Featured Longreader: Designer Sasha Lamb. See his story picks from The Quietus, Grantland, The Village Voice and more on his #longreads page.
The Longreads Blog
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In Amwell Township, your opinion of fracking tends to correspond with how much money you’re making and with how close you live to the gas wells, chemical ponds, pipelines and compressor stations springing up in the area. Many of those who live nearby fear that a leak in the plastic liner of a chemical pond could drip into a watershed or that a truck spill could send carcinogens into a field of beef cattle. (According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, 65 Marcellus wells drilled this year have been cited for faulty cement casings, which could result in leaks.) But for many other residents, including Haney’s neighbors, the risks seem small, and the benefits — clean fuel, economic development — far outweigh them.
On a Saturday morning in July 2011, Bill Hartley’s Styling Shop bustled with clients — a truck driver, a leaseholder, a landowner — all of whom profited from the gas boom. One was Ray Day, 64, a ginger-haired farmer, who, along with his brothers and sisters, owns nearly 300 acres of Amwell Township. Thanks to the money he received from allowing Range Resources to drill, build a compressor station and dig a chemical pond on his land, he has been able to reroof two barns, buy a new hay baler and construct an addition to his house for his 94-year-old mother. “I only buy something if I can pay cash,” Day said later. And he still has plenty of money left over. Was he planning a vacation, maybe to Florida? Day snorted good-naturedly. “Farmers don’t go to Florida,” he said.
“The Fracturing of Pennsylvania.” — Eliza Griswold, The New York Times Magazine
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Resuscitating a battered newsweekly in 2011 is a tough bit of business. Last year, The Daily Beast and Newsweek lost a combined $30 million. Ad page numbers tell how difficult it is, too: Newsweek’s ad page performance between April to September was down 18 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau quarterly report. This is easy to dismiss (what isn’t down these days!) — but Time is up 4 percent for the year, The Economist is flat and Newsweek is competing, year-over-year, against a version of itself that had an ownership change, a lame duck editor and a very uncertain future.
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There’s more to Sony’s problems than acts of God and currency traders. The maker of the Walkman and the Trinitron hasn’t driven pop culture for years. Sony thrived in an era of stand-alone electronics. When the Internet arose and digital began to mean connected, iPods became the center of people’s entertainment lives, then smartphones and tablets—which Sony was late to produce. Even the quintessential Sony product—the TV set—has become a millstone. Sony has lost nearly $8.5 billion on TVs over eight years and expects to keep losing at least into 2013. Samsung, Vizio, and other upstarts have driven prices so low that one Sony executive says the company charges less for some TVs than it cost to ship them a few years ago.
“What Is Sony Now?” — Bryan Gruley and Cliff Edwards, Bloomberg Businessweek
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Officials at the Second Mile, the charity for at-risk children that Sandusky founded and that prosecutors say he used to target victims, reported that several years of the organization’s records were missing and had perhaps been stolen. The missing files, investigators worry, may limit their ability to determine if Sandusky used charity resources — expense accounts, travel, gifts — to recruit new victims, or even buy their silence, according to two people with knowledge of the case.
And in 2002, after McQueary had reported what he had seen to the university’s senior officials, those officials not only never told the police, but they also never even informed the university’s top lawyer. That lawyer, Wendell Courtney, said in an interview this week that he would have been duty bound to report to law enforcement officials any allegations of inappropriate conduct toward children by Sandusky.
Most disturbingly, investigators continued to identify possible victims — young men who had been boys when Sandusky befriended them through his foundation for troubled youngsters.
“Inquiry Grew Into Concerns of a Cover-Up.” — Jo Becker, The New York Times
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[Fiction]
On Wednesday afternoon, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourthgrade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter — dazed and infrequent — sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see Mr. Hibler’s face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. I’l bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.”
“Gryphon.” — Charles Baxter, American Story
Photo via Flickr
Longreads Teams Up with Read It Later

Hi everybody. I wanted to share some quick personal news: In addition to my work on Longreads, I have joined Read It Later as an editorial advisor.
When I started Longreads two and a half years ago, one of the first people I met was a thoughtful, brilliant developer in San Francisco named Nate Weiner. He and I stayed in touch, and his app, Read It Later, in addition to being a beautiful complement to Longreads, has grown into a company that now helps nearly 4 million users save their favorite stories to “read later.” (You can get the free versions for iPhone/iPad and Android, or you can just sign up here.) He and I have always talked about ways we could do more together, and I’m thrilled to be representing from New York.
Of course, Longreads will continue as it always has, serving our growing community of readers, curators, authors and publishers, and continuing to improve our service. There’s obviously a lot that we’ll be able to build with the help of the Read It Later team, and their support means we can continue to grow. So that’s pretty exciting.
(For anyone who’s curious: Ever since I created #Longreads in 2009, I’ve operated the service alongside other content strategy work. So, yes, I’ll still have plenty of time to read.)
There’s some amazing stuff in the works, and Nate, the team and I share a strong belief in the importance of developing new ways to support and encourage those who create the best content on the web. I’m thrilled to be a part of a team that’s dedicated to that mission.
Thanks again to the incredible #Longreads community for all of your support.
-Mark
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Featured Longreader: Music blogger Damien Joyce. See his story picks from Bloomberg Businessweek, Nouriel Roubini, plus music stories on his #longreads page.
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As Congress and the president have acknowledged, the way to meet the flood of new patients coming down the pike is to expand the nation’s existing network of community health centers— nonprofit clinics that offer primary care to the medically under-served, often in rural areas or inner cities. But to get this done, there’s no need to appropriate billions more in direct government spending. Rather, there is a way to lure skittish banks into lending private capital to finance a health center construction boom in all fifty states, simply by tweaking the language of an existing federal lending program. Doing so would save money in the long run by providing cost-effective primary care to those who desperately need it. And it would quickly create tens of thousands of jobs, many of them in the hard-hit construction sector. Moreover, unlike the roads, bridges, and other complex infrastructure projects the Obama administration wants to fund, few of which are shovel ready, health center projects could get the hammers swinging in months, not years.
“Shovel-Ready Clinics.” — Jeffrey Leonard, The Washington Monthly
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In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a “force for good” — even for teenagers — this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States. “There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed,” said Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”
Across the country, the approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”
“Teaching Good Sex.” — Laurie Abraham, The New York Times Magazine
See also: “Exit Strategy.” The American Prospect. May 26, 2009
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