The Longreads Blog

David Kushner’s new book explores the origins of the infamous videogame, which began as a straitlaced driving simulation:

By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor.

When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through traffic lights, a persnickety programmer reminded him that the stop lights needed to be obeyed. Were they building a video game or a train set? Even worse, the pedestrians milling around the game created frustrating obstacles. It was almost impossible to drive fast without taking people down, and, because the player was a cop, he had to be punished for hit-and-runs.

“Excerpt: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto.” — David Kushner, Gamespot

See also: “Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?” — Joshuah Bearman, New York Times, Nov. 13, 2009

Featured Longreader: Author Danyel Smith. See her story picks from Bloomberg News, The Atlantic, Esquire, plus more on her longreads page.

Photojournalist Tyler Hicks on his last trip into Syria with New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid, who later died:

The ammunition seemed evidence of the risk we were taking — a risk we did not shoulder lightly. Anthony, who passionately documented the eruptions in the Arab world from Iraq to Libya for The New York Times, felt it was essential that journalists get into Syria, where about 7,000 people have been killed, largely out of the world’s view. We had spent months planning to stay safe.

It turned out the real danger was not the weapons but possibly the horses. Anthony was allergic. He did not know how badly.

“Bearing Witness in Syria: A Correspondent’s Last Days.” — Tyler Hicks, The New York Times

See also: ”4 Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality.” — Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks, The New York Times, March 22, 2011

Brendan I. Koerner's All-Time Favorite #Longreads

Brendan I. Koerner’s All-Time Favorite #Longreads

The true story of the case that helped change the legal landscape for gay rights in the U.S.: 

The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his decisive majority opinion, it was even about the physical dimension of love: “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” The opinion used the word ‘relationship’ eleven times.

That is the story that Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, seeks to untell in his important new book, “Flagrant Conduct” (Norton), a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really got to know, and back again through centuries of laws criminalizing “unnatural” sexual activity. What if, Carpenter asks, this weren’t a story about love, or even sex?

“Lawrence v. Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional.” — Dahlia Lithwick, The New Yorker

Previously: “The Making of Gay Marriage’s Top Foe.” — Mark Oppenheimer, Salon, Feb. 8, 2012

Judt’s widow Jennifer Homans reflects on her husband’s life and the making of his last book:

I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a two-year ordeal, from his diagnosis in 2008 to his death in 2010, and during it Tony managed against all human odds to write three books. The last, following “Ill Fares the Land” and “The Memory Chalet,” was “Thinking the Twentieth Century,” based on conversations with Timothy Snyder. He started work on the book soon after he was diagnosed; within months he was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, but he kept working nonetheless. He and Tim finished the book a month before he died. It accompanied his illness; it was part of his illness, and part of his dying.

“Tony Judt: A Final Victory.” — Jennifer Homans, New York Review of Books

See also: “The Forgiveness Machine.” — Tim Adams, Guardian, April 10 2011

How the TED conference exploded in popularity—spawning a host of competitors, copycats and aspiring TED talkers:

Until recently, the universal self-­actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who upload webcammed soliloquies about whatever and title them things like “My TED Talk.” There’s now even a genre of meta–TED Talks. For a TEDActive talk in 2010, Sebastian Wernicke, a statistician, crunched the data of extant TED Talks to reverse-engineer both the best- and worst-possible talks. Elements common to the most popular TED Talks, he determined good-humoredly, included using certain words (“coffee,” “happiness”), feeling free to “fake intellectual capacity and just say et cetera et cetera,” and growing your hair long. He created an app, the TEDPAD, a kind of TED-omatic that can generate “amazing and really bad” TED Talks.

“Those Fabulous Confabs.” — Benjamin Wallace, New York magazine [Not single-page]

See more #longreads by Benjamin Wallace

For years, doctors attempted to create artificial hearts that mimicked the real heart—using methods that recreate blood pumping. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier instead developed a continuous-flow device that has worked on calves and some humans, including patient Rahel Elmer Reger:

The little quilted backpack held two lithium-ion batteries and the HeartMate II’s computerized controller, which are connected by cable through a hole in Reger’s side. Needless to say, she has never left her backpack on a bus. “My cousin once disconnected me, though, by mistake,” she said. “I was showing her how to change the battery. She disconnected one, and then—I was distracted for a second—the other. I yelled, ‘You can’t do that!’ and then passed out. The device blares at you. She reconnected it, and I came back. I was probably out for 10 seconds. She was completely freaked out.”

“No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart.” — Dan Baum, Popular Science

See more #longreads from Popular Science

A New York Chinese restaurant loses a former member of its kitchen staff—who then opens his own, very similar restaurant. Inside the legal battle:

In essence, the suit claimed, they’d tried to become Mr Chow—the Invasion of the Body Snatchers of haute Chinese cuisine. “They want to not just clone me, they want to take the whole thing,” Mr. Chow testified on the stand, sporting his trademark owlish glasses and a bespoke Hermés suit. “They want to wipe me—just replace me completely, including my personal identity.”

“Chow vs. Chow: The Story of an Epic New York City Food Fight.” — Aaron Gell, New York Observer

See also: “Takeout Story: Behind Bulletproof Glass and Out on a Bike for a Chinese Restaurant in Mott Haven.” Kevin Heldman, Capital New York, Oct. 24, 2011

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Inc. Magazine, Mother Jones, New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Michael Roston.