The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
October 25, 2024 at 03:30PM
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
- The exploitative methods of political campaigners.
- A profile of a python hunter.
- The dangerous sport of cheerleading.
- The demise, revival, and demise again of the fin whale.
- Not a fad: our love for movie theaters.
1. How Elderly Dementia Patients Are Unwittingly Fueling Political Campaigns
Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, Anna-Maja Rappard, Casey Tolan, Lou Robinson, and Byron Manley | CNN | October 22, 2024 | 3,984 words
Some days I feel like I receive more texts and emails from political candidates and campaigns than I do from friends and family. Last week, I was invited to sign Kamala Harris’s birthday card on a website where I was also asked to “chip in” to her campaign coffers. In August, Ted Cruz asked if I could spare a dollar, and he apologized that it wasn’t the first time he’d come begging. You’ve probably had this experience, too. The use of people’s personal contact information to solicit political donations en masse is out of control, and the tone of the requests is creepy. Sometimes a message is awkwardly intimate (I am not your “friend,” Mark Kelly); other times it’s scolding (“Despite texting you MANY TIMES…”). I usually ignore the messages, as I suspect most people do; I’ve also found that replying “f— off” gets you an automatic unsubscribe. But, as this CNN investigation reveals, this public nuisance has an exploitative underbelly that warrants scrutiny. There are vulnerable people who engage with the messages in earnest. They really think they’re being contacted by some of the most powerful people in the US, and that the fate of the country is in their hands. These people are elderly Americans with dementia. They’ve hemorrhaged life savings and put their children in debt by donating huge amounts to campaigns. Often, they’ve unwittingly signed up for recurring payments on popular donation platforms thanks to pre-checked boxes and fine print that they either don’t notice or read and forget. “Recurring donations only multiply as confirmed donors become valuable political currency—their names and contact information quickly swapped and sold,” the authors of the investigation explain. “And once WinRed or ActBlue has a donor’s financial information, donations can be triggered by actions including a response to an online survey, an order of campaign merchandise, or a one-word reply to a text message.” I uttered “oh my god” under my breath a lot while reading this story, but that passage made me say something else, at volume: “f— off.” —SD
2. She’s One of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters
Lindsey Liles | Garden & Gun | October 15, 2024 | 3,187 words
At the age when some look forward to mall walking and complaining about the government full-time, Donna Kalil, age 62, is busy capturing 200-pound snakes as part of the Florida Water Management District’s python bounty hunter program. In this thoughtful Garden & Gun profile, Lindsey Liles explains that today’s pythons descend from the exotic pet boom in the 1970s; when some Florida snake owners got bored of their slithering charges, they simply opened the back door. Burmese pythons have since proliferated in the state’s muggy warmth. An invasive species, they’ve decimated bird and fur-bearing animal populations alike, single-scaledly upending the ecosystem. This piece is far more than a mere profile of a female first. While Kalil was for a long time the only woman working as a bounty hunter, Liles recounts this dangerous—but very necessary—work with deep care and respect for all the humans and animals in the story. Sadly, the ending is an unhappy one for every snake the team finds. Although euthanasia is the only viable option due to the volume of pythons in the region, the team takes stoic pride in following strict rules for treating each snake humanely when the time comes. “Kalil does not like to talk about this part of her job,” writes Liles. “It is something she does alone, in the privacy of her garage. ‘Before I do it, I tell each python that I’m sorry for what I have to do,’ she says, and falls silent.” To be able to do the job, the team remembers the animals who will live without the threat of an invasive predator among them. If only humans, upon adopting a pet snake so many years ago, had been faithful in our duty to provide lifelong care. —KS
3. How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular
David Gauvey Herbert | The New York Times Magazine | October 22, 2024 | 9,062 words
All these years, I’ve not given the topic of cheerleading much thought beyond my own experience on a middle school squad in the early ’90s. Wearing that black-and-gold uniform at football games was mainly a social-status booster, putting me in the same league as the cool girls. It wasn’t until watching Bring It On, the 2000 film starring Kirsten Dunst, that I realized there was a bigger world out there of high-stakes competitive cheer. Cheerleading, as David Gauvey Herbert explains, has evolved since the late 1800s. I had no idea, for instance, that it began as a male collegiate sport and wasn’t common among women until World War II, when men went off for duty. Over more than four decades, one man—Jeff Webb—transformed modern cheerleading from a tradition on the sidelines to a televised main event. Webb shaped the activity into a rigorous sport of acrobatics, performed by young athletes who flash exuberant faces. Herbert’s deep dive into this world, however, reveals a dark side: a sport soiled by private equity; a culture that extracts money from families; emotional and sexual abuse; and alarming injury statistics. (For years, Webb has refused to call cheerleading a sport because it would require stricter safety regulations.) At the heart of competitive cheer is Varsity Spirit, Webb’s billion-dollar company, which controls most of the market. As with Herbert’s other great reads over recent years, his reporting and storytelling never fail to immerse me in the worlds he writes about, and this piece is just as engrossing. When you strip away the smiles, the sequins, and the sparkly pom-poms, what’s left is an ugly, dangerous industry. —CLR
4. The Coming Collision Between Whales and Tankers on British Columbia’s Coast
Laura Trethewey | Hakai | October 15, 2024 | 5,300 words
A few weeks ago, I was staying on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. Early one morning, as I picked my way along a chilly pebble beach, I heard what sounded like a giant sigh and saw a mist of steam rising above the still sea. A few seconds later, I saw a tail. A tail! I stood transfixed as the whale meandered slowly across the bay, holding my breath every time a smooth gray fin cut through the surface. Afterward, I messaged nearly everyone on my phone to give them my important viewing news. Various tepid responses of, “oh, cool,” trickled back, but I remained delighted. A quick consult on whale shapes revealed the source of my joy to be a fin whale, the subject of Laura Trethewey’s carefully reported piece for Hakai. Trethewey visits whale expert Hermann Meuter at Cetacea Lab, his research station on British Columbia’s north coast. Meuter is a man who would have appreciated my whale sighting text: taken out on his boat, Trethewey watches the stoic poker-faced German “practically dancing across the boat deck” when they spot fin whales, not shy of his “raw unabashed love for whales.” But this love can be painful. Whales have been hunted mercilessly in the Kitimat fjord system—where Meuter works—and, as Trethewey writes, “After the last BC whaling station shut down in 1967, no one spotted a fin whale here for nearly 40 years.” They have finally been coming back—possibly even the same ones who fled decades ago (a fin whale can live for a hundred years). But now there is a new threat: tanker strikes are killing the whales. Plans to ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) out of Kitimat mean this problem is set to get much worse. This piece is not always an easy read, but there is still some hope that fin whales, the second-largest animals on Earth, will keep cruising past the beaches of British Columbia. If we pay attention to the likes of Meuter, that is. —CW
5. The Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies
Abe Beame | The Ringer | October 23, 2024 | 5,422 words
When vinyl record sales began to rise in the mid-’00s, the phenomenon was dismissed as a hipster affectation. After 17 straight years of that rise, however, the truth became clear: people enjoy engaging with art in a meaningful way. Dropping the needle, flipping an LP at the end of a side, reading liner notes, even just looking at the art while you listen; it’s all part of treating music with intention, rather than relegating it to the noise of a background stream. That same energy animates Abe Beame’s illuminating story on the resurgence of repertory theaters in the post-COVID cinema world. Whatever’s at play here—and Beame investigates multiple factors—it’s more than just nostalgia. It’s a rebuke of Hollywood’s franchise/remake/sequel addiction, of theatrical chains pumping digital files onto ever-bigger screens, of movies being an afterthought as people text through the screening. Rep cinema’s survival, Beame writes, “speaks to the essence of cinema and what many want out of it—not to simply consume a piece of content, but to get something deeper, richer, and more communal.” That realization is one more and more theater owners are having in more and more areas. In the beginning, it was easy to look at revival screenings in LA and Brooklyn and Austin and think of it as vinyl for movies. It is that, absolutely. But it’s not vinyl in 2006; it’s vinyl now. —PR
Audience Award
The most read story of the week? Here it is!
A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
Tad Friend | The New Yorker | October 21, 2024 | 11,649 words
In this engrossing New Yorker profile, Tad Friend profiles Glenn Horowitz, a top dealer of rare books and manuscripts who built a fortune selling the archives of famous writers and celebrities such as Vladimir Nabokov, Alice Walker, and Bob Dylan. Then he was sued by Don Henley, the Eagles’ drummer and singer. —CLR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/25/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-537/
via IFTTT
Watch