The Longreads Blog

Sam Brown, a soldier badly burned in an IED explosion in Afghanistan, undergoes an experimental treatment to ease his pain through a virtual reality game called “SnowWorld”:

When they first lowered the goggles over his eyes, Brown was not all that impressed. He found himself floating through a kind of glacial canyon, but the overall vibe was pretty kiddie. Snowflakes wheeled gently from a digital sky. Snowmen and penguins lined up on ledges along the fjord. The soundtrack was kind of lame, too. Kind of an upbeat chirpy world music, a catchy-against-your-will kind of thing that he’d never heard before. If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your loo-ong lost pal, the lyrics went.

But there was no question Sam felt very much inside this Disneyesque world on ice, and it was a hell of a lot better than being present while they yanked and pulled at his petrified shoulders. So he tried to get into the game. A few milligrams of Dilaudid didn’t hurt.

“Burning Man.” — Jay Kirk, GQ

See also: “Soldiers Take One Step at a Time with Prosthetic Limbs.” — John Pekkanen, Washingtonian, Aug. 1, 2011

Featured Longreader: Jaime Fuller, assistant web editor at The American Prospect. See her story picks from Washington Monthly, New York Review of Books, Esquire, plus more on her #longreads page.

A look at which alternative energy initiatives succeeded, which ones failed, and whether there’s hope for a rebound:

In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom.

Anyone who has heard the name Solyndra knows how this all panned out. Due to a confluence of factors—including fluctuating silicon prices, newly cheap natural gas, the 2008 financial crisis, China’s ascendant solar industry, and certain technological realities—the clean-tech bubble has burst, leaving us with a traditional energy infrastructure still overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels.

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

See more #tech #longreads

Pete O’Neal, 70, founded the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther party and once threatened to “shoot my way into the House of Representatives.” He fled the country in 1970, eventually landing in Tanzania:

Exile was supposed to be temporary. O’Neal corresponded with other Panthers and planned to return home to help lead the revolution. He watched from abroad as the party collapsed from infighting, arrests and an FBI campaign of surveillance and sabotage. People stopped talking about revolution. Radicals found new lives.

“O’Neal’s exile became permanent. His fury abated. Some of it was age. Some of it was Tanzania, where strangers always materialized to push your Land Rover out of the mud, and where conflicts were resolved in community meetings in which everyone got to speak, interminably.

“Former Black Panther Patches Together Purpose in Africa Exile.” — Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times

See also: “Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt: The Untold Story of the Black Panther Leader, Dead At 63.” — Kate Coleman, June 27, 2011

Featured Longreader: Sathyanarayanan Chandrasekar’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The Caravan Magazine, The New York Times, AlterNet, plus more.

On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident:

An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a conversation, and the recipient must accept the request. But Ravi had tweaked his iChat settings so that the program could automatically accept incoming calls. According to Ravi, he had made this his computer’s usual setting. Whatever the case, that evening the program was set to auto-accept; he also turned off his monitor, or darkened it to black. At 9:13 P.M., he was beside Wei at her computer. He opened iChat, and clicked his name on her chat list. A few feet away, his computer accepted his request, and Ravi and Wei saw a live video image of Room 30.

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

See also: “Want to Prevent Gay Teen Suicide? Legalize Marriage Equality.” — Steve Silberman, PLos, Sept. 30, 2010

[Fiction] A trip from the Jersey Shore to jail:

My usual connection wasn’t by the pier on the beach. It started to rain, so I pulled my shirt over my head and ducked under the pier. It stank like hell under there, like fish guts and piss. Thunder boomed and the sky tore open. It couldn’t last, though. These summer showers only run about 10 minutes. I was squeezing out my shirt when a homeless guy came up to me from out of the back.

“Hey, you smoke pot?” he asked. The man was hunched over and wasted. He looked like Keith Richards without a guitar.

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“Some guy was here and he dropped a bag by accident.”

“Motherfuckerland.” (Chapter One) — Ed Lin, Giant Robot

See more #fiction #longreads

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Wired, a #fiction pick, plus two guest picks from Jalees Rehman, Associate Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Photo: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr

Lawrence Egbert, a retired anesthesiologist from Baltimore, has been present for 100 suicides in the last 15 years. But he is more reluctant in his leading role, in contrast to the late Jack Kevorkian:

I ask Egbert how much helium it takes to kill a person. “I don’t know,” he says. He recommends buying 50-liter tanks. “I know we have two tanks, and we run them to zero. Until they stop hissing. … It’s better to have too much than too little.”

I find myself staring at one of the hoods, turning it over and over, trying to comprehend how someone could spend the final moments of life with this thing over his head. I tell Egbert that the hoods make me feel uncomfortable.

He responds in a reed-thin voice, with the manner of a country doctor: “I hope so.”

“The New Public Face of American Assisted Suicide.” — Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post

See also: “After Suicides, a Family’s Journey Toward Grace.” — Joshua Wolfson, Casper Star-Tribune

Inside Israel’s attempts to slow Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and whether it may ultimately take military action:

Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July 2010 to July 2011. One of his tasks was defense policy and strategy on Iran. When I spoke with Kroenig last week, he said: “My understanding is that the United States has asked Israel not to attack Iran and to provide Washington with notice if it intends to strike. Israel responded negatively to both requests. It refused to guarantee that it will not attack or to provide prior notice if it does.” Kroenig went on, “My hunch is that Israel would choose to give warning of an hour or two, just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.”

“Will Israel Attack Iran?” — Ronen Bergman, New York Times Magazine

More Bergman: “Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life.” — New York Times Magazine, Nov. 9, 2011