The Longreads Blog

[Fiction] A student juggles the present and the future:

The future is messy. Scott’s senses feed him all possible futures at once. He’s learned to wander only a few seconds ahead. That’s close, but it’s still not normal. This man, though, is a relief to his senses. He makes everything clean. Scott wonders for how long he can ogle the man and if he’ll ever walk by the room again. He untethers his senses, and the future rushes in.

Thirty seconds from now, the man, when he turns to leave, will see Scott juggling. He will rip the flyer he posted off of the bulletin board. The dorm room door will bounce against the closet wall when he knocks on it. A boom will punctuate the bounce. The man will stare at the door, chagrined. Scott finds him even more like a teddy bear from the front.

“Thirty Seconds from Now.” — John Chu, Boston Review

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Has political parody in Russia turned Vladimir Putin into a national joke?

Putin, who says that he does not use the internet, seemed unaware that much of the fear that he generated in his first decade in power has evaporated in the past year. Provoked by allegedly falsified results in the December Duma elections, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest against Putin’s decision to stand for a third presidential term in the election of 4th March. (He purported to stand aside in 2008 in taking the role of Prime Minister.) If he had been more connected with Russia’s fast-growing online culture, he would have known that by comparing the protestors’ white ribbons to condoms (as he did in the same phone-in), and metaphorically inviting his opponents to come to him to be hypnotised, suffocated and consumed, he was only offering himself up to the ridicule of the satirists who have played such a large role in the nation’s sudden political change of mood.

“With My Little Eye.” — Rachel Polonsky, Prospect

See also: “The Civil Archipelago.” — David Remnick, The New Yorker, Dec. 19, 2011

Inside CEO Dick Costolo’s efforts to perfect the company’s revenue model and compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars:

Twitter still makes money with licensing deals—Microsoft pays to get a real-time feed of tweets for its search engine, Bing. But Costolo firmly established the company’s primary identity as a communications tool that lets advertisers contribute content along with other users free of charge—and then pay extra to make their messages more prominent. The centerpiece of Twitter’s plans, what Costolo calls “the atomic unit of our ad strategy,” is the “promoted tweet,” a message from an advertiser that appears near the top of a user’s feed. Advertisers pay only when a user “engages” with the tweet—retweets it, say, or clicks on a link. The more people click on an ad, the more the ad appears. Twitter executives trumpet an engagement rate of 3 percent to 5 percent, compared with less than 0.5 percent for normal banner ads.

“Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn’t Die.” — Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek

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Featured: E.’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The Village Voice, The Atlantic, Deadspin, plus more.

(Not single-page) A writer recalls the disappearance of her adopted cat, and links the event to other experiences of loss in her life.

Six months after Gattino disappeared my husband and I were sitting in a restaurant having dinner with some people he had recently met, including an intellectual writer we both admired. The writer had considered buying the house we were living in and he wanted to know how we liked it. I said it was nice but it had been partly spoiled for me by the loss of our cat. I told him the story and he said, ‘Oh, that was your trauma, was it?’

“I said yes. Yes, it was a trauma.

“You could say he was unkind. You could say I was silly. You could say he was priggish. You could say I was weak.

“Lost Cat.” — Mary Gaitskill, Granta, 2009

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A 2010 profile on the big media dreams of Andrew Breitbart, who died early Thursday morning at age 43:

Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism. “He’s a Marxist,” Breitbart says of Obama. “His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.”

“The Rage Machine.” — Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, May 24, 2010

Africa is changing—but when it comes to conflict, the battles are smaller, messier and not necessarily driven by a specific purpose:

This is the story of conflict in Africa these days. What we are seeing is the decline of the classic wars by freedom fighters and the proliferation of something else—something wilder, messier, more predatory, and harder to define. The style of warfare has shifted dramatically since the liberation wars of the 1960s and 1970s (Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau), the cold-war wars of the 1980s (Angola, Mozambique), and the large-scale killings of the 1990s (Somalia, Congo, Rwanda, Liberia). Today the continent is plagued by countless nasty little wars, which in many ways aren’t really wars at all. There are no front lines, no battlefields, no clear conflict zones, and no distinctions between combatants and civilians, which is why the kind of massacre that happened near Niangara is sadly common.

“Africa’s Dirty Wars.” — Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Review of Books

See also: “Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy.” — David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2011

Featured: Journalist and globetrotter Ana Lopez. See her story picks from The New York Times’s Pam Belluck, The Atlantic’s James Fallows, The Guardian, plus more on her #longreads page.

Jeremy Lin’s sudden stardom has also put the spotlight on how Asian Americans are viewed in the U.S.:

Not since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has there been so much national discussion about the appropriateness of discussing race. The 2008 election set the groundwork for an aggressive sort of colorblindness — as long as you voted for Barack and/or can celebrate, say, Jackie Robinson, you now have the right to flag down anything that might shake us from our post-racial dream. Statements like “I see everybody equally, therefore everyone should just talk about him as a basketball player” and accusations of “playing the race card” have become even more ubiquitous. And although the former signals a nice sentiment, it also provides convenient cover for those of us who benefit most from the status quo, regardless of race. Yes, Jeremy Lin became Linsanity because he has been playing at a level that has recalibrated expectations of any obscure player. And yes, there’s nothing more tiresome than a long-winded meditation on a basketball player, especially if he’s clearly been hijacked to promote some other agenda. But to strip Jeremy Lin of his status as the Great Yellow Hope not only seems dishonest and lazy, it also deprives the community he represents — willfully or not — of the unabashed joy of seeing one of its own succeed in the most improbable arena.

“A Question of Identity.” — Jay Caspian Kang, Grantland

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Khalid Shaikh helped create the file-uploading company YouSendIt. After battling with the CEO, he was fired—and he soon launched a series of cyberattacks:

In Shaikh’s absence, YouSendIt had continued to grow. It had raised an additional $14 million in VC funding and had 100,000 paying subscribers. Still, Shaikh marveled at how often YouSendIt’s site went down. He had even sent a tip about one of the outages to Valleywag, an industry gossip blog, which ignored his e-mail. If YouSendIt’s servers were still running the way he had left them, he believed, the site wouldn’t be crashing. At YouSendIt, Shaikh had been the subject of what he calls ‘senseless, mindless pressure’ to keep the servers running. Now, no one seemed to care.

So, on a chilly Tuesday morning in December, Shaikh ran a piece of testing software, called ApacheBench, that flooded YouSendIt’s servers with traffic. The servers keeled over immediately. Later that day, a sentence appeared on YouSendIt’s Wikipedia page: “Looks like the company may be out of business, their site is down.”

“The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge.” — Burt Helm, Inc. magazine

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