Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *

Elena Passarello | The Normal School | 2010 | 14 minutes (3,470 words)
The Normal SchoolOur latest Longreads Member Pick is a deep dive into the sounds of history, from Elena Passarello and The Normal School. The essay also is featured in Passarello’s book, Let Me Clear My Throat.Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

— Rex Sorgatz, on Medium, in an essay about living in lower Manhattan after 9/11 and watching the neighborhood slowly rebuild itself.
Photo: Socram_Yar

— Paul Roberts, in The American Scholar, on how our constant pursuit for instant gratification will result in long-term negative social consequences. This essay is adapted from Roberts’s new book, The Impulse Society.
Photo: Jenny Downing

We’re pleased to bring College Longreads back for the academic year. Even if you had a productive summer, you still didn’t do as much as the 2014 News21 team. The Carnegie-Knight News21 is an investigative multimedia reporting project based out of Arizona State but staffed by student journalists from some sixteen universities. This year’s project, Gun Wars, resulted in dozens of stories, videos, interactive graphics and more about gun rights and regulations in the United States. The slick presentation is supported by deep, solid reporting, the kind that’s time consuming (interviews) and sometimes just plain tedious (comparing suicide-by-gun data, state by state). News21 presents its findings with empathy but without judgment, a rarity in a media culture where reporting is often presented through the lens of a particular point of view. So read, watch, and explore this lush journalism experience.
Carnegie-Knight News21 Fellows | News21.com

—From “For London’s Cabbies, Job Entails World’s Hardest Geography Test,” a special feature for National Geographic by Roff Smith. Smith’s piece chronicles the intensive process necessary to obtain a London taxi license.
Photo: Grepnold, Flickr

— In the Oxford American, Alex Mar goes to San Marcos, Texas to visit the Forensic Anthropology Center, which contains the largest of America’s five “body farms.” Body farms are research facilities where families or individuals can donate their bodies for scientific studies, like how our bodies decay when left out in the sun and exposed to nature for weeks at a time.
Photo: Robert Hensley

—Ian McEwan, writing in The New Republic about the court cases that inspired his new novel.

–From Don Van Natta Jr.’s 2013 ESPN profile of Roger Goodell.
Photo: west_point, Flickr

Affiliate marketing is almost as old as the Internet; it developed back in 1994 thanks to pornography sites, and it was implemented by Jeff Bezos at Amazon shortly afterward. Here’s how it works: Say you search for flights on Priceline. The hyperlinked airfare results aren’t just any old links. They’re affiliate links. The act of clicking one saves a Priceline cookie to your browser before sending you on to the airline’s website. If you buy the ticket, the airline website will see Priceline’s cookie and will pay Priceline a commission. Affiliate marketing companies like Commission Junction and Linkshare, which created these trackable links, were aimed at developers. A company called Skimlinks made them easier to implement, but it didn’t focus on the fashion market. Baxter, who had interned at a tech start-up in San Francisco, saw an opportunity. If they could make it easy for bloggers to integrate affiliate links to retailers into their posts, everyone involved stood to profit. Retailers could make more sales. Bloggers could earn commissions. And a company that facilitated the transaction and negotiated the commission could take part of the proceeds. After all, many prominent bloggers were already including retail links in their #OOTD (“outfit of the day”) posts anyway.
Sitting at Starbucks, Amber could immediately envision the company. She decided it should be called rewardStyle, and while she was designing the logo on a napkin, Baxter used his iPhone to register the domain name. By February 2011, they had a test platform for the site. She reached out to a few blogger friends and asked them to try it out. “You don’t have to pay anything, you don’t have to sign any contracts, you just have to see if you start making money,” Amber said.
—Francesca Mari, writing in Texas Monthly about the business of fashion blogging.
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