Summer is a time to knock off those books you’ve been meaning to read all year, but it’s also a prime time to return to those digital dog-ears you made throughout 2023. The Broadsheet team has read, shared and bookmarked many longreads this year: these were some of our favourites.
Life Changes Tomorrow: What Happened When Pro Basketball’s Isaac Humphries Came Out – Good Weekend
Feature writer Konrad Marshall can infuse any story with gravitas – he recently ghost wrote Dani Laidley’s memoir – but I was particularly moved by his piercing cover story on gay basketballer Isaac Humphries. Some might think we’ve evolved enough not to need the big “coming out” piece – as this story eloquently asks, “Who cares?” But when there are still implausibly few professional sportsmen who are out of the closet, it matters. “Just because homophobia is not in your immediate line of thinking doesn’t mean it’s not affecting a lot of people,” says Humphries.
– Michael Harry, national editor
Erewhon’s Secrets – The Cut, New York Magazine
This account of the backstory behind cult LA grocery store Erewhon – the supermarket responsible for bringing the Hailey Bieber Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie into the world – left me, for lack of a better word, shook. I had no idea how Erewhon started, but humble beginnings – in a below-street-level store – had not been my expectation. Nor were other parts to this tale. Store raids. A book dedicated to 36 celebrities who, if they didn’t eat better, “might come to a bad end”. Its two “macrobiotic educator” founders broke multiple zoning laws and were effectively kicked out of town at one point. I have no doubt I’ll be thinking about this piece for many months to come – particularly the last line.
– Ruby Harris, deputy branded content editor
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule – The New Yorker
I, like many young men, came to Elon Musk as a bit of a fan boy. Wow, this guy is going to save the planet with Tesla! He’s going to take us all to Mars! He’s boring a hole under LA! While I’m very much on team Grimes these days, this brilliant article by Ronan Farrow explodes the idea that Musk is simply another billionaire arsehole. We’re at the point where his power is so insidious, it can turn the tide of war, bamboozle governments, and will certainly shape the future in his image, whether we like it or not. But he’s also a profoundly lonely guy, trapped in a ketamine-fuelled nightmare. After reading this, you almost feel sorry for him.
– Dan Cunningham, directory editor
Cheesier, Saucier, and Drowning in Caviar: How Tiktok Took Over the Menu – Grub Street
Since 2009, Broadsheet has become a bible for those navigating Australia’s culture and dining scene. In 2015, the term “Broadshat” was coined to describe the overnight success of a local business after it appeared on our site. But in recent years, user-generated content (namely Tiktok and Instagram) has become a force for discovery and breeding ground for a “shameless, boisterous approach to chasing views”. This article shines a light on how restaurants are adapting to Tiktok-first menus (sauce-filled pasta balloon, anyone?); the lucrative business of connecting restaurateurs with influencers; and the spots that perform best on social media, including “a ‘sushi speakeasy’ decorated with a 19th-century nautical theme that asks guests to type in a pass code to gain access”. (Take that Broadsheet headline generator).
– Stephanie Vigilante, head of social media
The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story – Wired
Celebrated sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And the internet – the immense, complex, fundamentally unknowable internet – sometimes feels like magic to me, even though I have a top-level understanding of how things like submarine cables and TCP/IP protocols work. It’s deeply unsettling, then, to learn that humanity’s most ambitious and transformative creation is so fragile and easily disrupted. That three hobbyist teenage hackers could take down the likes of Netflix, Spotify and Paypal with no special training or equipment. Wasn’t the whole point of the internet that it’s a distributed, decentralised network? Sobering stuff.
– Nick Connellan, publications director
Western Sydney Is Dead, Long Live Western Sydney! – Sydney Review of Books
I grew up around Blacktown and the Hills before moving to Sydney’s north shore as an adult. Over the last decade I’ve moved, via inner-west Sydney, to Parramatta, where I’ve lived since 2021. Sheila Ngoc Pham’s 2022 essay about a mythical Western Sydney identity bubbled up to the top of my reading list earlier this year. A line early on in the piece – describing Western Sydney as “an area which is vast and evolving – and impossible to essentialise” – made me wonder about how we define culture and identity through arbitrary boundaries, particularly as Western Sydney has become a term used by politicians to stand for suburban cultural diversity and disadvantage. Pham explores how Western Sydney is something that cannot and should not be contained by the label.
– Adeline Teoh, subeditor
It’s Barbie’s World. We Just Live Here Now – Vanity Fair
Barbie has always been an influencer. In this piece, published before Greta Gerwig’s box-office smash, reporter Delia Cai went into the Mattel offices and behind the scenes of the plastic doll’s Instagram and Tiktok accounts, where a team of up to 15 people were creating videos and reels for her then-three million followers across both platforms. Not surprisingly, those numbers have spiked since Margot Robbie’s on-screen incarnation of the iconic doll earned more than US$1 billion worldwide, cementing the film in Hollywood earnings history. “People think it’s just taking the doll out of the box,” says Zlatan Kusnoor, the art director who runs Barbie social. “But no. It’s actually very meticulous.” In this piece, Cai unpacks not only the Barbie social kingdom but influencerdom, the creator economy and content creation in 2023. (Vanity Fair followed up the story with a podcast episode that is also well worth a listen.)
– Audrey Payne, Melbourne food and drink editor
The Case Against Travel – The New Yorker
Show me someone who has travelled the world many times over and I will show you a crashing bore. In a globalised and hyper-mobile culture, the more interesting, brave and subversive life story surely comes from the person who has never strayed from their hometown (as almost impossibly rare as that probably is). The case against travel is made with piercing acuity by Agnes Callard of the New Yorker, whose article draws on literature and philosophy to examine how travel has evolved into a shallow, box-ticking accessory of personality more than any profound mind-expanding adventure, which she argues is a myth. Travel, she writes, has a spurious “aura of virtue” and is often “branded as an achievement”, and therefore becomes inherently competitive between those in its thrall. And this is to say nothing of the fact that most travel has become a predictable, heavily marketed product that we casually consume like any other, nor of the environmental impact. Mind you, Callard is clearly well travelled herself, suggesting that these mature observations might only have come in the wake of experiencing what she now condemns. Her conclusion, meanwhile, and a disquieting final sentence, perhaps reveal the morbid truth about our irresistible wanderlust.
– Barnaby Smith, subeditor
A Big Blob of Boring – Grub Street
From the moment I clocked the headline, I thought: I should’ve written that. New York Magazine’s food offshoot Grub Street pierced open the global obsession with burrata, causing a fromage-fuelled meltdown in the netiverse. Burrata is Boring, it said. The oozing orbs grace menus everywhere, whether with lashings of oil, atop swirls of spaghetti, or jazzing up Caprese salads, but very rarely bring anything new to the table. We all enjoy couriering it to our gobs (maybe via just-depuffed bread in Bondi) but, as Tammie Teclemariam writes, is it just a “thick blob of cold dairy that gets a few splashes of seasonal garnishes and a $20 price tag”? I tend to think so. And I’m glad someone said so. However, I find her take on bread and butter – “serviceable, and totally unsurprising” – frankly offensive.
– Grace MacKenzie, Sydney food and drink editor
A Chaotic Taxonomy of the Nancy Meyers Cinematic Universe – Vulture
I’m going to make a very un-Broadsheet confession. When it comes to the world of cinema, I only ever want to watch a rom-com. Look, I know there are plenty of stimulating documentaries and black-and-white classics out there, and I’m sure whatever Christopher Nolan recently released is actually very good but, damn it, I just want a happy ending with a boppy soundtrack and very solvable problems. And I want it all to be written by Nancy Meyers (or maybe Nora Ephron). So when I found Vulture’s love letter to the Meyers cinematic universe, I knew I had found my people. Rachel Handler argues that Meyers is an auteur and her world of fancy kitchens and white-wine-glugging, turtleneck-wearing heroines should be treated just as seriously as any other filmmaker. She then goes on to rank 14 Nancy Meyers movies from least to most quintessentially Meyers.
– Lucy Bell Bird, national assistant editor
Inside the Meltdown at CNN – The Atlantic
Writer Tim Alberta was given the kind of access to then-CEO of CNN, Chris Licht, that journalists rarely get anymore. But there’s probably good reason for that. Alberta followed and conducting multiple interviews with Licht from mid-2022 (around the time David Zaslav appointed him as CEO of CNN Worldwide) until mid-2023. The article revealed just how in over his head Licht was, who prior to leading CNN produced The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Just five days after its publication, he was fired.
– Audrey Payne, Melbourne food and drink editor
Slavery’s Descendants: The Ancestral Ties to Slaveholding of Today’s Political Elite – Reuters
A team of investigative journalists set out to find out how many members of America’s political ruling class are direct descendants of slaveholders, examining the lineages of more than 600 officeholders, from presidents to supreme court justices. The team poured over census records, obituaries, wedding announcements, cemetery archives and more primary sources to uncover linkages, including “documents more than 100 years old and handwritten in cursive that ranged from the clear to the hieroglyphic”. Out of their research and reporting came this mind-blowing five-part series, which includes intriguing interactives and gut-wrenching personal stories. The idea for the series began when reporter Tom Lasseter returned to the US after almost 20 years abroad as a foreign correspondent, just a few weeks after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. He wondered if the country had “truly reckoned” with its history of slavery and asked, “how many had ancestors who enslaved people? Did they even know?” As it turns out, some did, some did not, and who was willing to talk about those links was another question entirely.
– Katya Wachtel, editorial director
Looking for more summer longreads? Check out our guide from 2022 – it is filled with goodies.
