Automattic

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.

A boy with kidney disease finds a way to thrive in high school thanks to a robot: “‘His personality helps out a lot,’ says Kent Deville, Lyndon’s chemistry teacher. ‘A shier kid would have problems.’ Lyndon isn’t afraid to call out when he needs help, and he uses the bot’s tricks to his advantage. He […]

The inside story of Ranbaxy, a generic drug maker that committed criminal fraud by fabricating data to win FDA approvals: “Thakur knew the drugs weren’t good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world’s poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who […]

The founding editor of The Toronto Sun died on Monday. He wrote his own obituary: “It was nerve-wracking in 1967 to be mistaken for an Israeli prisoner by a Cairo mob and punched and battered until rescued by a brave Egyptian who defied the mob. “There were the lethal streets of Algiers, where daily assassinations […]

The world is getting automated more quickly than we think—and when the robots take over it will throw our capital-labor balance out of whack and decimate the middle class: “Until a decade ago, the share of total national income going to workers was pretty stable at around 70 percent, while the share going to capital—mainly […]

An excerpt from The Spark, a memoir about a mother who nurtures her autistic son’s genius: “The ‘math people’ in our lives found Jake fascinating. One day I was having a cup of coffee with my aunt, a high school geometry teacher, while Jake sat at our feet, playing with a cereal box and a […]

On being pregnant and uninsured—too rich to qualify for state-funded health insurance, too poor to afford private insurance: “We looked into purchasing private insurance. Andrew could get insurance for himself as a small business owner and I could be included in his plan as his wife, but the pregnancy wouldn’t be covered. I found this […]

The writer visits the 2013 National School Scrabble Championship, a competition between children in the fourth through eighth grade: “The two boys have a laugh at my complaints. Frankly, I’m in a no-win situation. If I lose, I’m a loser. If I win, I’m the heartless bastard who beat two middle schoolers. Sam’s mother agrees […]

The short life of Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend her last days practicing journalism: “Jessica hadn’t expected to win. The other finalists were teams of students, and she worked solo on her ‘Slab City Stories’ project—a multimedia report on the inhabitants of a former Marine base-turned-squatter-RV-park in the California desert […]

Amy Butcher describes the experience of mourning a person she barely knew. An excerpt from Butcher’s memoir-in-progress: “This is what happens now. I feel sadness about everything. I have no idea, of course, what Emily did or did not see, because of course I have no reason to mourn a woman I barely knew. “‘It’s […]