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Lessons from inventor Lenn Rockford Hann’s negotiations with companies over a carbon-fiber shoe he patented in 2004:

When it came time to talk price with New Balance, Hann set his offer sky-high. He says he meant it as a starting point, but company executives closed discussions. Hartner remains a supporter of the shoe, but says Hann blew the negotiation. ‘He would be way better off with an agent to represent him,’ says Hartner. ‘He’s the inventor-scientist guy, you know it from movies. But in real life they sometimes end up shooting themselves in the foot, and it’s hard to watch. They’re not as good at the people thing.’

“The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold.” — Bob Parks, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “How Nike’s CEO Shook Up the Shoe Industry.” — Fast Company, Sept. 2010

Judith Clark was a new mom when she was arrested, along with three other militants, for armed robbery and murder in 1981. She remains in prison—and her daughter Harriet has no memory of her mother any other way:

The prison’s visiting center was her second living room. ‘When they got a new vending machine, it felt like new furniture in my house,’ Harriet said. The other children she met visiting their inmate moms fell into two groups: those who lost them to prison ‘within memory or before memory.’ She was puzzled when some were anguished that their mothers weren’t home for holidays and family events. Harriet had never had that experience to miss. ‘My mother lived in prison,’ she explained. ‘That was always the reality going backward and going forward.’

Harriet and her mother spent hours making creations with pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks. ‘I have no memories of not having my mother’s undivided attention,’ she said.

“A Young, Cold Heart.” — Tom Robbins, New York Times Magazine

More Robbins: “Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress.” — Village Voice, Oct. 23, 2007

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Sports Illustrated, GQ, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Guernica, plus a guest pick from Los Angeles Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg.

What helmets can’t fix when it comes to concussions and high school football:

Because of its national reputation — and extremely well-funded athletic department — Mater Dei has been on the leading edge of concussion prevention and treatment for high school football players. The coaches are vigilant; the equipment is top of the line; the latest medical recommendations are exactingly followed.

And yet, even when a football program does everything right, it’s still not clear if it’s enough. This uncertainty haunts the Mater Dei coaching staff, who struggle on a daily basis to effectively manage the risk of concussions among their players. The new research on concussions has allowed them to prevent many of the worst injuries, but it has also made them increasingly aware of the ubiquity of injury. They know better than anyone that if an elite program like Mater Dei can’t solve the problem of head trauma, it seems unlikely the problem can be solved. The sport may simply be too dangerous for teenagers.

“The Fragile Teenage Brain.” — Jonah Lehrer, Grantland

See also: “The Teenage Brain.” — David Dobbs, National Geographic, Sept. 16, 2011

Ten years after the arrival of the first detainees, officials, lawyers, prisoners and soldiers speak out on how it all started—and how difficult it has been to close it:

When I first got down to Guantánamo, I, along pretty much with everybody else in my group, thought that we were going to be dealing with the worst of the worst. That’s what we had been told.

When I started to get a broader view, I realized that a large majority of the population just had no business being at Guantánamo. Maybe they had been picked up on the battlefield, and maybe they were involved in low-level insurgency. That would’ve been the worst of it with a large portion of these characters. The majority of the ones that I saw—really, we just didn’t have anything on them. So it was kind of a shock to the system on the level of the detainees.

“Guantánamo: An Oral History.” — Staff, Vanity Fair

See more #longreads about Guantánamo

Featured Longreader: Aaron Gell, executive editor at the New York Observer. See his story picks from the Observer, plus more on his longreads page.

Before Wonder Woman there was Miss Fury, the first female superhero, introduced in 1941:

Miss Fury was created, written, and drawn by a woman, June Tarpé Mills, who published under the more sexually ambiguous Tarpé Mills. Had Miss Fury entered an enduring canon like DC’s, it’s possible that the template for female superheroes, as well as for superhero comic readership, would have depended more on the influence and perspective of actual women.

“Heroine Chic.” — Evie Nagy, Los Angeles Review of Books

See also: “Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe in Yourself.” — Dan Kois, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 27, 2011

A Dallas murder suspect is also a paranoid schizophrenic, and his changing mental state raises questions about whether he can stand trial:

With medication he becomes someone else entirely, capable even of calm rationality. He would have to be induced into a state of synthetic sanity before he could stand trial for a crime that he allegedly committed while unmedicated.

For now, though, he was just another uncooperative suspect.

“We need your help. Are you going to help us?” Thompson’s index finger jackhammered the photo. “Look at him!” With his slight build and his short, blond hair, Winder looked hunted, like a boy among men. He looked up at the detectives and murmured, “I don’t remember.”

“Can an Accused Killer Stay Sane Long Enough to Stand Trial?” — Brantley Hargrove, Dallas Observer

See also: “The Lost Boys.” — Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly, March 24, 2011

Featured Longreader: Lexi Mainland, social media editor for The New York Times. See her story picks from Vanity Fair, New Yorker, The Atlantic and more on her #longreads page.

The early origins of separation of church and state in America. Williams was a Puritan minister, banished from Massachusetts, before creating the settlement Providence: 

He bought the land from the Narragansett Indians and wrote that “having, of a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress, [I] called the place PROVIDENCE, I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.”

By “conscience” he meant religion. His family and a dozen or so men with their families, many of them followers from Salem, joined him. Few as they were, Williams soon recognized the need for some form of government. The Narragansetts had sold the land solely to him, and in all English and colonial precedent those proprietary rights gave him political control over the settlement. Yet he drafted a political compact for Providence, and in it he demonstrated that his thinking had taken him into a new world indeed.

“God, Government and Roger Williams’ Big Idea.” — John M. Barry, Smithsonian magazine

See more #longreads from Smithsonian magazine