Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Grandparents’ Lives

After his grandfather’s death, Samanth Subramanian attempts to piece together what he did not know about the man’s past—and understand why he hadn’t sought out the information earlier:

Given all this, I now wonder, why did I fail to learn more about him? It is true that, for all the diligence my family has expended on passing down the rituals of our religion, it has never been as attentive to personal histories; I know absolutely nothing about my eight great-grandparents except for the name of one of them. Even so, my grandfather always felt like a special case — less a real person than a character pulled out of a fable, his abilities and his flaws both immensely larger than life, and his past obscured as much by my own ignorance as by the half-truths and legends that swirl around him.

Source: Aeon
Published: Oct 26, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,900 words)

Confessions of a Drone Warrior

From a windowless box in Nevada, Airman First Class Brandon Bryant helped pilot drones that killed over a thousand people as part of the U.S. drone warfare program:

Bryant’s laser hovered on the corner of the building. “Missile off the rail.” Nothing moved inside the compound but the eerily glowing cows and goats. Bryant zoned out at the pixels. Then, about six seconds before impact, he saw a hurried movement in the compound. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person.” Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot. “And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 26, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,485 words)

Mega Death: Meet the Company That’s Taking Over the Funeral Industry

SCI has 1,800 funeral homes and cemeteries in the U.S. and Canada, 20,000 employees and a market capitalization of $4 billion. Should a company this large have this much control over how we care for the dead?

“‘We are going to be poised to benefit from the aging of America, the baby boomers,’ Foley said. Deaths in the U.S. are forecast to increase at an average annual rate of 1.1 percent over the next five years. At SCI, earnings per share rose 26 percent in the first half of 2013. ‘This growth,’ Foley said, ’was driven in large part due to the strong flu season’—i.e., a lot of old people got sick and died last winter.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Oct 25, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,673 words)

Rocked: An Oral History of the 1989 World Series Earthquake

Former players, broadcasters, fans and city officials look back on the Giants-A’s series and the devastating 6.9 quake that rocked Candlestick Park and the Bay Area:

"McGwire: We thought the whole place was burning up like in 1906.

"George Thurlow, fan, upper deck: The mood of the crowd was jubilant and excited and Wow, that was cool until the first radio announcements began. The first one that I have written down was, ‘The Bay Bridge is down.’

"Dolich: They didn’t say a piece collapsed. It was, ‘The Bay Bridge collapsed.’ You can only think, Oh my god, this is a horror movie coming true.

Source: Grantland
Published: Oct 25, 2013
Length: 47 minutes (11,754 words)

‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

As our Longreads Member Drive continues (sign up here to join us), we wanted to share more of our Member Picks with everyone, to show how your financial support helps us find and share outstanding storytelling from the past and present. Today we’re thrilled to feature “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 24, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,133 words)

What It’s Like to Be Gay In a Country Where It’s Illegal: 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: Oct 24, 2013

‘An Island of Need in a Sea of Prosperity’: The Story of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Neighborhood

“It is a 40-square-block island of poverty and squalor.” The Tenderloin remains one of the seediest neighborhoods in San Francisco, mostly unchanged despite gentrification and an influx of tech money into the city. Can the neighborhood change—and just as importantly, should it?

"If there is one ironclad rule that governs cities, it’s that money and poor people don’t mix. Once money appears, poor people disappear. Most American cities used to have Tenderloin-like neighborhoods downtown, but in almost all cases, those neighborhoods have been gentrified out of existence. Take New York’s Bowery, a name synonymous with flophouses and alcoholic despair as recently as the 1990s. Today it gleams with luxury hotels, shops, galleries, and museums. Or Los Angeles’ downtown, long a skid row Siberia, now a bustling yuppie dreamscape. Similar changes have occurred in cities as disparate in size and disposition as Vancouver, London, San Diego, and Dallas.

“By rights, the TL ought to be suffering the same fate.”

Published: Oct 24, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,528 words)

A Tale of Two Drugs

A cancer drug offers no obvious advantages over an alternative drug, but is also twice as expensive. Why? The writer looks at how drug companies determine prices:

“Because of medical insurance, co-pay reductions, and expanded access programs for the uninsured, relatively few Americans pay more than a few thousand dollars per year for even the most expensive drugs. The primary customers in the United States are not patients or even individual physicians, although physicians can drive demand for a drug; rather, the customers are the government (through Medicare and Medicaid) and private insurance companies. And since the insurer or government is picking up the check, companies can and do set prices that few individuals could pay. In the jargon of economics, the demand for therapeutic drugs is ‘price inelastic’: increasing the price doesn’t reduce how much the drugs are used. Prices are set and raised according to what the market will bear, and the parties who actually pay the drug companies will meet whatever price is charged for an effective drug to which there is no alternative. And so in determining the price for a drug, companies ask themselves questions that have next to nothing to do with the drugs’ costs. ‘It is not a science,’ the veteran drug maker and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer told me. ‘It is a feel.'”

Published: Oct 22, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,609 words)

The Whitest Historically Black College In America

How Bluefield State, a historically black college, became a school where 90 percent of the students are now white:

“In 1966, the state picked Wendell G. Hardway to lead the college — the school’s first white president. Deirdre Guyton, who runs the college’s alumni affairs department, said that Hardway was the first president to live off campus rather than at Hatter Hall, the house in the center of campus named for the school’s black founder. By 1968, according to the book Bluefield State College Centennial History, Hardway had hired 23 new faculty members — all of whom were white. The book goes on to say that the college’s dedicated faculty, which had been all-black as recently as 1954, was only 30 percent black by 1967. If there was a tug of war over what the college was going to be, many of the black alumni and students felt they were losing. Bluefield State was quickly becoming unrecognizable.

“That tug of war looked a lot like battles being waged across the country, like the growing divide between black folks who believed in nonviolence as an avenue to black progress and those who felt that method was taking too long and yielding too little. During halftime at homecoming in 1967, black students staged a demonstration on the football field to protest what they saw as Hardway’s discrimination against black faculty and students. Things got rowdy. The police were called. Students were suspended.”

Source: NPR
Published: Oct 18, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,665 words)

The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America

Longreads Members not only support our daily service, but their financial support allows us to go out and find stories and book chapters that aren’t already available on the web. As part of our Longreads Member Drive, we’re excited to share our latest Member Pick with everyone—it’s an excerpt from Duff McDonald’s new book, The Firm, on the history of McKinsey. Thanks to McDonald and Simon & Schuster for sharing it with the Longreads community.

If you like our service, become a Longreads Member today, and help us get to 5,000 Members.

Published: Oct 23, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,000 words)