Longreads

Investigating a rare genetic disorder that causes those who suffer from it to grow a second skeleton:

"Within a few years, she would begin to grow new bones that would stretch across her body, some fusing to her original skeleton. Bone by bone, the disease would lock her into stillness. The Mayo doctors didn’t tell Peeper’s parents that. All they did say was that Peeper would not live long.

"'Basically, my parents were told there was nothing that could be done,' Peeper told me in October. 'They should just take me home and enjoy their time with me, because I would probably not live to be a teenager.'

How Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and members of Anonymous are finding ways to address cyberbullying:

"Lieberman is most interested in catching the egregious instances of bullying and conflict that go destructively viral. So another of the tools he has created is a kind of air-traffic-control program for social-networking sites, with a dashboard that could show administrators where in the network an episode of bullying is turning into a pileup, with many users adding to a stream of comments—à la Let’s Start Drama. 'Sites like Facebook and Formspring aren’t interested in every little incident, but they do care about the pileups,' Lieberman told me. 'For example, the week before prom, every year, you can see a spike in bullying against LGBT kids. With our tool, you can analyze how that spreads—you can make an epidemiological map. And then the social-network site can target its limited resources. They can also trace the outbreak back to its source.' Lieberman’s dashboard could similarly track the escalation of an assault on one kid to the mounting threat of a gang war. That kind of data could be highly useful to schools and community groups as well as the sites themselves. (Lieberman is leery of seeing his program used in such a way that it would release the kids’ names beyond the social networks to real-world authorities, though plenty of teenagers have social-media profiles that are public or semipublic—meaning their behavior is as well.)"

It remains nearly impossible for investors to understand what's going on inside the big banks—and what risks they're taking on:

"When we asked Dane Holmes, the head of investor relations at Goldman Sachs, why so few people trust big banks, he told us, 'People don’t understand the banks,' because 'there is a lack of transparency.' (Holmes later clarified that he was talking about average people, not the sophisticated investors with whom he interacts on an almost hourly basis.) He is certainly right that few students or plumbers or grandparents truly understand what big banks do anymore. Ordinary people have lost faith in financial institutions. That is a big enough problem on its own.

"But an even bigger problem has developed—one that more fundamentally threatens the safety of the financial system—and it more squarely involves the sort of big investors with whom Holmes spends much of his time. More and more, the people in the know don’t trust big banks either."

[Fiction] A man receives a letter from his deceased brother:

'My brother hired you to give me a message after he was dead?'

Harding smiled and nodded.

'He died six and a half months ago,' I said. 'What took you so long?'

'His wish was for us to execute his instructions not less than half a year after his demise.'

'Is this some kinda legal thing?'

'It is a simple agreement between FRC and your brother,' Lance Harding said, maintaining an aura of imperturbable patience. 'Often individuals wish to pass on knowledge outside of the rubric of wills and other legal formats. Some leave a spoken message, others might wish to pass along a note or a small package.'

'Seth didn’t have much,' I said. 'He couldn’t have anything to hide.'

'We all have something to hide, Mr. Vaness. Either that or something is hidden from us.'

Author Ann Patchett on opening an independent bookstore in Nashville, Tenn. at a time when brick and mortar bookstores are considered dead:

"I was starting to understand the role that the interviews would play in that success. In my 30s, I had paid my rent by writing for fashion magazines. I found Elle to be the most baffling, because its editors insisted on identifying trends. Since most fashion magazines 'closed' (industry jargon for the point at which the pages are shipped to the printing plant) three months before they hit newsstands, the identification of trends, especially from Nashville, required an act of near-clairvoyance. Finally, I realized what everyone in fashion already knew: a trend is whatever you call a trend. This spring in Paris, fashionistas will wear fishbowls on their heads. In my hotel room in Australia, this insight came back to me more as a vision than a memory. 'The small independent bookstore is coming back,' I told reporters in Bangladesh and Berlin. 'It’s part of a trend.'

"My act was on the road, and with every performance, I tweaked the script, hammering out the details as I proclaimed them to strangers: All things happen in a cycle, I explained—the little bookstore had succeeded and grown into a bigger bookstore. Seeing the potential for profit, the superstore chains rose up and crushed the independents, then Amazon rose up and crushed the superstore chains. Now that we could order any book at any hour without having to leave the screen in front of us, we realized what we had lost: the community center, the human interaction, the recommendation of a smart reader rather than a computer algorithm telling us what other shoppers had purchased. I promised whoever was listening that from those very ashes, the small independent bookstore would rise again."

A 1979 look inside the making of George Lucas's blockbuster franchise—now owned by Disney:

"Star Wars was manufactured. When a competent corporation prepares a new product, it does market research. George Lucas did precisely that. When he says that the film was written for toys ('I love them, I'm really into that'), he also means he had merchandising in mind, all the sideshow goods that go with a really successful film. He thought of T-shirts and transfers, records, models, kits, and dolls. His enthusiasm for the comic strips was real and unforced; he had a gallery selling comic-book art in New York.

"From the start, Lucas was determined to control the selling of the film, and of its by-products. 'Normally you just sign a standard contract with a studio,' he says, 'but we wanted merchandising, sequels, all those things. I didn't ask for another $1 million-just the merchandising rights. And Fox thought that was a fair trade.' Lucasfilm Ltd.,. the production company George Lucas set up in July 1971, 'already had a merchandising department as big as Twentieth Century-Fox has. And it was better. When I was doing the film deal, I had already hired the guy to handle that stuff.'"

Inside Google's secretive Ground Truth program—and why it suddenly makes sense that they are working on a self-driving car:

"Let's step back a tiny bit to recall with wonderment the idea that a single company decided to drive cars with custom cameras over every road they could access. Google is up to five million miles driven now. Each drive generates two kinds of really useful data for mapping. One is the actual tracks the cars have taken; these are proof-positive that certain routes can be taken. The other are all the photos. And what's significant about the photographs in Street View is that Google can run algorithms that extract the traffic signs and can even paste them onto the deep map within their Atlas tool."

[Fiction] A close-knit family's struggles in Dickens-era England:

"Caroline always prepares Fred’s breakfast herself. Her young brother’s looking sallow around the eyes. 'We saved you the last of the kippers,' she says, in a tone airy enough to give the impression that she and Pet had their fill of kippers before he came down this morning.

"Mouth full, Fred sings to his niece in his surprising bass.

"His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.

"Pet giggles at the face he’s pulling. Caroline slides her last triangle of toast the child’s way. Pet’s worn that striped frock since spring. Is she undersized, for two years old? But then, girls are generally smaller. Are the children Caroline sees thronging the parks so twig-like, under their elaborate coats? 'Where did you pick that one up?' she asks Fred.

"'A fellow at the office.'

"'Again, again,' insists Pet: her new word this week.

"Caroline catches herself watching the clock."

In the first four years as the first black president, Obama has largely avoided addressing race directly. Some historical context:

"Thus the myth of 'twice as good' that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. 'Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,' he said in his 'More Perfect Union' speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s 'God Damn America' remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race.

"Whatever the political intelligence of this calculus, it has broad and deep consequences. The most obvious result is that it prevents Obama from directly addressing America’s racial history, or saying anything meaningful about present issues tinged by race, such as mass incarceration or the drug war. There have been calls for Obama to take a softer line on state-level legalization of marijuana or even to stand for legalization himself. Indeed, there is no small amount of in­consistency in our black president’s either ignoring or upholding harsh drug laws that every day injure the prospects of young black men—laws that could have ended his own, had he been of another social class and arrested for the marijuana use he openly discusses. But the intellectual argument doubles as the counterargument. If the fact of a black president is enough to racialize the wonkish world of health-care reform, what havoc would the Obama touch wreak upon the already racialized world of drug policy?"