The Longreads Blog

What it’s like to be a bisexual man in a world that wants you to choose between being either gay or straight:

Recently, on OKCupid, a woman messaged me: “Are you truly into ladies, and if so, what type? Finding a truly bi man is like finding a unicorn.”

If I’m a unicorn where I live now, in L.A., then I was a unicorn rocky mountain oyster when I moved to the old rustbelt city of Syracuse, New York to go to grad school and live for the first time as a fully out bi man. There was one other mythical bi man in the entire city, but try as I might, I never found him. At the gay bar, I sometimes got called a “half-breeder.” Straight people treated me just as shittily as they treat gay people. Three times, gay men hit me in the back of the head when they saw my head turn for a women. For the most part, straight women wouldn’t date me because, as one said, “You’re just gonna leave me to go suck a dick.” For the first time in my life, frat boys called me fag. My professor said, “The world just isn’t ready for gay marriage.” I emailed him “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Then I went out with friends and my gay friends didn’t know what to do because I got drunk and flirted with a lesbian. A friend said she thought bi people didn’t exist. I said, “I’m sitting right here,” because that was my answer, but I was starting to believe her. I stopped telling people what I was. I let people think what they wanted, which was usually that I was like them.

“Notes From a Unicorn.” — Seth Fischer, The Rumpus

See also: “Teaching Good Sex.” — Laurie Abraham, The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 16, 2011

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg Businessweek, Reuters, Popular Science, City Pages Minneapolis, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Jason Boog.

Filmmaker Kunle Afolayan is looking to push the boundaries of moviemaking in Nigeria—but it’s still too early to know whether the audiences can support a film with even a $500,000 budget:

Twenty years after bursting from the grungy street markets of Lagos, the $500 million Nigerian movie business churns out more than a thousand titles a year on average, and trails only Hollywood and Bollywood in terms of revenues. The films are hastily shot and then burned onto video CDs, a cheap alternative to DVDs. They are seldom seen in the developed world, but all over Africa consumers snap up the latest releases from video peddlers for a dollar or two. And so while Afolayan’s name is unknown outside Africa, at home, the actor-director is one of the most famous faces in the exploding entertainment scene known — inevitably — as “Nollywood.”

On a continent where economies usually depend on extracting natural resources or on charity, moviemaking is now one of Nigeria’s largest sources of private-sector employment.

“A Scorsese in Lagos: The Making of Nigeria’s Film Industry.” — Andrew Rice, New York Times Magazine

More film #longreads: “I Watched Every Steven Soderbergh Movie.” — Dan Kois, Slate, Sept. 14, 2011

Reading List for 'Uncovering the Cover Story' with Longreads and The New Republic

Reminder! We’ll be in D.C. next Wednesday, Feb. 29 for a special night with The New Republic at Busboys and Poets. It’s a free event, and you can RSVP on the Longreads Facebook page. 

“Uncovering the Cover Story” will feature The New Republic’s Rachel Morris, Eliza Gray, Alec MacGillis, Timothy Noah and Editor Richard Just.

Want some #longreads to check out beforehand? Here’s a reading list: 

• Eliza Gray, Assistant Editor: “The Collector.”

• Alec MacGillis, Senior Editor: “The Guy Who Fires You: What voters really think about Romney’s wealth.” and “Temperamental Journey: The peculiar anger of Mitt Romney.”

• Timothy Noah, Senior Editor and TRB columnist: “The Mobility Myth: Why everyone overestimates American equality of opportunity.”

A weeklong investigation to discover who created the Twitter account that spits out “context-free nonsense” and in doing so has now amassed more than 40,000 followers and a devoted fanbase:

The feed’s strangely poetic stream has been embraced like a life-preserver by internet users drowning in a sea of painfully literal SEO headlines and hack Twitter comedians. Since it appeared in August 2010, word of Horse_ebooks has spread steadily, propelled by blog posts and Twitter chatter by internet obsessives. But unlike many internet culture phenomenons, it never truly went viral. Horse_Ebooks is too weird, too much of an acquired taste to break into exponential growth.

But these same qualities that have relegated Horse_ebooks to relative obscurity have inspired a passionate Twitter fanbase rivaled only by Beliebers. Followers have fashioned an elaborate fandom based on Horse_ebooks, comics, fan-fiction, merchandise, and inside-jokes. A browser plug-in that turned the text of any website into Horse_ebook-isms was the latest craze among fans. A characteristic Horse_ebook superfan boast is: ‘I unfollowed Horse_ebooks, because my friends retweet all its tweets anyway.’ We’re so deep into Horse_ebooks, you couldn’t escape it if you tried.

“How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot.” — Adrian Chen, Gawker

More from Chen: “The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers.” — Gawker, Jan. 25, 2012

Featured: The Days of Yore. See some of their interviews with writers and creators like Jo Ann Beard and Shawn Ryan, plus picks from The Los Angeles Review of Books, FSG’s Work in Progress, plus more on their #longreads page.

A review of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, and a different perspective on the dark side of Steve:

Sometimes the repetition serves a purpose: The drug LSD, referred to 33 times, is clearly important to Jobs. (The FBI thought the same, according to documents released this month.) “How many of you have taken LSD?” Jobs taunts an audience of Stanford business school students. “Are you a virgin? How many times have you taken LSD?’ he demands of an Apple interviewee. Bill Gates would ‘be a broader guy if he had dropped acid.” Tripping was “one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life.” People who had never dropped acid ‘would never fully understand him.’ The generations that followed his own were more ‘materialistic’ and less ‘idealistic’ for not having tripped; also, they all looked like ‘virgins.’ In the binary world within Steve’s reality, having consumed LSD was the key determinant of whether a colleague or employee was deemed “enlightened” or “an asshole.”

To iSummarize: Steve Jobs had a litmus test for evaluating workers: It was a lot like a literal litmus test.

“The Book of Jobs.” — Moe Tkacik, Reuters

See more #longreads about Steve Jobs

Inside the making of the social network for programmers—which now has 1.3 million users and more than 2 million source code repositories:

At first, GitHub was a side project. Wanstrath and Preston-Werner would meet on Saturdays to brainstorm, while coding during their free time and working their day jobs. “GitHub wasn’t supposed to be a startup or a company. GitHub was just a tool that we needed,” Wanstrath says. But — inspired by Gmail — they made the project a private beta and opened it up to others. Soon it caught on with the outside world.

By January of 2008, Hyett was on board. And three months after that night in the sports bar, Wanstrath got a message from Geoffrey Grosenbach, the founder of PeepCode, a online learning site that had started using GitHub. “I’m hosting my company’s code here,” Grosenbach said. “I don’t feel comfortable not-paying you guys. Can I just send a check?”

“Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software.” — Robert McMillan, Wired

See also: “Why Software is Eating the World.” — Marc Andreessen, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20, 2011

Featured Longreader: Sara Blask, communications manager for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. See her story picks from Texas Monthly, Smithsonian magazine, plus more on her #longreads page.

More than 100 police officers from 18 different agencies accessed the driver’s license records of Rasmussen, a former officer. She’s now suing for invasion of privacy:

Rasmusson’s lawsuit, which will be filed in the coming weeks, alleges that not only was her privacy compromised, but that her story is merely a symptom of a larger culture of data abuse by police. Her attorneys charge that while police are trained to use the driver’s license database for official purposes only, in reality it’s more like a Facebook for cops.

The agencies involved have maintained that this is an isolated incident. But one officer, who would not use his name for fear of further discipline, says that the practice is commonplace.

“I get Anne’s side of it,” he says. “But every single cop in the state has done this. Chiefs on down.”

“Is Anne Marie Rasmusson Too Hot to Have a Driver’s License?” — Jessica Lussenhop, City Pages

See also: “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” — Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times, July 21, 2010