EDITORS’ NOTE: Happy Sunday! Let us be one of the first to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, the best American holiday for all the obvious reasons. We will be off next Sunday to celebrate, but as a way of expressing our thanks to those of you who are supporting the newsletter, we will be sending out a members-only issue late this week, featuring the best essays of the year, as selected by Popula editor Maria Bustillos. You can become a member here to get that newsletter and every other member bonus (including an early edition of each Sunday newsletter). Otherwise, our next edition will come to everyone December 2. Thank you, and have a great holiday!
Today's guest editor is Drew Magary. Drew is a columnist at Deadspin, a correspondent at GQ Magazine, and the author of four books, including The Hike and The Postmortal. He also won Chopped and will never EVER let your sorry asses forget it. And, like Don, he is a forever-suffering Minnesota Vikings fan.
All yours, Drew...
I am a veteran of the schlongform process and I can tell you that whenever I finish some bigass magazine assignment—after all the interviewing and note-taking and poring through transcripts and writing and arranging and rearranging and editing and fact-checking and all that other horseshit—the only thing I really want to know about the final story is, “Does it read fast?”
This newsletter will ascribe a total reading time to each story recommended below, but you and I both know those times are a lie. They’re based mainly on word count, and not on whether or not the author did a decent job of keeping you scrolling. Because I can write the longest, fanciest, most writerly thing in the goddamn world and it won’t make a lick of difference if you, the reader, get bogged down in the middle and end up abandoning the thing because it takes forever to read and you already have 6,000 other tabs open. It’s my job to keep you interested and to give you a reason to read on.
Because people gotta read this shit, right? Frankly, too many big-name writers don’t care about the reader. They care about putting out something that looks prestigious so that they can get all the attendant media canoe praise and then go tweet a photo of a bourbon on the rocks to congratulate themselves. They think they’re doing you a fucking favor when it’s really the other way around. The reader has no obligation to listen to my horseshit. The reader can go make mint juleps if they feel like it. And if they grant me the remarkable courtesy of reading something I wrote—out of literally infinite options— well then I’d better not take it for granted.
I’m not saying everything should be boiled down into some Buzzfeed listicle or some garbage Axios BE SMART bullet point summary. I’m not saying writers have to pander. But there’s nothing that says a serious longform article can’t also be entertaining (even if the subject matter is deadly serious) and engaging and not a burden. Readers are smart. A lot of times they can see flaws in the copy that I can’t, and they’re definitely not gonna miss any of the copy that gets left on the cutting room floor. If the reader gets bogged down and bored reading something of mine, or if I become so in love with my purple-y words that the reader can SEE the writing, then I’ve fucking failed at my job. The words need to RUN. The best reading doesn’t feel like reading at all now, does it?
So here are some stories from the past week or so that read like butter.
Yes, this is a story from Deadspin, where I work. But this is my newsletter and I don’t have to recuse myself from jack shit. Go over now and read Barker’s perfect story about a bunch of deranged ultramarathoners who participate in a distance race that’s a sadistic combination of The Long Walk and Hands On A Hard Body. You run a 4-mile loop once an hour, every hour, until no one is left standing. Nothing beats reading about insane people doing shit I would definitely not ever do.
A haunted house story! OH FUCK YEAH. Listen man, if I’m reading some big longform thing, it better be about shipwrecks, grifters, insane runners, NBA teams squabbling, murder, or a haunted house. Those are the five pillars of the feature form. This haunted house story also doubles as an upper class real estate nightmare. Imagine plunking down $1.3 million just to have an anonymous stalker send you handwritten notes about drinking your young blood. The depreciation is the REAL nightmare, folks.
"The more I create these hypotheticals, the scarier everything becomes.” We’ve reached a point in American society where kids have virtually no hope of mass shootings ending, and instead dutifully prepare for them instead. It’s a kind of horrible acceptance that makes me want to punch through glass. Fuck the NRA, and fuck the Republican party for making stories like this a reality.
Please note the photo, in which Canadian Alex Trebek is, indeed, rocking a Canadian tuxedo. That’s a man who has some national pride right there. Anyway, come for the Jeopardy icon stepping in it when the topic of #MeToo comes up, and stay for his story about Justin Trudeau keeping a secret button under his shirt to summon assistants when he needs to end a meeting. Canadians, man.
Nobody writes about the President better than Roth, who goes to a very dark place in his mind and summons up deadly accurate descriptions of the putty-brained lizard currently ruling over our lives: “Watch these pissy helicopter-adjacent scrums and you may see a lumpy pink dope bellowing ‘we’re looking into that very strongly’ in response to questions he transparently can’t answer and dispensing whatever thudding speculative idiocy he thinks will get him to the next question.” Yup, that all tracks.
Did you know Edgar Allen Poe was a soldier? Did you know that he was kind of a good one, until he decided he didn’t feel like being one anymore and got booted? It’s true! Be sure to bring it up at cocktail parties. Everyone will be AWED by the breadth of your factoidal knowledge.
By the way, I do all my schlongform reading at the gym. I get on the elliptical, open up some tabs on my phone, and get my reading done while listening to Queesnryche. Just the way the author intended! Anyway, here’s a story about the very real health benefits of snake oil cures. Please don’t tell Tom Brady about it.
Axios is a repulsive dump of a shop headed by lifetime access merchants who proudly display zero shame in sucking up to any fascist who happens to be in power at the moment. This is why I’m glad Feinberg got their slacks and posted them for all to see.
FUN FACT: The late Garry Shandling is the only stand-up comedian in history who was also a good person. The rest of them are monsters. But Garry? Garry was cool. This is an oral history of a regular pickup basketball game Shandling started after he was burnt out creating The Larry Sanders Show. It was one of those mythical Hollywood scenes where a bunch of famous people show up at a pretty house and play in the sun and have a good time and you aren’t invited… hey, wait a second, now I’m mad at Garry! How come I never got an invite? Fuck you, man!
What happens when a well-meaning food critic singles out the best burger in America and sends fifty million asshole burger tourists to a little restaurant incapable of accommodating them all? Nothing good.
Yes it’s a story from my OTHER day job, over at GQ. But I’m biased for a good reason, because I genuinely like the places I work. They make good shit! This story’s a cover profile on the very sudden and very deserved fame of Crazy Rich Asians leading man Henry Golding, who landed the starring role in the year’s biggest romcom essentially by criss-crossing the globe, doing whatever he felt like doing at the time. He’s entirely self-made, and self-made GLOBALLY. It’s important to remember that America does not have a monopoly on underdog stories. If anything, Henry Golding proves that more may be possible away from here anyway.
You could frame the story of every American state as allegory for the story of America as a whole, but this five-part Nick Martin epic proves just how much of a claim North Carolina has to being a worthy proxy for all of the country’s evils.
This is a firsthand account of Sabalow rescuing a calico cat from the deadliest wildfire in California history, and reuniting the cat with its family. It’s short, but I don’t care. It’s not about how long the story is but about how long it stays with you.
“Very specific things reached them: that they were sending troops and his comment that anybody who picked up a rock would be shot. I had many people ask me if that was true.”
There’s no way I’m editing this without giving you a fat trove of food porn to take home in a doggie bag. I like reading food porn because I enjoy being hungry for things I can’t have! It’s super awesome. Anyway, dig in here for suitably mouthwatering photos and descriptions of hot chicken, pork rind macaroni, smoked beef tongue, goat biryani, and dozens of other dishes I want in my body right now, this instant.
This disturbing idea was suggested by an incident this past spring at the Anne Frank House, the blockbuster Amsterdam museum built out of Frank’s “Secret Annex,” or in Dutch, “Het Achterhuis [The House Behind],” a series of tiny hidden rooms where the teenage Jewish diarist lived with her family and four other persecuted Jews for over two years, before being captured by Nazis and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Here’s how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank’s diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year, with reserved tickets selling out months in advance. But when a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum’s managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.
One could call this a simple mistake, except that it echoed a similar incident the previous year, when visitors noticed a discrepancy in the museum’s audioguide displays. Each audioguide language was represented by a national flag—with the exception of Hebrew, which was represented only by the language’s name in its alphabet. The display was eventually corrected to include the Israeli flag.
“I’ve been swarmed by biting beetles attracted to the smell of wildfire smoke, hoping to lay their eggs in the damaged timber. I’ve laughed at the sight of two bored cops at a fire check point wearing smoke masks as they cooked burritos on the exhaust manifold of their patrol SUV’s engine. I’ve run to my car as embers rained down around me. I’ve been spattered with pink fire retardant as air tankers dumped their loads on homes with flames raging toward them through the underbrush. I’ve fought back tears at the gulping baritone sobs of a man who just got confirmation that his wife and two grandchildren had burned to death.
But it’s the burned animals that most haunt my memories.”
Back in the old days of 2008 when the then fledgling Facebook wasn't very profitable but the software developers that Mark Zuckerberg's company shared its user data with were, Alex French profiled the boy genius for GQ. Could we really trust young Zuck with all of our personal details? He said we could. But in a prescient paragraph, media activist Jeff Chester said no. Most Facebook users were unaware that their personal information was distributed to thousands of third-party developers whose applications run on the site. What would happen if rogue developers sold the info to unscrupulous marketers? Like that could ever happen?
Classic Read curator Jack Shafer writes about media for Politico.
Brrrr, I can’t relate. Sitting in my flip-flops in 73-degree South Florida, this image by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Robert Cohen of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is as close as I’ll get to the pre-winter storm that swept across the United States this past week. Shooting cold-weather photos is miserable. First, you have to find someone like you desperate enough to brave the solitary streets. Then, there’s the physical discomfort of shooting in freezing temps. On Nov. 15, Cohen caught Richard Burst in his bathrobe, with bare hands and bare head, hastily digging out of his driveway in St. Louis. Cohen chose an angle that captures the boots, naked legs and snowed-in homes, transforming the man-vs-nature moment into a single, bone-chilling image.
Patrick Farrell, the curator of The Sunday Still, is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner for Breaking News Photography for The Miami Herald, where he has worked since 1987. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Management at the University of Miami School of Communication.
Sunday Pod curator Jody Avirgan’s 30 for 30 podcasts series recently released its fourth season. Jody is the host of the podcast as well a producer and the series’ editor. Sunday Long Read producer Étienne Lajoie talked to him about the first few episodes. Below is an excerpt of their conversation–read the interview in full on sundaylongread.com.
The interview has been edited for clarity.
Before we get into the episodes, why did 30 for 30 go from a serialized series last season to single-episode stories for the fourth season?
It was always part of the plan, to have the flexibility to do multi-parts stories and be able to do individual stories. To me, in the larger sense possible, my favorite thing about 30 for 30 is the flexibility and the diversity of stories you can tell.
Is there a throughline, a common theme, in the five episodes of season four?
The throughline is really the throughline for the whole series, which is that every story we tell, we wanted it to feel like it has a bigger “So what?” That’s what we ask all the time. “This thing happened? So what?” What does it mean for society? What does it mean for the people involved?"
Juiced, the first episode of the new season, is the story of former MLB player Jose Canseco’s book about the use of steroids in baseball. What was your vision when you began working on this story and was the final product close to what you had envisioned?
In some fundamental way, I think I have an instinct that the bigger the story, the smaller the angle. And also, the reverse applies. In this case, I knew that trying to tell “THE STORY OF STEROIDS IN BASEBALL,” or even “THE JOSE CANSECO STORY,” was going to be a fool’s errand. Frankly, if this story changed in its conception in any way, it may have gotten a little bigger. At its core, I like that it’s a small, strange angle on this big story.
What did Canseco think of the project and how did he feel about the podcasting aspect–having to tell his story this way?
It was—no surprise—a bit chaotic to organize. One thing that we ask of our characters is to give us information on two levels: on the one hand, we ask them to just tell us what happened and then they also have to take another path to that story and describe their emotional life during that. So it’s a pretty high bar for our characters, we ask a lot of them. And for Jose Canseco, that kind is tough.
Let’s talk about the second episode–All In: Sparking the Poker Boom. You said earlier your technique was “The bigger the story, the smaller the lens” and vice versa. Where did this story fall on that spectrum?
It took a while to figure out what the lens was going to be. We chose this production company that was tasked with making this story. They went in thinking this was going to be a story about stars and about starpower and all of a sudden this complete amateur [Chris Moneymaker] with this crazy last name comes out of nowhere and they have a magical story fall into their lap. It’s a little meta because we are telling a story about storytelling.
In episode three, Six Who Sat, you begin by framing the story as “Running is popular now, but it’s in great part because of the battles fought by these women.” Why did you decide to tell this story?
There’s just a natural appeal to hidden history for us and so anytime you have an event as big as the New York City marathon that has a secret moment in its history that not that many people know, there’s an appeal there. Moreover, that moment is like an actual specific moment–in this case, a protest–that’s great because you know you have a narrative point to hang your story around and then anytime it taps into larger themes like misogyny and discrimination and protest, it feels important.
Did you find or talk to people who opposed the presence of women in these races?
That was a big challenge for the story as well because obviously there were impediments and there was misogyny both within running and in society as a whole. But there wasn’t a clear boogeyman. There was an institution, the Amateur Athletic Union, that was putting a number of laws on the book that made it harder for women to run, so the fight was really against this institution.
Sunday Pod curator Jody Avirgan is the host of FiveThirtyEight's politics podcast and is heading up the new "30 for 30" podcast documentary series from ESPN.
I lapped up this poignant story of a teacher/coach who saves the life of his students during a school shooting by stepping into the line of fire. This is the tale of a humble hero in small-town America who now lives with bullets lodged in his body.
The Long View curator Justine Gubar is the former Vice President, News Narratives at Fusion and the author of Fanaticus: Mischief and Madness in the Modern Sports Fan. Reach out to Justine at justinegubar@mac.com if you have a suggestion for next week's Long View.
On November 13, 2018, journalist Jim Acosta and CNN sued President Trump and number of White House officials in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia following the revocation of Acosta's White House press credentials. Acosta and CNN allege three causes of action in the 18-page complaint: (i) violation of the First Amendment; (ii) violation of the Fifth Amendment; and (iii) violations of the Administrative Procedure Act. Among other things, Acosta and CNN have asked for "[i]immediate restoration of Acosta's press credentials and hard pass."
Sunday Esoterica curator Ryan Rodenberg works as a professor at Florida State University, where he teaches research methods and sports law. He writes a lot of academic articles and some mainstream pieces too.
Modern rock may not have a more enthralling current journey than that of Laura Jane Grace. From 1997 until 2012, Grace was known as Tom Gabel, leader of Against Me!, arguably the fiercest American punk band of the past two decades. In 2012, Gabel came out as transgender, began going by the new name Laura Jane Grace and living as a woman.
With a great deal of vocal support from the punk community behind her, Grace has continued to lead Against Me! in a dynamic, blistering manner, releasing one killer album after another, including the appropriately titled Transgender Dysmorphia Blues in 2014 and Shape Shift With Me in 2016.
Bought to Rot is the debut album from Laura Jane Grace and the Devouring Mothers, Grace's less punk, but still very rock side project. Released own the storied roots-rock label Bloodshot Records, Bought to Rot features Grace's dominant vocals in a rather approachable context, with a broader palette of rock textures, from glam, to power pop with even hints of jangly twang mixed in.
Long Play curator Kelly Dearmore is the Music Critic for the Dallas Morning News. Yes, he's heard your son's demo tape, and he thinks it's fantastic.
"Bless This Acid House,” by Kasabian, remains the perfect Rowdy British lad anthem. Accept no substitutes.
The Sunday LimeRick from Tim Torkildson
It's white and fluffy, soft and cold; and falls on good and bad.
It turns the poor commuter into some deranged nomad.
Flung from heaven up above to beautify and clean,
the pale stuff is as slippery as newly spun sateen.
Give me a tropic beach somewhere with sultry palms that shake;
I'd rather fight a typhoon than another darn snowflake!
Sunday Limerick writer Tim Torkildson is a retired circus clown who fiddles with rhyme. All his verses can be found at Tim's Clown Alley.
This is our new occasional feature: The Sunday Long Thread. If there’s a Twitter thread you’d like to see featured in this space, please let us know editors@sundaylongread.com.
Got a call on my cell from @JimVandeHei while I was cooking dinner, what follows is a rough transcript, pls enjoy.
Me: Hi this is Lyz
JV: Hi Jim Vandehei do you have a minute?
Me: Yeah, like five, I'm getting dinner ready how can I help you?
JV: Did you actually read all the deep dives that you wrote about in that dopey piece?
Me: Every single one, some of them twice
JV: And that's the conclusion you came to?
Me: Yep.
JV: I'm curious who are you?
Me: What's this about? Because if you are just calling to yell at me, this conversation is over.
JV: I am asking a simple question, who are you to write this, because you are insulting some of the best journalists in the business
Me: Okay, well if you are just going to insult me, this conversation is over, have a good night
PS he was mad about this. Thank you for enjoying this edition of men yell at Lyz pls order my book.
Just a quick update, I wasn't actually cooking. I was just waiting for GrubHub to deliver my ribs and drinking whiskey. I apologise for misleading you all.
The Sund&y Ampers&nd from Nick Aster
The Sunday Ampersand is chosen by Nick Aster. Nick most recently served as founder of TriplePundit.com, a leading publication focused on sustainability and corporate social responsibility.
Founder, Curator: Don Van Natta Jr. Producer, Curator: Jacob Feldman Producer, Curator: Étienne Lajoie Senior Recycling Editor: Jack Shafer Senior Long View Editor: Justine Gubar Senior Photo Editor: Patrick Farrell Senior Music Editor: Kelly Dearmore Senior Limerick Editor: Tim Torkildson Senior Podcast Editor: Jody Avirgan Senior Editor of Esoterica: Ryan M. Rodenberg
Digital Team: Nation Hahn, Nickolaus Hines, Megan McDonell, Alexa Steinberg Podcast Team: Peter Bailey-Wells, Cary Barbor, Julian McKenzie, Jonathan Yales Webmaster: Ana Srikanth Campus Editor: Peter Warren
Contributing Editors: Bruce Arthur, Shaun Assael, Nick Aster, Alex Belth, Sara J. Benincasa, Jonathan Bernstein, Sara Blask, Greg Bishop, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Maria Bustillos, Chris Cillizza, Anna Katherine Clemmons, Rich Cohen, Jonathan Coleman, Pam Colloff, Maureen Dowd, Charles Duhigg, Brett Michael Dykes, Geoff Edgers, Hadley Freeman, Lea Goldman, Michael N. Graff, Maggie Haberman, Reyhan Harmanci, Virginia Heffernan, Matthew Hiltzik, Jena Janovy, Bomani Jones, Chris Jones, Peter Kafka, Paul Kix, Mina Kimes, Peter King, Michael Kruse, Tom Lamont, Edmund Lee, Chris Lehmann, Will Leitch, Glynnis MacNicol, Drew Magary, Erik Malinowski, Jonathan Martin, Betsy Fischer Martin, Susan McPherson, Ana Menendez, Kevin Merida, Heidi N. Moore, Eric Neel, Joe Nocera, Ashley R. Parker, Anne Helen Petersen, Jo Piazza, Joe Posnanski, S.L. Price, Jennifer Romolini, Julia Rubin, Albert Samaha, Bob Sassone, Bruce Schoenfeld, Michael Schur, Joe Sexton, Jacqui Shine, Rachel Sklar, Dan Shanoff, Ben Smith, Adam Sternbergh,Matt Sullivan, Wright Thompson, Pablo Torre, Kevin Van Valkenburg, John A. Walsh, Seth Wickersham and Karen Wickre.
Header Image: Ryan Pfluger
You can read more about our staff, and contact us (we'd love to hear from you!) on our website: sundaylongread.com. Help pick next week's selections by tweeting us your favorite stories with #SundayLR.
Enjoy the best longform journalism. Every Sunday.
Happy Sunday! Let us be one of the first to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, the best American holiday for all the obvious reasons. We will be off next Sunday to celebrate, but as a way of expressing our thanks to those of you who are supporting the newsletter, we will be sending out a members-only issue late this week, featuring the best essays of the year, as selected by 
This is our new occasional feature: The Sunday Long Thread. If there’s a Twitter thread you’d like to see featured in this space, please let us know 
