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The billionaire oilman had the perfect plan to help his alma mater Oklahoma State University raise money—by taking out $10 million life insurance policies on him and 27 other people:

Unfortunately for Oklahoma State, Pickens, and the other men and women who thought their demise would benefit their favorite university, Gift of a Lifetime has turned into the Present from Hell. First it fell apart. Then came the lawsuits. And this past March came a decision from a federal judge who declared that not only was the university not entitled to a refund of $33 million in premium payments, it was also responsible for the court costs incurred by the people it had sued.

So how did a sure bet turn into a lost cause? Pickens and the school aren’t talking, as they’ve since appealed the judge’s decision. Neither are the insurance brokers and agency that sold the policies. Yet because it’s a matter of interest in federal court, the arc of Gift of a Lifetime’s downfall can be traced in the thousands of pages of internal e-mails and deposition testimony that are now a part of the public record. Those documents reveal a plan sunk by impatience, hubris, and a belief that the hour of death could be predicted. One that all began when Pickens took his shirt off.

“If Only T. Boone Pickens Had Died.” — Caleb Hannan, Bloomberg Businessweek

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“Cold Pastoral.” — Marina Keegan, The New Yorker

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A pool salesman struggles to cope with a weak economy, which has forced him to rethink the meaning of the American Dream:

‘You can’t be too safe or too smart about money with the economy now,’ Tyler said. ‘I want to save up and make the smart investments.’

‘You’ll make them,’ Frank said, nodding.

‘I want to have that absolute stability,’ Tyler said.

‘You’ll have it.’

They stayed out on the deck until the sun disappeared behind the townhouses. Frank went to bed just before midnight and awoke at 4. He always had been a sound sleeper, but lately he had been putting himself to bed with Tylenol PM and stirring awake to questions in the middle of the night. When had stability become the goal in America? What kind of dream was that? And in the economy of 2012, was it even attainable?

“Life of a Salesman: Selling Success, When the American Dream is Downsized.” — Eli Saslow, The Washington Post

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“Andres’ Story.” — William Browning, The Florida Times-Union

Inside the life of Somali refugees in Nairobi, Kenya:

The heartland of that exodus is the vast refugee camp complex centered around Dadaab town in Kenya’s North Eastern Province—at 450,000 people and growing at the rate of over 1,000 people a day, the camp is Kenya’s third largest city, and the biggest refugee camp in the world. But many thousands of Somalis choose not to go to the camp and head straight to Nairobi to the neighborhood of Eastleigh, which Kenyans have nicknamed ‘Little Mogadishu.’ That’s where I was headed as I walked to the corner to catch a matatu, a dirt cheap minivan so crowded I had to hang out the doors. Eastleigh, Dadaab—over the past two years, they’ve been cardinal points on the compass of what K’naan, a Somali rapper, calls ‘a violent prone, poor people zone.’

But that’s only one part of the story: as Andy Needham, a deeply informed, canny, and humane Irish Aid press officer working with the UN, put it: ‘Journalists come to the camps because the story’s right in front of them. It makes for good photographs like, you can take one look and see the problems for yourself. But refugees in the city—and let’s be clear here, there are thousands of them, most of them undocumented, hard to trace, hard to reach out to—that’s a story that goes almost untold.’ And I could see what Andy meant: in Nairobi, there were no camps, no food distribution centers, and so the refugees disappeared into the city—for if you went to Nairobi rather than Dadaab, you had to make it on your own. There wasn’t a lot of obvious drama that would appeal to Western media, no ‘suffering chic’ to spice up your story.

“A Violent Prone, Poor People Zone.” — Tom Sleigh, VQR

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A writer debates his dad about the legacy of Baby Boomers: Do they deserve blame for our current economic situation?

You could call this anecdote Exhibit A in my father’s defense of the boomers, which he offered over coffee on the first day of our weeklong dispute. It boils down to a claim that he didn’t exactly inherit a great deal, either. Tom Tankersley’s argument breaks into two categories. First, he deflects blame for all of the bad stuff of the past several decades to previous generations and myopic politicians. Second, he builds a case that the boomers did far more good than harm.

The Greatest Generation, his parents’ cohort, paid a lot less into Social Security and Medicare than it took out of it, he says. (This is true.) It did nothing to reduce pollution, conserve natural resources, or halt the nation’s growing and dangerous addiction to fossil fuels. ‘Previous generations did not have a Clean Air Act or a Clean Water Act,’ he says. His enacted both. (Also true.)

Point, parasite.

“My Father, The Parasite.” — Jim Tankersley, National Journal

An excerpt from Howe’s new book on how internal arguments, drugs, failed feminism, and the exploitation of minority characters in comic books and the freelance writers and artists who drew them, changed Marvel Comics during the late ’60s and early ’70s:

‘I was just as crazy as everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam,’ said Starlin, whose hobbies included motorcycles, chess, and lysergic acid diethylamide–25. ‘Each one of those stories was me taking that stuff that had gone before and trying to put my personal slant on it. Mar-Vell was a warrior who decided he was going to become a god, and that’s where his trip was.’ In the pages of Captain Marvel, existence itself might be altered several times in the course of an issue. ‘There is a moment of change, then reality becomes a thing of the past!’ howls the evil ruler Thanos, before everything morphs into funhouse-mirror images. His sworn enemy Drax responds: ‘My mind and my soul are one — my soul — an immortal intangible, nothing and everything! That which cannot die cannot be enslaved, for only with fear is servitude rendered!’ On the following page, Drax’s shifting realities are represented by thirty-five panels of warped faces, skulls, eyes, stars, and lizards. Captain Marvel had practically become a black-light poster with dialogue. Its sales kept increasing. Soon Starlin was opening his fan mail and finding complimentary joints sent by grateful, mind-blown readers.

“First Serial: Marvel Comics, The Untold Story.” — Sean Howe, Grantland

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“Factory Girls.” — John Seabrook, New Yorker

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Paul Auster opens up about his life and work:

Academics theorize endlessly about Auster and his literary motivations, labeling him everything from a New York Jewish hunger artist to a clever semiotician whose every decision — down to the color of the notebook his protagonists choose to write in — is fraught with symbolism. Auster dismisses most of this as academic overanalyzing, usually with a hidden agenda.

‘So many of these people have a point of view, a position, and are trying to articulate this position by using me as an example. But I myself, living within myself, never try to put labels on what I do. I just follow my nose.

‘I’m a man of contradictions, you know; I can’t say any one thing about myself. Yes,’ he says with a laugh, ‘I’m the hunger artist who likes to eat.’

“The Solitude of Invention.” — Stacey Kors, Columbia Magazine

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: GQ, Allure magazine, The Rumpus, 5280 Magazine, New York Magazine, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Scott Young.