Reading List: Amazing People for Desperate Times

This week’s list from Emily includes stories from BuzzFeed, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, and Left Field Project.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 10, 2013

The Lonely Guy

Todd Purdum argues that President Obama’s isolation from the rest of Washington, D.C., has made him less effective as a politician over the last five years:

Obama is far from the first president—or the first suddenly world-famous figure—to keep his own counsel or to rely on the tightest possible circle of longtime advisers and old, close friends. More than 20 years ago, when Mario Cuomo was seen as the Democratic Party’s best hope for taking the White House, one knowledgeable New Yorker assured me that Cuomo would never run, because he could never bring himself to trust the number of people required to undertake an effective campaign. In February 2007, the week Obama declared his candidacy, his confidante Valerie Jarrett told me that she had warned him at a backyard barbecue in Chicago the previous fall, when his book tour for The Audacity of Hope was morphing into a presidential campaign, “You’ll never make any new friends.” Obama has since worked overtime to prove the prescience of Jarrett’s view.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Nov 10, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,042 words)

A Very Dangerous Boy

On the trial of Joseph Hall, who murdered his neo-Nazi father when he was 10 years old. (For more background on the story, see Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Feb. 2013 piece.)

Did an atmosphere of hate drive Joseph to kill? Did his stepmother? Or was it his childish misreading of a TV show? Or a complicated amalgam of factors, tangled together in a damaged brain? Was Joseph confused or deranged, a victim or a victimizer? Had he simply changed his story and implicated Krista because he was tired of being locked up? Or did he finally find the strength to tell the truth, months after the killing, because he was no longer under her sway? There were many questions, but Judge Leonard focused on one: Did Joseph know when he pulled the trigger that what he was doing was wrong?

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 4, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,279 words)

War Tourists Flock to Syria’s Front Lines

A group of misguided adventure seekers travel to a war-ravaged village in rebel territory north of Aleppo:

“Most people on their holiday go out partying, but we decided to do something a little different for once,” says Smith. They had “no contacts or anything like that” in southern Turkey or the northern part of Syria controlled by opposition forces. Nonetheless, they flew to Istanbul, hopped on a bus, and made their way to Kilis, a small, dusty town barely on the Turkish side of the Syrian border, the last safe stop on the road to Aleppo.

Author: Ben Taub
Source: The Daily Beast
Published: Nov 9, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,643 words)

From Here to Paternity

A visit behind the scenes of Maury Povich’s long-running daytime talk show—and how he ended up the reigning king of televised paternity tests:

Listen to the familiar voice of Maury Povich:

This is Tiffany. In two months, Tiffany is marrying her fiancé, Cornelius. But the results of this lie detector test may stop that wedding dead in its tracks.

Cornelius is a rapper. But Tiffany fears he’s using his studio to lay down a lot more than just tracks. And get this: Tiffany has a very good witness — their neighbor, Candice.

Source: Grantland
Published: Nov 8, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,994 words)

The Way Out of a Room Is Not Through the Door

The story of Charles Manson, from Jeff Guinn’s new book Manson:

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson is a cradle-to-grave treatment, though the graves belong to other people. The subject remains in California, an inmate at Corcoran State Prison, where he issues statements his followers disseminate via the website of his Air Trees Water Animals organisation. A recent example: ‘We have two worlds that have been conquested by the military of the revolution. The revolution belongs to George Washington, the Russians, the Chinese. But before that, there is Manson. I have 17 years before China. I can’t explain that to where you can understand it.’ Neither can I. Guinn explains a lot in his usefully linear book. The standard Manson text, Helter Skelter, the 1974 bestseller by his prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, and true-crime writer Curt Gentry, is a police and courtroom procedural, with no shortage of first-person heroics (‘During my cross-examination of these witnesses, I scored a number of significant points’); the first corpse is discovered on page six. No one is murdered in Guinn’s book until page 232. He brings a logic of cause and effect to the madness.

Published: Nov 8, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,620 words)

Longreads Member Pick: A Stiller Ground, by Gordon Grice and This Land Press

Thanks to Longreads Members’ support (join us here), we’re able to bring you outstanding stories from publishers and writers around the world—including today’s Member Pick from This Land Press, which is doing some incredible work out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and whose story by Kiera Feldman, “Grace in Broken Arrow,” topped our Best of 2012 list

Today’s story is “A Stiller Ground,” a devastating piece from Gordon Grice about the loss of a child. The story will be featured in an upcoming issue of This Land, and we’d like to thank them for sharing it early with Longreads Members.

Source: This Land Press
Published: Nov 7, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,398 words)

Dr. Hoffman vs. the Mosquito

Dr. Stephen Hoffman has been searching for a way to eradicate malaria for the past 30 years. He may have found a vaccine to do it:

There was no way Hoffman was going to ask US Marines to line up for a thousand mosquito bites each. But he decided to repeat the irradiated-mosquito experiments to understand the science better.

Once again, Hoffman signed himself up for the study. In the mid 1990s, he returned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research to stick another pint-size container of insects against his arm. This time, the cylinder swarmed with hundreds of malaria-infected mosquitoes, each having been buzzed with a dose of radiation. The bloodthirsty insects left a circle of swollen red skin on his arm, but Hoffman didn’t stop until he had been bitten by 3,000 mosquitoes.

Weeks later, when he was infected with malaria, he didn’t get sick.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Oct 23, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,718 words)

The Story of Tim Armstrong, Patch and AOL

Another exhaustive biography from Nicholas Carlson and Business Insider, this time on Tim Armstrong, his hyperlocal startup Patch and his leadership at AOL:

“He’s a very loyal guy. He made a commitment to different parts of that matrix organization, and damn it, he’s not going to let them down. And even though we brought in McKinsey and they told us to unravel it and Tim bought into it as the right strategy, he couldn’t get himself to do that because it would have been a breach of his personal loyalties.”

This was the first time Armstrong would struggle to make a call that he knew to be the right call because making the decision would force him to hurt lots of people who had believed in something he built from the ground up.

Published: Nov 7, 2013
Length: 52 minutes (13,138 words)

How an SNL Trailer Parody Gets Made: Wes Anderson’s ‘Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders’

Alex Buono, director of photography for Saturday Night Live’s film unit, offers an incredibly detailed post on how they shot the recent Wes Anderson horror-film parody, all the way down to the sets, color palettes, location scouting and lighting. He also reveals just how quickly the entire team needed to work in order to make the show:

There are two major deadlines for the Film Unit. The Dress Rehearsal starts at 8pm – for which the goal is to have the spot fully mixed and color corrected, but sometimes it’s not quite there yet. Then, of course, the live show starts at 11:30pm, and you’d think that would be a pretty hard and fast deadline…except in this case, when Rhys and Adam were truly down to the wire – scrambling to finish revision notes from the dress rehearsal, minor voiceover changes and final color fixes. Rhys was downstairs in the studio edit bay where the final picture and mix are married together and uploaded to the live switcher. As Rhys was watching down the final cut, he noticed two errors: one shot slipped into the cut without being “un-squeezed” and another repositioned shot had lost its repo. We all know that these kinds of errors happen all the time, but they rarely happen when you are literally gun-to-the-head, minutes away from a live broadcast.

Author: Alex Buono
Source: alex-buono.com
Published: Nov 7, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,197 words)