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The staff of Longreads.

Stanford White and Harry Thaw’s battle for the heart of model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit in 1906:

One warm June night in 1906, Albert Payson Terhune could be found engaged in battle for a telephone booth in the old Madison Square Garden while wearing a tuxedo. He had forcibly removed a man mid-conversation, and now, as he shouted into the phone, he kicked out a leg and swung his free arm to fend off the displaced caller and another man wielding a chair. Moments before and one floor above, Terhune, filling in as a drama critic for the New York Evening World, had been a witness to the crime of the century, and he was calling in the scoop.

The movie version of his half of the conversation would go something like this: “Right, yes, that Stanford White. It’s about Evelyn Nesbit!”

“The Architect, The ‘It’ Girl And The Toy Pistol That Wasn’t.” — Evan Hughes, The Awl

See more #longreads from The Awl

The next phase of George Lucas’s career, the making (and studios’ rejection) of his new Tuskegee Airmen film Red Tails, and who’s really to blame for the “nuking the fridge” idea in the last Indiana Jones film:

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. ‘It’s not true,’ he said. ‘He’s trying to protect me.’

In fact, it was Spielberg who ‘didn’t believe’ the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. ‘The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,’ Lucas said.

“George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits.” — Brian Curtis, The New York Times Magazine

Related: “Interview: Steven Spielberg on Jaws.” — Ain’t It Cool News, June 7, 2011

Featured Longreader: David Veneski, U.S. media director at Intel. See his #tech story picks from Wired, Forbes, and more on his #longreads page.

Another perspective on the city’s struggles, and the attempts to revive it:

A recent New York Times article lauded Detroit as a ‘Midwestern Tribeca’ of socially aware folk; but off of its bustling main drag, Corktown is surrounded by Detroit’s burned-out industrial structures and houses, weedy lots, and subsidized housing. For every white entrepreneur in an inner-city neighborhood, a score of young, college-educated kids live in dense, hip suburbs like Royal Oak and Ferndale. The Detroit perceived by artists like Catie and Marianne — often from privileged, suburban backgrounds — is radically different from the city visible to EMS workers. I have doubts about the city’s oft-vaunted creative scene, which I was part of for much of the year: to what extent were we dancing to electro-pop while Detroit burned?

“Letter from Detroit.” — Ingrid Norton, Los Angeles Review of Books

See more #longreads from the Los Angeles Review of Books

On Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir, The Last Holiday, and a family connection to the poet and musician:

Later, in 2005, when Scott-Heron was sent to prison upstate for violating parole, Fred mailed him a leather-bound book — a journal, I guess — with a picture of Scott-Heron from their high school days secreted in the spine. In the photo, Fred told me, Scott-Heron ‘looked like an angel. At this point, because he was doing crack, he resembled my grandfather. His hair was all white and wizened and his teeth were bad. I stuffed the picture in the binding of the book so they wouldn’t find it. And when he got out I saw him and he said, “Man, you really nailed my ass.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, it was late one night, and I couldn’t sleep, and I had this book and I started flipping through it. And all of a sudden this picture fell right on my chest. And it really hit me, all the places I’ve been, you know?”

“Pieces of a Man.” — Zach Baron, The Daily

Also by Baron: “Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas.” — The Daily, Oct. 4, 2011

[Fiction] A family of children escape starvation in North Korea: 

The day the siblings left to find their mother, snow devoured the northern mining town. Houses loomed like ghosts. The government’s face was everywhere: on the sides of a beached cart, above the lintel of the post office, on placards scattered throughout the surrounding mountains praising the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il. And in the grain sack strapped to the oldest brother Woncheol’s back, their crippled sister, the weight of a few books.

The younger brother Choecheol ran ahead. Like a child, Woncheol thought, frowning, though he too was still a child, an eleven-year-old with a body withering on two years of boiled tree bark, mashed roots, the occasional grilled rat and fried crickets on a stick.

“Drifting House.” — Krys Lee, Granta

See more #fiction #longreads in our archive

Featured Longreader: Writer Jess Weiss. See her story picks from Wired, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and more on her #longreads page.

On the encouraging signs of change in Burma—from the end of press censorship to the release of some political prisoners. A report from inside, and questions about why the government is doing it:

Ever since the country’s longtime dictator, Than Shwe, stepped aside early last year, a remarkable thaw has appeared to be underway in Burma—and journalists have been among the prime beneficiaries. In June 2011, the government announced that magazines focusing on sports, technology, entertainment, health, and children’s topics no longer had to be submitted for censorship. Later, publications covering business, economics, law, or crime were also exempted. In October, U Tint Swe, head of the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department, made a mind-boggling statement during a rare interview with Radio Free Asia (RFA). ‘Press censorship,’ he said, ‘is nonexistent in most other countries as well as among our neighbors, and, as it is not in harmony with democratic practices, press censorship should be abolished in the near future.’ For the head of the censorship board to say this at all was astonishing, but for him to say it to a news organization like RFA, which is funded by the U.S. government and has been banned in Burma, was unthinkable. (Until recently, state media spouted melodramatic slogans about RFA and other external radio services running Burmese-language programs, calling them ‘killers in the airwaves’ and accusing them of producing a ‘skyful of lies.’)

“Drifting House.” — Emma Larkin, The New Republic

See also: “On Libya’s Revolutionary Road.” — Robert F. Worth, New York Times, March 30, 2011

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” plus other MLK-related speeches and interviews can be found in the #Longreads archive.

Photo via Seattle Times.

A trip through the “bike-crime underbelly”—and the futility of new technology when it comes to preventing it:

The purpose of stealing a bike, after all, is to sell it. SFPD’s McCloskey estimated that 90 percent of bike thieves are drug addicts. In America’s rough streets, there are four forms of currency—cash, sex, drugs, and bicycles. Of those, only one is routinely left outside unattended. So the story of bike thieves would not be complete without a trip through the second half of the transaction—the recycling of cycles.

Stolen bikes suffer many fates. In the Bay Area, they are often sold at flea markets, particularly in Alameda, just south of Oakland. In Portland, within hours of being taken, a few will appear at pawn shops just outside city limits, where documentation rules are lax. But just as they do in New York City, which shut down most ad hoc bike dealers years ago, the majority end up online, either on eBay or on Craigslist, the black hole of bicycles.

“Who Pinched My Ride?” — Patrick Symmes, Outside

See also: “Anatomy of a Greenpoint Bike Accident.” — Camille Dodero, Village Voice, Aug. 17, 2011