The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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The horrific trafficking of intimate partners. An homage to Pitchfork. Memories of a childhood spent in a Kentucky kitchen. Risking lives for extreme skiing. And why we need to calm down about UFOs.

1. The Venture

Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan | Cosmopolitan | January 30, 2024 | 3,899 words

When someone first suggested that her boyfriend might be trafficking her, Kayla Goedinghaus was incredulous. She was being abused—beaten, drugged, denied money—but trafficked? In time, as Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan detail in this gripping story, Goedinghaus came to understand the truth about her situation, which was far from unusual. “As of 2020, an estimated 39 percent of sex-trafficking victims in this country were brought into it by intimate partners,” Johnston and Quinlan write. “Through physical force, manipulation, or fraud, those victims are compelled to engage in sex acts for the trafficker’s benefit. That could mean posing for nudes he secretly sells to cover his gambling debts or sleeping with random men off the street so he can score drugs or letting the landlord watch sex acts through the bedroom window as a form of rent payment.” In Goedinghaus’s case, her boyfriend, Rick, was peddling her as a commodity among his friends, who allegedly included powerful men such as Trammell Crow Jr., an heir to a massive real-estate fortune (and brother to Harlan Crow, the conservative donor who’s been bankrolling Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lifestyle for years). This piece, then, serves as a corrective to widespread assumptions about trafficking, including who perpetrates it and who is hurt by it. Narratively speaking, the story’s crux is an unlikely friendship. Before Goedinghaus, Rick trafficked his ex-wife, Julia Hubbard, and the two women encountering each other changed everything—indeed, it made this feature possible. “Setting eyes on each other for the first time,” Johnston and Quinlan write, “Julia and Kayla were zapped with an eerie sense of mutual recognition, as though they were standing on opposite sides of a looking glass: Kayla as the new Julia and Julia as the former Kayla. They even looked alike.” —SD

2. A Notorious Pitchfork Reviewer Was My Biggest Musical Influence

Dan McQuade | Defector | January 31, 2024 | 2,944 words

I’ve always loved music. I grew up recording music videos set to New Edition, Salt-N-Pepa, and Bel Biv Devoe on VHS with my cousins, and listening to ’80s hip-hop in the tiny back seat of my older brother’s Porsche 914 convertible while he and a friend “cruised for babes.” Bay Area radio stations LIVE 105 and KOME taught me about grunge and alternative rock, and my first underground rave opened the door to a whole new world. In the ’90s, I wasn’t yet reading about music online, still relying on my local Tower Records to discover it: as a customer, combing through new releases and reading issues of Urb and NME, and later as an employee, obsessively organizing its modest “Dance/Electronica” selection and getting recommendations from my coworkers. But I don’t know much about music; I have no formal music education (except for a brief dalliance with the violin) and have certainly never felt confident enough to write about it. So I was drawn to Dan McQuade’s thoughts on Pitchfork, the music publication Condé Nast announced would be folded into GQ. Right at the start, McQuade states that he, too, doesn’t know much about music. But Pitchfork, especially in its early years, helped to fill in the gaps. His writing resonates with me: it’s personal, funny but not snarky, and comes from the heart. He reflects on how Pitchfork’s reviews had influenced him, particularly those of music critic James P. Wisdom. How the site had been a champion of electronic music since the ’90s. And how, in a very ’00s bloggy way, it was an outlet for people to review music but also to express themselves in the process, freely and irreverently, about things they cared about. “Pitchfork not only gave me bands to listen to, but told me how I might think about them,” he writes. Wisdom also puts it nicely, saying that “contextualizing and humanizing how we find and explore music is valuable.” A lovely essay and stroll down memory lane, with links to fun archived reviews. (And +1 for the playlist inspiration: I now have Moby on rotation nonstop.) —CLR

3. Tasting Indian Creek

Crystal Wilkinson | Oxford American | January 23, 2024 | 3,409 words

In this wonderful book excerpt from Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson serves up memories of her childhood in Black Appalachia, spent with Granny Christine in their Kentucky kitchen. This piece is more than mere memoir; Wilkinson reflects on roots that run deep and close, the hefty domestic contribution women make, and preservation as a labor of love. For Wilkinson, recipes transcend ingredients and instructions to prepare a dish. They’re stories imbued with wisdom and experience handed down and across generations from ancestors that remain present in spirit, supervising each new iteration of Granny’s jam cake. “In the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen, spirits shimmered near the bucket of well water, hovered over the olive refrigerator, floated above the flour sifter, and glided around the coal-burning stove,” she writes. Granny Christine’s cake recipe—written in “her perfect cursive” and reproduced in full in the piece—is an incantation that conjures home for Wilkinson: “3 sticks of butter, 2 cups sugar, 2 cups flour, 6 eggs …” Take the time to whisper that recipe to yourself and feel full, emotionally. Needless to say this piece was deeply satisfying; I savored it from beginning to end. —KS

4. Precipice of Fear: the Freerider Who Took Skiing to its Limits

The Guardian | Simon Akam | January 30, 2024 | 5,932 words

I love to ski. Well, I love to ski on a nice clear day, on a nice clear run. Anything too steep or too icy, and I am edging down that slope inch by inch, brow deeply furrowed, sweat beading, pole dragging behind me (as if that would stop me). I am in awe of people like Jérémie Heitz, who can sweep down an impossible cliff face with such grace it becomes poetry, poles firmly up front and part of a fluid, gliding movement. Heitz’s specialty is at the extreme end of professional freeriding—his descents are so steep the gradient is twice that of some “expert” ski resort terrain. Simon Akam describes these icy peaks so vividly I could feel my heart pounding in my mouth as “Heitz slid sideways down the first few meters, made a turn, and then cut down onto the highest grey smear of ice.” He is committed to his reporting—even skiing with Heitz and completing some terrifying runs himself. But this piece is more than a litany of daredevil feats: it’s a reflection on the nature of extreme sports and the sponsors who support them. Heitz has lost 20 friends—normal in this world. Can that ever be worth it? —CW

5. How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs

Nicholson Baker | New York | January 31, 2024 | 6,751 words

Close Encounters of the Third Kind filled me with wonder as a kid, and an ’80s childhood provided no shortage of material to keep that wonder alive: Flight of the Navigator; The Last Starfighter; E.T. But despite being primed to believe, I’ve never been able to fully accept any of the countless UFO sightings and reports that have emerged over the decades. I never knew why, only that it all felt … vague. And then I read Nicholson Baker’s lively, informed takedown in New York. Oh, I thought. Duh. Regardless of where you land on the believer spectrum, there’s a lot to like here. (Well, maybe not for the full-throated evangelists like Avi Loeb, who claims skeptics and critics “behave like terrorists.”) Baker’s stance is clear from the get go, but his fiction career serves him well, leavening his skepticism with crackling phrases like “wiggy-sounding.” He’s dismissing, but not dismissive, which can be a tough needle to thread. He reports generously, not simply combing through archives but connecting with many of today’s ufology luminaries. None of that, though, shakes his well-grounded thesis: our entire flying-saucer mythology is derived from Cold War weapons research, carried out via high-tech balloons. Sure, I’ll still wonder about what might be out there—hell, it’s logically impossible to think we’re the only sentient lifeforms around—but until there’s something a little more undeniable, I’ll be living on Baker Street. —PR

Audience Award

The piece our readers loved the most this week is …

The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage

Leslie Jamison | The New Yorker | January 15, 2024 | 7,126 words

In this excerpt of her forthcoming book, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison recounts the early months of her daughter’s life. During that period, Jamison juggled a book tour, a teaching career, and the demands of a newborn—amid the growing realization that she wanted to leave her marriage. —KS

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How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs

Attention, ufologists: Nicholson Baker regrets to inform you that your entire movement is easily debunked by investigating Cold War history. At least he eviscerates your extraterrestrial dreams with good cheer and good writing. And he suggests that you bring some proof beyond grainy footage and anonymous sources.

I never got into UFOs. I loved science fiction as a kid, enjoyed buglike space monsters as much as the next person, and in 1967 I read Bill Adler’s book Letters to the Air Force on UFOs with fascination and delight, but the actual documentary evidence on offer has always seemed poor. And the abduction stories, which reached a peak in the late ’80s, were just nuts. Not until recently, though, when I worked on a book about secret Cold War weapons research, did I begin to understand how the saucer madness got started.

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Precipice of Fear: the Freerider Who Took Skiing to its Limits

At its crux, this is a piece about whether a sport is worth dying for. Simon Akam is analytical in his approach to this question, refraining from sensationalism and delivering a thoughtful essay, peppered with thrilling adventures.

In its early days, steep skiing’s drama had come from the fact that these slopes could be skied at all. Now Heitz sought to bring speed – up to 75mph (120km/h) – and style to a sport that once impressed through sheer audacity. The result was something remarkable – and even riskier than before. “That style of skiing is incredibly dangerous,” says Dave Searle, a British mountain guide based in Chamonix. “You can keep pushing the limits of it until you either stop pushing the limits, or you die. That’s the two things really.”

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How Far Can Running Take You After a Decade of Addiction?

For 10 years, Mitch Ammons’s sole focus was using drugs to avoid withdrawal. He hadn’t done a run since high school. Now, at age 34—after a pivotal second chance offered in his sixth stint at rehab in 2015—Ammons is not only clean, his superhuman ability to withstand pain has earned him a chance at the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials.

Mitch Ammons knows his story could have ended like the stories of so many buddies from his darkest years—with an obituary. Instead, the longtime addict changed course in a manner that is, without hyperbole, beyond belief.

It’s tough to fully grasp the scale of this turnaround until you see Ammons run—to see him metronomically cruise 4:50 miles for more than an hour or to watch him push himself to the brink of consciousness in an interval session at sunrise. Then you can absorb the way he embraces suffering—relishing the revelation of what his body can do while immersing himself in pain that must feel like a cosmic body rub compared to waking up every morning in opiate withdrawal.

Ammons is comfortable talking plainly about his transformation and all the ways running has made his life better, but the truth is he’s still learning about it. “I have said in previous interviews that running doesn’t keep me sober, but I have since changed my mind,” he says. “I’m addicted to the miles and the workouts. I mean, I love it so much.”

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Miracle in the Jungle

William Ralston | The Atavist Magazine |January 2024 | 1,513 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 147, “Mayday.”

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1.

Hernando Murcia was the kind of pilot who flew routes others wouldn’t dare. Murcia worked for Avianline Charters, one of the air taxi companies that shuttle people across Colombia’s Amazon region, a pristine expanse of rainforest roughly the size of California. The forest is dark, dense, and often treacherous. There are no roads, much less commercial airports. The meandering rivers have strong currents and teem with predators, including piranhas and anacondas. Jaguars prowl the banks.

Violent rebel groups and drug smugglers are known to hide out in the region. Otherwise it’s sparsely populated. The people who do call the Amazon home are mostly members of indigenous tribes, and they rely on privately chartered flights to reach the outside world.

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To take these flights is often to risk death. Landing strips used by Avianline and other companies are no more than makeshift clearings of dirt and gravel amid thick vegetation; many of the sites fail to meet the safety standards of Colombia’s Civil Aviation Authority. Thunderstorms, heavy rainfall, and strong winds are frequent. Because Colombia does not set an age limit for aircraft, the small propeller planes that fly the Amazon’s routes are often so old that they don’t have autopilot or other modern safety features. Pilots must be alert to rattles and to odors that don’t seem right. To navigate, they must rely on instinct shaped by experience. The skies over the rainforest are plagued with radio blind spots, requiring pilots to travel long distances without any contact with the ground.

None of this bothered Murcia. The 55-year-old had been piloting small airplanes in Colombia for more than 30 years, working for Avianline since 2021. He was willing to fly through torrential rain, even though it could crash a prop plane in a heartbeat. Once, in 2017, the aircraft he was flying experienced engine failure, and he managed to make an emergency landing on an unfinished road, saving the lives of his passengers.

On April 30, 2023, Murcia agreed to pilot a flight from the southern Amazon town of Araracuara to San José del Guaviare, a population center more than 200 miles to the north that is connected to Colombia’s road network. His aircraft would be a blue and white Cessna 206 with the registration number HK2803. The plane was manufactured in 1982, but it had only been operating in Colombia since 2019. Before that it accumulated thousands of flight hours in the United States. In 2021, prior to being purchased by Avianline, HK2803 had crashed. No one on board was seriously injured, but damage to the propeller, engine, and a wing required extensive repairs before the plane could be put back in service.

Murcia was late to arrive in Araracuara because a storm delayed his incoming flight, so the HK2803 trip was moved to the next morning, and Murcia stayed in town overnight. Before going to bed he called his wife, Olga Vizcaino, to tell her that he loved her. He asked her to give their daughters a hug for him. Early the following day, Murcia sucked down some coffee, scrambled eggs, and plantains, then made his way to the Cessna to carry out his usual preflight inspection.

HK2803 was supposed to be carrying representatives from a company called Yauto, a broker of carbon credits between indigenous populations and multinational firms. But sometime before takeoff, members of the Colombian military stationed in Araracuara approached Murcia. They told him that there was a change of plans: He needed to evacuate an indigenous family who feared that a local rebel group wanted them dead.

As the family hurried into the rear of the Cessna’s cabin, a local indigenous leader named Hermán Mendoza clambered up front next to Murcia; he said that he was there to ensure the other passengers arrived at their destination safely. Murcia added everyone’s names to the flight manifest, radioed the information to Colombian air traffic control, then revved the plane’s engine.

At first the Cessna wouldn’t budge. The recent downpour had turned Araracuara’s landing strip into mud, and the plane’s wheels were mired. As Murcia fought to free the aircraft, one of its wheels hit a divot, tilting the plane so much that the propeller bumped the ground. Finally, just before 7 a.m. on May 1, he managed to take off.

The skies were blue that day, and there was a light wind. For around half an hour all was well. But as the Cessna approached Caquetá, a Colombian department that contains one of the densest, wettest, most remote corners of the Amazon, something went wrong. Over his radio, Murcia declared engine failure.

“Mayday, mayday, 2803,” he said. “My engine is idling. I’m going to look for a field.”

Air traffic control pointed him toward nearby landing strips and reported the emergency to the Colombian Air Force, but then the Cessna’s radio signal cut out. Fifteen minutes later it returned, and Murcia reported that the engine was working again. But not for long: Eight minutes later, Murcia was back on the radio.

“Mayday, mayday, 2803, 2803, my engine failed again,” he said.

The Cessna was no longer flying—it was gliding. Murcia needed an opening in the landscape below him, somewhere he could set the plane down and search and rescue could find it. But in the Amazon, such openings are exceedingly rare. In emergencies some pilots aim for a bushy tree; if an aircraft’s velocity is sufficiently reduced and its nose remains lifted on impact, the foliage can sometimes cradle a plane until help arrives.

Instead, Murcia decided to shoot for water. “I’m going to look for a river,” he said. “Here I have a river on the right.” Air traffic control asked him to confirm his location. “One hundred and three miles outside of San José,” Murcia responded. “I am going to hit water.”

These were the last words air traffic control heard from Murcia. Moments later, radar recorded the Cessna taking a sharp right turn. Then, around 7:50 a.m., it disappeared.

Neither Avianline nor the air force saw any sign of the crash: no debris, no smoke, no conspicuous swath cut through the rainforest’s canopy. All they saw was a seemingly endless sea of green.

Word of the Cessna’s disappearance spread quickly. In Bogotá, the Search and Rescue Service of the Colombian Civil Aviation Authority reviewed the plane’s last known coordinates and calculated the maximum distance it could have glided before crashing. This provided a broad area of interest for a recovery mission.

By 8:15 a.m., authorities had picked up a distress signal from the plane’s emergency locator transmitter, a device triggered by impact from a crash. The ELT would also broadcast approximate GPS data every 12 hours until its battery died, which would happen after two days. The Cessna appeared to be somewhere in an area of around 1.5 square miles, near a small community called Cachiporro along the Apaporis River. Maybe that was where Murcia had attempted his water landing.

When a plane crashes in Colombia, the responsibility for finding it normally lies with the Civil Aviation Authority, which will arrange for both the military and the air force to dispatch recovery teams. But the vast wilderness and unique dangers of the Amazon meant that it was initially deemed too risky to send anyone on foot. Only the air force was deployed, and it sent surveillance planes over the jungle near Cachiporro, hoping to spot the wreckage or possibly survivors.

There was reason for hope. People had survived crashes in the Amazon before, in Colombia and elsewhere. Most famously, in 1971, a 17-year-old named Juliane Koepcke fell from an altitude of more than 10,000 feet after lightning struck LANSA flight 508. She walked alone for 11 days in the Peruvian jungle before being rescued.

As the Colombian air force got to work, Freddy Ladino began organizing his own search for HK2803. Ladino, 40, with a shaved head and pearly white teeth, is the founder of Avianline. By 10:30 a.m. the day of the crash, the company had sent up several of its other planes to look for HK2803. But neither Avianline nor the air force saw any sign of the crash: no debris, no smoke, no conspicuous swath cut through the rainforest’s canopy. All they saw was a seemingly endless sea of green. Searchers would have to take another approach, and fast.

As Colombian authorities and Avianline regrouped, the families of the passengers aboard HK2803 received word that their loved ones were missing. Murcia’s wife was at home with her daughters when she got the call. She prayed that her husband was alive and decided to keep the television turned off. The crash was already making headlines, and she didn’t want to get caught up in speculation.

The last-minute change to the HK2803 manifest supercharged the media’s interest in the crash. The indigenous family on the flight included a woman named Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia (34) and her four young children: daughters Lesly (13), Soleiny (9), and Cristin (11 months), and son Tien (4). Within hours of the Cessna vanishing, the fate of Magdalena and her children became an obsession in Colombia. International interest followed. In the weeks to come there would be breathless news segments, finger-pointing, misinformation, and dashed hopes. It would be 40 days until the world had answers.

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How Connie Walker Got Us Listening

Indigenous journalist Connie Walker won a Peabody Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Stolen, a podcast about the abuse her father suffered as a boy attending St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. Despite a successful career shedding light on Indigenous issues, it’s still an uphill battle to convince decision makers that Indigenous stories are well worth telling.

True crime podcasts typically aim to solve a mystery by finding an ending, by uncovering new evidence or pointing a finger at the likely killer, like a campfire story meant to thrill and frighten. Indigenous stories, too, are often reduced to their tragic endings: a brutal death, a haunting absence. But Walker goes in the other direction, by showing who a person was before they became a statistic, emphasizing the complexity and humanity of her subjects while avoiding the genre’s tendency to sensationalize the most lurid details of their deaths.

Having won the two biggest awards in North American journalism and cultivated a massive audience, Walker appeared to have unstoppable career momentum as she prepared for the release of Stolen’s third season. But her story took an unexpected twist: in December 2023, Spotify, which had bought Gimlet in 2019, confirmed that the show had been axed (season three will still air). Walker, whose success represented a beacon of hope for despairing journalists, was now a symbol of the profession’s alarming, inescapable collapse. And it illuminated another mystery too, this one about the industry itself: If executives don’t see the value in a show as popular and critically acclaimed as Stolen or Missing & Murdered, what will it take to convince them that these stories are worth telling?

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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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