The Longreads Blog

Inside the Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims, a hospital in Afghanistan that’s funded by an Italian NGO and is committed to helping all victims:

Last year, Emergency’s three hospitals and 34 clinics across Afghanistan treated nearly 360,000 patients. During the course of reporting this article, after visiting these facilities and meeting a number of these patients, I began to wonder how such a responsibility had fallen to a small, modestly financed Italian NGO. This, of course, was connected to a larger question: What is our responsibility to the Afghans who are maimed, burned, disabled and disfigured by a war we started and can’t seem to end?

According to NATO, even civilians who are injured during operations by U.S. or other coalition forces are only ‘entitled to receive emergency care if there is threat to their life, limb or eyesight.’ In such cases, ‘discharge or transfer to an appropriate Afghan civilian facility is recommended as soon as the patient is stabilized.’ On paper, this might appear to make sense; after all, the United States and other foreign donors have invested vast sums of money in Afghanistan’s public health system. But given the poor quality of care, scarcity of equipment and pervasive graft that still defines most government hospitals, ‘discharge or transfer’ can look a lot like abandonment.

“Pacifists in the Cross-Fire: The Kabul Hospital That Treats All Sides.” — Luke Mogelson, New York Times

More from Mogelson

A history of sprawl and escape routes in a Central California town, from the perspective of one family searching for its own escape:

As I started high school my mom became convinced my dad had ruined her life. They’d married quickly, and for superficial reasons. Two immigrants from the same country, raised in the manacles of an obscure religion, who both had a hunger to build a familial kingdom of their own. It could have been done with anyone. As my brother and I neared adulthood, the fervor of kingdom-building had subsided, and so too the optimistic glow it had brought. My parents had their dream careers, their dream family, and had just built their dream house. There was nothing more to want except each other. But they didn’t like each other.

“Fresno.” — Michael Thomsen, n+1

Ethan Imboden is founder of Jimmyjane, a Bay Area company that is aiming to bring design standards and mainstream acceptance to a product that has long been hidden away from the public: 

Within Sharper Image, that neck massager became known jokingly as ‘the Sex and the City vibrator,’ but in 2007, Imboden approached the company with the Form 6. Literally the sixth in a series of vibrator sketches — Imboden believes in minimalist names — the Form 6 has a curved, organic shape that is suggestive without being representational. It is wrapped completely in soft, platinum silicone, making it completely water-resistant, and charges on a wall-powered base station through a narrow stainless steel band, a novel cordless recharging system that Imboden patented. For these features, the Form 6 earned an International Design Excellence Award, the first time a sex toy had earned such a distinction. It comes in hot pink, deep plum or slate—non-primary, poppy colors that he believes convey sophistication. It is packaged in a hard plastic case inside a bright white box — ‘literally and figuratively bringing these products out of the shadows,’ Imboden said. And it has a 3-year warranty (this may not seem remarkable, but is for a sex toy).

“Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?” — Andy Isaacson, The Atlantic

More #longreads from The Atlantic

Technical interview with the sound engineer on two classic U2 albums and how the band recorded them:

The band subsequently spent almost half a year in a rented house by the sea near Dublin, using equipment rented from Audio Engineering, Ireland’s largest pro-audio hire company, before moving on to the legendary Windmill Lane studios in Dublin for the final mixes. Similarily, Zooropa was also largely recorded in improvised surroundings. These unusual recording surroundings must have awoken the muses, because the stories of the recording sessions for Achtung Baby and Zooropa recount chaotic and almost manic outpourings of creativity. They feature such unusual tales as: the band simultaneously using three rooms to record and mix and the various bandmembers overdubbing in the different studios with people running around with tapes from room to room; last minute overdubs during or even after the final mix; nightly flights home straight after European gigs to complete Zooropa; the filling of 180 2-hour DAT tapes with a procedure called ‘fatting’, complete disregard for standard recording objectives such as separation and low noise levels, and last but not least the interesting dichotomy between the intense 11 months that it took to complete Achtung Baby, endlessly sculpting the songs into perfect shape, and the attitude of ‘recklessness’ and ‘performance first’ encouraged by Daniel Lanois.

“Robbie Adams: Recording U2’s Achtung Baby & Zooropa (1994).” — Editors, Sound on Sound

More music longreads

A group of Marines discover they have breast cancer—a diagnosis that is rare in men, and even more startling given they all had previously lived in the same area, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina:

It all started with Mike Partain, a.k.a. Number One. A barrel-chested father of four with a goatee and a predilection for aviator sunglasses, Partain was born at Camp Lejeune, the North Carolina base where his father, a first lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, was stationed in the late 1960s. Now he lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he makes his living as an insurance claims adjuster.

Five years ago Partain’s wife noticed a grape-size bump next to his right nipple. ‘I thought it was from an ingrown hair or something. I blew it off,’ he recalls. But a couple of weeks later he decided to get it checked out. When his doctor ordered a mammogram, he remembers, ‘a chill went down my spine.’ Then came a sonogram: Partain watched in amazement as an image emerged on the screen looking like one of the globular star clusters he knew as an astronomy hobbyist. ‘I never even knew men could get breast cancer!’ he says.

“The Marines’ Breast Cancer Epidemic.” — Florence Williams, Mother Jones

More from Mother Jones

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Guernica, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Village Voice, and Mother Jones, plus fiction from Joyland and a guest pick from writer John Fram.

What the Facebook founder did to outmaneuver his competitors, and the challenges he faces to keep employees motivated and investors happy after the IPO:

One area Facebook will have to prove itself in is mobile. Earlier this month, it amended its public filings with the SEC to disclose that it doesn’t collect any meaningful revenue from smartphones and tablets, and its failure to do so is dampening per-user revenue. Mobile has flummoxed the company for years. In 2008, Jobs asked Facebook to present its iPhone app at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity himself, Zuckerberg sent a Facebook engineer and a marketing manager to handle it. They did such a poor job in auditions attended by Jobs and other Apple executives that Apple pulled them from the presentation, according to the person, who declined to be named for fear of alienating both companies.

“How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked the Valley.” — Brad Stone, Douglas MacMillan, Businessweek

More #longreads from Stone

[Fiction] A home-schooled minotaur enters high school and learns to adjust: 

At the mall a lady offers me a free sample of zit cream and I’m about to be all sarcastic, like “Look, lady— I’ve got a giant bull’s head. No one’s going to notice a few zits.”

But there’s something about the way she’s smiling at me, not a plastic fantastic artificial airbrushed smile like all the ladies on the magazines, that draws me up short and makes me smile back at her (have you ever seen a bull smile? It took me years of practice to get my lips to curl just right) and yeah, I know she’s been trained in the fine art of zit cream sales but either she’s the best actress in the world or she’s the nicest person in the world and either way my heart just melts. Zits or no zits, suddenly I know this year is going to be different.

“I Was a Teenage Minotaur.” — A.G. Pasquella, Joyland

See more #fiction longreads

Who is “Gary Jones”? An investigation into how a hacker may have stolen nude photos for a “revenge porn” site:

Is it really so easy to hack a Gmail account? See for yourself: Go to the Gmail login screen and click on the frequently ignored link underneath the sign-in menu, ‘Can’t access your account?’ Three options appear; choose ‘I forgot my password.’ Type in a Gmail address—any active Gmail address—and if there’s a phone number associated with the account, you’re given three more options, one of which is ‘Get a verification code on my phone.’ You don’t even need to know the phone number. Just hit ‘continue’ and an unrelated six-digit code will appear in a text to the account owner’s phone. Type in that verification code—a number easily obtained by a masquerading e-impostor—and you’re in. The first thing you’re prompted to do is immediately change your password, thereby blocking out the original owner.

In other words, if a hacker knows only your Gmail address and can figure out how to access your phone, he’s already most of the way into your shit.

“‘Gary Jones’ Wants Your Nudes.” — Camille Dodero, The Village Voice

More #longreads from Dodero

Whitney Houston was destined to become as revered as her godmother, Aretha Franklin, before drugs and a toxic marriage caused her to hit rock bottom. A look at the pop icon’s rise and fall, and her final days, when it looked like Houston was going to make a comeback:

[Clive Davis] enlisted Diane Warren to create songs for a new album. Warren tells me that she put herself in Houston’s mind when she wrote a song about struggle and rebirth, entitled ‘I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.’ As soon as Whitney heard the lyrics—’I thought I’d never make it through, I had no hope to hold on to I was not meant to break’—she told Warren that she’d written her life.

But Warren and David Foster weren’t sure that Whitney had the vocal strength to sing it. In the end, she not only sang it, says Warren, ‘she sang the shit out of it.’ According to Gary Catona, 75 percent of Whitney’s vocal strength had returned by the time of her appearance at the American Music Awards in November 2009. When she came onstage in a white gown, singing the Warren song, the crowd leapt to its feet. ‘The buzz was: Holy shit!’ says Warren. ‘It was one of the best performances I’d ever seen. It was: Whitney is back!’

“The Devils in the Diva.” — Mark Seal, Vanity Fair

More #longreads from Seal