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Reading List for 'Uncovering the Cover Story' with Longreads and The New Republic

Reminder! We’ll be in D.C. next Wednesday, Feb. 29 for a special night with The New Republic at Busboys and Poets. It’s a free event, and you can RSVP on the Longreads Facebook page. 

“Uncovering the Cover Story” will feature The New Republic’s Rachel Morris, Eliza Gray, Alec MacGillis, Timothy Noah and Editor Richard Just.

Want some #longreads to check out beforehand? Here’s a reading list: 

• Eliza Gray, Assistant Editor: “The Collector.”

• Alec MacGillis, Senior Editor: “The Guy Who Fires You: What voters really think about Romney’s wealth.” and “Temperamental Journey: The peculiar anger of Mitt Romney.”

• Timothy Noah, Senior Editor and TRB columnist: “The Mobility Myth: Why everyone overestimates American equality of opportunity.”

A weeklong investigation to discover who created the Twitter account that spits out “context-free nonsense” and in doing so has now amassed more than 40,000 followers and a devoted fanbase:

The feed’s strangely poetic stream has been embraced like a life-preserver by internet users drowning in a sea of painfully literal SEO headlines and hack Twitter comedians. Since it appeared in August 2010, word of Horse_ebooks has spread steadily, propelled by blog posts and Twitter chatter by internet obsessives. But unlike many internet culture phenomenons, it never truly went viral. Horse_Ebooks is too weird, too much of an acquired taste to break into exponential growth.

But these same qualities that have relegated Horse_ebooks to relative obscurity have inspired a passionate Twitter fanbase rivaled only by Beliebers. Followers have fashioned an elaborate fandom based on Horse_ebooks, comics, fan-fiction, merchandise, and inside-jokes. A browser plug-in that turned the text of any website into Horse_ebook-isms was the latest craze among fans. A characteristic Horse_ebook superfan boast is: ‘I unfollowed Horse_ebooks, because my friends retweet all its tweets anyway.’ We’re so deep into Horse_ebooks, you couldn’t escape it if you tried.

“How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot.” — Adrian Chen, Gawker

More from Chen: “The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers.” — Gawker, Jan. 25, 2012

Featured: The Days of Yore. See some of their interviews with writers and creators like Jo Ann Beard and Shawn Ryan, plus picks from The Los Angeles Review of Books, FSG’s Work in Progress, plus more on their #longreads page.

A review of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, and a different perspective on the dark side of Steve:

Sometimes the repetition serves a purpose: The drug LSD, referred to 33 times, is clearly important to Jobs. (The FBI thought the same, according to documents released this month.) “How many of you have taken LSD?” Jobs taunts an audience of Stanford business school students. “Are you a virgin? How many times have you taken LSD?’ he demands of an Apple interviewee. Bill Gates would ‘be a broader guy if he had dropped acid.” Tripping was “one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life.” People who had never dropped acid ‘would never fully understand him.’ The generations that followed his own were more ‘materialistic’ and less ‘idealistic’ for not having tripped; also, they all looked like ‘virgins.’ In the binary world within Steve’s reality, having consumed LSD was the key determinant of whether a colleague or employee was deemed “enlightened” or “an asshole.”

To iSummarize: Steve Jobs had a litmus test for evaluating workers: It was a lot like a literal litmus test.

“The Book of Jobs.” — Moe Tkacik, Reuters

See more #longreads about Steve Jobs

Inside the making of the social network for programmers—which now has 1.3 million users and more than 2 million source code repositories:

At first, GitHub was a side project. Wanstrath and Preston-Werner would meet on Saturdays to brainstorm, while coding during their free time and working their day jobs. “GitHub wasn’t supposed to be a startup or a company. GitHub was just a tool that we needed,” Wanstrath says. But — inspired by Gmail — they made the project a private beta and opened it up to others. Soon it caught on with the outside world.

By January of 2008, Hyett was on board. And three months after that night in the sports bar, Wanstrath got a message from Geoffrey Grosenbach, the founder of PeepCode, a online learning site that had started using GitHub. “I’m hosting my company’s code here,” Grosenbach said. “I don’t feel comfortable not-paying you guys. Can I just send a check?”

“Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software.” — Robert McMillan, Wired

See also: “Why Software is Eating the World.” — Marc Andreessen, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20, 2011

Featured Longreader: Sara Blask, communications manager for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. See her story picks from Texas Monthly, Smithsonian magazine, plus more on her #longreads page.

More than 100 police officers from 18 different agencies accessed the driver’s license records of Rasmussen, a former officer. She’s now suing for invasion of privacy:

Rasmusson’s lawsuit, which will be filed in the coming weeks, alleges that not only was her privacy compromised, but that her story is merely a symptom of a larger culture of data abuse by police. Her attorneys charge that while police are trained to use the driver’s license database for official purposes only, in reality it’s more like a Facebook for cops.

The agencies involved have maintained that this is an isolated incident. But one officer, who would not use his name for fear of further discipline, says that the practice is commonplace.

“I get Anne’s side of it,” he says. “But every single cop in the state has done this. Chiefs on down.”

“Is Anne Marie Rasmusson Too Hot to Have a Driver’s License?” — Jessica Lussenhop, City Pages

See also: “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” — Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times, July 21, 2010

High school hockey player Jack Jablonski was left paralyzed after a hit during a game—leading Minnesota to get tougher on rules, and leading families to rethink hockey’s risks:

“I forgot to tell you,” he says. Something in his voice is strange. He looks at me. Cade and Raye are both staring at me now. Peter touches my hand.

“Jack Jablonski broke his neck last night.”

Jack Jablonski—known as Jabby to his friends and the kids like Cade who grew up skating with him on the lakes around our homes—is not the first boy to break his neck playing this game. But he is the first one whom we who have kids still in Minneapolis youth and high school hockey programs have watched grow up.

“The Way We Play the Game.” — Karen Schneider, Sports Illustrated

See also: “A Boy Learns to Brawl.” — John Branch, The New York Times, Dec. 3, 2011

Revisiting—and correcting—the stories of Frances Farmer. The star of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood was once thought to have been lobotomized after being involuntary committed to an institution:

Let’s make something perfectly clear: Frances was not lobotomized. Granted, Dr. Walter Freeman did visit Steilacoom and perform lobotomies while Frances was incarcerated there—but correlation isn’t commission, obviously, and, more importantly, Frances’s medical records confirm that she wasn’t operated on for any reason whatsoever at Steilacoom. This according to Jeffrey Kauffman, a musician and historian, who describes himself as “the first person to obtain access to pertinent medical and court records [that] clarify many aspects of Farmer’s history.” Furthermore, no one during Frances’s lifetime claimed or even implied that Frances had been lobotomized—not Frances, not her doctors, not her family, not her bitter former lovers, not her ex-husbands three, not even that veritable (albeit charming) bullhorn of calumny, movie gossip columnist Louella Parsons. No one.

“Burn All the Liars.” — Matt Evans, The Morning News

See also: “Unauthorized, but Not Untrue.” — Kitty Kelley, The American Scholar, Dec. 3, 2010

Scientists are discovering how chemicals can affect the way memories are formed, paving the way for a future where it could be possible to forget anything we wanted by taking a single pill:

This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style mindwiping. In some ways it’s potentially even more effective and more precise. Because of the compartmentalization of memory in the brain—the storage of different aspects of a memory in different areas—the careful application of PKMzeta synthesis inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. Right now, researchers have to inject their obliviating potions directly into the rodent brain. Future treatments, however, will involve targeted inhibitors, like an advanced version of ZIP, that become active only in particular parts of the cortex and only at the precise time a memory is being recalled. The end result will be a menu of pills capable of erasing different kinds of memories—the scent of a former lover or the awful heartbreak of a failed relationship. These thoughts and feelings can be made to vanish, even as the rest of the memory remains perfectly intact. “Reconsolidation research has shown that we can get very specific about which associations we go after,” LeDoux says. “And that’s a very good thing. Nobody actually wants a totally spotless mind.”

“The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever.” — Jonah Lehrer, Wired

See also: “Remember This.” — Joshua Foer, National Geographic, Nov. 1, 2007