The Longreads Blog

Featured Longreader: Matt O’Rourke’s curated #longreads page, @fuckyesreading. See his story picks from Wired, The New York Times, BOMB magazine, This Recording, and more.

A Minnesota school district enacts a policy designed to stop teachers from discussing or acknowledging homosexuality. Gay students report bullying, but administrators do nothing. The result is a string of suicides that has shaken the community:

Sam’s death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a ‘suicide cluster,’ adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion; suicidal thoughts had become catchy, like a lethal virus. “Here you had a large number of suicides that are really closely connected, all within one school district, in a small amount of time,” explains Reidenberg. “Kids started to feel that the normal response to stress was to take your life.”

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied.

“One Town’s War on Gay Teens.” — Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone

See also: “The Story of a Suicide.” — Ian Parker, The New Yorker

An inside look at the operational challenges facing United and Continental as they merge—from the union negotiations to the choice of in-flight coffee:

On July 1 the new United introduced its new coffee. Fliers on the ‘legacy United’ fleet, accustomed to Starbucks, let out a collective yowl of protest. Pineau-Boddison had expected some resistance—Starbucks, after all, is a popular brand—but this was something else. Flight attendants reported a barrage of complaints. Pineau-Boddison received angry e-mails from customers, as did Smisek. The coffee, fliers complained, was watery.

The beverage committee launched an inquiry. The coffee itself, they discovered, was only part of the problem. Airplane coffee is made from small, premeasured ‘pillow packs’ that sit in a brew basket drawer at the top of the galley coffee machine. When the drawer is closed, boiling water flows through the pillow into the pot below. The old United brew baskets, the committee discovered, sit a quarter of an inch lower than Continental’s, leaving a space for water to leak around the pillow pack.

“Making the World’s Largest Airline Fly.” — Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Ask the Pilot.” Patrick Smith, Salon, May 15, 2009

Excerpt from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Pulphead,” on his brother’s electrocution, and what it did to his brain: 

On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Ellsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and in the strict sense of having been ‘shocked to death,’ was electrocuted. He and his band, the Moviegoers, had stopped for a day to rehearse on their way from Chicago to a concert in Tennessee, where I was in school. Just a couple of days earlier, he had called to ask if there were any songs I wanted to hear at the show. I asked for something new, a song he’d written and played for me the last time I’d seen him, on Christmas Day. Our holidays always end the same way, with the two of us up late drinking and trying out our new ‘tunes’ on each other.

“Feet In Smoke.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, Deadspin

See also: “Pulp Fever: Interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan.” — Daniel Riley, GQ, Nov. 3, 2011

The latest #deepinterviews from Kevin Smokler’s #Longreads Page: Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Pete Hamill, plus more.

Can a pet change the life of a boy born with fetal alcohol syndrome?

Chancer sometimes heads off tantrums before they start. If a tutor or a therapist has worked with Iyal in the dining room a bit too long, Chancer moves between the visitor and the boy, clearly relaying: We’re done for today. From two floors away, he will alert, flicking his ears, tuning in. Sensing that Iyal is nearing a breaking point, he gallops up or down the stairs to find him, playfully head-butts and pushes him down to the floor, gets on top of him, stretches out and relaxes with a satisfied groan. Helplessly pinned under Chancer, Iyal resists, squawks and then relaxes, too. The big dog lies on top of the boy he loves, and seals him off from the dizzying and incomprehensible world for a while.

“Wonder Dog.” — Melissa Fay Greene, New York Times

See also: “Can the Bulldog Be Saved?” — Benoit Denizet-Lewis, New York Times, Nov. 22, 2011

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s path from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to Washington—where he and the Obama administration have been forced to retreat on many of their alternative energy plans:

On a cold morning in mid-November, Chu was hauled into a committee room on Capitol Hill. The hearing was the spectacle of the week, and the GOP lawmakers kept Chu—the only witness—in his chair for five and a half hours. “You’re a very bright man—much brighter than I am. I know you didn’t leave your brain at the door,” Virginia freshman Morgan Griffith growled. Chu’s hands shook slightly as he handled the edges of his prepared testimony.

By the time we spoke a month later, Chu seemed to have survived the experience, though not without some bitterness; the hearing, he told me, ‘was not the high point of what I wanted to do with my time.’ Still, the whole affair had cast a harsh light on a scientist turned policymaker for whom things had not gone as planned, even before the Solyndra bankruptcy. The president who brought him to Washington three years ago had promised nothing less than an environmental revolution, and Chu was supposed to be at its center, presiding over the most dramatic expansion of the clean energy industry the federal government had ever attempted. Now Chu may have no choice but to preside over its similarly dramatic retreat.

“The Experiment.” — Charles Homans, The New Republic

Previously:  “Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust.” — Juliet Eilperin, Wired

[Fiction] The story of a couple’s life, in 11 places:

They stand on a rock ledge beside the shore, boy and girl, leaning together, their bare shoulders touching, as the adults unfold and arrange cots. Her father watches them as he sips from his bottle, though, and he knows what the night means. He calls the boy’s name—hey, Will, c’mere!—and the invitation is a command. The girl squeezes Will’s fingers as he leaves her side. When he’s gone the mother comes and places an arm around her daughter, whispering, and the lake whispers back, expectant, and through the giant cottonwood trees on the far shore an orange and lunatic moon hides in the branches.

“Eleven Beds.” — William Harrison, Missouri Review (Sept. 1, 2002)

See more #fiction #longreads

Featured Longreader: Patrick Doyle, executive editor at Boston Magazine. See his story picks from the magazine, plus more on his #longreads page.

The New York Observer covers our “Behind The Longreads” event with New York magazine:

“It’s somehow thrilling and somewhat unbelievable that there is now a thriving community of lovers of long-form periodical nonfiction,” Mr. Moss told a packed audience of readers and—judging by the technical specificity of the question-and-answer session—fellow writers at Housing Works Bookstore.

“Longreads is an especially gratifying corrective to the comments I read at NYMag.com complaining that anything over 400 words is too long and therefore necessarily boring,” Mr. Moss said.

“The Long and Short of New York Magazine’s Longreads.” — Kat Stoeffel, New York Observer