Inside the social media factory created by former Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti—how they’ve cracked viral content, invested in original content, and made money:
At around 5 p.m., Stopera published ‘48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s’ on BuzzFeed. ‘These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!’ he wrote at the top of the list. A BuzzFeed visitor with an appetite for ’90s nostalgia could scroll down, gawk at the 48 retro images, read the deadpan captions, recall Bob Saget, Tipper Gore, and Scottie Pippen, laugh at the crazy fashion, and resurface to the present day in a matter of minutes. It racked up 1.2 million page views.
Inside the making of a hit pop song—or hundreds of them. Stargate and Ester Dean are a producer-“top-liner” team that helps write hits for stars like Rihanna:
“The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—’taking control … never die tonight … I can’t live a lie’—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been ‘writing’ in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.
They helped overthrow Qaddafi, and now “women want what is due to them”:
Until the war broke out, women generally were forced to keep a low profile. Married women who pursued careers were frowned upon. And Qaddafi’s own predatory nature kept the ambitions of some in check. Amel Jerary had aspired to a political career during the Qaddafi years. But the risks, she says, were too great. “I just could not get involved in the government, because of the sexual corruption. The higher up you got, the more exposed you were to [Qaddafi], and the greater the fear.” According to Asma Gargoum, who worked as director of foreign sales for a ceramic tile company near Misrata before the war, “If Qaddafi and his people saw a woman he liked, they might kidnap her, so we tried to stay in the shadows.”
The stories of Daniel Murphy and Ben Zucker, two participants in Occupy Wall Street who are still looking to define what the movement is all about:
At 23, Zucker has the organizing gene. He’s a fresh graduate of Tulane University, where he studied public health to get a foot in the door of social justice work, and his family lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, just inside the Beltway. He once spent a semester running a health program in Senegal, and upon his return, he got involved with a protest by dining services workers. Zucker, who was hooked after first swinging by McPherson in early October, represents the liberal side of the movement. He wants universal health care and federal takeovers of big banks, and he thinks Occupy Wall Street is a good way to make it all happen.
That’s a sharp contrast with Murphy, a Long Beach native who earned his high school diploma in 2004 but never graduated. At 17, he was sentenced to more than two years in the California Youth Authority for stabbing three people at a coffee shop after his friend was punched.
[Fiction] Two couples, living in a “Yooper town,” dreaming of a better life:
Craig is sweet and smarter than he or anyone else gives him credit for. After a long day of work, he smells like sweat and sap. He likes to read Decadent literature, especially Oscar Wilde. I’m the only one who knows that. He doesn’t hate himself for being a Yooper boy dating a Yooper girl working a Yooper trade. We’ve been together for eleven years, since we were sophomores in high school. We had a baby once, a little girl named Emma. She had his eyes and his dimples and my smile and my temper. She died when she was four and a half—got sicker than we knew was possible and needed the kind of help people like us can never afford. Craig asks me to marry him every month or so but I don’t know how to say yes in a world where our child isn’t alive. I don’t know how to say no either. I tell him soon.
Mixed Feelings by Sunny Bains – How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses, and build new ones.
Sense and Sensitivity by Andrea Bartz – Is it possible that some people are wired to take in more sensory information than others, and that are our attitudes towards sensitivity are misguided?
The Sniff of Legend by Karen Wright – “Human pheromones? Chemical sex attractants? And a sixth sense organ in the nose? What are we, animals?”
The Taste Makers by Raffi Khatchadourian – This trip to the heart of the flavour industry is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how modern food gets its taste.
You’ve Got Smell by Charles Platt – DigiScent is here. Will it take off, and if it does, will it be a fad or a technological revolution?
Seeing by Annie Dillard – An excellent essayist takes a personal, often abstract look inside the world of vision.
Master of Illusion by Ed Yong – How a neuroscientist from Stockholm can use mannequins, rubber arms and virtual reality to transport you outside your own body.
James Erwin, a writer for software manuals in Des Moines, Iowa, responded to a Reddit thread wondering what would happen if the U.S. Marines battled the Roman Empire. His comments lit up the Internet:
The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes.
The section of Bagram where the 35th was gathered suddenly reappears in a field outside Rome, on the west bank of the Tiber River. Without substantially prepared ground under it, the concrete begins sinking into the marshy ground and cracking. Colonel Miles Nelson orders his men to regroup near the vehicle depot—nearly all of the MEU’s vehicles are still stripped for air transport. He orders all helicopters airborne, believing the MEU is trapped in an earthquake.
One of the coolest things about Longreads is when someone tweets:
“I’m at the airport about to fly to San Francisco / New York / London / India / Argentina. I need some #Longreads for the trip.”
This got us thinking: What if we started gathering the best #longreads for every destination in the world?
It’s a big job, so we might as well start now. Today we’re announcing the launch of Travelreads, a new channel curated by Longreads and presented by Virgin Atlantic to help you find and share the best stories about the best places in the world.
You can find Travelreads at Longreads.com/travelreads, and you can find our curated picks on Twitter and Facebook. Share your favorite stories by tagging them #travelreads, and tell us where you want to go next.
We couldn’t be more thrilled to team up with Virgin Atlantic for this new endeavor.
For those interested in the business side of this: With Travelreads, we’re creating a sponsorship model that serves both the Longreads community and Virgin Atlantic’s community, by doing what we do best—providing a service that finds the best stuff on the web and links directly to the original publishers’ work, on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Longreads.com. We think this approach works well for everyone in our community.
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