Long Reads
Gabe Fleisher | Politico | March 8, 2024
Surdy first began following American politics during the 2020 election, which he said many of his friends and peers in the UK paid close attention to as well. A few months later, he watched the 2021 House speaker’s election, and became fascinated with the unusual-sounding procedures governing the session. “I’ve been hooked ever since,” he said.
The Search for Special Case–Baby 1
Lizzy Ratner | The Nation | March 12, 2024
The lost child buried in a lonely grave on Hart Island, and the terrible and untold story of the impact of AIDS on disadvantaged children in New York City.
The botched backyard operation
Paul Farrell | ABC Investigations | March 17, 2024
An unarmed young man with a minor criminal record came under police suspicion for wearing a hoodie in a Western Sydney street. Minutes later, they shot him dead in his own backyard. The death of Brad Balzan and the fatal errors of proactive policing.
Truman Capote | Esquire | Aug 18, 2022
Capote's barely-disguised roman à clef, originally published in 1975, savagely exposed the secrets and scandals of the society doyennes he'd fawned over. He never recovered from his swift and permanent exclusion from their rarefied circles, leading to his death in 1984 and dramatised in the 2024 series, Feud: Capote vs the Swans.
Eric Umansky | ProPublica | Jun 23, 2020
ProPublica Deputy Managing Editor Eric Umansky’s family saw an unmarked NYPD cruiser hit a Black teenager. He tried to find out how it happened, and instead found all of the ways the NYPD is shielded from accountability.
Oscar Schwartz | The Drift | March 12, 2024
Walter Isaacson has carved a role as the semi-official biographer of those he has deemed Great Geniuses of Our Times, writing sycophantic tomes chronicling figures even he describes as "risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training". Elon Musk is a bloated, boring, awful man about whom Isaacson has written a bloated, boring, awful book that lots of people will buy and no one will read, and everything keeps getting worse.