The Longreads Blog

Doyle approached him and said, “Do you know there’s a retired number in Williams football?”

“Williams doesn’t retire numbers,” Quinn replied.

“Apparently it does,” Doyle said.

On the Monday after that game Quinn called Boyer and asked, “Williams has a retired football number?”

“I don’t know about retired,” Boyer said, “but there’s this box down here.

“The Forgotten Hero.” — Tim Layden, Sports Illustrated

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Orion Magazine, The New York Times, GQ, Business Insider, McSweeney’s, plus a guest pick by sportswriter Ben Cohen.

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Orion Magazine, The New York Times, GQ, Business Insider, McSweeney’s, plus a guest pick by sportswriter Ben Cohen.

Featured Longreader: Peter Smith, contributing editor at GOOD. See his story picks about engineering perfume products, illegal immigration, commercial fisherman and more on his #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Peter Smith, contributing editor at GOOD. See his story picks about engineering perfume products, illegal immigration, commercial fisherman and more on his #longreads page.

More people now recognized the Winklevosses as either themselves or a recently cloned Armie Hammer, and Felipe assumed the proprietary grandeur of a Victorian circus impresario before some engagingly deformed beast. “These are the ones who came up with the idea for the Facebook, but had it stolen from them,” he explained to one and all, in Spanish. “But don’t ask them that. If you do, they might get offended.”

The Mexican soccer team defeated America 4–2, a victory sweetened by the presence of a compound American marvel, Harvard-pedigreed, Hollywood-certified, flesh-made-celluloid, celluloid-made-flesh. They signed autographs, received party invitations, and posed for iPhone pictures with locals who examined the photos as soon as they got their phones back, finger-zooming in and out with awe of self, child-like, fleetingly possessed of the primitive wonder which ascribes photography directly to magic, and once inspired fear of Xerox machines, and keeps the millions wondering why they can’t stop staring at a Web site whose greatest debt will always be to Pavlov.

“The Code of the Winklevii.” — Dana Vachon, Vanity Fair

See #longreads about Facebook

More people now recognized the Winklevosses as either themselves or a recently cloned Armie Hammer, and Felipe assumed the proprietary grandeur of a Victorian circus impresario before some engagingly deformed beast. “These are the ones who came up with the idea for the Facebook, but had it stolen from them,” he explained to one and all, in Spanish. “But don’t ask them that. If you do, they might get offended.”

The Mexican soccer team defeated America 4–2, a victory sweetened by the presence of a compound American marvel, Harvard-pedigreed, Hollywood-certified, flesh-made-celluloid, celluloid-made-flesh. They signed autographs, received party invitations, and posed for iPhone pictures with locals who examined the photos as soon as they got their phones back, finger-zooming in and out with awe of self, child-like, fleetingly possessed of the primitive wonder which ascribes photography directly to magic, and once inspired fear of Xerox machines, and keeps the millions wondering why they can’t stop staring at a Web site whose greatest debt will always be to Pavlov.

“The Code of the Winklevii.” — Dana Vachon, Vanity Fair

See #longreads about Facebook

It’s easy to turn away. It’s much easier than looking directly. He walks quickly with his head down, arms stiff at his sides. Or he paces the room and is unable to stop. Unable to stop making repetitive motions and sounds, fragments of sentences, noises that have no connection to the context (screech, yelp, pop, clap). He hits himself in the head. Stupid. Retard. When strangers come, he keeps to the corners, twitching and grinning wide, but unable to approach. It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for him, for them, for myself. A brave stranger holds out his hand and walks toward Micah slowly, speaking evenly, as if he were a stray dog let into the house. My father says, amused, “Say hi, Micah.” Micah grins like a stray dog let into the house.

“Eyes Like Lithium.” — Danielle Cadena Deulen on her brother’s autism in The Iowa Review, Utne Reader

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It’s easy to turn away. It’s much easier than looking directly. He walks quickly with his head down, arms stiff at his sides. Or he paces the room and is unable to stop. Unable to stop making repetitive motions and sounds, fragments of sentences, noises that have no connection to the context (screech, yelp, pop, clap). He hits himself in the head. Stupid. Retard. When strangers come, he keeps to the corners, twitching and grinning wide, but unable to approach. It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for him, for them, for myself. A brave stranger holds out his hand and walks toward Micah slowly, speaking evenly, as if he were a stray dog let into the house. My father says, amused, “Say hi, Micah.” Micah grins like a stray dog let into the house.

“Eyes Like Lithium.” — Danielle Cadena Deulen on her brother’s autism in The Iowa Review, Utne Reader

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While Gates’ vaccine-based giving—closing in on $6 billion to fight measles, hepatitis B, rotavirus and AIDS, among others—is part of the largest, most human-driven philanthropy in the history of mankind, what’s missing in his language are the individual ­humans.

In many ways that’s the point. Gates’ clipped manner in discussing the children he and his wife met in India and Africa (“Melinda and I spend time with these kids, and we see that they’re suffering; they’re dying”) disappears when the underlying numbers come up, his speech getting more rapid, his voice ever higher. “A 23-cent vaccine,” he says, “and you’ll never get measles,” a disease that “at its peak was killing about a million and a half a year; it’s down below 300,000.” Gates rattles off milestones in the history of global health and the prices of vaccines down to the penny, but blanks on the name of one of his favorite vaccine heroes, John Enders, the late Nobel laureate, or Joe Cohen, a key inventor of the new malaria vaccine Gates helped bankroll.

“With Vaccines, Bill Gates Changes The World Again.” — Matthew Herper, Forbes

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