Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This edition of the Top 5 looks at Ukraine’s defiant underground beauty salons, the fight for a wild butterfly population, the meaning behind the quilts crafted in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, the world of Criterion Collection, and the shifting role of the call center worker.

1. Inside Ukraine’s Wartime Salons

Sophia Panych | Allure | February 22, 2024 | 4,531 words

As the war in Ukraine enters its third year, beauty salons in the country have become symbols of perseverance and resistance. Salon owners go to work despite the constant threat of missile strikes. They’ve moved their businesses underground. When they have no access to electricity and water, they run on generators and use bottled water. They’ve also adapted to working in the dark, painting clients’ nails under the glow of headlamps. Unfazed by air-raid sirens, they’re accustomed to calculating risks. Sirens can sound up to a dozen times a day, a cosmetologist from Zaporizhzhia, a city close to the frontlines, tells Sophia Panych: “At that rate, it would take all day to finish just one facial.” In this piece, Panych asks, “Does beauty even have a place in a society at war?” For many salon owners in central and eastern Ukraine, the answer is an emphatic yes. Many Ukrainian women have felt a deep sense of patriotism and duty to jumpstart the economy, while salon patrons get their hair cut and nails done to take control—and find normalcy—in an unstable time. “Every blowout, every massage, every pedicure they provide is a statement of defiance against an enemy that wishes to see them destroyed,” writes Panych. They’re also communal acts of self-care. A longtime beauty editor with Ukrainian roots, Panych had been looking for a way to write about the country since 2022, but she hadn’t found an appropriate angle. But her reporting here, on the unexpected resilience of Ukraine’s beauty industry, comes together beautifully in an inspiring piece on the courage and resourcefulness of ordinary citizens in a time of war. —CLR

2. The Butterfly Redemption

Brian Payton | Hakai Magazine | February 27, 2024 | 4,000 words

For more excellent writing from Brian Payton, read “The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay,” also from Hakai Magazine.

In his latest for Hakai Magazine, Brian Payton creates excitement from the start: “They are ravenous and roving. Newly emerged from a six-month state of suspended animation, over a dozen larvae scale the crumpled paper towel inside a plastic cup.” I love Payton’s writing—I don’t yet know the name of these creatures, but I am already rooting for them. These are Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly larvae; they favor “bright, moist, open wildflower meadows” and were once abundant from Willamette Valley in Oregon to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Today, only 13 wild populations remain, but conservationists in the US and Canada—including some incarcerated women who care for the butterflies—are trying to change that, for the butterflies and for humans who may not understand the critical role insects play in life on our planet. “Insects help create and sustain the natural systems terrestrial life depends on,” he writes. “A world with fewer insects is a world with less flora, fauna, and food.” Payton’s piece is educational and entertaining, a welcome and necessary spark of joy. This butterfly is particularly magnificent and Payton records them with thoughtful detail: “In April or May, they emerge as adults and take to the air on wings of vivid red or orange and white, outlined in black, calling to mind the brightly hued geometry of stained-glass windows.”  What’s perhaps most beautiful (in addition to learning that the collective noun for butterflies is a kaleidoscope)? The Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly lives for only 14 days, but in that time, it does its part to help life on this planet to thrive. That humans are banding together to help the species? It sets my hopes aflutter. —KS

3. The Black Women of Gee’s Bend Work Hard and Easy

Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | February 21, 2024 | 5,680 words

Gee’s Bend, Alabama, is famous for its quilters. Maybe you’ve seen their work in a museum or on a US postal stamp—it is abstract, geometric, and arresting. The quilters are Black women descended from slaves, and their craft is a tradition born of necessity. To keep warm, have a soft place to sleep, and swaddle newborns, the quilters’ forebears made what they needed with what they had. How, then, to view the contemporary acclaim for Gee’s Bend quilts that focuses more on aesthetics than function? Or the forces of capitalism that invited the acclaim in the first place? There’s a moment in this essay by Jeannette Cooperman when one of the quilters asks the author, “Who discovered art, do you know?” The line took my breath away because it’s a Russian doll of questions. To address it in any meaningful way requires asking other questions about the nature of art, the power dynamics of discovery, and how knowledge is shared across time and space. Cooperman does a splendid job lacing these lines of inquiry through the essay while also suggesting that trying too hard to answer them risks missing the point of creating and experiencing beauty—which is to say, the doing and the feeling. “Quilts were about loving people. And saving and re-using honored the material world,” Cooperman writes. “When Missouri Pettway’s husband died, she made a quilt from his old work clothes . . . so she could warm herself with the memory of him, ‘cover up under it for love.’” —SD

4. Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?

Joshua Hunt | The New York Times Magazine | February 29, 2024 | 4,230 words

There are three primary kinds of business profiles. You’ve got your classic schadenfreude-fueled Rise and Fall, your everyone-loves-a-comeback Redemption Tale, and your Company at the Crossroads. All can be compelling. All can also feel like sponsored content. Joshua Hunt’s feature about Criterion Collection, that beloved reissuer of movies, manages to skirt that issue by being a culture story rather than a business one. Criterion started with LaserDisc, then moved to DVD and streaming; what’s remained constant is its seemingly bottomless love of film and commitment to supplemental materials, which Hunt conveys through director interviews as well as Criterion employees. Cinephile icons (Jim Jarmusch, Kelly Reichardt), A24 darlings (the Safdie Brothers), and even Michael Bay show up to discuss their favorite Criterion memories. Criterion’s warts are on display as well—its tendency to ignore Black filmmakers, the heavy toll exacted by its streaming strategy—further helping steer the piece away from Valentine territory. Obsession is as universal as it is single-minded, and stories like this bear that out perfectly: I may never have the encyclopedic knowledge that these filmmakers do, but I’ll also never tire of reading about another person’s lifelong passion. —PR

5. The Last Stand of the Call-Centre Worker

Sophie Elmhirst | 1843 Magazine | February 2, 2024 | 4,739 words

“It reminds me of processed cheese, Sophie,” says Gary, a call center worker, during his chat with Sophie Elmhirst on AI technology. Gary tells it how it is. I love Gary. An instantly endearing character, he epitomizes the sense of personality that could be lost as call center work edges further into the realm of the robot. Don’t get me wrong—we don’t always get a Gary when we call a customer service line. Elmhirst recounts, with her trademark dry humor, some of her less enjoyable calls (you will relate). But Gary from Vision Direct has her laughing as he guides her through ordering new contact lenses like they were “engaged in some kind of high-stakes joint project.” Roping him into an interview, she discovers more about the infectious joy he brings to customers, even after 20 years of working in call centers. Can AI ever replicate this? Perhaps. Developments are happening faster than the public or regulators can keep up with, and automating empathy is already in the works. In fact, as Elmhirst notes, ChatGPT recently scored better on standardized emotional awareness tests than the general population, according to a paper in Frontiers in Psychology. (Not sure if that says more about ChatGPT or the general population.) As is often the case with AI, there is much talk of hybrid roles, but inevitably, there will be less room for the traditional call center worker. The topic of AI use in customer service calls had the potential to be incredibly dull. Elmhirst makes it wildly entertaining. Gary makes it human. —CW

Audience Award

What did our readers devour this week?

What Really Happened to Baby Christina?

Matthew Bremner | Esquire | February 15, 2024 | 8,100 words

Twenty-six years ago, Barton McNeil called 911 to report that his 3-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. —SD

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Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?

Commentary tracks? Presenting films in their original letterbox format? Both started with Criterion, the company that’s been reissuing beloved movies for more than 40 years. Joshua Hunt dives into the history of the Criterion Collection, interviewing filmmakers and employees alike—and exploding the myth that the catalog contains only the artiest cinephile bait.

In September, when I called Michael Bay at his home in Miami, he seemed blissfully unaware that many cinephiles don’t think his films belong in the collection. He was also unaware of Criterion’s continued existence, but told me quite earnestly how “cool” it was that they were still around. His enthusiasm for its LaserDiscs was palpable as he described washing cars for the cash to buy them, just as he did to afford the best stereo equipment. “I just remember it being the pinnacle,” Bay said of the brand. Bay also gamely entertained my questions about the most infamous feature of Criterion’s commentary track for “Armageddon,” in which the movie’s star, Ben Affleck, mentions an on-set spat with Bay over the plot: Why, Affleck wondered, would it be easier to prepare oil-rig workers for outer-space travel than to train NASA astronauts how to drill into and then destroy an asteroid on a collision course with earth? “I told him to shut the [expletive] up,” Bay said. “Ben has a wry personality, so you just have to come back at him with that same type of personality.”

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How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

In an excerpt adapted from his book, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State, Byron Tau reveals how advertising data collected from mobile phones has been used to track the movements of members of the military and even those closest to Vladimir Putin. What’s most troubling is that this advertising data can be purchased by nearly anyone—even bad actors.

If you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are, there is a good chance a log of your precise movements has been saved in some data bank that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies.

While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.

They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.

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‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’

In December, The New York Times published a front-page story alleging that Hamas had committed systematic sexualized violence on October 7. The piece, which was written by a Pulitzer Prize-winner and two Israeli freelancers with very little journalism experience, has since come under scrutiny. The Times’ flagship podcast, The Daily, even shelved an episode about the story because of serious questions about the reporting. In this damning dissection, Intercept journalists lay bare the decisions that led to the story’s publication in the first place, some of which one of the freelancers, Anat Schwartz, articulated in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news:

Schwartz began her work on the violence of October 7 where one would expect, by calling around to the designated “Room 4” facilities in 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence, including rape. “First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she recalled in the podcast interview. “I had a lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”

The next step was to call the manager of the sexual assault hotline in Israel’s south, which proved equally fruitless. The manager told her they had no reports of sexual violence. She described the call as a “crazy in-depth conversation” where she pressed for specific cases. “Did anyone call you? Did you hear anything?” she recalled asking. “How could it be that you didn’t?”

As Schwartz began her own efforts to find evidence of sexual assault, the first specific allegations of rape began to emerge. A person identified in anonymous media interviews as a paramedic from the Israeli Air Force medical unit 669 claimed he saw evidence that two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their bedroom. The man made other outrageous claims, however, that called his report into question. He claimed another rescuer “pulled out of the garbage” a baby who’d been stabbed multiple times. He also said he had seen “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses … with the blood of the people that were living in the houses.” No such messages exist, and the story of the baby in the trashcan has been debunked. The bigger problem was that no two girls at the kibbutz fit the source’s description. In future interviews, he changed the location to Kibbutz Be’eri. But no victims killed there matched the description either, as Mondoweiss reported.

After seeing these interviews, Schwartz started calling people at Kibbutz Be’eri and other kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 in an effort to track down the story. “Nothing. There was nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.” She then reached the unit 669 paramedic who relayed to Schwartz the same story he had told other media outlets, which she says convinced her there was a systematic nature to the sexual violence. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.

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Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab

Two anthropologists looking to reshape the world via consciousness expansion. Dosing dolphins at a research institute in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Lab visits from a not-yet-famous 29-year-old Carl Sagan. A psychedelic subculture among crews of TV shows in the ’60s, including Flipper. Benjamin Breen’s piece—an excerpt from his book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science—recounts an interesting period in the history of psychedelics and leaves you wanting to read more. (Signup required.)

The recordings were grist for Lilly’s mill. By 1963, he was absolutely convinced that his dolphins were uttering coherent words in English — but at a speed so rapid and a pitch so high that only computerized manipulation could make them understandable. The payoff was vague, but in his mind immense. After all, if he could bridge the barrier in communication between these two radically different species, how could Americans and Soviets continue to claim that communication between their own camps was impossible?

In 1961, Sagan helped plan one of the first conferences on extraterrestrial life. The organizers had sought not just scientists interested in first-contact scenarios but also someone who already spoke to “aliens” — or at least the closest parallel that Earth afforded. Lilly was the obvious choice. Afterward, Sagan founded a whimsical scientific fraternal organization, the Order of the Dolphin, that was partially inspired by Lilly’s work. Now, three years later, Sagan was finally visiting Lilly’s “aliens” in person.

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‘What Can I Even Say Without Having to Go to Jail?’

The overturning of Roe v Wade has left domestic violence advocates in many states wondering what to do when they encounter a pregnant DV survivor. What advice and resources can they offer without risking legal consequences? Julianne McShane reports:

Advocates aren’t the only ones caught in the middle: Administrators at both the agencies that employ them and the state-level coalitions that are supposed to act as leaders and resource hubs are often unsure of what’s legal and what’s not, and worry that issuing clear guidance to their service providers could put their funding at risk. “We’re hearing a lot of anger from people who have gone into this work because they care deeply about supporting survivors and their lives and making sure people have dignity and access to care,” said Quinn, from Provide. “They feel that their hands are tied.” 

Williams, the advocate in Tulsa, is a 47-year-old former cop who wore her hair pulled back tight and her face makeup-free when we met a few weeks before Christmas; on her days off, she said, she indulges in Botox and salon visits to decompress from the intensity of work. She likens herself to a “bulldog”: “I will fight for my victims like there’s no tomorrow,” she told me. But when she’s working with survivors with unwanted pregnancies, she’s become more cautious. “I think it’s just so new to us that we’re all so afraid to even touch it,” she said of discussing abortion in light of the state’s ban. Agency administrators said that Williams speaks only for herself and not for the organization as a whole, and that advocates can always seek guidance from, or refer their client to, another team member. 

But for Williams, the uncertainty can feel overwhelming: “I ain’t trying to lose my whole livelihood because I’ve given someone this advice.”

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The Butterfly Redemption

Dedicated conservationists in the US and Canada—including some incarcerated women—are breeding Taylor’s checkspot butterflies in captivity and taming the invasive plant species that threaten the insect’s natural habitat, all in a bit to increase the wild populations of a beautiful pollinator that lives for 14 days.

They are ravenous and roving. Newly emerged from a six-month state of suspended animation, over a dozen larvae scale the crumpled paper towel inside a plastic cup. One determined individual undulates past the others to the top of the paper peak. There, it anchors its hind prolegs, raises its head and abdomen, and begins a kind of dance. About the length of a paper clip, the caterpillar sways its black and bristly body back and forth. It reaches toward the light streaming in through the greenhouse glass and the face of the woman beaming down.

Working alongside Heather is a fellow butterfly tech we’ll call Brooke. She’s dressed in a matching red DOC sweater, khaki pants, and rubber boots, but wears her long hair down. She, too, feels fortunate to be working just beyond the prison’s fence, where she regularly hears birdsong and the gurgling croak of ravens. The work includes monitoring greenhouse temperatures and humidity, growing and picking food for the caterpillars each day, and early in the year, watching for when the caterpillars awake from diapause. To ensure diverse and resilient populations, the women carefully document genetic lineages and track data to avoid breeding siblings. They also give them names. This year’s crop of males includes a lot of Georges—George Michael, George Foreman, and Boy George among them.

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