A ponderous piece. The author should be commended for dogged pursuit of the facts and for taking interest in all of those whom he contacted. In fact, he would make a good investigative journalist. My only complaint is that his writing stretched far beyond what is necessary in terms of length and detail. A+, however, for subject matter. No spoiler alert here. Read it and weeeeeeeep.
The occasional Atlantic articles I’ve read were all like that. I actually enjoy that writing style which is very different from the concise, shallow writing I more often see on the Internetz.
Tyler Rogoway at The Drive/Warzone writes in much the same, voluminous way, with every hypothesis fleshed out in its entirety. Reading two or three of his articles will occupy an entire evening.
I tried to read it. I don’t mind The Atlantic in general, they sometimes do have compelling stories. This one is just too long and too much detail to get through - it’s like 8 paragraphs just to explain what he is going to write about. So I scanned and scrolled and scanned and couldn’t find “the answer to the mystery seeds”.
Agreed, kudos to the author for putting in the time and legwork to research - that is missing in most journalism these days... but get to the point faster next time please. Put the extraneous details in an appendix or something.