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“As a boy, I wanted to be a train. I didn’t realize this was unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them. They liked to build tracks and have trains not fall off them. Watch them go through tunnels. I didn’t understand that. What I liked was pretending my body was two hundred tons of unstoppable steel. Imagining I was pistons and valves and hydraulic compressors.

“‘You mean robots,’ said my best friend, Jeremy. ‘You want to play robots.’ I had never thought of it like that. Robots had square eyes and jerky limbs and usually wanted to destroy the Earth. Instead of doing one thing right, they did everything badly. They were general purpose. I was not a fan of robots. They were bad machines.”

From Max Barry’s Machine Man, about an engineer in pursuit of physical perfection at the expense of life and (literal) limb. Read more on science fiction in the Longreads Archive, including a list of the Best Robot Fiction.

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“The problem today is that neither individual homebuyers nor even larger commercial builders drive ‘market forces.’ Instead, the market for real estate construction comprises managers of hedge funds and speculators who buy buildings and homes as rental properties. They are waiting for the value of the buildings to rise, as they had before the 2008 collapse. By early 2014, these high-volume buyers will most likely be near their short-term return on investment (ROI) with their investors and therefore looking to sell.”

-A modest proposal for remaking America through construction and real estate, from LA Review of Books. Read more on housing in the Longreads Archive.

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“Circumstances in the Tenderloin are not normal. And San Francisco is not a normal city. Barring a seismic shift in city politics, the TL is not going to gentrify the way that similar neighborhoods have in other cities. Not next year. Not in five years. Maybe never. For better or worse, it will likely remain a sanctuary for the poor, the vulnerable, and the damaged—and the violence and disorder that inevitably comes with them. The thousands of working people, seniors, and families, including many Southeast Asians, who make up a silent two-thirds majority of the Tenderloin’s 30,000 residents will remain there. And so will the thousands of not-so-silent mentally ill people, addicts, drunks, and ex-cons who share the streets with them—as well as the predators who come in from the outside to exploit them. The Tenderloin will remain the great anomaly of neighborhoods: a source of stubborn pride for San Francisco, or an acute embarrassment—or both.”

-A look at the future of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood (via San Francisco Magazine). Read more about San Francisco in the Longreads Archive.

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“But was Playboy Marfa creative expression or crass commercialism? The debate over art versus advertising has consumed artists and critics for decades. Andy Warhol brought it to a head in 1962 with his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans; a few years later, critic Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that “art is anything you can get away with.” In the eighties artist Richard Prince got away with photographing and enlarging Marlboro’s cowboy ads; in the nineties Chinese artist Ai Weiwei got away with making ceramic vases with the Coca-Cola logo. Could Playboy get away with this?”

– Francesca Mari travels to the small town of Marfa, Texas to report about an art installation by Playboy that has residents riled up and arguing: Is it art? Or is it advertising? See more stories from Texas Monthly in the Longreads archive.

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“I never saw my mother happy with me or proud of me doing something. I never got a chance to talk to her or know her. Professionally, that would have no effect on me, but emotional and psychologically, it was crushing. I would be with my friends, and I’d see their mothers kiss them. I never had that. You’d think that if she let me sleep in her bed until I was 15, she would have liked me, but she was drunk all the time.”

Mike Tyson on his mother, from his book excerpt in New York magazine. Read more on boxing in the Longreads Archive.

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“Who, after all, would want to compile an exhaustive list of mental illnesses? The opening passages of DSM–5 give us a long history of the purported previous editions of the book and the endless revisions and fine-tunings that have gone into the work. This mad project is clearly something that its authors are fixated on to a somewhat unreasonable extent. In a retrospectively predictable ironic twist, this precise tendency is outlined in the book itself. The entry for obsessive-compulsive disorder with poor insight describes this taxonomical obsession in deadpan tones: ‘repetitive behavior, the goal of which is […] to prevent some dreaded event or situation.’ Our narrator seems to believe that by compiling an exhaustive list of everything that might go askew in the human mind, this wrong state might somehow be overcome or averted.”

-Sam Kriss offers a “review” of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, reimagined as a dystopian novel (via The New Inquiry).

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“All this infrastructure was forced underground not through some grand plan that can easily be sorted out but rather through two centuries of competition and compromise as the value of New York’s surface space increased and the streets grew more crowded. Taken as a whole, underground New York is an incoherent three-dimensional space that defies simple visualization—a single understanding, at least somewhere in someone’s mind. When I mentioned this to Steve Duncan, who is one of underground New York’s most persistent explorers, and who would have such a visualization if anyone could, he said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I used to think there’s gotta be someone who knows what’s going on, but more and more it seems like the answer is no.’”

-What lies beneath New York City? William Langewiesche explored for Vanity Fair. Read more on New York from the Longreads Archive.

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“It’s insidious, the way your own success can stifle you. As our machines get faster and ingest more data, we allow ourselves to be dumber. Instead of wrestling with our hardest problems in earnest, we can just plug in billions of examples of them. Which is a bit like using a graphing calculator to do your high-school calculus homework—it works great until you need to actually understand calculus.”

-What is real artificial intelligence? And is it even possible? Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Hofstadter thinks we haven’t been trying hard enough to solve the real mystery of the human mind (via The Atlantic). Read more from James Somers in the Longreads Archive.

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“Perhaps he wasn’t wrong to stake everything on this. He’d chosen a different path – a journey deep into the unknown to confront his self-doubts and fears head-on. He had to walk fearlessly inside the gates of Rucker Park and believe it was all worth it … then play the game of his life. His choice to put everything on the line was rare, but it’s not unique. Nearly every culture and tradition has a similar story, real or imagined. When a young man starts his journey, he must be brave enough to take a metaphysical leap of faith. He must be willing to step foot on the bus and travel straight into the labyrinth of his fears, toward whatever awaits him on the other end, even if it may rip him to shreds. It’s the ultimate gamble. If the young man is successful, he comes home a hero, and becomes important. His life has meaning and purpose. But in order to succeed, he must first completely open up his soul to the consequences of failure, knowing there may be no way back out. This, above all else, is the hardest thing to do.”

Flinder Boyd on the hoop dream of Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr. (SB Nation). Read more from Boyd in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo by Flinder Boyd

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“In 2011, Air Force psychologists completed a mental-health survey of 600 combat drone operators. Forty-two percent of drone crews reported moderate to high stress, and 20 percent reported emotional exhaustion or burnout. The study’s authors attributed their dire results, in part, to ‘existential conflict.’ A later study found that drone operators suffered from the same levels of depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation as traditional combat aircrews. These effects appeared to spike at the exact time of Bryant’s deployment, during the surge in Iraq. (Chillingly, to mitigate these effects, researchers have proposed creating a Siri-like user interface, a virtual copilot that anthropomorphizes the drone and lets crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens. Siri, have those people killed.) ”

GQ on the life of a “Drone Warrior.” More from the Longreads Archive on how drones are changing the modern battlefield.

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