Reading List: Summertime and the Reading Is Easy

Five stories about summer from The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Flavorwire, The Paris Review, and Autostraddle.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 7, 2014

Twilight of the Pizza Barons

On the divergent legacies of the Domino’s and Little Caesars founders— two Detroit titans with different visions of what their companies mean to the city.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jul 3, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,730 words)

Perdition Days

Esmé Weijun Wang writing for The Toast on her experience with psychosis: “Let’s note that I write this while experiencing psychosis, and that much of this has been written during a strain of psychosis known as Cotard’s delusion, in which the patient believes that she is dead. What the writer’s confused state means to either of us is not beside the point, because it is the point. The point is that I am in here, somewhere: cogito ergo sum.”

Source: The Toast
Published: Jun 25, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,434 words)

Dealers Inject Business School Basics In Selling Heroin

Heroin dealers catering to affluent suburban addicts have shifted their operations from back-alley deals in shady parts of town to delivery on demand at downtown offices, high-end malls and suburban homes. But as the heroin business branches out from sketchy back-alleys, tactics have also changed. Now, drugs are marketed, dealers are trained, and the whole operation has been injected with MBA-style techniques.

Source: USA Today
Published: Jul 2, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,377 words)

The Heart You Save Won’t Be Your Own

A young social worker fights Medicare to cover a homeless teenage boy’s medication, forfeiting her own idealism in the process.

Published: Jun 5, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,581 words)

The Camorra Never Sleeps

For years before they caught him, the Italian police had no idea that Paolo Di Lauro was one of Naples’s most powerful crime bosses, running a drug and counterfeit-goods empire—and responsible for a peace his turf had rarely known. Writing for Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche goes deep into heart of the Neapolitan mob’s most dangerous family, revealing the chaos that followed the fall of a patriarch.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: May 1, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,900 words)

Stand Down

The victims of police shootings are often people with mental illness. Memphis, Tennessee may have a solution.

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Jul 1, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,796 words)

The Truth About Tinder and Women Is Even Worse Than You Think

Reporter Nick Summers on what he discovered when he first covered Tinder—a company now embroiled in a sexual harassment and discrimination case involving one of its co-founders. “What gives these allegations even greater sting is Wolfe’s contention that she was not just any employee but a Tinder co-founder—and was stripped of the designation as a result of the treatment she endured.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jul 2, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,813 words)

Without You I’m Nothing

Molotkow takes a closer look at the memoirs of rock stars’ ex-lovers—from Cynthia Lennon to Angie Bowie. “‘The truth is that if I’d known as a teenager what falling for John Lennon would lead to,’ read ‘John’’s final lines, ‘I would have turned round right then and walked away.’ Aside from the living death of losing her husband abruptly and in public, Cynthia never recovered the life she could have had without him.”

Source: The Believer
Published: Jul 2, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,135 words)

Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats

Barry Grass reflects on the pain of rooting for a cursed team. “Each year it is another variation on the same theme: ‘This is Our Year’ or ‘Is This Our Year?’ or ‘Can the Royals Win it All?’ or ‘Our Time’ or ‘How Good are these Royals?’ or ‘How Good are these Royals’ or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No.”

Published: Jul 2, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,537 words)