The Venture

Julia Hubbard and Kayla Goedinghaus were both attracted to a man named Rick. He made them feel happy, safe, comfortable—until the moment he didn’t. He started drugging them, beating them, and ultimately trafficking them. This gripping story of survival and sisterhood culminates in a bombshell Texas lawsuit that could take down a vast network of power brokers, including Trammell Crow Jr., one of the heirs of a U.S. real-estate tycoon:

By then, Julia was working as a nude dancer, making six figures a year at The Lodge, a high-end club themed like an opulent hunting cabin. Rick asked that she leave her cash wages and tips on the kitchen microwave each night, ostensibly for the household pot. He managed all their finances, including her personal debit card, and praised her earning power effusively. She could be a billionaire with that body of hers, he marveled. Maybe she should try to get pregnant by Trammell Crow Jr. Ha ha.

Julia ended up having Rick’s baby instead. A beautiful daughter, born in late 2010. A few weeks later, Rick urged Julia to get back to work—and to the party scene, where he made it increasingly clear he expected her to please their wealthy friend Trammell. Rick pressured her to perform sex acts with Trammell’s then-girlfriend as Trammell and Rick captured everything on video. He ordered her to find more and more women for the gatherings, bringing her to gas stations to cruise for prospects on some nights. Trammell had plenty of drugs and dedicated lingerie rooms at his homes with skimpy apparel and stilettos in a range of sizes for lady guests, according to the legal complaint. (In a statement to Cosmopolitan through his attorney, Trammell Crow Jr. denied all allegations of wrongdoing against him, as he has in court filings.)

To be clear, says Julia, these “jobs” were always unpaid, yet she got the sense that money was moving all around her. One time, at home, she glimpsed a letter Rick wrote asking Trammell for $25,000. To Julia, this entire world felt reckless and wrong. Never mind that she had three kids to raise.

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Tasting Indian Creek

In this deeply satisfying book excerpt from Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson explores her upbringing in Black Appalachia, in Indian Creek, Kentucky. Wilkinson recalls the unceasing labor of farm life and her Granny Christine’s love, served up on heaping plates of greens and in slices of jam cake.

But most of my memories of her are nestled in the growing, the cooking, the preservation of food.

Hoeing the garden. Stroking the long necks of the yellow squash. Stirring butter beans in a pot. Pouring hot bacon grease over new lettuce, onions, and cucumber. Canning runner beans.

Every morning of my childhood, my grandmother donned an apron and cooked breakfast. Slow. Precise. Deliberate. She equated food with love, and she cooked with both a fury and a quiet joy. She fried bacon, sausage, or country ham. She scrambled eggs. The eggs came from our chickens. She made biscuits from scratch. The lard was rendered from our pigs. The milk from our cows. She rolled out the dough and threw flour into the air like magic dust. She churned butter, made the preserves from pears, peaches, or blackberries that she had harvested herself.

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A Notorious Pitchfork Reviewer Was My Biggest Musical Influence

Conde Nast recently announced that it was folding beloved music publication Pitchfork into the operations of GQ. In this enjoyable essay for Defector, Dan McQuade reflects on his love for early Pitchfork reviews and the evolution of music criticism since the ’90s, when writing about music on the internet, and the internet itself, was very different.

Every week Wisdom would get a stack of CDs in the mail and was responsible for writing four reviews a week. Most are only a few paragraphs, but that’s understandable: He only had a day or two to listen to, think about, and review an album. He was not paid, but did make some money from selling the CDs to a record store after he was done with them. Again, this was a very ’90s thing to do.

Pitchfork was old, with roots that date back to what feels like the beginning of the usable internet. The site had been around since the 1990s. Al Isaacs closed Scoops, the wrestling site I wrote for, more than 25 years ago; Pitchfork continued, and a lot of people got to write about things they cared about there. Even if a lot of the site was about posturing, the jobs there seemed honest.

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Ripples of Hate

One morning in November 2023, when Ashish Prashar and his toddler son were at a playground in Brooklyn, they were attacked by a woman who threw her phone and coffee cup at them and repeatedly shouted at Prashar to “go away.” At the time, Prashar—who is Punjabi—wore a kaffiyeh around his neck. His 47-second video of their encounter went viral on the internet, sparking a chain of events: an online mob searching for the woman in the video, the doxxing of a wrongly identified person, and the real assailant eventually charged with hate crime charges. In this story for The Washington Post, Ruby Cramer spends time with Prashar and his wife after the incident, as they deeply consider questions about justice and mercy, as well as compassion. (Note: Story is for Washington Post subscribers.)

Someone had seen the woman at a grocery store in Brooklyn.

The person had taken photos. They’d called the precinct and waited at the store for the police. No police came. No arrest was made. Ash was also feeling impatient. He decided to post the photos to his Instagram. “It is disheartening to let you know that the NYPD didn’t send an officer to the scene to apprehend her,” he wrote, and more comments came streaming in.

But a few days later, he saw something that alarmed him. It was a new video about the case, from another stranger. This one named the woman and listed her home address.

“This is not what I wanted,” Ash said.

He called the detective. “Someone posted her address and her name online,” he said, speaking quickly. “I don’t know who this person is, but I wanted to call you to tell you straight away —”

The detective stopped him. “Okay, so, Ash,” he said, “I have her under arrest.”

“You have her under arrest?”

“I have her under arrest.”

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The Potent Pollution Of Noise

Related reads: You might also enjoy one of my picks on the rise of bird deaths from glass collision in bioGraphic and a reading list on the sounds of silence by Longreads contributor Chris Wheatley.

So many elements contribute to a city’s soundscape, from songbirds to rushing streams to the collective chatter across a neighborhood. Instead, human- and machine-generated sounds like car engines, leaf blowers, and amplified Bluetooth devices typically drown out these more natural and “pleasant” sounds in urban settings.

For Noema, Jeffrey Arlo Brown explores the research in urban soundscape planning, looking to cities like Berlin for solutions that promote healthier acoustic environments.

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Care, Out of the Closet

It’s no secret that the state of elder care in the United States is disastrous. Nursing homes have long been under-staffed and under-resourced; the private-equity boom—to say nothing of the pandemic—has only made things worse. Here, Ann Neumann links this crisis with the specific concerns of aging LGBTQI+ people:

A rather quiet ongoing legal conflict in California is set to determine whether it is a crime for nursing home staff to intentionally and continuously deadname or misgender a trans elder. The California legislature passed a law known as SB 219 in 2017 prohibiting such discrimination, but it has not taken effect due to a lawsuit claiming to protect nursing home employees’ “freedom of expression”—at the explicit expense of residents’ rights.

The challenge is the work of Taking Offense, a shadowy advocacy group which self-describes as an “unincorporated association which includes at least one California citizen and taxpayer who has paid taxes to the state within the last year.” That’s practically all we know about Taking Offense, as well as the name and contact information of their lawyer, David Llewellyn Jr., who has declined to speak with any journalist I could find. (Llewellyn also did not return my call.)

With SB 219, the intent of the California legislature was to make it unlawful for long-term care staff to “willfully and repeatedly” refer to residents by names and pronouns they don’t identify with, and to assign, reassign, or refuse to assign rooms to transgender residents that don’t match their gender identity. Repeatedly calling a trans woman “Mr.,” for instance, would be a misdemeanor, and it would be illegal to put her in a room with men, with the possible penalty of 180 days in jail and a $2,500 fine. If implemented, the bill would strengthen and qualify existing nondiscrimination laws in the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.

The Taking Offense challenge is a “get off my lawn” screed and a willful misunderstanding of LGBTQ rights; it invites overzealous nursing home staff to pass judgement on their residents’ sense of self. The contempt in the group’s legal filing practically drips off the page. It complains a lot, at length, and randomly. One section declares that pronoun is not clearly defined, then goes on to list “different declensions” like “zie, zim, zir, zis, zieself.” The intention is to make the current moment’s search for how best to protect sex and gender minorities to be silly, a child’s game beneath the state court and state law, and certainly beneath the righteous, anonymous people behind Taking Offense.

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Fentanyl: The Portrait of a Mass Murderer

In this ambitious project, El País shows how fentanyl has become a global crisis, involving criminal syndicates in Wuhan and Sinaloa, as well as addicts in the streets of Philadelphia and San Francisco; and stretching from a mayor’s office in Manzanillo, Mexico, to the halls of power in Washington, D.C. El País offers vignettes at what it describes as the various “stops” along fentanyl’s path:

Life—or what’s left of it—stops on Kensington Avenue every 10 minutes or so. It happens when the subway hums along the elevated tracks, a blue steel structure that flies over this Philadelphia street. The roar doesn’t allow you to think… but, at least for that moment, the problems at ground zero of the fentanyl crisis in the United States are put on hold.

Afterward, the addicts and the volunteers who help them, the dealers and the police, the YouTubers and the tourists attracted by the news, the armed merchants and the residents of this gigantic open-air drug market will return to the free-for-all fight under the tracks. Hundreds of people who are addicted to the powerful opioid—which is 50 times stronger than heroin—live and die on these streets. Some, like Daniel—who lost all his toes due to the cold—have been wandering around them for years. Others don’t make it past their first month here.

The fate of all of them begins about 2,500 miles away, next to a different set of train tracks: those that cross Culiacán, in the heart of Mexican drug trafficking territory. There, a fentanyl cook—who calls himself Miguel—carries out macabre experiments on a handful of consumers, who test the merchandise before it’s shipped off to the United States. They start with one dose: one third pure and the rest, cut. The “human guinea pigs” inject it in front of him. If they say, “No, it didn’t rock me, it didn’t put me to sleep, add more,” the percentage increases. Miguel assures EL PAÍS that no one has ever died from this process.

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