The Daily Beast’s Best Longreads, March 16-22
Monica Lewinsky is back, examining AA and smuggling Pez. The Daily Beast picks the best journalism from around the web this week.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
The Revolution Will Probably Wear Mom Jeans
By Eugenia Williamson, The Baffler
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
Monica Lewinsky Is Back, but This Time It’s on Her Terms
By Jessica Bennett, New York Times Magazine
A lot is different for Monica Lewinsky these days, starting with the fact that, until last year, she had hardly appeared publicly for a decade. Now 41, the former White House intern once famously dismissed by the president as “that woman” holds a master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics.
The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous
By Gabrielle Glaser
Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.
‘Everything That Had Been Alive Was Buried’
By Rachel Cernansky, Medium’s Matter
Duke Energy was just fined $25 million for a huge coal ash leak in North Carolina. So why are the victims of the Kingston, Tennessee spill— the largest industrial accident in American history — still waiting for justice?
By Colin Dickey, Longreads
The rise and fall of Pyramiden, a Russian mining town located in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
How A Michigan Farmer Made $4 Million Smuggling Rare Pez Containers Into the U.S.
By Jeff Maysh, Playboy
Even with frayed nerves, an empty gas tank and no cash, Steve knew they had to get their haul back to the States, whatever the risk. He’d gambled every penny he had on this foolish mission, because in the hands of collectors, the colorful plastic cargo was at that moment, gram for gram, more valuable than cocaine or even gold. There was no turning back.
By Patricia Marx, New Yorker
Why is South Korea the world’s plastic-surgery capital?