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The staff of Longreads.

A 2009 interview with the writer, who died Wednesday at age 76:

My students are all around the country. All that shit that’s on the, whatever you call it, the internet or something? Google or something? I don’t have it on my computer.

That’s probably a blessing.

Well, I do have it, but I just don’t pull it up. But there’s a ton of shit about me on there. There’s a boy named Damon Sauve in San Francisco. He’s a fine writer. He put all that shit on, I guess it’s called a website? I know very little about computers. I just do the best I can and leave all that shit alone. I write in longhand, I write on a typewriter, I write on a computer, I’d write with charcoal if it would make me write better. I don’t care what it is as long as it gets the words down. I only want about 500 words a day. Five hundred words a day is just wonderful if you can get that many, but you usually can’t—not that you can keep anyway.

“Interview: Harry Crews.” — Jesse Pearson, Vice Magazine

More from Pearson: “Interview: Berkeley Breathed.” Jan. 7, 2010

Two of the world’s best tennis players meet for a match 1912, just weeks after they both survived the Titanic disaster: 

Now consider a scenario in which two of the survivors were dashing, world-class athletes in the same sport, destined to face off against each other many times. The hype surrounding those matches would be immeasurable. After their playing careers, the two men would be bracketed together—the Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson of the sea—perhaps cowriting a book, then hitting the speaking circuit.

A century ago the culture was different. Look-at-me sensibilities were considered gauche. Many passengers lucky enough to have ended up on the Carpathia struggled with what today would be diagnosed as post—traumatic stress disorder. This was especially true for the men, whose survival was seen by some as evidence of cowardice.

“Unsinkable.” — L. Jon Wertheim, Sports Illustrated

See more from Wertheim

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Inquiry, The London Review of Books, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Nicholas Jackson.

Featured: Rahel Aima, writer/editor at The State. See her story picks from The Millions, Guernica, New York magazine, plus more on her #longreads page.

In situations where girls are showing signs of puberty as early as age 6, should parents fight it with drug treatments, or figure out ways for their child to accept what is happening?

‘I would have a long conversation with her family, show them all the data,’ Greenspan continues. Once she has gone through what she calls ‘the proc­ess of normalizing’ — a process intended to replace anxiety with statistics — she has rarely had a family continue to insist on puberty-arresting drugs. Indeed, most parents learn to cope with the changes and help their daughters adjust too. One mother described for me buying a drawer full of football shirts, at her third-grade daughter’s request, to hide her maturing body. Another reminded her daughter that it’s O.K. to act her age. ‘It’s like when you have a really big toddler and people expect the kid to talk in full sentences. People look at my daughter and say, “Look at those cheekbones!” We have to remind her: “You may look 12, but you’re 9. It’s O.K. to lose your cool and stomp your feet.”’

“Puberty Before Age 10: A New ‘Normal’?” — Elizabeth Weil, New York Times Magazine

See also: “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” — Lori Gottlieb, The Atlantic,  June 13, 2011

What it’s like for a teenager to try to emancipate herself:

Child Protective Services is meant to protect children from abusive homes and provide safe alternatives with consistent monitoring but often the system fails children. I only knew that the institution was a machine, one capable of destroying lives and spirits in its rigid methodology. And I felt it had failed me. I resolved to do anything to avoid it. And after years of living under the spotlight of the Child Welfare System, I wanted to be free.

My chance came in the form of two law students. After an intense impromptu conversation on a park bench, they scribbled down a number for their professor and urged me to give him a call. When I did, he told me the person who could help me was Bob Schwartz.

“Minor Cords.” — Laura Rena Murray, The New Inquiry

More New Inquiry: “The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers.” — June 22, 2011

Steve Jobs pledged to go “thermonuclear” in Apple’s battle against Google’s Android and device manufacturers like Samsung who he claimed ripped off the iPhone and iPad designs. But bringing a patent fight to court comes with significant risks:

Several Asian manufacturers were noodling around with similar-looking rectangular smartphones before the iPhone came to market. Tipping its hat to a fellow Korean manufacturer, Samsung notes that in 2006, nearly a year before the iPhone appeared, LG Electronics (066570) announced the round-cornered LG Chocolate, with ‘virtually all of the [design] features Apple claims’ to have patented. In December 2006, before Apple released images of the iPhone, Samsung itself filed a design patent in Korea for a similar rectangular phone called the F700. Smartphone and tablet-computer design was ‘naturally evolving’ in the direction Apple claims it has exclusive rights to use, according to Samsung. If true, that matters because basic patent law states that if an idea is ‘obvious’ to an ‘ordinary observer’ at the time of its invention, it doesn’t deserve patent protection. By attacking Samsung, Apple has inadvertently put its own patents into play.

“Apple’s War on Android.” — Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Google Android: on Inevitability, the Dawn of Mobile, and the Missing Leg.” — Mark Sigal, O’Reilly Radar, Dec. 3, 2009

What Marx got right—and wrong—about capitalism: 

The most obvious mistake in his version of the world is to do with class. There is something like a classic Marxian proletariat dispersed through the world. But Marx foresaw that this proletariat would be an increasingly centralised and organised force: indeed, this was one of the reasons it would prove so dangerous to capitalism. By creating the conditions in which labour would be sure to organise and assemble collectively capitalism was arranging its own downfall. But there is no organised global conflict between the classes; there is no organised global proletariat. There’s nothing even close. The proletariat is queuing to get into Foxconn, not to organise strikes there, and the great danger facing China, which is in a sense where the world’s proletariat now is, is the inequality caused by fractures within the new urban proletariat and the rural poverty they’re leaving behind.

“Marx at 193.” — John Lanchester, London Review of Books

See more #longreads from John Lanchester

What it’s like to be one half of a couple where one partner is HIV positive, and the other is not:

We go to the mall and spend too much. We go to multiplexes and laugh at bad horror movies. We scrape by, for several months, on turkey sandwiches and canned soup and whatever meals we can eat with my parents. He offers good advice. He listens to me when I talk, which I’m not sure anyone I have ever dated or loved has ever really done. We, at times, have sex that is identical in every position and maneuver and duration as the time we had it before and yet we both, it seems, enjoy it just as much if not more. We have sex without worry.

“Odd Blood: Serodiscordancy, or, Life With an HIV-Positive Partner.” — John Fram, The Atlantic

See also: “Life After Death.” — Michael Harris, Walrus Magazine, Aug. 15, 2011

A former Dartmouth College fraternity member speaks out about rampant hazing and alcohol abuse at the Ivy League school. But reforming the frat culture might be too much for just one whistleblower: 

On January 25th, Andrew Lohse took a major detour from the winning streak he’d been on for most of his life when, breaking with the Dartmouth code of omertà, he detailed some of the choicest bits of his college experience in an op-ed for the student paper The Dartmouth. ‘I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks… among other abuses,’ he wrote. He accused Dartmouth’s storied Greek system – 17 fraternities, 11 sororities and three coed houses, to which roughly half of the student body belongs – of perpetuating a culture of ‘pervasive hazing, substance abuse and sexual assault,’ as well as an ‘intoxicating nihilism’ that dominates campus social life. ‘One of the things I’ve learned at Dartmouth – one thing that sets a psychological precedent for many Dartmouth men – is that good people can do awful things to one another for absolutely no reason,’ he said. ‘Fraternity life is at the core of the college’s human and cultural dysfunctions.’ Lohse concluded by recommending that Dartmouth overhaul its Greek system, and perhaps get rid of fraternities entirely.

“Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses.” — Janet Reitman, Rolling Stone

See also: “Confessions of an Opium Seeker.” — Nick Tosches, Vanity Fair, Sept. 1, 2000