Colten Moore Returns to the Mountaintop

The story of Caleb and Colten Moore—two talented brothers who competed in the X Games doing tricks on snowmobiles. After Caleb died in a competition, Colten had to learn to move on without his older brother, whom he looked up to all his life:

Wade was not enthusiastic about their desire to ride freestyle. They’d already spent so much time and money on racing and some of those stunts seemed so crazy. But soon Caleb had an agent who wanted to pay him to perform in arenas all over the world. The shows were full of pyrotechnics and heavy metal and, on occasion, monster trucks. And at every opportunity, Caleb would tell his agent about his little brother and all the fantastic tricks he could do. When he finally convinced someone to give Colten a shot, he then had to convince Colten that he could do it. Colten actually crashed in his first show, but Caleb was relentless with both his little brother and the promoters, and Colten eventually got another shot. Every time her sons left home, Michele would remind them to take care of each other.

Source: D Magazine
Published: Apr 1, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,417 words)

Shadows by the Sea

Fifteen years ago, a Charlotte woman was found shot to death on Bald Head Island. Her case has been reopened, but the mystery remains: Did Davina Buff Jones kill herself, or did someone else kill Davina Buff Jones?

The .40 caliber slug tears through the officer’s skull at nearly 700 miles per hour, shattering bone and ripping gullies into tissue.

It’s minutes before midnight, nine days before Halloween, 1999. Here, beneath the turret of North Carolina’s oldest standing lighthouse, 218 miles from her hometown of Charlotte, the officer takes her final breath.

When someone pulls the trigger on a handgun, it causes a small explosion inside the weapon. The explosion moves a piston that slams a tiny piece of metal, the firing pin, into a bullet. The force of the combustion creates pressure, sending a round hurtling through the barrel of the gun. The entire process takes just a fraction of a second.

How a pistol works is a matter of science and mechanics. It is established fact.

And it is one of the few details of Davina Buff Jones’s death that isn’t still a mystery.

Author: Adam Rhew
Published: Apr 1, 2014
Length: 35 minutes (8,857 words)

The Girls Next Door

In 2012, President Barack Obama said the fight against human trafficking was “one of the great human rights causes of our time.” So why are so many Colorado children still being exploited?

Lipstick kisses stain the corners of the mirror. Open tubes of mascara, a rainbow of eye shadows, and a warm curling iron cover the counter of the pink bathroom. T-shirts, skirts, and heels are scattered on the couch and spread along the floor of the basement. Sixteen-year-old Susie discards an entire pile of tops before settling on a cropped T-shirt, jeans, and wedges. Her naturally curly black hair is stick straight, her nails are freshly manicured, and her youthful olive skin needs no makeup. She hums along to some current mid-’90s radio hits—Mariah Carey, Tupac, Biggie—and helps a friend apply yet another layer of eyeliner, while the giggles and chatter of two other girls, ages 15 and 16, fill whatever space is left in the cramped room.

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: Apr 1, 2014
Length: 26 minutes (6,675 words)

How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying: The True Story of J.C. Penney (Member Pick)

This week, we’re thrilled to share a new Longreads Member Pick from Fortune magazine. “How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying” is Jennifer Reingold’s definitive account of what really happened inside J.C. Penney—from the dramatic reinvention of the company, led by new CEO Ron Johnson, to its disastrous unraveling (and Johnson’s firing) less than two years later.

Source: Fortune
Published: Apr 3, 2014
Length: 28 minutes (7,108 words)

Reimagining the Student Publication: Our College Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 3, 2014

The Trouble With Shaken Baby Syndrome

After three decades and thousands of accusations and fractured lives, medical and legal experts are challenging shaken baby syndrome as a diagnosis. And as one family’s saga demonstrates, we can’t wait any longer to get it right.

“Do you have identification?” Robyn asked the woman. No. “A court order?” The largest deputy in the group, maybe six-five, 250 pounds, placed his boot over the doorsill. I’m the court order, he said. They weren’t leaving without Eliana. Robyn scanned the street. At least five patrol cars lined the curb. Every home on the street glowed, the silhouettes of onlooking neighbors framed in the windows. After a 30-minute standoff—the deputies demanding entry into the house, the Felixes refusing—and after tearful phone calls to friends for advice, Robyn woke Eliana in her crib, bundled her, and passed the toddler to the caseworker. The child cried out for Nathan—“My daddy! My daddy!”—and disappeared into the backseat of the caseworker’s car.

Source: Seattle Met
Published: Apr 1, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,447 words)

Medellín: Latin America’s New Superstar

How Medellín went from crime-ridden cocaine capital to one of the world’s most innovative cities:

The Medellín Cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar, perhaps the only drug lord to become a worldwide household name, transported billions of dollars worth of cocaine, which had surpassed coffee as Colombia’s leading export by 1982. Arriving on U.S. shores, the exploits of cocaine cowboys made Miami the murder capital of the world in the early ’80s, an ignominious title Medellín itself stole in 1991, when it topped out at 381 murders per 100,000 residents, 40 times what the United Nations considers “epidemic.” That rate, if translated to New York

Source: Next City
Published: Mar 31, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,363 words)

Certifiable

How a squad of self-appointed experts quietly took over the billion-dollar autograph industry:

Today, few autographs are bought or sold without the blessing of either Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) or its competitor, James Spence Authentication (JSA). The two companies have come to dominate the market, verifying hundreds of thousands of signatures each year.

Business is so good that they use garbage cans to hold the cash they collect from reviews at hobby conventions. EBay, the world’s largest facilitator of memorabilia auctions, endorses both companies to its customers. Nothing seems beyond the scope of their expertise, from Frank Sinatra’s scrawl to baseballs defaced by Mickey Mantle.

Published: Mar 27, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,661 words)

The Talk

A new kind of sex ed for teenage boys includes having discussions about healthy relationships, sexual orientation, and how to trust, communicate, negotiate, and empathize:

Vanier was the first of five junior high schools across Calgary to host WiseGuyz, almost four years ago now. Principal Martin Poirier, a dapper man in a blue bow tie, tells me the younger students look forward to signing up in grade nine. Though the program is voluntary, some are encouraged to enroll, the ones who act inappropriately, or who seem immature and might need more confidence. “What these boys learn,” he says, “has an impact on the whole school. They become role models.”

The curriculum follows a carefully plotted schedule. After the unit on human rights and values, it moves on to the nuts and bolts: anatomy, sex, and contraception. The third unit focuses on gender and sexuality, and the course wraps up in the spring by addressing healthy relationships. It’s heavy stuff, and WiseGuyz takes it seriously, basing the content on current research and constant evaluation. The Calgary Sexual Health Centre study that informed the program drew on surveys from health and social service organizations that serve young people, as well as focus groups and academic literature. A couple of years ago, WiseGuyz commissioned another report measuring its impact and collecting feedback from interviews with teachers and past participants.

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Apr 1, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,011 words)

Television’s Original ‘Bad Fan’ Crisis: Archie Bunker

How Norman Lear changed television with All in the Family, and sparked a debate about the impact of Archie Bunker’s bigotry:

To critics, the show wasn’t the real problem: its audience was. In 1974, the social psychologists Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach offered some evidence for this argument in a study published in the Journal of Communication, using two samples, one of teen-agers, the other of adults. Subjects, whether bigoted or not, found the show funny, but most bigoted viewers didn’t perceive the program as satirical. They identified with Archie’s perspective, saw him as winning arguments, and, “perhaps most disturbing, saw nothing wrong with Archie’s use of racial and ethnic slurs.” Lear’s series seemed to be even more appealing to those who shared Archie’s frustrations with the culture around him, a “silent majority” who got off on hearing taboo thoughts said aloud.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 2, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,779 words)