This Week’s Top 5 Long Reads

In this week’s issue:

• Remembering AIDS activists
• Hiding secrets in the blood
• The “Chacmool” women who disappeared from Carlos Castaneda’s cult
• International bike theft ring
• Chef making pork dishes for a party

Sophie Vershbow | Esquire | June 18, 2024 | 7,436 words

Time flies when storytelling is this compelling in a 7,500-word profile. Reporter Sophie Vershbow was four days old when she attended the funeral of her cousin, Jeffrey Bomzer, who died on Monday, August 14, 1989, at age 38. He had fallen into a coma after surgery to treat complications from AIDS. EsquireVershbow told his story by examining diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, and talking to many of the people around Jeff. He and his brother Larry contracted HIV early in the AIDS epidemic and died within six months of each other. Vershbow learned that Jeff was bisexual. He never knew if he had contracted the virus through sex or by sharing needles with his brother. Jeff became a forceful and outspoken advocate for others fighting HIV infection. He fought stigma and advocated for clinical trials to find a promising cure. Above all, he helped people live the rest of their lives in peace and grace at a time when an HIV diagnosis meant fear, shame, and isolation. “Jeff believed that the more people who knew about AIDS and were infected with it, the more likely a cure would be found,” she writes. “He recognized the privilege he had as a charismatic, straight-looking, sober, middle-class white man facing a diagnosis that, at the time, was shared primarily by gay men and underprivileged intravenous drug users, who were systematically ignored.” Vershbow is excellent at reminding readers of the stigma society places on people living with HIV and AIDS, and he clearly highlights why Jeff and his contributions were extraordinary. What Vershbow makes clear in this fascinating profile is that it’s not about the dysfunctional and dangerous path he once walked, or what befell him as a result. It doesn’t matter where your purpose comes from, it’s what you do with it that matters. —KS

Sharon Lerner | ProPublica | May 20, 2024 | 8,018 words

This is a story about dangerous secrets. It’s also about complicity and how it manifests not only in the keeping of dangerous secrets, but also in the decision (failure) to question or take a stand. In the 1990s, 3M chemist Chris Hansen tested human blood taken from the Red Cross for the presence of the company’s fluorochemicals. She found fluorochemicals everywhere, because, as we now know, fluorochemicals are “forever chemicals,” contaminating our water sources, soil, animal products, and bodies, and even being transmitted from mother to child. When Hansen published her research, the company stopped her research. Her bosses also told her that fluorochemicals were safe, and she believed it. The headline of this article says that 3M “persuaded” Hansen, when in fact she I wanted It didn’t sit well with her. She respected the company; her father had worked there and helped develop some of its most important products. Even after the research was stopped, Hansen continued to work at 3M. “Perhaps she didn’t want to know if her company was poisoning the public, I thought aloud,” Sharon Lerner writes. “To my surprise, Hansen readily agreed. ‘It was unbearable at the time,’ she told me.” This is not the profile of a hero. This is the profile of someone closer to home than many of us would like to admit: someone who knows the truth, or at least senses it, but chooses to turn a blind eye to it. These people are essential to the functioning of corporate America, which puts profits above well-being. You know these people, I know them. Maybe we are them, too. —SD

Jeffrey Gray | Alta | June 20, 2024 | 20,487 words

Chances are, at some point in your life, you’ve come across a copy of a Carlos Castaneda book with a bent corner. Maybe on a bookshelf in a hostel, in a little free library, or on a park bench. At least that’s how I stumbled across it, but I did. read For me, “Carlos Castaneda” is a name synonymous with New Age that has been floating around for many years. He became a bestselling author in the late 60s and is best known for his books on the spiritual teachings of Don Juan. But his encounters with Yaqui shamans were fabricated and his writings, which began as an anthropology thesis at UCLA, have been discredited and thoroughly refuted. And yet, decades later, he remains a New Age icon. Among the lesser known details of his life that Jeffrey Gray brings to life in this episode are: Alta The story goes that he disappeared from public view in the ’70s, bought a mansion in Los Angeles and formed a cult centered around young women who identified as witches. Chakmol(an ancient Mexican term for warrior statues) were “gatekeepers of the mundane and the sublime.” After Castaneda’s death in 1998, six Chac-Mools mysteriously disappeared, and one female body was found in Death Valley. Did they commit suicide? So where did the other bodies go? And why did Castaneda change his will just days before his death, naming the Chac-Mools as the primary beneficiary? At the urging of a friend, Gray decided to investigate. He acts as our guide into a strange world, weaving a twisted tale that spans Los Angeles (a place where people can remake themselves, and where Castaneda was creating his own reality) and the surreal, consciousness-expanding landscape of the California desert. Things get weird, but Gray keeps us grounded. He tells a fascinating story that feels dated given the current resurgence of interest in psychedelics and our tension-ridden post-truth era, but at the same time, it’s very contemporary. —CLR

Christopher Solomon | WIRED | June 12, 2024 | 5,759 words

“I have a weakness for a good detective story,” said journalist Peter Flax, who shared this article with me. Peter, I agree. And once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. It’s very entertaining, but that doesn’t make it irresponsible. Quite the opposite. Christopher Solomon tells the story of Brian Hance, who runs Bike Index, a website where cyclists can report stolen gear. Hance was “tall, affable, and flamboyantly vulgar,” with hair that “fluttered down his face in black feathers reminiscent of mid-’80s yearbook photos.” A few years ago, he got an anonymous tip about a Facebook page run by a Mexican company that appeared to be selling recently stolen bikes from California. “Not that long ago, bike theft was a crime of opportunity — snatching, taking a screwdriver to a flimsy lock. Those quaint days are over,” Solomon writes. “Today’s thieves are more capable, more daring and more prolific. They wield portable angle grinders and high-powered cordless screwdrivers. They scout neighborhoods in trucks equipped with ladders and steal luxury bikes from second-story balconies. They use your Strava feed to tail you and your luxury bike back to your home.” Hans investigated and investigated until he uncovered the identity of the man behind an international crime ring that has stolen hundreds, if not thousands, of bikes. (As someone who likes to dive down internet rabbit holes in search of answers to questions, I admire Hans’ talents as a citizen detective.) At one point Solomon himself takes command of the detective work, liaising with a Mexican crime mastermind and having some bizarre conversations. This feature is fun. —SD

Abe Beam | TASTE | June 17, 2024 | 4,262 words

Chef Ángel Jiménez’s profile is only sketchy here. He grew up in Puerto Rico, cutting sugarcane at age 14, his father grilling on the beach as a side business. That’s it. This isn’t about Jiménez’s journey to the United States, but the experiences he had once he got there. In a converted trailer in the South Bronx, Jiménez runs La Piraña Lechonera, a restaurant and weekly block party, where he roasts and sells two pigs on Saturdays and Sundays. I don’t eat meat anymore, so I didn’t expect a pork-focused essay to interest me. I didn’t anticipate the magic of Abe Beam’s descriptive powers. I heard Jiménez’s salsa music blaring on the overpass, drowned out by the hustle and bustle of weekend commuters. I try to get a feel for the atmosphere as a diverse crowd, from tourists to local drunks, is gathered there, all of whom are dominated by the cheery Jiménez. I pull the pork out of the oven and smell the hot fat. Try the meat for what it is, though, and it gets a little too raw when Beam bites into the meat, “glossy with fat and pork liquor, shredded without needing to be shredded, somewhere between solid and liquid.” Neither Jimenez nor Beam take themselves too seriously, which lends the film a lightness that lends it a sense of disbelief and humor. I particularly liked the bullet-point explanation of why it takes two hours for food to come out at La Piranha (a key factor is stops to check on the pork trays, “where we often leave our trailers unattended and smoke marijuana in between”). Jimenez could do it more efficiently. He could make more money. It’s not his style, but that’s what makes it great. At one point, Beam muses: “[H]”Oh my God, I can’t believe I can put into words all the craziness I went through,” he says, putting it in words that are both fun and insidious. —CW

Audience Award

Which piece will take the crown this week?