Longreads

[Essays and Criticism] A child's isolating illness:

"Isabel was asleep in the recovery room, motionless, innocent. Teri and I kissed her hands and her forehead and wept through the moment that divided our life into before and after. Before was now and forever foreclosed, while after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle star, into a dark universe of pain."

[Public Interest] Welcome to Colorado. One of seven states in the country where district attorneys can unilaterally decide when to criminally prosecute kids as adults.

Sixteen-year-old Gary Flakes didn’t want to go to the police station, but his dad—his namesake, the career soldier—thought it was for the best, and Flakes didn’t want to disappoint him. He’d only been living with his dad in Fort Carson for 19 months; before that, he’d only ever visited his dad for a summer or short stays. He’d grown up with his mom, or as Flakes puts it, his “Moms” in Detroit, but his grades started slipping. He was partying, riding around, and then things got serious: He started dabbling with guns. In August 1995, his mother sent him on a train to Colorado to move in with his dad.

[Public Interest] A plague of sexual violence in Indian country:

My second day on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas, an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent a memo to all its law-enforcement employees forbidding them to talk to me. One of those officers working the jail at Fort Yates, North Dakota, walked into a tribal judge’s office, and throwing the memo down, said, “Can you believe this shit?” Since I was on the reservation to write about crime—sexual assault and rape, in particular, and how often these crimes go unreported when they take place on tribal land—I had naturally hoped to speak to the police. But after politely declining to be interviewed, Standing Rock’s police chief, Michael Hayes, referred me to Elmer Four Dance, who, as the BIA’s special agent in charge of District 1—which serves fifty-two tribes in the states of South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Iowa—was the man who had issued the memo from his office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, 150 miles away.

[Public Interest] Some $6 billion a year is committed to breast cancer research and awareness campaigns. Is it any wonder that the disease has become a gold mine for pink profiteers and old-fashioned hucksters?

Aside from the slow-rolling hot dogs at concession stands and the sideline billboards for Hubba Bubba bubble gum, you'd be hard-pressed to find a hint of pink at any of the National Football League's 31 stadiums, where, during most of the six-month season, the decor tends to match the distinctly masculine nature of the game. Not so in October, when pink becomes the de facto color of the sport. Players bound onto the field sporting pink cleats, wristbands, and chin straps, and punt pigskins emblazoned with pink decals under the watchful eyes of refs with pink whistles. It's all part of the league's massive sponsorship of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which by October's end will have seen the distribution of 650,000 pink ribbons at stadiums across the country.

Discouraged for religious reasons from playing basketball, a young Jehovah's Witness who would soon be 7 feet tall had to decide whether to follow his mother's ardent beliefs or his own heart

"Dieter Horton first caught sight of the skinny kid with the long arms one afternoon in April 2008. The boy was sitting in the first row of the bleachers in the small gym at Antelope Valley College, waiting silently, his knees together. Only when he stood up, 30 minutes later, did Horton realize just how tall he was. At least 6'8", Horton thought. Then he looked closer: Who the hell is this kid? "After all, AVC is located in Lancaster, Calif., in the heart of the Antelope Valley, only an hour's drive north of Los Angeles over the San Gabriel Mountains but in a world of its own. If there was a teenager within a nose of 6'6" in the valley, Horton could tell you his home address, his girlfriend's name and what he liked on his pizza. In 11 years as a junior college basketball coach in California, Horton had won a state title, sent nearly 20 kids to Division I schools and set a state juco record by finishing 37--0 at Fullerton College in 2005--06. Young, ambitious and handsome in a clean-cut way, Horton scouted so relentlessly that his phys-ed students had grown accustomed to his teaching with a cellphone pressed to his ear. Yet here was a towering kid unfamiliar to the coach from local high schools or the AAU circuit or even city rec leagues."

[Profile Writing] [Excerpt only] He knew the alphabet by two, fractions by four, and entered college at eleven. What happens to a kid who’s too smart for school?

"Santiago Gonzalez, 13 years old and a full-time stu­dent at one of the nation’s top engineer­ing colleges, wakes up at 5:30 every morn­ing during the school year so that he can spend an hour and 20 minutes develop­ing iPad and iPhone applications in a pro­gramming language called Objective-C, which he learned from a textbook when he was nine. That textbook and 86 simi­lar volumes – Applied Finite Mathematics, Infinity in Your Pocket, Programming in C++, Dictionary of Physics – sit in a book­case opposite his bed. A dozen stuffed an­imals – purple dragons, Donald Duck, Shamu, a hound named Patrick – reside permanently at the foot of the bed."

[Profile Writing] Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.

"The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. 'You’re going to leave it that far from the curb?' he asks. He’s standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb."

[Profile Writing] From a tiny Uptown apartment he's organizing a worldwide collective of hackers that brought down HBGary and helped overthrow the government of Tunisia.

"The night before Michael Isikoff came to Dallas, I got an e-mail from Barrett Brown. 'Apparently Isikoff is freaked out about having another journalist here,' it said. 'But I’ll secretly record the proceedings and provide to you.'

"A little context: Michael Isikoff is a former investigative reporter for Newsweek. Now he’s a correspondent for NBC News. He flew in from Washington, D.C., in late February with a producer and a cameraman to talk to Brown about his involvement with a notorious international group of hackers called Anonymous that recently used their Low Orbit Ion Cannon to bring down the websites of MasterCard and Visa and the Swedish government, among others, because the institutions had made moves hostile to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. It’s complicated—as Isikoff would learn. But more on that in a moment."

[Fiction] I WAS IN THE middle of eating some bib-guk-gui-tang Korean shit that Hog was making me try when a woman came in the front door. She just stood there looking at us like she might turn around and bolt, and when the door shut behind her, she jumped forward and looked back at it as though someone had just spanked her ass. I could tell she was a tattoo virgin, all jittery and confused-looking. I glanced at Hog, betting, “Rosary beads. Ankle.” He grinned, his mouth full of noodle slop. He mumbled something, but I couldn’t understand him. Anyway, he’d be wrong. Everyone was coming in wanting rosary beads these days.