Simon Owens

I love my stepladder as if it was my own

The best longform journalism we consumed this week Welcome to The Long Story, the weekly newsletter where we curate the best longform journalism on the internet.

Want some good weekend reading? I compiled the best longform journalism I consumed this week. I guarantee you there's something on this list you'll enjoy.

thelongstory.substack.com/p/the-best-l...

This all could have been avoided, but 77 million couldn't be bothered to read a newspaper once in a while.

TRANSLATION: Trump is going to try very hard to cook the books in future jobs data reports.

Since Bluesky won't let me turn off reposts for individual users, I finally caved in and turned them off for everyone.

So many of you people are just completely insufferable when it comes to your reposting practices.

Dying for gold: who killed the miners of Buffelsfontein? South Africa’s government blockaded hundreds underground. The results were deadly

Upwards of 40% of all the gold that exists in circulation originated in South Africa, and much of it was mined through the exploitation of black Africans who lived in extreme poverty. In the 2010s, hundreds of desperate people descended into a shuttered South African mine so they could dig up and se

How a Nazi-obsessed amateur historian went from obscurity to the top of Substack Tucker Carlson has called Darryl Cooper the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.” His background is more extreme than previously reported.

A popular rightwing historian has been slowly nudging the Republican base into adopting a more sympathetic view of Nazi Germany. While he never embraces Nazism outright, he often cherry picks historical anecdotes to make it seem as if the Germans of that era were the true victims. Mother Jones uncov

Did Craigslist decimate newspapers? Legend meets reality. - Poynter Craig Newmark’s simple site was hailed as a disruptor and blamed for the collapse of classifieds. But journalism’s business failures ran deeper.

For decades, Craig Newmark has been blamed for triggering the downfall of legacy media, since Craigslist decimated newspapers' classified sections, which were their main profit centers.

Trump destroy economy

A lot of people compare Elon to Hitler, but I think that's unfair. Elon is way more effective at killing people. He wiped out a single government agency, and as a result 14 million people are projected to either starve to death or die of curable disease. Hitler wished he had that sort of efficiency.

The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

"Before January 2025 there had been no—zero, zilch—interest in killing off USAID. It wasn't something Trump ran on. It wasn't envisioned in Project 2025. It was only once Elon Musk decided that USAID was evil that destroying the agency became a policy goal for the Republican party."

Millions will die as a direct result of Elon’s cuts to USAID. He rivals Hitler in terms of the amount of human carnage and suffering he’s caused and will cause.

Mothertucker Not only has Emma Tucker completely revitalized the staid Journal with her suffer-no-fools attitude and upscale tabloid instincts, but her strategic bet to repopulate the D.C. newsroom has the paper e...

I have to agree with this take: Emma Tucker's been killing it at the Wall Street Journal. Obviously its Trump reporting has been good, but I'm much more impressed with its embrace of longform journalism, as evidenced by the fact that I consistently link to it in my weekly longform newsletter.

YouTube video by SuprOrdinary You've Never Seen Pancake Art Like This Before

This guy is so crazy talented. Imagine going back in time to 2007 and telling someone that something like this will one day exist on YouTube.

youtu.be/zdUNGQc3aJs?...

MrBeast's plan to sell more toys? Turn them into an animated series - Tubefilter Let us journey back to the 1980s. Kids came home from school, slapped on the wood-paneled TV, and were greeted by a swath of 2D-animated cartoons. MrBeast Lab: The Descent is an upcoming series of ani...

This will be a really fascinating experiment to watch over the coming year. MrBeast has essentially cast himself as a super hero in animated action series for YouTube. Not only will it be monetized through the traditional channels, but also with action figure toys.

Bookshop.org Reports 65% Growth, E-books Add $1 Million in Sales The online bookselling platform reported 65% year-over-year growth for the first six months of 2025. After introducing e-books in January, sales for the category have topped $1 million and now represe...

$1 million is a tiny milestone, but a good one nonetheless. Bookshop has done an admirable job of helping independent book stores band together to put a dent in Amazon's ecommerce monopoly for print books.

www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Honestly, I'm rooting for Bluesky to succeed but also think the product sucks because its senior leaders are so fixated on recreating Twitter circa 2012.

Podcasts become a strategic IP play for Hollywood talent Podcast IP ownership has become an increasingly central motivation for Hollywood actors and writers interested in the audio space.

This is a really interesting trend: narrative fiction podcasts are able to attract A-list acting talent by giving them equity in the shows.

I’d be really curious to know the daily active user count for Substack Notes and how it compares to, say, Bluesky.

Traffic Apocalypse Google’s AI Overviews are killing click-throughs to news sites.

I continue to be deeply skeptical that the rise of AI summaries/chatbots will have a net negative impact on content creators in the long term.

This is a really good example of how the Creator Economy can carve away at a media niche by creating content that's cheaper to produce and in some instances better in quality.

deadline.com/2025/07/hgtv...

It's annoying that you can't follow someone and then turn off their reskeets. This is a feature that's long been available on Twitter and it's a great way to deal with the power users who constantly retweet people praising/replying to them.

I wonder what it's like for Mark Zuckerberg that he has access to virtually unlimited amounts of capital and the best engineers in the world and yet hasn't managed to launch an innovative product from scratch since 2004.

Deep down, it must eat at him.

Texas Republicans Unveil Gerrymandered House Map, Trying to Please Trump

Democrats need to vow to fight fire with fire. It sucks, but it's the only way since the Supreme Court won't step in and stop this insanity

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/u...

‘Climate Delusion’ Or Vital Solution? Carbon Capture’s Uphill Battle | NOEMA Industrial carbon capture is a climate strategy environmentalists love to hate. Those committed to its development are trying to win back allies they sorely need.

The idea for carbon capture seems almost too good to be true: what if we could reverse over 100 years of irresponsible carbon emissions by simply using a machine to pull carbon back out of the air? But many critics do believe that it is, in fact, too good to be true.

AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates Companies have long leaned on entry-level workers to do grunt work that doubles as on-the-job training. Now ChatGPT and other bots can do many of those chores.

Recent college grads have seen a steep uptick in unemployment over the last year, and the executives who'd normally hire them are claiming AI is replacing many entry-level positions.

www.wsj.com/lifestyle/ca...

The Bull Market for Economists Is Over. It’s an Ominous Sign for the Economy.

For decades, economics PhDs were hot commodities, with companies eager to tap into their expertise and the top professors in the field generating much more income from consulting retainers than their university salaries.

The economy is weird

Inside the collapse of Builder.ai: Was it even an AI company? The implosion of a white-hot startup has employees asking how it all went wrong.

A buzzy London-based AI company raised hundreds of millions of dollars based on its claims that customers could use its AI chatbot to build sophisticated software products, but an investigation found it was simply outsourcing the coding to inexpensive programmers in developing nations