WE’VE HAD 12 months of compiling excellent longreads every week for Sitdown Sunday – and now it’s time to pick the best of the bunch.
Here were the highlights from across 2022, month by month.
A look at the brand Shein, and how it ushered in an era of ultra-fast shopping.
(The Guardian, approx mins reading time)
Shein’s fast growth has brought with it a series of controversies. Numerous designers accused it of stealing their work, and brands including Levi Strauss and Dr Martens have sued the company for trademark infringement. (The former settled for an undisclosed sum, and Shein said it doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation).
A Texas Ranger named James Holland became famous for extracting confessions from killers – but did his methods encourage innocent people to confess too?
(The Marshall Project, approx 30 mins reading time)
Holland was lying about the license plate and the police list. This was perfectly legal — and effective, since Driskill rummaged through his memories and recalled driving through the area to visit his father, make car payments, and — perhaps — to bid on some home renovation work.
After several turbulent years, with the deaths of his parents, the total flop that was Zoolander 2 and a global pandemic, Ben Stiller says his life is getting back on track and that his dreams are in motion as he releases his new Apple + TV show, Severance.
The following year, Zoolander No. 2 flopped spectacularly—and while the failure of a zany comedy isn’t a tragedy, especially compared to losing one’s mother, when it’s an international spectacle that you conceived, wrote, directed, starred in, and produced, and it seems like the whole world is watching it fail, it is, Stiller says, “not a great experience.”
A look at how the restoration of Paris’s historic Notre Dame cathedral three years after a devastating fire is honouring its medieval roots.
(National Geographic, approx 32 mins reading time)
Jean-Michel Leniaud, a historian of architecture, was at a reception at the Palace of Versailles. He rushed back to Paris and watched the drama. “People were crying. People were praying. People were kneeling in the street,” he said.
An interview with the legendary Al Pacino on The Godfather and how it catapulted his career to a new level.
(New York Times, approx 14 mins reading time)
“It’s hard to explain in today’s world — to explain who I was at that time and the bolt of lightning that it was,” Pacino said. “I felt like, all of a sudden, some veil was lifted and all eyes were on me. Of course, they were on others in the film. But ‘The Godfather’ gave me a new identity that was hard for me to cope with.”
Allan Little looks at Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, taking in wider European history along the way.
(BBC, approx 15 mins reading time)
First, he believed the West was in chronic decline, weakened by internal division and ideological rancour. The election of Donald Trump and Brexit he saw as proof of this. The rise of right-wing authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary was further evidence of the disintegration of liberal values and institutions.
The story of Mackenzie Morrison, who was accused by her university of misrepresenting her childhood abuse.
(The New Yorker, approx 48 mins reading time)
Mackenzie began documenting her life with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Henry Lovelace, Jr, a personal trainer who had won the Missouri Strongest Man Championship in his weight group. Two days after starting the journal, in March, 2014, she wrote an entry about a head injury she’d suffered three months earlier.
A journalist sets out to find ‘Susan Thunder’, a famed female hacker from the 1980s.
(The Verge, approx 32 mins reading time)
Over the phone, she could convince anyone of anything. Her voice honey-sweet, she’d pose as a telephone operator, a clerk, or an overworked secretary: I’m sorry, my boss needs to change his password, can you help me out?
Following a rookie militiaman watching a video of a massacre in Damascus and leaking it to academics, a researcher undertakes a second personality to lure in the war criminal who carried out the mass killing.
(The Guardian, 13 minute reading time)
It is the story of a war crime, captured in real time, by one of the Syrian regime’s most notorious enforcers, branch 227 of the country’s military intelligence service that also details the painstaking efforts to turn the tables on its perpetrators – including how two researchers in Amsterdam duped one of the most infamous security officers in Syria through an online alter ego and seduced him into spilling the sinister secrets of Assad’s war.
The images are stark – thousand of photographs from the highly secretive Chinese system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang. They show the human faces inside the camps, and provide more information about what is going on with them.
(BBC, approx 13 mins reading time)
The cache reveals, in unprecedented detail, China’s use of “re-education” camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs – and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both.
As the popular dating show returns to our screens, Anna Peele examines how the carefully produced machine that is Love Island came to be, and how it affects the lives of those who appear on it.
(Vanity Fair, approx 34 mins reading time)
Aspiring contestants—100,000 people apply each year—know the explicit premise of the series is being judged by viewers who literally vote on whether they like you. They know there will be challenges created by the show’s producers to provoke them.
A very young teenager has to make a huge trip in order to access an abortion.
(The New Yorker, approx 30 mins reading time)
The father’s girlfriend, who is close to Laura and controlled the household supply of sanitary pads, deduced that the girl had missed only one period. That meant Laura might just beat the six-week cutoff, so the girlfriend hastened to call local clinics. A few hours later, though, she and the father were confronting a fact faced by many other Texas families since the passage of S.B. 8.
Dublin DJ Kate Butler writes about Beyonce’s latest single, which samples Robyn S, and how it relates to the long history of sampling Black women’s voices.
(Kate Marcella, approx 7 mins reading time)
Loleatta Holloway famously described how a dance hit produced by three men in Italy — Danielle Davoli, Valerio Semplici, Mirko Limoni — Black Box’s Ride on Time, topped the charts for six weeks in 1989, and that, “I sat there and watched the television every day and saw this girl pantomime my song and get credit for it.”
A look at how Istanbul became the global capital of the hair transplant.
(GQ, approx 18 mins reading time)
Then a few things changed. One day, standing in a check-out line, I looked up at the security camera TV and saw a bald guy standing at the cash register. Then I realized that the bald guy was me. I had never seen the top of my head from that bird’s eye perspective; my self-image aged a decade.
A man named Glen McCurley strangled a young woman in 1974, but was she his only victim?
(Texas Monthly, approx 41 mins reading time)
He seemed to be a good man leading a quiet life. One woman had even sent a letter to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram praising him and Judy for returning her lost wallet. “The world needs more folks like this,” she wrote. But detectives had developed an entirely different perspective on McCurley. They had compelling evidence that he was responsible for the notorious unsolved murder of a teenage girl in 1974.
A look at the actor Bruce Willis’s career, and how his roles in later life might have contributed to his aphasia going unnoticed on set.
(Vulture, approx 13 mins reading time)
Over time, though, Willis started moving away from the thoughtful Everyman action hero he had incarnated in Die Hard and toward more retrograde macho-man roles. The Die Hard sequels were far more typical of the era’s R-rated action blockbusters, stressing McClane’s sour cynicism and lethal skills instead of his humanity.
How a man known as the ‘man in black’ was exposed by the Russian women he terrorised.
(BBC, approx 11 mins reading time)
The women, mostly aged between 19 and 25, had attended a rally in Moscow in March against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They were quickly rounded up by officers and put in the back of a police van. Most of them didn’t know each other, but despite the circumstances the atmosphere was upbeat. They even set up a Telegram group chat as they travelled across the city to Brateyevo police station. What happened next was far worse than they anticipated.
Police in New York City had to field dozens of calls about crimes taking place at one address on the Upper West Side. But when they’d turn up, nothing could be found.
(New York Times, approx 15 mins reading time)
Again and again, police officers had raced to the tree-lined block of the Upper West Side, between West 103rd and 104th Streets. Firefighters and paramedics met them there. But the responses all ended the same way: The emergency vehicles turned and left, their sirens off. The police, over time, stopped responding to the calls at all. Because there is no 312 Riverside Drive.
October
Before Angela Lansbury died – 10 years before, in fact – she sat down with the New York Times for a video interview only to be broadcast after her death.
A ‘Gone Girl’ cruise? How can a cruise be themed around a book about a woman faking her own abduction to take revenge on her partner? Imogen West-Knights went to find out.
(Slate, approx 22 mins read time)
There look to be about 70 people in the room, other than the ship’s captain and the handful of Avalon staff. They are mostly 50-plus of an even gender split. From the sounds of their voices, they are all American. I am given a glass of Champagne, the first of dozens and dozens of drinks thrust into my hands over the course of this trip, to my eventual great distress.
The legendary director speaks about his upcoming film The Fabelmans, a coming-of-age drama based on his own childhood, and looks back over his life and career.
(The Hollywood Reporter, approx 19 mins reading time)
The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s most vulnerable movie, and at 75, he considers it “the first coming-of-age story I’ve ever told.” “My life with my mom and dad taught me a lesson, which I hope this film in a small way imparts,” he says. “Which is, when does a young person in a family start to see his parents as human beings? In my case, because of what happened between the ages of 7 and 18, I started to appreciate my mom and dad not as parents but as real people.”
Are we all prisoners of geography, victims of geopolitics? The truth might be different to what some assume.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
Marshall noted how this gap in Russia’s natural fortifications has repeatedly exposed it to attacks. “Putin has no choice”, Marshall concluded: “He must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west.” When Putin did precisely that, invading a Ukraine he could no longer control by quieter means, Marshall greeted it with wearied understanding, deploring the war yet finding it unsurprising.
A writer for Grey’s Anatomy who was found to be lying about her cancer explains what happened.
(The Ankler, 36 mins reading time)
Her wife left her, family members disowned her and she’s no longer allowed to see the children she helped rear for several years. She fills her day taking long walks and talking to her therapist. And she’s sitting down with me, the reporter who first broke the story about her lies, to tell her story. This time, she says, a real one. Because there is nothing else she can do.
Composer Adrian Sutton (War Horse) was recently given a devastating diagnosis of incurable cancer. Here, he writes about what it has taught him.
(The Guardian, approx 7 mins reading time)
This question of music’s perceived value – and one’s personal contribution to the mountain of music already available – vexes me somewhat. Over 100,000 new tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day. That’s quite a hurricane to shout into with any confidence, especially if you’re a composer just starting out. But shout you must, with your own voice, while honing your own craft.
(Elle, approx 20 mins reading time)
Over the course of nine months, beginning in July 2018, Smythe quit her job, moved out of the apartment, and divorced her husband. What could cause the sensible Smythe to turn her life upside down? She fell in love with a defendant whose case she covered. In fact, she broke the news of his arrest.
(The Cut, approx 35 mins reading time)
The way Anna spent money, it was like she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Her room was overflowing with shopping bags from Acne and Supreme, and in between meetings, she’d invite Neff to foot massages, cryotherapy, manicures (Anna favored “a light Wes Anderson pink,” according to Neff).
(The Guardian, approx 36 mins reading time)
“The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close,” was the final notice issued by George V’s doctor, Lord Dawson, at 9.30pm on the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine – enough to kill him twice over – in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.
(LitHub, approx 10 mins reading time)
As a black child with tightly coiled hair, growing up in an incredibly white, homogeneous, socially conservative Ireland, I certainly wasn’t considered pretty, but that started to change in my midteens. I remember being told that I was “lucky I was pretty,” which meant I could “almost get away with being black.”
(GQ, approx 33 mins reading time)
Snoop’s not an OG in the slang-term way. He’s an actual original gangsta. Calvin Broadus Jr. beat a first-degree murder charge in 1996. He stood up to Suge Knight and left Death Row Records for Master P’s No Limit Records in 1998. We were stunned. It was like LeBron James leaving the Cavaliers for the Miami Heat.
(London Review of Books, approx 298 mins reading time)
In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road Station. From some of the flats you could see the cars, like ants, crawling up the Westway, and from others you were looking at the financial district, all those new towers in the distance with the Shard in the middle.
(The Guardian, 10 mins reading time)
Despite the extraordinary volume of evidence (including 382kg of moon rock collected across six missions; corroboration from Russia, Japan and China; and images from the Nasa Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the tracks made by the astronauts in the moondust), belief in the moon-hoax conspiracy has blossomed since 1969.
(Wired, approx 19 mins reading time)
In this three-by-three-metre box, with little more furniture than a bed, desk and chair, Kim kept confined for close to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year – eating and smoking and staring at his computer screen.
(Rolling Stone, approx 22 mins reading time)
Retiring for the night, Stevie turned off the light in her huge shadowy bedroom. Suddenly, she was startled by the sound of rapidly flapping wings in the blackness. The noise abruptly ceased. Then came a queer whir, and something brushed against her cheek. She froze. .
(The New Yorker, approx 10 mins reading time)
I wanted to write a song that would sum them up. Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well. I don’t even know how I first met “Eleanor Rigby,” but I would go around to her house, and not just once or twice. I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around there and just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy.
This 2021 story is about two babies switched at birth in Newfoundland.
(The Atavist, approx 20 mins reading time)
According to Longreads: Although two children grew up in the wrong families, they were both surrounded by love, living just a bay apart in a homely place where towns are called Heart’s Desire, Leading Tickles, and Dildo. It is this small community that made the story possible, with the children meeting as adults and eventually uncovering the truth about their births.
(FT, approx 17 mins reading time)
While Johnson’s personal finances have grabbed the headlines, his friend Elliot has quietly transformed the party’s money culture, bringing aspects of Quintessentially’s model, so that ever-larger cash donations bring ever-greater access to the heart of government.
(Pitchfork, approx 14 mins reading time)
As Twitter itself was rapidly approaching something close to cultural ubiquity—in late 2010, the platform claimed a 200 percent spike in users over 2009—Kanye had unlocked one of its core secrets. Social scientists called it “ambient awareness”: a potent sense of ersatz intimacy with a person that derives from immersion in a stream of their text-based micro-updates.
(On Just One Breath, approx 32 mins reading time)
Our bodies are slightly less dense than water, so we float near the surface and need to kick hard to dive down. But the deeper we go, the more the water above squeezes us. As the pressure increases, so does our density. Eventually, it becomes too much, and we start to sink like a stone. There’s no need to kick. Gravity takes us — we’re in free fall.
(The New Yorker, approx 54 mins reading time)
Gorbachev was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and the first—and last—President of the Soviet Union. He resigned Christmas Night, 1991—an event that marked the end of Soviet history. His fate, unique in a thousand years, was to be a retired czar, free to accept plaudits and lecture fees abroad, free to suffer the disdain of a people he did so much to liberate.
(New York Times, approx 34 mins reading time)
The specific thesis here is that if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the ’06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a “bloody near-religious experience.”
(GQ, approx 34 mins reading time)
And there he was. Probably. The person stealing food appeared entirely too clean, his face freshly shaved. He wore eyeglasses and a wool ski hat. Was this really the North Pond Hermit, a man who’d tormented the surrounding community for years—decades—yet the police still hadn’t learned his name?
(The Guardian, approx 11 mins reading time)
“Burnout is the cumulative result of unresolved and chronic stress,” says the clinical psychologist Dr Roberta Babb. Generally, there are three main types, she says. You can be burned out by being overworked and overloaded (“frenetic” burnout), but also by its opposite, “boreout”, where you may feel “consistently underchallenged or underworked”. “It may seem counterintuitive but we need a certain amount of stimulation in our daily work and lives in order to perform and feel satisfied,” says Babb.
(Texas Monthly, approx 58 mins reading time)
And all these years later, almost everyone involved feels permanently changed or, in some cases, permanently scarred by the film. At least one actor—Ed Neal, who played the “hitchhiker”—can’t speak about it without becoming enraged.
(Wired, approx 46 mins reading time)
Employees knew about such rampages. Sometimes Musk would terminate people; other times he would simply intimidate them. One manager had a name for these outbursts—Elon’s rage firings—and had forbidden subordinates from walking too close to Musk’s desk at the Gigafactory out of concern that a chance encounter, an unexpected question answered incorrectly, might endanger a career.
(Reuters, approx 19 mins reading time)
Often cited is the case of the Tennessee woman who returned a 7-year-old boy she adopted from a Russian orphanage. The woman had cared for him only six months when she put the boy on a flight to Moscow in April 2010. He was accompanied by a typed letter that read in part, “I no longer wish to parent this child.”
(The New Yorker, approx 97 mins reading time)
The fourth week of the trial had produced an arresting illustration of the malleability of trial evidence. During a police search of Borukhova’s apartment, an audiotape had been found and seized. It was a garbled, fragmentary, almost inaudible recording of a conversation between Borukhova and Mallayev, speaking in Bukhori and Russian. The conversation had taken place in May of 2007—five months before the murder.
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