The Longreads Blog

Once an enemy of the U.S., Vietnam is growing as a country, and has become a key ally “as a counter to China’s rising power”:

Nothing better illustrates the Vietnamese desire to be a major player in the region than the country’s recent purchase of six state-of-the-art Kilo-class submarines from Russia. A Western defense expert in Hanoi tells me that the sale makes no logical sense: ‘There is going to be real sticker shock for the Vietnamese when they find out just how much it costs merely to maintain these subs.’ More important, the expert says, the Vietnamese will have to train crews to use them—a generational undertaking. ‘To counter Chinese subs,’ the expert says, ‘they would have been better off concentrating on anti-submarine warfare and littoral defense.’ Clearly, the Vietnamese bought these submarines as prestige items, to say We’re serious.

“The Vietnam Solution.” — Robert D. Kaplan, The Atlantic

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Break All the Way Down

[Fiction] A baby’s arrival stirs up difficult memories:

I sat with the baby in the living room, setting her on a clean blanket. When I tired of watching her, I stretched out, resting my hand on her stomach. I fell asleep with the baby staring at me, her eyes wide open.

In the morning, my boyfriend kicked my foot with his heavy work boot. ‘What the fuck is this?’

I sat up quickly, holding a finger to my lips. I stood and pulled him into the bedroom. ‘Anna Lisa brought the baby last night. She can’t take care of her anymore.’

“Break All the Way Down.” — Roxane Gay, Joyland

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One of the greatest athletes of all time faded into the background while his wife and daughters became reality TV stars:

Fathers suffer a curse, and Bruce Jenner knows this curse better than most: The day you become a father, you stop being who you were. In the eyes of your children, your life began when theirs did.

The strange thing about Jenner, now that he’s sixty-two years old: It’s not just his glorious past that has disappeared. It’s as though all of him, every previous incarnation of him, has been flooded out of view: by the fame of his adopted family — his third wife, the former-and-sometimes-still Kris Kardashian, her son, Rob, and her collection of daughters, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie, the last two also Jenner’s — by the glib demands of reality-TV story lines, by dubious plastic surgery and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Even in his own home, that familiar Spanish castle with the fountain splashing out front, you have to look hard to find those few traces of his existence. (‘My mom’s house,’ Kim calls it.) All of the photographs are of the children; all of the memorabilia and props are the product of their successes, not his. There is no red singlet in a frame; his gold medal is nowhere to be found. For the most part, Bruce Jenner, Olympian, has been banished to the garage.

“The Strange Thing About Bruce Jenner.” — Chris Jones, Esquire

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Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss?

The Internet was supposed to liberate artists and replace the traditional businesses that had been disrupted by digital distribution. Musician David Lowery (Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker) says the math still isn’t working:

I was like all of you. I believed in the promise of the Internet to liberate, empower and even enrich artists. I still do but I’m less sure of it than I once was. I come here because I want to start a dialogue. I feel that what we artists were promised has not really panned out. Yes in many ways we have more freedom. Artistically this is certainly true. But the music business never transformed into the vibrant marketplace where small stakeholders could compete with multinational conglomerates on an even playing field.

In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates. And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger.

“Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss?” — David Lowery, The Trichordist

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[Fiction] The pressure of exams and college acceptances, and the decisions that stem from it:

In the first quarter of sophomore year, Cindy got an A-minus in Chemistry, and Paul Takahashi caught up to her. We liked Paul okay, but once he’d won the top spot, we had trouble maintaining our good feelings toward him. By the midway point of second quarter, most of us had added him to our Mono Wish List.

This wasn’t ill will; it was a calculation of survival. Sometimes late at night, writing a paper or studying for an exam, we reflected that if Dmitri Alexandrov should fall ill or slip into a months-long depression, his grades would suffer and we’d move up in the class ranking. We imagined the same thing happening to Cindy and Paul, and to everyone else who was ranked above us. Occasionally, we imagined it happening to our closest friends.

“Honors Track.” — Molly Patterson, The Atlantic

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A writer who’s expecting meets one of the pioneers of the home birth movement, and considers whether to have her baby at home or in a hospital:

When I reached my due date, an ultrasound estimated that my baby weighed 9.4 pounds. I didn’t have gestational diabetes and had gained an average amount of weight, and fetal tests showed my baby was thriving. But the baby’s estimated size, combined with the fact that he hadn’t yet descended into my pelvis, worried my midwife.

She wanted the baby out by 41 weeks, and to my surprise, she suggested I consider going straight to surgery without labor. She sent me to be evaluated by a doctor she worked with. ‘One way or another, this baby will be a C-section,’ he said.

I wanted to avoid induction or surgery, so eight days postdate, I drank castor oil, said to be a homeopathic labor inducer, and it worked.

“Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births.” — Samantha M. Shapiro, New York Times Magazine

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How Moammar Gadhafi’s regime built a surveillance network called the Electric Army that captured all Internet traffic going in and out of Libya, and how dissidents fought back.

Gwaider’s favored method, like that of Kevin Mitnick, the famous American hacker he admired, was “social engineering,” which meant tricking the victims into giving up access themselves. In Tawati’s case, all he had to do was send her a Word document infected with a Trojan, which installed malware on her computer when she opened it. At that point he had access to everything, including her Facebook account and her supposedly encrypted Skype conversations, which Gwaider siphoned off with malware that recorded all the audio on her machine. All of it eventually got posted to the Internet in an effort to smear her. The hacker even stole photos showing her without a head scarf—rather embarrassing in Libya’s conservative culture—and regime supporters then posted these to Facebook. Hala Misrati, the TV presenter who previously had broadcast some of her emails, now played audio from a Skype conversation she had with a foreign journalist, trumpeting it as proof of her collusion with outside forces. Tawati was devastated.

“Jamming Tripoli: Inside Moammar Gadhafi’s Secret Surveillance Network.” — Matthieu Aikins, Wired

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, This Land Press, The New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, a fiction pick from Five Chapters, plus a guest pick from Ester Bloom.

A history of how chickens went from the jungle to dinner tables all around the world:

Europeans arriving in North America found a continent teeming with native turkeys and ducks for the plucking and eating. Some archaeologists believe that chickens were first introduced to the New World by Polynesians who reached the Pacific coast of South America a century or so before the voyages of Columbus. Well into the 20th century, chickens, although valued, particularly as a source of eggs, played a relatively minor role in the American diet and economy. Long after cattle and hogs had entered the industrial age of centralized, mechanized slaughterhouses, chicken production was still mostly a casual, local enterprise. The breakthrough that made today’s quarter-million-bird farms possible was the fortification of feed with antibiotics and vitamins, which allowed chickens to be raised indoors. Like most animals, chickens need sunlight to synthesize vitamin D on their own, and so up through the first decades of the 20th century, they typically spent their days wandering around the barnyard, pecking for food. Now they could be sheltered from weather and predators and fed a controlled diet in an environment designed to present the minimum of distractions from the essential business of eating. Factory farming represents the chicken’s final step in its transformation into a protein-producing commodity. Hens are packed so tightly into wire cages (less than half a square foot per bird) that they can’t spread their wings; as many as 20,000 to 30,000 broilers are crowded together in windowless buildings.

Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler, Smithsonian

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Nearly one year after taking over for Steve Jobs, a report card for the new CEO. The company has never been more efficient, or fun, but some are wondering about the future of the products: 

The ultimate ‘tell’ of tectonic changes at Apple will be the quality of its products. Those looking for deficiencies have found them in Siri, a less-than-perfect product that Apple released with the rare beta label in late 2011, a signal that the service shouldn’t be viewed as fully baked. Siri’s response time has been slow, meaning the servers and software powering it are inadequate. ‘People are embarrassed by Siri,’ says one former insider. ‘Steve would have lost his mind over Siri.’

Obviously, no one can say for sure how Steve Jobs would have reacted to anything that’s going on at Apple, and Cook seems increasingly comfortable leading the company where he thinks it should be going. Jobs was opposed to dividends and stock buybacks, for example. Yet Cook repeatedly prepared investors for a coming dividend by stating publicly that he had no ‘religious’ opinion about them. Apple announced on March 19 that it would begin paying a quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share and buy back $10 billion worth of stock.

“How Tim Cook is Changing Apple.” — Adam Lashinsky, Fortune

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