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“Film Studies.” — David Thomson, Narrative Magazine (Free/Login required)

“Bill & Hillary Forever.” — John Heilemann, New York magazine

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Boss Rail

Longreads Pick

A high-speed train crash in China unravels years of corruption in the building of the world’s most expensive public-works project:

“Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had no choice but to visit the crash site and vow to investigate. ‘If corruption was found behind this, we must handle it according to law, and we will not be lenient,’ he said. ‘Only in this way can we be fair to those who have died.’ People didn’t forget Wen’s pledge as the first deadline for the investigation came and went, and they continued to demand a fuller accounting. At last, in December, authorities released an unprecedented, detailed report. It acknowledged ‘serious design flaws,’ a ‘neglect of safety management,’ and problems in bidding and testing. It also blamed fifty-four people in government and industry, beginning with Great Leap Liu. The Minister’s name became a byword for ‘a broken system,’ as the muckraking magazine Caixin called the Railway Ministry, a testament to the political reality that, as Caixin put it, ‘since absolute power corrupts absolutely, the key to curbing graft is limiting power.’ When I spoke to an engineer who worked on the railway’s construction, he told me, ‘I can’t pinpoint which step was neglected or what didn’t get enough time, because the whole process was compressed, from beginning to end.’ He added, ‘There is an expression in Chinese: when you take too great a leap, you can tear your balls.'”

Author: Evan Osnos
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 15, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,124 words)

An Iraq war veteran becomes blind during combat, and learns how to live on:

When the doctors told him the blindness was irreversible, he felt a rage and despair that made him feel like his head would explode.

Castro began therapy a week after waking up, and he only halfheartedly endured the rehab sessions with a 6-foot-tall girl he called ‘Katie the Physical Terrorist.’ The first time she asked him to stand, he couldn’t. He could barely lift a one-pound dumbbell.

Evelyn tried to focus him on the positives. Obliterated as his body was, his brain was OK — remarkable considering that traumatic brain injury, or TBI, has become the trademark of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and that thousands of soldiers sent to Walter Reed had to battle it. But in a way Castro wished he’d not been spared, because an intact brain meant the other thing he could actually see was exactly how much his life had been ruined. He’d ask, ‘What kind of man can I even be?’

“Blind Ambition.” — Brandon Sneed, ESPN The Magazine

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Texas MonthlyVanity Fair,Outside MagazineNarrativelyThe New York Review of Books, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Catherine Kustanczy.

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Paul Auster opens up about his life and work:

Academics theorize endlessly about Auster and his literary motivations, labeling him everything from a New York Jewish hunger artist to a clever semiotician whose every decision — down to the color of the notebook his protagonists choose to write in — is fraught with symbolism. Auster dismisses most of this as academic overanalyzing, usually with a hidden agenda.

‘So many of these people have a point of view, a position, and are trying to articulate this position by using me as an example. But I myself, living within myself, never try to put labels on what I do. I just follow my nose.

‘I’m a man of contradictions, you know; I can’t say any one thing about myself. Yes,’ he says with a laugh, ‘I’m the hunger artist who likes to eat.’

“The Solitude of Invention.” — Stacey Kors, Columbia Magazine

More from Columbia Magazine

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: GQ, Allure magazine, The Rumpus, 5280 Magazine, New York Magazine, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Scott Young.

Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level:

By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just know you were a pro-choice teacher who once gave $40 to save the endangered Rocky Mountain swamp gnat; they also could have a data firm sort you by what type of magazines you subscribed to and where you bought your T-shirts. The fifth source, the increasingly powerful email lists, track which blasts you respond to, the links you click on, and whether you unsubscribe.

In the past, this information has been compartmentalized within various segments of the campaign. It existed in separate databases, powered by different kinds of software that could not communicate with each other. The goal of Project Narwhal was to link all of this data together. Once Reed and his team had integrated the databases, analysts could identify trends and craft sharper messages calibrated to appeal to individual voters. For example, if the campaign knows that a particular voter in northeastern Ohio is a pro-life Catholic union member, it will leave him off email blasts relating to reproductive rights and personalize its pitch by highlighting Obama’s role in the auto bailout—or Romney’s outsourcing past.

“Inside the Obama Campaign’s Hard Drive.” — Timothy Murphy, Mother Jones

More from Tim Murphy

Inside the Obama Campaign’s Hard Drive

Longreads Pick

Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level:

“By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just know you were a pro-choice teacher who once gave $40 to save the endangered Rocky Mountain swamp gnat; they also could have a data firm sort you by what type of magazines you subscribed to and where you bought your T-shirts. The fifth source, the increasingly powerful email lists, track which blasts you respond to, the links you click on, and whether you unsubscribe.

“In the past, this information has been compartmentalized within various segments of the campaign. It existed in separate databases, powered by different kinds of software that could not communicate with each other. The goal of Project Narwhal was to link all of this data together. Once Reed and his team had integrated the databases, analysts could identify trends and craft sharper messages calibrated to appeal to individual voters. For example, if the campaign knows that a particular voter in northeastern Ohio is a pro-life Catholic union member, it will leave him off email blasts relating to reproductive rights and personalize its pitch by highlighting Obama’s role in the auto bailout—or Romney’s outsourcing past.”

Author: Tim Murphy
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Oct 2, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,417 words)