This Week’s Top 5 Long Reads

In this week’s issue:

• Featured Excel Competitive Sports
• The opioid epidemic at sea
• Escaping a Polygamous Cult
• The art of worm roaring
• The Complexity of Using Parents as Content

David Pearce | The Verge | June 12, 2024 | 7,191 words

Even before I read this feature on the Excel World Championship, I was enthralled by its design. The visuals are perfect: paragraphs rendered as spreadsheet cells, old-fashioned black background with a green text palette, bitmap-style illustrations that come together as you scroll through them. Even the footers and credits tabs feel well thought out, consistent, and, most importantly, don’t impede readability (a balance between good looks and readability is very rare in the post-“Snow Fall” era). Thankfully, Kristen Radtke, the creative director on this piece, has co-signed with author David Pierce. But don’t ignore Pierce’s role in the great story. It’s something of a scene piece, as he makes his way to Las Vegas in a totally unrealistic attempt to win the grand prize, but it’s also a surprisingly lyrical meditation on why a program like Excel can be so powerful and poetic. “In a world of spreadsheets,” Pierce writes, “there is no time like the other programs in the world that can be so powerful and so poetic.” “Everything is comparable and, if you only know how to ask, ultimately reducible to basic numbers that explain everything. Spreadsheets promise that the world isn’t actually complicated; you just need to know the formulas. I don’t know if that’s beautiful or dark or both, but it’s definitely big business.” What’s so lovely about the whole project is how perfectly the story and the art blend together; neither takes themselves too seriously, and both execute at the highest level. I had a smile on my face as soon as I opened the tab, and didn’t stop until I finished the last word. It’s a simple formula to hope for, but hard to achieve. —public relations

CJ Chivers | New York Times Magazine | June 6, 2024 | 7,449 words

Some of the best journalism of the past few years has been about the opioid crisis: the people who caused it, the destruction it has wrought, the inequalities it has deepened. CJ Chivers’s masterpiece is an entry into a new kind of canon, one that marries widely known outcomes with increasingly available solutions. Chivers focuses on a fishing industry populated by contractors who pride themselves on their tenacity and independence. Substance abuse is rife in this demanding job, and nearly everyone in Chivers’ story is affected by addiction in some way, whether they are a worker, their family, or their friends. In 2021, a fisherman fatally overdosed at sea just 72 hours into his employment, and his death prompted a family-run fleet to consider stocking Narcan on their boats. Why not make a nasal spray that can reverse an overdose as ubiquitous as, say, a fire extinguisher? Chivers chronicles the efforts of a small group of people trying to save lives and change an industry, describing their struggles in beautiful prose. “Working quickly, hands tossed scallops into buckets and dropped the entrails down chutes into the greenish water beside the boat, while a large shark circled lazily alongside, flashing its pale underside as it sucked in an easy meal,” Chivers writes of a scallop fisherman’s 11-hour shift. “After enough buckets were filled with meat and rinsed with seawater, two deckhands loaded about 50-pound cloth bags with the glistening ivory catch and lowered them down a hatch into the cold fish hold, burying them under the ice while everyone else continued to shell.” (Shameless advertisement: If you’re reading this and have the time, AtavistThe story, “Revive,” explores the little-known and very personal origins of Narcan. —SD

Paige Kupchuk | Runner’s World | June 5, 2024 | 4,568 words

Paige Kupchuk begins her article with a powerful image: an unidentified woman in a prairie dress, “with a collar buttoned up to her chin and sleeves down to her wrists,” running up and down hills in the 90-degree heat of a Utah summer. When she found the woman a few years ago, Kupchuk learned that she was a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) who lived in Short Creek. Kupchuk clearly has a strong interest in the FLDS, even mentioning her own family connections. But the focus here is Darlene Barlow Stubbs, a former FLDS member who discovered running after leaving the group in 2005. Stubbs left the group during the time Warren Jeffs was a “prophet” and leader who normalized not only polygamy but also underage marriage and child labor. By 2018, things had changed. Jeffs was in prison, the land was in different hands, and Short Creek’s population was plummeting. Returning to reclaim his family’s land, Stubbs felt he could help the community where he once lived, so he started the Short Creek Running Club. The club is about health and fun, and is non-denominational, something that wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago. Kupchuk writes that the group “runs against the backdrop of the jagged red landscape featured in so many documentaries and news stories about the region, and eerie music often plays, evocative of the unthinkable crimes that took place here.” They are reclaiming their lives. Kupchuk weaves together the years with some lovely storytelling, and eventually ends up running with the club members, all wearing sportswear instead of dresses. —The CW

Michael Adno | Oxford American | June 4, 2024 | 4,991 words

Somewhere in the Apalachicola National Forest in Sopchoppy, Florida, Gary Revell uses a piece of black rubber wood called a stob and a heavy metal file to summon earthworms from the ground. His wife, Audrey, picks up the earthworms as they come to the surface and stores them in a bucket. They call it “earthworm grunting.” It’s also known as earthworm fiddling, earthworm rubbing, earthworm snore, and earthworm charming. The Revells sell earthworms as fishing bait to local stores and to customers who come to them, in an honest-to-goodness way. “The Revells’ intuition was like that of the fishermen whose bait they were collecting: a catalog of knowledge gleaned from spending time here, bound together by a deep curiosity,” writes Michael Adno. Fourth-generation earthworm grunt fishermen, they’ve been making a seasonal income this way for the past 54 years, surviving the advent of small plastic fishing lures and earthworm farming. I am powerless against stories like this. Streaked with history and culture, mysteries unfold along the way. Adno writes well about Florida, but this piece is now my favorite of all his works. A single pass with a file over the stove is called a loop. The loop creates vibrations in the soil, encouraging the earthworms to move to the surface and pick it up. Through the Levels, Adno reveals the lore and a bit of history of this practice. Things get even more fascinating when Kenneth Catania, a neuroscientist with a penchant for ecology and biology, arrives to test a scientific theory that reveals why the grunting works. Could it have something to do with the lunar cycle? Cosmic vibrations? A spell cast during the loop? I can’t spoil the surprise for you. Read this article and find out for yourself. —KS

Jessica Winter | The New Yorker | June 5, 2024 | 1,664 words

In this article, Jessica Winter discusses some great examples of adult creators who have used parents in movies and TV shows over the years: Think back to John Cassavetes’ 1974 film, “The Great Gatsby.” Affected womenor Good Fellows The scene where Tommy, Jimmy and Henry have dinner with Tommy’s mother (played by Martin Scorsese’s real-life mother, Katherine) right after killing a man and stuffing him in a trunk. Or, more recently, Jerrod Carmichael reality show“The Man Who Was Born” tells the story of a gay comedian’s search for love and connection with various people, including his parents, who struggle to accept his sexuality. I initially dismissed Winter’s work as a top five contender because it’s shorter than most of his feature-length works. But I’ve read it again and again, and one beautiful sentence in particular caught my attention: “[It] “It can be a rite of passage in your twenties to realize that your parents are more than your parents, that they had lives before you, that they were beautiful, moved beautifully, were wanted, and still are.” It’s a profound realization, the essence of which I finally understood in my forties. (This is why I was so intrigued by the recent series of clips from the #80sDanceChallenge, in which TikTok users filmed their parents dancing as if it were the ’80s to the unmistakable beat of “Smalltown Boy.”) For a while now, I’ve wanted to do something similar. Instead of recording my parents dancing free and offering a glimpse into their younger years, I’d like to sit down with them, all my uncles and aunts, and ask them questions about their lives, especially their early years; their childhoods in the Philippines, their firsts, and so on. As Winter explores here, the process of turning parents and older family members into fodder for entertainment can be fun, moving, and rewarding, but it can also be tense and uncomfortable, revealing complex generational and familial dynamics. It’s a short but thoughtful read, with links to some fun TikToks from Francesca Scorsese, where she records herself engaging in heartfelt, funny interactions with her famous film director father, like this one where she asks him the name of a feminine product. —CLR