Rolling Long Form Article Thread

This was unexpectedly engrossing:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/10/the-invisible-power-of-big-glasses-eyewear-industry-essilor-luxottica

An American family’s struggle for student loan redemption

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/looks-like-debt-to-me-miller

Charles W. Howard is the porta-potty king of New York City. The seat of his vast empire is Broad Channel, Queens; from this windswept rock in Jamaica Bay, you can see the lights of Manhattan twinkling across the water. Early every morning, while the city sleeps, dozens of trucks — tagged with WE’RE #1 AT PICKING UP #2 decals — snake through the five boroughs to clean his 18,000 toilets. The company boasts more than $35 million in annual revenue, thanks in part to “salesgirls” who head out each day in the company’s signature Volkswagen Beetles to poach contracts from competitors who are too shy to sell with sex. Charlie himself arrives at work only around midday in a black Cadillac Escalade. Young female dispatchers and clerks cry “Charlie! Charlie!” while men in orange slickers hose down toilets in the yard.

On a recent Thursday, the gleaming Escalade stops at a pizzeria, and Charlie, 53, steps out, a bit heavy and wearing a rumpled purple dress shirt. He’s brought along Kimberly, the star of his company’s YouTube channel. She’s beautiful, blonde, and his wife. Charlie favors superlatives, like another Queens businessman, and speaks with the accent you’d expect from a man so old-school New York there’s a neighborhood named after his family. And now, not far from Howard Beach, he explains why he’s the greatest toilet man in America. “I had different theories about business,” he says, “and they all turned out to be correct.”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/charles-howard-porta-potty-king-of-nyc.html

https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/bruce-hay-paternity-trap-maria-pia-shuman-mischa-haider.html

^^^ oh yeah this thing was insane.

maybe dude would have gotten hoodwinked either way bc he's such a sap but it certainly didn't help matters that he and his ex-wife had such a nebulous arrangement and had apparently failed to communicate any parameters or boundaries. I guess I can understand wanting to still co-habitate while raising young children (though it definitely seems like a highly fraught proposition) but then to have some kind of perceived understanding that you can't pursue a serious relationship but you CAN pursue casual hook-ups, and then apparently to be completely wrong about that, at least from the ex-wife's perspective...jesus, what a clusterfuck.

This Simon Reynolds article got quite a lot of traction at the time it was published, I seem to recall:

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/

The legacy of violence surrounding James Brown, up to and including questions surrounding his own death. Compelling reading, but it’s...a lot:

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/02/us/james-brown-death-questions/index.html

christ

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter

jo ann beard is one of the greatest to ever do it, buy the boys of my youth mookie

Seconding that, that book is so good.

interview with ellen burstyn

https://www.vulture.com/2019/12/interview-ellen-burstyn-on-inside-the-actors-studio.html

https://www.limestonepostmagazine.com/bloomington-2019-year-of-farmers-market-controversy

If someone asked you for your favorite longform pieces, what would you list? Interpret that however you want

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) May 28, 2021

want to know lots and lots about man-made freshwater lakes?

https://limestonepostmagazine.com/deep-dive-how-healthy-is-lake-monroe/

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/o-uommibatto-how-the-pre-raphaelites-became-obsessed-with-the-wombat/