The Longreads Blog

Researchers have worked for years to develop a prosthetic limb controlled by the brain or myoelectric activity. For now, many still prefer the old prosthetics that use centuries-old technology:

Watching the arm intently as it goes through these motions, Lehman imagines his missing arm moving in the same way. This focused mental exercise triggers neuromuscular activity in his stump that the electrodes pick up. A cell-phone-sized computer velcroed onto the sling behind Lehman’s shoulder correlates the arm’s vocabulary of motions to Lehman’s desires. The hand pinches closed, Lehman tries to tell his missing hand ‘pinch,’ and the computer remembers the muscle activation that his thought engenders. He has to go through this routine every time he straps on the arm because the sensors never end up in exactly the same place. Lehman’s stump changes from day to day, too. He sweats. His skin stretches. His muscles swell and shrink. And, more fundamentally, Lehman’s brain changes. Tomorrow he might visualize his arm movements differently.

“A True Bionic Limb Remains Far Out of Reach.” — Michael Chorost, Wired

See also: “Soldiers Take One Step at a Time with Prosthetic Limbs.” — John Pekkamen, Washingtonian, Aug. 1, 2011

An explainer on Google’s challenges with privacy, its competition with Facebook and Twitter, and two big questions: Is search no longer central to its mission? And are Google’s recent moves “evil” by its early company standards? 

It’s hard to understand how Google could screw up its core product like that. But there’s a remarkably simple explanation: Search is no longer Google’s core product.

One Googler authorized to speak for the company on background (meaning I could use the information he gave me, but not directly quote or attribute it) told me something that I found shocking. Google isn’t primarily about search anymore. Sure, search is still a core product, but it’s no longer the core product. The core product, he said, is simply Google.

“The Case Against Google.” — Mat Honan, Gizmodo

See also: “Confessions of Google Employee No. 59.” — Douglas Edwards, Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2011

Exploring the life and work of the Czech playwright, politician and philosopher:

‘I approach philosophy somewhat the way we approach art,’ Havel once confessed. Despite his lack of method, he took a reading of Heidegger and a handful of homegrown metaphors and set forth in his writing powerful ideas about politics, truth and human nature. Havel believed that under communism and capitalism, people are threatened by what he described in his 1984 essay ‘Politics and Conscience’ as ‘the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power—the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.’ He coined a word for this power, samopohyb, which his graceful and sensitive longtime translator, Paul Wilson, believes is derived from samopohybný (‘self-propelled’). Wilson has rendered the word variously as ‘self-momentum’ and ‘automatism.’

“Havel’s Specter: On Václav Havel.” — Caleb Crain, The Nation

See also: “The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician.” — James Ryerson, Lingua Franca, July 1, 2001

Photo: Prague-Life

Inside the social media factory created by former Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti—how they’ve cracked viral content, invested in original content, and made money: 

At around 5 p.m., Stopera published ‘48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s’ on BuzzFeed. ‘These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!’ he wrote at the top of the list. A BuzzFeed visitor with an appetite for ’90s nostalgia could scroll down, gawk at the 48 retro images, read the deadpan captions, recall Bob Saget, Tipper Gore, and Scottie Pippen, laugh at the crazy fashion, and resurface to the present day in a matter of minutes. It racked up 1.2 million page views.

“BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?” — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Can CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen Turn Viral Funny into the Future of TV?” — Adam Sternbergh, New York magazine, Dec. 13, 2010

Inside the making of a hit pop song—or hundreds of them. Stargate and Ester Dean are a producer-“top-liner” team that helps write hits for stars like Rihanna:

“The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—’taking control … never die tonight … I can’t live a lie’—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been ‘writing’ in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.

“The Song Machine.” — John Seabrook, The New Yorker

See also: “Daniel Ek’s Spotify: Music’s Last Best Hope.” — Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 12, 2011

Featured Longreader: Martin Eiermann, managing editor at The European Magazine. See his story picks from Rolling Stone, GQ, More Intelligent Life, plus more on his #longreads page.

They helped overthrow Qaddafi, and now “women want what is due to them”:

Until the war broke out, women generally were forced to keep a low profile. Married women who pursued careers were frowned upon. And Qaddafi’s own predatory nature kept the ambitions of some in check. Amel Jerary had aspired to a political career during the Qaddafi years. But the risks, she says, were too great. “I just could not get involved in the government, because of the sexual corruption. The higher up you got, the more exposed you were to [Qaddafi], and the greater the fear.” According to Asma Gargoum, who worked as director of foreign sales for a ceramic tile company near Misrata before the war, “If Qaddafi and his people saw a woman he liked, they might kidnap her, so we tried to stay in the shadows.”

“Women: The Libyan Rebellion’s Secret Weapon.” — Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian

See also: “What I Lost in Libya.” — Clare Morgana Gillis, The Atlantic, Dec. 1, 2011

The stories of Daniel Murphy and Ben Zucker, two participants in Occupy Wall Street who are still looking to define what the movement is all about: 

At 23, Zucker has the organizing gene. He’s a fresh graduate of Tulane University, where he studied public health to get a foot in the door of social justice work, and his family lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, just inside the Beltway. He once spent a semester running a health program in Senegal, and upon his return, he got involved with a protest by dining services workers. Zucker, who was hooked after first swinging by McPherson in early October, represents the liberal side of the movement. He wants universal health care and federal takeovers of big banks, and he thinks Occupy Wall Street is a good way to make it all happen.

That’s a sharp contrast with Murphy, a Long Beach native who earned his high school diploma in 2004 but never graduated. At 17, he was sentenced to more than two years in the California Youth Authority for stabbing three people at a coffee shop after his friend was punched.

“The Occupiers: A Liberal and a Radical Struggle for the Soul of a Movement.” — Andrew Katz, The Atlantic

See more #longreads on #OWS

Gravity at the End of the World

[Fiction] Two couples, living in a “Yooper town,” dreaming of a better life:

Craig is sweet and smarter than he or anyone else gives him credit for. After a long day of work, he smells like sweat and sap. He likes to read Decadent literature, especially Oscar Wilde. I’m the only one who knows that. He doesn’t hate himself for being a Yooper boy dating a Yooper girl working a Yooper trade. We’ve been together for eleven years, since we were sophomores in high school. We had a baby once, a little girl named Emma. She had his eyes and his dimples and my smile and my temper. She died when she was four and a half—got sicker than we knew was possible and needed the kind of help people like us can never afford. Craig asks me to marry him every month or so but I don’t know how to say yes in a world where our child isn’t alive. I don’t know how to say no either. I tell him soon.

“Gravity at the End of the World.” — Roxane Gay, Knee-Jerk

See more #fiction #longreads

10 Great Reads About the Senses

10 Great Reads About the Senses