The Longreads Blog

Childhood Heroes: A Reading List

Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student from the Bronx named Donna Grace Moleta won the chance to meet Bill Nye “the Science Guy.”

“Meeting my childhood hero was one of the greatest experience of my life,” she told the Bronx Times. “It’s something I’ll never forget. He’s such a strong believer in what science and education can do.”

Inspired by Ms. Moleta’s experience, here’s a reading list of some of our childhood heroes:

1. Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. (Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, 2014)

Getting to work with a celebrated comic artist:

…I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected to get a reply.

And what do you know, he wrote back.

Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me?

 

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Stephen Colbert on the Nature of Grieving

PLAYBOY: It’s been almost four decades since it happened. Does the grief dissipate?

COLBERT: No. It’s not as keen. Well, it’s not as present, how about that? It’s just as keen but not as present. But it will always accept the invitation. Grief will always accept the invitation to appear. It’s got plenty of time for you.

PLAYBOY: “I’ll be here.”

COLBERT: That’s right. “I’ll be here when you need me.” The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase He was visited by grief, because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.

Stephen Colbert, in Playboy, on losing his father at a young age.

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Photo: David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons

The Quest for Native American Voting Rights

What would Martin Luther King do? “About Native voting? He sure as hell wouldn’t dither about technicalities,” says Four Directions consultant Healy, a former head of the South Dakota Democratic Party. “Read Dr. King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on the subject of waiting for rights.” In the 1963 letter, King decries the man “who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

But hey, Democrats! How about winning elections? Controlling the Senate? Doesn’t the party want all those Native Democrats at the polls? Wiley says the DNC doesn’t see it that way. “We don’t look at [expanding the vote] as making sure that more Democratic voters vote. We don’t look at it as a program to make sure more African-American or Latino or Native voters can vote. It’s [about] making sure everyone can vote.”

Perhaps the DNC believes it can count on Native voters without taking sides in Wandering Medicine. This may be hubris, warns former Montana Democratic state legislator Margarett Campbell. Originally from Fort Peck Indian Reservation and now a Fort Belknap school superintendent, Campbell has fought for Indian rights for decades. She suspects that confidence in the Democratic Party may wane among tribal members, who may then stay home in 2014. “You can’t take a huge segment of your voting population and treat them like that without them feeling disenfranchised,” she says.

In These Times‘ Stephanie Woodard, on the voting rights discrimination that Native Americans still face.

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Photo: solarnu, Flickr

After the Television Cameras Go Away

In MIT’s Technology Review, Antonio Regalado reports that paralyzed patients are participating in long-term studies of how putting implants in the brain to create brain-controlled prosthetics and computers may help paralyzed people in the future. Jan Scheuermann, 54, is one of these patients. After she awoke from her brain surgery, she was able to control a robotic arm within days. The findings from these studies were published in journals and made it onto the newsmagazine program 60 Minutes. But Scheuermann wasn’t expecting what would happen to her after she was out of the spotlight:

Since the TV cameras went away, however, some of the shortcomings of the technology have become apparent. At first Scheuermann kept demonstrating new abilities. “It was success, success, success,” she says. But controlling Hector has become harder. The reason is that the implants, over time, stop recording. The brain is a hostile environment for electronics, and tiny movements of the array may build up scar tissue as well. The effect is well known to researchers and has been observed hundreds of times in animals. One by one, fewer neurons can be detected.

Scheuermann says no one told her. “The team said that they were expecting loss of neuron signals at some point. I was not, so I was surprised,” she says. She now routinely controls the robot in only three to five dimensions, and she has gradually lost the ability to open and close its thumb and fingers. Was this at all like her experience of becoming paralyzed? I asked her the question a few days later by e-mail. She replied in a message typed by an aide who stays with her most days: “I was disappointed that I would probably never do better than I had already done, but accepted it without anger or bitterness.”

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Photo: Joshua Zader

What Happens When the Internet Takes Over Your Home: Virus Edition

I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again.

Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal.

I don’t sleep well anyway, and already had my Dropcam Total Home Immersion account hacked, so I’m basically embarrassment-proof. And anyway, who doesn’t have nudes online? Now, Wat3ryWorm, that was nasty. That was the one with the 0-day that set off everyone’s sprinkler systems on Christmas morning back in ’22. It did billions of dollars in damage.

Mat Honan, in Wired, with a fictional account of living in the internet-connected home of the future.

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More Wired in the Longreads Archive

Photo: jonathan_moreau, Flickr

When Gamers Assumed the Role of the Antihero

At Gamespot, an excerpt from David Kushner’s book Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, which details the origin of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Initially, designers devised a game where the player would assume the role of a police officer who had to obey traffic lights and avoid hitting pedestrians. Players found the gameplay boring. Everything changed when the designers decided to let the player assume the role of a bad guy:

One day a new build of Race ‘n’ Chase arrived for Sam and the others to try out. At first, it seemed the same. With the top-down perspective, the gamer felt as if he were hovering over a city in a balloon, looking down on gray and brown rooftops. Puffy green trees poked of out of green parks. Horns honked. Engines roared. When you tapped your forward arrow on the keyboard, you saw your unnamed character, a tiny guy in a yellow long-sleeved shirt, stride across the street.

With a few more taps of the arrow keys, you maneuvered the character toward a stubby green car with a shiny hood, then tapped the Enter key. That’s when it happened. The door flew open, and the driver–some other little dude in blue pants–came flying out of the car and landed on the pavement in a contorted pile. He got jacked. As you held down the forward arrow, the car careened forward, supple to the flick of the side arrows–left, right–with a satisfying vroooom. You headed toward a flickering traffic light. Why stop? This was a game, right? A game wasn’t life. A game takes you over, or you take over it, pushing it in ways you can’t for real.

So you drove through the light, squealing around a corner. As you took the turn too wide, you saw a little pedestrian in a white long-sleeved shirt and blue pants coming too close, but you couldn’t stop. Actually, you didn’t want to stop. So you just drove. Drove right into the ped–only to hear a satisfying splat, like a crushed grape with a wine-colored stain on the sidewalk, and the number “100” rising from the corpse. Score! This wasn’t the old Race ‘n’ Chase anymore.

The moment that DMA let players run over pedestrians–and be rewarded with points, no less–changed everything. Instead of cops and robbers, the game became robbers and cops. The object was to run missions for bad guys, such as jacking cars, the more the better. The leap was radical. In the short history of games, players had almost always been the hero, not the antihero. You were the heartsick plumber of Super Mario Bros., the intergalactic pilot of Defender, the glacial-paced explorer of Myst. One obscure arcade game from the 1970s, Death Race 2000, let players run over virtual ghosts, and it got banned. Nothing put you behind the wheel to wreak havoc like this. As Brian Baglow, a writer for DMA, said “You’re a criminal, so if you do something bad, you get a reward!”

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What Would Happen if Life on Earth Started Over Again?

At Nautilus, science reporter Zach Zorich examines the following question: If the world began again, would life as we know it exist? In science and evolution, this is a discussion of convergence vs. contingency. Scientists like Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University, are conducting experiments in the lab to test out their theories. In 1988, Lenski separated a single population of Escherichia coli bacteria into 12 separate flasks and has been studying them for 26 years:

In 11 of Lenski’s flasks, the E. coli cells grew physically larger, but bacteria in one flask divided itself into separate lineages—one with large cells and the other with small cells. “We call them the smalls and the larges,” says Lenski. “They have coexisted now for 50,000 generations.” No other population in the experiment did the same; a historically contingent event seemed to have taken place. Even 26 years later, none of the other E. coli lineages evolved it. In this case, contingency seems to have won out over convergence.

In 2003, another contingent event took place. The number of E. coli in one of the flasks increased to the point where the normally translucent nutrient solution turned cloudy. At first Lenski thought that the flask had been contaminated, but it turned out that the E. coli, which normally just feed on glucose in the solution, had developed a way to consume a different chemical in the flasks, called citrate. After 15 years, or 31,500 generations, just one of the populations was able to consume the substance.2 Its population size quickly expanded by a factor of five.

This “historical contingency” gave Lenski and his graduate student Zachary Blount a chance to examine the likelihood that it would happen again if they rewound the tape. Blount went to the archive of frozen E. coli, and selected 72 samples collected at different periods in the experiment from the population that later evolved citrate metabolism. He thawed them out, and let them grow. Eventually, four out of the 72 samples acquired the ability. What’s more, the mutations only occurred in populations that had been frozen after 30,500 generations. Genetic analysis showed that several genes had undergone mutations that “potentiated” the evolution of citrate metabolism before that point. In other words, the ability to consume citrate was contingent upon other mutations that had come before it. Those formed a fork in the road, altering the path that generations after would be able to travel.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Why Do We Get Suspicious About ‘Extreme Morality’?

“Some thought people who appeared to be extremely ethical must be somehow cheating—that they couldn’t actually be doing all those good things. Others believed they were doing those things, but they found that so weird that they thought they must have some kind of mental illness—that they must lack the ordinary component of desires or feelings, or that there was something robotic about them.

“I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself—that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!”

-The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar, in conversation with the Boston Review’s David V. Johnson, on “extreme moral virtue.”

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'Orange is the New Black' is Back: A Reading List on the Representation of Prison

Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show. The first two pieces cover season one, for all you newbies out there. The second two address the most recent season.

1. “Five Formerly Incarcerated Women on Prison, Relationships, and Orange is the New Black.” (Kat Stoeffel, The Cut, August 2013)

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Maya Angelou on the Joys of Being Edited

When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.

-Maya Angelou, in a 1990 Paris Review interview with George Plimpton.

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Photo: wheelockcollege, Flickr