The Longreads Blog

A Pyramid Scheme for the Social Media Generation

Moritz Vennemann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

The movie Wolf of Wall Street launched an untold number of copycats, inspired by protagonist Jordan Belfort’s self-made riches, undeterred by his downfall, and using Instagram and Twitter to sell their scam.

For The Guardian, Symeon Brown exposes this subculture of social media charlatans dubbing them”the wolves of Instagram.”. Posting photos of themselves in fancy clothes with luxury vehicles, they sell an image of self-made success  to entice followers to invest in a shady financial product called a binary option, which has been outlawed in some countries. But these influencers are just the marketing outreach for larger companies, and a lot of their personal wealth exists only online and in their imaginations. A binary option isn’t trading. It’s gambling, and it’s rigged against the neophytes, who are often vulnerable young people with little money to waste.

The mystery is how such complex products became an internet youth craze. And this is where the wolves of Instagram swagger in. Oyefeso described himself as a social media “influencer”, which means he and others like him can use Instagram and Twitter to sell the trading platforms a supply of teenagers and young adults with limited knowledge of the money markets and a hunger for success.

This is how it works. Oyefeso posts images of luxury goods he claims to have bought with his winnings. He gives the pictures hashtags such as #richkidsofinstagram and mass-follows young people online. One teenager told me he and his friends were drawn in by the sight of a young black man who grew up on a council estate similar to theirs, driving a Rolls-Royce. As soon as anyone follows Oyefeso back, he slides into their DMs with a message: “I’m offering a great opportunity to earn £100-400+ per week from trading, no experience required, all done from home and only requires 15-30 min per day.” If you’re young, poor and want to defy the odds against you, the next question is: where do I sign up?

What wolves like Oyefeso fail to declare is that each of the trading platforms you sign up to (with a minimum deposit of £250) pays him around £40-80 – and that recruitment, rather than betting on these predatory financial products, is the way he makes his risk-free money (Oyefeso maintains he’s making money from trading). Young people join the platforms, make a few trades and can lose anything between £250 and several thousand pounds, then realise they can make it back by repeating the trick: becoming a paid marketing affiliate masquerading as a successful trader. It looks like a vintage pyramid scheme, rebooted for the social media era using a model of e-marketing that has boomed over the last 20 years.

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“This Is Our Regional Refugee Crisis”

Marchers in Minnesota protest Trump's immigration policies and call for TPS (Temporary Protected Status) for countries like El Salvador and Haiti. (Photo by Fibonacci Blue via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))

Rosi fled El Salvador after being threatened by members of the Barrio 18 gang and came to the U.S., eventually having a daughter here. Immigration-rights activist Allegra Love took on her asylum case — it was a weak case, but prosecutorial discretion gave locals officials to close it out and Love was hopeful. Then Trump’s administration changed the rules, and Love withdrew as Rosi’s attorney; since she isn’t fleeing persecution based on her identity and immigration prosecutors no longer have the same leeway, her situation puts her in a no-woman’s-land of U.S. immigration law. Justine van der Leun, writing in VQR, reports Rosi’s story.

At the same time, people who exist in between categories—needing help but not qualifying for asylum—are left in limbo, and are eventually forced to disappear or are caught and deported. Among them, anyone who fears for his or her child’s life, or has nothing to eat, or wishes to reunite with his family, may well return, repeatedly, crossing a national border no matter the danger, no matter the agents, no matter the fence.

“This is our regional refugee crisis,” David Baluarte, Associate Clinical Professor of Law at Washington and Lee School of Law, told me. “But we would rather view it in terms of a security crisis. That’s politically useful, and it plays into concerns Americans have about shifting demographics, and what we are doing with public resources.”

This is how Rosi and many thousands like her found themselves in an impossible bind. And while Love appreciated how punishing Rosi’s circumstances were, she also knew that Rosi didn’t have a winnable case. Love couldn’t take on such a loss. It was particularly hard for her to come to this conclusion because, as she explained, “I can’t say no. And I love, like, everyone.” But she already had too much on her plate.

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The Mexican Mafia and the Conspiracy Behind the Tati Torrez Prison Murder

Federal Prison in Florence, Colorado. (AP Photo/Pueblo Chieftain, Chris McLean)

A rookie FBI agent spent a decade investigating the conspiracy around the murder of Manuel “Tati” Torrez, a high-ranking member of the notorious Mexican Mafia gang, la Eme. At The Atavist, Chris Outcalt reports on Torrez as “one of the graying old guard” of the gang at ADX Florence. Despite the fact that the federal maximum security prison was specially designed to keep its population of extremely violent inmates in “near total isolation,” Torrez was brutally murdered in the prison yard while the cameras were rolling. But who did it and why?

What came next was uncharted territory: an investigation of the first homicide in a place specifically designed to prevent violence of any kind. Instead of a shank or some other crude weapon, the killer had used fists and feet to pummel a fellow prisoner to a pulp. He’d committed murder in broad daylight, with cameras everywhere, yet avoided being caught in the act. Who had done it? And, more importantly, why?

Not yet 48 hours into his inaugural FBI assignment, Jon learned that he’d be investigating the first murder at the ADX, which had badly shaken the facility’s staff. A colleague explained that, as far as he could tell, the killing had everything to do with the Mexican Mafia.

“What’s that?” Jon asked. “Like a street gang?”

“No, it’s not a street gang,” his colleague replied. “It’s the mother of all street gangs. It’s like the Navy SEALs.”

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Goodness, How Delicious, Eating Goober Peas

A bowl of boiled peanuts
A bowl of boiled peanuts (AP Photo / Dave Martin)

Boiled goober peas and an ice-cold Nehi — or peanuts and a soda, to those of us not from the American South — are a beloved snack below the Mason-Dixon. In The Bitter Southerner, James Beard-award winning writer Shane Mitchell offers a history of and paean to this most versatile and nutritional of ground nuts and to the region where it’s grown, correcting a few peanut myths along the way.

George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. That’s one of those conflated facts taught in grade school, much like everyone still believing the earth was flat in the 15th century when Columbus discovered America. Actual first honors go to a Canadian, Marcellus Gilmore Edson, who was issued U.S. Patent No. 306727 for his “flavoring paste” to be used in the manufacture of “peanut-candy” on October 21, 1894. (Pre-Columbian Aztecs also pounded peanuts into a paste, so nothing is really new in the New World.) But Carver’s botanical research at the Tuskegee Institute contributed greatly to peanut butter’s rise in popularity. In 1916, he published a bulletin titled “How to Grow the Peanut & 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption,” which included his recipes for soup, cookies, fudge, and mock chicken. He also recommended peanuts for shampoo, mayonnaise, paint, massage oil, and flour. The Carvoline cosmetics company of Birmingham manufactured peanut hair pomade with his endorsement.

But wait! The humble peanut is even more multi-functional than that.

It is unlikely Carver would have imagined the use devised more recently by 12 inmates at Walker County Jail in Jasper, Alabama, on a Sunday evening last July. They saved peanut butter from their sandwiches and molded it like clay to alter a number above a door leading outside, then tricked a rookie guard into opening it. (The employee thought he was letting them back into the cells.) The prisoners ditched their orange jumpsuits, flung blankets over the razor wire fence, and busted out. Most didn’t get far—two were captured at the Flying J truck stop in town. At a news conference the next day, county Sheriff James E. Underwood said:

“Changing some numbers on the door with peanut butter — that may sound crazy, but these people are crazy like a fox.”

When I reached Jasper Mayor Paul Liollio for comment, he wrote back: “This wasn’t Jasper’s finest hour.”

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How To Be a Plain Girl

Pro-Line

 

Lolly Bowean | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,414 words)

 

Prologue

Every black woman has a hair story. This is mine.

Good hair means curls and waves
Bad hair means you look like a slave
— India.Arie, “I Am Not My Hair”

1.

I had never even met John P., but there I was, on a bus in East Knoxville, riding to meet him where he lived in a troubled public housing complex called Lonsdale.

I should have been at school, sitting in homeroom with the rest of the freshmen. But instead, at 13, I had decided to cut class and take a journey across a town I wasn’t even vaguely familiar with, to meet a man I didn’t know.

John P. was my classmate Kayla’s uncle, and in the neighborhood and at our school, he was known to have “gifted hands.”

He didn’t have the proper credentials to work in a professional salon, so instead he would accept women into his ground level apartment. It was there that he would slather their scalps with white creams that smelled like drain cleaner and lye, then cut and curl their hair for about a third of the price at a real beauty parlor.

My family had only been living in this small southern town for a few months, but in that short time I had come to vividly understand that the way I wore my hair was not only “not cool”; for many, it was unacceptable.

And so, even though I wasn’t the rebellious type of teen who would normally skip school, I broke the rules for the very first time so that I could go get my hair done.

Without permission — in fact, in direct defiance of my family’s wishes — I headed to see John P. I was determined to get a Jheri curl — a slimy hairstyle popularized by Michael Jackson and Prince.
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It’s Like This and Like That and Like What?

Death Row / Interscope Records, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,912 words)

 

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

In the entirety of 1990, exactly one hip-hop single made it to the top spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. This was “Ice Ice Baby,” and the LP whence its dope melodies came, To the Extreme, also ruled the Billboard album charts for the final eight weeks of that year — knocking off the previous number one, another rap record, Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em. (It turned out that if U were Vanilla Ice, U could, in fact, touch this.) As the nineties rush-rushed in, aching to break out of the previous decade’s noxious forcefield of Aqua Net, one thing was clear: American Top 40 radio was ready for hip hop — so long as it was squeaky clean, or, failing that, performed by a white guy with the wackest eyebrows in history.

By the end of the decade, the landscape had shifted almost beyond recognition. Synth-pop was the stuff of nostalgia nights; rock was emitting the first gurgle of its death rattle (which sounded like this); and what had heretofore been called “hardcore” hip hop was so ubiquitous in “mainstream” (read: white) culture that its ubiquity became a bit in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space.

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Searching for a Future Beyond Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg
Jose Luis Magana / AP Photo, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

 Jacob Silverman | Longreads | May 2018 | 9 minutes (2,206 words)

 

 

For the better part of two decades, an important set of assumptions has underwritten our use of the internet. In exchange for being monitored — to what degree, many people still have no idea — we would receive free digital services. We would give up our privacy, but our data and our rights, unarticulated though they might be, would be respected. This is the simple bargain that drove the development of the social web and rewarded its pioneers — Facebook, Google, and the many apps and services they’ve swallowed up — with global user bases and multi-billion-dollar fortunes. Read more…

It Turns Out No One’s in Kansas Anymore

Farmer Robert Bacon empties wheat into a grain cart outside of Hutchinson, Kansas. (AP Photo/The Hutchinson News, Cavin Mattheis)

No one lives in rural Kansas any more — many counties have fewer than 10 people per square mile — and the state ranks first for 25- to 29-year-olds who leave. Why? Wheat. For The New Food Economy, Kansan Corie Brown drove across Kansas, all 1,800 miles of it, to see how Kansas has become a victim of its own farming success.

Everywhere, I felt the absence—of people, of commerce, even of sound. The silence was broken only by a vintage pickup truck pulling up to the Downs grain elevator, huge mounds of excess grain piled high on the ground all around it.

That image—abundance at the center of a depopulated landscape—sums up the reality of rural Kansas. Yes, the harvest continues to be bounteous. But it masks a harder truth: Kansas’s plentiful grain crop has come at the expense of nearly everything else.

Why? The costs of growth.

Since 1980, the average Kansas farm has expanded in size from 640 to 770 acres—and yield increased, too, thanks to investments in machinery and chemicals. Between 2003 and 2016, Kansas’s farmers improved their wheat yields from 48 bushels/acre to 57 bushels/acre and enjoyed some record harvests, according to Mykel Taylor, a K-State agricultural economist.

But those extra bushels per acre likely required exorbitant financial investment. During those same years, Kansas’s average annual expenses per farm more than doubled, rising from $130,000 in 2003 to a whopping $300,000 in 2016, according to Taylor. And now, commodity crop prices have fallen off a cliff. Commodity wheat, for instance, fell to $3.37 per bushel in 2016 after averaging $6.50 per bushel across the previous eight years.

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The Surprising Case of One Houston Robber

J. Patric Schneider/Houston Chronicle via AP

Someone wise whose name now escapes me said we can never truly know anyone, and by “truly” they meant “fully.” For Texas Monthly, Skip Hollandsworth tracks the case of one of the boldest, most elusive teams of armored car robbers the FBI has ever tracked. This Houston, Texas, crew wasn’t simply stealing cash from armored cars. They were murdering the cars’ employees, and their system was so effective their hits left few clues for the FBI. When the FBI seemed to crack the case, the ring leader’s criminal life surprised everyone, his girlfriend especially. “He wanted to build his life the right way, have a family,” she said, “and that’s what we were doing. We were building our family and making sure our kids were okay.” But people are complicated, and authorities are still speculating about their culprit’s motives.

Yet even then, no one considered him to be particularly dangerous. Vivian King, a Houston attorney who represented Batiste on some of his cases (she’s now a senior prosecutor in the Harris County district attorney’s office), told me that Batiste was “one of the most well-mannered clients I ever had, perfectly polite, always saying ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am’ to me whenever we talked.” And curiously enough, after his 2009 conviction, he seemed to abandon his criminal impulses altogether. He went to work for his neighbor Tommie Albert, who ran a roofing, fencing, landscaping, and container delivery business. “What struck me about Red was that he was interested in so many subjects,” Albert told me. “He would sit at the computer for hour after hour, just doing general research. He’d read about everyone from Muhammad Ali to Dick Gregory. I once told him I had an uncle who was one of the first black pilots in Birmingham, Alabama, and he researched that.”

Albert, whose own son had been shot to death nearly twenty years earlier, hoped that Batiste would someday take over his business. But Batiste said he aspired to get into real estate. Besides renovating homes, he wanted to purchase empty lots on which he planned to open storefront businesses, everything from a beauty salon to a day care center to a snow cone stand. “He even had this idea of buying large shipping containers and converting them into small homes that he would put on his empty lots,” Albert said.

In 2013, on Valentine’s weekend, Batiste met Buchi Okoh at a party. A former college volleyball player, she was in her late twenties, and she too was determined to do something with her life: she had earned her real estate license before becoming a salesperson at Stewart Cadillac, in Midtown. Okoh told me she immediately liked Batiste because he wasn’t a “sweet talker.” He was “straightforward and to the point.”

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Born Again

Illustrations by Karen Barbour

Michelle Dean Topic | April 2017 | 13 minutes (3,100 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

Candace Newmaker was 10 years old when she died in 2000. There are only a few pictures of her, and even fewer biographical details. Here is what we do know: she had dark brown hair and eyes, she liked dogs and horses, and she enjoyed arts and crafts. Candace had been a ward of the state of North Carolina since she was about 5 the daughter of a very young mother who hadn’t been able to hold her own life together, and who had lost her very young children to the Department of Children and Family Services. Jeane Newmaker, a kindly nurse-practitioner who was single and in her early 40s, found Candace in the system when she was 6 and adopted her in 1996. It’s not clear exactly when things got difficult between Newmaker and her adopted daughter. Maybe things were difficult from the start. (Newmaker declined to comment for this article; this account is based on contemporaneous press reports in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.) Candace, one of the girl’s therapists later said, could be sweet, but she could also be “mean.” One therapist said it just seemed like Candace had a “defense mechanism for being through so many places” — that “it was like having the average 18-year-old adolescent in your house,” one who was trapped in a 10-year-old’s body. Read more…