The Longreads Blog

Scientist Tyrone B. Hayes discovered a link between the herbicide atrazine and male frogs developing female body parts. His work led to a bizarre battle with atrazine manufacturer Syngenta, in which the two taunted each other over email:

When a batch of these emails became public in 2010, Hayes’ supporters and critics alike were stunned. Here was one of the top scientists in his field, provoking one of the world’s largest agrichemical companies with crude sexual innuendos and LL Cool J-inspired raps:

tyrone b hayes is hard as hell

battle anybody, i don’t care who you tell

you object! you will fail!

mercy for the weak is not for sale

“It hasn’t been productive in the debate, and it hasn’t helped him,” Skelly says. “I mean, why do that?”

“The Frog of War.” — Dashka Slater, Mother Jones

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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[Fiction] Life behind the cash register, and other possibilities: 

A proper mental Saturday it is, what with New Sue off with her hernia and the Lukes of Hazzard gone AWOL, so Muggins Here’ll have to cover for everyone else’s break. Not New Sue and Beverly are still giving me the silent treatment ‘cause I can’t let them take the bank holiday off, but it’s water off a duck’s back by this point. By ten o’clock the queues are looping back, and it’s like all Greenland’s one of those swilling dreams you get with ‘flu. Full of eyes, drilling into me. Philpotts can’t get close enough to fire off a ‘What are half your team doing without their name-badges, Pearl?’ but I need the loo – no chance, not ‘til all the breaks are over. This beardy customer’s spitting, ‘Twenty-three minutes I’ve been in this queue!’ I tell him, ‘It certainly is a busy morning’ so in he leans, breath all pilchardy, and says, “Then hire – more – staff!”, like I’m backwards, like Gary used to do sometimes.

“Muggins Here.” — David Mitchell, Guardian (Aug. 2010)

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Featured Longreader: Sarah Zhang’s #Longreads page. See her story picks from the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Slate.com, plus more.

[Not single-page.] Financial reform has been more successful at changing Wall Street’s business than many imagined—and the public outcry from Occupy and elsewhere has led to some soul-searching: 

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

“The End of Wall Street as They Knew It.” — Gabriel Sherman, New York magazine

See more #longreads about Wall Street

On making a move from the City to the South. Steven Boone and other New Yorkers have headed to Warner Robins, Georgia:

Like so many young black parents, she moved south not just to provide her children with a more secure environment but also to escape the punishing New York rents. In Warner Robins, entire homes in quiet areas rent for less than a single room in Bed Stuy. Townhouses on well-kept complexes, complete with pool and 24-hour gym access, go for as little as $450 a month and rarely higher than $850. In Macon, the college town next door (and geographically the true dead center of Georgia), gorgeous historic homes rent for as low as $400 a month and often no more than $650. (The local rumor is that, as lovely as the homes are, the ghosts in them insure frequent turnaround. Cool.)

This new wave of African-Americans heading south has been called the Second Great Migration or the Reverse Migration, in contrast to last century’s black exodus from a segregated, hostile South to opportunities in the North.

“A Reverse Migration from Post-Crack New York.” — Steven Boone, Capital New York

See also: “The Uprooted.” — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2010

A brief history of the cruise ship industry—from its early idealism to its evolution into “funships” for “Huggets”:

Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast fleet of tankers. In 1966 Kloster and Arison set up a company called Norwegian Cruise Lines based in Miami.

Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west – and the ‘third world’ which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly unequal distribution of global power.

So his cruise ships were going to remedy that.

“We’re All in the Same Boat—Aren’t We?” — Adam Curtis, BBC

See more #longreads about cruises

Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy:

That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had poured lighter fluid into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and stoked a bonfire for at least five hours. Had he burned evidence? Hennis did go voluntarily to the police station, but Bittle told me that this was a tactic regularly employed by a certain class of criminal. “Why do people rob banks? They think that others didn’t know how to do it right. That was Tim Hennis’s attitude: ‘You can’t get me. I am smarter than you are.’”

“Three Trials for Murder.” — Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker (Nov.14, 2011)

See more #longreads from Nicholas Schmidle

[Fiction] Pepa’s not afraid of anything:

For two weeks, her parents were gone, and during this time Pepa took care of her brother as she did when they were not in the jungle. She prepared meals. She went to the market and mopped the floors and fed the chickens, of course. She made sure that Kurt took a bath every day and helped him with his lessons. When her parents returned from the jungle, their clothes caked in red mud, their breaths smelling of hunger, Pepa washed their clothes, stomping and rinsing them over and over again, the water flowing red like blood. Then she made them a twelve-egg omelet, for the protein, and fed them mounds of rice and fried bananas. After the meal, which they ate dutifully and in silence, they slept for twenty-four hours straight.

“The Doctor’s Daughter.” — Anne Raeff, Guernica Magazine

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, a #fiction pick, plus a guest pick from @Kaisertalk.

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