The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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In this week’s edition:

• Perilous industry, meet unsung hero
• The mother of forensic science
• A brilliant critical essay about AI and art
• Saving a town by ignoring the government
• Homesteading, mindfully

1. The Canary

Michael Lewis | The Washington Post | September 4, 2024 | 11,268 words

This week, The Washington Post began a series in which journalists go long on government workers. Not politicians, not elected officials. Workers. The men and women who actually make the wheels of bureaucracy turn. (“[The journalists’] only brief,” says a note about the series, “was to go where they wanted, talk with whomever they wanted, and return with a story from deep within the vast, complex system Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss and celebrate.”) And while future installments will include stories from luminaries like Geraldine Brooks and Dave Eggers, the inaugural piece by Michael Lewis sets an unimaginably high bar. Searching for a subject—a story in its own right, and a thoroughly entertaining lede—Lewis happened upon Chris Mark, a former coal miner whose research revolutionized safety in the underground mining industry. Sounds dry, right? So did baseball statistics before Moneyball. Just as Lewis’s beloved book found humanity in seemingly impenetrable data, so too does Chris Mark’s lifelong quest become as riveting as a rescue mission. It helps that Mark is dream profile material even beyond his work: self-examined, articulate, and thoroughly uninterested in bullshit. A mix of archival and contemporary photography perfectly contemplates the proceedings, with cave-ins of the 1940s giving way to Mark as a doctoral student and then again to him as an éminence grise of sorts, revisiting the sites where he first began answering the questions that no one had bothered asking. So often we dismiss government by pointing to the creeping pace of change; with Mark’s life and work, that’s kind of the point. Only by moving as slowly and methodically as a mining machine has he been able to transform risk in such a dangerous industry. —PR

2. The Heiress at Harvard Who Helped Revolutionize Murder Investigations—and the Case She Couldn’t Forget

Patricia Wen | Globe Magazine | August 14, 2024 | 5,828 words

I first learned of the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” a collection of gruesome miniature dioramas created in the 1940s to train detectives on how to analyze a crime scene, in a BuzzFeed story a few years ago. (While I recommend it, the photographs of these dollhouse-sized murder scenes may make some readers uneasy.) I was reminded of these peculiar dioramas this week when I came upon Patricia Wen’s fascinating profile of Frances Glessner Lee: the creator of these “nutshells,” the first woman police captain in the US, and the woman known as the “mother of forensic science.” Born in 1878, Lee was an inquisitive, driven woman from an affluent family; she wasn’t allowed to go to college, but that didn’t stop her from blazing an unconventional path in the field of forensics. After befriending a medical examiner, she became obsessed with crime scenes, and what they revealed about causes of death. Lee dedicated her life and used her wealth to reform murder investigations, and established a department of legal medicine at Harvard, which was the first of its kind to train investigators in scientific techniques. “Lee stepped into the male-dominated world of detective work later in life, like a real-world Miss Marple from Agatha Christie’s novels,” Wen writes. A story centered on Lee’s life and legacy in the field would have been compelling enough, but Wen also recounts the 1940 case of Irene Perry, a 22-year-old working-class mother found dead in the woods of Massachusetts. It was the Harvard department’s first high-profile investigation, a chance to show the promise of forensic science, and a tragic case whose ultimate injustice Lee would never forget. Here, Wen offers a mix of true crime and women’s history—what it was like to be a pioneering woman in the mid-20th century. —CLR

3. Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

Ted Chiang | The New Yorker | August 31, 2024 | 3,478 words

Artificial intelligence terrifies me. Not because I think the robots are coming for us, body and soul, but because I think AI is making people less engaged with the world at a time when more engagement is exactly what we need. When I say engagement, I mean it in the profoundest sense; its hallmarks are purpose, humanity, empathy. Here, in one of the best critical essays I’ve read in ages, author Ted Chiang makes the case better than I ever could for the limitations of AI. As with Chiang’s previous New Yorker pieces about AI, everyone should read it, and as the technology continues to develop, we should read it again, and again. Chiang eviscerates the notion that AI can make art by reminding us that art isn’t just a final product we can see, read, touch, or consume—art is also the process that leads to a product. “Art is something that results from making a lot of choices,” he writes. “The countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate ‘large-scale’ with ‘important’ when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.” (Cut to me nodding vigorously while reading this passage.) Later in the essay, Chiang expounds further: “The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations. . . . It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning.” (Cut to me getting a neck cramp from all the nodding.) And finally, Chiang writes of AI, in a line now imprinted in my brain forever, “It reduces the amount of intention in the world.” This. This! This!!! —SD

4. This Man Saved his Town From Deadly Floodwaters. So Why Did the Us Government Try to Stop Him?

Katie Thornton | The Guardian | August 28, 2024 | 4,464 words

Windell Curole oversaw a levee built in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, that protected his community from the floodwaters of Hurricane Ida in 2021. Typically, the US federal government’s Army Corps of Engineers dictates specifications for such monumental undertakings. Curole built his levee 18 feet high—bypassing the corps’s insistence on a wider levee reaching 13 feet in height. The big wrinkle? Ida brought floodwaters reaching 17 feet. Had Curole followed the federal requirements, his community would have been devastated. For The Guardian, Katie Thornton profiles Curole and reports on the aftermath of his decision. —KS

5. Protecting the Prairie

Sarah Smarsh | Orion Magazine | August 27, 2024 | 4,071 words

When we bought a patch of prairie land nearly 30 years ago, we wanted to be careful with it. Clearing space for the cabin that is now our home, we did it by hand: handsaw, chain saw, and a beat-up lawnmower to deter tree sprouts. We preserved as much bush and as many trees as we could to minimize any adverse effects of our presence; as a result, our carefully culled canopy of ash, oak, evergreen, and poplar has always shaded us from summer heat while neighbors rely on air conditioning. For Orion, Sarah Smarsh writes about the hard work and missteps involved in clearing her property in Kansas. In removing eastern red cedars, she’s letting the light in, reclaiming space for tallgrass prairie that was born after glacial retreat, but eventually choked out by “woody encroachment” humans fostered in the name of agriculture. “In contrast to the European colonizer’s idea of a vast ‘nothing’ in the middle of the country, the prairie is among the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world,” she writes. I fell in love with Smarsh’s writing after reading her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. Her voice is strong and lyrical, laden with purpose. It’s also distinctly no-nonsense; nothing is wasted. She understands and acknowledges her privilege: “The meaning that animates my life is a connection to this place—where my own farmer ancestors, poor white immigrants and beneficiaries of genocide and land theft, helped dismantle the ecosystem I now feel called to protect.” In revealing how the prairie was consumed by colonization and agricultural practices time has proven detrimental, Smarsh’s piece is equal parts fascinating history and ecology lesson. To be good stewards of the land, she and her husband are working hard to turn something back into nothing. —KS

Audience Award

What was our most-read pick of the week? The envelope, please.