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“Somehow Anthony is blaming me and my 8,000-word story for the fact that everything turned to shit for him. I wish I knew if there was a word for all this. There’s probably a German word for it. And maybe I am naïve, but I am telling you that when you spend so many hours with somebody, you really do feel like you get a sense of who they are, and you make decisions based on that.”

A look inside the making of (and fallout from) a magazine profile, featuring Anthony Weiner, the New York Times Magazine and GQ.

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“As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes. So as a crew, how do you stay focused, and how do you not get paralyzed by the fear of it?

“And the way we do it is to break down what are the risks. And a nice way to keep reminding yourself is, ‘What’s the next thing that’s going to kill me.’ And it might be five seconds away, it might be an inadvertent engine shutdown, or it might be staging of the solid rockets coming off, or it might be, you know, some transition or some key next thing.

“It’s not like astronauts are braver than other people. We’re just, you know, meticulously prepared. We dissect what it is that is going to scare us and what it is that is a threat to us, and then we practice over and over again so that the natural, irrational fear is neutralized.”

Commander Chris Hadfield, to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, on how astronauts handle risk. Read more on NASA in the Longreads Archive.

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“In America, the economic fortunes of ordinary people like those in Ramsey’s audience are stagnating, while the fruits of increased productivity and profits are accruing to the wealthiest among us, including Ramsey himself, at an accelerating rate. But Ramsey seems to think that concern over inequality just comes down to bitterness. ‘This idea that it is all going to be fair—it’s a message Satan is using in our land right now: People who are wealthy must have done something bad,’ he said in his Sunday sermon in Houston. ‘It’s the spirit of poverty.’ He went on: ‘If you are living in a spirit of poverty, any car that is nicer than yours is too nice.’”

– Helaine Olen profiles personal finance guru Dave Ramsey who may or may not be saving America with his advice, depending on whom you talk to. See more stories from Pacific Standard.

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“I did have an interesting (unattributable, of course) briefing from someone very senior in one West Coast mega-corporation who conceded that neither he nor the CEO of his company had security clearance to know what arrangements his own organization had reached with the US government. ‘So, it’s like a company within a company?’ I asked. He waved his hand dismissively: ‘I know the guy, I trust him.’”

“Do MPs and congressmen have any more sophisticated idea of what technology is now capable of? Could they, as supposed regulators, also decipher such documents? A couple of weeks ago I asked the question of another very senior member of the British cabinet who had followed the Snowden stories only hazily and whose main experience of intelligence seemed to date back to the 1970s. ‘The trouble with MPs,’ he admitted, ‘is most of us don’t really understand the Internet.’”

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, in New York Review of Books, on who we trust and what we know when it comes to technology and spying. Read more on spying.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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College Longreads Pick: 'The End of the Waffle House' by Jessica Contrera, Indiana University

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

You may have already read this week’s #college #longreads pick because someone posted it on Facebook or Twitter. Indiana University senior Jessica Contrera paid homage to the end of the local Waffle House with hours of reporting and 15 drafts. You hear the reporting in the details: An empty gumball machine. A stopped clock. Broken locks. You see the writing in the verbs: “On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.”

But you didn’t read the story because it’s a quaint look at a fading icon. Your friend didn’t send it to you because it’s better than what we expect from a student. You read it, and passed it on, because it’s just about perfect.

The End of the Waffle House

Jessica Contrera | Indiana Daily Student | 8 minutes (1,897 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

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“In the days before this Halloween, it was especially hard for me to avoid interpreting its elements too bluntly. If you have cancer, if you’ve had it for a while, at some point you start really seeing all those skulls and skeletons and Styrofoam headstones, all those children in hooded capes, bearing scythes on their little shoulders.

“So how could I explain the euphoria of the 45 minutes Alice and I spent in her bedroom, colluding over her hair, giggling at her faux-leather, deeply fringed bell-bottoms? The pleasure of watching her strap on those awful silver platform shoes, like something I wore in 1973?”

The late Marjorie Williams, Washington Post, 2004.

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Photo: aerosolhalos, Flickr

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The Bones of Marianna, by David Kushner

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This week’s Longreads Member Pick is by David Kushner, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone whose work has been featured on Longreads often in the past. He has just published The Bones of Marianna, a new story from The Atavist, and we’re thrilled to give the ebook to Longreads Members.

Kushner explains:

Almost everyone who hears the shocking story of the Dozier School for Boys, one of the country’s oldest and largest reform schools, and a model for the nation, asks the same question: how could this happen? How could the Florida government allow generations of young wards to be whipped, shackled, forced into hard labor, and possibly worse for over 100 years? Allegations of abuse dogged the school through its closing two years ago, and continue today, with troubling questions and answers still remaining.

In The Bones of Marianna, which I spent the past year reporting, I tell the story of two determined crusaders who pushed this dark past into light. Jerry Cooper, a star of Dozier’s football team, haunted by the memory of a teammate he accused the school of killing, spends years quarterbacking the fight to expose the truth, while a leading forensic anthropologist, Dr. Erin Kimmerle, digs up grim secrets in the school’s unmarked graveyard. The Prologue, excerpted here in Longreads, draws from Cooper’s recollection of a little white building that he, and hundreds of boys who passed through Dozier, will never forget.

Thanks to Kushner and The Atavist for sharing this story with Longreads Members. Below is the opening chapter. You can also purchase the full ebook on Amazon.

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It didn’t take much to get sent to the White House. Smoking. Cussing. Taking an extra pat of butter at lunch. Or, as Jerry Cooper learned late one spring night in 1961, refusing to play football.

The White House was a small building near the cafeteria at the Florida School for Boys, where 15-year-old Cooper had arrived earlier that year. The school was the oldest reformatory in Florida, spread across 1,400 acres of rolling farmland in Marianna, a town of 7,150, an hour from the state capital in Tallahassee. Like most schools in the South, it treated football like religion. But the reform school’s Yellow Jackets had languished of late, and acting superintendent David Walters—who took such pride in the team that he kept its few trophies in his office—wanted Cooper to lead them to victory again.

Cooper was tall, lean, and amiable, the star quarterback at his high school in suburban Orlando before his life veered off course. When Walters, a stocky, crew-cut middle-aged man, summoned Cooper to his office a few months after his arrival, he didn’t ask if he’d play quarterback for the Yellow Jackets. He told him to.

But Cooper didn’t want to suit up. With his good behavior and dutiful work as a teacher’s aide, he had earned an early release from the school and would be going home in a few months. He didn’t want a commitment to the football team to keep him around through the fall. He obligingly attended practices with the other boys, struggling through the Florida heat in thick, ratty pads every afternoon, but he refused to sign up for the coming season.

Then, one night, he was awakened by a hand gripping his neck. Two guards—one larger than him, one smaller—dragged him barefoot from his cottage. They wouldn’t say where they were taking him as they threw him into the back of an old blue Ford. They drove along the rocky dirt roads across campus until they reached a little white building. Cooper had never been sent to the White House before, but he had heard the stories of kids being taken there to be whipped—or worse.

As the guards shoved Cooper through the door, the stench of bodily fluids overwhelmed him. A lightbulb hung from the ceiling of the bare concrete room, illuminating three husky men: Walters, school disciplinarian R. W. Hatton, and a supervisor, Troy Tidwell, whom the boys nicknamed the One-Armed Bandit. As a child, Tidwell had leaned on the muzzle of a shotgun and blown off his left arm. His remaining arm possessed a fearsome strength, and he was known to the boys as the strongest whipmaster of the White House.

“What do you know about a runner?” Walters asked Cooper, referring to a boy who had run away from the school earlier that night.

“I don’t have a fucking clue,” Cooper replied.

Walters lunged for him, and Cooper’s football instincts took over. The boy jammed his shoulder into the superintendent, taking Tidwell down with him. But the men recovered, and Tidwell’s hand closed around Cooper’s neck, hurling him against the wall. Tidwell smashed his heel down on Cooper, shattering the ball of his foot. When Cooper grabbed his foot in agony, he caught a fist to the mouth, which knocked loose his front teeth.

The men threw Cooper facedown on an army cot and tied his legs down. Cooper heard Tidwell’s whip snap against the ceiling and an instant later felt it sear his skin. One burning lash followed another, and Cooper, who never considered himself a coward, begged for mercy. “Jesus, God help me!” he cried. “Mother!” Then he passed out from the pain.

That night in his cottage, Cooper nursed his broken foot. The wounds from the whip were still so raw that the blood soaked through the back of his nightshirt. A boy who had been waiting his turn in the White House during Cooper’s beating later told him he had counted 135 licks in all. The supervisors had told Cooper he was being punished for not helping them find the runaway, but Cooper surmised the real reason for the whipping: They wanted him on the football team, even if they had to beat him into compliance (though they probably hadn’t planned on breaking his foot). Now, on account of his alleged insubordination, he wouldn’t be released from the school anytime soon—certainly not before the end of the football season.

Lying on his bed, Cooper wondered how he would survive the months that stretched before him. The White House had changed him. He vowed to bring the men who had broken him to justice, no matter how long it took.

But first he had to play ball.

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“In the jargon of economics, the demand for therapeutic drugs is ‘price inelastic’: increasing the price doesn’t reduce how much the drugs are used. Prices are set and raised according to what the market will bear, and the parties who actually pay the drug companies will meet whatever price is charged for an effective drug to which there is no alternative. And so in determining the price for a drug, companies ask themselves questions that have next to nothing to do with the drugs’ costs. ‘It is not a science,’ the veteran drug maker and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer told me. ‘It is a feel.’”

– An examination of how pharmaceutical companies determine the price of drugs. Read more on medicine in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Rennett Stowe

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Bureaucracy’s Playthings

“‘In the average business office, record making constitutes approximately ninety percent of the activity. Alert businessmen keep a constant check on their costs of doing business. One paper lost, mislaid, or delayed can and often does inconvenience and retard a dozen or more people in their work.’

“Furthermore, ’few people realize that, of all the service activities of an organization, the creation and the storage of business records are the greatest consumers of space, salaries, and equipment’—in 1967, at least.”

Shannon Mattern looks back at the way we once handled paperwork and filing systems in pre-Internet offices (Reanimation Library). Read more on business from the Longreads Archive.

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“Bill Cassidy—the second owner of Pretzel—told us before he passed away that that was one of the gimmicks that he was most proud of. It was just a spool of thread. It would hang from a rafter in the ceiling, and it would rub up against people’s faces and creep them out. It’s supposed to be cobwebs, I guess, but it wasn’t an actual web. It was just a string, but you couldn’t see it. It seems to me that just about every dark ride I rode in the 1960s had that. If it didn’t come factory-installed, I’m sure the park owners themselves would tack it up.”

Collectors Weekly on the history of amusement park “dark rides” and haunted houses. Read more from Collectors Weekly in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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