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LUNCH BREAK READS

Here it is. The LBR 15

Here are the 15 stories I send to people who ask where to start with longform. Five true crime, five investigative, five profiles. They run from the 1950s to the 2020s, and each one is the kind of piece you remember years after reading it.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Brett

True Crime
01 • 2008
ProPublica T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong
An Unbelievable Story of Rape
In 2008, an 18-year-old in Lynnwood, Washington, named Marie reported being raped at knifepoint in her apartment. Detectives doubted her almost immediately, pressured her into recanting, and charged her with false reporting. Years later, a Colorado detective hunting a serial rapist found photos of Marie on his computer. The man, Marc O'Leary, had attacked at least five other women across two states. The story is about how a real victim was bullied into denying her own rape, and what it took for the truth to surface.
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02 • 2022
Chicago Magazine Jake Malooley
Unmaking a Murderer
Chester Weger spent 59 years behind bars as Illinois's longest-held inmate, convicted of bludgeoning three Riverside women to death at Starved Rock State Park in 1960. He confessed after a night of interrogation, then recanted within days and has insisted on his innocence ever since. Malooley follows Weger out of prison at 80 and into a new fight: getting decades-old crime scene evidence tested for DNA. The piece lays out a confession that never quite added up, a prosecutor's plan to break a suspect through psychological warfare, and a case the Illinois Valley has whispered about for three generations.
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03 • 2006
Texas Monthly Pamela Colloff
96 Minutes
On August 1, 1966, a 25-year-old architectural engineering student named Charles Whitman wheeled a footlocker of rifles to the top of the University of Texas Tower and started shooting. By the time two police officers killed him 96 minutes later, he had shot 43 people and introduced the country to the idea of mass murder in a public place. Colloff tells the story entirely through the voices of more than three dozen survivors, witnesses, and first responders. Forty years on, they describe what they saw, what they did, and what they could not do.
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04 • 2002
New York Magazine Vanessa Grigoriadis
The Single-Mom Murder
In January 2002, fashion writer Christa Worthington was found raped, beaten, and stabbed to death in her Cape Cod home. Her two-year-old daughter Ava, physically unharmed, was still clinging to her body. Worthington had left a glamorous New York and Paris career to raise Ava in the quiet of Truro, and her tangled personal life quickly became the story. Grigoriadis reconstructs the world Worthington built and the one she could not escape: an unstable ex called "the magician," an affair with a married shellfish constable, and a circle of friends with no shortage of theories about who killed her.
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05 • 2016
Tampa Bay Times Lane DeGregory
The Long Fall of Phoebe Jonchuck
Just after midnight on January 8, 2015, a St. Petersburg police officer watched John Jonchuck stop his PT Cruiser at the top of the Dick Misener Bridge, lift his 5-year-old daughter Phoebe out of her booster seat, and drop her six stories into Tampa Bay. DeGregory reconstructs Phoebe's short life and her father's long unraveling: 27 involuntary commitments, seven domestic violence arrests, meth and synthetic marijuana, a string of women who took them in. Florida's Department of Children and Families had been in his life since he was 5. Five investigations into Phoebe ended the same way. They left her with him.
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Investigative
01 • 2021
Toronto Life Chris Nuttall-Smith
Inside the Rise and Fall of the Buca Empire
Buca was the place to go in Toronto for ten years, a glitzy, $35-million Italian dining empire built by two club promoters from Greektown and a young chef named Rob Gentile. Italy's most decorated chefs flew in for VIP dinners. Critics raved. Then the bills stopped getting paid. Suppliers were stiffed. Lawsuits piled up. A foraged-mushroom guy got pulled in deeper and deeper before realizing his "partners" were dodging him. Nuttall-Smith pieces together how the King Street Food Company unraveled, leaving a private equity firm with the scraps and dozens of small vendors with nothing.
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02 • 2017
HuffPost Melissa Jeltsen and Dana Liebelson
The Super Predators
A Delaware state trooper named Andrel Martinez dated a nurse, then an EMT, lying to both for years. When Sarah Loiselle tried to leave, he showed up at her hospital, parked outside her apartment, and ran her, her friends, and her babysitter through the police database dozens of times. Karen Tingle, who he later married, said he choked her against a bathroom sink while she held their baby. Jeltsen and Liebelson use the case to examine domestic abuse by police officers, an underreported crime made worse by databases, professional courtesies, and badges that follow men home.
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03 • 2011
ProPublica, Frontline, and NPR A.C. Thompson
The Real 'CSI'
A year-long investigation into the 2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices that decide how Americans die. Thompson found a system held together by underfunding, missing credentials, and elected coroners with high-school diplomas. In New Orleans, a longtime pathologist missed broken ribs, strangulation marks, and the actual cause of death in case after case, including police custody deaths later ruled homicides. Massachusetts cremated a body before police could investigate. Oklahoma stopped autopsying most suicides and anyone over 40 who dies without an obvious cause. Bad autopsies put innocent people in prison and let killers walk.
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04 • 1991
Time Richard Behar
Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power
Behar's 1991 Time cover story is the modern blueprint for reporting on Scientology. He laid out the church's finances, its harassment of critics, the suicide of a young recruit named Noah Lottick, its $20 million in annual legal spending, and front groups like Sterling Management Systems that funneled dentists into the fold. While reporting it, Behar said private investigators pulled his credit report, contacted his family, and surveilled his sources. Scientology sued Time all the way to the Supreme Court and ran weeks of attack ads in USA Today. Behar won the awards while the lawsuits all failed.
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05 • 2016
The New Republic Suki Kim
The Reluctant Memoirist
Suki Kim spent six months undercover in Pyongyang, teaching English to the sons of North Korea's elite while hiding her reporting notes on SD cards in her dorm room. She came home with 400 pages of material and a book contract. Then her publisher labeled the result a memoir. Reviewers questioned her ethics rather than her findings. Readers called her dishonest. Male audience members showed up at her events to challenge her firsthand reporting on one of the world's most closed states. Kim's essay is about who gets to be an investigative journalist and who gets pushed into the personal.
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Profiles
01 • 1966
Esquire Gay Talese
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
The piece is often called the greatest magazine profile ever written. Sinatra refused to be interviewed, so Talese stayed in Los Angeles for three months and watched him instead. He trailed Sinatra and his entourage through bars, recording studios, and casinos, talking to friends, family, and the seventy-five people on his personal payroll. Sinatra was 50, sick with a head cold, brooding about a CBS documentary that pried into his Mafia ties, and worried about an NBC special he had to sing through with a damaged voice. Esquire later called it the best story it ever published, and Vanity Fair called it the greatest piece of magazine journalism of the 20th century.
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02 • 1998
Esquire Tom Junod
Can You Say... Hero?
Tom Junod was a 40-year-old men's magazine writer with a reputation for hatchet jobs when his editor sent him to profile Fred Rogers for an issue on American heroes. Rogers, then 70, kept turning the interview around on Junod, asking him about the stuffed rabbit he had loved as a child. The two became close friends and wrote each other long letters about faith and journalism until Rogers' death in 2003. The piece is the basis for the 2019 Tom Hanks film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and is the rare profile that changed the writer more than it changed the subject.
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03 • 2015
The New Yorker Kathryn Schulz
The Really Big One
Technically a profile of a place rather than a person, Schulz heard about the Cascadia subduction zone over dinner with friends in Portland and could not believe she had never heard of it. The fault line runs 700 miles off the coast of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island, and it last ruptured in January 1700. Scientists put the odds of another full-margin rupture in the next fifty years at roughly one in ten. FEMA estimates that when it happens, 13,000 people will die and a million will be displaced. The piece won the Pulitzer for feature writing and changed how the Pacific Northwest talks about its infrastructure.
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04 • 1957
The New Yorker Truman Capote
The Duke in His Domain
Capote flew to Kyoto in 1956, talked his way past a press ban set by director Joshua Logan, and spent one long evening eating dinner with Marlon Brando in the actor's suite at the Miyako Hotel during a break from filming Sayonara. Brando, 33 and at the height of his fame, opened up about his mother's alcoholism, his loneliness, his contempt for Hollywood, and his sex life. He spent the rest of his life saying he had been tricked. The piece is taught as the template for the modern celebrity profile and the moment journalism learned to seduce its subjects.
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05 • 2007
The Washington Post Gene Weingarten
Pearls Before Breakfast
At 7:51 a.m. on a Friday in January 2007, Joshua Bell stood against a wall at the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station in a baseball cap and jeans, opened a small case, took out a $3.5 million Stradivarius, and played six classical pieces for 43 minutes. Two days earlier he had sold out a Boston theater at $100 a seat. In the Metro, 1,097 people walked past. Seven stopped to listen. Twenty-seven gave money, mostly on the run, for a total of $32. Weingarten won the Pulitzer for asking, in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, whether beauty transcends.
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