The $30 Million Clinkle Mystery

The story of a 21-year-old Stanford grad who wowed investors with a demo and raised $30 million for a mobile payments service. He soon lost scores of employees, and the company still hasn’t released a product:

Says one former growth team member, “I never saw a direct demonstration of the product.”

The growth teams met ambitious goals by targeting the most influential students on campus, such as group presidents and fraternity and sorority leaders. The leaders were shown some images from the website, and the deal was sealed with a compelling prize: If the entire organization signed up for Clinkle’s waitlist, then all of them downloaded the app on the day it became available, the group could win a $500 party, spa visit or stereo-system package. None of the pitches included a demo of the actual app.

After July, Duplan had dictated that no one — including potential hires and even some employees — would be shown the app anymore.

Published: Apr 15, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,944 words)

Cell to Cell

How Smuggled Mobile Phones Are Rewiring Brazil’s Prisons:

On January 18, 2013, prison guards in the Brazilian city of Joinville rounded up a group of inmates and began torturing them. Over the course of four hours, the naked men were shot with rubber bullets and doused with pepper spray. In a video clip, the men are seen in the fetal position, waiting for the attack to end.

The prisoners’ counterattack was swift and deadly. Days after the video surfaced, prisoners organized attacks across the six-million-person state of Santa Catarina. The homes of prison officials, police stations, and public busses were all attacked. “Prisoners decided to orchestrate the attacks to call the attention of the population and authorities to issues of management in the prison system,” said Col. Nazareno Marcineiro, the commander of Santa Catarina’s military police.

Source: Motherboard
Published: Apr 14, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,300 words)

The 2014 Pulitzer Prize Winners: A Reading List

Story picks from this year’s winners, including The Washington Post, Colorado Springs Gazette and more.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 14, 2014

For Richard Family, Loss and Love

A family forever changed by the Boston Marathon bombings, one year later:

Bill, still in pain from an unsuccessful operation to repair his ruptured eardrums, continued to struggle making restaurant reservations for four and found himself instinctively grabbing five plates for dinner, having to put one back.

After a while, they were happy to see neighbors, but it wasn’t always comfortable. Some weren’t sure what to say to the Richards and felt strange talking about themselves, at times apologizing for carping about things that seemed so trivial by comparison, like a backache.

But Bill and Denise were buoyed by a steady flow of good will.

Author: David Abel
Source: Boston Globe
Published: Apr 13, 2014
Length: 54 minutes (13,683 words)

Font Wars

Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones were the boy wonders of the design world when they joined forces to form the type foundry Hoefler&Frere-Jones. For fifteen years their partnership seemed charmed, until it dissolved, with $20 million at stake.

Among those who draw letters for a living, Gotham is most notable for being the crowning achievement of two of the leaders of their tribe, Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler. The two men seemed to be on parallel paths since the summer of 1970, when they were both born in New York. Hoefler and Frere-Jones were already prominent designers when they began operating as Hoefler&Frere-Jones in 1999, having decided to join forces instead of continuing their race to be type design’s top boy wonder. Each would serve as an editor for the other, and they would combine their efforts to promote the work they did together.

Colleagues still struggle to explain what a big deal this was at the time. Debbie Millman, president emeritus of AIGA, the major trade organization for graphic designers, begins by comparing them to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, then stops. “They were famous before they got together, so that’s how they’re not like the Beatles. It’s more like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,” she says, before pausing again. “You know what—I’ll tell you what they were like. They were like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Apr 8, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,758 words)

The Last Hand-Me-Down: Retracing My Brother’s Life Through His Clothes

Molanphy reflects on an influential sibling, and the clothing that came with it:

Sister has to ring the bell twice our way to shut me up and freeze us before line-up. Paul’s shoes become my first chance at storytelling, and I love it. Even though my Mom offers me a new pair of shoes at the end of the month, I wear Paul’s shoes, pinching and painful but with pleasure, for the rest of the year.

Source: OutPost19
Published: Apr 13, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,652 words)

Suffering Children and the Christian Science Church

The unwillingness of many Christian Science parents to seek help from physicians for their critically ill children has led to many painful and unnecessary deaths and, increasingly, to legal actions that have become burdensome to the Church and its members:

On May 5 Detective Edwin Boehm, of the Paradise Valley Police Department, came to the house; he believes himself to have been the first person other than her parents to see Ashley in months. When I reached Boehm recently and asked him if he remembered Ashley King, he said, “You work on a case like that, you don’t forget it.” He said it had taken some time before he “gained entry,” because Catherine King at first refused to answer the door. He described seeing Ashley: “I knew first thing looking at her that she was dying.” He couldn’t see her leg, because “she had a pillow on it under the covers–she was hiding it.” He would eventually tell a grand jury, “She was extremely white, ashen colored–to be specific, death color.” The next day Child Protective Services received a court order allowing them temporary custody of Ashley for the purpose of medical examination.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Apr 1, 1995
Length: 46 minutes (11,542 words)

The Business of Books: A Reading List

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from The Atlantic, Vulture, The Rumpus, and Slate.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 13, 2014

Naked and Famous

A profile of photographer Ryan McGinley, whose work has influenced advertising, film, music videos, and Instagram:

One of McGinley’s portraits of McChesney—taken in the bathroom of a gay club into which he dragged a mini trampoline for her to bounce naked on—was used as the lead image for his Whitney show. In it, Lizzy is caught in midair, feet a blur, mouth caught in the earliest milliseconds of a smile. The background is bisected at her torso—from the waist down, it’s all graffıti, but from the waist up, it’s a celestial mural. Her head pops up between two spacecrafts; her breasts—obscured by her own wrist—look to be about Saturn-sized. Twelve years later, it’s still one of McGinley’s most collectable photographs. José Freire calls it “one of the most beautifully optimistic things you’ll ever see.”

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 10, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,028 words)

The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie

Sullivan searches for the real story behind two phantom voices that recorded songs for Paramount in the early 1930s:

No grave site, no photograph. Forget that — no anecdotes. This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on. The objects themselves — the fewer than 10 surviving copies, total, of their three known Paramount releases, a handful of heavy, black, scratch-riven shellac platters, all in private hands — these were the whole of the file on Geeshie and Elvie, and even these had come within a second thought of vanishing, within, say, a woman’s decision in cleaning her parents’ attic to go against some idle advice that she throw out a box of old records and instead to find out what the junk shop gives. When she decides otherwise, when the shop isn’t on the way home, there goes the music, there go the souls, ash flakes up the flue, to flutter about with the Edison cylinder of Buddy Bolden’s band and the phonautograph of Lincoln’s voice.

Published: Apr 12, 2014
Length: 55 minutes (13,953 words)