If you want to make a sports fan happy, give them a deep dive into a goofy pool. To wit: Ben Dowsett going nearly 5,000 words on the jump ball, that contested toss that has started every game of basketball since 1891. Micro-analyzing the tradecraft used by both referees and players, Dowsett crams the piece with GIFs and videos aplenty to illustrate why it takes more than height to win the tip.
Every ref develops their own nuanced style. Crawford had a method of moving his head side to side, ostensibly checking all 10 players, before suddenly tossing the ball up with two hands. Rush would talk to the jumpers, then toss mid-sentence to surprise them; Javie and current NBA ref czar Monty McCutchen would also bounce the ball while talking, randomizing their bounce height and the number of bounces to keep players guessing.
Vaden would wait until both jumpers were set, then rock forward on his feet as if to throw the ball—typically fooling both players and getting them on their toes. “As soon as they both rocked back and got low, I would throw it,” Vaden says. Zach Zarba, one of today’s elite NBA officials, who has called several consecutive Finals, uses a similar extra pause.
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“Does beauty even have a place in a society at war?” For many women in Ukraine, the answer is yes. In this story for Allure, Sophia Panych highlights the beauty salons that have persevered over the last two years—many of which have moved into underground basements that double as shelters—and writes an inspiring piece about courage, community, and resistance in a time of war.
“An air alert is sounded when airplanes with possible weapons take off somewhere in Russia; an air alert doesn’t scare anyone anymore,” explains Borodina. It’s at this point that some Ukrainians who find themselves in public spaces go through a series of calculations, not all of which are based in fact or official protocols, attempting to rationalize the risk. “When a missile launch is recorded, you receive an air-raid alert on your phone, but even then Ukrainians don’t immediately seek shelter,” Borodina continues. “You have to find out where the launches are coming from. If it is the Caspian Sea, we know it will take about 50 minutes to fly to Kyiv. So I have the opportunity to finish this Zoom, finish my manicure, and then, in 30 minutes, if [the missile is] suddenly directed to Kyiv or if it doesn’t get shot down, I move.”
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• A front-row seat to the US immigration crisis
• A thoughtful, warts-and-all profile of a civil rights icon
• A rare look inside a nuclear submarine
• A new way to cope with frightening change
• A conservative fever dream dressed up as summer school
Eli Saslow | The New York Times | February 18, 2024 | 4,159 words
In December, Tucson’s Border Patrol saw nearly 20,000 migrants each week, marking a 300 percent surge from the previous year. Just south, near the US-Mexico border, lies Chilton Ranch: a sprawling expanse of 50,000 cattle-grazing acres in the Arizona desert owned by the same family for four generations and currently managed by Jim and Sue, a couple in their 80s. Five-and-a-half miles of their ranch run along the border wall. Here, footprints in the dirt reveal tales of survival and desperation. Accompanied by Erin Schaff’s emotive photography, Eli Maslow’s dispatch from this family ranch is masterfully reported, showing what its owners and cowboys encounter each day and night: Young children screaming for help, or arriving at their doorstep, their parents dead. Guides paid by the Sinaloa cartel, leading people through one of numerous gaps in the wall. Women who’ve been assaulted, mistaking their home for a Border Patrol station. A pregnant Sudanese woman, possibly in labor, exposed to the cold on a 36-degree night. Migrants, from all over the world, caught on camera footage traversing some of the 150 smuggling trails on the property. As many as 250 people a day wander onto their ranch from remote entry points—a microcosm of a nation facing an immigration crisis and humanitarian disaster—and the Chiltons are in the midst of it all. While Maslow paints a dismal bigger picture, the ordinary individuals in this story show compassion, even in the threat of their own safety and security. Many pieces on immigration feel abstract, impersonal; this is quite the opposite. —CLR
Mitchell S. Jackson | Esquire | February 21, 2024 | 9,471 words
Evolution never happens in a vacuum. At its grandest scale, it’s a response to a complex web of environmental and internal stimuli. At the humbler scale of a single human being over the course of their life, it’s . . . well, it’s pretty much the same. Take Al Sharpton. The child preacher turned activist that many of us first met in the ’80s—he of the tracksuits and the press conferences—seems far different than the Al Sharpton of today, an eminence grise of the civil rights movement. But how much of that is a change in the man himself, and how much is the context that has accumulated around him? Mitchell S. Jackson never comes out and asks that question directly, but his long, fascinating profile of Sharpton teases out an answer nonetheless. Over the course of a summer, Jackson spends untold hours with Sharpton, and unspools those hours in a recursive series of vignettes, each one taking the measure of the man in a new and surprising way. One of Jackson’s many writerly gifts is that he’s always present in a piece, but never overwhelms it; here that makes him crucial to the profile’s warts-and-all approach. Yes, he contends, the Tawana Brawley debacle remains a blemish. Yes, the Sharpton of long ago maybe had a kiss of hucksterism. Also, though: yes, Sharpton changed irrevocably at a certain point. And yes, the affectations that might have arched your eyebrow have stories behind them, and those stories might just change your mind the way they changed Jackson’s. Al Sharpton has given no shortage of time to reporters over the years, and this profile doubtless serves him the way they all have. But in taking stock of the man’s evolution, and how that has ultimately determined his larger impact, it might also be the truest, fullest profile of them all. —PR
Adam Ciralsky | Vanity Fair | February 15, 2024 | 6,598 words
I can’t even imagine the amount of paperwork necessary for Adam Ciralsky and photographer Philip Montgomery to spend time on the USSWyoming, one of the nation’s 14 submarines carrying nuclear weapons. As Ciralsky writes, “The number of civilians who had been given this level of access was roughly the same as that who have walked on the moon.” Our intrinsic voyeurism means weapons of mass destruction hold a morbid fascination, and Ciralsky builds on this with descriptions that imply dark deeds and espionage—boarding the submarine on a stormy night amid high Atlantic seas. It all feels very Cold War. However, the people he then meets break character, coming across as pleasant, even humorous (and in some cases, very young). But a steely resolve is also apparent. Chilling lines in this piece emphasize the dark times we are in. Off the submarine, Ciralsky meets experts such as navy captain Dan Packer, who reminds him, “2027 is the year Xi Jinping said they need to be ready to go to war,” and General Anthony Cotton, the head of US Strategic Command, who alludes to other threats from Russia, North Korea, Iran, and armed groups like the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. These submarines are powerful chess pieces on this tense global stage. In position, ready to move. They are designed as a deterrent, but the chess masters are still poised to play: “If you ever wonder if people would be ready to employ these weapons, the answer is yes,” Ciralsky is told. Perhaps the reason a Vanity Fair reporter was allowed access to the Wyoming—and to literally sleep next to Trident missiles—is just another move in the game. —CW
Heidi Lasher | Orion Magazine | February 13, 2024 | 3,346 words
My favorite uncle was diagnosed with dementia three years ago. His decline has been rapid: he went from someone who joked nonstop to being nearly incapable of speech. When I see him, I witness his ever-narrowing new normal. I remember the man who lived with us at various points in my life, the swimming outings, the movies we watched together, how he made me soup after his overnight shift when I left school sick. In this thoughtful essay at Orion, Heidi Lasher considers the concept of shifting baselines in relation to her father’s dementia. “Shifting baselines is the idea that each successive generation will accept as ‘normal’ an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a healthy ecology looks and feels like,” she writes. In mulling our mutable climate, raising kids, and her parents’ declining health, she urges us to be present and to remember in the face of chaotic and frightening transition: “Social researcher Phoebe Hamilton Jones says the antidote to shifting baselines is found in our ability to pay attention and to call forth what once was.” We are not powerless in the face of change, Lasher reminds us. You can mourn what you had or cherish it—the choice is yours. —KS
Noah Rawlings | The New Inquiry | February 19, 2024 | 6,839 words
If you’re not addicted to media discourse, I envy you. I also realize you might need some background before diving into this pick, so here goes: a couple of years ago, a collection of reactionary academics and journalists, hysterical about the purported “wokeness” of US higher education, decided to start their own university. It’s called the University of Austin, but it’s actually in Dallas, in an office complex owned by Harlan Crow, billionaire BFF and patron of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. UATX’s figurehead is ex-New York Times staffer Bari Weiss, who also runs The Free Press (“For Free People”), an online outlet that spends an inordinate amount of time clutching pearls about gender-affirming care for trans children. Many of UATX’s faculty and fellows have expressed support for Israel’s continuing bombardment of Gaza; at least one has couched the genocide as a matter of good versus evil. So. In this essay, which is as hilarious as it is rage-inducing, Noah Rawlings describes attending UATX’s “Forbidden Courses” summer program, which it launched in advance of actually enrolling students. Better Rawlings than I, because I would have lost my damn mind. Not when founding faculty member Peter Boghossian, who once accused his former employer, Portland State University, of being a “Social Justice factory” (quelle horreur) said he’s so good at jiu-jitsu that he could murder everyone on a bus carrying participants to the program’s commencement dinner. Not when Joe Lonsdale, who helped found Palantir, told students that the rise of AI would let humans do “more natural things” with their lives. Not when Weiss, when asked by a student why there aren’t any left-of-center faculty at a school that supposedly prides itself on illuminating truth through dialogue, suggested the left is just less interested in debate. No, I think I would have lost it when someone (Rawlings doesn’t say who) uttered the following: “If Simone de Beauvoir were alive right now, she would be very popular, like Jordan Peterson.” —SD
Audience Award
What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?
Sarah Scoles | Undark | January 22, 2024 | 3,875 words
Ever lost your way in the wilderness? In 2021, nearly 3,400 people got lost in a US national park. In the 2000s, a researcher named Robert Koester gathered and analyzed data on the behaviors of different types of people, from children to experienced hikers, who’ve wandered and gotten lost in the wild. In what direction do they go? How do geographic features and different terrains influence their movements? In this piece for Undark, Sarah Scoles reports on the growing science of “lost person behavior,” which in turn can inform the strategies of search-and-rescue missions. —CLR
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Magazines have been writing about Al Sharpton for damn near 40 years. But the Al Sharpton of now is not the Al Sharpton of then, and Mitchell Jackson’s profile gets its arms around the civil rights activist with such totality that it’s hard to imagine anything short of a book-length biography could match it. It’s not the last word on a complicated man, but it’s perhaps the best.
What if Sharpton’s ultimate legacy is not some omnibus writ that the ill-intentioned—looking at you, SCOTUS—will work lifetimes to dismantle but his indefatigable insistence (he logs a staggering 250,000 to 300,000 air miles per year) on the overtruth that there never has been nor will be a post-racial America, least of all in the city that is its locus of power. It’s not the bright, tangible achievements of his forebears but the difficult, often fallible work of steadying a light that won’t let you look away.
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Change—sometimes good, sometimes frightening—is inevitable, but according to Heidi Lasher, we need not feel powerless in the face of it. The antidote, she suggests, is simply to remember.
SHIFTING BASELINES is the idea that each successive generation will accept as “normal” an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a healthy ecology looks and feels like. Absent any personal or societal accounting of migrating butterflies, winter snowfall, or spawning salmon, future generations will have tolerated so many small losses in population, abundance, and habitat that eventually they won’t know what they’re missing. Worse, they may not even care.
SOCIAL RESEARCHER Phoebe Hamilton Jones says the antidote to shifting baselines is found in our ability to pay attention and to call forth what once was. “Knowing the names of flora and fauna,” she says, “allows us to counter shifting baseline syndrome.” I imagine walking around in my backyard like a schoolteacher taking the daily roll call. Ponderosa pine? Here. Box elder bug? Here. American goldfinch? Here. Calling beings by their names builds familiarity and affinity, helps us notice subtle changes in health, lifestyle, or habitat, that we might wonder aloud about their well-being and mark their absences.
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Twenty-six years ago, Barton McNeil called 911 to report that his three-year-old daughter had died in the night. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to any parent. Then a new nightmare began. Matthew Bremner tells the harrowing story through a personal lens:
On Christmas Eve 2022, my three-year-old tried to pick up his baby brother and accidentally dropped him. On the way to the hospital, our baby was peaceful. His tiny hand locked around my pinky as he peered out the window at the orange blur of the streetlights in the nighttime drizzle. I felt guilty for a thousand things: for not intervening sooner, for not turning around a second earlier. It wasn’t my older son’s fault; it was mine. Normalcy was so fragile—one minute, things were fine, then they weren’t. Harmony and horror seemed divided by nothing more than an instant. I felt I’d failed to protect my baby in that instant.
Over the hacking coughs and squeak of rubber soles in the ER, the doctor told us he probably had a fractured skull. Results of a CAT scan would tell us if he had internal bleeding. I prepared for a tomorrow in which I loathed myself forever.
But somehow, he was fine. I’d narrowly missed what I supposed was the worst thing that can happen to a person. He would need to be monitored for a while, but my relief was immediate. I burst into tears. I’d never cried like that before.
A day later, crammed into a chair beside my son’s hospital bed, amid the click and drip of hospital machinery, the submarine pulses, I remembered a story I’d heard about a father in Illinois who’d spent the last quarter century in prison for the murder of his three-year-old daughter. He claimed he was innocent.
I’d heard it maybe a month before, but the man’s story came back to me now, as my son slept beside me, still wrapped in a tangle of tubes as I contemplated what nearly happened to him, to me.
If what I’d read was true and Barton McNeil was innocent of killing his daughter, then it occurred to me that I’d been wrong the night before. Losing a child was not the worst thing that could happen to a person: Being unjustly locked up for it was.
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Jim and Sue Chilton, a couple in their 80s, own tens of thousands of grazing acres in Arizona along the U.S.-Mexico border—an area three times the size of Manhattan that has become one of the busiest corridors for illegal border crossings. In this well-reported story, Eli Saslow shows what day-to-day life is like for the couple and their cowboys on Chilton Ranch.
The Chiltons had always had some immigrants traveling through the property, but recently Border Patrol agents estimated that as many as 250 people each day were arriving on the remote corners of the ranch after being led across the border by paid guides working on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel.
He turned onto a rugged road that paralleled the border wall and drove for a few more miles, until he saw a campfire burning in the distance. “Nobody should be out here,” he said. He was on the most remote corner of one of the most remote ranches in America, but as he drove closer, he counted more than 45 people sitting near the fire. Children shouted in French. A woman prayed in Arabic.
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