The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
August 09, 2024 at 03:30PM
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In this week’s edition:
- The people risking their lives to save Ukrainian art
- The life of an Olympic champion, on and off the track
- The DNA lab solving hundreds of cases
- Reflections on insomnia, distraction, and grief
- A writer’s Scrabble obsession
1. Ukraine’s Death-Defying Art Rescuers
Charlotte Higgins | The Guardian | July 30, 2024 | 5,856 words
After a seemingly interminable period of creeping despair, it’s been strange the last few weeks to feel hopeful about the world. There’s a lot that’s still terrible—Gaza and climate change top my list, and perhaps yours—but the shifts in the US presidential race, with an assist by the bonhomie of the Olympics, have made me feel uncharacteristically buoyant. So I was primed to love this story about Leonid Marushchak, who has made it his mission to save Ukraine’s art from the front lines of Russia’s invasion. Simply put, Marushchak is a hero, one who doesn’t wear a cape and who has to ride shotgun: because he doesn’t have a driver’s license, when he decided to start hauling his country’s irreplaceable heritage westward, he enlisted friends and loved ones to help him. He’s stowed paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and other objects into vans and trucks, then ferried them away from danger, covering tens of thousands of miles in the process. “On one trip, what at first felt like an enormous pothole turned out to be the shock waves from a supersonic bomber, which all but knocked the van over,” Charlotte Higgins writes. “Another time, a Ukrainian tank almost crushed them by accident.” This piece is both a propulsive adventure story and a tender celebration of Ukrainian art, filled with beautiful writing about the objects Marushchak has rescued. Here is Higgins on babas, huge statues carved by Turkic nomads a millennium ago: “Age has blurred their facial features into inscrutability. Beside them, you feel a little smaller, a little more what you really are, which is to say a flimsy, short-lived creature of bone and muscle and soft tissue.” Swoon. —SD
2. The Spiritual Realm of Sydney McLaughlin
Lex Pryor | The Ringer | August 7, 2024 | 3,203 words
The Paris Games have already delivered their share of jaw-dropping track and field moments. Julien Alfred beating out Sha’Carri Richardson for gold in the women’s 100 meters and becoming Saint Lucia’s first-ever medalist. Cole Hocker’s homestretch siege in the men’s 1500 meters. The pole-vault acrobatics of Mondo Duplantis. But for my money, the most impressive one didn’t result in a medal at all. Rather, it was the semifinals of the women’s 400-meter hurdle, where Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone presented an athletic spectacle, so pure and effortless that it seemed to defy articulation. Or it would defy articulation, were it not for Lex Pryor’s remarkable profile of the runner. Like McLaughlin-Levrone, he comes out of the blocks with power and settles into an easy grace: “There is the contest between the lanes and the contest beyond them.” His subject is a woman of unprecedented gifts who never stops working, a woman who has struggled with demons while keeping her faith close, a woman who dreams of a life away from the track even as she redefines what’s possible upon it. The magic here is that Pryor teases out all those tensions through reporting rather than disclosure; McLaughlin-Levrone shares with him, sure, but this isn’t a silver-platter profile. Instead, he does the hard work: talking to coaches, watching the film, finding a way to reconstruct the mind of a champion. This is a special piece of sportswriting—not for the narrative, but for the knowledge you walk away with. —PR
3. Inside the Texas Crime Lab That’s Cracked Hundreds of Cold Cases
Michael Hardy | Texas Monthly | July 18, 2024 | 6,587 words
Texas Monthly is back with another engrossing true-crime tale, this time about the 1995 unsolved murder of Catherine Edwards. Michael Hardy weaves this account with a look inside Othram, the private lab that helped solve the case nearly three decades later. The innovative startup specializes in forensic genetic genealogy, which combines DNA sequencing with traditional genealogical research to identify victims and suspects. This technique is very new; it gained attention in 2018, when it was used to identify California’s Golden State Killer. My idea of a crime lab like Othram is one-dimensional, shaped by police procedurals on TV, and Othram’s interior as Hardy describes it matches those expectations: research labs with bulky machines, masked technicians analyzing evidence like bones, teeth, and nail clippings. But Hardy’s excellent reporting on how the technology works adds more color to such a place—what’s needed to build a helpful DNA profile, how careful the lab must be in handling evidence, what percentage of evidence they reject. Hardy introduces David Mittelman, Othram’s founder, as a sort of modern mad scientist whose vision is ambitious, even hopeful. He asks: “So how can we take this powerful technology to do something good in the world?” He hopes Othram’s methods will become the standard, embraced by law enforcement and adopted by crime labs that struggle to keep up with investigations. It all makes you wonder: could we ever live in a future in which cold cases do not exist? In just six years, consider that Othram has been publicly credited with helping to solve nearly 350 cases, and has assisted in thousands more. The evidence is compelling, but the jury’s still out. —CLR
4. Forever Less of Beauty
Elissa Altman | The Bitter Southerner | July 24, 2024 | 2,106
In this thoughtful essay for The Bitter Southerner, Elissa Altman invites us into her night brain—perseverator, purveyor of the irrational, player of tricks. Her mind wanders over the dangers in society, the health problems of dear friends, and needed home repairs. She eventually arrives at more pleasant thoughts: the magical opening of Underland by Robert Macfarlane; making music; and sitting in silence on her porch with an emerald-green male luna moth, a creature that lives only one week after emerging from its cocoon. In considering the good and the bad in her life, Altman realizes that as humans, we would not be able to recognize beautiful things without the contrast of hardship and darkness. We would have no concept of day without the concept of night. For Altman, whose food blog won a James Beard Award in 2012, cooking helps ground her. When faced with life’s trials, she bakes bread, a healing ritual. “I stand in the kitchen with my aching back, listening to the radio, my hands in a yellowware bowl; I leave my rings on as instructed when I was a child by the older women in my life, to be caked with the dough of sustenance and sorrow, and worn to the grave as representative of the quiet and holy immensity of one’s life,” she writes. This piece got me to slow down, and I love it for that. It’s a great reminder that context is everything and that we must hold space for moments of beauty and, more importantly, seek them out—precisely because they’re so fleeting. —KS
5. Scrabble, Anonymous
Brad Phillips | The Paris Review | May 15, 2024 | 2,489 words
My husband and I have played an ongoing game of Wordfeud, a Scrabble clone, for over five years, so I was powerless against Brad Phillips’s Paris Review piece, in which he recounts playing speed Scrabble against a bot every day for the past 25 years. On one particular day, he played 19 three-minute games before breakfast, 13 of which he won. Matches were limited to three minutes. Scrabble is Phillips’s obsession, a not-necessarily-healthy replacement for alcohol addiction, a compulsion that holds a hint of shame. The game isn’t about improving Phillips’s vocabulary, it’s about instantaneous anagrams, strategy, and rote memorization. Apparently this is true for the most serious professional players. “When playing Scrabble, language explodes then settles quietly on your rack, having been decommissioned,” he writes. “Each letter is a weapon only in the service of point accumulation and can no longer convey meaning by joining with its fellow letters. A word on a Scrabble board is a mathematical fact, not a unit of expression.” In addition to a litany of fun anagrams I attempted to memorize—CAUTIONED also spells EDUCATION, for one—I enjoyed the twist this piece takes when Phillips goes on the road to a meeting of the New York Scrabble Club. Up until this point in his life, he’d never played against strangers in person. There were actual Scrabble boards to play on, tiles stored in purple velvet Crown Royal bags. The whole vibe feels almost calming. There, Phillips played four opponents head-to-head, and for the first time in a quarter century, he learns something new about how to play the game. —KS
Audience Award
What Happened to Ice Cube?
Joel Anderson | Slate | August 3, 2024 | 4,998 words
For anyone who grew up with pre-Friday Ice Cube, it’s been hard to reconcile the firebrand behind AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted and Death Certificate with the man we see today. Joel Anderson doesn’t just mourn that tension; he litigates Cube’s ideological trajectory, making a strong case that behind the rhetoric has been a man who’s attuned, above all, to the art of the deal. —PR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/09/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-526/
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