The Longreads Blog

When Kruse IM’d Kim to see if she was done babysitting, no response came. But he didn’t expect one. The instant message was a cover. Kruse knew Kim had never made it to her job. She was right there in his house with him and Cam. Bound. Beaten. Raped. And, by the next morning, stuffed in his freezer. Dead.

Everyone knows teens live with abandon online—exposing their secrets, likes, dislikes, sexual preferences, home addresses, phone numbers, and so on—in ways their parents can’t understand. But it’s not just this generation’s sense of privacy that’s eroding. It’s their sense of permanence. They act as though the words they write and pictures they post and texts they send vanish into the ether. But in fact they’re leaving a running transcript behind, a digital trail of their hopes, their anxieties, and, in the case of at least one small Canadian town, even their crimes.

“Murder by Text.” — David Kushner, Vanity Fair

See more #longreads from Vanity Fair

Featured Longreader: Writer Elmo Keep. See her story picks from Wired, Foreign Policy, The Hairpin and more on her #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Writer Elmo Keep. See her story picks from Wired, Foreign Policy, The Hairpin and more on her #longreads page.

As the 1950s arrived, more teams starting signing African-Americans. A turning point came when the great Jim Brown, from Syracuse, joined the Cleveland Browns in 1957. Brown’s domination on the field was so thorough that all questions about the skills of black players were erased—except in the nation’s capital, whose team, Marshall said, would “start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.”

Washingtonians, it must be said, did not simply let all this go unremarked. Redskins fans, then as now, were among the most passionate in the league, and many ardent supporters among both the Georgetown set and the hoi polloi urged Marshall to rethink matters. Their view was given its strongest expression by Shirley Povich, the star Washington Post sportswriter. Povich (a man—Shirley was a male name as often as it was a female name in the early twentieth century) was Jewish and a native of Maine who originally moved to Washington to study law at Georgetown. He often wrote sentences like “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.” Marshall remained unmoved.

“The Racist Redskins.” — Michael Tomasky, The New York Review of Books

Also by Michael Tomasky: “Something New on the Mall.” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 22, 2009

As the 1950s arrived, more teams starting signing African-Americans. A turning point came when the great Jim Brown, from Syracuse, joined the Cleveland Browns in 1957. Brown’s domination on the field was so thorough that all questions about the skills of black players were erased—except in the nation’s capital, whose team, Marshall said, would “start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.”

Washingtonians, it must be said, did not simply let all this go unremarked. Redskins fans, then as now, were among the most passionate in the league, and many ardent supporters among both the Georgetown set and the hoi polloi urged Marshall to rethink matters. Their view was given its strongest expression by Shirley Povich, the star Washington Post sportswriter. Povich (a man—Shirley was a male name as often as it was a female name in the early twentieth century) was Jewish and a native of Maine who originally moved to Washington to study law at Georgetown. He often wrote sentences like “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.” Marshall remained unmoved.

“The Racist Redskins.” — Michael Tomasky, The New York Review of Books

Also by Michael Tomasky: “Something New on the Mall.” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 22, 2009

[Fiction]

Mother comes back one evening and she starts up at supper about feng shui, how our house isn’t organized for a happy life, how the front door should never line up with the back door like ours does – never. One of her colleagues in Parks and Recreation told her that.

They’re all dipshits down there, I said.

And the boy said, talking with his mouth full like he always does, That’s why you’re not supposed to have a crucifix in the bedroom. Is a cross the same as a crucifix? he says.

“Brass.” — Joy Williams, Granta

See more #longreads from Granta

[Fiction]

Mother comes back one evening and she starts up at supper about feng shui, how our house isn’t organized for a happy life, how the front door should never line up with the back door like ours does – never. One of her colleagues in Parks and Recreation told her that.

They’re all dipshits down there, I said.

And the boy said, talking with his mouth full like he always does, That’s why you’re not supposed to have a crucifix in the bedroom. Is a cross the same as a crucifix? he says.

“Brass.” — Joy Williams, Granta

See more #longreads from Granta

At CIA headquarters in Langley, one of the newest artifacts in the agency’s private museum is a message from a father to his 3-year-old son. The gold-embossed letterhead features a swastika and the name Adolf Hitler.

“Dear Dennis,” the seven-sentence letter begins. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”

“How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post

See more #longreads from The Washington Post

At CIA headquarters in Langley, one of the newest artifacts in the agency’s private museum is a message from a father to his 3-year-old son. The gold-embossed letterhead features a swastika and the name Adolf Hitler.

“Dear Dennis,” the seven-sentence letter begins. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”

“How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post

See more #longreads from The Washington Post

Groupon actually lost $413 million in 2010.

Diving into the S-1, it turned out that Groupon only considered itself profitable because it used a peculiar accounting metric of its own creation — adjusted consolidated segment operating income, or ACSOI.

Basically, Groupon was taking the money it was spending on advertising to acquire new subscribers to its email and not counting that money as a quarterly, recurring expense — but as a one-time, capital expense, the way Google might account for the cost of building a new server farm. 

Groupon was saying that ACSOI helped it figure out the ratio between the amount of money it needed to spend on marketing to acquire a subscriber and how much that subscriber would be worth to the company over the long haul.

But marketing expenses are not typically accounted for this way, and people looked at Groupon as though it were trying to pull a fast one.

“Inside Groupon: The Truth About The World’s Most Controversial Company.” — Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider

See also: “Groupon Therapy.” Vanity Fair, August 2011