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How filmmaker David Ayer’s early years in South Central Los Angeles has given him a distinct understanding of the LAPD:

‘I was feral,’ he recalls, ‘uncontrollable, did my own thing. Brushes with the law and all that stuff.’ He punctuates this with a gruff laugh. ‘It was a disaster.’ Most everyone who knew Ayer was predicting a future in prison for him. ‘It was just the expectation that a lot of people had of me. Because I was not a good kid, and the consequences were getting more serious.’ When he was 14, his mother sent him to live with cousins who were among the first urban homesteaders to move into a West Adams Craftsman, in the shadow of the 10 freeway. ‘The irony is, I was just a bush-league juvenile delinquent,’ Ayer says. ‘And I end up in fucking South Central. Now I’m around the professionals. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I quickly grew accustomed, though. You can get used to anything.’

“The Cop Whisperer.” — Ed Leibowitz, Los Angeles Magazine

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“The Great New England Vampire Panic.” — Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian magazine

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Member Exclusive: Working the Room

Our latest Exclusive comes from the editors of Lapham’s Quarterly. They’ve been longtime contributors to the Longreads community, and this week we’re thrilled to present “Working the Room,” a new essay on humor and the presidency by Michael Phillips-Anderson, from their latest issue, “Politics.” (If you like this, you can subscribe to their print edition here):

In 1848, as a young representative from Illinois, Lincoln took the House floor in support of the Whig presidential candidate, Zachary Taylor. He mocked his Democratic opponents for not gathering behind a single candidate by telling a curious anecdote:

I have heard some things from New York, and if they are true, we might well say of your party there, as a drunken fellow once said when he heard the reading of an indictment for hog stealing. The clerk read on till he got to, and through the words, ‘did steal, take, and carry away, ten boars, ten sows, ten shoats, and ten pigs’ at which he exclaimed, ‘Well, by golly, that is the most equally divided gang of hogs I ever did hear of.’ If there is any gang of hogs more equally divided than the Democrats of New York are about this time, I have not heard of it.

When Lincoln finished with a remark, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘He looks up at you with a great satisfaction, and shows all his white teeth, and laughs.’

“Working the Room.” — Michael Phillips-Anderson, Lapham’s Quartly

Educators at Stanford University are paving the way for the future of online learning by providing free lectures on the Internet, but the idea of a prestigious college providing mass online education for free remains the subject of intense debate:

Within days of going online with little fanfare, the three free courses attracted 350,000 registrants from 190 countries—mostly computer and software industry professionals looking to sharpen their skills. ‘To put that in context,’ Ng says, ‘in order to reach a comparably sized audience on campus I would have to teach my normal Stanford course for 250 years.’

The stories behind those numbers were compelling. One person who completed Ng’s machine learning course was an engineer at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. Another was a 54-year-old Romanian engineer named Octavian Manescu. He wrote that his job had been on the line, but after following Ng’s course ‘with great pleasure and enthusiasm,’ he asked his CTO if he could use machine learning to monitor the complex telecommunications systems in his company. ‘At first my idea was received with disbelief,’ he wrote, but he finally gained approval to conduct some tests, with results ‘so convincing that my proposal became a part of a major project. Currently I’m working on its implementation.’

“Stanford for All.” — Theresa Johnston, Stanford magazine

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“Mugglemarch.” — Ian Parker, New Yorker

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[Fiction] A young boy and his nuclear family leave their extended family in a remote village for the city slums:

One cold, dewy morning, you are huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot. Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since, wealth-obsessed though you will come to be, you’ve never in your life seen any of these things.

The whites of your eyes are yellow, a consequence of spiking bilirubin levels in your blood. The virus afflicting you is called hepatitis E. Its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral. Yum. It kills only about one in fifty, so you’re likely to recover. But right now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your mother has encountered this condition many times, or conditions like it, anyway. So maybe she doesn’t think you’re going to die. Then again, maybe she fears it.

“The Third-Born.” — Mohsin Hamid, New Yorker

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Rethinking schizophrenia as a brain disorder that requires medication, and recognizing that part of the cure is looking at the social factors that cause mental breakdowns:

By the time I met her, Susan was a success story. She was a student at the local community college. She had her own apartment, and she kept it in reasonable shape. She did not drink, at least not much, and she did not use drugs, if you did not count marijuana. She was a big, imposing black woman who defended herself aggressively on the street, but she had not been jailed for years. All this was striking because Susan clearly met criteria for a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the most severe and debilitating of psychiatric disorders. She thought that people listened to her through the heating pipes in her apartment. She heard them muttering mean remarks. Sometimes she thought she was part of a government experiment that was beaming rays on black people, a kind of technological Tuskegee. She felt those rays pressing down so hard on her head that it hurt. Yet she had not been hospitalized since she got her own apartment, even though she took no medication and saw no psychiatrists. That apartment was the most effective antipsychotic she had ever taken.

“Beyond the Brain.” — Tanya Marie Luhrmann, The Wilson Quarterly

Vicissitudes, CA

[Fiction] A story about an unemployed ethnomusicologist, gray whales, and Miranda July:

‘Garfield was my favorite president,’ said Brandon.

‘James A. Garfield?’ said Kara. ‘President from March to July of 1881?’

‘From Ohio?’ she said.

‘That’s the one,’ said Brandon.

He said: ‘I think he would have proven to be an effective leader if he’d been given the chance.’

Charles put his hand on Kara’s knee.

‘That’s funny,’ said Charles. ‘Garfield’s killer, Charles Guiteau, is my favorite presidential assassin, and it’s not just because we share a name.’

“Vicissitudes, CA.” — Bryan Hurt, New England Review

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“How Much Tech Can One City Take?” — David Talbot, San Francisco magazine

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The only American designer for high fashion retailer Hermés lives in Waco, Texas—and works as a postal worker:

Kermit was sitting in the living room, in an armchair covered by a red-and-white quilt. He stood up when I arrived. He was small-framed, with salt-and-pepper hair combed off his forehead. Dressed in loose khakis and an untucked plaid oxford shirt, he gave the impression of a small-town surgeon who’d just gotten off the late shift. His eyeglasses were in his hands, which continuously fidgeted while the rest of him stood still. ‘Why do you want to talk to me?’ he asked. 

I stammered something about his story, how interesting it was. He looked skeptical. ‘Why don’t you tell me what my story is,’ he said. I told him what they had said in Lyon, reciting the words almost like the first line of a fable: ‘There once was a postman who designed scarves for Hermès.’

‘Well, it’s never that simple,’ he said with a mysterious grin.

“Portrait of the Artist as a Postman.” — Jason Sheeler, Texas Monthly

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