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The Story of L.A.'s Insatiable Thirst for Water

Mulholland began looking throughout Southern California for an alternative supply of freshwater, but it was Fred Eaton who came up with a solution. On a camping trip to the Sierra in the early 1890s, Eaton had gazed down upon Owens Lake and thought about all the freshwater flowing into it and going to waste. Yes, Los Angeles was some 200 miles away, but it was all downhill. All one would have to do to move it to the city was dig some canals, lay some pipe and let gravity do the rest. Furthermore, he realized, several streams flowing out of the Sierra could be used to generate hydroelectric power. Imagine, a 200-plus-mile aqueduct running downhill to L.A. and “free” power to boot! Over the next two decades, as his civic interest joined his personal financial interests, Eaton grew increasingly evangelical about Owens Valley water.

In September 1904, he took Mulholland to Owens Valley with only “a mule team, a buckboard, and a demijohn of whiskey,” Mulholland later recalled. Despite the hooch, it was the water and not the whiskey that made a believer out of Mulholland. He readily endorsed Eaton’s proposal to build an aqueduct. Eaton, meanwhile, was buying water options from Owens Valley ranchers and farmers whose pastures bordered the river, without disclosing the city’s plan. He also purchased a 23,000-acre cattle ranch in Long Valley, most of which he hoped to sell to the city, at a tidy profit, for use as an aqueduct reservoir.

Mark Wheeler, in his 2002 Smithsonian feature on the history of Los Angeles and the water that helped it grow. Read more on California in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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When Richard Sherman Met Pete Carroll

I was a high school junior when I first met him. I got pulled out of class unexpectedly to see him waiting in the hallway—Pete Carroll, national championship-winning head coach. We stood and talked there by the lockers for a few minutes. I’ll never forget that—USC’s head coach coming to recruit me at Dominguez High School in Compton in 2004. At the time, it was one of the coolest experiences of my life.

He said, “you’ve got the perfect size to be a lock-up corner.” I’d never heard that before: “lock-up” corner. I made ‘lockup2006’ my email address and used it until I got to college. I didn’t end up going to USC, because my mind was already made up to go to Stanford, and there was no way I was passing up the opportunity to get a Stanford education, but I could tell then there was something that separated Carroll from others coaches who recruited me. You could feel the positive energy, how upbeat he was and how much he believed in what he was saying. He had a different aura to him.

Richard Sherman, in Sports Illustrated (2014), on the Seattle Seahawks coach.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Book That Inspired Your Favorite Twitter Bots

After graduating from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Kazemi entered the world of video game development, building programs that could systematically test new games for bugs. Kazemi also designed his own games—like many game designers, he considered games an art form as much as a technical accomplishment—until one day in 2012, he decided that the medium was holding him back from what he really wanted to express. It was around this time that Kazemi read a book of philosophy called “Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing” by Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In the book, Bogost advanced a concept that greatly appealed to Kazemi: that it was possible to be a philosopher who didn’t write down ideas, but instead made objects that embodied them.

The “objects” Kazemi was moved to make after reading Bogost’s book were Twitter bots, a class of digital beings typically associated with irritating spam accounts that automatically send advertising messages to any Twitter user who mentions a particular word or brand name. Kazemi was hardly the first person to realize the potential in programming conceptually interesting Twitter bots—for example, Adam Parrish had already made the popular @everyword, which has been working its way alphabetically through the English language, tweeting one word every 30 minutes, since 2007. But Kazemi quickly became one of the medium’s most inventive practitioners.

Leon Neyfakh, in the Boston Globe, on the work of Darius Kazemi. Read more from Ian Bogost’s book, and from the Longreads Archive.

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One Question for Microsoft's Next CEO

OM: The challenge for Microsoft comes down to: you’ve got developers, you’ve got cloud, you’ve got the legacy, the enterprise relationships, those things you got right. You’ve got old legacy products which people like to use however there is a little bit of challenge when it comes to the new world. Look at the world where people are spending money on applications, devices, other way of thinking. We don’t have a Microsoft product in our company now, which is unimaginable five years ago and I think that’s the challenge you have.

SN: I thought you had an Xbox in your lounge?

Om Malik, in a conversation with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who’s now the reported frontrunner to become CEO. Read more on Microsoft in the Longreads Archive.

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The Truth About What Goes On at the 'SNL' After-Party

“If you had a good show you’re on cloud nine,” said Jon Lovitz, who had a lot of them in the mid–1980s. On the other hand, Mr. Lovitz recalled the forlorn night when he had appeared in only one sketch, and was sitting at the party with Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey and Mike Myers.

“It feels like your career’s over,” Mr. Lovitz said. “Honestly, they call it the after-party. In my mind, I only know one time when it actually felt like a party.” (That was in 1990, he said, when Technotronic played their hit “Pump Up the Jam” there.)

Paul Brownfield, in The New York Times, investigating Saturday Night Live’s legendary after-party—and whether it’s actually fun. Read more on SNL in the Longreads Archive, or check out the Live from New York oral history.

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Facebook's Real Names Problem

One thing about some of the new apps that will come as a shock to anyone familiar with Facebook: Users will be able to log in anonymously. That’s a big change for Zuckerberg, who once told David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

At the time of Facebook’s founding, there was no such thing as real identity online. Facebook became the first place where people met one another as themselves, and the company was stubborn about asking users to sign in and share material with their own names. A Facebook account became a sort of passport to the rest of the Web, and with its success came new problems. No teenager wants to share insane party pics with a group of friends that may include his or her parents and teachers. And dissidents in parts of the world where speaking freely can be incriminating avoided the service in favor of alternatives such as Twitter, where real names are optional.

Former Facebook employees say identity and anonymity have always been topics of heated debate in the company. Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies. “I don’t know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things,” he says. “If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.” Paper will still require a Facebook login, but Zuckerberg says the new apps might be like Instagram, which doesn’t require users to log in with Facebook credentials or share pictures with friends on the social network. “It’s definitely, I think, a little bit more balanced now 10 years later,” he says. “I think that’s good.”

Brad Stone and Sarah Frier, in Bloomberg Businessweek, on the challenges for Facebook on its 10th anniversary. Read more about Facebook in the Longreads Archive.

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The Future of Reading, and What We Can Learn from Beyonce

FULL STOP: Today, we’re flooded with stories via the internet — on personal Tumblrs, Facebook and Twitter statuses, the abundance of magazines and newspapers that make their content free online. With so many narratives all around us, why do we still read (and pay for) novels?

“Oh I’m fairly certain we… don’t any more. We do a little I guess! We all paid for Beyoncé’s album though didn’t we, how do you like that. People will pay for a book for a few reasons:

“• The big books get bought because they’re guaranteed feel-good weepers. (Not a contradiction; see also Upworthy, dogs greeting homecoming veterans, and babies.)

“• The littler books get bought for a few reasons, besides the ‘oh I have heard good things from a trusted purveyor of opinions and I wish to indulge in this book’: aspirational purchasing (related to aspirational sharing), which means ‘I want to be the kind of person who buys this book,’ which is less obnoxious than ‘I want to be seen reading this book’ which is less bad than ‘I want to tell people I’m reading this book.’ I mean not that I haven’t done all those things, so you know. Then there are identity reasons; Tao Lin is bought by a cadre of young smart people who want to be in some sort of Smart Kids scene. And then there’s the good old capitalist market-maker: exclusivity. You can’t get it anyhow anyway? Then you’ll buy it.”

The Awl co-founder Choire Sicha, in an interview with Full Stop, on the future of books, reading and the internet. Read more from The Awl in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: ch-villa, Flickr

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9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List

Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. Read more…

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Here are our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist. Read more…

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Jan. 3, 2014

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist.

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