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The staff of Longreads.

[National Magazine Awards finalist, 2012] A family’s difficult journey after discovering their youngest daughter has a brain tumor: 

He would remove the tumor, and we would find out what kind it was only after the pathology report. ‘But it looks like a teratoid,’ he said. I didn’t comprehend the word ‘teratoid,’ either—it was beyond my experience, belonging to the domain of the unimaginable and incomprehensible, the domain into which Dr. Tomita was now guiding us.

Isabel was asleep in the recovery room, motionless, innocent. Teri and I kissed her hands and her forehead and wept through the moment that divided our life into before and after. Before was now and forever foreclosed, while after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle star, into a dark universe of pain.

“The Aquarium.” — Aleksandar Hemon, The New Yorker, June 13, 2011

See also: “A Family Learns the True Meaning of ‘in Sickness and in Health’.” Susan Baer, Washington Post, Jan. 5, 2012

What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City:

The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a questionnaire and recorded two short videos for the chance to compete for just 14 spots. That works out to an acceptance rate of less than 1 percent. ‘Look to your right; look to your left,’ Tisch said at a recruiting event in early January, modifying the Harvard Law School warning to first-year students. ‘Probably none of you will get in here.’

“Future TechStars, Step Forward.” — Max Chafkin, Inc. magazine

See more #tech #longreads

Congratulations to this year’s National Magazine Awards finalists! Here’s a collection of the stories nominated.

What happens when a grizzly bear kills a human being in Yellowstone National Park? An examination of a special criminal justice system designed to protect endangered bears, while giving leeway to euthanize bears that kill humans in ways that are deemed “unnatural”:

It’s a squirrely notion, that a team of government biologists might be able to figure out why a bear does the things it does, or whether any bear behavior could truly be described as “unnatural.” But whatever its shortcomings, the grizzly justice system has been mostly successful over the years since it was introduced, and is reasonably popular. People seem to like the fact that a female bear can kill someone while protecting her cubs and be acquitted of the crime. According to a poll conducted by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in 2001, more than 70 percent of Wyoming residents believe that grizzly bears are a benefit to the state and are an important component of the Yellowstone ecosystem. They want grizzlies to have the benefit of the doubt.

“A Death in Yellowstone.” — Jessica Grose, Slate

See also: “Taming the Wild.” — Evan Ratliff, National Geographic, Feb. 18, 2011

[Not single-page] Brigitte Harris was sexually abused by her father for years, before she decided to stop him from ever doing it to anyone again. She’s now in prison for second degree manslaughter, with a parole hearing this week:

The first thing she learned was that it could be done. ‘Everyone always focuses on Lorena Bobbitt because it’s the most popular. But each and every case I researched, no one died.’ She read about cases in China and in Europe. ‘And I start seeing how to do it without actually killing him.’ On June 26, she bought a package of 50 scalpels on eBay for $6.83, including shipping.

On July 25, Harris had her final argument with Carleen. On her home video, titled ‘My Reasons,’ she mentions Carleen’s children explicitly. ‘We both know what he wants to do with them.’ She talks about what she’s about to do. ‘Somebody’s got to do something,’ she says on the video.

“A Daughter’s Revenge.” — Robert Kolker, New York magazine

See also: “The Living Nightmare.” Barry Bearak, New York Times, Feb. 13, 2012

Featured: Andrew Hart’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The Seattle Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, plus more.

Forty years after Title IX, the number of female college athletes has soared, but the number of female college coaches has dropped. What happened? 

Some blame the dropoff on a shallow pool of female candidates, who often aren’t as eager to apply for jobs, let alone pack up and move, as men. But there are more pernicious reasons as well. First is an old-fashioned sexism that gives men a chance to coach women’s programs but squelches any thought of hiring a woman to coach men. There is also an ingrained homophobia that quietly pressures women to hire male assistants so as to combat any appearance of a ‘gay’ program.

One other theme came up again and again during espnW’s dozens of interviews: a lack of second chances for female coaches. Male coaches, particularly in men’s sports, often pass through a revolving door whenever they lose a job—from Bob Knight to Rick Neuheisel to Rich Rodriguez. But women fear they are much more likely to be one and done.

“The Glass Wall.” — Luke Cyphers, Kate Fagan, ESPN

More from Cyphers and Fagan: “On Homophobia and Recruiting in Women’s College Basketball.” — ESPN, Jan. 26, 2011

Macau’s rise as the new global gambling capital leads to complications for the Las Vegas casinos that have flocked to China for a piece of the action. Its differences are illustrated in the God of Gamblers case, in which a former barber named Siu Yun Ping won $13 million, setting off a chain of events, including a murder plot:

The files of the God of Gamblers case can be read as a string of accidents, good and bad: Siu’s run at the baccarat table; Wong’s luck to be assigned an assassin with a conscience; Adelson’s misfortune that reporters noticed an obscure murder plot involving his casino. But the tale, viewed another way, depends as little on luck as a casino does. It is, rather, about the fierce collision of self-interests. If Las Vegas is a burlesque of America—the ‘ethos of our time run amok,’ as Hal Rothman, the historian, put it—then Macau is a caricature of China’s boom, its opportunities and rackets, its erratic sorting of winners and losers.

“The God of Gamblers.” — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

See also: “Online Poker’s Big Winner.” — Jay Caspian Kang, New York Times, March 25, 2011

[Fiction] An elderly woman encounters her past at her nursing home:

A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a skinny man comes toward her, showing off his mastery of the strap-on LIMBs.

‘Elise.’ He squints at her. ‘You still got it. Prettiest girl at Eden Village.’

She flashes her dentures but says nothing.

“LIMBs.” — Julia Elliott, Tin House

See more #fiction #longreads

The Game of Thrones star’s long path to stardom—and the choices he made to reject stereotypical roles for dwarves:

I read about him online the day before the Globes. It really made me sad. I don’t know why.’ He corrected himself: ‘I mean, I know why: it’s terrible.’ In October, Henderson, who is 37 and is 4-foot-2, was picked up and thrown by an unknown assailant in Somerset, England. He suffered partial paralysis and now requires a walker. The night of the Globes, after Dinklage’s mention, Henderson’s name was a trending topic on Twitter. Dinklage later turned down offers to discuss the case with Anderson Cooper and other news hosts.

‘People are all, like, I dedicated it to him,’ he said. ‘They’ve made it more romantic than it actually was. I just wanted to go, “This is screwed up.” Dwarves are still the butt of jokes. It’s one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice. Not just by people who’ve had too much to drink in England and want to throw a person. But by media, everything.’ He sipped his coffee and pointed out that media portrayal is, in part, the fault of actors who are dwarves. ‘You can say no. You can not be the object of ridicule.’

“Peter Dinklage Was Smart to Say No.” — Dan Kois, The New York Times Magazine

See also: “The Secret Drew Barrymore.” — Todd Gold, People Magazine, Jan. 16, 1989