The Top 5 Longreads of the Week - Longreads (2024)

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In this week’s edition:

• The preventable toll of youth football
• Professional whistleblowing for profit
• Survivalist hideouts for sale
• The consultant con
• Discovering new bee species

Alex Morris | Rolling Stone | September 9, 2023 | 8,154 words

All over the US, school is starting back up, which means football season is nigh. In fact, for many players, it’s already begun: high schoolers are toiling in intense preseason practice sessions known as two-a-days, and kids as young as five have been enrolled in Pop Warner’s tackle football offerings since the beginning of August. My feelings about this annual juncture can be summed up in one word:why?We know all too well at this point about the ravages of concussions sustained on the field. We’ve heard about the scientists studying former professional players’ brains, read the headlines about suicides committed by once-famous men with declining cognitive function, seen the maudlin but well-intentioned Will Smith movie about the doctor who faced breathtaking backlash for exposing a public health crisis funded and manufactured by the NFL. But as Alex Morris shows in a tremendous story published a year ago—I missed it while I was on a work sabbatical—young kids whose parents put them on the field are at risk, too, and diagnosed concussions aren’t the only concern. So are “repeated, seemingly benign assaults to brain tissue, little ‘dings’ that could occur dozens of times in a single game and that a player may not even clock but that nonetheless cause damage at the cellular level—microscopically torn blood vessels, disconnected neurons, jumbled tau proteins (the building blocks of the fibers that carry nutrients and messages from cell to cell).” Through the stories of several young men, all of whom are now dead, Morris illustrates the toll football can take even if players pack up their helmet and cleats after high school. “America’s greatest game is hurting our children in insidious and incalculable ways,” Morris writes. “Addressing the issue might mean fundamentally changing the way we teach a game that has become fundamental to America’s sense of self.” That’s one approach. Another is to stop letting kids—or anyone—play the game, period. I realize that’s never going to happen, because this is America, and our society thrives on ashared death drive. But a girl can scream into the void. —SD

2. How To Make Millions As a Professional Whistleblower

Gordy Megroz | GQ | August 21, 2024 | 4,589 words

We think of whistleblowers as those people brave enough to call out corruption or wrongdoing at their workplace. We don’t think of them as people who are compensated for their efforts—or consider the possibility that this could present a seven- or eight-figure income stream for an enterprising freelancer. Enter: the pseudonymous Richard Overum, the subject of a highly entertaining feature by Gordy Megroz. While he sounds like a con man (whom he understandably needs to share a skillset with), the reporting doesn’t lie. Read it now, before the inevitable film adaptation gets underway. —PR

Patricia Marx | The New Yorker | August 26, 2024 | 4,946 words

According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 39% of adults in the US believe they’re living in end times. Who are these people, and how are they preparing? Patricia Marx descends into the bunker real estate market for this story, which is funny, twisted, and unnerving all at once. (This is exactly how I’d describe season one ofFallout, which I binged last week and is complementary entertainment to this piece.) Marx tours unique hideaways and McBunkers across the vast middle of America, including an inoperative missile-silo site in North Dakota, a massive cave in Arkansas previously used to raise worms, and an earth home in Montana, a “hole in the ground [that] looked as if it could be the home of a paranoid hobbit.” I’m generally allergic to marketing copy but immune to real estate listings; I consider myself a Zillow power user, browsing listings daily despite not being in the market to buy or sell for years. So I thoroughly enjoyed Marx’s witty voice as she describes a number of “finisher homes” fit for survivalists and anxious rich people, as well as the property listings sprinkled in throughout the piece. (“Discover the ultimate retreat . . . a custom-built Underground Prepper Bunker that perfectly balances security and comfort,” one begins.) There’s even a demand for prefab shelters; the founder of one such company sells a bunker a day, with business steady since the start of the pandemic. Whether or not you’re one of the four in ten Americans who believe the end is near, you still may find bits of yourself reflected in these folks: if not the fear for what might come, then perhaps the appreciation for a good-sized primary bedroom, soaring ceilings, and an expansive pantry to store all that food you’ll need. —CLR

4. The Contingency Contingent

Leigh Claire La Berge|n+1|August 22, 2024|6,994 words

Coming out of college in the mid/late ’90s, chances are you knew somebody who was making a weird amount of money as a “consultant.” You didn’t really know what consultants did, exactly, but their work seemed almostintentionallyill-defined, and also somehow very lucrative. Twenty-five years after her own stint in the field, Leigh Claire La Berge has mixed those spirits of ambiguity and corporatism into a wry, bracing co*cktail. La Berge’s time as an analyst with Arthur Andersen, she tells out at the outset, was pure artifice—everything from her employment status (contractor) to the project she worked on (Y2K disaster preparedness) to Andersen’s so-called best practices. Her chronicle of those fictions couldn’t feel truer, though: ceaseless spreadsheets, dehumanizing dronework, an endless sea of middle managers failing upward. And above all, ennui. “The only times we really spoke to each other in an uncurated fashion,” she writes of her fellow analysts, “were over the blinding flashes and tray clicks of the Minolta copy machine. There we would discuss our commuting woes, roommate dramas, awkward dates, student loan repayment plans, as well as a rather unarticulated feeling of: What?” Like Anna Wiener’s memoirUncanny Valley, this essay proves yet again that even the best workplace satire can never live up to the real thing. —PR

5. Here a Bee, There a Bee, Everywhere a Wild Bee

Anne Casselman | Hakai Magazine | August 20, 2024 | 4,395 words

Imagine the thrill of discovering a new species—a creature no one else has ever documented. ForHakai Magazine, Anne Casselman introduces us to the melittologists (bee biologists) who are doing just that with surprising regularity. Amid the poetic litany of plants in the west Kootenay region of British Columbia—purple onion grass, bitterroot, limestone hawksbeard—we meet Rowan Rampton, then a graduate student at the University of Calgary who stumbled uponHoplitis emarginata, a relative of the mason bee seen only a handful of times in northern California and southern Oregon. Bee identification can be tricky, but rewarding. As Casselman explains, the field guideCommon Bees of Western North Americagroups specimens into comical categories such as “bees that are extremely large” or “bees that are very hairy.” For his winged wonder, Rampton turned to his mentor Lincoln Best, an expert taxonomist with the Master Melittologist Program at Oregon State University, who identified the bee under a microscope. I learned much from reading this piece, but what I found most fascinating was the singular symbiotic relationship between a bee and their preferred plant. For example,Proteriades(a subgenus of mason bees) has a love connection with a plant calledCryptantha. Their “stems are like pale green miniature pipe cleaners that twist up and end in curved sprays of minuscule flowers, which open like popcorn kernels. . . . These bees have evolved Velcro-covered tongues to scrape the pollen out of the flower’s narrow corolla, and special brushes on their legs to comb pollen into a pile that it then packs onto its belly to take back to the nest for its larvae, which specialize in digesting this one plant’s pollen.” Discovering these beautiful relationships are critical to conservation efforts. Only when you understand which plants bees prefer and why, can you devote time and energy to protecting them and their habitat. The more you know, the more you can bee a friend to the pollinators among us. —KS

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