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The staff of Longreads.

Featured: E.’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The Village Voice, The Atlantic, Deadspin, plus more.

(Not single-page) A writer recalls the disappearance of her adopted cat, and links the event to other experiences of loss in her life.

Six months after Gattino disappeared my husband and I were sitting in a restaurant having dinner with some people he had recently met, including an intellectual writer we both admired. The writer had considered buying the house we were living in and he wanted to know how we liked it. I said it was nice but it had been partly spoiled for me by the loss of our cat. I told him the story and he said, ‘Oh, that was your trauma, was it?’

“I said yes. Yes, it was a trauma.

“You could say he was unkind. You could say I was silly. You could say he was priggish. You could say I was weak.

“Lost Cat.” — Mary Gaitskill, Granta, 2009

See more #longreads from Mary Gaitskill

A 2010 profile on the big media dreams of Andrew Breitbart, who died early Thursday morning at age 43:

Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism. “He’s a Marxist,” Breitbart says of Obama. “His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.”

“The Rage Machine.” — Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, May 24, 2010

Africa is changing—but when it comes to conflict, the battles are smaller, messier and not necessarily driven by a specific purpose:

This is the story of conflict in Africa these days. What we are seeing is the decline of the classic wars by freedom fighters and the proliferation of something else—something wilder, messier, more predatory, and harder to define. The style of warfare has shifted dramatically since the liberation wars of the 1960s and 1970s (Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau), the cold-war wars of the 1980s (Angola, Mozambique), and the large-scale killings of the 1990s (Somalia, Congo, Rwanda, Liberia). Today the continent is plagued by countless nasty little wars, which in many ways aren’t really wars at all. There are no front lines, no battlefields, no clear conflict zones, and no distinctions between combatants and civilians, which is why the kind of massacre that happened near Niangara is sadly common.

“Africa’s Dirty Wars.” — Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Review of Books

See also: “Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy.” — David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2011

Featured: Journalist and globetrotter Ana Lopez. See her story picks from The New York Times’s Pam Belluck, The Atlantic’s James Fallows, The Guardian, plus more on her #longreads page.

Jeremy Lin’s sudden stardom has also put the spotlight on how Asian Americans are viewed in the U.S.:

Not since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has there been so much national discussion about the appropriateness of discussing race. The 2008 election set the groundwork for an aggressive sort of colorblindness — as long as you voted for Barack and/or can celebrate, say, Jackie Robinson, you now have the right to flag down anything that might shake us from our post-racial dream. Statements like “I see everybody equally, therefore everyone should just talk about him as a basketball player” and accusations of “playing the race card” have become even more ubiquitous. And although the former signals a nice sentiment, it also provides convenient cover for those of us who benefit most from the status quo, regardless of race. Yes, Jeremy Lin became Linsanity because he has been playing at a level that has recalibrated expectations of any obscure player. And yes, there’s nothing more tiresome than a long-winded meditation on a basketball player, especially if he’s clearly been hijacked to promote some other agenda. But to strip Jeremy Lin of his status as the Great Yellow Hope not only seems dishonest and lazy, it also deprives the community he represents — willfully or not — of the unabashed joy of seeing one of its own succeed in the most improbable arena.

“A Question of Identity.” — Jay Caspian Kang, Grantland

More #longreads from Jay Caspian Kang

Khalid Shaikh helped create the file-uploading company YouSendIt. After battling with the CEO, he was fired—and he soon launched a series of cyberattacks:

In Shaikh’s absence, YouSendIt had continued to grow. It had raised an additional $14 million in VC funding and had 100,000 paying subscribers. Still, Shaikh marveled at how often YouSendIt’s site went down. He had even sent a tip about one of the outages to Valleywag, an industry gossip blog, which ignored his e-mail. If YouSendIt’s servers were still running the way he had left them, he believed, the site wouldn’t be crashing. At YouSendIt, Shaikh had been the subject of what he calls ‘senseless, mindless pressure’ to keep the servers running. Now, no one seemed to care.

So, on a chilly Tuesday morning in December, Shaikh ran a piece of testing software, called ApacheBench, that flooded YouSendIt’s servers with traffic. The servers keeled over immediately. Later that day, a sentence appeared on YouSendIt’s Wikipedia page: “Looks like the company may be out of business, their site is down.”

“The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge.” — Burt Helm, Inc. magazine

See more #tech #longreads

Featured: Patrick LaForge, editor, news presentation, at The New York Times. See his story picks from The Village Voice, The American Scholar, Founders Fund plus more on his #longreads page.

"Why’s This So Good?" No. 32: Darcy Frey on the Brink

Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.

This week: Laurie Hertzel takes a look at Darcy Frey’s “Something’s Got to Give,” which was originally published in The New York Times Magazine in 1996.

“Savage, bug-eyed.” “Frantic bursts of techno-chatter.” “Sucks down coffee.” Casual words, carefully chosen to set a particular scene and a particular jittery mood. Throughout the piece, controllers don’t eat; they “take chow.” They aren’t startled or worried or annoyed – the machines “mess with their heads.” These men look like they’re on the verge of drowning. Their legs pump like pneumatic drills. They fume and squint and scramble and pant. It makes me anxious just to read about them.

Frey’s verbs are powerful and carefully chosen: Huge, passenger-packed jumbo jets barrel up the river and streak across the sky, nervous controllers curse and twitch. They don’t just bite their nails; they “sink their teeth” into their cuticles.

“Why’s This So Good?” No. 32: Darcy Frey on the Brink

William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:

Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. ‘The Collapse of American Criminal Justice‘ was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.

“Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong.” — Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe

See also: “The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, Jan. 23, 2012