A fearless investigation into child migrant labor. Reconstructing an activist’s tragic killing. A trip back to the place you once called home. A character study dressed as a plumbing mystery. A new look at an old trope. All that and more in this week’s installment.

1. The Kids on the Night Shift

Hannah Dreier | The New York Times Magazine | September 18, 2023 | 7,705 words

The past week saw no shortage of quality investigative reporting—Wired putting the lie to Elon Musk’s claims about Neuralink lab monkeys, ProPublica uncovering how Columbia University protected a predatorial doctor—but work like Hannah Dreier’s exposé of the child labor powering poultry plants doesn’t come along often. It begins with 14-year-old Marcos Cux getting his arm nearly torn off by a conveyor belt at 2:30 in the morning. It ends, multiple surgeries and untold heartbreaking stories later, with Cux going back to another night shift at an even more dehumanizing job. He has to; his family in Guatemala is depending on him. In between, Dreier brings you into the migrant community of rural Virginia: Dreamland, the trailer park where many of these child workers live with their relatives and guardians. The high school where exhausted children sleep through class and teachers keep their students’ overnight work schedules on sticky notes. The convenience store where teen after teen cashes in their paychecks to send money home to their families. This isn’t a drive-by, it’s a live-in, fueled by tireless reporting and peerless scenework (and phenomenal photography, courtesy of Meridith Kohut). And crucially, it’s a wake-up call. Everyone knows how the factory farming industry disrespects the animals it turns into food. They even know how that same industry feasts on the people who keep its slaughterhouses running. But until now, many of us could plead ignorance of how the Perdues and Tysons of the world, buffered by the third-party contractors they hide behind, chew through the childhoods of those who have no choice. That time is over. —PR

2. The Killing of Richard Oakes

Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson | San Francisco Chronicle | September 19, 2023 | 9,717 words

In 1969, charismatic Mohawk activist Richard Oakes led the occupation of Alcatraz, an island that was once Ohlone land. The “invasion” was in protest of the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans, and an act of reclamation. Oakes became the face of the “Red Power” movement, inspiring protests across the country and laying the groundwork for expanding Indigenous rights. Decades later, however, his name is largely unknown. In 1972, at just 30, he was fatally shot in the woods north of San Francisco, unarmed, by a wilderness camp caretaker who claimed self-defense. After a trial in which his shooter was acquitted, his loved ones believed that Oakes had been targeted because of his Native identity and activism. Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson dig deep to reconstruct, with meticulous detail, the events leading up to Oakes’ death. (Kudos to the whole Chronicle team for the immersive design, placing the reader right there in Oakes’ final moments in the woods.) They interview family, prosecutors, and law enforcement, and draw from hundreds of government records and secret FBI files obtained through FOIA—information never revealed during the trial—to fill in the gaps. Their words alone are powerful, but the digital presentation, including portraits of fellow activists, officials who were involved in the case, and Oakes’ living family members, come together to tell an important story about a forgotten civil rights leader. —CLR

3. Meeting Mumbai Again After a Life-Changing Loss

Shruti Swamy | AFAR | September 19, 2023 | 2,173 words

Shruti Swamy plumbs childhood memories of Mumbai, India, as she returns for the first time as a wife and mother. This is a lovely, striking meditation on what it means to return to a place you once knew—and to show it to those you love. Swamy’s dissonance is palpable when she struggles to be understood in Hindi and to navigate a city altered by time. She asks: “But is there a moment, a meal, an exchange that will make Mumbai legible to us?” As the young family visits markets, beaches, and street vendors, Swamy revels in the smells, sights, sounds, and tastes of the city. She recounts the pleasure of promised coconut cream for her four-year-old daughter and the street bite that made me want to book a plane ticket: “My husband will tear into a lifafa wrap from Swati Snacks, the both of us nearly shouting at the exquisite mix of mint and fat, the slow burn of chili. Like biting into art.”As a reader, it’s wonderful to watch as her persistence is rewarded: “Moment by moment, this city will teach me to stay awake to the present, to pay attention, to follow the thread of human connection, to take pleasure where it’s found.” If this is what it means to go home again, count me in. —KS

4. Man Called Fran

John Jeremiah Sullivan | Harper’s Magazine | August 14, 2023 | 3,700 words

I have a fear of needing to call a plumber to my house. Experience has taught me they will inevitably sigh, then inform me that whoever last ventured near my dodgy pipes was a cowboy, with hundreds of dollars now needing to be spent. My anxiety is so great that—to my immense pride—I recently fixed a running toilet myself, tying down the ballcock with a sparkly purple ribbon I found in the knickknack drawer. (A cowboy job indeed.) Obviously, I leapt to read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s delightful piece about his own plumbing woes. His innocuous opening sentence, “Here is the tale of something plumbing-related that happened at my house[,]” belies the rollercoaster journey you are about to embark on. Halfway through, I was just as invested in where that mysterious sewage smell was coming from as Sullivan. To find the solution, we have to go rogue, bringing in Greg and Fran, plumbers with “crackhead power” from the underbelly of the contractor world. Having never known of this mysterious plumber stratum, I devoured the glorious descriptions of these two men, Sullivan conjuring them from the page until I felt they stood in front of me: Fran with his buzzcut and denim culottes, bitching about Greg; Greg with his “formidable gray mustache, strong hands, and wild, piercing eyes” talking at length about bowel movements. Sullivan may be as flummoxed by plumbing issues as I am, but he is a master in character study. —CW

5. “Florida Man,” Explained

Kristen Arnett | Vox | September 18, 2023 | 1,634 words

Have you played the game Florida Man? It’s simple: type your birthday (month, date) and “Florida Man” into a search bar. You will be regaled (as I was) with not one, but several inane crimes committed over the years by men in Florida. As Kristen Arnett explains, “These crimes are odd and incomprehensible; the kind of behavior that someone might associate with a badly behaved toddler whose brain has yet to fully develop.” I had several to choose from; my favorite was the Florida Man who was caught on video driving down I-4 while standing up, his upper body poking through the sunroof. Arnett explains that the game is made possible because of the Sunshine Law, which makes arrest records and mugshots “readily available online for the general public to gawk and point at. If you’ve committed a crime in the Sunshine State, that information becomes accessible to everyone, everywhere, immediately.” This piece is far more than just a litany of bizarre behavior. Arnett, a third-generation Floridian, suggests that while the Florida Man meme makes it easy for outsiders to dismiss the state as the epicenter of America’s ills, we need to look deeper. “I think the harder lesson is that Florida is no different from anywhere else; the headlines just turn our hardships into a joke to make things more palatable,” she writes. “We can’t and won’t disregard the fact that we’re going to stay strange and continue to be completely, authentically ourselves; we also can’t forget the wonderful alongside the troubles.” Maybe it’s time we embraced that little bit of Florida Man in all of us. —KS

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.

The umbilical cord of my Floridian existence has long fed and fueled me, dictating the kind of writer that I’ve inevitably become; someone focused on the messiness of the body, the outlier, the bizarre, a person who craves questions and mystery. Florida refuses to be pinned down. It is that very refusal — a resistance to being known, to being stable — that continues to enthrall and delight those who speak about it. There’s something magnetic about this place.

Maybe I don’t want to reclaim Florida Man. Perhaps I just want to reimagine it. Transform it, turn it into the thing that Florida could someday become and often is. Understand it, finally, as a place that refuses to be categorized. To show care to myself and to the people who live here and our continued questioning and unknowing. In that way, I embrace the roiling sea of Florida Men as my community; as a collective that I can contribute to in a helpful way. We can’t and won’t disregard the fact that we’re going to stay strange and continue to be completely, authentically ourselves; we also can’t forget the wonderful alongside the troubles. We can claim our state proudly, even to sympathetic strangers. We can stay, and live, and thrive. Wacky headlines don’t describe me personally any more than they describe anyone else in Florida. Strange things happen every day, everywhere.

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As I write this, there are two episodes left. Soon, there will be none. Although Jesse Armstrong’s decision to end Succession with its fourth season is doubtless wise — it’s a relief to know the show won’t dwindle past its sell-by date like so many other cultural behemoths — the thought of no more new installments to feverishly anticipate, and then devour, remains a deeply depressing one.

It’s in the very nature of episodic television, where you watch a group of characters face a distinct set of challenges week after week, year after year, that you come to care about the people you’re watching. After all, if you didn’t care, then why would you keep watching? That’s what I tell myself, anyway, whenever I’ve found myself worryingly invested in the lives of the Roys, the deeply dysfunctional family at the heart of the TV megahit. 

The Roys, by just about any measure, are awful people. The owners of a gargantuan right-wing media empire, perennially battling over who will inherit the kingdom from their ailing octogenarian patriarch, their concerns are borne of avarice and pride and immense self-interest. Almost every relationship depicted on the show is a transactional one, and any brief flicker of kindness is quick to be extinguished. We’re left in little doubt that none of the four adult Roy kids would have amassed any power under their own steam; that they’re afflicted with varying degrees of ineptitude has proven no barrier to their standing. 

Nevertheless, I’ve become fascinated by, and even — somewhat guiltily — fond of these dreadful, ruinous nepo babies. However much they wound each other and the poor souls unlucky enough to cross their paths, the richness with which they’re drawn by the virtuosic writers and played by the spectacular cast exposes the warped vulnerability beneath their obscene privilege. Succession is deeply, lavishly funny, and peppered with some of the silliest and most creative uses of profanity that television has ever hosted, but the whole series is built on a foundation of tremendous sadness. These people may have all the money in the world, but as the last four seasons have shown us in vivid, lacerating detail, their cold, loveless lives inspire little envy. 

Guessing how this whole internecine struggle will ultimately resolve feels like a futile task, although it hasn’t stopped me from doing so. When a happy ending for any of the show’s core characters would likely be disastrous for the world in general, it’s hard to even know who or what to root for. 

So in an attempt to escape pointless prognostication, I’ve been thinking about a different aspect of its massive success over the last five years — the many astute, amusing, and illuminating articles that it has inspired. After all, great writing begets great writing, so it stands to reason that the commentary around Succession would be some of the best around. Here are just five of the wonderful pieces written during the course of its phenomenal run, covering the show’s style, substance, and real-world inspiration. 

Twenty Per Cent Less Hope: The Very English Satire of Succession (Hannah Mackay, Sight and Sound, January 2020)

Succession is an American-set series with a largely British writers’ room, and Hannah Mackay’s essay posits that the push and pull between those broadly opposing national sensibilities is one of the chief factors in its success. Mackay describes how Succession has never followed the U.S. network tradition “of depict[ing] power in its most potent, aphrodisiacal form,” instead hewing more to the U.K.’s innate cynicism by depicting the frighteningly influential Roys as “inept, fragile, [and] lost.” She examines that theme through an aesthetic lens; with both the Roys’ sartorial choices and the spaces they inhabit exhibiting a distinct lack of character, this is not a show that makes being fabulously wealthy look all that fabulous.

Three exhausting years after Mackay’s piece was published, it’s fair to say that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are feeling far warier of the powerful than they were in January 2020. Still, positioning Succession as the product of utter disillusionment with the one percent is, if anything, more on point now than it was back then.

By contrast, nobody in Succession dresses well, a sign of the show’s refusal to sign up to traditional US TV aesthetics when it comes to depicting wealth and power – and a tribute to the show’s much-lauded costume designer Michelle Matland (it’s famously much harder to dress shows in which people have bad taste, or no taste, than it is to dress shows in which people make flamboyant and creative choices, which are more fun). Everybody in Succession has the means to dress well — but nobody has the confidence to make a flamboyant choice, sartorially or otherwise. Stepping out is too dangerous.

As the UK and US drift ever further into uncharted political territory, it has begun to feel that there are no longer any consequences to anything. The US president has been accused of sexual harassment by more than 20 women, and yet he is still the president. Both he and his British counterpart continue, so far, unhindered by the growing whiff of scandal and corruption. We can end up feeling like Reggie Perrin ourselves, running pointlessly into the sea to make a point nobody wants to hear. But at least we have Succession to watch while we’re doing it.

The Four F’s of Trauma Response and the Four Roy Kids of Succession (Emily St. James, Vox, November 2021)

However much their gargantuan privilege and venomous behavior patently suggests that they don’t deserve our pity, to be a fan of Succession is to find yourself, again and again, feeling sympathy for some immensely rich devils. 

Emily St. James had already written an essay for Vox about how the show depicts the effects of growing up with an abusive parent, and here she lays out how the four Roy kids’ dynamics with their father demonstrate a typology known as the four Fs of trauma response: fight, flight, fawn, and freeze. She also discusses how the show’s love of wide shots enables Succession to more fully display how the family drama affects and discomfits innocent bystanders. 

Kendall, meanwhile, takes and takes and takes his father’s abuse, but eventually, he gets frustrated and fights back, as he’s been doing all season. He’s the most ineffectual of his siblings in this episode, but there are still a few moments where his “fight” impulse engages: when he enters the family’s suite and tries to bully them into holding everything together, for example, or when he gets onstage to read the names of the victims of the cruise line scandal that’s plaguing the company. Kendall likes to make himself the biggest, easiest target — a fairly classic “fight” response that can also be attuned to protecting younger siblings.

After all, Succession’s wide shots often capture the random other people who end up trapped in a room with the Roys, forced to watch them play out their elaborate psychodramas. And most of the time, those other people are nowhere near as rich as the Roys, because who possibly could be? Their reactions to what the Roys say and do serve to deepen our understanding of the family’s many dysfunctions.

On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke (Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, December 2021)

When Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong was published just as the third season of Succession was drawing to a close, it seemed like the only thing anyone on the internet was talking about. That was not good news for Strong. 

Although not an out-and-out hit piece, it’s still difficult to read Schulman’s vivid, engrossing profile without wincing. It paints Strong as someone who at best approaches the role of Kendall Roy with a full-throatedness that borders on the unhealthy, and at worst applies a self-serious dedication to his craft that makes him almost impossible to work with. The profile is littered with painfully specific details about Strong’s intense acting philosophy — Strong calls his technique “identity diffusion” — along with quotes from cast and crew members who remain unconvinced of the technique’s necessity.

Strong, who is now forty-two, has the hangdog face of someone who wasn’t destined for stardom. But his mild appearance belies a relentless, sometimes preening intensity. He speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence, especially when talking about acting, which he does with a monk-like solemnity. “To me, the stakes are life and death,” he told me, about playing Kendall. “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” He does not find the character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role.

Last year, he played the Yippie activist Jerry Rubin in Aaron Sorkin’s film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” While shooting the 1968 protest scenes, Strong asked a stunt coördinator to rough him up; he also requested to be sprayed with real tear gas. “I don’t like saying no to Jeremy,” Sorkin told me. “But there were two hundred people in that scene and another seventy on the crew, so I declined to spray them with poison gas.”

Misery Loves Matrimony: The Beautiful, Bleak Science Behind ‘Succession’ Weddings (Alyssa Bereznak, The Ringer, April 2023)

Succession consistently questions whether any of its core characters are even capable of love — and yet there’s no set piece the show prefers to a wedding. Three of the four seasons have plotted their most vital events around these seemingly damned unions, the fairytale promise of happily ever after making a caustic backdrop to palace intrigue and corporate skullduggery. And with the Roys having almost limitless funds at their disposal, their weddings are always eye-wateringly extravagant.

In her piece for The Ringer, Alyssa Bereznak digs into the role these opulent affairs play on Succession, talking to the production designers who “adopted a role as a Roy family wedding planner” and exploring how the weddings are often our best shot at gleaning details from the Roy kids’ little-mentioned but tumultuous upbringings.

Just as far-flung family members fill in the blanks of the Roy progeny’s upbringing, so does the sprawling property chosen for Shiv’s wedding. “The house, Eastnor house, was, in the story line, a special one of the family’s country estates,” said Newman, who decorated the set for the episodes “Pre-nuptial” and “Nobody Is Ever Missing.” As Connor recounts to Willa when they arrive, one of the homes became a “thorn in Caroline’s side” because she was screwed out of inheriting it. Elsewhere, Caroline gestures at portraits of all of her “disreputable slave-owning ancestors.” “In Eastnor Castle there’s wonderful bits of art,” Newman said. “Even wallpapers and the furnishing, carpets and rugs and things like this, nothing is new. Everything has a personality, has a history and a provenance. … That’s the key, is that it’s layered.”

Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama (Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair, April 2023)

While creator Jesse Armstrong has cited various inspirations for the Roy family, the one that comes up the most often by far is the Murdochs. From an elderly patriarch who refuses to acknowledge his mortality, to the two sons and a daughter battling over the crown, to the noxiousness of their right-wing media empire and its influence over a disturbingly demagogic presidential candidate, it’s hard not to see their shadow looming over Succession. 

Though Sherman’s piece contains only glancing mentions of the show (amusingly, one of the conditions of Rupert Murdoch’s recent settlement agreement from fourth wife Jerry Hall was that she wasn’t allowed to pitch story ideas to the writers), the details of how running a multibillion dollar company is so regularly entwined with the petty squabbles of a troubled family demonstrate that, despite its more ridiculous twists and turns, Succession has been far truer to life than one might think. 

He long wanted one of his three children from his second wife, Anna—Elisabeth, 54, Lachlan, 51, and James, 50—to take over the company one day. Murdoch believed a Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir. “He pitted his kids against each other their entire lives. It’s sad,” a person close to the family said. Elisabeth was by many accounts the sharpest, but she is a woman, and Murdoch subscribed to old-fashioned primogeniture. She quit the family business in 2000 and launched her own phenomenally successful television production company. Lachlan shared Murdoch’s right-wing politics and atavistic love for newsprint and their homeland, Australia. “Lachlan was the golden child,” the person close to the family said. But Murdoch worried that his easygoing son, who seemed happiest rock climbing, did not want the top job badly enough. 

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the U.K. She is a regular contributor to Paste Magazine and the BFI.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

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The Delphi murders is a case that every true crime commentator has jumped on; analyzing the eerie footage of the suspect captured by Liberty German on her phone before her tragic murder. Huge public interest has done little to find definitive answers for the murdered girls; instead operating as a catalyst for this vast amount of content. Aja Romano details this disturbing case, thus adding to the glut of information, but Romano at least uses this poster case of the true crime genre to question the ethics of this growing industry.

Nine days after the murders, police released an audio recording of Bridge Guy, now officially named a suspect, saying, “Down the hill.”

This was arguably the moment when Delphi stopped being solely a hometown tragedy and entered the annals of true crime fame — when the eerie disembodied audio, complete with the pixellated image of the killer, swept across media outlets nationwide, galvanizing interest in the tragic story of two young friends who died brutally, side by side. 

What the women didn’t know was that the community that Launch House had established was one that could be hostile to them — one that seemed to prioritize money, status, and clout over anything a community might actually need or want, and that could ostracize them if they spoke out against it. Rather than simply an example of yet another mismanaged business full of Los Angeles dreamers, Launch House is a case study in how “community” operates when profit and attention appear to be its main motives.

The vibes are off, basically, and in times of financial uncertainty, community is more important than ever. Launch House, however, is a prime example of what a community can look like under inept leadership: It’s chaotic, ragtag, unpredictable.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jason Fagone, Stephanie Mencimer, Roberta Hill, Kaleb Horton, and Kelundra Smith.

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1. The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.

Jason Fagone | San Francisco Chronicle | July 23, 2021 | 10,801 words

“The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?”

2. Armed Standoffs With the Government, ‘Uber Militias,’ and Ammon Bundy’s Run to Be Idaho’s Next Governor

Stephanie Mencimer | Mother Jones | July 26, 2021 | 8,649

“Does running for office make him less dangerous—or more?”

3. Survivor

Roberta Hill | Toronto Life | July 27, 2021 | 3,917 words

“The discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children’s remains in the spring was particularly hard for me—because I knew I could have been one of them. How I made it through Canada’s residential school system.”

4. The Ballad of the Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping

Kaleb Horton | Vox | July 23, 2020 | 13,872 words

“If you told somebody 26 kids went missing, the most ever in America, that somebody would likely assume they were dead. But they’d survived! All of them! Many potlucks would ensue.”

5. On the Heels of Foot Soldiers

Kelundra Smith | The Bitter Southerner | July 27, 2021 | 1,912 words

“Fueled by the power of love, Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown wants the next generation of activists to learn from the music and wisdom of the past and to press on to protect voting rights in the rural South and beyond.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Paul Kiel & Justin Elliot, Andy Greenberg, Mary Heglar, Katherine Miller, and Kyle Chayka.

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* * *

1. Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free

Paul Kiel, Justin Elliott | ProPublica | October 17, 2019 | 27 minutes (6,848 words)

“Under the terms of an agreement with the federal government, Intuit and other commercial tax prep companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system. Since Free File’s launch, Intuit has done everything it could to limit the program’s reach while making sure the government stuck to its end of the deal.”

2. The Untold Story of the 2018 Olympics Cyberattack, the Most Deceptive Hack in History

Andy Greenberg | Wired | October 17, 2019 | 32 minutes (8,126 words)

As the opening ceremonies of the 2018 winter olympics began in Pyeongchang, a cyberattack targeted the games’ digital infrastructure, jeopardizing WIFI connections, event tickets, and even the official Olympics app, packed full of information on event schedules, maps, and hotel reservations. Andy Greenberg examines who was behind the attack and why they wanted to publicly embarrass South Korea.

3. After the Storm

Mary Heglar | Guernica Magazine | October 22, 2019 | 9 minutes (2,400 words)

As Mary Heglar remembers Hurricane Katrina — which hit the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till — she considers how racism and climate change are inextricably linked.

4. The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense of Time

Katherine Miller | BuzzFeed | October 24, 2019 | 15 minutes (3,875 words)

A watch that tells time? How quaint! We don’t need watches any more; we have algorithms now.

5. My Own Private Iceland

Kyle Chayka | Vox | October 21, 2019 | 26 minutes (6,733 words)

When an island nation of 300,000 residents receives more than two million tourists a year, radical change is inevitable — but is it all negative?