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The staff of Longreads.

Chronicling a four-decade fight over campaign finance, and how American politics is fueled by secret spending.

For decades, the campaign finance wars have pitted two ideological foes against each other: one side clamoring to dam the flow while the other seeks to open the floodgates. The self-styled good-government types believe that unregulated political money inherently corrupts. A healthy democracy, they say, needs robust regulation—clear disclosure, tough limits on campaign spending and donations, and publicly financed presidential and congressional elections. The dean of this movement is 73-year-old Fred Wertheimer, the former president of the advocacy outfit Common Cause, who now runs the reform group Democracy 21.

On the other side are conservatives and libertarians who consider laws regulating political money an assault on free markets and free speech. They want to deregulate campaign finance—knock down spending and giving limits and roll back disclosure laws. Their leaders include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr., and former FEC commissioner Brad Smith, who now chairs the Center for Competitive Politics, which fights campaign finance regulation.

“Follow the Dark Money.” — Andy Kroll, Mother Jones

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A call for women and men to have a more honest conversation about work-life balance:

Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference.

After a few months of this, several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. ‘You have to stop talking about your kids,’ one said. ‘You are not showing the gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.’ I told them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together.

“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” — Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic

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Does our body tell us when we can’t go any farther, or does our brain? A look at marathon runners and the science behind human endurance.

A classic situation in which athletes believe they have hit a true physical limit is ‘bonking’ during a marathon: you stagger to a halt, ostensibly because your body runs out of carbohydrates. When Noakes started running in the 1970s, the standard advice was to drink only water during long races. Then, in the late stages of a sixty-four-kilometre race one year, he tried a few spoonfuls of corn syrup. ‘Five minutes later, I just started running. I finished that race faster than I ever finished,’ he recalls. ‘It was like the brain released something.” The discovery led to the first external funding (‘a thousand rand in a brown paper packet,’ he says) for his nascent sports science lab, to study the effects of corn syrup on participants in South Africa’s Stellenbosch marathon.

The fact that the corn syrup worked seems to support the idea that the body is limited by its finite store of carbohydrates. But it almost worked too well, and Noakes began to question whether carbohydrates could even reach the muscles that quickly. Sure enough, recent experiments in Britain have shown that your brain picks up the presence of carbohydrates in your mouth via previously unknown sensors, anticipates that fuel is headed to your muscles, and allows you to go a bit faster — even if you trick it by spitting out the carbs rather than swallowing them to replenish your muscles.

“The Race Against Time.” — Alex Hutchinson, Walrus Magazine

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How Hilary Clinton carefully negotiated blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s freedom, and proved herself to be a tenacious Secretary of State.

“By the time the American diplomats acknowledged what had happened and went back to cut a new deal for Chen, the Chinese were in no mood to talk. In the meantime, Clinton herself was pulled away by the hours of unrelated meetings that had brought her to Beijing in the first place. The two sides had used the dialogue to schedule an intensive series of small discussions with Clinton and Dai on the most pressing — and divisive — issues between the countries, from thorny nuclear talks with Iran and what to do about North Korea’s erratic new leader to the bloody crackdown in Syria and the mounting crisis between the Philippines, a major U.S. ally, and China over disputed waters in the South China Sea. It was quite a performance by both sides; no one mentioned Chen. ‘This was all taking place in the eye of the storm,’ said one Clinton aide.

“Head of State.” — Susan B. Glasser, Foreign Policy

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A woman confronts memories of abuse:

When I was little, I thought the word was ‘rake.’ I imagined a man standing over a woman, in a pile of leaves. He dragged a rake over her naked body. I imagined it happening in my own back yard. Now, as an adult, I’m not sure that this image is entirely incorrect.

***

How it begins: I am 18. I am 6 hours from home. I am in a relationship with my childhood best friend. I am nervous.

“How to Tell a True Story.” — Caedra Scott-Flaherty, The Rumpus

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Dirt Under the Rug

What’s wrong with the crime stats in Baltimore? “The Wire” creator David Simon on how to fix them, and how beat reporting is necessary to understand the problem:

So if you’ve read this far, and you understand the actual dynamic in play, you’re probably saying to yourself: What’s the solution? In the past, the detectives and lawyers simply swept their mistakes under the rug, with neither side taking responsibility for the bad stats. And now, because the state’s attorney has prevailed in this contest of statistical gamesmanship, the police department clearance rate has been savaged and some bad cases are no longer being charged, yet at the same time, good murder cases aren’t going forward.  Which is worse?  And how can this be fixed?

Well, it’s easy.  And I’ll give you as long as it takes you to read past the next string of asterisks.

“Dirt Under the Rug.” — David Simon, DavidSimon.com

A professional musician calls for a rethinking of how we value (and pay) artists in the digital era:

Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.

“Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered.” — David Lowery, The Trichoridist

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Photo: Flickr/Shankar, Shiv

Consequence

In 2007, Eric Fair wrote an article in the Washington Post describing his experience as an interrogator in Iraq. He has had trouble finding a way to move on.

I tell my professor I am sick. I put away verb charts, participles, and lexicons, board a train for Washington, D.C., and meet with Department of Justice lawyers and Army investigators in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. I disclose everything. I provide pictures, letters, names, firsthand accounts, locations, and techniques. I talk about the hard site at Abu Ghraib, and I talk about the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I talk about what I did, what I saw, what I knew, and what I heard. I ride the train back to Princeton. I start drinking more. Sarah takes notice. I tell her to go to Hell.

I sit for my final Greek exam in August. It is a passage from Paul’s letter to the people of Thessalonica.

‘You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition.’

I am not one of the believers in Thessalonica. I am one of the abusers at Philippi.”

“Consequence.” — Eric Fair, Ploughshares

A man with hypochondria attempts to understand his disorder:

Eleven years ago, when he was still a medical resident at Columbia University, Fallon was asked to help a man who was convinced, despite medical results to the contrary, that he was saddled with a brain tumor. ‘He tried Prozac, and it made a dramatic change,’ Fallon says. ‘He went from irritable and hostile to grateful and happy that something was helping him. I thought, ‘Wow, this is fascinating.’ Because at that point so little was known.’

The use of Prozac and similar medications is now under formal study. Columbia’s Fallon and Arthur Barsky, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, are conducting the largest trial ever undertaken of the disorder. They are enrolling 264 hypochondriacs in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial comparing cognitive behavioral therapy, Prozac, and a combination of the two. They suspect that CBT and the drug will be equally effective, but that combination therapy will be even more effective for ‘this major public health disorder.’ ‘I don’t know what to expect,’ says Fallon. ‘But it will be very interesting.’

“Hypochondria: The Impossible Illness.” — Jeff Pearlman, Psychology Today, Jan. 1, 2010

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A startup keeps searching for its winning formula:

While their neighbors toiled away, building unglamorous businesses, Justin.tv’s March 19, 2007, launch became an immediate sensation. The San Francisco Chronicle did a front-page story. Ann Curry, in an excruciating Today show interview, lectured Kan. “Fame, I have to tell you, Justin, has a price,” she said. But it was all fun, at first. Kan took the camera with him to the park, to business meetings, even to bars, where it made for awkward small talk. When one young woman took him back to her place one evening, he left the camera in the dark outside the bedroom; the gang back at Justin.tv headquarters overdubbed the video stream with audio from a porn movie. On his walk back to his apartment, Kan encountered a group of cheering viewers.

‘If this doesn’t scare the shit out of TV networks, it’s only because they don’t understand it yet,’ Graham told the San Francisco Chronicle. On NPR’s All Things Considered, he declared: ‘Their ultimate plan is to replace television.’ It was fortunate for television, then, that Kan and his friends knew very little about running a business. ‘We had one week’s worth of a plan,’ says Kan, laughing at what he describes as his youthful folly. ‘Today, I have an understanding of the world, and of the entertainment and media industries, of how people consume content,” he tells me. “But at the time, I had no idea.’

“The Many Pivots Of Justin.tv.” — Andrew Rice, Fast Company

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