As they do, The New York Times dropped a big, beautiful investigation into a social ill that no one knew about. The piece — The Giant, Under Attack — is an expansive take on the addiction treatment industry, which is, it turns out, a big business. The reader is introduced to the two main characters up high — right after the nut graphs — but one of them, the young stock trader Chris Drose, doesn’t really emerge until halfway through the piece. When he does, the reintroduction is sharp, fun — which is nice in a business story about pain and loss — and hints at the authors’ depth of knowledge about their subject. Here’s the bit that got me:
With bushy eyebrows and a boyish face, Mr. Drose comes from a family of skeptics and crusaders. His grandfather helped plot the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, a dictator in his native Dominican Republic, in the 1960s.