Gentrification has no shortage of first-order sins: displacement in the name of “progress” is bad enough. But after the displaced have been pushed to the margins, what’s left in their stead is a stunning homogeneity — not simply demographic, but dystopian. Anna Wiener’s latest “Letter From San Francisco” sums up the vague malaise that comes […]
Peter Rubin
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What Went Wrong With Substack Local
A little more than a year ago, newsletter darling Substack announced a million-dollar initiative to help fund local journalism. How’d that turn out? As Andrew Federov reports for the (non-Substack) media newsletter The Fine Print, not great. In some instances, Substack did step in to offer business support. “Substack put up a round of Facebook […]
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The Cause of the Crime Wave Is Hiding in Plain Sight
When crime goes up, divining the root of the problem is usually as ideologically fraught as it is practically impossible. But this probing feature from Alec MacGillis eludes both traps. Instead, it examines two American cities and comes to a conclusion that’s all the more compelling for its obviousness: stop letting people rot in jail. […]
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Patrick Radden Keefe Gets to the Bottom of It
If you’re a sucker for hearing how great journalists report and structure their work — and who isn’t? — this Q&A with New Yorker write-around specialist Patrick Radden Keefe makes for a perfect Monday read. It’s always the same: It starts with a series of big beats. If it’s an article, it starts with eight […]
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Deep Time Sickness
“In Mexico, people who are ‘tocado’—’touched’—reveal that geological traumas, like earthquakes, can destabilize our concepts of health, identity and even time.”
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More Than Pony Patrol: The Park Rangers of Assateague Island
The best nature writing doesn’t just evoke the outdoors; it makes you want to get up from wherever you’re reading and go be there too. You may not drop everything to go see the wild horses and undisturbed beachfront of Maryland’s largest state park, but the next time you’re nearby you’ll think of the people […]
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Gary Smith, Master of the Sports Longform, Left at the Very Top. Why?
The latest in SI‘s “Where Are They Now?” series covers longtime staffer Smith, arguably one of the finest profilers the journalism world has ever known. His portraits of Mike Tyson, Andre Agassi, and other icons cut through the insularity of sports fandom to become the stuff of magazine legend. Now, Joseph Bien-Kahn heads to South […]
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Fidelity Angst
Every few years, someone comes along to claim their new audio format finally strips away everything between musician and ear. Once, it was Neil Young; now, it’s T-Bone Burnett. But in this incisive essay, Mack Hagood teases at why a certain kind of listener is so consumed with the search for “a technology sophisticated enough […]
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Nathan Fielder Is Out of His Mind (and Inside Yours)
On the axis of cringe comedy, Nathan Fielder’s work on TV series Nathan For You ranks somewhere between Sasha Baron Cohen and Covering Your Eyes and Ears to Escape the Vicarious Embarrassment. But Lila Shapiro’s profile, coming just ahead of Fielder’s return to television, attempts to peel back the layers of artifice between man and world. […]
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The Confessions of a Conscious Rap Fan
Mychal Denzel Smith’s musical upbringing sounds a lot like mine: copious amounts of hip-hop that was deemed “underground,” “backpack,” or (perhaps most conspicuously brandished) “conscious.” Elitism disguised as authenticity. Yet, with the recent returns of Black Star and Kendrick Lamar, Smith found himself unmoved — and in this crystalline essay, he unpacks exactly why. The […]