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(Recommended by Peter Rubin)
Seeing this headline evoked some frenzied reminiscing among your friendly Longreads editors. Turns out we were all scandalized by the mere mention of the 1978 horror movie Faces of Death, even if we’d never seen the actual film. The fact that it purported to show actual deaths made it an urban legend nonpareil, a meme before we knew to call it a meme. Now, with the (acknowledgedly) fictional meta-adaptation hitting theaters, Sam Adams investigates the real story behind the VHS bloodbath that gave so many ’80s babies nightmares.
I can’t speak for the elderly or the squeamish. But that box, and the movie inside it, held an irresistible fascination to me as a child. Kids who’d seen it—or, even better, whose older siblings had—spoke in whispers about its contents, less because they were afraid of being overheard by an adult than because it felt as if even putting its terrible images into words might open the door to some unimaginable evil. There were plane crashes and beheadings, men and women getting run over by trucks and eaten by alligators, all portrayed in the goriest of detail. And to top it all off, it was all real. This wasn’t Hollywood trickery. These were people’s actual deaths, captured on film and available for rental—if you dared.
(Recommended by Brendan Fitzgerald)
Joseph Osmundson, a molecular biologist, considers the recent work of Anne Carson and Richard Siken, two poets “writing from the inside of neurodegeneration . . . considering the brain as it loses itself.” (Carson has Parkinson’s disease, and Siken survived a stroke.) His essay—an entrancing mix of criticism, memoir, and craft talk—reveres the body and the act of writing, despite the threshold that waits to quiet us. “Language,” he writes, “is worth staying alive for.”
Words are the first metaphor, the word standing in for the object. If words lose their primary meaning, then metaphor has left the room. How to get into the room of metaphor again? We write. “A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall,” Siken writes, and I can feel the rock in my hand. There is no metaphor here, only a search for the meaning that comes before metaphor.
(Recommended by Seyward Darby)
Did the chatbot Claude select a girls’ school in Iran as a bombing target? In this searing analysis, Kevin T. Baker argues that this question obscures the real concern about AI-fueled air wars. The US military’s quest to collapse the “kill chain,” or “the steps between detecting something and destroying it,” is the result of human decision-making intended to take humans out of decision-making, leaving ample room for error and tragedy:
The target package for the Shajareh Tayyebeh school presented a military facility. Lucy Suchman, whose 1987 book Plans and Situated Actions remains the sharpest account of how formal procedures obscure the work that actually produces their outcomes, would not have been surprised. Plans always look complete afterward. They achieve completeness by filtering out everything that wasn’t legible to their categories. This package looked like every other package in the queue. But outside the package, the school appeared in Iranian business listings. It was visible on Google Maps. A search engine could have found it. Nobody searched. At 1,000 decisions an hour, nobody was going to. A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.” How indeed.
(Recommended by Carolyn Wells)
It is hard to imagine watching a video of your loved one falling to their death—but the fall of David Moudy‑Miller’s son, alpinist Balin Miller, was captured on a TikTok livestream and now lives online forever. Moudy‑Miller recounts watching the clip for the first time and trying to reclaim his son after thousands of strangers had already seen it and passed judgment. His grief is raw and spiralling, and this essay captures the messy, looping nature of a mind trapped in trauma.
However, even in that heartbreaking and shameful moment, I was still able to marvel at Balin’s athleticism. That he had the mental capacity and the reflexive spring to try and turn that unfolding tragedy into legend. Most of us would still be trying to understand what was happening as that recalcitrant haulbag receded into the distance and we were halfway to the bottom. That my little boy, who it seems was just learning to crawl, then walk, could instantaneously turn a backwards fall into a sideways leap, boggles my mind. That the strength to grab that haul line tightly enough to make a haulbag jump, could come from a boy who only yesterday could not hold his own baby bottle filled me with awe.
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