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Long before the 1947 Roswell incident brought “little green men” into the public consciousness and prompted an explosion in UFO sightings, writers and scientists have speculated about the existence of life beyond our planet. H. G. Wells laid the groundwork for modern science fiction with novels like The War of the Worlds (1898), one of the first books to imagine an extraterrestrial invasion. Before Wells, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) sparked the imagination by discovering “canals” on Mars. But for the first recorded instance of humanity pondering the possibility of alien life, we have to go all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. In the first century B.C., Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beast.” Not exactly a controversial supposition; still, whether or not such tribes have come to our planet remains impossible to prove, and those who claim to have encountered alien beings have long been dismissed.

That said, in recent years, the concept of otherworldly visitors has begun to shift toward the mainstream. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the latest governmental entity devoted to investigating unexplained sightings. Even the term of choice, “UFO,” has given way to “UAP”—unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon. And just this June, former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch claimed that the U.S. government had retrieved remains of several aircraft of “non-human” origin. The fallout from Grusch’s claims is yet to be determined—as is their veracity—but it seems likely that, in the end, the world will settle back into the binary of believers and skeptics, with no concrete evidence to settle the debate. Regardless of which camp you fall into, some of us will always look skyward with hope; we may never be able to scour the entirety of the universe, but it’s hard not to thrill to Lucretius’ logic. In the meantime, the longform articles collected here offer a fascinating glimpse into the UFO community and the stories that have shaped our modern understanding of the topic.

I Want To Believe (Brad Badelt, Maisonneuve, July 2021)

For me, what makes alleged alien encounter testimony so compelling is that—regardless of whether I believe the person’s interpretation of events—the incident had an undeniable and profound effect on their lives. This may not be true in every case, but even if you write off many accounts as delusion or whimsy or simply fiction, you’re still left with a legion of people who have been dramatically changed by their perceived experiences. It’s comforting to know, then, that for those such as Jason Guillemette, a character in this piece about amateur ufologists, communities exist where one can share their experiences without judgment.

In Guillemette’s case, that community is the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a non-profit, volunteer-run organization active in more than 40 countries—and one whose members are as rigidly skeptical as Guillemette. For most MUFON alumni, this is a quest for truth, not validation; members work rigorously to find earthly explanations for reported sightings. And as Badelt widens his scope to other folks in other organizations, you can’t help but be moved by people’s stories. After all, if you were to have a life-changing close encounter, with whom would you share that knowledge?

Most of the time, he’s able to find an explanation, he says. He often sends videos to other volunteers at MUFON who specialize in analyzing computer images. He refers to websites that track the flight patterns of satellites and planes and the International Space Station—the usual suspects when it comes to UFO sightings, he says. Guillemette described a recent case in which a couple reported seeing strange lights hovering above a nearby lake. The lights circled above the lake and then dropped down into the water, only to rise up a moment later and zip away. It turned out to be a plane, he says—filling up with water to fight a nearby forest fire. “Not everybody likes what we come up with,” he says, “but sometimes it’s really evident.”

Crowded Skies (Vaughan Yarwood, New Zealand Geographic, April 1997)

The history of UFO sightings in New Zealand dates back to the early 20^th century. It seems such a tranquil and unassuming country—cinematic hobbit history notwithstanding—which perhaps makes the events recounted here even more unsettling. These are all-too-human tales of altered lives. Some cases, such as that of Iris Catt, a self-proclaimed alien abductee whose nightmarish encounters go back to her childhood, are heartbreakingly tragic. Others follow more positive narratives, believing that aliens are beaming down rays of positivity and openness, gradually bringing humanity to a point where it is ready for formal communication.

When I was at university in the 1990s, “regression therapy”  became big news, with countless stories of trauma-blocked memories and past-life remembrances unearthed through hypnosis. Just as suddenly, regression therapy drowned in a flood of peer-reviewed criticism, relegated to yet another pseudoscience. The concept never went away entirely and it pops up again in Vaughan Yarwood’s story, cautiously approved by academic institutions for its utility in specific circumstances. It’s complex territory, but Yarwood navigates it with clarity and sensitivity.

Iris Catt, a mild-mannered, unprepossessing woman in her 40s, then introduces herself. She is an abductee. It appears certain aliens have had their eye on her from an early age. She recounts her night horrors calmly, the way people do who have learned to accept their scars, to make their hurt and anguish a part of themselves.

“It is happening every day, and it is happening in New Zealand,” says Iris. “It is not going to go away. I truly believe that more and more people are beginning to remember what is happening to them because the time is getting closer when we are going to have to recognise that we are not the only intelligent form of life in the universe.”

Her audience understands. She is among friends.

Alien Nation (Ralph Blumenthal, Vanity Fair, May 2013)

Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Edward Mack spent many years engaging with people who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, in the process becoming a pioneer in his field. Not surprisingly, he attracted resistance from the scientific community—less because of his work than because, over time, he came to the startling and highly controversial conclusion that a number of alleged abductees were telling the truth. Mack’s research may be little remembered by his profession at large, but his warmth, humanity, and faith continue to inspire hope in a small community that gathers annually in Rhode Island. They prefer the term “experiencer” to “abductee,” and in this Vanity Fair feature Ralph Blumenthal interweaves their stories with Mack’s.

Once again, for me, the fascination of this piece lies in the stories of these everyday folks. To some degree, it doesn’t matter what they actually experienced. What counts, as Mack understood, is they have experienced something, and that something left a profound mark on their lives. In seeking to apply rigor and structure to the stories he was collecting, Mack plowed a hard path with poise and compassion. As this piece eloquently shows, his work was not in vain.

“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”

One Man’s Quest to Investigate the Mysterious “Wow!” Signal (Keith Cooper, Supercluster, August 2022)

I have long been fascinated with the so-called Wow signal, received in 1977 by Ohio University’s Big Ear radio telescope, which was then being used to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The tale of the signal makes for a great story in itself, but Keith Cooper’s piece sees that as merely a starting point. His narrative finds a central character in a man named Robert Gray: While the scientific community, including SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), gradually lowered the Wow signal to the status of “interesting curio,” Gray remained convinced that there was more to uncover.

Gray’s tenacity and belief in the face of mounting opposition is remarkable. Struggling for funding, unsuccessfully attempting to enlist help, and bartering for much-needed time on a limited number of radio telescopes, the frustrations he must have experienced make the twists in his story all the more poignant. Just when his enthusiasm began to wane, his work seemingly at a dead end, an exoplanet scientist reached out to Gray with a fresh idea, breathing new life into the man’s relentless quest. There is no neat, satisfying definitive end to this tale, but perhaps therein lies the true glory of Gray’s work. In the face of uncertainty, he carried on until the very end.

Nobody knows what the Wow signal was. We do know that it was not a regular astrophysical object, such as a galaxy or a pulsar. Curious the frequency that it was detected at, 1,420 MHz, is the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in space, but it is also the frequency that scientists hunting for alien life listen to. Their reasoning is that aliens will supposedly know that astronomers will already be listening to that frequency in their studies of galactic hydrogen and so should easily detect their signal – or so the theory goes. Yet there was no message attached to the signal. It was just a burst of raw radio energy.

If SETI had a mythology, then the Wow signal would be its number one myth. And while it has never been forgotten by the public, the academic side of SETI has, by and large, dismissed it, quite possibly because it hasn’t been seen to repeat, and therefore cannot be verified—the golden rule of a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) detection.

How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer from Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream (Bryan Bender, Politico, May 2021)

Celebrities who have copped to believing in UFOs are numerous enough to populate a listicle. Politicians? Not so much. Yet, the U.S. Congress’ House Oversight Committee has announced plans for a hearing regarding UAP reports, and if you trace the conversation  back a few years, you’ll find that this shift is at least partly thanks to the protagonists in this story: former U.S. senator Harry Reid and Tom DeLonge, a founding member of pop-punk band Blink 182.

There’s a lot to digest here. It’s a wonderful example of hidden history: a small group of like-minded individuals working behind the scenes to advance their cause, with potentially wide-ranging repercussions. That history would be far less engaging, however, were it not for Tom DeLonge’s gregarious personality and indefatigable belief in alien visitors. His company, To The Stars, devotes considerable time and money to researching UAPs and extraterrestrial matters in general; Bryan Bender’s feature tells the story of how the singer managed to recruit experts and politicians to his cause.

Hanging on DeLonge’s wall was what might be considered the medals he’s collected in his struggle: a display case filled with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with generals, aerospace contractors and secret government agencies. They trace his visits to the CIA, to the U.S. Navy, to the “advanced development programs” division at Lockheed Martin’s famously secretive “Skunk Works” in Southern California, where some of the world’s most advanced spy planes were designed.

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

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But consider this last remaining donut. Deconstruct it, for a second, from the outside in. The glaze: a gooey, cloudy substance that varnishes the ring of cake, pure glucose soon to strike the palate. Then, the cake itself: yeast and enriched wheat flour and palm oil and more sugar, congealing and forcing one’s salivary glands to go into overdrive. Thirty-three grams of carbohydrates that fuel a sugar rush but leave your hunger totally unsated. At the literal center of it, a hole — emptiness.

On Tuesday September 11th, 2001 I was at my desk in the Communications Department at Boeing in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The radio was on. Just after 8 a.m. local time, breaking news reported that an airplane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. I imagined a small plane, perhaps a Cessna. A horrible accident, but hopefully one with few casualties, I told myself. I could not have been more wrong.

As more reports came in, we found the only conference room in the building that had a television set with a cable feed. As colleagues converged on the room, we watched in disbelief when United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower and in horror as the towers fell less than two hours later. Parts of the two Boeing 767s and Boeing 757s used in the attacks had been hand-made and assembled in our building. We could not believe that four aircraft we’d helped make with love and pride had been used to cause terror and death. We were stunned, silent.

As the 20th anniversary of September 11th approaches, here are six stories about the tragedy and its ongoing aftermath. In curating this list — out of so many stories written in response to the events of that day — I found myself drawn mostly to ones published in the past few years.

1) What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind (Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic, September 2021)

Bobby McIlvaine was 26 years old when he died at the Twin Towers in Manhattan on September 11th, 2001. Reporter Jennifer Senior knew Bobby and the McIlvaine family; senior’s brother had been Bobby’s roommate. Senior’s impeccably paced story is a deep study in grief: How grief differs for everyone. How some guard theirs and others rail, both pitted against something that can never be truly assuaged. Senior reminds us that memory is fallible even in, or perhaps even because of, the most tragic circumstances. That life as a survivor remains exactly that — surviving — day-by-day, knowing you are forever in the after and your loved one is forever in the before.

Then, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Bobby headed off to a conference at Windows on the World, a restaurant in a building to which he seldom had reason to go, for a media-relations job at Merrill Lynch he’d had only since July. My brother waited and waited. Bobby never came home. From that point forward, I watched as everyone in the blast radius of this horrible event tried to make sense of it, tried to cope.

Early on, the McIlvaines spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that you’re all at the top of a mountain, she told them, but you all have broken bones, so you can’t help each other. You each have to find your own way down.

It was a helpful metaphor, one that may have saved the McIlvaines’ marriage. But when I mentioned it to Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at UC Irvine who’s spent a lifetime studying the effects of sudden, traumatic loss, she immediately spotted a problem with it: “That suggests everyone will make it down,” she told me. “Some people never get down the mountain at all.”

This is one of the many things you learn about mourning when examining it at close range: It’s idiosyncratic, anarchic, polychrome. A lot of the theories you read about grief are great, beautiful even, but they have a way of erasing individual experiences. Every mourner has a very different story to tell.

That therapist was certainly right, however, in the most crucial sense: After September 11, those who had been close to Bobby all spun off in very different directions. Helen stifled her grief, avoiding the same supermarket she’d shopped in for years so that no one would ask how she was. Jeff, Bobby’s lone sibling, had to force his way through the perdition of survivor’s guilt. Bob Sr. treated his son’s death as if it were an unsolved murder, a cover-up to be exposed.

2) The Falling Man (Tom Junod, Esquire, September 2003)

“The Falling Man” by Tom Junod is among the canon of pieces that surface in my mind now and again, ones I reread because they’re unforgettable. What touched me when I first read the piece in 2003 and continues to resonate today, is the humanity of the man captured by photographer Richard Drew. Amid unimaginable catastrophe, this unknown man — one who became controversially symbolic of the senseless tragedy of 9/11 — accepts his fate with dignity. He does not struggle. He does not flail. Faced with certain death, he chose the way in which he left this world and in his leaving, blessed us with his grace.

But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky—falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves.

The photographer is no stranger to history; he knows it is something that happens later. In the actual moment history is made, it is usually made in terror and confusion, and so it is up to people like him—paid witnesses—to have the presence of mind to attend to its manufacture.

In most American newspapers, the photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling Man ran once and never again. Papers all over the country, from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to The Denver Post, were forced to defend themselves against charges that they exploited a man’s death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering pornography. Most letters of complaint stated the obvious: that someone seeing the picture had to know who it was. Still, even as Drew’s photograph became at once iconic and impermissible, its subject remained unnamed.

In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers’ experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten.

3) An Oral History of The Onion’s 9/11 Issue (Brian VanHooker, MEL Magazine, June 2020)

In September 2001, The Onion staff had only just moved to Manhattan, from Madison, Wisconsin. When satire and comedy are what you do, how do you respond to tragedy in your brand-new backyard? With great care, as it turns out.

Hanson: Our normal, irreverent, edgy, cynical, dark humor wasn’t going to be emotionally appropriate with this situation.

Loew: At some point we realized, “Oh my God, this is going to be the first print paper we’re going to drop on the streets of New York City!” So we had to make it about 9/11, because if we made it about Cheetos or some silly stuff, that would be offensive. But this was terrifying because we’re these kids from Wisconsin coming into New York City and we’re going to drop this silly comedy paper about this horrific tragedy. So we knew we had to get it right — it was like threading the eye of the needle.

Loew: We all got back in and we all sat together, pitching headlines, trying to find the right tone. We’ve got to cover it from this angle, we’ve got to cover it from that angle. What about the average person at home, how are they handling it? That’s where “Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake” comes from. We have to capture some of this righteous anger, so “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell.” The one that always tickled me was “Rest of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection for New York.”

4) Raising Brown Boys in Post-9/11 America (Sorayya Khan, Longreads, September 2017)

In her personal essay, Sorayya Khan recounts the clueless curiosity, microaggressions, and overt racism she endured as a brown immigrant in America. Later, as a mother she relates having to explain that Muslims had perpetrated the attacks, knowing she would be unable to protect her sons, aged 9 and 5, from a deeply wounded and vengeful white America.

Before the week was out, a boy his age told Kamal on the bus that he would come to our house and kill us all. He’d been Kamal’s second grade classmate when he bragged about owning a shotgun, a detail we discussed over dinner. I knew his father, as much as I could know a man who dressed in fatigues on Tuesday afternoons and said nothing while we waited by the classroom door to take our children to after school activities. The boy’s name was Gunner, not yet irony, merely fact, like his eyes that were set not quite right and the blond crop of unruly hair which fell over them. The same day, also on the bus, another child called Shahid a terrorist. Our kindergartener understood the import, but not the word, and at bedtime he insisted on a precise definition. Naeem explained that the pejorative term depends on which side of a fight you’re on. Terrorist is complicated when you’re a political science professor speaking to a five-year-old who is your son, has been to Pakistan, and like all five-year-olds, understands a thing or two about justice.

One afternoon on the school bus, with no better grasp of the term, Shahid was again called a terrorist, and this time a boy named Rich told him he was going to kill him. “Only Gunner has guns, right?” Shahid asked when he got off the bus. Right away, I telephoned the principal who promised to take care of the matter. Trusting that he had, we put Shahid on the bus the next morning, but on the afternoon ride it happened again. We met with the principal who said he’d dropped the ball. Despite the sports analogy, the Americanism never failed to fail me, as if it should be possible to make things right by locating a dropped ball, picking it up, and putting it in its place.

5) The Mystery of 9/11 and Dementia (Patrick Hruby, The Washington Post Magazine, August 2021)

The emotional toll of September 11th is a heavy price families and loved ones have paid every day since. As Patrick Hruby reports at The Washington Post Magazine, first responders are now suffering health consequences after prolonged exposure to airborne chemicals and toxins during the immediate post-attack search and rescue and in the months-long cleanup that followed at Ground Zero. Responders, many of whom are in their 50s, don’t just suffer emotional aftershocks like sleep disturbances and PTSD. Physical ailments, which started with breathing and gastrointestinal issues just after the attacks, now include cancers as well as memory problems and cognitive impairment at three times the rate of others in their age group.

Ron was one of the tens of thousands of police, firefighters, construction workers and others who worked amid the ruins of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan following 9/11. Like many of those responders, he later paid a price. Diagnosed with asthma and a lung disease both linked to Ground Zero exposure, Ron retired on disability in 2009 and moved to Arizona.

By 2014, however, Ron’s troubles with thinking and memory were becoming unmanageable. Back in New York, he had deftly maneuvered a fire engine along the city’s crowded streets; now, he struggled to parallel park the family’s SUV inside two spaces. He would put toothpaste on his toothbrush and not know what to do with it. He was let go from his security job — in part, Dawn says, because he struggled to use a smartphone.

Ron’s condition is almost unheard of for a 59-year-old man, and it points to an emerging medical mystery: Twenty years after 9/11, Ground Zero first responders are suffering from abnormally high rates of cognitive impairment, with some individuals in their 50s experiencing deficiencies that typically manifest when people are in their 70s — if at all.

Of the 818 responders Clouston and his colleagues first tested, 104 had scores indicative of cognitive impairment, a condition that can range from mild to severe and that occurs when people have trouble remembering, learning new things, concentrating or making decisions that affect their everyday lives. Ten others scored low enough to have possible dementia. Clouston was stunned. As a group, the responders were relatively young. Many had to pass mentally demanding tests to become police officers and firefighters in the first place. They were some of the last individuals you would expect to be impaired, let alone at roughly three times the rate of people in their 70s. “We should have seen — maybe — one person” with dementia, he says. “And we had way too many people showing impairment. It looked like what I’m used to seeing when we study 75-year-olds. It was staggering.

6) The Children of 9/11 Are About to Vote (Garrett M. Graff, Politico, September 2020)

As Garrett M. Graff reports, 13,238 Americans were born on September 11th, 2001. In 2020, they turned 19 and were eligible to vote in a U.S. presidential election for the first time. How has growing up in a post-9/11 world saturated by social media, amid near-daily mass shootings and racial inequality, shaped their politics and their worldview? Graff interviewed 19 of them to find out.

The interviews do not represent a strict, scientific cross section of the 67 million children of Generation Z, but collectively they capture a portrait of a generation entering politics seemingly with a more clear-eyed sense of America’s place in the world—a country that still represents hope and opportunity to millions around the globe, yet is no longer the unchallenged superpower or champion of Western values that perhaps it was for previous generations.

Chloe: Every single day since I was born, we haven’t been in a time where we’re at peace.

Tawny: The main mindset growing up with that—actually something that I am ashamed to admit—was this deep-rooted fear, this Arab-phobia. “Oh, these are the bad people.” which was certainly not my parents’ intention when teaching me about 9/11. I think a lot of Americans who grew up after 9/11 grew up with that kind of racism. Anytime you go on an airplane and you saw someone of that race or ethnicity, you get a little uneasy. Thankfully, that’s something I grew out of, and I definitely worked on.

Chloe: When I was younger, my feelings about America were more classic, patriotic, Fourth of July, red, white and blue. You’re proud to be American because of the way that our country values hard work and capitalism. Right now, for me, I would say that being an American is being empathetic to everyone from all different types of backgrounds and races and understanding them, and understanding what they’re doing here in our country. Everyone here is an American.

As Adsel told me, “Millennials are a lot more weary—they came into adulthood during the recession, they lived through 9/11. I think their view is a lot more depressing. Whereas Gen Z—our generation—things can only get better. We’ve been born with the backdrop of 9/11, we’ve lived through shootings, we’ve lived through very polarizing politics, we have the pandemic.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Tim Alberta, Jane C. Hu, Katy Kelleher, Jimmy Thomson, and David Marchese.

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1. The Inside Story of Michigan’s Fake Voter Fraud Scandal

Tim Alberta | Politico | November 24, 2020 | 29 minutes (7,400 words)

“How a state that was never in doubt became a ‘national embarrassment’ and a symbol of the Republican Party’s fealty to Donald Trump.”

2. COVID’s Cassandra: The Swift, Complicated Rise of Eric Feigl-Ding

Jane C. Hu | Undark | November 25, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,200 words)

“The scientist has gained popularity as COVID’s excitable play-by-play announcer. But some experts want to pull his plug.”

3. Verdigris: The Color of Oxidation, Statues, and Impermanence

Katy Kelleher | The Paris Review | November 24, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,213 words)

“Verdigris is emblematic of that movement. It’s a blue-green, yes. But more importantly, it’s a quality. It is hard to give it a hex code because it’s not flat. It’s a color made from change.”

4. Grizzlies at the Table

Jimmy Thomson | Beside | November 23, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,149 words)

“The carcass is a reminder that bears remain a threat even today; accordingly, there are a few things I need to know before I step outside the Wuikinuxv lodge, according to the facility’s manager. ‘If you smell something, it’s a bear,’ Judy says. “If the dogs are going crazy, it’s a bear.’”

5. Yo-Yo Ma and the Meaning of Life

David Marchese | The New York Times | November 20, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,132 words)

David Marchese interviews cellist Yo-Yo Ma on music, politics, culture, the pandemic, stereotypes, and the meaning of life.

The collapse of MedMen is a tale for the microdosing, CBD-soda-drinking tech era. The company itself couldn’t always figure out if it was a tech company or a cannabis company. It just knew it was racing to capitalize off the lucrative opportunity presented by cannabis’ legalization. In an incredible, deep, absorbing investigation for ProPublica, Ben Schreckinger and cannabis policy reporter Mona Zhang narrate the rise and fall of this ambitious startup, which they call the “Apple of Pot.” MedMen modeled their stores after the Apple Store. They published a glossy culture magazine called Ember that ran articles like “Is CBD the New Tylenol?” In an attempt to reach the masses and normalize cannabis consumption, they ran expensive ad campaigns where they’d cross out the word ‘stoner’ and replace that loaded term with words like “Grandmother.” “One image,” the story says, “featured a uniformed police officer.” As the story put it, “MedMen stands as a cautionary tale of American Wild West capitalism.“ It all started simply enough.

It was 2009, long before the advent of legal recreational weed, and Bierman was not aware of California’s mom-and-pop medical pot industry—if you could even call it an industry. At the time, he and his young business partner, Modlin, were running a branding firm, mashing up the names MODlin and bierMAN and calling it ModMan. ModMan helped small, wellness-related companies like the old lady’s dispensary upgrade their image.

When Bierman finally gathered that the old woman had her numbers right, he realized that he was in the wrong business. ModMan became MedMen, and Bierman’s trade became medical marijuana.

On our September 27, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Head of Audience Catherine Cusick, Head of Fact-Checking Matt Giles, and Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Politico.

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0:45 Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign? (Adam Entous, July 1, 2019, The New Yorker)

13:33 Dark Crystals: The Brutal Reality Behind a Booming Wellness Craze (Tess McClure, September 17, 2019, The Guardian)

21:36 These 5 Places Tried Bold Political Experiments. Did They Work? (Amelia Lester, Jill Filipovic, Todd N. Tucker, Astra Taylor, Ruairi Arrieta-Kenna, September 21, 2019, Politico)

* * *

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It’s been one year since Donald Trump was elected president and he hasn’t fulfilled many of his campaign promises, like building a wall or repealing Obamacare. For Politico, Michael Kruse visited a town in western Pennsylvania where voters helped win Trump the presidency and learned that many of them don’t care about what he has or hasn’t been able to achieve in office — they will support him no matter what. Here’s Kruse talking with Maggie Frear, a retired nurse:

He said he was going to bring back the steel mills.

“You’re never going to get those steel mills back,” she said.

“But he said he was going to,” I said.

“Yeah, but how’s he going to bring them back?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s what he said, last year, and people voted for him because of it.”

“They always say they want to bring the steel mills back,” Frear said, “but they’re going to have to do a lot of work to bring the steel mills back.”

He hasn’t built the wall yet, either. “I don’t care about his wall,” said Frear, 76. “I mean, if he gets his wall—I don’t give a shit, you know? But he has a good idea: Keep ’em out.”

He also hasn’t repealed Obamacare. “That’s Congress,” she said.

And the drug scourge here continues unabated. “And it’s not going to improve for a long time,” she said, “until people learn, which they won’t.”

“But I like him,” Frear reiterated. “Because he does what he says.”

What might account for this kind of devotion? As Kruse puts it, “his supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments.” They feel angry, and identify themselves in Trump’s anger.

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