“The Cranky Wisdom of Peter Kaplan”—Nathan Heller, The New Republic
The Longreads Blog
→
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Vanity Fair, The Billfold, The New Yorker, Wired and New York magazine, plus fiction from Electric Literature and a guest pick by Brittany Shoot.
→
[Not single-page] More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:
As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.
But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’
Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.
→
“Cosmo, the Hacker ‘God’ Who Fell to Earth.” — Mat Honan, Wired
→
“Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?” — Ben Makuch, Vice
→
A classic game is being undermined by technology, allowing players to come up with elaborate cheating schemes:
In the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia, the most moneyed tournament in the land — this year’s event, which concluded in July, had a kitty of $250,000 — tournament director Mike Atkins got bad feelings about a competitor named Steve Rosenberg, entered in the 2000-and-under division (a category for competent but non-master players). Rosenberg came into the tournament having won 18 matches in a row. Then Rosenberg kept his winning streak going against superior competition in the early rounds of the World Open, all the while wearing several layers of clothing in the heat of the Northeastern summer and playing each game with his hands cupped over his ears. Atkins eventually surmised the oddball get-up was part of a scheme, and that Rosenberg was somehow getting moves fed to him. With Rosenberg undefeated heading into the late rounds of the tournament and one win away from taking home the $18,000 first prize, Atkins confronted him about his suspicions, and during the interrogation a tiny electronic device was discovered in Rosenberg’s ear. The player claimed it was a hearing aid; Atkins hopped on his laptop and from Internet research quickly found that the gadget, called a Phonito, was in fact a radio receiver that could be used to relay information from a third party, and, in this case, was likely a third party accessing Fritz or some other chess engine. (The $270 Phonito was manufactured by Phonak, a Swiss electronics firm that at that time was in the news as the sponsor of Floyd Landis during his Tour de France cheating episode.) Rosenberg declined to answer Atkins’s questions; given what was at stake, the tournament director took the non-answers as a confession and booted him out of the tournament.
→
A man with $90,000 in debt makes some hard decisions about his life—starting with a trip to Kosovo for an IT job:
Of course, all I understood at the time was JOB INTERVIEW and VIENNA. Prior to my application, I had never heard of the OSCE, and I knew next to nothing about Kosovo. My IT skills were rudimentary and my management experience nonexistent. I was mystified why I got a call. I was so completely unqualified for this job, I might have treated this like a mini-vacation but for one significant fact: the salary. The job paid $85,000 a year, tax-free (due to the glorious Foreign Earned Income Exclusion). This was an incomprehensible amount of money. It would fix everything. The pressure to do well in this interview, just for this one small chance at a dream life and the magical solution to all of my problems, was intense.
I flew to Vienna two weeks later and interviewed the next morning in a small yellow room. It was 10 a.m.—4 a.m. EST. There was a panel, chaired by my would-be boss, a taciturn Austrian man. I was dressed in a garish blue Hugo Boss sport coat that I picked up at Century 21 a week earlier. I was over caffeinated, jet lagged, and clammy. I made nervous self-deprecating jokes, which translated poorly between our cultures. It was a disaster from start to finish. I left the interview thinking, ‘Thanks for the free trip to Vienna.’ I spent the rest of the day squandering my remaining per diem on beer and meat, refusing to think about what might have been. The next morning I flew home.
“Crushing Debt Drove Me to Kosovo — And Then to Iraq.” Anonymous, The Billfold
→
→
→
An excerpt from Stross’s new book, which goes inside Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s Silicon Valley startup incubator:
The Kalvins are attempting an improbable thing, making a case for a nondigital product: ‘Having a physical product that you flip through and have on your coffee table and show your friends—it’s really valuable! We’ve actually bought photo books for our friends and family. It sucks because you have to spend hours making them, finding the photos.’ Every dorm has to prepare one each year, pay a printer $20 a copy, and buy at least a hundred.
Graham returns to his still-unanswered question: ‘Where does this expand?’
A Kalvin suggests offering a book based on your personal calendar and Foursquare check-ins. Or your tweets for the year.
‘You’re not serious, that people are going to print up tweets from last year?’ asks Trevor Blackwell, who is in his early 40s, about the same age as the other three founding partners. He too has a day job, as the chief executive of Anybots, the robot company that then shared its building with Y.C.
‘Actually, I have a tweet book,’ says one of the Kalvins.
“Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?” — Randall Stross, Vanity Fair

You must be logged in to post a comment.