Longreads

This week's Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner's new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who's been featured on Longreads in the past, explains:

For Father's Day, we've unlocked our recent Longreads Member Pick, chapter one from Drew Magary's new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books).

An examination of Margaret Thatcher's life as chronicled in the authorized biography by Charles Moore:

"It’s depressing to suppose that fortune favours the people who can keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as they do. But she is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps chopping and changing long after they have gone home. She didn’t outsmart or outperform her enemies. She outstayed them."

This week's Member Pick is a chapter from Among Murderers, a new nonfiction book by Sabine Heinlein, published by University of California Press, examining the lives of criminals as they prepare to re-enter society. Heinlein, who was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her Iowa Review essay "A Portrait of the Writer as a Rabbit," explains the origins of this chapter, which focuses on "Job Readiness."

On the man known as 'H.M.', whose brain was caught in "permanent present tense" and whose story is documented in a new book by neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin:

"Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves."

For this week's Member Pick, we're thrilled to share the first chapter of Drew Magary's new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt  (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for  Deadspin and  GQ, has been  featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together.

An excerpt from the new book The Magical Stranger. Rodrick was 12 when his pilot father died in a plane crash:

"A colleague once nicknamed me – half mocking – the 'magical stranger' because I get people to tell me things. But to me, the magical stranger has always been my father. He was brilliant and unknowable, holy but absent, a born leader who gave me little direction. Peter Rodrick was one of only around 4,000 men in the world qualified to land jets on a carrier after dark. And he was an apparition, gone 200 days of the year from when I was six until he died. He was such a ghost that I didn't fully accept he was gone for years.

"Evidence of the actual man was harder to come by. His pictures hung on our walls, but Mom never talked about him. Most of my father was locked away in cruise boxes and crates in our basement: a framed picture from the Brockton Enterprise of a boy with a pole on the first day of fishing season; a long black leather sleeve holding a sword, and a small metal box containing envelopes with single dollar bills sent to him on his birthday by his father, the envelopes still coming for years after he died."

Inside the offices—and servers—of the video streaming empire:

"On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined. Traffic to Netflix usually peaks at around 10 p.m. in each time zone, at which point a chart of Internet consumption looks like a python that swallowed a cow. By midnight Pacific time, streaming volume falls off dramatically."

A diagnosed sociopath explains how she thinks and functions. Adapted from a book by M.E. Thomas:

"I loved getting high marks in school; it meant I could get away with things other students couldn't. When I was young, what thrilled me was the risk of figuring out just how little I could study and still pull off the A. It was the same for being an attorney. During the California bar exam, people were crying from the stress. The convention center where the exam took place looked like a disaster relief center; people made desperate attempts to recall everything they had memorized over the prior eight weeks—weeks that I spent vacationing in Mexico. Despite being woefully ill-prepared by many standards, I was able to maintain calm and focus enough to maximize the knowledge I did have. I passed while others failed."