Longform

This Longform story, Eat What You Kill, is astonishing and well worth your time. At the heart of it is a doctor growing rich by misdiagnosing patients, including one who died after receiving chemo for 11 years for stage 4 cancer despite never having cancer:

Hailed as a savior upon his arrival in Helena, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner became a favorite of patients and his hospital’s highest earner. As the myth surrounding the high-profile oncologist grew, so did the trail of patient harm and suspicious deaths.

You can read the full investigation on ProPublica: Eat What You Kill by J. David McSwane.

I'll point out that ProPublica is the best place for thorough journalism that I'm aware of. When I cancelled my subscriptions to The Guardian (due to anti-Trans bias) and The Atlantic (too expensive), I funnelled that money into a monthly donation to PP.

Another banger piece they published just this week was The Militia And the Mole by Joshua Kaplan:

A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.

He only told Joshua Kaplan at ProPublica.

Speaking of Longreads (see the post below), Longreads.com has released their best of 2024, which is broken into numerous categories. They always compile the best best-of list of the year:

Best of 2024 - Longreads

Since 2011, Longreads editors and contributors have compiled the most notable reads of the year in our annual Best of Longreads collections. We’re continuing this tradition for 2024, with a few new changes that we hope you’ll enjoy. Bookmark this page, where we’ll share all of our Best of 2024 lists through December. Thank you, […]

LongreadsLongreads

I hate linking to Bloomberg, but I do appreciate their annual Jealousy list, wherein their reporters list the articles published at other outlets that they themselves wish they'd written.

Here's the 2024 Jealousy List. Previous years have archive links on the page.

"The day before the Taliban trammeled her freedom, a young woman went for a bike ride."

Terrific long-form piece in Bicycling about female cyclists in Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban. The Taliban of course doesn't want females to ride bikes because the bike seats "threatens a woman’s chastity": The Alchemists by Kim Cross.

These Women Were Some of Afghanistan’s Best Athletes. Then They Started Getting Death Threats.

They led a cycling revolution in a country where women were forbidden to ride. When the Taliban returned to power, their only hope was a harrowing escape to an uncertain future.

BicyclingKim Cross

One of the many reasons I'm so down on Toronto is just how oppressively hot it can get. I've lived in some hot places (Los Angeles, Southern Spain, Vanuatu, Cuba, the Dominican, Melbourne...), but Toronto, in my opinion, is the hottest. I don't care what the number on the thermometer reads — I care how I feel. How I sweat. What a slog it is to get from place to place as a pedestrian — and, to me, there is no worse place than Toronto in the summer. (It also has the worst traffic, but that's another post.)

Anyway, there's a great long-form piece by Sam Bloch in Places Journal about Shade.

"The entry is dated June 1981, and while I have no memory of writing it, the penmanship is unmistakably my own. There, between accounts of my grandfather dying and a game-winning double I hit in Little League, is an account of my being raped three years before. I concluded the entry by wondering what I would do if I ever met the man who'd raped me on the street once I myself was a grown man."

The above is from David Holthouse's article in Westword: Stalking the Bogeyman.

There is a follow-up: Arrested Development.

This American Life also did a piece on it.

Holthouse's website is here.