The Top 5 Longreads Of The Week

In this week’s edition:

• Visiting your past self
• The need for speed
• Netflix’s race to mediocrity
• Awaiting the apocalypse
• The Cybertruck’s (shudder) appeal

1. Beautiful Plan of Your Future

Ed Park | The Baffler | October 28, 2024 | 3,442 words

If you asked me to identify experiences that have left an imprint on me throughout my writing life, I’d note three: The first screenplay I wrote, by hand, at 14; my second script, typed out and saved to a floppy disk, at 17; and the unpublished nonfiction manuscript I completed during my MFA program, nearly 20 years ago. I have no idea if the handwritten script or the floppy disk still exist, but I hope to stumble on them someday, perhaps in a box stored at my parents’ house. In this Baffler essay, Ed Park describes just this sort of discovery. In the spring of 2020, when Park and his family were locked down in a 10th-floor Manhattan apartment, he found a manuscript he hadn’t seen in years: an unpublished memoir that he’d written in a few months in 1998, “a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again.” In a closet-turned-office, during the height of the pandemic when “time lost meaning,” Park transcribed all 214 pages, reengaging with the words of his younger self. “Pandemic isolation brought a degree of introspection to everyone but not, I wagered, like this,” he writes. “In a few months I would be fifty, and Three Tenses was all I could read, a prismatic self-portrait at twenty-eight.” I love how Park reflects on the creative process behind it, including its structure (composed of 1,478 fragments he calls “tiles”), its sentences (which all start with “In”), its randomness and lack of chronology, and his experimentation with tense. He shares passages from the manuscript that read like short vignettes, seemingly unrelated. “But there in my closet, it was easier to defend than disown such concatenations,” he writes. “I saw a writer searching for connections, an American tethered to the idea of Korea, and above all the shape of a life lived in books.” It’s one thing to read your past writing and cringe. (Hello, that’s me!) But it’s quite another to have a meaningful dialogue with your past self in the way Park does, and over time gain the needed perspective about your work. I’m now tempted to dig up my early writing—to see how I’ve grown, to give those ideas the space to breathe again. —CLR

2. In the Rockets’ Red Glare

Rachel Kushner | Harper’s Magazine | November 18, 2024 | 10,314 words

Rachel Kushner is our foremost literary scholar of human velocity, a writer keenly attuned to the forces that fuel our desire for acceleration. In her 2001 essay “Girl on a Motorcycle”—which also appeared, in excerpted form, in Harper’s Magazine—she recounts her participation in the Cabo 1000, an illegal motorcycle race from Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas. “Despite crashing at 130 miles an hour, having my motorcycle stolen, having all my possessions bounced out of the truck bed, et cetera, my attitude was intact,” she once told an interviewer. “I remember a feeling of genuine happiness.” Reno, the protagonist of Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, likens downhill ski racing to “drawing in time,” a fusion of physical virtuosity and conceptual art. Now, Kushner details her months-long “apprenticeship” with the National Hot Rod Association, traveling from Bakersfield, California, to Bowling Green, Kentucky, frequenting the pits of “those who build and race dangerous and archaic machines.” Kushner’s companion is Remy, her 16-year-old son, a nascent gearhead who, at a young age, told his mother, “I am going to use my body in my work.” Together, they compare the aromas of various types of gasoline, encounter a chaplain who likes to travel at 146 miles per hour, and talk shop with a boy Remy’s age, who tells Kushner, “I grew up poor, so I had to learn to work on stuff.” As Kushner chronicles “the history of going fast in a straight line,” she also turns away from the rearview to sharpen our understanding of the present as it whips past us. “Modern technology is not meant to be disassembled, studied, fixed,” she writes. “We have been de-skilled, almost invisibly, as if it happened without our consent.” In her hands, hot-rodding becomes “the opposite of passive consumption, of leasing, licensing, renting, subscribing.” A thrill to read at any speed. —BF

3. Casual Viewing

Will Tavlin | n+1 | December 16, 2024 | 8,841 words

During the 2010s, when the streaming era began, Wired devoted multiple cover packages to the advent of data-driven entertainment. Comedy (2011). Music (2014). Star Wars (2013, 2015). But nothing felt as innovative, as optimized, as the fact that television had entered its “platinum age” (2013). At the tip of that spear, of course, was Netflix. They’d cracked the code! They’d figured out how serve us something that felt custom-developed. They’d funded all manner of out-there project, and had helped define the new rules of television. Fast-forward to 2024, and what we’d thought was the future now feels a little different. For one, Netflix started funding movies. Lots of movies. So many movies, in fact, that they’ve mostly sunk to the lowest reaches of the catalog, where discoverability is basically nil. What’s the play here? Will Tavlin tries to answer that question in a long n+1 feature that frames Netflix’s evolution as not just inevitable, but intentional. “Film studios have always released duds: movies that fail to gain traction and are shuttled to the studios’ archives, where they disappear into obscurity,” he writes. “But Netflix, uniquely, seemed to relish making its films vanish as soon as they were released, dumping them onto its platform and doing as little as possible to distinguish one from the next.” This is a thesis-driven piece, yes, but deep reporting makes it a damn convincing one; Tavlin seeks out producers and distributors who partnered with or worked for Netflix and watched the shift happen up close. Thankfully, the story retains propulsion, even levity, thanks to its polemic approach. If Wired of the 2010s was the cheerful herald of a shiny, happy future (not a judgment!), this piece is its indignant child, pointing accusingly at the mess. Entertainment is indeed data-driven—just not in the way anyone had hoped. —PR

4. The Hideaway

Michaela Cavanagh | Hazlitt | December 3, 2024 | 6,336 words

For Hazlitt, Michaela Cavanagh spent a week at “Climate Doomer Camp,” an acreage in Germany run by Ben Green, a man who believes that society will collapse because of climate change. Cavanagh is fully present in this hybrid of essay and reportage. She profiles Green, surveys varying attitudes toward climate change and doomsday scenarios, and interrogates her own feelings and beliefs about whether climate change is intractable. The subject matter may be serious, but this piece isn’t without some wry humor. Cavanagh’s eye for detail in describing fellow doom campers is spot on: “Eva, a monosyllabic Finn about my age who dressed in head-to-toe black, seemed uninterested in most of what was happening around her, including me.” Ben Green expects doom and his remote, self-sufficient farm is his refuge should society end as we know it. Cavanagh, though, sees something more like potential. As the visit ends, Green tours her through his orchard. The trees—some of which will only become productive decades into the future—symbolize for Cavanagh a kind of hope. In the end she discovers something she didn’t expect to find during her visit: common ground. —KS

5. The Most Polarizing Thing on Wheels

S.C. Gwynne | Texas Monthly | December 11, 2024 | 4,454 words

A few weeks ago, I came across my first Tesla Cybertruck. I was ambling over to the local pet store in the sleepy little mountain town where I live when the incongruous silver beast glided into the store’s tiny car park, sliding between a rusty pickup and an F-150 laden with hay bales. I stopped and gawked, half expecting Marty McFly to nip out for some cat food. Since then, friends have texted me of further sightings around the area. Cybertrucks are here, and we are fascinated by them. But why the interest? And why are people actually buying a truck that looks like an origami project gone too far? S. C. Gwynne tries to answer these questions in his Texas Monthly piece on Elon Musk’s passion project. Cybertrucks shouldn’t be successful: They arrived behind schedule and cost twice what Tesla said they would. Worse, as Gwynne writes, people found them to be “a compendium of defects and malfunctions. The list includes: dying batteries, sticky accelerators, wheel covers that gouge the tires, warping tailgates, trim pieces that fall off, malfunctioning wipers, software that seems to work only when it wants to, and body panels that don’t come close to fitting.” Musk himself has also become an increasingly controversial figure, with some Tesla drivers buying bumper stickers that read, “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.” Nevertheless, last July, the Cybertruck surged “to become the third-best-selling electric vehicle of any kind in the United States.” People seem to want a truck that could survive a Mad Max-type scenario (as long as it doesn’t involve a steel ball). Gwynne notes it was perhaps not an accident the Cybertruck debut coincided with Musk’s political turn to the right; this is a truck of the time. There is fun in this piece, with Gwynne test-driving different vehicles Top Gear-style (Cybertrucks are pretty fast), but he doesn’t shy away from the real reasons these trucks are coming to a mountain town near you. It shouldn’t have worked, but there’s something about Tesla. Even now. —CW

Audience Award

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