Why are pants so big right now and are we all sellouts? The best long reads I've discovered this month.
Happy Sunday!
One of my goals for 2024 is to read less shit on the internet and read more well researched, beautifully written long form journalism.
So, welcome to my first Sunday long reads roundup! Once a month, on a Sunday, I’ll send out a newsletter to my paid subscribers with a few long reads I loved reading over the month, plus a TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) summary of what each piece is about and what I learnt from it.
Here are the long reads I’ve loved over the past month (let me know in the comment section if you’ve read anything lately that you think I should check out!):
Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?
By Jonah Weiner for The New York Times Magazine
TL;DR: In this witty and reflective piece, contributing writer Jonah Weiner explores the recent evolution of pants from skinny, to straight, to wide, to what he calls “acute-onset elephantiasis”.
Weiner argues this new trend of pants with hemlines that boast “dinner-plate-size circumferences” is just the latest swing of the “pants pendulum”, which has been swinging from slim to big to slim again since the very beginning of pants.
So why does the size of our pants matter? Because our clothes, and more specifically our pants, tend to change when we do. So with the pandemic waning, Gen Z dominating the zeitgeist, and growing uncertainty about what the future will look like, it’s probably no surprise that the conservative slim leg pants of the past decade are rapidly being replaced by pants that wouldn’t look out of place on a clown. In short, if your pants feel silly, you’re doing it right.
The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty
By Michael Hall for Texas Monthly
TL;DR: No one does true crime long reads quite like Texas Monthly. In this gripping feature, Michael Hall walks the reader through how a man named Carlos Jaile ended up spending decades behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit and how a woman named Estella Ybarra played a regrettable role in his conviction.
In 1990, Jaile, a vacuum cleaner salesman, was put on trial for the rape of an 8-year-old girl. The evidence against him was patchy at best — the girl identified him in a lineup two years after the assault, he had two alibis for the time when the assault occurred, and he didn’t match the description of the man the girl gave when she first reported the crime to the police.
However, within three hours a jury found him guilty. Ybarra sat on that jury and every Christmas, Jaile’s conviction haunted her — until 27 years later when she decided to finally do something about it. In this feature, Hall lays out what really happened in that jury room for the first time.
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