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How young Colton Burpo’s visit to Heaven became a word-of-mouth best seller, and what it means to a writer raised fundamentalist:

When I was not quite 4 — about the same age as Colton Burpo — my own newly born-again parents sat me down to impart the good news about Jesus, the son of God, who was born in a manger surrounded by sheep and donkeys and ended up being nailed to a cross on a hill and dying there. On the third day, he rose from the grave (you could tell it was he from the nail holes), and he did all of this to pay for my sins. If I accepted him into my heart, I would be rewarded with everlasting life in heaven. Otherwise, I would burn eternally with the Devil in hell. So we needed, urgently, to pray.

‘Right now?’ I said, or something like that. I remember not feeling 100 percent ready to ask this undead man, with his holey extremities, to dwell inside me.

“My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller.” — Maud Newton, New York Times

More #longreads from Newton

“If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then [Eric] Fehrnstrom is Romney’s balls.” Meet the former Boston Herald reporter-turned-consigliere to the presidential candidate: 

It was January of 2008, the last time Romney ran for president, and Fehrnstrom was getting in the face of an Associated Press reporter in a Staples store in South Carolina. The reporter, Glen Johnson, had just challenged Romney during a press conference, interrupting him in the middle of a claim that he didn’t have lobbyists working on his campaign—Mitt definitely did—and when the press conference was over, Romney rushed after Johnson to press his case. ‘Listen to my words, all right? Listen to my words,’ Romney sputtered, smiling through gritted teeth. That’s when Fehrnstrom stepped in and cornered Johnson in front of a Post-it notes display. ‘You should act a little bit more professionally instead of being argumentative with the candidate,’ he hissed at Johnson. ‘It’s out of line. You’re out of line.’

“Mitt Romney’s Dark Knight.” — Jason Zengerle, GQ

See more from Zengerle

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Orion Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, GQ, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Oregonian, fiction from Granta, plus a guest pick from Declan Fay.

On former News of the World editor Colin Myler, who was blamed by Rupert Murdoch for the phone-hacking scandal. He’s now taking on Rupert as editor of the New York Daily News, the tabloid rival of the Murdoch-owned New York Post:

The fun is going to be in competing against a man who first saved his career, then nearly ruined it. When Rupert Murdoch brought Myler to the Post, in late 2001, the move was a step down. For a decade, he’d been editor-in-chief of one British tabloid or another, most recently the Sunday Mirror, playing the Fleet Street game with brio. But then he crossed a line. In April 2001, in the midst of the trial of two soccer players accused of assaulting a Pakistani fan, Myler published an article that suggested racism as a possible motive. The problem was that the judge had prohibited consideration of a racial motive, and in England there are strict laws about honoring such prohibitions—’Journalism 101,’ says one of Myler’s Fleet Street colleagues. The judge in the case immediately called for a retrial, and even though Myler had consulted company lawyers, he was pushed out in disgrace.

“The Tabloid Turncoat.” — Steve Fishman, New York magazine

See more #longreads from Steve Fishman

The Bedford Quarry

[Fiction] A teenage boy falls into criminal life:

It was the first summer Jack and Mom didn’t care when I came home. Finding things missing around the house, Jack had said something about his wallet springing a leak, and it better fix itself fast. I was a much better liar than Betsy, and had perfected the pose of injured innocence when accused. It helped a lot that she had strings of goateed boyfriends around the house, guys with bottle openers on their key rings. I started coming to the quarry after dark. At night, the quarry was a completely different story.

“The Bedford Quarry.” — Michael Rosovsky, AGNI

(Thanks Instafiction)

See more #fiction #longreads

Profile of Srdja Popovic, who was a member of Otpor (Resistance), the nonviolent group that helped topple Serbia’s dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000. He’s since formed an NGO called Canvas, which advises rebels in 40 countries on how to use the tools of nonviolent struggle:

The trainers, all former participants in protests, deliver the curriculum, usually in English. The trainees analyse and evaluate their country’s situation, after being coached in the theory of nonviolent struggle and the three principles for its success: unity, planning and nonviolent discipline. They study the role of consent and obedience, and ‘pillars of society’ (military, police, judiciary, bureaucracy), and how to lure ordinary people away from them and towards the nonviolent movement. Next come strategy and tactics, especially ‘low-risk tactics’, such as co-ordinated banging of metal pans at set times across a city—actions in which all can join, and which keep people in the movement even under harsh oppression.

“A Velvet Fist.” — Emma Williams, More Intelligent Life

See more #longreads from More Intelligent Life

A new chemical endangerment law in Alabama, originally designed to protect children from meth labs, is now being used to prosecute mothers who used drugs during their pregnancy:

Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, has been following Kimbrough’s case closely. She has drafted ‘friend of the court’ briefs for Kimbrough signed by groups like the National Organization for Women-Alabama and the American Medical Association. She argues that applying Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law to pregnant women ‘violates constitutional guarantees of liberty, privacy, equality, due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.’ In effect, she says, under Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law, pregnant women have become ‘a special class of people that should be treated differently from every other citizen.’ And, she says, the law violates pregnant women’s constitutional rights to equal protection under the law. Ketteringham also recruited two prominent Alabama lawyers, Jake Watson and Brian M. White, to take Kimbrough’s case pro bono. ‘I love babies, too, but I don’t like locking up their mamas,’ Watson told me.

“The Criminalization of Bad Mothers.” — Ada Calhoun, New York Times Magazine

See also: “A Young, Cold Heart.” — Tom Robbins, New York Times, Jan. 14, 2012

Q&A with the man who created Mosaic and Netscape, and has since funded some of the biggest companies on the web:

The future was much easier to see if you were on a college campus. Remember, it was feast or famine in those days. Trying to do dialup was miserable. If you were a trained computer scientist and you put in a tremendous amount of effort, you could do it: You could go get a Netcom account, you could set up your own TCP/IP stack, you could get a 2,400-baud modem. But at the university, you were on the Internet in a way that was actually very modern even by today’s standards. At the time, we had a T3 line—45 megabits, which is actually still considered broadband. Sure, that was for the entire campus, and it cost them $35,000 a month! But we had an actual broadband experience. And it convinced me that everybody was going to want to be connected, to have that experience for themselves.

“The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen.” — Chris Anderson, Wired

A call for justice for women in the Middle East. The writer, who was sexually assaulted by Egyptian police last year, says the revolutions have not addressed the plight of women:

Yes: They hate us. It must be said. 

Some may ask why I’m bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn’t everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I’m not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system — one that treats half of humanity like animals — must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.

“Why Do They Hate Us?” — Mona Eltahawy, Foreign Policy

See also: “Women: The Libyan Rebellion’s Secret Weapon.” — Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian

Featured: Tech/Science site BBC Future’s #longreads page. Story picks about Olympic doping, the Titanic’s anniversary, plus more.