The Longreads Blog

Longreads Best of 2018: 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.

Lindsay Gellman
Senior Researcher for investigative journalist Ronan Farrow

Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis (Linda Villarosa, The New York Times)

Villarosa’s unflinching examination of giving birth while black in America has stayed with me. We lose black newborns and black mothers at astonishing rates; in the U.S., black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants, Villarosa writes, and black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts. Why? The piece lays out evidence for a theory that black women bear the trauma of systemic racism in their very physiology — that years of exposure to the stress of discrimination wreaks havoc on a body, and might contribute to pregnancy complications. Just as lethal, Villarosa’s reporting demonstrates, is the frequency and callousness with which medical staff routinely — and disproportionately — dismiss the complaints of black pregnant women and ignore warning signs.

The ISIS Files (Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times)

Callimachi is a reporter’s reporter; she’s all about the documents. During five trips to Mosul spanning more than a year, she scoured abandoned buildings that had recently housed the workspaces, training grounds, courts, and living quarters of ISIS militants, stuffing tattered papers and folders the group had left behind into trash bags. Callimachi and her team ultimately carted off more than 15,000 pages of documents. Through the lens of these records, Callimachi describes a regimented governing body focused on collecting taxes, issuing birth and marriage certificates, and meting out punishments. ISIS, she writes, “even ran its own D.M.V.” There are practical applications for such insights, the piece suggests. Our prior misconceptions about extremist groups like ISIS, Callimachi writes, have led to tactical failures in U.S.-led efforts to defeat them, such as a focus on destroying petroleum reserves when the group relied more heavily on agriculture for revenue. All this from a haul of jettisoned papers.
Read more…

My Brother, My Self

Illustration by Eric Peterson

Katie Prout | Longreads | December 2018 | 25 minutes (6,270 words)

Every addict is a lawyer and my brother is no exception. On the first winter day that feels like spring, the boys next-door get too rowdy. Beer cans fall to the ground under a faint February sun. Frat boys slur-shout along to Drake and make my thin walls quake. I huff and puff, and I consider putting on my boots and crunching over through the melting snow to tell my neighbors I have a sick kid (“Will you please turn it down?”), but instead I pull my bathrobe tighter and text Hank. I feel like you know about noise complaints, I write.

Huh? he texts back.

I know it’s only 5:30 and a Saturday, but I’m trying to work on my thesis, I have a deadline, the undergrads next door are having a party. I’m about to cut their wires.

It’s not too early to call in a noise complaint, he writes. It just depends on how loud.

I thank Hank and call in my noise complaint, and as the sun goes down I screenshot our text exchange and go back to writing, as I always do, about him.

Every addict is a pharmacist and my brother is no exception. In June, our mother asks for Hank’s take on a new pain medication before allowing our youngest brother, struck by spina bifida in the womb, to be put on it. I am less inclined to take his advice when it comes to my own medication: “Xanax is as bad as a drink,” he says, and perhaps for him, that’s true. Like my mother, I go to Hank for his take on medicine in general, on how various pills may or may not interact with one another, even if I don’t always follow what he says. As an addict, he’s come to know the law, from its loopholes to its nooses, as intimately as he knows how ADHD meds mix with benzos, or how much vodka can steady withdrawal shakes until he can figure out his insurance for the hospital.

Every alcoholic is an addict, but not every alcoholic is taken seriously as such. I think about this every time I refer to Hank as an addict in conversation with others or on the page by myself: I think about this a lot. “Addict,” I say, and the faces of the people I’m speaking to grow still in sympathy; “alcoholic,” I say, and their faces are blank. The word alcoholic doesn’t mean much to them, or maybe it’s that the word alcoholic could mean anything. “I’m basically an alcoholic,” a man said to me once over drinks, laughing, and then frowning when I didn’t laugh too, when I stood up from my barstool and asked him if he was OK. It’s a joke, he said, you should joke more. But words matter to me, and that one matters in particular.
Read more…

Longreads Best of 2018: Science and Technology

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in science and tech.

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poison Squad.

They Know Seas Are Rising, but They’re Not Abandoning Their Beloved Cape Cod (Meera Subramanian, InsideClimate News)

For more than a year, Meera Subramanian has been traversing the country for InsideClimate News, creating a series of vivid and wonderfully balanced portraits of small communities wrestling with the havoc of climate change (whether they admit it or not). This one from October, focused on an increasingly flood-washed area called Blish Point, stands out for me. It’s a tapestry-like picture woven of relentlessly rising seas, threatened homes and businesses, the politics of climate change science, and pure, stubborn human reluctance to give up on a beloved way of coastal living.

Subramanian never raises her voice or treats any viewpoint with less than respect — although she occasionally deftly slides in the scientific arguments that counter climate denialism. She has an elegant way of making both people and place live on the page. The result is a compelling and compassionate narrative in which this one small, beautiful, vanishing strip of Massachusetts, perched on the edge of an encroaching ocean, becomes a microcosm for the much bigger story of change — and its reckoning — now being realized around the world.


Aleszu Bajak
Freelance science journalist, former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and lecturer at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

God Is in the Machine (Carl Miller, The Times Literary Supplement)

Whether it’s your social media feed, prison sentence, or driverless car, our world is increasingly governed by algorithms. The terrifying thing is that we’re quickly approaching a horizon after which no one will be able to explain the code used or decisions made to build these things. This sobering excerpt from Carl Miller’s book, The Death of the Gods: The new global power grab, makes startlingly clear our ignorance of the machines we’ve hacked together. “Truth is dead,” as one programmer tells him. “There is only output.”


Ashley Carman
Tech reporter at The Verge and co-host of Why’d You Push That Button?

How Forlini’s Survives the Instagram Horde (Alex Vadukul, The New York Times)

Instagram has fundamentally changed where and why we visit the places we do. Alex Vadukul’s piece on New York Italian restaurant Forlini’s taps into this idea. He perfectly captures how one establishment’s demographics can change over time. One group of patrons goes for the food and convenience — Forlini’s is next to the courthouse — while another prefers it as a backdrop for Instagram photos. Vadukul includes incredible quotes, too, especially the one in which a Forlini’s owner marvels at how influencers manage to drink alcohol and stay thin. I wonder that, too.


Meehan Crist
Writer-in-residence in biological sciences at Columbia University, previously editor at Nautilus and The Believer.

Survival of the Richest (Douglas Rushcoff, Medium)

There’s a lot of bad science writing about transhumanism − rich people wanting to live forever by uploading their minds to computers, etc. But Rushcoff explores the very human drive for a post-human future by elegantly tracing links between the failures of global capitalism, the growing divide between rich and poor, the ongoing climate catastrophe, and what transhumanism is really all about: escape. It’s the best thinking I’ve read on the subject, and the piece stands out as a clear articulation of how some imagine − or fail to imagine − our digital future. I’m still haunted by the moment when a super-wealthy CEO who has paid to pick Rushcoff’s brain about “the future of technology” asks, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”


Surya Mattu
Investigative data journalist at The Markup, research scientist at the Center for Civic Media at MIT.

See No Evil (Miriam Posner, Logic)

Posner’s piece on using software to make supply chains more transparent contains some powerful observations. It elegantly highlights how some characteristic features of modernity have harmed rather than helped this endeavor. Large scale, distributed networks like the internet and global supply chains might be more resilient and efficient than their predecessors, but they are almost impossible to regulate. Similarly, modular information design and the ‘black box architecture’ of software helps scale businesses, but they can also obfuscate the decision making process of those in charge, leading to a lack of accountability.

As we grapple with the challenge of how to hold algorithmic decision-making accountable for the harm it can cause, this piece reminds us that the harm is often a feature of these systems, not a bug.


Neel V. Patel
Science and tech journalist, contributor to The Daily Beast, The Verge, Slate, Wired, Popular Science, Foreign Policy, and New York Magazine.

How Duterte Used Facebook To Fuel the Philippine Drug War (Davey Alba, BuzzFeed News)

Facebook had a bad year, culminating most damningly in a New York Times’ report in November that showed the company’s inability to safeguard the platform from nefarious parties trying to influence the 2016 election, as well as its unwillingness to take responsibility and make fixes. But the insidiousness of Facebook in the U.S. dwarfs what’s happening overseas. Davey Alba, writing for BuzzFeed News, illustrates how Rodrigo Duterte and his autocratic regime in the Philippines leveraged the platform to disseminate false news and propaganda, exacerbating the carnage inflicted by his war on drugs and dismantling many of the country’s democratic structures. It’s a terrifying example of what happens when our biggest fears of the unregulated sprawl of Facebook are realized.


Catherine Cusick
Audience editor, Longreads

Can Dirt Save the Earth? (Moises Velasquez-Manoff, The New York Times Magazine)

Readers may be more familiar with Nathaniel Rich’s historic New York Times Magazine story from this summer, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, than with this epic piece on dirt that came out back in April, but Moises Velasquez-Manoff literally redefined on-the-ground reporting — on soil itself. This story helped me dust off all of my murky grade school memories of nutrient cycles while teaching me anew why these basic, natural processes are so relevant to every sustainable challenge we face. Maybe I’m just a fan of solarpunk, but I love reading about known, practical mitigation methods that are worth doing anyway, even past all of our many missed opportunities and catastrophic points of no return. Carbon farming may not be enough, but what it can do might still be miraculous. Stories that neither sugarcoat real options nor deny that any exist at least give us some time back — if not enough for a full second chance, then enough to do something more meaningful, ultimately, than wait.

* * *

Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

Thank You for Not Being Afraid, Pat Maginnis

Photo by Charlotte Cooper via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

You’ve almost certainly heard of Betty Friedan, and probably also of Margaret Sanger. But what about Pat Maginnis? If you don’t know about the outspoken, angry, pioneering abortion rights activist and health educator, Lili Loofbourow’s excellent profile at Slate is a good starting point.

When Maginnis launched her leaflet campaign, she chose a location that would maximize her ability to confront a medical community she saw as at best patronizing to women and at worst exploitative and controlling. The state Board of Medical Examiners had gathered at the University of San Francisco to discuss the implementation of hospital committees that would determine whether women could receive abortions. As the mostly male board debated the circumstances under which women could be forced to give birth, Maginnis was outside handing out information on how to abort without the help of the doctors within. She was shocked at how unseriously the board took their mandate. She told the Berkeley Barb that when she’d handed some board members a leaflet titled “Are you Pregnant?” with abortion information on it, they “twittered like a bunch of schoolgirls.”

This, she felt, was the collective effect of the laws and ordinances that made even talking about abortion illegal: The entire concept had become untouchable, a boogeyman. “The word abortion was taboo,” she says. “And I thought: That’s crazy. People won’t talk about abortion! They’re afraid to. I’m going to talk about abortion! ABORTION!” she yelled. “Women weren’t talking about it. They were afraid to talk about it.”

Read the story

Piecing Together the Story of an Oregon Serial Killer

Oregon Highway 20 at dusk. Photo by Beth Nakamura, Oregonian Staff

Before Oregonian reporter Les Zaitz retired, he and his colleague Noelle Crombie examined some cold cases that seemed linked to one incarcerated killer. After two years of reporting, research, and field work, Crombie and photographers Beth Nakamura and Dave Killen found the link: between the late 1970s and early 1990s, one man raped and killed multiple women along Highway 20, which crosses all of Oregon state. The team starts their five-part story with the one woman who survived her violent encounter with killer John Ackroyd. And for the first time, she tells the story of these other missing women.

Filled with photographs, maps, and documentary footage, this is incredible, necessary reporting. It’s also heart-wrenching. Reading about the young lives this man ended, the pain survivors endured: the mother who couldn’t discuss her daughter’s disappearance; the husband who imagined the great things his wife would have done had she not disappeared during a jog; the brother who laid in the spot in the forest where his sister’s body was found and imagined the last thing she saw. As one widow told the team, “These are important stories to be told.” Unfortunately, with Ackroyd dead, this is as close to justice as these women will get.

Despite all the tantalizing coincidences and Ackroyd’s apparent eagerness to place himself at the scene of the crime, investigators could find no physical evidence definitively linking him to the killing. He steadfastly maintained his innocence, admitting only that he had seen Kaye that morning and found her remains.

Then a confession by a convicted murderer sidetracked detectives before they determined he was lying.

Eventually, the investigation stalled. Ackroyd returned to the periphery.

It seems remarkable in hindsight that he managed to elude police despite such compelling circumstantial evidence and his rape a year earlier of another woman off Highway 20.

Yet Ackroyd went on working for the state, responding to broken down cars, clearing wrecks and fixing state rigs along the highway, alone.

He married a local woman named Linda and they lived with her young kids, Byron and Rachanda.

Beck left Oregon. He was convicted of a sex crime in Minnesota, served seven months in prison, and moved to California.

Kaye Turner’s killing became a faded memory. Her case remained unsolved. Detectives moved on.

Then Rachanda Pickle, Ackroyd’s 13-year-old stepdaughter, disappeared.

Read the story

Seasonal Associate

An Amazon fulfillment center in Italy. Getty Images News.

Heike Geissler | translate from German by Katy Derbyshire | an excerpt from the novel Seasonal Associate | Semiotext(e) | December 2018 | 12 minutes (3,203 words)

You have a stride today that leads you almost above everyone’s heads at speed, but you walk in their midst, and it’s not down to you that a logjam forms down at the time clock; you’ve got your ID at the ready and you hold it up to the sensor as you pass. It’s down to others who are newer than you, who have to examine what the screen says first, who wait for the display to formulate clearly that they’ve been logged in. You make small noises to express your annoyance, jostle a little, but you’re not as snappy as those who pass by the waiting line and really hold their IDs up to the sensor as they walk, so fast that the new employee currently examining the screen and slowly raising his ID to the sensor doesn’t even notice.

And now: things, oh boy, things. It’s because of all the things that are here, which someone or another wants to buy, that you’re here in the first place. Strange products in your hands, for example this baseball cap that already looks so lived-in it could hardly get much more worn. Used- or distressed-look fashion, you get the point, but the cap is nothing but a ragged piece of cloth, more like something for adherents to a radicalized acceleration of the commodity cycle, people who only buy what has to be thrown away because it fails to meet its requirements as a usable product, serves only to move money and material. The cap has an Iron Maiden logo on it and has slipped out of its bag. You almost sense the greasy feel of sweat mixed with dust. You’re tempted to try it on for a moment, perhaps because it looks like something you found on the street for which you might have some use. A colleague at the next desk calls over that a guy was fired two weeks ago for trying out a skateboard he was supposed to be receiving. You nod, stuff the cap back in the bag, and tape it shut. Read more…

Shelved: The Lady of Rage’s Eargasm

Earl Gibson III / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (2,118 words)

 

Robin Allen started writing rap lyrics in the 6th grade. By her senior year, she needed an MC name. When a classmate jokingly referred to her as the Lady of Rage, she thought the moniker good enough to tag on the wall of the high school bathroom.

A singular rapper in her own right, Rage would go on to become known as a collaborator, appearing on Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg’s extraordinarily successful debut albums. Her 1994 hit single “Afro Puffs” perhaps illustrates her artistic potential as much as what she was eventually able to achieve: Rage’s first solo album, Eargasm, was shelved and never completed. Named by Dre, who would have also co-written and produced it, the album would have been made at the height of the rapper’s powers and released during Death Row Records’ incredible winning streak. That Eargasm never came to fruition kept Rage’s career dependent on men — in the form of collaborators and label bosses — rather than resolutely her own.

Read more…

‘It Happened to My Father the Way It Happened’: The Truth About Green Book

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book. Courtesy of Universal Pictures/Participant/DreamWorks.

Peter Farrelly’s Green Book, a film about an Italian-American bouncer who escorts a black pianist on a tour of the Jim Crow South in 1962, is emerging as an awards season frontrunner. Not just inspired by historical events or “based on a true story,” the film is the true story. “It happened to my father the way it happened,” says Nick Vallelonga, the son of the film’s protagonist and one of the movie’s screenwriters.

But the family of the pianist, Dr. Don Shirley, has dismissed the film, not just for its factual inaccuracies, but for essentially revising and rewriting a black man’s identity. At Vanity Fair, film critic K. Austin Collins comments on all that’s wrong with the movie.

The artistic and political success of any film “based on a true story” doesn’t hinge entirely on absolute historical accuracy. But the debate over the truth of Green Book fascinates me because of all of the unquestioned assumptions—and the presumptions—undertaken by Farrelly and crew in their design of Dr. Shirley’s character.

It’s really something. Everyone seems to agree that Tony Lip had a, shall we say, limited view of black Americans before meeting Shirley. According to his son, he was “a product of his times. Italians lived with Italians. The Irish lived with the Irish. African-Americans lived with African-Americans.” The trip with Dr. Shirley, Vallelonga said, “opened my father’s eyes . . . and then changed how he treated people.”

Yet it is this man’s account that became the basis for an entire film—this account which, from his screenwriter son’s own admission, is informed by a limited, very 1960s, very white understanding of race. Though unreliable on its face, this understanding becomes our lens into the history of this specific black man.

Read the story

This Month in Books: Two Sides of the Same Gaslight

Ingrid Bergman holding a book in a scene from "Gaslight." (Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter is a bundle of contradictions, a cornucopia of counterintuitions. “I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase,” writes Marina Benjamin in her memoir-cum-treatise on insomnia. “You’re not supposed to identify with monsters. But people are rarely disturbed by things they don’t already recognize in themselves,” says Guy Gunaratne in an interview about his debut novel, which revolves around a real-life act of terrorism perpetrated by someone who reminds Gunaratne very much of himself. And Gemma Hartley, recalling a time when she was sick in bed and her husband failed to prepare their son properly for school before it was time for her (still sick!) to walk him there, explains how different the emotional fallout of the mess-up was for the two parents. She felt guilty that her son would have a bad day at school, whereas her husband easily moved on:

Even though my husband had been the one on duty for the morning, I was the one left with the guilt of taking my son to school ill prepared…. Parenting mistakes aren’t a moral failing for him like they are for me. Dads get the at-least-he’s-trying pat on the back when people see them mess up. Moms get the eye rolls and judgment…. I was still expected to be the one in charge, even when I was incapacitated, because isn’t that just what moms are supposed to do? He wasn’t expected to have the morning routine locked down. He was still a dad — still exempt from judgment.

And as Hartley points out, the problem isn’t just the ‘care gap’ between the genders: It’s that even “talking about emotional labor requires emotional labor.” Moreover, when women do try to make men care, men will twist women’s own needs back on them, asking women to do their caring for them — to care about caring for them:

One woman, upon becoming overwhelmed with the emotional labor she was performing, told her partner the only way they were staying together was for him to go to a therapist. He asked her to find one and make an appointment for him.


Sign up to have this month’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up


David Montero, meanwhile, marvels that the bigger and perhaps more disturbing part of Watergate is somehow the least remembered. Investigations into Nixon’s slush fund led regulators to the discovery that American firms had been bribing political parties around the world, to the tune of at least $1 billion dollars. The vastness of the wrongdoing left investigators feeling like they lived in an upside-down reality. “It was inconceivable to me,” the director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division Stanley Sporkin recalled, “that companies could be bribing all over the world, and the shareholders not know how they’re making their money.” And it wasn’t just the casual, widespread criminality that shocked everyone, but also the very real geopolitical consequences — entire elections seemed to have been swung (and inevitable subsequent government overthrows ignited) abroad by American corporate money. “Surely the public expects more than to have foreign policy made in the boardrooms of United Brands or Lockheed,” a congressman quipped on the matter. Laws were passed to outlaw international corporate bribery, but over time conservative thinkers reduced anti-bribery law’s purpose from the ideological necessity of preserving democracy to the amoral and quotidian goal of preserving market competition. And, as Tim Wu points out in his book on the subject, a nearly identical rightward shift happened in the interpretation of antitrust laws over the same period of time (and at the hands of the same conservative school of thought). Our reviewer Will Meyer writes:

…by the seventies, a Chicago School lawyer named Robert Bork stood at the center of unmaking the tradition pioneered by Brandeis and Roosevelt. Bork, starting on the fringes, argued that antitrust laws should focus on “consumer welfare” instead of ensuring competition. Explaining how this standard shifted, Wu writes, “the government or plaintiff had to prove to a certainty that the complained-of behavior actually raised prices for consumers.” Wu chronicles how, as Bork moved the goal posts for understanding antitrust laws, their enforcement began to slip as well…. Justice Scalia [wrote] in 2004: “The mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system.”

But I think the most counterintuitive statement in this month’s books newsletter comes from Lara Bazelon‘s new book about restorative justice for the wrongfully convicted, in which she writes that “seventy-eight percent of… exonerations did not involve DNA evidence. This finding surprises many people, as it seems at odds with the way that crime is prosecuted on popular television shows and in movies…” The foremost reason that innocent people end up being exonerated, she reveals, is the discovery of police and prosecutorial misconduct, by either one person or a small group of people over many years, which can lead to hundreds or even thousands of convictions being reversed.

And last but not least, in her review of Jean Améry’s recently translated 1978 apologia for the ever-maligned Charles Bovary, Ankita Chakraborty points out that Emma Bovary was a contradiction in terms, the kind of woman who only exists when a man is writing her:

wherever [Emma Bovary] went — and she went all around, everywhere — she was never questioned for her whereabouts or for her absence. In what world is a woman who so freely moves never questioned by society regarding her movements? Only in a world where the woman also happens to be a man.

Which feels to me sort of like the inverse of a remarkable study that Gemma Hartley cites — almost like they’re two sides of the same gaslight:

A 2011 survey in the UK found that 30 percent of men deliberately did a poor job on domestic duties so that they wouldn’t be asked to do the job again in the future.

With that disquieting information in mind during this most busy of emotional labor seasons, happy reading, happy counterintuiting, and happy holidays!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

Sign up here

Longreads Best of 2018: Crime Reporting

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in crime reporting.

Pamela Colloff
ProPublica senior reporter and New York Times Magazine writer-at-large.

The Disappeared (Hannah Dreier, ProPublica with Newsday)

When eleven high school students went missing in a single county on Long Island in just two years, law enforcement shrugged. Most of the teenagers who disappeared were recent transplants from Central America, and many of them were last seen heading into the woods, lured by the promise of weed. The Suffolk County police department responded with stomach-churning indifference, telling frantic parents that their children had simply run away.

Hannah Dreier chronicles an upside-down world in which one boy’s mother – an envelope factory employee who speaks no English – is left to piece together what happened to her son. Based on more than 100 interviews and voluminous public records, Hannah Dreier’s storytelling is as vivid as it is effortless. She builds upon an accumulation of damning details — like the fact that one Spanish-speaking mother, whose son was murdered, had to pay a taxi driver to interpret for her at the police station. (“He kept the clock running and charged her $70,” Dreier writes.) “The Disappeared,” which was turned into an episode of This American Life, is a devastating work of both relentless reporting and empathy.


Michael A. Gonzales
Contributor to Catapult, The Paris Review, and Longreads.

A Preacher, a Scam, and a Massacre in Brooklyn (Sarah Weinman, CrimeReads)

Fans of vintage New York crime stories will love Sarah Weinman’s brilliant Brooklyn-based tale, a sordid story that only gets worse the more you read. Weinman takes the reader into the mind and home of a con man named DeVernon LeGrand, a pretend preacher who kept a stable of women who dressed as nuns and begged on the streets. Of course, in true pimp fashion, LeGrand took most of their money. After moving his flock to 222 Brooklyn Avenue in 1966, things get worse for the crooked organization as it eventually becomes involved in kidnapping and murder. Although in the early 2000s I lived four blocks away from the scene of LeGrand’s various crimes for thirteen years, I had never heard of him or his house of pain and death until reading Weinman’s wonderfully written piece.


Jeff Maysh
Contributor to The Atlantic, Smithsonian MagazineLos Angeles Magazine, and The Daily Beast. Author of The Spy with No Name.

Jerry and Marge Go Large (Jason Fagone, Huffpost Highline)

I write about unusual heists from middle-America, so I was game for this Michigan lotto scam story from FOIA-bandit Jason Fagone. In crime writing it’s the characters who make for a good yarn, and I was all-in on this Mom and Pop who used brain-power to beat the system, and the odds.

The Man Who Captures Criminals for the DEA by Playing Them (Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, The New Yorker)

Why actor Spyros Enotiades told his story to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee I don’t know (there must surely be a bounty on his head), but the storytelling was extraordinary. Undercover capers don’t get better than this.


Jayati Vora
Managing editor at The Investigative Fund.

The Trauma of Everyday Gun Violence in New Orleans (Jimmie Briggs and Andre Lambertson, VICE)

This photojournalistic investigation into how gun violence affects black communities explores how living with that violence can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) just like experience with war can. But unlike with returning veterans, gun violence-plagued communities don’t get the funding or mental health resources to help them cope.


Alissa Quart
Executive Editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Author of five books including SqueezedBranded, and the poetry book, Monetized. She writes The Guardian’s Outclassed column.

Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out (Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times Magazine)

This is fantastic longform that embodies what I think social justice reportage should be today. It combines an under-heard, first-person voice with a gripping true story about one of the most crucial issues in America today, incarceration. Betts, who is a lawyer and a poet, also gives his tale an unexpected literary feel, with a comprehensive gloss on the sociology behind juvenile crime, prisons, jailhouse lawyers, and the limited social possibilities for ex-felons.

Omnipresence (Ann Neumann, Virginia Quarterly Review)

This multimedia criminal justice story is about how too-bright, all-night lighting in housing projects, and faulty design overall, contributes to a troubling level of surveillance in poorer communities under the guise of fighting crime. It makes something as basic as sleeping uncomfortable for thousands upon thousands of law-abiding citizens. I really like this story’s taxonomic, poetic style, as well as how architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella gives the story a more formalist visual valence than your typical housing piece.


Tori Telfer
Author of Lady Killers and host of the Criminal Broads podcast.

Blood Cries Out (Sean Patrick Cooper, The Atavist)

In the book Popular Crime by Bill James, the author writes that the phrase “something terrible has happened” is “the best title ever for a crime book…those words turn the ‘crime story’ inside out by exposing the human beings standing on what otherwise appears to be a vast and grisly stage.”

We’re hardly ten percent of the way into the story in “Blood Cries Out” before someone uses those words to tell her husband that the unthinkable has occurred: there’s been a murder right across the road. And the vast and grisly stage? Small-town Chillicothe, Missouri, where two men have amicably farmed the same land for years, until one of them wakes up in the middle of the night with a bullet in his face and his wife dead beside him. The wounded man initially suspects his daughter’s abusive boyfriend, but then changes his story and accuses his farming partner, and then his farming partner’s son, which results in the sort of twisty and utterly corrupt legal process worthy of Making a Murderer part three.

The piece is full of letters and depositions and secret meetings and a lot of paperwork, but on occasion, it vibrates with poignantly biblical/Americana-esque undertones, from the title (plucked from Genesis) to lines like, “[the victim’s] murder was an attack on a Christian matriarch, a cherished local archetype. Similarly, [the innocent man’s] conviction represented the denial of an eldest son’s right to live and work on his father’s land.”


Sarah Weinman
Author of The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World.

The End of Evil (Sarah Marshall, The Believer)

I published a book and wrote a lot of my own pieces in 2018 — including one for this site — so, oddly, I didn’t keep as good track of longform reporting produced by others (podcasts, however, that’s a different story, but this is Longreads, not Longlistens). But I keep returning to Sarah Marshall’s “The End of Evil” because it makes fresh a story long consigned to easy tropes. Marshall, who also co-hosts the stellar podcast You’re Wrong About… and is one of my favorite true crime writers, gives voice to the myriad of women and girls Bundy murdered, shows him as something far less than an evil mastermind, and demonstrates why, with particular clarity, “the longer you spend inside this story, the less sense you can find.”


Catherine Cusick
Audience editor, Longreads

Checkpoint Nation (Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer)

When Americans think of “the border” as a narrow and specific line, we neglect the legal reality that the term actually applies to a border zone, a much larger halo covering up to 100 air miles from any U.S. land or coastal boundary. The zone touches parts of 38 states, covering 10 in their entirety — and within that wide rim, anyone can be subjected to a warrantless search at any time. In this signature longform reality check, Melissa del Bosque digs into the history of how Congress vested U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with alarming, far-reaching powers to search and detain even long-term residents who’ve never committed a crime at surprise, “suspicionless” checkpoints.

Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women (Shiho Fukada, Bloomberg Businessweek)

In a series of sweet, anonymous snapshots, Shiho Fukada talks to and photographs a growing cohort of Japanese seniors: “otherwise law-abiding elderly women” who have found a solution to the loneliness of aging in the reliable comforts of prison. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior, Fukada reports, and 90 percent of them are arrested for shoplifting. From the simple things they steal (rice, cold medicine, a frying pan) to the circumstances they’re trying to escape (bedridden or violent spouses, invisibility, loss, and financial strain), the details of this story make structural inadequacies to meet the unmet social and healthcare needs of an aging population all too clear.

* * *

Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.