advances, because she’d already lost her virginity. Only many years later did Vanessa recognize some of these incidents as sexual assaults, she told me when I visited her in 2017. She didn’t blame the boys, necessarily; they were just doing what everyone expected them to do, she felt. But her reputation suffered.
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Ian Hogarth is an investor in AI startups in Europe and the U.S. and the co-author of the annual State of AI Report. In an essay for Financial Times, he makes a case for colleagues and companies in the AI space to slow down the global race toward AGI, or artificial general intelligence. “God-like AI could be a force beyond our control or understanding, and one that could usher in the obsolescence or destruction of the human race,” he writes early on in the piece. Hogarth urges companies to invest more in AI alignment research (the area focused on mitigating existential risk), to collaborate rather than compete, to focus on safety, and to be open to some kind of governmental oversight. Here, Hogarth combines expertise and knowledge with a frank and unexpectedly personal perspective. There are a lot of pieces floating about on AI, but don’t miss this one. It’s insightful — but also terrifying.
Those of us who are concerned see two paths to disaster. One harms specific groups of people and is already doing so. The other could rapidly affect all life on Earth.
The latter scenario was explored at length by Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. In a 2021 Reith lecture, he gave the example of the UN asking an AGI to help deacidify the oceans. The UN would know the risk of poorly specified objectives, so it would require by-products to be non-toxic and not harm fish. In response, the AI system comes up with a self-multiplying catalyst that achieves all stated aims. But the ensuing chemical reaction uses a quarter of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. “We all die slowly and painfully,” Russell concluded. “If we put the wrong objective into a superintelligent machine, we create a conflict that we are bound to lose.”
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
In today’s edition, our editors recommend:
A glimpse into a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama, where volunteers with different ideologies come together.
A takedown of a phony celebrity criminal profiler and co-founder of an elite crime-solving club.
A story about a Croatian gambler who exploits the flaws in roulette wheels and whose methods have changed the game.
A read on the feral horses roaming around decommissioned mines in Appalachia, and the people who are caring for them.
A profile of the man behind the @dril Twitter account — “the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting” — on emerging from anonymity, Twitter, art and comedy, and creating things on the internet.
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein | Lux | March 3, 2023 | 3,498 words
I hate the South, and I love it. This internal conflict is my inheritance. My roots in the region run deep and strong, but I have no illusions about who and what fed them. “We bury the people we do not care about in the South,” Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote for The New York Times. “It is where we have put migrants and poor people and sick people.” As Cottom rightly notes, however, “Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope.” Needless to say, I’m forever grappling with the South and its sins, which lately include two high-profile mass shootings, threats to reproductive rights, two Black men’s ejection from the Tennessee legislature, and Florida circling the policy drain even more than usual. What a joy, then, to read a story with a different vision of the South. Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein introduces readers to Zac Henson and his band of leftist rednecks who run a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama. “The organizers,” Kaiser-Schatzlein writes, “believe that people in the South, conservatives especially, just need to be given the chance to operate in institutions that harness their most altruistic, communal, and caring tendencies — or, as Henson describes it, ‘positive reinforcement to not be fascist.’” I too want to believe this. Here’s to hope. —SD
David Gauvey Herbert | New York Magazine | April 11, 2023 | 7,018 words
David Garvey Herbert tells the wild story of Richard Walter, a low-paid staff psychologist at a Michigan prison who, in the ’80s, invented a more glamorous persona: genius criminal profiler. Walter faked his qualifications and positioned himself for decades as an eccentric, sought-after expert on the criminal mind, testifying in murder trials and enjoying the true-crime TV spotlight. “He so fully inhabited the role of celebrated criminal profiler he appeared to forget he was pulling a con at all,” writes Herbert. But how did this Sherlock Holmes wannabe fool people for so long? How can such a narcissistic impostor embed themself in America’s criminal justice system? I read this from start to finish, then went back to the beginning to dive in again. The first read was engrossing. The second? Infuriating. —CLR
Kit Chellel | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 6, 2023 | 6,516 words
You can beat roulette: A game designed to be pure random chaos has a flaw. That is fascinating, but throw in London’s Ritz Club, Scotland Yard, and a skilled Croatian, and you’ve got a plot worthy of any heist film. But did Tosa — the Croatian who won tens of thousands from the Ritz and other casinos — even commit a crime? That is what Kit Chellel sets out to answer in this brilliant piece. He spends six months investigating the world of professional roulette players, and this careful research is evident. We learn about the tiny computers that can beat roulette tables, though no devices were ever found on Tosa. We learn that, over time, wheels develop flaws that can turn into predictable patterns: Was that how he did it? Casinos changed their wheels just in case. Miraculously, Chellel tracks down the elusive Tosa to ask him in person, and Tosa is adamant he trained his mind to beat roulette. Nothing dodgy to see here! But would he say if he had cheated? Sometimes not reaching a clear conclusion can leave a bad taste, but not in this instance. I was delighted that Tosa remains an enigma — and is still planning secret international gambling trips. I bet he wins. —CW
Ashley Stimpson | The Sunday Long Read | April 9, 2023 | 5,236 words
It’s Ashley Stimpson’s keen eye that pulls you into her stories, original detail by original detail. In this feature that examines feral horse management in the U.S., you’ll meet Tinia Creamer, who runs Heart of Phoenix equine rescue: “At 40 years old, Creamer has a mane of dark hair, glassy blue eyes, and a full-throated Appalachian accent that stretches her vowels like taffy,” writes Stimpson. “She knows it sounds made up but swears it’s true: her first word was horsey.” You need not have an affinity for feral horses to go wild for this piece. Stimpson’s writing has that magical ability to pique your interest and make you care about a subject you may know nothing about: “Renegade was the first horse I met,” she writes. “The color of black coffee, his mane was so choked with burrs that it was twisted into green dreadlocks. I arrived unarmed with snacks, but he frisked me anyway – my fingers, my phone, my notebook, my hair – with a nose soft like flower petals.” If you’d like to read more by Stimpson, check out “Shades of Grey,” her Longreads feature about Florida greyhound racing. —KS
Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words
Despite being on Twitter for almost 15 years — a number that’s shameful for multiple reasons — I’ve never actually followed the shitposter extraordinaire known as Dril. I didn’t need to. His absurdism was retweeted into my feed nearly every day. Sometimes I’d laugh, sometimes I’d shake my head, but over time two things became clear. The first was that whoever was behind the blurry Jack Nicholson photo had created a wholly unique persona. The second was that this persona somehow distilled Twitter’s worst impulses into a single parodic voice: bombastic, utterly un-self-aware, and so in thrall to the Dunning-Kruger effect that you couldn’t help but marvel. Dril, in one anonymous form or another, has been written about before, but he’s never been truly profiled; that first falls to Nate Rogers, who managed both to score some face time with him and to use that as the foundation for a long, well-reported piece about the man and his legacy. Even if you’ve never heard of Dril (in which case I commend you, again for multiple reasons), Rogers’ piece functions as an incisive assessment of how we think about art and creativity, and perhaps even why so many of us have yet to fully divorce that godforsaken bird site. When a character as good as Dril exists, you don’t need the other 279. —PR
Grazie Sophia Christie | Tablet | February 15, 2023 | 3,359 words
You see it everywhere. On the Kardashian sisters, supermodels Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, influencers, and celebrities. It’s the “perfect” face of an ethnically ambiguous woman, composed of a chiseled nose, filled lips, a Botoxed forehead, and other cosmetic work. For Tablet, Grazie Sophia Christie examines our culture’s obsession with Instagram Face; the path toward “doomed, globalized sameness” in which women are just copies of one another; and how wealthy women can easily reverse what they’ve done to their face, discarding enhancements like just another fashion trend. —CLR
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Lacey Rose’s piece on the rapper Dave Burd (Lil Dicky) manages to exude the same tone as Burd’s comedy series, Dave. It’s funny and fast. Burd’s blinding confidence is made evident from the first sentence, and although at times Rose at times seems bemused by this larger-than-life character, she still creates a very entertaining profile.
Jeff Schaffer, who’d written on Seinfeld, already had his hands full showrunning Curb Your Enthusiasm when a friend asked that he take a meeting with Lil Dicky. He didn’t really have the bandwidth for a second TV show, but he was intrigued enough to say yes. Even in early 2017, Schaffer knew exactly who Lil Dicky was. “Back then, the internet was, like, 70 percent porn, 10 percent clickbait and 20 percent Lil Dicky videos,” he jokes, recounting how, at that first meeting, Burd told him he was going to be the biggest entertainer in the history of entertainment. “And I’m looking at this guy, and he looks like a piece of broccoli had a bar mitzvah, and I’m like, ‘This is hilarious, it’s like cartoon-level delusion.’ And then I start thinking, like, ‘What a great engine for a TV show, because what if he’s right?’ ”
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