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.
* * *

It’s been 40 years since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hit theaters and shocked moviegoers with its violent scenes. Texas Monthly has resurfaced their story from 2004 by John Bloom about the making of the film, which was made on a budget of $60,000 (about $290K, adjusted for inflation). Here, Bloom describes the injuries the cast members suffered through while making the film, especially by Marilyn Burns, who had the lead role:

Here’s a reading list exploring Disney’s more than 80-year grip on popular culture—the animation, the music, the princesses, and the parents killed off in the First Act. Read more…

In the latest Mother Jones, Tasneem Raja argues that “code literacy” is becoming just as critical as reading and writing in education. To understand how we as a society might begin to take it seriously, it also helps to understand the history of literacy itself:
More on tech in the Longreads Archive
Photo: worldbank, flickr

In the Guardian, an adaptation of The Iceberg, a memoir by Marion Coutts about her husband’s last months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. She writes: “There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part.”
Photo: Joris Louwes

Student journalists and recent grads! Are you writing for an internship this summer? Share your work with a wider audience via College Longreads. We’ll consider published news or nonfiction articles or essays of 1,500 words or longer. E-mail links to aileen@longreads.com, or post links to Twitter tagged #college #longreads.

Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. (“Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges. For instance: maybe you made the wrong hires?) When an established company succeeds, that’s only because it hasn’t yet failed. And, when any of these things happen, all of them are only further evidence of disruption.
-From Jill Lepore’s 2014 critical look at the language of disruption and innovation, in The New Yorker.

At PopMatters, Anita Felicelli discusses why TV shows get ruined when they’re written and produced with their fans in mind rather than for their own sake as pieces of creative work:
Screengrab from ‘How I Met Your Mother’

Rachel Kolb has been deaf since birth and in Stanford magazine, she writes about learning how to lipread and describes what it’s like to read the lips of people with accents or who over-enunciate:
Photo: Bill Strain

—Josh Saul, writing in The New York Post, about the effect of gentrification on Brooklyn’s court system.
More stories about gentrification
Photo: Flickr, Erin
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