This week’s top 5 long reads

In this week’s issue:

• A front row seat to the US immigration crisis.
• A thoughtful, all-around profile of a civil rights icon.
• Unusual look inside a nuclear submarine
• New ways to deal with scary changes.
• A conservative fever dream disguised as summer school.

Eli Saslow | New York Times | February 18, 2024 | 4,159 words

In December, Border Patrol agents in Tucson were admitting nearly 20,000 migrants each week, a 300 percent jump from a year earlier. Chilton Ranch is located just south of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 50,000 acres of cattle ranching in the Arizona desert has been owned by the same family for four generations and is now managed by Jim and Sue, a couple in their 80s. Their ranch stretches 5.5 miles along the border wall. Here, footprints in the dirt reveal stories of survival and despair. With Erin Schaff’s emotional photography, Eli Maslow’s dispatches from this family ranch are beautifully reported, showing the events that ranchers and cowboys encounter day and night. Young children screaming for help, arriving at doorsteps, parents dead. Guides paid by the Sinaloa cartel lead people into one of the many cracks in the wall. Women were assaulted after mistaking their home for a Border Patrol post. A pregnant Sudanese woman (possibly in labor) exposed to the cold on a 36 degree night. Migrants from around the world were caught on camera crossing some of the 150 smuggling routes on the site. On any given day, he sees as many as 250 people wander into their ranch through a secluded entrance. This is a microcosm of a country facing an immigration crisis and humanitarian disaster, and the Chilton family is in the middle of it all. Although Maslow paints a bleak picture, the ordinary people in this story demonstrate compassion, even when their own safety and security are at risk. Many articles about immigration feel abstract and impersonal. This is quite the opposite. —CLR

Mitchell S. Jackson | esquire | February 21, 2024 | 9,471 words

Evolution never occurs in a vacuum. On the grandest scale, it is a response to a complex web of environmental and internal stimuli. On a more humble scale over the lifetime of a single human being, it is he. . . Well, it’s pretty much the same. Take Al Sharpton, for example. The child preacher-turned-activist many of us first met in the ’80s, in his jersey and at his press conferences, looked quite different from today’s Al Sharpton, a prominent villain of the civil rights movement. It looks like there are. But how much of that change is his own, and how much is the context that has accumulated around him? Mitchell S. Jackson never publicly asks that question directly, but his long and fascinating profile of Sharpton hints at the answer. Over the course of the summer, Jackson spends countless hours with Sharpton, and that time unravels in a series of repetitive episodes, each taking measure of this man in new and surprising ways. One of Jackson’s many talents as a writer is that he is always present within his work, but never overwhelms his work. That makes him important to every approach in this profile. Yes, he insists, the Tawana Brawley debacle remains a stain. Yes, Sharpton may have had a bad habit in the past. Also, but yes, Sharpton changed irrevocably at some point. And yes, the affection that may have arched your eyebrows has a story behind it, and those stories just might change your mind, like they changed Jackson’s mind. . Al Sharpton has given plenty of time to reporters over the years, and this profile will no doubt serve him as well as all the other reporters have. But when you assess this man’s evolution and consider how it ultimately determined his larger influence, it may also be the truest and most complete profile of them all. —PR

adam ciralski | vanity fair | February 15, 2024 | 6,598 words

I can’t even imagine the amount of paperwork required for Adam Ciralski and photographer Philip Montgomery to spend their time researching this. USS wyoming, one of 14 domestic submarines carrying nuclear weapons. “The number of civilians given this level of access was roughly equivalent to the number of civilians who walked on the moon,” Ciralski wrote. Our inherent voyeurism means that weapons of mass destruction have a morbid fascination, and Ciralski builds on this with his story of boarding a submarine on a stormy night in the high Atlantic Ocean. It includes depictions that hint at dark acts and espionage. It all feels very Cold War. However, the people he meets afterwards break out of his personality and seem cheerful and even humorous (sometimes very young). But Steel’s determination is also evident. The film’s chilling dialogue emphasizes the dark times we are living in. Outside the submarine, Ciralski met experts such as Navy Capt. Dan Packer, who reminded him that “2027 is the year Xi Jinping said we needed to prepare for war.” And Gen. Anthony Cotton, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said of other threats from Russia, North Korea and Iran, as well as armed groups such as the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Popular Mobilization Forces. mentioned. Iraq. These submarines are powerful pawns on this tense world stage. It’s in place and ready to go. These are designed as a deterrent, but chess masters are still ready to play. “If you’re wondering whether people are ready to use these weapons, the answer is yes,” Ciralski said. Perhaps the reason is vanity fair Reporters were granted access to wyoming— and literally sleeping next to a Trident missile — is just a move in the game. —C.W.

Heidi Lasher | Orion Magazine | February 13, 2024 | 3,346 words

My beloved uncle was diagnosed with dementia three years ago. His decline was rapid, he went from being a constant joker to a state where he could barely speak. When I look at him, I see his new and increasingly narrow normality. About the man who lived with me at different times in my life, about the times we went swimming, about the movies we watched together, about the man who made me soup after the night shift when I was sick from school. I remember that. In this thoughtful essay, orion, Heidi Lasher explores the concept of changing baselines in relation to her father’s dementia. “Changing the baseline means accepting increasingly degraded and disorganized ecosystems as ‘normal’ with each successive generation, and understanding what a healthy ecosystem will look like at some point in the future. “The idea is that no one will remember what things look like,” she writes. As we reflect on our volatile climate, parenting, and the deteriorating health of our parents, she urges us to remember that we are facing chaotic and frightening change. The ability to pay attention and evoke what once was. ” We are not helpless in the face of change, Lasher reminds us. You can mourn or cherish what you had. The choice is yours. —K.S.

Noah Rawlings | New Explorations | February 19, 2024 | 6,839 words

If you are not dependent on media discourse, I envy you. I also understand that you may need some background knowledge before making this choice, so I will provide the information below. A few years ago, a bunch of reactionary academics and journalists, hysterical about the so-called “wokeness” in American higher education, decided to start their own university. . Although the university is called Austin College, it is actually located in Dallas, in an office complex owned by Harlan Crowe, a close friend of billionaires and a patron of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The UATX sign is the originalnew york times Bari Weiss, a staff member, is also the manager. free press (“For Free People”) is an online outlet that spends countless hours clutching pearls about gender-affirming care for transgender children. Many UATX faculty and researchers have expressed support for Israel’s continued bombing of Gaza. At least one person argues that genocide is a matter of good and evil. So. In this essay as hilarious as it is outrage-inducing, Noah Rawlings describes his participation in UATX’s “Forbidden Courses” summer program, which began before UATX actually enrolled students. I am. Rawlings is better than me because I would have lost my mind. That was not the case for founding faculty member Peter Boghossian, who once denounced his former employer, Portland State University, as a “social justice factory” (horror horror) He said he was so good at jiu-jitsu that he could kill everyone on a bus full of participants at the program’s graduation dinner. That wasn’t the case when Joe Lonsdale, who helped found Palantir, told his students that the rise of AI would allow humans to do “more natural things” in our lives. In response to a student’s question about why there are no center-left faculty members at a school that prides itself on uncovering truth through dialogue, Weiss suggested that leftists simply aren’t interested in debate. That wasn’t the case when I did it. No, I think I forgot when someone (Rawlings won’t say who) said: “If Simone de Beauvoir were alive today, she would be extremely popular like Jordan Peterson.” —SD

audience award

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