This week's top 5 long reads

In this week's issue:

• More than 30 years later, a repentant juror decides to take a stand.
• A Palestinian writer examines what it means to witness unrelenting brutality.
• A look back at the uncertain future of a beluga whale once captured in Norway.
• Digging into weightlifting culture and destigmatizing steroids.
• A youth tour of the early internet, before we were fully online.

Michael Hall | Texas Monthly | January 16, 2024 | 9,962 words

With this riveted braid feature, texas monthly, Michael Hall reveals how everything went wrong for Carlos Jayre. In the 1980s, Jail was a successful Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman in Texas, living his American dream with the motto “persistence over resistance.” One day, the police suddenly showed up at his office and took him away on suspicion of raping a girl. Estela Ibarra served on Jail's jury. She voted to convict him, but she felt pressured to make a decision by two of her fellow jurors, tough, tough white men. Hall explains all of this up front. We have miscarriages of justice, repentant jurors, and men in prison for decades for crimes they did not commit.We think we know what happened, but we don't know exactly how It happened. Thanks to Hall's masterful pacing, the need to understand how bad detective work, grave police mistakes, and two nagging jurors led to a prison sentence of life plus 20 years stimulated. His masterful storytelling is rewarding as he follows Estela Ibarra as she confronts her conscience to embrace “persistence over resistance” in order to free an innocent man. “Everyone involved in Carlos' case found a reason to turn a blind eye,” Hall wrote. “Everyone, that is, except for one woman who decided to do the right thing.” It's always bittersweet when a wrongful conviction is overturned. And while the most beautiful thing is the release of Carlos Jayre, it is Hall's profound skill that does justice to his story and its unforgettable, emotional and poignant ending. —K.S.

Sarah Aziza | Jewish Currents | January 12, 2024 | 2,587 words

Three months have passed since Israel launched a relentless campaign of violence in Gaza. Israeli forces have killed nearly 25,000 people, about 9,600 of whom were children. They expelled approximately 85 percent of the remaining population, pushing the survivors to the brink of starvation. Day after day, the world watches the devastation. We have seen bodies crushed by rubble, mothers weeping over their dead babies, and doctors tending to the injured in hospitals plunged into darkness due to power outages. What is happening is unconscionable and unacceptable, and there is no end in sight. In her brilliant essay, Palestinian author Sara Aziza reflects on what it meant to witness her “livestreamed genocide” and to look upon her own fear and powerlessness. doing. She said: “I wasn't thinking about the British, I was thinking about the prosecutor.'' witness, But in Arabic,” Aziza wrote. “In this, our language, our verbs, Witness It comes from the root شهد. This is also the origin of the much maligned word “شهيد”. Shahid, In other words, literally witness, It is often translated as, Martyr. . . . To be a witness is to touch, to be touched, and to leave traces of that contact. ” In this sense, witnessing an atrocity means being hurt by it. “We have to allow ourselves to be cut and try to stay with what we see,” Aziza continues. “This wound is important. Imagination may be invested in it – not to violate the other person's subjectivity, but to awaken a sense of awe for the depth, privacy, and uniqueness of each life. There, we may be able to catch a glimpse, albeit from the side, of the extent of the suffering in Gaza that we will never know. This is where the real testimony must begin, the mystery. yeah.” –SD

Ferris Jable | New York Times Magazine | January 14, 2024 | 6,434 words

When Hvaldimir the beluga first appeared in northern Norway, he was wearing a harness, clearly a relic from his days in the Russian Navy. (Satellite photos of Russian naval bases around Murmansk show a sea cage near where Hvardimir appeared, where he may have escaped.) That's right, the whale was captured. , trained for military use. I knew we had been keeping cetaceans in tanks for entertainment since the 1860s, but I didn't know they were forced into captivity. Enter military service. A quote from this great work by Ferris Jabr struck me. “Whales and dolphins are basically the last animals on Earth, and they have to work seven days a week until they die in completely barren boxes with not even a rock to hide in,” Hvaldimir said. Although he is just one whale, his story resonates with the stories of thousands of other whales. Can whales survive in the wild once captured? Or, as Jabr writes, can “severely traumatized abductees reintegrate into society”? Now, a human tangle of ambition, ignorance, noble intentions, and bickering intertwine over Hvaldimir's welfare. Mr. Jabr's writing is modest but poignant. We really don't know what to do with captured whales.This essay hooked me from the first line, but by the end it left me feeling like I did after watching the 2013 documentary black fish: Deflated state. I wish I hadn't taken them in in the first place. —C.W.

Adrian Nathan West | The Baffler | January 12, 2024 | 3,856 words

There's joy in finding stories that relate to your core interests, and even more joy when those interests are generally ignored or despised by the “literary” world. So it was almost shocking this week when two different pieces took on the world of physical culture and weightlifting. (The last time I came across something like that was almost two years ago.) While I enjoy Jordan Castro's work; harpers Works by Adrian Nathan West baffler This story is truly unusual. You can have a lot of fun even if you don't agree with the discussion. (If you like deadlifts, that's a bonus, but not a prerequisite, I promise.) West has been in the weight room and jiu-jitsu dojo for years, but he's also “a thoughtful guy with modest physical goals.” , I am doing my best at my level. He eliminates the prejudice against steroids and even admires them. But he does it wisely, both by distinguishing the double standards of their demonization and by being honest about his own desires. It all takes a sharp look at the bloated stupidity of defunct fitness influencers. “As Adorno pointed out in his writings on astrology,” he writes in one of his many amazing passages, For the same reason, young steroid users faced with the intricacies of organic chemistry can turn away from the hundreds of studies on PubMed and rely on the big 19-inch arm brawlers who tell them what they want to hear. likely to search. ” In fact, it's probably not fair to call this an essay on weightlifting. That's something completely different. It's about danger, hysteria, and self-delusion. About what happens when the illusion of physical transformation becomes a little less fantastical. Regarding illegal pedestrianization. In other words, a weird flex. . . but it's okay. —PR

Kyle Chayka | The New Yorker | January 13, 2024 | 3,986 words

In an excerpt from his new book, Filterworld: How algorithms flattened culture, Kyle Chayka recalls the early internet, the web many of us miss, that enabled “creative possibilities” and “self-definition.” When he tells me his AOL Instant Messenger username, “Silk,” I immediately remember his first AOL screen name, “RsrvoirGrl.” (Yes, in high school I was obsessed with Quentin Tarantino's movies.) When he writes about posting to Livejournal and explains that writing there “became a kind of public performance,” I thought, , reminds me of my own musings on Diaryland, another early publishing platform. These diaries make me cringe when I read them now, but they are also very pure and passionate. I'm embarrassed to say that I've never written so vigorously since then. His subsequent experiences are very enjoyable to read and remind us of some of the milestones in that evolving space. That's how my MySpace profile suddenly merged my online “shadow” self into his physical IRL identity. My first virtual meeting with my future spouse (I will never forget the first tweet that her husband and I exchanged). How Instagram first inspired me as a photographer and then slowly sucked all my creativity out. Like many articles I've read recently about the broken state of the web, this essay says nothing about the Internet that we don't know or already know. feel In our bodies, minds, and attention spans. But I've always enjoyed his Chayka writing, and his thoughts on what it was like to be online in a time when “being online wasn't yet the default state of being” resonated with me. , brings a certain amount of nostalgia. —CLR