This Week’s Top 5 Long Reads

This week we bring you:

• People who love New York’s “pests.”
• Racism infuriated a high school baseball team.
• The power behind the starving cult.
• The spirit of a champion bull rider.
• The power of silence.

Benji Jones | Vox | April 22, 2024 | 3,267 words

“The Merv Griffin Show” is perfect Seinfeld Episodes: Kramer finds discarded show items in the dump and arranges them in his apartment, Jerry is obsessed with his girlfriend’s toy collection, Elaine is annoyed with a new coworker who “sneaks up” behind her and takes credit for her work, and George is… well, George. In one scene, he and his girlfriend are driving around town. She tells him to watch out for pigeons in the road, but he ignores her, saying they’ll make way. They don’t, and he hits one. “Don’t you have a deal with pigeons?” he asks Jerry later. On the next drive, poor George finds himself in the same predicament, but when he swerves to avoid a pigeon, he hits a squirrel. As I was reading Benji Jones’s delightful article about people in New York who rehabilitate injured and abandoned animals like rats, baby opossums, and stray birds, I couldn’t help but think about this agreement George mentions. It’s the idea that we and the wild animals who coexist in cities have some kind of agreement that favors humans. We’re going to keep you alive. our As long as they don’t cause a nuisance or invade personal space, people can have animals on the street. In contrast, the rehabilitation workers who care for these small animals at their own expense are incredibly kind and humane. Spending time with them, Jones began to understand: why They do this hard work, often for free. “They don’t see these species as pests, they see them as part of nature – part of the New York City ecosystem. They see them as part of their home.” Sure, some creatures are dirty, destructive, and disease-ridden. But is pigeon droppings really that bad? Have subway rats caused real harm to society? Why do humans treat these tiny creatures with so much contempt and disgust? Jones shows us that giving them respect, love, and a place to heal has enriched the lives of these people. Personally, I’ve always felt an affinity for squirrels, but there’s a fundamental line between “us” and “them,” and somehow, like most people, I’ve conditioned myself to think that squirrels deserve less sympathy than cats and dogs. Jones writes that we need to be better stewards of the environment. But that can only happen if we truly see these creatures as living beings trying to survive just like us. So the next time you’re driving and there’s a creature on the road, don’t expect it to move. Or even better, slow down, stop, acknowledge the creatures, and be grateful that our world is filled with such amazing and diverse life. —CLR

Howard Bryant | ESPN | April 23, 2024 | 8,079 words

Few baseball writers are as experienced or skilled as Howard Bryant. He brings all of his skills to this story about a high school team torn apart by racism. Beginning with a startling scene of the Fort Myers High School Green Wave’s white coach and players leaving the field, leaving the team’s two black players behind, Bryant deftly unpacks the festering effects of white discontent. The team’s problems may have started from within, but it was the parents of the white players who fueled the fire. When an assistant coach was fired for sending messages to the team that included the N-word, they all rushed to his defense, singing the well-worn hymn, “Why can’t white people say that?” As a result, the team’s black players became scapegoats for players and parents alike. Bryant’s detailed report, which brings together FOIA requests, personnel records, and interviews with parents, argues that this heartbreaking series of events was an outgrowth of “conservative imperatives unfolding in education circles in Florida and across the nation.” He wisely devotes a section to the racial political history of Lee County, providing valuable background information for those who would dismiss this as an isolated phenomenon (yes, Robert E. Lee.) This is a sports story only because it involves a sports team, but it is actually a story about major corners of the country, including the state Legislature, deciding that others catching up means they are falling behind.public relations

Karey Baraka | 1843 | April 19, 2024 | 6,030 words

I love horror movies, and the beginning of this story sounds like a scene from a great movie. A group of mysterious outsiders move into a spooky forest where locals never dare live. They refuse to explain who they are or why they are there. Men with machetes tell questioning bystanders to fend for themselves. Then groups of people start disappearing, first children, then women. Finally, the truth is revealed in the form of horrifying testimonies and shallow mass graves with hundreds of bodies. They were part of a cult called Good News International (GNI), whose charismatic leader, Paul Ntenzi Mackenzie, had convinced them to kill themselves. Instead of drinking Kool-Aid, they wouldn’t eat anything. In other words, Mackenzie’s followers starved to death. Kerry Baraka does a great job telling this story that took place in his native Kenya. The writing is tense and evocative. In the vein of the best of the horror genre, Baraka is careful to show how seemingly outlandish stories of terror and suffering are the product of familiar social, political, and cultural forces. I would argue that this fact makes it all the more frightening. These forces include the legacy of white colonialism in Kenya, the enduring influence of evangelical Christianity on the country, the basic human desire to find community and purpose, and even the global COVID-19 pandemic that accelerated the recruitment of cult members. When Baraka asks one of the GNI survivors what she needs to make her life better now, she responds with money, land, food, and a home: basically, safety. “What she described was the life MacKenzie had provided for her and thousands of others before the fast began,” Baraka writes.SD

*This story is paid content.

Sally Jenkins | The Washington Post | April 20, 2024 | 7,807 words

Every May, there’s a rodeo near my house. It’s like entering another world. Everywhere you turn there are horses, cattle, cowboy hats, and muffled speakers adding an inaudible bass to the noise of excited families (and dogs and trucks). There’s a general party atmosphere, which only gets more exciting when the bulls make their appearance. Their muscles rippling in the sun, their flanks sweating, they race through the ring kicking up tornadoes of dust, and they swing their massive bodies back and forth with determination, trying to shake off the brave riders who cling to their backs. These bulls are celebrities in their own right, and the one I saw hadn’t even been ridden by a single rider for the eight seconds needed to score, and the bull was the winner. Wanting to learn more about this otherworldly world, I read Sally Jenkins’ article, and I was not disappointed. Jenkins immediately draws the reader into Texas rodeo life. Jenkins introduces JB Mauney as “probably the best rodeo bull rider of all time, the toughest man, the man who never bowed to authority, until a bull snapped his neck.” If you picture a cowboy, Mauney is it. His rugged features are framed by a Marlboro cigarette dangling from his mouth. Jenkins perfectly describes Mauney as “a striking face honed by years of outdoor activity, smoke, good humor, and pain softened by Jägermeister.” She details Mauney’s career and the devastating toll that years of falls have taken on his body, and her skill in portraying this tough life so beautifully is remarkable. She also explores the psychology of the bull rider. Bull riders are definitely a kind of addict, and for Mauney, who needs “centrifugal force and vertical speed, the rush of dopamine and epinephrine, and the feeling of conquering the nearly unconquerable,” that addiction is over, and he is now retired, spending his time with his family and the Arctic Assassins. Arctic Assassin was the last bull he rode, the one that broke his neck. Mauney bought Arctic Assassin and retired him to a quiet pasture on his ranch. He feels a strange gratitude for the bull. He may have ended his career, but he did it while Mauney was still able to get up and walk away.translation

*This story is paid content.

Janet Cooperman | The Common Reader | March 26, 2024 | 4,575 words

Blessed silence. Quiet time. An absence of trivial, empty conversation. That’s the kind of silence I had in mind when I read Janet Cooperman’s thoughtful essay. General readerI hadn’t thought about other kinds of silence, but as she points out, there are many. Consider the treatment of silence, when someone chooses to withhold words and inflict pain. Silence carries tension and suspense. Consider a moment of silence, usually for a life lost. That silence signifies deep, collective pain.Silence grows like a cancer“Silence occurs whenever power refuses to hear the truth,” she writes. “Silence is the whistle unblowed, the activist gone missing, the journalist torn apart. Silence is the pain kept secret, passed from generation to generation. Silence is the neighbor remembering the shooter.” I had never thought about how silence can harm. But Cooperman, in addition to making me think, reminds me of the healing power of silence, a welcome respite from the empty hustle and bustle of life that consumes me. “Yet every wisdom tradition, from time immemorial, as far as I know, has extolled silence. The stillness they urge is a letting go, a slowing down, a loosening of our hands and our stubborn, uncontrollable desires. It leaves us empty, but far from empty.” We often define silence by what is missing, or absent. But often, including in my case, silence is what fills us. —KS

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