“Lyndon Baty and the Robot That Saved Him.” Luke Darby, Dallas Observer
The Longreads Blog
Reading List: Brave New Internet

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.
1. “The Vice Guide to the World.” (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 8 April 2013)
“My big thing was I want you to do stupid in a smart way and smart in a stupid way.” Vice pioneers methods of marketing, advertising and reporting while trying to mesh investigative journalism with its party image.
Shirky talks about the nebulous definition of the journalist, the perilous combination of print and online news services, and the relationship between story and audience. Warning: somewhat jargon-y.
Media theory classes have found an unlikely home in the hearts of Christian college students and other evangelical, primarily Reformed Christians. (I should know—the epigraph of this piece is from my Media Ecology professor, to whom I credit my deep unease toward Google Glass.)
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Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Longreads Guest Pick: Emily Schultz on Roxane Gay and Tin House

Emily Schultz is the co-publisher of Joyland Magazine and the author of The Blondes, forthcoming from St. Martin’s-Thomas Dunne in 2014. She lives in Brooklyn.
“In writing about Benjamin Percy’s werewolf novel, Red Moon, Roxane Gay’s review transforms into a fascinating essay with bite. She sums up the challenge authors face when examining the militarization of everyday life since 2001: ‘It’s a tricky thing to address pressing issues of the day in fiction without making prose do the work of preaching.’ Artistic success has eluded great authors who took the subject head on and Gay suggests that allegory is the platform that can let the author speak loudest. When I started writing my novel The Blondes I didn’t know that is was about these same subjects but by the time it was finished the world had crept in.
“Since writing a novel about a worldwide calamity and how its narrative unspools through the media, I’ve been haunted by its resonances with real events, but tragedy and unspeakable crime have always been documented. Today, we crowd source reflexively filmed camera footage to solve cases, but in the aftermath of the Second World War a Hollywood contingent hunted down and sifted through the propagandists’ own footage to build evidence against the Nazis for the Nuremberg trials. Budd Schulberg was a morally complicated screenwriter and author of the classic Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? In ‘Budd and Leni’ Bruce Handy tells the story of how Schulberg arrested director Leni Riefenstahl. The story is complex, the material is harrowing, and the facts sometimes blur into strange humor, such as the Communist guard who is also a film critic.”
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Students, Professors: We Want Your Best #College #Longreads

Throughout May and June, a new generation of reporters, writers, editors, and essayists make their way out of school and into the professional world. They come bearing clips, work samples produced for class or during an internship. Hundreds of media outlets at colleges and universities across the country publish student work, and an equal number of professors, instructors, and advisors help students report, write, and edit their best journalism. We’d like to encourage those writers to produce more and better work, and introduce these new voices to a wider audience of readers—and maybe even future employers and mentors.
To help in this effort, we’ve teamed up with Aileen Gallagher, assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, to help search for and share outstanding student work.
Students, writers, publishers, professors: We need your help to find and share the best work of the past year.
If you’ve read (or written) something this school year, just tag it #college #longreads on Twitter or Tumblr, or email it to aileen@longreads.com.
Student publications are the easiest and best place to find college #longreads, like Mary Kenney’s account of an Indian sex worker, published earlier this year by Indiana University’s INSIDE magazine. Or Project Wordsworth, the outstanding new pay-what-you-want experiment from Michael Shapiro and students at Columbia University.
Sometimes a piece that a student writes for class, such as the one Syracuse University grad student Danielle Preiss wrote about high suicide rates among Bhutanese refugees, lands in a professional outlet. And of course, we’ll also tout good work produced by students as part of a fellowship or internship, like Columbia undergrad Jack Dickey’s investigation for Deadspin about Manti Te’o.
The only rules for #college #longreads are: Stories should be over 1,500 words and written by a student enrolled in a college or university at the time of publication.
Share stories worth reading by tagging them #college #longreads.
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Know of a writer or publication we should keep an eye on? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Our Longreads Member Pick: Someone Could Get Hurt (Chapter 1), by Drew Magary

For this week’s Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the first chapter of Drew Magary’s new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for Deadspin and GQ, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together:
I was in the middle of writing a second novel that would hopefully earn me a billion dollars in movie franchise royalties when my third kid was born. There were complications. I find that ‘complications’ is the universal euphemism for anything bad that happens during the birth and early life of an infant. It can mean anything, really: birth defects, mental illness, a lost limb, an ambulance driven into a tree, etc.If you’ve ever experienced complications with a baby, you know that it immediately makes any other difficulty you’ve ever experienced in life seem harmless by comparison. Your life can be neatly separated into Before Complications and After Complications. They always say that having a kid changes you, but that’s a lie. It’s having a kid on the brink of dying that changes you.So I had to table the novel for a bit and get this out of my system. I had to write about my third kid, and I had to write about my family as a whole, about this whole unit of people that needed to be strong enough to go through what we were about to go through. And that’s how Someone Could Get Hurt came to be. This is the first chapter.
Illustration by Kjell Reigstad
Your Latest Fiction Picks: Lorrie Moore, Tor.com and Taddle Creek

In case you’ve missed them, here’s a quick list of some of the most recent #longreads #fiction picks from the community:
1. “The Side Sleeper” (Emily Schultz, Taddle Creek)
RT @taddlecreek: “The Side Sleeper”: a longish short story by @manualofstyle (Emily Schultz). taddlecreekmag.com/the-side-sleep… #longreads #fiction
— Joyland Magazine (@joylandfiction)
2. “We Have Always Lived On Mars”(Cecil Castellucci, Tor.com)
.@misscecil‘s “We Have Always Lived On Mars”bit.ly/13rR9bs #longreads #fiction
— alexanderchee (@alexanderchee)
3. “Paper Losses”(Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker, 2006)
Lorrie Moore’s ‘Paper Losses’ newyorker.com/archive/2006/1… via @newyorker #Fiction #Longreads #LorrieMoore #ShortStory
— Pravesh Bhardwaj (@AuteurPravesh)
4. “Burning Bright” (Ron Rash, Ecotone Journal, 2008)
Ron Rash’s ‘Burning Bright’ ecotonejournal.com/index.php/arti…#Fiction #Longreads #RonRash #ShortStory
— Pravesh Bhardwaj (@AuteurPravesh)
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
Longreads Guest Pick: Michael Macher on 'Putin's Rasputin'

Michael is the associate publisher at The Awl network.
“Earlier this week, Vladislav Surkov—also known by his nickname, the ‘gray cardinal’—resigned (i.e. was fired) from his position as a leading cabinet official in Medvedev’s government. As a character, Surkov is endlessly fascinating. On one hand he’s a ruthless political operator whose genius maneuvers have drawn comparisons to Machiavelli. On the other he’s a master ironist who has turned Russia in to his own ‘postmodern theatre’. This October 2011 profile by Peter Pomerantsev in The London Review of Books is easily one of the best things written about him and the strange state of Russian politics in general. Pomerantsev beautifully weaves together fragments of Surkov’s personal biography with broader cultural observations to make deep points about power politics in Russia. I really, really enjoyed this piece and I hope you do too.”
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
Reading List: Mother’s Day

With Mother’s Day on the horizon, I chose “mothers/relationship with moms” as the theme of my list this week:
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1. My Mom (Mary H. K. Choi, Aeon, April 2013)
A deceptively simple title belies a gorgeous, funny, sometimes dark essay in which Choi attempts to communicate her strange affection for her mother.
2. The Love of My Life (Cheryl Strayed, The Sun, Sept. 2002)
The indomitable Strayed explores the unexpected intersection of sex, death, grief, marriage, and, above all, her overwhelming love for her mother.
3. The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition (Andy Marra, The Huffington Post, Nov. 2012)
Andy Marra returns to Korea to find her biological family and ponders whether or not to reveal that she’s transgender.
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Longreads Guest Pick: BKLYNR's Favorite Brooklyn Stories

Thomas Rhiel and Raphael Pope-Sussman are the founding editors of BKLYNR, a new online publication that features in-depth journalism—including more than a few #longreads—about Brooklyn.
Thomas’s pick: “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” by Pete Hamill in New York magazine
It’s 2013—three long years since New York magazine asked “What was the hipster?”—and yet there are still people for whom Brooklyn means Bedford Avenue. It’s depressing that so played out a trope could displace, in the popular imagination, everything else that the borough is: more populated than Manhattan and three times as massive; a patchwork of neighborhoods, some of which, incredibly, aren’t Williamsburg or Park Slope; and a place whose history stretches as far back as the country’s.
A restorative for the trend piece du jour is Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” a New York magazine cover story from 1969. It’s an oldie but goodie, a look at the borough’s bounce back from what Hamill sees as its postwar (and post-Dodgers) decline. As a snapshot of an evolving Brooklyn from decades ago, the story’s a fascinating read today. And Hamill’s wide-angle view of the borough’s complexities, as well as his celebration of its energy and diversity, still rings true.
Raphael’s pick: “Gentrified Fiction,” by Elizabeth Gumport in n+1
There’s a story many Brooklynites tell in which the moment of their arrival in a neighborhood coincides with the last breath of its “authentic” life. Those who came after, this story goes, never knew the “real” neighborhood. They missed the junkies who hung out on the stoops down the block, the bodega on the corner that sold 40s, the drop ceilings and vinyl siding and linoleum. It’s a seductive story, to hear and to tell. But it’s also a destructive story—really a myth—that valorizes an arbitrary authenticity at the expense of a more complex understanding of the place we call home. What is the “real” Brooklyn—what is the “real” anywhere?
If you’re interested in interrogating that question, I strongly recommend Elizabeth Gumport’s 2011 essay “Gentrified Fiction,” which explores the fixation on authenticity in contemporary literature about Brooklyn.
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Our friend Mike Deri Smith has launched a new site, inspired by Longreads, for finding and sharing great videos over 3 minutes— @watchlongviews and #longviews. We asked him to share a pick from this past week’s selections, and give us some backstory on the site:
“I read all day every day so when I want to switch up the pace, or when I eat lunch at my keyboard, I yearn for something great to watch. Viral videos are too unsatisfying, TV is too hit-and-miss, and full-length documentaries are too long. So I watch the growing amount of brilliant longform news video being produced with excitement. In the spirit of Longreads, I’ve called these videos #longviews. I’m now sharing the best of them @watchlongviews and through a weekly newsletter. You can share what you find with #longviews.”
Above: One of Mike’s recent picks, “Secrets of The Dead—Bugging Hitler’s Soldiers” (13 min.) from PBS.
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