The Long Read

This week: a major investigation into the autism therapy industry's prescribing practices, and the fraught question of what — and who — gets to define the Luigi Mangione story before it goes to trial.

5 Takeaways From a Times Investigation on Autism Therapy Clinics

The kind of investigation that takes months and earns its length. The Times found that a rapidly growing industry of autism therapy clinics is systematically overprescribing Applied Behavior Analysis treatment — sometimes prescribing as many as 40 hours a week for young children whose diagnoses may not warrant it. The piece is exceptional for its restraint: it follows the money with precision, tracing how insurance reimbursement structures created incentives that have very little to do with patient outcomes, without collapsing into advocacy or polemic. The families at the center are rendered with care, and the researchers and practitioners who've been raising alarms internally — often at professional cost — get real space to make their case. Longform accountability journalism making visible a harm that was hiding in plain sight inside a sympathetic-sounding industry. Read it before the follow-up hearings start.

The New York Times · 25 min read

The children can't advocate for themselves. The parents are told this is the gold standard. And the clinics are billing forty hours a week because forty hours a week is what the insurance will pay.

Who Gets to Own the Luigi Mangione Story?

The Verge goes somewhere more uncomfortable than most outlets have been willing to go with this story: what the spectacle around Mangione reveals about how murder trials, media credentialing, and public sympathy interact in the social media era. Reporters are being denied press credentials to hearings. Supporters are organizing outside the courthouse in ways that blur the line between political demonstration and fan culture. The piece asks, without flinching, what it means that a significant portion of the public has developed something closer to parasocial loyalty than civic outrage — and what the legal system does when the defendant has become a symbol before the verdict. It's a genuinely strange situation examined with the rigor it deserves. The best journalism about trials is often journalism about the frame around the trial, and this piece understands that.

The Verge · 20 min read