Featured Longreader: Christopher Butler, writer, reader, vice president of Newfangled.com. See his story picks from the New York Review of Books, Domus, Grist, plus more on his #longreads page.
The Longreads Blog
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James Erwin, a writer for software manuals in Des Moines, Iowa, responded to a Reddit thread wondering what would happen if the U.S. Marines battled the Roman Empire. His comments lit up the Internet:
The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes.
The section of Bagram where the 35th was gathered suddenly reappears in a field outside Rome, on the west bank of the Tiber River. Without substantially prepared ground under it, the concrete begins sinking into the marshy ground and cracking. Colonel Miles Nelson orders his men to regroup near the vehicle depot—nearly all of the MEU’s vehicles are still stripped for air transport. He orders all helicopters airborne, believing the MEU is trapped in an earthquake.
“How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big Budget Flick.” — Jason Fagone, Wired
See also: “Flick Chicks.” Mindy Kaling, New Yorker, Oct. 3, 2011
Introducing Travelreads: The Best Storytelling for the Best Places in the World, Presented by Virgin Atlantic

One of the coolest things about Longreads is when someone tweets:
“I’m at the airport about to fly to San Francisco / New York / London / India / Argentina. I need some #Longreads for the trip.”
This got us thinking: What if we started gathering the best #longreads for every destination in the world?
It’s a big job, so we might as well start now. Today we’re announcing the launch of Travelreads, a new channel curated by Longreads and presented by Virgin Atlantic to help you find and share the best stories about the best places in the world.
You can find Travelreads at Longreads.com/travelreads, and you can find our curated picks on Twitter and Facebook. Share your favorite stories by tagging them #travelreads, and tell us where you want to go next.
We couldn’t be more thrilled to team up with Virgin Atlantic for this new endeavor.
For those interested in the business side of this: With Travelreads, we’re creating a sponsorship model that serves both the Longreads community and Virgin Atlantic’s community, by doing what we do best—providing a service that finds the best stuff on the web and links directly to the original publishers’ work, on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Longreads.com. We think this approach works well for everyone in our community.
If you’re a brand and would like to work with Longreads, here’s more information on the services we provide. You can also drop a note to Joyce King Thomas, director of brand partnerships for Longreads.
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When do we really die? Is it when the heart stops—or is there a certain point that brain death means actual death? As we make advances in medicine, it’s raising new questions about what’s final. An excerpt from Teresi’s new book, The Undead:
Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh recalls making the rounds at a student teaching hospital with his interns in tow when he remembered that he had a patient upstairs who was near death. He sent a few of the young doctors “to check on Mr. Smith” in Room 301 and to report back on whether he was dead yet. DeVita continued rounds with the remainder of the interns, but after some time had passed he wondered what happened to his emissaries of death. Trotting up to Mr. Smith’s room, he found them all paging through “The Washington Manual,” the traditional handbook given to interns. But there is nothing in the manual that tells new doctors how to determine which patients are alive and which are dead.
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Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.
This week: Deborah Blum examine’s Buzz Bissinger’s “Shattered Glass,” which was originally published in Vanity Fair in Sept. 1998:
You might think that devious and uncooperative Glass would end up simply the evil counterpoint to the dauntless Lane. But Bissinger doesn’t cheapen the tale. One of the things that elevates this above a standard retelling of a sordid story is that the writer shows such a serious, almost nonjudgmental effort to understand what he comes to see as a very troubled child.
Bissinger does indeed end up on a street in Highland Park, pondering the influence of neighborhood and upbringing. He looks at old yearbooks, college newspapers, the history of Glass’s professional career. He talks to friends and former colleagues, (a few actually go on the record). And he puzzles with all of them over the destructive habits of “the sweet and nice boy, the hardworking boy who could never be what he wanted to be, the boy who couldn’t live up to the expectations he had inherited.”
“Why’s This So Good?” No. 34: Buzz Bissinger Trails A Fabulist
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[Not single-page] From the 2012 James Beard Award nominations: A profile of Sam Mogannam, who transformed his tiny family grocery store, San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market, into one the most influential stores in the country:
When Mogannam was 15 years old, the market was owned by his father and uncle. The Mission district hadn’t yet been discovered by a generation of tattooed 25-year-olds happy to stand in line for a $3 latte. Just up the street, Mission Dolores Park was popular with unemployed men who spent their days drinking fortified wine, some of which they bought at Bi-Rite. Though he was not yet old enough to drink, in 1983 Mogannam asked his father if he could remerchandise the wine department. He got rid of the Night Train Express, MD 20/20, and Ripple, and on the advice of the store’s wine reps brought in their strongest sellers—Sebastiani, Robert Mondavi, and Beaulieu Vineyard. The drunks found someplace else to shop, and Bi-Rite’s wine sales soared.
“Cornering the Market.” — Emily Kaiser Thelin, San Francisco Magazine
See also: “The Great Grocery Smackdown.” — Corby Kummer, The Atlantic, March 1, 2010
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A writer tries to figure out if he’s any smarter than he was at age 17:
Many times, I had to skip a question because I couldn’t figure out the answer, and then I got that paranoia that’s unique to someone taking a standardized test. I became fearful that I had failed to skip over the question on my answer sheet. So every five seconds, I’d double-check my sheet to make sure I didn’t fill out my answers in the wrong slots. One time I did this, and so I had to erase the answers and move them all forward. Only I had a shitty eraser, which failed to erase my mark and instead smeared the mark all over the rest of my sheet. FUCK YOU, TRICK ERASER. I HATE YOU.
“What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?” — Drew Magary, Deadspin
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A trip around Italy, from Venice to Lampedusa, and how immigration is changing Europe:
A mere five or six years ago, foreigners in Italy, and indeed in Europe, did not pose the problem they do today. Anti-immigration, and in particular anti-Muslim hysteria, intensified after the publication of controversial caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2005, assuming serious proportions with the onset of the recession in 2008. The people of Bari were supportive and helpful, because at the end of the nineteenth century millions of Italy’s poor emigrated from the city and from the province of Puglia to America, the promised land, where in a matter of two or three generations they became completely assimilated. Some hundred years later, Italy had become the promised land to some other immigrants.
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