The Longformist, a Newsletter of Long Journalism
Vol. 1, February 2026
Hello and welcome to the inaugural edition of The Longformist, my curated list of the best longform published over the past month. My name is Brent Crane and I’m an investigative reporter, with work in Bloomberg Businessweek, the New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere.
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