-Brent Crane (@bcamcrane)

The Best

Pardon Me, Ruth Marcus, the New Yorker

A timely dive into the presidential “pardon economy,” booming like never before under Trump 2.0. “The White House insists that money plays no role in Trump’s pardons. The evidence suggests otherwise.”

Why Steve Kerr Stayed With The Warriors, Wright Tompson, ESPN

I am not an NBA fan but still found lots to keep me glued to this profile examining Steve Kerr’s ambition, grief and triumph at the twilight of his career. “‘You wanna trust yourself but also be suspicious of your own motives. You don’t want to walk away too early but you don’t want to walk away too late.’”

Hard Rain, Wyatt Williams, Harper’s

A long examination of the still-unrealized technology of weather modification could make for a real snooze fest. But Williams hits just the right notes to produce a feature of real distinction. A classic Harper’s piece in the best way. “If cloud seeding could end drought or make water more abundant for a farmer or help prevent wildfires isn’t that exactly what God would want?”

Chasing the Man Who Stole the Gods, Matthew Campbell, Bloomberg Businessweek

Many moons ago I worked in Cambodia as a newspaper reporter. Archaeology was one of my beats, so I read this investigation into stolen Khmer antiquities with great interest–an excerpt from Campbell new’s book. His last one, Dead in the Water, was a banger. “When asked why he stayed, Gordon liked to say he had no choice: Cambodia had him under a magic spell.”

Nonfiction book

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, W. David Marx (2025)

The 21st-century often feels totally incomprehensible. I found this cultural history to be enlightening examination of our odd era, connecting the dots from the rise of reality TV to the Great Recession to MAGA in a way that rings true. “With creators no longer required to pursue artistic excellence, culture has become a lowest-common-denominator fight for attention.”

Novel

Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami (2014)

Murakami for me is always a nostalgic experience. You know what you’re going to get but you’re also always surprised. These seven stories are classic Murakami, full of pathos and odd turns in simple prose.

Podcast

Amitav Ghosh, Take Four Books, BBC Radio 4

-Brent Crane

The Best

He Helped Stop Iran From Getting The Bomb, David D. Kirkpatrick, the New Yorker

In this riveting glimpse behind the veil of US espionage, a former super spy in the Middle East decides to tell all to one of America’s best national security reporters. “Not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Kevin Chalker set out to become a spy.”

My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler, McKay Coppins, the Atlantic

This personal investigation into the exploding world of sports betting was on my mind during a visit to Las Vegas this month. As McKay shows us, even gambling for journalistic reasons is a dangerous gambit. “Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.”

Big Game, Nick Davidson, the Atavist

I had no idea that there was such a thing as undercover poachers operating for US Fish and Wildlife. Davidson brings this hidden world to life with cinematic verve and deep sourcing. “But I have to be real careful,” Espinoza added. “If I find out you’re a federal agent, I’ll shoot you and leave you out here in a gut pile.”

Beta Blockers, Charles Bethea, the New Yorker

This was a fun dispatch from the lucrative world of male empowerment programs that, in between funny anecdotes, gets surprisingly touching. “‘The gift that he’s getting right now is just knowing that other men are sitting here listening to him and saying, ‘Hey, we love you, bro. We get it.’”

No Enemies to the Right, Antonia Hitchens, the New Yorker

In a similar but more toxic vein, Hitchens’ reporting from within the bowels of the “Groyper” right is both utterly compelling and deeply depressing. “They greet each other with the salutation ‘Christ is King’; they banter about their aspiration to re-create Agartha, a mythological Aryan kingdom supposedly situated somewhere in the earth’s core.”

Nonfiction book

A Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, Amy Stanley (2020)

This carefully constructed biography of a common woman in 19th-century Tokyo (then Edo) reads like fiction. Stanley, the rare historian that can actually write, relies on a goldmine of letters to recreate her subject’s life, fleeing bad marriages for the big city. Concurrently, we learn about the immense societal changes transforming the last days of feudal Japan. “Maybe everyone in Edo was maintaining an illusion of sanity with clothes and hairpins. Or maybe they all started out as virtuous people but were transformed into monsters when they learned—over and over again—that they could never hold on to what they thought was theirs.”

Novel

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

Noticing that Dostoevsky has been having a moment, I took this one off the shelf. It describes the aftermath of a senseless double-murder in csarist St. Petersburg, but feels like it could have been written yesterday. Reading it, you’re reminded of Hemingway’s line, about how Dostoevsky could write “so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply.” “‘Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.’”

Podcast

Wright Thompson: Learn Storytelling in 63 Minutes, How I Write

-Brent Crane, @bcamcrane

The Best

The Death Spiral of a $250 Million Satellite Start-up, Brent Crane (me!), Bloomberg Businessweek

This story, on the epic rise and fall of a wildly ambitious satellite surveillance company, has been months in the making. But I really lucked out a week before filing my first draft when I received a jailhouse call from the enigmatic company founder one evening, who spoke for over two hours. On a whim, I had mailed him a postcard months earlier with my contact info.

“In the new Space Age, the capital is plentiful and the sky is the limit, but it’s a long, long way down.”

The Man Who Broke Into Jail, James Verini, the New Yorker

This is one of those stranger-than-fiction stories every journalist dreams of finding. Verini, a war reporter with a Ukraine book coming out this year, had me devouring every word in this reverse-whodunnit involving a troubled criminal justice activist. As noted in the piece, it took Verini several years to report this one and it really paid off.

“Although Hall believes that his job requires forgiveness, he can’t forgive Friedmann. ‘There’s just evil there. I know that.’”

The Founder of Anthropic Says He Wants to Protect Humanity From AI. Just Don’t Ask How, Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair

A notable addition to the “skeptical reporter tours Silicon Valley” genre. Focused on AI hype, there are some suitably weird asides, like a woman and her AI lover. There’s a pretty surprising twist at the end which has generated fury in some quarters against Hagan, a veteran magazine writer. But I thought it worked in the cheeky context of the piece.

“‘The alternative is not building it at all,’ he says, ‘and that’s not realistic. Someone will build it. Multiple someones. We’re trying to make sure at least one of them does it carefully.’”

He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had To Get Out Alive, Andy Greenberg, Wired

A guilt-haunted employee of a scam compound in Laos reaches out to one of the best investigative tech reporters in America, offering up his services as an informant. This is a riveting feature and so well-told by Greenberg. There’s been a flurry of reporting on the scam compound phenomenon in southeast Asia. This one sticks out.

“One video showed a victim crying in his car after losing a six-figure sum; the mark had sent the clip to his scammer to elicit guilt, perhaps, but it was instead being passed around the office for laughs.”

They Came to Spy on America. They Stayed to Coach Little League, Zach Dorfman, Politico

For the first time, Dorfman tells the story of the FBI’s investigation into a deep-cover communist spy in San Francisco at the end of the Cold War. The details of his average Joe life are fascinating but what I found most interesting was the fallout for deep-cover spies in America after the Soviet Union ended.

“‘A lot of them didn’t want to go back. It wasn’t as if they’d all just salute and get on a plane and head back to Prague.’”

Nonfiction book

Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder, 2003

Including here in memoriam to Tracy Kidder, who died of cancer this month at the age of 80, a major loss. The fellow MA native and longtime Atlantic writer was one of the best narrative non-fiction writers to ever do it. His biography of the late doctor and humanitarian Paul Farmer is a pinnacle of literary reportage: deeply reported, humane, true, artful. Read as much Kidder as you can but if you only have time for one, this is it.

“I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls “ambivalence,” the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.”

Novel

The 500, Matthew Quirk, 2012

I want to shout out this fun beach read about a shadowy DC lobbying group by the author of The Night Agent. Quirk is a former Atlantic journalist-turned-novelist. He also lives in San Diego and we met recently over tacos. His new book, The Method, is out now.

“He wanted a deal. He wanted to feel like he owned me again.”

Podcast

What the Iran War Means for MAGA, the New Right, and the America First Movement, The Realignment

I love longform. By my lights, it is the purest reporting medium (sorry documentarians.) The artistry lies in melding deep reporting with pristine prose and a sound structure. And while there are a few curated longform newsletters out there, none quite fit my tastes. The Browser is too science nerd, Longreads too MFA grad. I gravitate towards geopolitics, business, crime, history and literature. I prefer pieces informed by on-the-ground reporting. If these sound like your interests too, then please subscribe and share.

I’ll also be including two book recommendations–fiction and nonfiction–that for whatever reason have tickled my fancy. Also, a recent podcast rec. I want these newsletters, in your inbox at the end of each month, to be quick and to-the-point.

The Best

The Fall of the House of Assad, Robert F. Worth, the Atlantic

• The sudden, spectacular collapse of the Assad dynasty in Syria did not get as much media attention as it deserves. Worth’s well-sourced, novelistic recounting of Bashar al-Assad’s listless final years and days fills in a lot of gaps. One imagines him reading it over caviar in Moscow. “Asked about the downsides of democracy, Assad said, with a contemptuous grin: ‘In the West, the presidents, especially in the United States, are the executive directors, but they’re not the owners.’”

A War Foretold: How the CIA and MI6 Got Hold of Putin’s Ukraine Plans and Why Nobody Believed Them, Shaun Walker, the Guardian

• As Putin’s invasion enters its fourth year, it’s worth reflecting on the start of his “special military operation.” Walker interviewed over a hundred intelligence and government officials in the US, Europe and Ukraine for this gripping play-by-play. “A big psychological block for some European intelligence services was that they believed Putin to be a largely rational actor, and were deeply sceptical that he would embark on a plan they felt was likely to fail.”

Child’s Play, Sam Kriss, Harper’s

• Silicon Valley founder culture provides endless amusement for visiting reporters. Kriss’ latest is a superb addition to the genre. Funny, bleak, totally worth your time. “‘That’s what you have to understand about zoomers: we’re agents of chaos. We want to destroy the whole world.’”

Listening to Joe Rogan, David Remnick, the New Yorker

• Remnick is always a must-read. His deep-dive into Rogan’s curiously influential position in American politics and society explains a lot. “His signature hospitality can look like decency. But it’s the kind of decency that tends to judge indecency mainly by its entertainment value.”

What is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, the New Yorker

• In a media landscape dominated by credulous AI maximalism, Lewis-Kraus takes the proper, skeptical approach. We hear endlessly from the doomers about how AI is going to steal everyone’s jobs. But, as Lewis-Kraus shows, Claude can’t even operate a vending machine. “Anthropic had functionally taken on the task of creating an ethical person. This, needless to say, was a formidable challenge.”

If a Tree Falls, Rosa Lyster, Harper’s

• This legal dispatch, on the strange felling of a famous tree in England, should be a snooze-fest. But Lyster’s prose is delightful and she is able to get at the heart of the matter: why do people do shocking, unexplainable things? “In literature and myth, people don’t cut down or otherwise mess with proscribed trees because they are idiots. They do it because they cannot help themselves, because it is like hammering away on a big red button with a sign above it that says do not press.”

Books

Nonfiction: The World Of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig (1942)

• The Austrian Jewish novelist, writing in exile during WWII shortly before taking his own life, reflects on the seemingly halcyon days of pre-Nazi Vienna. Contemporary echoes abound. “In its liberal idealism, the nineteenth century was honestly convinced that it was on the direct and infallible road to the best of all possible worlds. The people of the time scornfully looked down on earlier epochs with their wars, famines and revolutions as periods when mankind had not yet come of age and was insufficiently enlightened.”

Novel: The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carre (1983)

• This is le Carre’s only work touching on Israel-Palestine. Forty years old, it could have been written yesterday. Reading it is a reminder of how little has changed in that conflict and the West’s pained reactions to it. “Those who are treated as pariahs become pariahs—just as, to quote Auden, those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

Podcast

Frankly Fukuyama, Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein on America as a Family Business

• Three political scientists on the corrosive and corrupt “patrimonial” style of Trump 2.0

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