The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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The dark side of the transmigrante industry. A meditation on the true meaning of public safety. Staggering new health recommendations around alcohol consumption. Insight into the writers’ strike and an ode to the beauty of bees. For more great reading, be sure to check out our editors’ picks.

1. A Trucker’s Kidnapping, a Suspicious Ransom, and a Colorado Family’s Perilous Quest for Justice

Chris Walker | 5280 | May 2, 2023 | 5,292 words

Through a special visa program, transmigrantes are able to drive goods and vehicles from the U.S. to Central America via Mexico, without paying for high import and export fees. These truckers, many originally from Central America, are able to connect with their home countries through this line of work, while the industry as a whole transforms America’s excess items into valuable goods abroad. In 2014, one trucker, Guatemalan-born Enrique Orlando León, took a contract job from a Colorado employer to deliver a truck, apparently full of furniture, to his homeland. It was a journey he’d taken many times before, but this time, it all went horribly wrong. Chris Walker recounts the kidnapping, explores the unknowns around Orlando’s capture that still plague him, and describes how this terrifying ordeal has affected his entire family. Through this one man’s story, Walker exposes a dark side of the transmigrante industry. —CLR

2. “Why You Talking to a Bum?”

Katie Prout | Chicago Reader | April 20, 2023 | 2,890 words

I was going to pick a different story this week, but then a man named Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator, was killed on the New York subway. He was unhoused, hungry, tired, distressed. He said as much to a car of people. In response, another passenger put him in a choke hold until he died. The best thing I’ve read about this appalling crime is a short, poignant piece in Defector. As a companion, I recommend this essay by Katie Prout, who recently spent time on Chicago’s public transport system talking to people who live there because they don’t have much other choice. Prout interrogates what politicians, the media, and many American citizens mean when they talk about public safety. Safety for whom, and from what? Who counts as part of the public, and who is cast aside? Jordan Neely should still be alive. He deserved better. America owed him more. —SD

3. Pour One Out

Tim Requarth | Slate | April 23, 2023 | 4,656 words

Not so long ago, a glass of red wine with dinner was considered a health benefit. Apparently there was research to back this moderate approach to tipple. New guidelines from the World Health Organization, the World Heart Federation, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction tell us something anyone who imbibes, even just a little, already knows: Alcohol is essentially poison. (Did they really have to gang up on us?) “’Mainstream scientific opinion has flipped,’ said Tim Stockwell, a professor at the University of Victoria who was on the expert panel that rewrote Canada’s guidance on alcohol and health. Last month, Stockwell and others published a new major study rounding up nearly 40 years of research in some 5 million patients, concluding that previous research was so conceptually flawed that alcohol’s supposed health benefits were mostly a statistical mirage.” For Slate, science writer Tim Requarth does a great job investigating what led to this staggering discovery. (For more Tim Requarth, be sure to check out “The Final Five Percent,” his award-winning reported personal essay on traumatic brain injury.) —KS

4. Why Are TV Writers So Miserable?

Michael Schulman | The New Yorker | April 29, 2023 | 2,085 words

For the first chunk of adulthood, I thought about my TV-writer friends as having hit some sort of lottery. Here I was, writing about real people and real events like a chump, while they were sitting around a table with their friends, eating junk food and making up stories — and earning ungodly amounts of money (or so I imagined) in the process. Finish a season, go to another show, climb the ladder, rinse, repeat. Then streaming came to town, and my friends’ dispatches from the front started to change. Uncertainty. Anxiety. Short-term gigs with no sense of security. All of a sudden, TV writing started to sound a lot more like the journalism game than I’d thought. Michael Schulman’s recent New Yorker piece bears out that suspicion with a clear, anecdote-driven explanation of exactly how streaming accelerated the devaluation of the creative act. The writers’ strike that began this week isn’t solely about residuals and streaming, of course — AI’s ever-advancing inroads are maybe even more existentially concerning — but after reading this piece you’ll realize that the Final Draft crowd isn’t different from any other labor force whose bosses are privileging profits over people. Seeing your name on a screen doesn’t necessarily pay the rent. —PR

5. Hive Mind

Celia Bell | Texas Highways | May 2, 2023 | 2,847 words

Celia Bell’s warm descriptions make bee society sound lovely, with her bees visiting “flowers or the quiet creek, or, on the hottest days, hang[ing] in clusters like elderberries on the outside of the hive, waiting for a breath of cool air.” The pleasure she finds in their world is not taken for granted. After entering beekeeping during the pandemic, Bell is conscious of how it grounds her and keeps her present. A video game fan, she draws thoughtful comparisons to the rendering of the natural world in gaming. While appreciating the artistry of game developers, she feels outside of her body in their virtual landscapes, whereas sweating in an apiary her body calls out its needs, forcing her to connect with her physical self. Although online life can creep in — a buzzing phone is never far away — the bees open up “the wonder and specificity of the world.” This reflective essay will make you consider which reality you choose to spend your time in. —CW

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What Happens When Dave Chappelle Buys Up Your Town

Tyler J. Kelley | Bloomberg Businesweek | April 28, 2023 | 4,851 words

Dave Chappelle has lived full-time in the tiny, idyllic Ohio town of Yellow Springs for more than 15 years; at this point, it’s as much a part of his personal brand as the everpresent cigarette. But as Tyler J. Kelley reports, Chappelle’s impact on Yellow Springs — including his many real estate purchases and a number of questionably zoned live shows — has become a point of contention among townspeople who fear the end of affordability and find themselves torn between pride and preservation. —PR

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“They Just Need a Safe Place to Be:” How Public Transit Became the Last Safety Net In America

On May 2, a young man named Jordan Neely was killed on the New York City subway. Neely, who was an unhoused New Yorker, was reportedly behaving erratically, so a fellow passenger, an ex-Marine who as of this writing has not been arrested or named by law enforcement, put him in a choke hold until he died. In the wake of this shocking crime, Aaron Gordon of Vice‘s Motherboard vertical examines how public transit became the front line of America’s housing crisis:

[J]ust because it is a known problem doesn’t mean there is an intelligent, evidence-based public discourse on what to do about it. The fact is that transit agencies have, to varying degrees, been dealing with this question for decades. Paradoxically, many members of the public, politicians, and the political commentariat clamor that transit agencies do something, even though the root cause of homelessness is quite obviously a housing problem and not a transit problem. And that something usually involves the same short-term non-solution that hasn’t worked for decades — ramping up police presence and enforcement at great cost — while ignoring the cheaper and more effective long-term solution of investing in outreach workers, drop-in centers with food and facilities, shelter beds, and supportive housing. 

For this article, I spoke to local and national housing and transportation experts, organizations that work closely with the homeless on a daily basis, and transit agencies around the country. I asked them: What are transit agencies doing about homelessness, and what should they be doing? 

I found near-universal agreement that the old approach of relying on police-based enforcement — creating a code of conduct that bans specific things homeless people do in public, then arresting them for it — is losing favor. Instead, transit agencies have embraced a model of “partnerships” with existing city agencies and nonprofits that tackle homelessness, a move that sounds sensible on its face but is often used as another excuse to continue to invest little or no money in the problem. 

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A Theatre of Horror

Tyler Hooper | The Atavist Magazine | April 2023 | 2,285 words (8 minutes)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 138, “The Titanic of the Pacific.” 

ONE

It was a warm winter’s day in San Francisco, and the city’s main port, the Embarcadero, bustled with activity. Men dressed in waistcoats, blazers, and homburg and bowler hats smoked their pipes and fidgeted with their mustaches. Women in elegant blouses and skirts so long they touched the ground sheltered from the sun under broad-brimmed hats trimmed with feathers, ribbons, and flowers. Children clung to their mothers and watched wide-eyed as crewmen hauled more than 1,400 tons of cargo and freight—canned goods, fresh fruit and vegetables, crates of wine—into the forward hatch of the steamship Valencia, soon to depart for Seattle.

The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

Frank Bunker and his family stood in the crowd waiting to board the ship. Today, January 20, 1906, marked the beginning of a new chapter in Bunker’s life. In his late thirties, with dark, neatly parted hair and a clean-shaven face, Bunker had recently accepted a prestigious job as assistant superintendent of the Seattle school district. He had built his reputation as a bright young teacher and administrator in San Francisco—one newspaper touted him as being among “the best educators in the state.” Seattle presented an exciting new opportunity. It was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, with a population that had exploded from 3,553 people in 1880 to more than 80,000 by 1900. Bunker hoped to leave his mark on the city’s school system.

Seattle was thriving for one reason: gold. With the discovery of bullion in the Yukon and Alaska in the late 1800s, Seattle became known as the “gateway to gold” among prospectors looking to head north and make it rich. In a few short years, the frenzy had transformed Seattle from a frontier town into a metropolitan hub. Real estate, shipbuilding, and other economic sectors were booming.  

Industry was why F. J. Campbell, his wife, and their 16-year-old daughter were traveling to Seattle on the Valencia. Campbell was of average build, with a finely groomed mustache. He had been employed as an agent by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in Alameda, just across the bay from San Francisco, until he struck up a friendship with an employee of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, who convinced him that they could start their own machine business in Seattle. Eager to chase his fortune, Campbell quit his job, packed up his family, and secured passage north.

The Bunkers and Campbells were among the roughly 100 passengers booked on the January 20 journey. Originally, a ship called City of Puebla was scheduled to carry them to Seattle, but the vessel’s tail shaft had snapped on a recent voyage, so the Pacific Coast Steamship Company commissioned the Valencia in its place. The iron-hulled ship boasted three decks, a single smokestack, and two masts, as well as a 1,000-horsepower engine that allowed it to reach a cruising speed of 11 knots. The ship looked sleek, with a bow stretching 100 feet long. Because the Valencia was designed to run the warm Atlantic waters between New York and Venezuela, however, it could be challenging to guide through the notoriously volatile seas of the Pacific Northwest, where it had been sailing for the past several years.

Tasked with getting the Valencia safely to port was a crew of more than 60, led by Captain Oscar Marcus Johnson. A man of slender, rigid frame, Johnson came from a family of mariners. Born in Norway, he had traveled to America as a teenager. He started as a common seaman and worked his way up. Now 40, Marcus had been married to his wife, Mary, for five years. The couple resided with their three-year-old daughter on Powell Street, which connected San Francisco’s main fishing wharf to Market Street. Mary worried about her husband when he went to sea; she looked forward to the moment when she could wave to him from their front window upon his return. 

Mary wasn’t the only woman on Powell Street anxious for her husband’s well-being. Among the Johnsons’ neighbors were the Valencia’s fourth officer, Herman Aberg, and his wife. According to Mrs. Aberg, not long before Herman departed on the trip to Seattle, a fortune-teller arrived at their doorstep, knelt, and laid out what the Seattle Daily Times later called “ancient grease-covered cards.” The fortune-teller predicted that Herman would soon be shipwrecked, leaving Mrs. Aberg a widow. Herman laughed. Mrs. Aberg begged him not to go on the journey, but Herman went anyway.

Mrs. Aberg would describe the unheeded premonition later, when Herman did not return to Powell Street, meeting his end in the cold, cruel ocean hundreds of miles from home. It would prove just one haunting detail in a story full of them.

The fortune-teller predicted that Herman would soon be shipwrecked, leaving Mrs. Aberg a widow. Herman laughed. Mrs. Aberg begged him not to go on the journey.

A person prone to superstition might be forgiven for thinking that the Valencia was cursed. Built in 1882, the ship was fired upon the following year near the island of Curaçao, and again four years later, this time by a Spanish warship just off the Cuban coast. During the Spanish-American War, it was leased to the U.S. Army and used to transport troops to the Philippines as part of an unofficial effort to aid rebels who, like their Cuban counterparts, were vying for independence from Spain. When the conflict ended, the Valencia’s owners put it to work transporting gold-crazed passengers to and from Alaska and the Yukon, but the ship’s luck didn’t change in the new environment.  In March 1898, during its maiden voyage to Alaska’s Copper River, rough seas and poor food quality almost led to a mutiny. In February 1903, another steamship rammed into the Valencia a quarter-mile from Seattle’s harbor, nearly wrecking it. And in 1905, Captain Johnson ran it aground just outside St. Michael, Alaska; the crew had to move 75 tons of cargo onto another vessel before they could free the Valencia.

It is impossible to know if this legacy was on Captain Johnson’s mind after passengers finished boarding the Valencia and the ship sailed away from the Embarcadero, past Yerba Buena Island, and through the Golden Gate to the open ocean. Though Johnson occasionally commanded the Valencia, taking the ship up north during the summer months, he had only taken the route to Seattle as captain of a different steamship, called Queen. The trip required sailing through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, part of the stretch of ocean between southern Oregon and the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where hundreds if not thousands of ships had wrecked by the early 20th century, earning it an ominous moniker: Graveyard of the Pacific.

The region’s unpredictable weather and ocean currents often pushed ships toward the wet, rugged, foggy coastline, creating a navigational nightmare. The farther north a ship traveled, the worse the conditions tended to get, particularly in winter. Unlike the Atlantic coast, which had numerous harbors where ships could shelter during storms, the shore of the Pacific provided little refuge. Between San Francisco and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a distance of approximately 660 nautical miles, there were maybe ten harbors that could be used by ships the size of the Valencia, if conditions were favorable. If a vessel was in distress, running aground on a sandy beach was rarely an option, as there were few such beaches to speak of. Meanwhile, of the 279 U.S. coastal lifesaving stations, only a handful were on the Pacific.  

Johnson and his crew planned to keep the ship between five and twenty miles of the coastline for the duration of the voyage. They hoped to reach the Cape Flattery lighthouse on Tatoosh Island, marking the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, within 48 hours. They hoped, too, for calm seas. In November 1875, the steamship Pacific sank 80 miles south of Cape Flattery in under an hour, taking as many as 300 souls to their deaths.

The first day of the Valencia’s voyage was uneventful; the ship steamed smoothly into the starry night. By roughly 5:15 a.m. on Sunday, it had traveled 190 miles and passed the lighthouse at Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point in California. It was the last time the people aboard would have a clear view of the shore until they reached Washington State. Upon passing Cape Mendocino, it was typical for a ship’s captain to chart a course to the Umatilla lightship, 477 miles north. The lightship was at a critical junction in the voyage to Seattle, a beacon signaling that Cape Flattery, and a ship’s necessary turn eastward, was just 14 miles away. 

As the Valencia steamed up the coast, the weather worsened. On Sunday afternoon, the wind shifted from a northerly breeze to southeastern gusts. Gray clouds gathered over the ocean, and as the sky became hazy, the seas grew heavy.

At 5:30 p.m., Johnson noted in the Valencia’s logbook that the ship, then ten miles offshore, had passed Cape Blanco on the Oregon coast, meaning that it had traveled 335 miles from San Francisco. However, second officer Peter E. Peterson would later say that no one on the ship’s bridge could see the Cape Blanco lighthouse, perched atop 200-foot chalky-white cliffs.

The sun briefly appeared on Monday morning, but conditions declined as the day went on. Peterson later said that visibility reduced to the point that he could see only a couple of miles into the distance. It was evident that Captain Johnson was starting to feel anxious. That evening, around 8 p.m., he asked Peterson, “When do you think we are going to make Umatilla lightship?” 

Peterson was an experienced seaman who had worked for the Pacific Coast Steamship Company for nearly a decade. He had started as a sailor on the ship Pomona, where he lost a finger. By 1906, Peterson knew the route from San Francisco to Seattle well, having traveled it more than 100 times, including on the City of Puebla as second mate.

Now Peterson studied the Valencia’s log, an instrument trailing behind the ship to help estimate its speed, and concluded that they had traveled 307 miles beyond Cape Blanco. In theory that meant the ship was only 13 miles away from the Umatilla lightship and should pass it sometime around 9:30 p.m. However, Johnson and first officer W. Holmes believed that the Valencia’s log was overrunning by approximately 6 percent—in other words, they thought that the ship was traveling slower than the log showed. It’s not clear why Johnson and Holmes held that belief, though Johnson’s previous experience in the area may have held a clue. He had commanded ships in the area during spring and summer, when northerly winds prevailed. In winter the opposite was true; winds from the south propelled ships up the Pacific coast at higher speeds.

Peterson told the captain that he trusted the log, given the weather conditions and his knowledge of the ocean at this time of year. If anything, he suspected that the log was underrunning. But he did not press the point. This was Peterson’s first trip on the Valencia; he had joined the ship’s crew at the last minute, to replace an officer who had been transferred to another vessel. Peterson knew virtually none of the men on board, save for a few servers, two cooks, and a fireman. He had never worked with any of the other officers, and it was a violation of the accepted order on any ship to defy the captain. Later Peterson would say that he took no part in the calculations required to plot the Valencia’s course—that was Johnson’s and Holmes’s responsibility. 

By 9 p.m. on Monday, the Valencia’s log showed that the ship had traveled 652 miles, which would have put it very close to the Umatilla lightship. However, Johnson was adamant that the lighthouse was still some 40 miles away. Privately, Peterson believed that the Valencia was likely past the lightship, nearing the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Around this time, Johnson ordered a course change that would bring the ship closer to the coastline. He also told the crew to gauge the depth of the ocean beneath the ship every half-hour by taking sounding measurements. To do this, the men dropped an 1,800-foot cable into the water until it hit bottom. At 9:30 p.m., the crew detected a sounding of 480 feet. An hour later, they measured 360 feet. The shallower water likely meant that the ship was getting closer to land.

By 11 p.m., the ship was moving dead slow, just four or five miles per hour. Johnson was sure the Valencia was approaching Cape Flattery. The captain stood on the bridge, waiting to hear a fog signal bellow from shore. No sound came.

Peterson later claimed that Johnson and Holmes had discussed taking the vessel west and waiting in the open ocean until daylight to figure out their exact location, but Johnson never gave that order. Instead, the Valencia continued chugging east. The sounding measurement at 11:15 p.m. was 240 feet. At 11:35 it was 180. Ten minutes later, the ocean’s depth was just over 140 feet. 

These were not the expected readings for the area where Johnson thought the ship was—the water was getting too shallow too quickly. Panicked, he changed course again, plotting a northwest route. Soon after, Peterson spied a dark object on the ship’s starboard side. He ran across the bridge and pointed it out to the captain.

When Johnson saw the dark silhouette, he cried out, “In the name of God, where are we?” He ordered Peterson to direct the crew to turn the ship “hard to starboard.” Peterson sprinted to the telegraph to issue the instruction.

The ship turned sharply, but it was too late. Just a few minutes before midnight, the Valencia collided with a rocky reef. 

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The Search for the Lost ‘Jeopardy!’ Tapes Is Over. The Mystery Behind Them Endures.

In 1986, Barbara Lowe won five games of Jeopardy! in a row, qualifying for the Tournament of Champions. But she didn’t appear in the tournament, and her games vanished from reruns of the show — only recently did Jeopardy! uber-fans recover and digitize the only known recordings of her episodes. In pop culture lore, Lowe became a villain: Rumors circulated that she had lied on her application for the show, violated contestant policies, and behaved badly on set. Claire McNear, who published a book about Jeopardy! in 2020, tracked Lowe down to try to get the bottom of what happened and found that the short answer might be, well, sexism:

In 1993, Harry Eisenberg, a writer turned producer during the first seven years of the Jeopardy! reboot, published a dishy account of his time at the program. Inside Jeopardy!: What Really Goes on at TV’s Top Quiz Show swiftly landed Eisenberg in hot water with his former employer, chiefly over his description of the show systematically altering game material to provide easier clues for female contestants — an act that would amount to a violation of fairness rules enshrined by the Federal Communications Commission in the wake of the 1950s quiz show scandals. Jeopardy! denied that the show did any such thing; a later edition of Eisenberg’s book dropped the claim.

But both versions of the book featured Eisenberg’s reflections on Lowe. Eisenberg radiated a strong dislike: Lowe, he wrote, “appeared rather strange” and prompted the most letters objecting to a contestant’s “mannerisms and behavior” that the show had ever received. Eisenberg described a fractious moment after Lowe rang in on a clue reading: “Sons of millionaires who killed Bobby Franks as a ‘scientific experiment.’”

“Her response was, ‘Who were Leopold and Leeb?’” Eisenberg wrote. “Alex ruled her incorrect, at which point she immediately shot back, ‘Leeb is just the German pronunciation of Loeb.’ Rather than get into an argument with her right in the middle of the show, Alex went ahead and gave it to her.”

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Homeless in the City Where He Was Once Mayor

After turning to alcohol to cope with Bipolar Disorder and a series of personal losses, lawyer Craig Coyner ended up becoming homeless on the streets of Bend, Oregon, a town in which he once served as mayor.

He had known Craig Coyner for more than 50 years, watching with admiration as the man from one of the most prominent families in Bend, Ore., rose through an acclaimed career — as a prosecutor, a defense lawyer and then a mayor who helped turn the town into one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities.

Now, at age 75, Mr. Coyner was occupying a bed at the shelter on Second Street, his house lost to foreclosure, his toes gnarled by frostbite, his belongings limited to a tub of tattered clothing and books on the floor next to his bed.

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A Trucker’s Kidnapping, a Suspicious Ransom, and a Colorado Family’s Perilous Quest for Justice

Through a special visa program, freelance truckers called transmigrantes are able to drive goods and vehicles from the U.S. to Central America via Mexico, without paying for high import-export fees. These truckers, many of whom have Central American roots, are able to connect with their home countries through this line of work, while the industry as a whole transforms America’s unwanted items into valuable goods abroad. One transmigrante, Guatemalan-born Enrique Orlando León, took a contract job in 2014 from his Colorado employer to drive a truck full of furniture to his homeland. It would be a routine trip like he’d done many times before. But this job went horribly wrong.

For 5280, Chris Walker recounts León’s kidnapping and its aftermath, and how this terrifying experience has affected León and his family. And it’s through León’s story that Walker is able to expose a very dark side of the transmigrante industry.

Even now—years later—Orlando still hears rumors about what may have been concealed in the truck’s cargo, including guns or even up to $2 million in cash hidden inside pieces of furniture. If that much money had gone missing, though, Orlando doesn’t think he’d be alive—or that he’d have been able to negotiate his release for such a comparatively small sum. While his kidnappers originally asked for $15,000, Orlando says he negotiated it down to $7,000 by telling his captors they could keep the school bus he’d driven down to sell in Guatemala. Only in retrospect does it appear that some outside factor—perhaps his family’s calls to local Guatemalan police—saved him from a shallow, unmarked grave.

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With My Heart on My (Gastric) Sleeve

This is a very honest and personal account of a struggle with weight. After reaching 460 pounds, Mike Bowers felt like a prisoner in his own body and decided he needed to navigate the complicated path to weight loss surgery.

Here’s the thing about being overweight: It impacts every aspect of your life. Depending on the situation, a thousand questions run through my head. Will the seatbelts fit? Are we sitting at a booth — will the table be movable? A table with chairs? How close to other tables?

What airline are we flying — what’s their policy on customers of size? How much is a second seat? How does that compare to first class? How long is the flight? How much can I eat or drink on the flight without having to go to the bathroom? That’ll be a tight fit …

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