The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
August 23, 2024 at 03:30PM
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In this week’s edition:
- When science fails to overturn a wrongful conviction
- Six strange months posing as a security guard
- Israel, through the eyes of a former IDF soldier
- The sensory experience of food shopping in Rome
- The catharsis of clubbing in Kosovo
1. He Was Convicted of Killing His Baby. The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough.
Pamela Colloff | ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine | July 11, 2024 | 8,853 words
Investigative juggernaut Pamela Colloff has dedicated the last several years of her career to examining the intersection of junk science and criminal justice. In her latest piece, she tells the story of Russell Maze, a Tennessee man who was put in prison for life after a jury found him guilty in 2004 of killing his infant son. The verdict rested on a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, which has since come under a huge deal of scientific scrutiny, so much so that a new department in the Nashville prosecutor’s office dedicated to post-conviction relief took up Maze’s case and argued in favor of vacating his conviction. But as Colloff shows, even when scientific evidence casts serious doubt on a guilty verdict, and even when prosecutors are the ones saying that a defendant is innocent, the justice system can be intractable. In other words, despite what many popular true crime podcasts and docuseries would have you think, science isn’t a surefire remedy for past injustice. Colloff’s feature is a bracing reminder of how dangerously prone US justice is to doing things the way they’ve always been done, to relying on what’s familiar instead of what’s true. As an added bonus, in Colloff’s hands, an extended courtroom scene that’s all dialogue feels like something from a novel. The climax of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold comes to mind. —SD
2. The Thin Purple Line
Jasper Craven | Harper’s Magazine | August 19, 2024 | 6,770 words
Jasper Craven’s memorable exposé of the private-security industry starts with an even more memorable caricature. In order to see the security world from the inside, Craven sets out to get a job with the massive firm Allied Universal, and his training instructor is basically every Danny McBride character rolled into one: he’s outfitted for combat, laden with survivalist accoutrements, and preoccupied with societal breakdown. Craven’s real target here isn’t cosplay cowboys, but the paranoia of Allied’s worldview and the flimsiness of its vetting process. His instructor gives students the answers before administering the certification tests; a student in the class who tests positive for meth progresses to the next phase of onboarding. Yet, Allied has more than 800,000 guards around the world, many of them in New York City, where private security guards outnumber NYPD officers three to one. As Craven reports, the history of private security in New York City is distinctly checkered, with agencies getting a foothold in the Big Apple through bribery and graft. Regulation ensued, but the industry remained lax. Today, as Craven’s six-month stint with Allied shows vividly, these firms have become titans by monetizing an ill-defined threat. “We were not guardians against fear but expressions of it,” he writes, “human markers placed in uneasy environments, providing permission for society to ignore the underlying issues that make them that way.” It’s both darkly comic and distinctly discomfiting—equal parts Observe and Report and Nickel and Dimed. —PR
3. As a Former IDF Soldier and Historian of Genocide, I Was Deeply Disturbed by My Recent Visit to Israel
Omer Bartov | The Guardian | August 13, 2024 | 7,433 words
Last November, a month into Israel’s siege on Gaza, Omer Bartov wrote a widely read New York Times op-ed entitled “What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide.” Bartov argued that while Israeli leaders’ rhetoric suggested genocidal intent, the country was not yet committing genocide, which meant that there was still time to stop the worst of international crimes from occurring. In this new essay, one of the best I’ve read lately about the destruction of Gaza, Bartov writes, “I no longer believe that.” Weaving his personal experiences from a recent trip to Israel with history and even poetry, Bartov illustrates the “nadir” at which Israel has arrived. “The ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning [has] been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory,” Bartov writes. In other words, Israeli politicians meant what they said last fall. Their calls to erase Gaza “from the face of the earth,” to go into the Strip and “kill, kill, kill” weren’t just talk—they were an articulation of strategy. And Bartov finds that much of the Israeli public either denies or refuses to engage with the notion that their government is committing genocide. “Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others—the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name—only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject,” he writes. “The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear, and anger.” Bartov’s essay is an illuminating, real-time examination of how a society justifies dehumanization and devastation. —SD
4. Food Shopping in Rome
Judith Sanders | Panorama Journal | July 30, 2024 | 7,079 words
How do you get your food? Do you visit a supermarket in person, order online, or grow your own? Judith Sanders’s thoughtful essay about grocery shopping in Rome has been on my mind ever since I read it. During a stay in Italy with her husband, Sanders buys supplies to last a couple of days at a time. She visits the fish monger, the chicken butcher, the outdoor markets, and the bakery in turn, carrying bread and meat and cheese up four flights to their cramped attic apartment. These domestic tasks become a ritual of cultural study. She learns how to shop via osmosis: wading into clusters of customers, overhearing exchanges in Italian between patron and purveyor, and mastering how to order—loaf by multigrain loaf. What resonates most about this piece is how Sanders’s approach to food changes during her stay. She forgoes smoothies and tofu scrambles for breakfast in favor of “slabs of that chewy multigrain, layered with jam and fresh ricotta.” Their building’s rooftop patio hosts many an al fresco repast: “There we spread a picnic of the good bread with olive oil or pesto, an earthy cheese, silky ribbons of prosciutto, olives that could inspire odes, tomato and cucumber slices, an apple.” While Sanders wrestles with the provenance of her purchases and their authenticity, she decides to embrace these simple and delicious elements of la dolce vita over a strict diet. “I had to eat less to feel satisfied,” she writes. “Each bite was so enjoyable, I didn’t need many of them.” In North America, we tend to prize variety and convenience over everything; as Sanders learns, this quest for efficiency leaves much to be desired. Read her satisfying essay and prepare your palate for poetry. —KS
5. In Kosovo, Techno Is a Symbol of Resilience
Lale Arikoglu | Condé Nast Traveler | August 17, 2024 | 3,735 words
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the end of the Kosovo War. In January, Kosovo joined the Schengen Zone, which marks another milestone: Kosovars are now able to travel freely across Europe without a visa. In this story, Lale Arikoglu gets a dose of Kosovo’s nightlife in its capital, Pristina: hitting up bars, clubs, and underground venues; speaking to partiers, promoters, and organizers as she hops from one hotspot to the next; and capturing the excitement and sense of possibility in the air. Kosovo’s electronic music scene, which has grown in isolation, is “driven by Kosovars, for Kosovars,” she writes, and is an essential part of the country’s rebuilding. Like Berlin—where techno-fueled nightlife emerged from the city’s ruins after the wall fell—Kosovo has found in the sound of electronic music “both its post-war struggle and collective euphoria.” In the spirit of some of my favorite rave reads, this piece is more than a lifestyle feature; it celebrates the beauty of club and rave culture across borders, and the dance floor as a space of resistance and freedom, of escape and release, of community and unity. Joined by an old friend whom she once partied with in Glasgow, Arikoglu recounts what sounds like a dizzying, sleep-deprived tour of the city, but also slows down to reflect during quiet moments: “The night is only just beginning,” she writes, “but while the dance floor has yet to fill up, the space between our bodies feels less like an absence and more like a pause amid change.” What comes next for Kosovars remains to be seen, but Arikoglu’s soulful story makes one thing clear: Kosovo dances to its own beat. —CLR
Audience Award
The Cure for Disposable Plastic Crap Is Here—and It’s Loony
Clive Thompson | WIRED | August 1, 2024 | 5,167 words
We rely on single-use plastics for every aspect of our daily lives. Thin white bags for groceries, thicker containers for takeout, bottles for sodas and water—the list goes on. Around the world, we generate more than 500 million tons of plastic waste a year, and only 9 percent of it is actually recycled. Is it time to break this addiction? Clive Thompson talks with people experimenting with viable solutions, like a bioplastic made of seaweed or a company that allows customers to return reusable products. The question is: are we ready to make these changes? —CLR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/23/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-528/
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