Featured Longreader: Peter Axtman, public relations associate. See his story picks from Gizmodo, ESPN, The Village Voice, plus more on his #longreads page.
The Longreads Blog
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In the 1940s, U.S. doctors led experiments that intentionally infected thousands of Guatemalans with venereal diseases. A closer look at how it happened, and who knew:
John Cutler, the young investigator who led the Guatemalan experiments, had the full backing of US health officials, including the surgeon general.
“Cutler thought that what he was doing was really important, and he wasn’t some lone gunman,” says Susan Reverby, a historian at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, whose discovery of Cutler’s unpublished reports on the experiments led to the public disclosure of the research.
“Human Experiments: First, Do Harm.” — Matthew Walter, Nature
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[Not single-page] The secret life of Manoj Bhargava, whose 5-Hour Energy caffeine and vitamin shot has rung up more than $1 billion in sales:
Bhargava, 58, is so under the radar that he barely registers on Web searches. His paper trail is thin, consisting primarily of more than 90 lawsuits. This is his first press interview. “I’m killing it right now,” he says, adjusting a black zip-up cardigan from behind the table of a soulless conference room in a beige low-rise building in a suburban business park in Farmington Hills, Mich. “But you’ll Google me and find, like, some lawyer in Singapore.”
Vague and inscrutable is how Bhargava likes things. The names of 5-Hour’s parent company, Living Essentials LLC, and that company’s parent firm, Innovation Ventures, are purposely bland. “They were intended as placeholders, and they stuck,” he says, smiling.
“The Mystery Monk Making Billions With 5-Hour Energy.” — Clare O’Connor, Forbes
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[Fiction, not single-page] A father, his sons, and what he teaches them:
When we got home from school Paps was in the kitchen, cooking and listening to music and feeling fine. He whiffed the steam coming off a pot, then clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly. His eyes were wet and sparkled with giddy life. He turned up the volume on the stereo and it was mambo, it was Tito Puente.
“Watch out,” he said, and spun, with grace, on one slippered foot, his bathrobe twirling out around him. In his fist was a glistening, greasy metal spatula, which he pumped in the air to the beat of the bongo drums.
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Featured Longreader: Emily Keeler, books editor at The New Inquiry. See her story picks from The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The New York Review of Books, plus more on her #longreads page.
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A brief history of “library porn”:
Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magik by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form—the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera—are, of course, well known.
“Checking Out.” — Avi Steinberg, The Paris Review
See also: “The Story of the ‘Story of O’.” — Carmela Ciuraru, Guernica, June 16, 2011
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An artist recreates Gettysburg with a lifelike cyclorama—and the painting changes how many people viewed the battle:
“No person should die without seeing this cyclorama,” declared a Boston man in 1885. “It’s a duty they owe to their country.” Paul Philippoteaux’s lifelike depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg was much more than a painting. It re-created the battlefield with such painstaking fidelity, and created an illusion so enveloping, that many visitors felt as if they were actually there.
For all its verisimilitude, though, the painting failed to capture the deeper truths of the Civil War. It showed the two armies in lavish detail, but not the clash of ideals that impelled them onto the battlefield. Its stunning rendition of a battle utterly divorced from context appealed to a nation as eager to remember the valor of those who fought as it was to forget the purpose of their fight. Its version of the conflict proved so alluring, in fact, that it changed the way America remembered the Civil War.
“The Great Illusion of Gettysburg.” — Yoni Appelbaum, The Atlantic
More Atlantic: “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, Dec. 4, 2011
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The early days of robots. The Age of Enlightenment inspired inventors like Jacques de Vaucanson to create ever more realistic machines that mimicked human behavior:
Vaucanson, however, was less a philosophical theorist than a practical, even greedy businessman. In 1739, as profits from the Flute Player’s performances began to decline, he added two new automatons to his exhibit. One was a pipe-and-drum player. The other—which was to make him, for a time, one of the most famous men in Europe—was a mechanical duck.
And not merely a wind-up duck that flapped its wings and quacked and turned its head. If you held out a bit of food in your palm, the duck’s head would lower, its beak would fall open, and the automaton would actually gulp down the morsel. And then, some minutes later—Reader, I am not making this up—the duck would excrete it.
“Man as Machine.” — Max Byrd, Wilson Quarterly
See also: “Robots That Care.” — Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker, Nov. 2, 2009
Photo: Joost/Flickr
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A kung fu master looks for new disciples to pass on his wisdom:
Dr. Yang had never had difficulty attracting students in the past—YMAA, the Boston-based organization he founded in 1982, operates more than 60 martial arts schools worldwide—but after more than 25 years, Dr. Yang was growing tired of doling out his ancient teachings piecemeal. If he died, only fragments of that knowledge would survive.
His dream was to transfer his entire legacy to a new generation in one fat chunk. But the legacy—white crane kung fu—was locked in his sinews, and the transfer would take time: 10 years, by his estimate, at the rate of six days per week. At the end of 10 years, Dr. Yang would be in his 70s and at the end of his ability to teach kung fu. It’s this urgency that explained the almost neurotic vigor he brought to his search for worthy disciples. He couldn’t risk investing effort in anyone who might bow out before the training was complete.
“Dr. Yang’s Fight Club.” — Oliver Broudy, Tin House
See also: “Fighting + Otherwise.” — Neil Chamberlain, The Classical, Dec. 7, 2011
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Featured Longreader: Writer Megan Buskey’s #longreads page. See her story picks from Christianity Today, The Nation, Killing the Buddha, plus more on her #longreads page.

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