Longreads

The story behind a car chase that ended in tragedy:

"It's agony. She feels gutted, hope drained, as she waits for a detective to call her back. Miles away, Jodon zooms past cars and weaves through lanes — but Nature doesn't see a car chase. She sees a man — her brother — deliberately orchestrating something. Stealing some kid's car, even though he had a nicer, faster truck at home; shooting at the door of a police car, even though officers are clearly within his aim. She sees a man purposefully backing himself so far into a corner that it seems like he has no other option."

The writer gains a new perspective on who her parents were after examining old photos and letters they left behind after they died:

"As I worked on my blog, I read these and similar letters again and again, and wondered how the man I thought my father was could have written these words, words that are so romantic that I melt on my mother's behalf when I read them. How could my father have been the person that I knew, the person I was happy to have dead, and the person in these letters, a person who was articulate, generous, and so, so loving? And how could my mother, who never seemed very happy with him, love him so much in return? Didn't she know he was a monster?"

A profile of rock star David Lee Roth, who has had a diverse career and life. He's now 57 years old and back doing shows with Van Halen:

"He eventually became a certified EMT in New York and then completed a tactical medicine training program in Southern California. Not famous enough to headline Madison Square Garden, plenty famous enough to stand out in a tactical medicine training program.

'The altitude drop is when somebody realizes who you are and they take you to task. Now you're the guy who gets to do garbage five days in a row instead of one, and doing ambulance-garage garbage is different from I-just-finished-dinner-and-now-I-have-to-dump-the-garbage-darling garbage. That will test you. But I was old enough and smart enough to know what I'd signed up for. These tactics are of value, they're a contribution.' For years he went on ambulance calls all over New York City, and found that a life in the music business was good preparation for rushing to the aid of grievously injured people in the less picturesque corners of the city. 'My skills were serious,' he says. 'Verbal judo, staying calm in the face of hyper-accelerated emotion. Same bizarre hours. Same keening velocity.'"

A 10-year-old boy suffers abuse growing up and murders his sleeping father, a member of the National Socialist Movement. What led to the killing, and did the system fail him?

"Inside the police station, Joseph sits in the interrogation room with a blanket on his lap and a McDonald's meal on the table. Krista strokes his hand as Detective Hopewell interviews him. Joseph tells Hopewell that he was 'tired' of his dad hitting him and his mom. 'I didn't want to do it,' Joseph tells Hopewell. 'It's just that he hurts us.'

"He says his dad is cheating on his mother and he's afraid if there would be a divorce, he would have to live with his father. 'That really scared me,' Joseph says. He tells Hopewell that Jeffrey threated to kill the family. 'He hates everybody, even my baby sister. When someone says that about someone I really care about, I get really mad.' Every day, Joseph says, he and his father 'are hating each other more and more.'

"Joseph tells Hopewell that the night of the killing he woke up in his bedroom — 'crazy in my thoughts. I think that if I shoot him then maybe he wouldn't be able to hurt us… I started thinking I should end this father-son thing.'"

An enterprising anesthesiologist is offering hungover people in Las Vegas an intravenous treatment:

"Burke set up an IV bag in his office and inserted a catheter into his foot. 'That's really the only place that's easy to start an IV on yourself,' he says. 'I let probably 300 or 400 cc's of fluid in.' The hydration offered some relief, but not enough to declare victory over his hangover. 'I said, "OK, it's time to put the drugs in. Let's see what's going to happen with this."'

"First, he added Zofran, an anti-nausea medicine. 'After about 10 minutes, the nausea started melting away.' Then, he added Toradol. 'When I get hangovers, it feels like there's a vice on my head.' The impact of the Toradol was dramatic, however. 'Literally, within three minutes, it was like someone had unscrewed the vice. I was like, 'Good God, I can't believe I've been suffering all these years when I could have been done with it in 30 minutes.'"

Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, "Can You Die from a Nightmare?" was featured on Longreads in September.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

A brief history of the title that launched Atari and the video game industry:

"In 1976, Atari took a monetary hit, settling a lawsuit out of court in Chicago with Magnavox. (Alcorn remembers the settlement being $300,000; Bushnell thinks Atari coughed up $500,000; Curt Vendel, who had seen documentation surrounding the suit, notes that $1.5 million in all was paid in installments up to 1983.) The suit concerned a patent held by Baer and Magnavox regarding interaction between machine-controlled and player-controlled elements on the screen, a basic foundation of design 'that covered just about every game developed between 1971 and the mid-1980s,' Baer says. He was clear about the lineage of Atari’s product: He told the Computer History Museum in 2006 that 'Pong is simply a knockoff of the Odyssey Ping-Pong game,' and that Bushnell 'knew he was going to lose and decided to come under contract' with Magnavox as a licensee."

How the Mitt Romney campaign, its supporters and the media addressed the candidate's Mormon faith:

"On the night of the South Carolina Republican primary in January, I sat near the front of a dark campaign press bus and listened to reporters talk about Mitt Romney's underwear.

"Earlier in the day, one of them had happened upon the candidate and his wife doing laundry in the basement of our Columbia, South Carolina, hotel, and a small cluster of colleagues had now gathered to listen to him relate the anecdote, lapping up every mundane detail of this rare interaction with the closed-off couple. Finally, another reporter interrupted.

"'Did you see their underwear?' she asked, grinning mischievously as though she had just said something naughty."

People who suffer from parasomnias, or sleeping disorders, often sleepwalk and experience night terrors, putting them in potentially dangerous situations:

"My research tells me that most people who suffer from night terrors describe episodes that sound familiar: They feel suffocated, they are about to die, there is someone in the room with them. That doesn't, of course, make my individual night terrors any less scary, and it crosses my mind that I could actually scare myself to death.

"The prevailing theory about Tobias Wong's death was that he hanged himself while experiencing a night terror. I imagine that something in his mind told him that hanging himself was the only way to escape whoever, or whatever, was chasing him, in the same way that I have thought that the only way to save myself was to jump out of a window or smash a pane of glass.

"I realize that I want to talk to Dubitsky, both to find out what it was like for him and also to see how closely my experiences dovetail with his. If unintended suicide is the logical extreme of a sleep disorder, am I in imminent danger?"