The Longreads Blog

How Detectives Interrogate Suspects and Get Confessions

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“The goal is to turn questioners into the equivalent of human lie detectors who can read behavioral tics to determine guilt. It begins with the isolation of the suspect. Kassin explained that a Reid-trained officer will typically go through nine steps, offering the suspect both positive and negative incentives. The goal of the interrogation, according to Reid & Associates, is to increase the suspect’s anxiety associated with denial and decrease the anxiety associated with confessing.

“‘Basically make it easier psychologically to confess than to deny involvement,’ he said. ‘And you do that with the carrot and the stick — both the maximizing techniques that scare the suspects into submission and minimizing techniques that seem to offer a palatable way out.’”

– There is no universal method of interrogating someone, but a private company called John E. Reid & Associates has trained clients in both the private and public sectors on how to do so. Chester Soria revisits the infamous Central Park Five case, and examines false confessions and NYPD interrogation tactics at the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. See more stories about interrogations.

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Photo by: Krystian Olszanski

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What George Clooney Smells Like, According to Tom Junod

“He is fifty-two years old. He is wearing a black hoodie zipped to the neck, blue jeans, and boots laced so assertively they squeak when he flexes his ankles. He has a long neck, upon which his long head, adorned by long ears, wobbles like a tulip. Everything is to scale with him. Many people have long eyelashes; he has lashes as long on the bottom as they are on the top. His eyes look like they’ve been caught by Venus flytraps. He is going gray, yes, but if you took a population sample of his hair, there is no doubt that any analysis would reveal that the numbers of black and gray hairs are evenly distributed and have achieved equipoise. He has recently showered, and a careful modicum of product lifts his hair off his forehead. He has surprisingly fine hands. He smells like soap.”

Tom Junod, describing George Clooney in a new Esquire profile. Read more from Junod.

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Photo: botheredbybees, Flickr

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'Am I a Vulture?' Katherine Boo on Reporting and Poverty

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“We take stories and purvey them to people with money. And in the conventions of my profession, which I try to adhere to, we can’t pay people for stories. Anyone with a conscience who does this work grapples with that reality, and if they don’t, I’d worry. I lie awake at night, and I think, ‘Am I exploiting them? Am I a vulture?’ All of the terrible names anyone could call me, I’ve called myself worse.

“But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.”

-Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, on journalism and reporting on poverty, in Guernica.

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More Guernica in the Longreads Archive

How to Steal a House

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“They described what amounts to a methodical moneymaking scheme in which Setad obtains court orders under false pretenses to seize properties, and later pressures owners to buy them back or pay huge fees to recover them.

“‘The people who request the confiscation … introduce themselves as on the side of the Islamic Republic, and try to portray the person whose property they want confiscated as a bad person, someone who is against the revolution, someone who was tied to the old regime,’ said Hossein Raeesi, a human-rights attorney who practiced in Iran for 20 years and handled some property confiscation cases. ‘The atmosphere there is not fair.’

“Ross K. Reghabi, an Iranian lawyer in Beverly Hills, California, said the only hope to recover anything is to pay off well-connected agents in Iran. ‘By the time you pay off everybody, it comes to 50 percent’ of the property’s value, said Reghabi, who says he has handled 11 property confiscation cases involving Setad.”

A Reuters investigation into the Iranian supreme leader’s $95 billion economic empire, run through an organization called Setad, which makes some of its money by confiscating citizens’ property. Read more on Iran in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The Decades-Long Quest for a Malaria Vaccine

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“Hoffman rolled up his sleeve and pressed the container—mesh side down—to the inside of his forearm. He felt a tickling sensation as the mosquitoes pricked his skin. Five minutes later, he removed the canister; an Army scientist examined the mosquitoes to confirm that each had sucked Hoffman’s blood. Five other volunteers did the same.

“For the next several days, Hoffman and the other volunteers bit their nails and hoped the vaccine would keep them healthy. (Those who come down with the disease are given drugs to kill the parasites.) By day ten, three volunteers were sick, but Hoffman and two others felt fine. Excitement began to swell; no injected malaria vaccine had come close to 50-percent protection—and this was its very first trial. ‘We thought we were going to win the Nobel Prize,’ Hoffman says.”

– In the Washingtonian, Luke Mullins profiles Dr. Stephen Hoffman, who has been trying to develop a malaria vaccine for the last 30 years. He hasn’t given up. Read more about vaccines.

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Photo by: NIAID

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Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, the Early Years

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“The first time Elizabeth Warren met Hillary Clinton was in 1998, when the then–first lady requested a briefing on an industry-backed bankruptcy bill. Warren was impressed by Clinton’s smarts and steel, and credited her when Bill Clinton vetoed the bill in 2000. But the following year Hillary Clinton was a senator and she reversed her position. Warren’s reaction was scathing. ‘Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions,’ Warren wrote in The Two-Income Trap. ‘As New York’s newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position.’ Warren never forgot the betrayal, invoking it as recently as her 2012 campaign.”

Noam Scheiber, in The New Republic, arguing that Sen. Elizabeth Warren could be a threat to Hillary Clinton when it comes to the 2016 presidential nomination. Read more on Elizabeth Warren.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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On Love and Sand.

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“‘Do you love me, Westley? Is that it?’

“He couldn’t believe it. ‘Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches. If your love were—’

“‘I don’t understand the first one yet,’ Buttercup interrupted. She was starting to get very excited now. ‘Let me get this straight. Are you saying my love is the size of a grain of sand and yours is this other thing? Images just confuse me so—is this universal business of yours bigger than my sand? Help me, Westley. I have the feeling we’re on the verge of something just terribly important.’”

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman (Or S. Morgenstern, if you prefer), the greatest love story ever told. Read more on love.

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'The Power of a Name': Maya Lin on Making the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

“I made a conscious decision not to do any specific research on the Vietnam War and the political turmoil surrounding it. I felt that the politics had eclipsed the veterans, their service, and their lives. I wanted to create a memorial that everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of whether one thought our country should or should not have participated in the war. The power of a name was very much with me at the time, partly because of the Memorial Rotunda at Yale. In Woolsey Hall, the walls are inscribed with the names of all the Yale alumni who have been killed in wars. I had never been able to resist touching the names cut into these marble walls, and no matter how busy or crowded the place is, a sense of quiet, a reverence, always surrounds those names. Throughout my freshman and sophomore years, the stonecutters were carving in by hand the names of those killed in the Vietnam War, and I think it left a lasting impression on me…the sense of the power of a name.”

Maya Lin on the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in the New York Review of Books. Read more on veterans.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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How Other Political Reporters Felt About the Late Michael Hastings

“While Hastings would later speak of having received ‘the Lindsay Lohan Mean Girls’ treatment from other political journalists, of the half-dozen fellow reporters on the charter with whom I spoke, all expressed affection for Hastings. ‘The truth is he was parachuting in to do something all of us wish we can do and can’t,’ says one. ‘When someone comes in and says he’s not going to play by the rules, it touches a nerve, but also there’s respect.’”

Benjamin Wallace, in New York magazine, on the life and death of reporter Michael Hastings, and the conspiracy theories that have arisen since. Read more from Hastings.

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Photo via Blue Rider Press

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John Lennon on What Made the Beatles Successful

“‘We thought we were the best in Hamburg and Liverpool—it was just a matter of time before everybody else caught on. We were the best fucking group in the goddamn world … and believing that is what made us what we were.’”

-John Lennon, in a 1980 interview. Lennon is quoted in Andrew Romano’s 2013 story for The Daily Beast, which aims to debunk Malcolm Gladwell’s argument in Outliers that the Beatles made their success through thousands of hours of playing in Hamburg.

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