The best longform journalism we consumed this week
Welcome to The Long Story, the weekly newsletter where we curate the best longform journalism on the internet. If you want this newsletter landing in your inbox every Friday, click on this handy little button:
Let’s jump into it…
Inside the New Private Mountain Clubs Where Billionaires Ski
Private equity firms spent the last few decades buying up ski resorts and pushing their customers into purchasing annual passes that incentivize those customers to ski as often as possible. This means that ski lift lines are longer than ever — unless of course you're a centimillionaire who can afford to plop down $2 million and join a private ski club. In that case, the wait lines are nonexistent and you'll have the world's most luxurious amenities waiting for you when you get back to the lodge. [GQ]
The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces
When you hear the term "rightwing media," you likely think of outlets like Fox News, Daily Wire, and Breitbart. But a Media Matters analysis found that many of the world's most popular podcasts and social media accounts that ostensibly focus on non-political subjects — like entertainment and sports — regularly push right-leaning messages. These findings underscore liberals' failure to build out their own messaging ecosystem, a failure that puts them at a distinct disadvantage in the runup to elections. [Media Matters]
Inside the Fight to Save the World’s Most Endangered Wolf
For hundreds of years, Americans considered it open season on wolves, which were often accused of killing livestock and even feared as a mortal threat to humans. One particular species, the red wolf, was hunted to near extinction, and now only about a dozen remain. To save them, a network of conservationists have to be on constant high alert so they can rescue wandering wolves from fearful landowners who are hellbent on killing them. [Garden & Gun]
Elon Musk Looks Desperate
Elon Musk's massive wealth depends entirely on the widespread belief in an idea: that beneath all the bluster and erratic behavior there's a stable business genius who's executing some sort of grand plan for infinite growth. Now that this idea is beginning to unravel, it risks taking everything Musk holds dear — his wealth, his companies, his power — down with it. [The Atlantic]
Hate rats? Then you won’t love this new study.
Cities are often warmer than their surrounding regions due to the heat absorbed into concrete. They're also facing unrelenting rat infestations that will only get worse as climate change progresses. The warmer the winter, the less time rats have to bunker down, which means they can spend more and more time focused on what they do best: breeding. [Vox]
How a Chinese battery factory sparked a political meltdown in a small Michigan town
A new battery factory in Michigan seemed primed to assuage all the economic anxieties that have besieged the US over the past forty years: It paid higher-than-average wages, onshored American manufacturing, and promised to revitalize a small town whose best days seemed far behind it. And yet the local residents wholly rejected the factory, pulling every political lever they could to halt its implementation. The incident not only highlights Americans' growing antipathy with China, but also explains why we're badly losing the EV adoption race. [Rest of World]
It’s Taylor Sheridan’s World. We’re Just Watching It
Taylor Sheridan is probably the most prolific writer in Hollywood, rivaled only by Tyler Perry. Not only is his output prodigious — he's created eight TV shows and wrote most of the episodes himself — but his hit rate is unheard of. His shows might represent the last claim to a TV monoculture, as they manage to appeal to vast swaths of Americans across age groups and regions. [Rolling Stone]
Can DIY Clothes Unravel Fast Fashion’s Climate Disasters?
With fast fashion generating upwards of 10% of the world's carbon emissions, some are turning to a radical alternative: making their own clothes. It's not only more environmentally friendly, but it gives its practitioners a greater appreciation for all the labor that goes into the making of our clothes. “Once I started to make [clothes], I realized, Oh, every single thing that you buy takes time. And if you’re buying something that costs $9, that means that the person who made it is clearly not getting paid well.” [Dame]
The FAA’s Troubles Are More Serious Than You Know
Prior to Trump's second inauguration, the FAA had a nearly flawless record at preventing commercial plane crashes, but his gutting of the agency has sent it into chaos, with many civil servants warning that they're not fully equipped to prevent future crashes. At risk is an industry that generates trillions of dollars in domestic spending each year. Quite simply, most Americans will no longer fly if they determine it's unsafe. [The Atlantic]
Zyn and the New Nicotine Gold Rush
Can a single nicotine product send lung cancer rates plummeting? In Sweden, snus producers like Zyn have already achieved this goal; now they've set their sights on the US, and, after 10 years in obscurity, the product has gone viral. Some think snus could be a much bigger market than cigarettes due to their lack of social stigma. [New Yorker]
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iShowSpeed Owns The World
What do you do when you become so famous that your mere presence creates a dangerous situation? The streamer iShowSpeed realized he needed to radically change his approach to public appearances after he found himself trapped in a store, unable to escape the throngs of fans that had clogged the streets outside. [golfcart]
The Loyalist
It'd be hard to settle on the most hateful bigot in Trump's administration, but Stephen Miller would likely be in the running for the title. How did a millennial jew who grew up in deep blue California become the country's most influential white nationalist? A disastrous series of events in the 1990s that sent his wealthy family into an economic tumble may hold the key. [The Nation]
How Natural Gas Became America’s Most Important Export
One of the most incredible trends over the past decade was the United States' transformation into an energy super power. In fact, it's the country's decreased reliance on outside energy providers that has helped embolden Trump to betray our allies; he believes they'll always be beholden to our natural gas exports. [Bloomberg]
Chaos at the V.A.: Inside the DOGE Cuts Disrupting the Veterans Agency
Cancer drug trials for veterans who ran out of treatment options were cancelled. Medical supplies are going unordered. Maintenance contracts for equipment were paused. These are just some of the effects from Elon Musk's gutting of the VA, an agency that services millions of veterans every year. [NYT]
How the Ukraine-Russia war is reshaping the tech sector in Eastern Europe
In the US, much of our military tech is produced by huge firms that charge sometimes tens of millions of dollars for state of the art vehicles and weapons. But the Ukraine army, with its tiny budget and guerilla warfare tactics, has been reliant on a small group of more scrappy startups that adapt civilian tech for the battlefield — often at a fraction of the cost compared to their defense contractor counterparts. [Technology Review]
Smells Like Protein Spirit
Nearly every fitness influencer these days repeats the same two mantras: 1. You're not eating enough protein, and 2. They have the perfect powder/food to deliver it to you (usually accompanied with a discount code). Many have also launched their own mobile apps for counting "macros," the most important of which is, you guessed it, protein. But does science actually support the consumption of one daily protein gram for every pound of body weight, or is it just another diet fad? [Taste]
How China pulled ahead to become the world leader in electric vehicles
"China now produces more than 60 percent of the world’s electric cars and 80 percent of the batteries that power them." Why has it been able to scale up production so efficiently? Because its centralized, top-down government prioritized every level of the supply chain, from the building materials to the manufacturing to the charging stations. Meanwhile, the US embrace of EVs has been more haphazard, with infrastructure and incentives widely varying from state to state. [WashPo]
What’s a Rebel Pundit to Do in the Age of Trump?
Why did several left-leaning journalists — people like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald — suddenly become loud Trump apologists? Most likely because the rightwing media ecosystem recognized these journalists' potential to pull wavering liberals over to the other side of the aisle and so showered them with attention and money. [The Nation]
The Politics of Pickleball
On the surface, pickleball seems like the most inoffensive sport imaginable. It doesn't damage players' brains like football and boxing. It doesn't kill animals like horseracing. It doesn't turn its spectators into degenerate gamblers, like just about every pro sport in existence. Its stadiums don't require billions of dollars in government subsidies. And yet there are probably more efforts to ban it than for any other sport — all because of the pop sound that's made when the paddles hit the ball. [Common Reader]
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