The Longformist

Vol. 2, March 2026

Hello and welcome to The Longformist, my newsletter of the best longform journalism over the past month (plus a podcast and two non-timely book recs.) I am an investigative reporter with work in Bloomberg Businessweek, the New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere. As a reader, I gravitate towards geopolitics, business, crime and literature–the more reporter-on-the-ground the better. If that sounds like your interests too, then please subscribe and share.

-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