The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
September 27, 2024 at 03:30PM
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In this week’s Top 5:
- Ta-Nehisi Coates on necessary truths
- The rise of Russian poker bots
- Searching for interplanetary life
- The real predator in the woods
- Letting horror movies be horror movies
1. The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ryu Spaeth | New York Magazine | September 23, 2024 | 7,165 words
Once among the most prolific political and social commentators in the US, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been relatively quiet for the last decade. (Emphasis on relatively: Coates has written a best-selling novel and several comic books; guest-edited an issue of Vanity Fair about race, violence, and protest; and dipped his toe into screenwriting.) Next week, he’s turning up the volume once again with the release of his new book, The Message. According to the publisher’s description, Coates’s book “is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.” Central among those truths is Israel’s violent, decades-long subjugation of Palestinians, and US institutions’ complicity in sustaining what Coates sees as a system akin to Jim Crow. As Ryu Spaeth explains in this wise, probing profile, which doubles as a necessary piece of media criticism, many of those same institutions have championed Coates. This positions The Message as a professional risk, but Coates is more concerned with morality than he is with power, something that far too few people in media can rightfully claim to be. As Spaeth shows, Coates is an unusual public intellectual in his willingness not just to change his thinking about an issue but to put that evolution on display. He’s open to learning, to critique, and to using the process of writing to work out what he means to say. In an era when people with platforms tend to be obsessed with their own certitude, facts be damned, this is a breath of fresh air. —SD
2. The Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online Poker
Kit Chellel | Bloomberg Businessweek | September 20, 2024 | 5,763 words
Several years ago, people warned that artificial intelligence would become an existential threat to online poker. Today, advanced poker software is easily accessible, and bots are everywhere: if you’re playing online, you might be playing a machine. Kit Chellel dives into this world and investigates the rise of bot farms, eventually tracing activity to a Siberian programmer collective that created the world’s most sophisticated poker technology—built on game theory, adapted to play against other machines, and unleashed across the internet’s major poker websites, earning millions. I love the world that Chellel builds and all the elements that make for a compelling story. Russian gamers versed in the “mathematical dark arts.” A mysterious massive operation known simply as BF Corp. Powerful bots called Neo and Cepheus. Intrigue aside, is online poker doomed? Have we strayed so far from the digital game’s glory years, back in 2003 when an unknown accountant named Chris Moneymaker emerged from a PokerStars satellite tournament to win the prestigious World Series of Poker? “The game is now less about psychology, spectacular bluffs or calls, and more about revealing as little as possible to opponents and grinding out the percentages,” he writes. “Machines have taught us to play better, more boring poker.” As Chellel discovers, the very people who changed the online game with a card-playing AI actually have a plan to save it. It’s an interesting idea—and I won’t spoil it for you—but I wouldn’t place any bets on it yet. —CLR
3. The Searchers*
Dave Eggers | The Washington Post | September 17, 2024 | 6,805 words
A few weeks ago, I picked the Michael Lewis piece that kicked off The Washington Post‘s feature series about government workers. I’m not surprised that the series has continued turning out gems, but I’m still delighted, because Dave Eggers’ report from the Jet Propulsion Lab (“the architecture is just short of gulag, the offices just short of stultifying”) delivers some much-needed hope for the future. The men and women he talks to are driving us toward a discovery that’s no less momentous for being inevitable: life on other planets. They are curious, brilliant, driven, and unfathomably modest. While self-deifying billionaires are trying to terraform Mars or launch their own egos into space, these scientists are spending taxpayer money as judiciously as possible, devising mind-bending technologies that will help us see farther, more clearly, than ever before. Eggers plays the layperson with joy, marveling as anyone would, professing ignorance as anyone would. Sixty years ago, the astronauts of the Gemini and Apollo missions became national heroes; yet, they always traveled by the grace of JPL and NASA scientists. Today, with crewed missions ever rarer and our eyes able to see farther than we can travel in multiple lifetimes, those scientists are the heroes. The personal risks may be different, but the possibilities they enable inspire us all the same. *Subscription required. —PR
4. Woman in the Woods
Holly Haworth | The Bitter Southerner | September 8, 2024 | 2,884 words
Amid a scene of spring flowers, amid vibrant color and promise, a woman lays dead of blunt force trauma. This is how Holly Haworth introduces us to 22-year-old Lakin Riley, who was murdered and discovered in a wooded area in Athens, Georgia, in early 2024. The juxtaposition in the opening paragraph between natural beauty and a horrific, needless death stopped me short. Riley’s story is just the beginning; Haworth litanizes several women of varying ages found dead in forested areas across America—all victims of violence, nearly all murdered by men. As a naturalist Haworth is drawn to the patterns she notices in the woods. Recognizing that during her walks she could very easily stumble on the body of a murdered woman is a particularly sobering observation. “As I foraged murders like a terrible, bitter fruit that is always in season, and collected them onto the page, it was clear that women found dead in the woods are all part of an ecology of gendered violence,” she writes. As she considers what it means to be a woman in the woods—a place where she sought refuge from the men and boys in her life who exerted “verbal, psychological, sexual, and physical violence” against her—she knows she has less to fear from venomous snakes, bears, and mountain lions than from encountering a man, a different kind of predator altogther. —KS
5. Elevate Me Later
John Semley | The Baffler | September 12, 2024 | 3,291 words
When my husband announced that he’d gotten us tickets to see the movie Longlegs one weekend a few months back, I was thrilled. I love horror movies—so much so, I once drove away a roommate who couldn’t take all the screaming coming from the TV in our living room—and this one was getting great buzz. Fast forward to today, and I still haven’t seen Longlegs. My husband and I got ticket refunds in advance of the showing we were due to attend. Our decision was based on a wave of disappointment that swept through fellow horror heads who got to Longlegs first. Without exception, these friends told me it wasn’t scary. And if a horror flick isn’t scary, what the hell is the point? As John Semley argues in this very smart essay, Longlegs is in keeping with a trend in the genre, which “prize[s] aesthetic sheen and psychological depth over typical hallmarks of the genre, like gore, jump scares, or heavy-breathing serial killers in dinged-up goalie masks.” Problem being, this can—and often does—strip the genre of its unique allure. Great horror doesn’t do analytical work for you; rather, it begs you to analyze it on your own, perhaps in the dark, and certainly after your heart rate has gone back to normal. “Where many of the classic horror films felt like they were smuggling meanings into them, these new cycles pushed (or ‘elevated’) any buried subtext to the level of text,” Semley writes. Now, there are some movies that Semley groups in the elevated category that I will defend to the death, chief among them Robert Eggers’s The Witch, a near-perfect, utterly terrifying movie with an ending so good I had to see it in theaters more than once. But he articulates precisely why I wasn’t enthralled by The Babadook, It Follows, or Midsommar; why I hated the remake of Suspiria with a fiery passion; and why a recent rewatch of Hereditary left me cold. It’s time to let horror be horror. Let my monsters go. —SD
Audience Award
Here’s the story our audience loved most this week:
Gold Treasure Worth a Fortune Was Just Hidden in a Forest. The Hunt Starts Now
Joseph Bien-Kahn | Wired | September 19, 2024 | 4,071 words
Somewhere in the northeastern United States, video game designer Jason Rohrer has hidden treasure worth $25,000, cast from 10 troy ounces of 24k gold. Rohrer’s created game titles including Passage, The Castle Doctrine, and One Hour One Life, but Project Skydrop is his first game set in the real world. And as of September 19, 2024, the hunt has just begun—the treasure awaits you. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/27/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-533/
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