There has been a lot of controversy going on with Elon Musk doing a nazi salute at Trumps inauguration. If you support nazis or fascism, you can leave this sub. If you support any of that, you are not welcome here. For those who don’t support it, there is never a bad day to punch a Nazi. So far there has been no politics involved with this sub, but I feel like now I should do a post about those guidelines. All active members of this sub (who don’t support Nazi stuff), continue enjoying Steve Martin and have a nice day!

Hey guys,

I'm back with some of the best longform profiles I've found this week. You can also subscribe ~here~ if you want to get the weekly newsletter in your inbox. Any feedback or suggestions, please let me know!

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📱 On TikTok, Every Migrant Is Living the American Dream

Jordan Salama | The New Yorker

Once the migrants are in the U.S., their accounts tend to follow a similar pattern. Migrants begin to show themselves living, in real time, the sueño americano for which they risked everything. I knew that most of these people were now working precarious jobs—indeed, living precarious lives—in the migrant underworld of New York, which has been unsettled by a surge of more than two hundred thousand new arrivals since 2022.

📚 There Is No Safe Word

Lila Shapiro | Vulture

At a reading ten months later, Gaiman suggested that Kendall and two other girls wait for him on his tour bus so they could all hang out after he was done signing. When Gaiman showed up, he pulled Kendall into the back of the bus and lay on top of her. He kept saying, “Kiss me like you mean it,” Kendall remembers. She tried to get into it, but she was panicked. Eventually, Gaiman rolled off her. “‘I’m a very wealthy man,’” she remembers him saying, “‘and I’m used to getting what I want.’”

💰 The wealth whisperers who save super-rich families from themselves (🔓 non-paywall link)

Sophie Elmhirst | 1843 magazine

But great wealth forces children to consider their legacy – and their mortality – almost before adulthood has begun. At the age of 18, Monahan was told she had to make a will. The family steel business had been sold in the 1970s and, since then, their wealth had been managed by a family office, on the board of which multiple branches of the family were represented.

🤖 Sam Altman on ChatGPT’s First Two Years, Elon Musk and AI Under Trump (🔓 non-paywall link)

Josh Tyrangiel | Bloomberg

I don’t think I was doing things that were sneaky. I think the most I would say is, in the spirit of moving really fast, the board did not understand the full picture. There was something that came up about “Sam owning the startup fund, and he didn’t tell us about this.” And what happened there is because we have this complicated structure: OpenAI itself could not own it, nor could someone who owned equity in OpenAI. And I happened to be the person who didn’t own equity in OpenAI.

🎭 Adrien Brody Is Drawn to High-Risk Roles. Nothing Compares to The Brutalist

Wendell Steavenson | Vogue

“I like a challenge,” Brody told me. “I’m very open to pushing myself past things that feel a bit intimidating and require a deep dive. You really have no option once you’re in it, but to just work hard.” No matter the material, “I have the same level of commitment and immersion. I’m eating worms and being thrown down glacial rivers and putting on real braces and living in solitude and eating less or hiding.”

⚖️ Chrishona Hodges’s Life Sentence

Elly Fishman | Chicago Magazine

Now that I’m a mother myself, Chrishona’s struggles hit me in new and personal ways. As we discussed Jerryon’s life in jail, Chrishona kept repeating one word: “irritates.” It irritates her that her 24-year-old son will disappear for days or weeks when he is put in solitary confinement for fighting. It irritates her that he is languishing behind bars for years simply awaiting trial. And it irritates her that if convicted, he could spend decades in prison.

🏡 The Spectacular Burnout of a Solar Panel Salesman

Brendan I. Koerner | WIRED

After a bit of mulling, Colvin declined the offer. He worried he’d regret quitting school without giving it a fair shake. But Will was a relentless recruiter. On a near-daily basis that fall and winter, he peppered Colvin with Instagram Reels produced by “solar bros” showing off their six-figure commission checks, their penthouse apartments, their exotic cars. These influencers—tanned, sculpted, brimming with confidence—stressed that anyone could reap such rewards if they had the courage to swap their mundane lives for a place in the green economy’s forward trenches.

📖 The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay

Sophie Pinkham | The Guardian

Pelevin has long been lauded as a kind of soothsayer who predicted Russia’s post-truth, neo-imperial present. Fans believe that his novels foretold the rise of Putinist coercive political spectacle and the descent of post-Soviet Russia into a sham democracy (Generation P); Russia’s engineering of a 2014 rebellion in eastern Ukraine and its full-scale invasion in 2022 (in S.N.U.F.F., published in 2011); and even the rise of Chat GPT (in iPhuck 10, from 2017).

🐕 ‘I Scream, I Cry, and Then I Run’: The Hell of Living with Extreme Dog Phobia

Thomas Hobbs | Vice

“There’s a real lack of empathy,” says 50-year-old cynophobia sufferer Esther Makaya, from Maidenhead, a town west of London. “If I say to a dog owner, ‘Could you please put your dog on a lead, because I am scared?’ They will always say, ‘Why? He’s lovely!’ and won’t do anything. They treat you like you’re a bad person, while others can even be rude or abusive.”

🏦 Keeping Up With the Kerkorians

Gary Baum | The Hollywood Reporter

Both residences have been in default. American Express, Ferrari and other creditors have been after Ross for unpaid bills. The parents have settled one lawsuit that accused them of financial predation against an elderly woman, a fellow client of their business manager, and since have defended themselves against multiple legal complaints contending fraud or contractual violations involving Doll Face, a youth-focused beauty brand the family owns and that Tess has said was purchased for her as a gift while still a teen.

🖼️ He’s a Security Guard at the Met. Now His Work Is Showing There. (🔓 non-paywall link)

Dodai Stewart | The New York Times

Every other year, the employees organize staff-only art shows to share pieces with each other. Recently, the employee show, which runs for about two weeks, was open to the public. But, a museum spokeswoman said, Mr. Khalil’s sculpture marks the first time in recent memory a current employee has had a piece in a major exhibition — a point of pride for his co-workers.

🎎 Eastern Promises

Dylan Levi King | The Baffler

I am rankled by offenses invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathizes with the family of sightseers blundering their way onto a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways.

🚔 The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real

Dhruv Mehrotra, Andy Greenberg | WIRED

Now she sat in the dispatch office next to Jones, listening to the radio, waiting with dread to hear that sound again. Instead, as dozens of officers moved through the school that May morning, they found—nothing. The school resources officer who had been posted near the school’s entrance radioed to the police line that he’d seen no sign of a shooter entering. Nor had he heard the automatic gunfire that Jones described.

🚢 Channel migrants: The real reason so many are fleeing Vietnam for the UK

Jonathan Head, Thu Bui | BBC

Her sister Hien had made it to Britain nine years earlier, smuggled inside a shipping container. It had cost her around £22,000 but she was able to pay that back in two years, working long hours in kitchens and nail salons. Hien married a Vietnamese man who already had British citizenship, and they had a daughter; all three are now UK citizens.

⚔️ Can Famo Music Survive Lesotho's Gang Wars?

Matthew Bremner | Rolling Stone

In Lesotho, people knew Kholopo Khuluoe by his stage name, Lisuoa, which means “Spitefulness.” He was among the brightest and most controversial stars in the famo music scene — a genre of music indigenous to Lesotho, characterized by rap-like chanting, frantic accordion playing, and rhythmic drumming. In recent years, organized crime and violence have plagued it.

👻 The House on West Clay Street

Ian Frisch | Curbed

She didn’t believe Merritt’s story about Colin and the spike — she couldn’t — but she didn’t know what to believe instead. It seemed unreal that Merritt or Brown could have murdered a person — never mind gathering his blood in storage bins. But there seemed to be no question something terrible had happened to Colin. And Pope felt some strange kinship with the missing man, a faint pulling connection. “I don’t know if people believe in the supernatural,” she said. “But there was something compelling me to stay.”

🎾 Novak Djokovic Conquered Tennis. What’s Next?

Daniel Riley | GQ

He describes all that he still hopes to accomplish as an elder statesman in the sport—ranging from improved players rights to his own entrepreneurial designs (“Tennis is still my biggest megaphone to the world”)—before conceding: “Yes, I mean if you solely look at it from the perspective of completing achievements and the game itself? Then, yeah, I mean I guess…” Then he laughs and laughs.

💊 The King of Ozempic Is Scared as Hell

Virginia Heffernan | WIRED

Now that Novo is responsible for the blockbuster semaglutide drugs and half the world’s insulin, it is putting tens of billions of dollars into expanding its production facilities. Each one costs $2 or $3 billion and takes five years to bring online—half of the time to build, the other half testing the machinery.

🎤 Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of “Saturday Night Live”

Susan Morrison | The New Yorker

“It’s him and Hitchcock,” John Mulaney told me. “No one else has had this kind of longevity.” Half of them think that Michaels has repeatedly been able to remake the show for a new audience because he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil. The other half wonder whether Michaels, gnomic and almost comically elusive, is a blank screen onto which they’ve all projected their hopes and fears and dark jokes—whether he, like the cramped stages in “S.N.L.” ’s Studio 8H, is just a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds.

✈️ The Flying Maestro: A Top Conductor Moonlights as an Air France Pilot (🔓 non-paywall link)

Javier C. Hernández | The New York Times

Over the past few years, the British-born Harding has led dual, and often dueling, careers: conducting Mozart and Mahler symphonies one day, piloting commercial flights to Paris, Milan, Stockholm and Tunis the next. He relishes the exacting regimen of flying — checking fuel figures, analyzing weather patterns, tallying passengers and cargo. He is also energized by the risks he can take in music.

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Longform Profiles: Depth over distraction. Cutting through the noise with weekly longform profiles that matter. Subscribe ~here~.

Who does this ‘China’ guy think he is? Only Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are allowed to steal our citizens’ private information!

The boomers in charge say banning TikTok is totally necessary but won’t show evidence to prove it, we must believe them!

It is not at all a red flag that our government wants to isolate us from a foreign app no other western nation is banning for ‘privacy’ reasons, while upholding that the Right to Privacy does not apply to American-owned apps!

This will totally cure social media brain rot!

Heavy /s because I just don’t get it.

Quin69's reaction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpXu9ft9h4M

Kriparian react to Quin69 aggreeing and adding more context to support the idea Elon is cheating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N-WW0UDrVQ

I thought Dgg, Destiny and 4thot would get a kick out of this, i remember the bee-man talking about loving the first game and the crossover of Elon cheating to get to the top of the ladder...

I think that Elon desires to be loved by the plebs more than any money he could haves.

Having to run all those companies and somehow having enough time to reach no1 on the Diablo 4 ladder and now he has reached top 10 in PoE2 hardcore.... level 95 in Hardcore.... that is an insane amount of time, effort, stress and skill and for him to achieve it while running all the corps was unbelievable to me... but now he streamed his game-play the other night and he was clueless on many things.. he fumbled picking up items, he struggled to work the atlas.. he seemed to not understand the most basic things about interfacing with the game yet he has gotten to the top 10 in the world... it does not make any sense.

It seems very obvious he is paying someone... a really skilled player no doubt to no life the game for him in Hardcore (if you die in HC your character is deleted)

Quin69 called him out last night and now other streamers are reacting to his call out and all seem to agree that Elon is account sharing... a bannable offence. and GGG (the studio) is autistic about enforcing their TOS.

Thought it would be of interest to this community and havnt seen a post about it.

Pre-emptive (if i get automoded for the IP that shares this subs name again... LoL)