The Longreads Blog

Meet Martin, the I.T. guy who’s helped everyone from drug dealers needing to dodge wiretaps, to restaurants looking to inflate their Foursquare numbers:

If you’ve seen that episode of The Wire, you know principle behind Martin’s system: ‘Burners,’ prepaid cell phones drug dealers use for a short time then abandon to thwart wiretaps. Prepaid phones have become so associated with drug trafficking and crime that New York Sen. Chuck Schumer wants to require an I.D. to buy one. (Martin said if I.D.s were required he could still run his business ‘but I would probably charge triple because I’d have to make fake I.D.s’)

But burners can be a pain. For maximum security, phones need to be switched as often as possible—a top Cali cartel manager was once reported to use 35 cell phones a day. Martin’s system makes it easy for a crew to switch all their phones rapidly.

“The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers.” — Adrian Chen, Gawker

See also: “The Hacker is Watching.” — David Kushner, GQ

Personal recollection of a life about to be transformed, from one day to the next:

In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.

“The Fourth State of Matter.” — Jo Ann Beard, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996

See also: “Chicago Christmas, 1984.” — George Saunders, The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2003

Featured Longreader: Jacqueline Frances’s #Longreads page. See her story picks from Vogue, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, plus more.

Former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum jumps from the traditional publishing world to “the dark side,” heading up Amazon Publishing. Meanwhile, the Big Six watch closely:

Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Jeff Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores. He’s also got almost infinitely deep pockets for spending on advances to top authors. Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. On the West Coast people cheerfully call this kind of arrangement coopetition. On the East Coast it’s usually referred to as getting stabbed in the back.

“Amazon’s Hit Man.” — Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek

More from Stone: “The Omnivore.” — Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 28, 2011

One man’s quest to determine if human beings can be — and have ever been — swallowed alive by whales:

If, I’ll pretend for a moment, you were swallowed, it would happen like this: You would first be chewed. Sperm whales’ teeth are 8 inches long – longer than most blades in your knife drawer. Then you would be gulped to the fauces, the back of the mouth, and forced down. Here is where Bartley apparently touched the quivering sides of the throat. You would also touch the throat, perhaps claw at the sides of the throat like you would sliding down an icy slope. There would be no air, and you’d suffocate in acid and water, but, we’re saying, you somehow survive. Imagine a black and mucous-smothered tube sock slipping over you.

You would then enter the first stomach, coined by 19th century naturalist Thomas Beale as the holding bag. It’s lined with thick, soft and white cuticle. At 7 feet long by 3 feet wide and shaped like a big egg, the first stomach would easily fit you. If you were kept in the holding bag for over 24 hours, you would likely be joined by squid, but a coconut or shark might come, too. Most squid that sperm whales swallow are bioluminescent — the neon flying squid is a favorite. So in no time at all you’d be bathing in a pool of phosphorescence, a slew of green-yellow light winking around you like you were standing in a field in Maine come July when all the fireflies are sparking up. The rest would be black, very black.

“Swallowed by a Whale — a True Tale?” (Ben Shattuck, Salon)

See also: “Blood in the Water.” — Tim Zimmerman, Outside, July 18, 2011

Capital New York covers last night’s “Behind the Longreads” event with New York magazine, and tells writer Dan P. Lee’s story about how he reported his “Travis the Menace” story:

Lee, in a striped grey-and-black hoodie and a mop of dirty blonde hair that matched his five o’clock shadow, was participating in a panel discussion convened by the longform journalism aggregator Longreads. Sitting on a riser beside fellow New York writers Jessica Pressler and Wesley Yang, as well as the magazine’s editor in chief, Adam Moss (Lee’s story editor, David Haskell, was sipping a beer on the sidelines), the former newspaper reporter gave the hundred or so assembled Longreaders the story behind the story of “Travis the Menace.”

It began when Lee saw the Nov. 11, 2009 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” during which Nash revealed her disfigured face for the first time. 

Even though the story had already been widely covered in the press, “I felt like there was still something else there,” he said. “It was the most compelling thing I had ever seen in my entire life.”

“The Story Behind the Story of ‘Travis the Menace’.” — Joe Pompeo, Capital New York

The harsh working conditions inside factories that make products for Apple:

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

“If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.

“Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad.” — Charles Duhigg, David Barboza, The New York Times

Previously: “Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class.” — Charles Duhigg, Keith Bradsher, The New York Times

See also this #Audiofiles story: “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” This American Life, Jan. 6, 2012

Featured Longreader: Derek Preston’s #longreads page. See his story picks from Smithsonian Magazine, London Review of Books, Tehelka, plus more.

The emotional and financial challenges in providing assisted living for parents, who are now living longer: 

Since then, Daddy’s long goodbye has drained his retirement income and life savings of more than $300,000. Where’s that money gone? Assisted living, mostly. Of course, that amount doesn’t account for his medical bills, most of which have been paid by Medicare and insurance policies that were part of his retirement. Daddy’s income—Social Security, plus monthly checks from two pensions—pays for the facility where he lives, his taxes, his life insurance policy premiums, and such incidentals as a visiting podiatrist to clip his nails.

And he has been kicked out of two hospices for not dying.

“The Long Goodbye.” — Doug Monroe, Atlanta Magazine

See also: “When Are You Dead?” — John Sanford, Stanford Medicine Magazine, March 29, 2011

Reflecting on the bonds between women, often overlooked or underappreciated, and how these bonds will help the writer in her time of need:

I made friends with a group of women. I was 22, and all three women — one American, one German, and one Argentinian – were 30 years older than I and had worked for the same organization in various administrative capacities for the length of time I’d been alive. After one lengthy, boozy dinner of fondue and buckets of white wine, they quickly took me into their friendship fold and jokingly referred to themselves as ‘the Wrinklies.’ We met once a week for dinner, and saw one another every day at the espresso machine in the hallway, in the fabulously lush cantina, on the expertly-tended grounds of our superluxe office building outside the city limits. We had inside jokes and secret looks. We gave each other little gifts: a cookie, a note, a bar of chocolate, a little token of affection spotted at a shop and slipped underneath an office door.

“The Power of Female Friendship.” — Emily Rapp, The Rumpus

See also: “All the Young Girls.” — Mary H.K. Choi, New York Times, Nov. 17, 2010