Search Results for: William Langewiesche
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Casey Newton, William Langewiesche, Sarah Miller, Hafizah Geter, and Shannon Keating.
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Longreads Best of 2019: Investigative Reporting

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in investigative reporting.
Alice Driver
Long-form journalist and translator based in Mexico City.
Stories About My Brother (Prachi Gupta, Jezebel)
Gupta investigates her brother’s death with tenderness and intimacy, providing us with a rare glimpse into the way toxic masculinity affects men. She recounts childhood memories of her brother Yush and his evolving views on power and masculinity, which have been shaped by his family and his mostly white classmates and peers. As Gupta grows up, she embraces feminism, which her brother defines as a “female supremacy movement,” and from that point on, their relationship deteriorates. Gupta, haunted by her brother’s death, digs deep to push through the pain of mourning and discover the cause. When she interviews Yush’s friends, they reveal that he had deep-seated insecurities about his height which led him to seek out limb-lengthening surgery. Yush believed that being taller would make him richer and more successful. Instead, he died of a pulmonary embolism, one of the side risks of the limb-lengthening surgery. Gupta’s work is personal, revelatory, shocking and provides insight into an area where we need more work: the ways in which conventional ideas of masculinity and power harm men.
The Death and Life of Frankie Madrid (Valeria Fernández, California Sunday)
I am drawn to investigations that harness the power of one story to illuminate the situation of a whole group — in this case, the lives of young, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Fernández writes poetically about the death and life of Frankie Madrid, an undocumented teen who arrived in the U.S. with his mom when he was either 4 or 6 months old. Fernandéz begins the story with Frankie’s death — he committed suicide after being deported to Mexico — and then works her way back in time, investigating the cause of his suicide, his relationship with his mother and the difficulties of daily life while being undocumented. Via Frankie’s story, we begin to understand the pressures that undocumented kids face and to question the increasingly inhumane U.S. immigration policies and practices that played a role in his suicide.
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MH370 Five Years Later: Will We Ever Know What Happened?

Three official investigations have failed to determine the probable cause behind the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, a Boeing 777ER carrying 239 passengers and crew. Originating in Kuala Lampur on March 8, 2014, the flight was bound for Beijing, China.
As William Langewiesche reports in The Atlantic, what has been discovered to date is that the Malaysian government, concerned about a blemish to the reputation of their prestigious national airline, has been less than forthcoming about what they know about the crash — even to the point of deliberately allowing searchers to scour the ocean for debris in locations they knew were far from MH370’s final descent. The plane made a series of turns away from Beijing and flew for more than six hours before descending into the Indian Ocean at high speed after running out of fuel.
Perhaps the only saving grace is that it is believed that the passengers had all long since passed peacefully because someone had deliberately depressurized the aircraft. Was it a foreign government? Hijackers? Or was it a pilot with marriage problems who led an existence outside the cockpit described by people who knew him as “lonely and sad”?
Less than a week after the disappearance, The Wall Street Journal published the first report about the satellite transmissions, indicating that the airplane had most likely stayed aloft for hours after going silent. Malaysian officials eventually admitted that the account was true. The Malaysian regime was said to be one of the most corrupt in the region. It was also proving itself to be furtive, fearful, and unreliable in its investigation of the flight.
Accident investigators dispatched from Europe, Australia, and the United States were shocked by the disarray they encountered. Because the Malaysians withheld what they knew, the initial sea searches were concentrated in the wrong place—the South China Sea—and found no floating debris. Had the Malaysians told the truth right away, such debris might have been found and used to identify the airplane’s approximate location; the black boxes might have been recovered.
A close observer of the MH370 process said, “It became clear that the primary objective of the Malaysians was to make the subject just go away. From the start there was this instinctive bias against being open and transparent, not because they were hiding some deep, dark secret, but because they did not know where the truth really lay, and they were afraid that something might come out that would be embarrassing. Were they covering up? Yes. They were covering up for the unknown.”
The Malaysian report was seen as hardly more than a whitewash whose only real contribution was a frank description of the air-traffic-control failures—presumably because half of them could be blamed on the Vietnamese, and because the Malaysian controllers constituted the weakest local target, politically. The report was released in July 2018, more than four years after the event. It stated that the investigative team was unable to determine the cause of the airplane’s disappearance.
Pirates on the ‘Postmodern Ocean’ Are Getting More Professional

Piracy and armed robbery at sea are on the rise, according to Deutsche Welle, which noted “the increasing professionalism of the pirates” in a recent report focused on Southeast Asia. “The Outlaw Ocean,” Ian Urbina’s ongoing New York Times series chronicling lawlessness at sea, says many merchant vessels have been hiring private security as protection. William Langewiesche captured pirates’ sophistication in his 2003 story for The Atlantic, “Anarchy at Sea,” part of his coverage that led to his 2004 book The Outlaw Sea:
The pirates involved are ambitious and well organized, and should be distinguished from the larger number of petty opportunists whose presence has always afflicted remote ports and coastlines. The new pirates have emerged on a postmodern ocean where identities have been mixed and blurred, and the rules of nationality have been subverted. Scornful of boundaries, they are organized into multi-ethnic gangs that communicate by satellite and cell phone, and are capable of cynically appraising competing jurisdictions and laws. They choose their targets patiently, and then assemble, strike, and dissipate. They have been known to carry heavy weapons, including shoulder-launched missiles, but they are not determined aggressors, and will back off from stiff resistance, regroup, and find another way. Usually they succeed with only guns and knives. Box cutters would probably serve them just as well. Their goal in general is to hijack entire ships: they kill or maroon the crews, sell the cargoes, and in the most elaborate schemes turn the hijacked vessels into “phantoms,” which pose as legitimate ships, pick up new cargoes, and disappear.
Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves?
William Langewiesche on the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, and how automation has changed the role of airline pilots.
The Camorra Never Sleeps
For years before they caught him, the Italian police had no idea that Paolo Di Lauro was one of Naples’s most powerful crime bosses, running a drug and counterfeit-goods empire—and responsible for a peace his turf had rarely known. Writing for Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche goes deep into heart of the Neapolitan mob’s most dangerous family, revealing the chaos that followed the fall of a patriarch.
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“All this infrastructure was forced underground not through some grand plan that can easily be sorted out but rather through two centuries of competition and compromise as the value of New York’s surface space increased and the streets grew more crowded. Taken as a whole, underground New York is an incoherent three-dimensional space that defies simple visualization—a single understanding, at least somewhere in someone’s mind. When I mentioned this to Steve Duncan, who is one of underground New York’s most persistent explorers, and who would have such a visualization if anyone could, he said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I used to think there’s gotta be someone who knows what’s going on, but more and more it seems like the answer is no.’”
-What lies beneath New York City? William Langewiesche explored for Vanity Fair. Read more on New York from the Longreads Archive.
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The Wave-Maker: On Big Wave Surfer Ken Bradshaw
The Wave-Maker: On Big Wave Surfer Ken Bradshaw
[Mark] Foo said, “But, no, no, this is really it, isn’t it? Just two guys in the water. Fifteen- to 18-foot swells. Perfect waves. No sections. This is as good as it gets.”
Bradshaw said, “Yes, Mark. This is what it’s about.” A light came on in his head. He thought, Wow, Mark actually does get it. He actually understands why we do this. Bradshaw said, “There’s just the two of us in the water. You’re riding some of the best waves of your life, and having a great time. How cool is that? No photographers, no cameramen, no nothing—just us.”
They paddled to shore and ended up at Foo’s house. They talked about nothing much, and for a while it was great. Then the phone rang, and suddenly Foo was saying, Oh, man, you wouldn’t believe what I just did! I did this! I did that! Oh yeah, I was out there with Bradshaw! Blah, blah, blah!
Bradshaw looked at him in disbelief. Foo hung up, called a magazine, and started in again. Bradshaw walked over and hung up the phone. He said, “You don’t get it after all, do you? Can’t you let it go once? Just once in your life? Don’t tell anybody? This was our moment. We did it. Isn’t that good enough for you?”
“Um, I don’t know, Ken. I could try, I guess.”
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