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From the start, the murder frustrated Abilene police. Eleven officers searched every room of Mary Eula’s house for clues, but all they found was the murder weapon, a bloody hunting knife that had no fingerprints on its ridged handle. Partly because the home’s ornately carved antique furniture had few smooth surfaces, only two usable fingerprints were found, and both of them belonged to Officer Berry. No hairs, no semen, and nobody else’s blood but Mary Eula’s.

“Who Killed Mary Eula Sears?” — Michael Hall, Texas Monthly

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In the weeks after Color’s belly flop last spring, friends and colleagues were concerned that Nguyen might be humiliated, or devastated, or at least very stressed out by the $41 million of venture money invested in his failed product. But Nguyen understands the arithmetic of Silicon Valley, and anyway he isn’t one to reflect. “I never get emotional,” says Nguyen, who hasn’t spoken to his parents in six years. “I can have the biggest argument with someone, and five minutes later, I won’t even remember that it happened.” He’s not even particularly attached to his name. In third grade, he had a crush on a classmate whose mother asked him his name. “I go, ‘Vu.’ She goes, ‘Bill,’ and I go, ‘Aha!’ And all my friends have called me Bill since then,” recalls Nguyen. “My whole point was, I don’t care what people call me. It’s like, whatever’s easier for people, I’m totally cool with it.” He adds, “There is no Vietnamese person in the history of the world born with the name Bill. It’s a total facade.”

“Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble.” — Danielle Sacks, Fast Company

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This is mostly the truth.

It was 1958 and Barbara Jean was 27 years-old. In Seattle, just before midnight she had a fight with my grandfather after returning from a summer party. Her three daughters all less than 8 years-old, were in bed when she retreated into the closet and as my copy of her death certificate simply states, “shot self in head with .22 rifle.”  The girls heard nothing and for a while did not know their mother was dead, only that their world changed when they moved in with Barbara Jean’s brother. Their aunt and uncle said very little about the whereabouts of their father, except to say that he would be coming for them soon.

“What We Lost When We Lost Barbara Jean.” — Rebecca K. O’Connor, The Rumpus

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Featured Longreader: Josh Barone, asst. news editor at the Columbia Missourian. See his story picks from Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and more on his #longreads page.

The elders estimated that more than 100 families had fled Shahabuddin because of the local police. The people were defenseless, they said, and indeed they all seemed cowed and frightened. But before we parted ways, one of them, with a note of defiance, assured me: “Nur-ul Haq has no place in this province. As long as the foreign troops are here, he is king. The minute they go, he should leave the country.” Another agreed: “I bet he can’t stay for one night in Baghlan if there are no foreign troops.” Grinning at the prospect, the old man added, “The people will rise against him.”

“Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys in Afghanistan.” — Luke Mogelson, New York Times Magazine

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INTERVIEWER

So you chose novel writing as a profession.

BARNES

Oh, I didn’t choose it as a profession—I didn’t have the vanity to choose it. I can perhaps now state that I am at last a novelist, and think of myself as a novelist, and can afford to do journalism when it pleases me. But I was never one of those insufferable children who at the age of seven is writing stories under the bedclothes or one of those cocky young wordsmiths who imagine the world awaits their prose. I spent a long time acquiring enough confidence to imagine that I could be some sort of novelist.

“Interview: Julian Barnes, The Art of Fiction No. 165.” — Shusha Guppy, The Paris Review (2000)

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Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. “He said we were a feature, not a product,” says Houston. Courteously, Jobs spent the next half hour waxing on over tea about his return to Apple, and why not to trust investors, as the duo—or more accurately, Houston, who plays Penn to Ferdowsi’s mute Teller—peppered him with questions.

When Jobs later followed up with a suggestion to meet at Dropbox’s San Francisco office, Houston proposed that they instead meet in Silicon Valley. “Why let the enemy get a taste?” he now shrugs cockily. Instead, Jobs went dark on the subject, resurfacing only this June, at his final keynote speech, where he unveiled iCloud, and specifically knocked Dropbox as a half-attempt to solve the Internet’s messiest dilemma: How do you get all your files, from all your devices, into one place?

Houston’s reaction was less cocky: “Oh, s–t.” 

“Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech’s Hottest Startup.” — Victoria Barret, Forbes (Not single-page)

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Featured Longreader: Erie Times-News reporter Catherine Cloutier. See her story picks from The New York Times, Boston.com, and more on her #longreads page.

Dutcher had been duped.

The women who’d ogled him worked for Butler’s detective agency. Sharon, who told Dutcher she was a divorcee employed by an investment firm, actually was a former Las Vegas showgirl.

A man who once worked for Butler had blown the whistle. He told authorities Butler arranged for men to be arrested for drunk driving at the behest of their ex-wives and their divorce lawyers — and that entrapment was only one of many alleged misdeeds.

“Coming clean on ‘dirty DUIs’ in Contra Costa County.” — Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times

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Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, readWhere I Was From, about the delusions of her California pioneer ancestors. If you want to know how she feels about the sudden 2003 death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, you can readThe Year of Magical Thinking,her stark but openhearted account of emotional dislocation. And if you want to know how she feels about the drawn-out death of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, two years later at the age of 39, you can order her new memoir, Blue Nights, on Amazon.

“I Was No Longer Afraid to Die. I Was Now Afraid Not to Die.” — Boris Kachka, New York magazine

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