Lance Armstrong: The Downfall of a Champion

An excerpt from the new book Wheelmen, on the doping scandal that brought down Lance Armstrong, and a scene from the 2004 Tour de France:

“But soon, Landis said, everyone on board realized what was happening. The bus was being transformed into a secret blood transfusion unit.

“The riders had known they would be asked to take blood at some point in the Tour, but weren’t told when. As had happened before, someone—sometimes a motorcycle driver who had been hired to do it, sometimes the team chef, sometimes a security worker—had delivered the blood immediately before the transfusions. Engine trouble was just a ruse designed to outsmart the journalists and the French police who suspected the Postal team of doping.”

Published: Oct 9, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,382 words)

The Evangelist

Jim Gilliam was a precocious young conservative Christian who grew up in Silicon Valley and became a talented programmer. After fighting cancer, he lost his faith in God and found a passion for progressive causes. NationBuilder, a piece of software he built to—in his own words—help “democratize democracy,” has had some of his progressive friends consider him a traitor:

“Before he’d written a single line of code, Gilliam had decided that NationBuilder would be nonpartisan. Aaron Straus Garcia, a field organizer on Obama’s 2008 campaign who briefly worked at NationBuilder, recalls a conversation he had with Gilliam early on. ‘What happens when the Tea Party comes knocking on our door?’ Garcia asked. Gilliam’s response was immediate: ‘There’s no way we close doors, or we start picking or choosing. This is what will set us apart.’

“It was always going to be a controversial strategy. Gilliam’s activist friends saw him as both a leader and a product of the netroots; the liberal Campaign for America’s Future had even given him an award for being an unsung progressive hero. Now he was courting Republicans, trying to persuade them to use his product to defeat Democrats. In June 2012, NationBuilder announced that it had signed “probably the largest deal ever struck in political technology” with the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), whose primary mission is to elect GOP candidates at the state level. His competitors scoffed at the claim, but the agreement potentially put NationBuilder into the hands of several thousand Republican politicians.”

Author: Andy Kroll
Published: Oct 9, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,590 words)

All Is Fair in Love and Twitter

An excerpt from Bilton’s new book, Hatching Twitter: The untold story of Twitter’s true origins—and the contributions of Noah Glass, the co-founder who disappeared from the picture:

“What Glass didn’t know was that Dorsey was the one who wanted him out. Perhaps it was because he sensed vulnerability or perhaps it was because Glass was the only person who could rightly insist that the status updater was not Dorsey’s idea alone. Whatever his reasons, Dorsey had recently met with Williams and threatened to quit if Glass wasn’t let go. And for Williams, the decision was easy. Dorsey had become the lead engineer on Twitter, and Glass’s personal problems were affecting his judgment. (For a while, portions of the company existed entirely on Glass’s I.B.M. laptop.) After conferring with the Odeo board, around 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 26, 2006, Williams asked Glass to join him for a walk to South Park. Sitting on a green bench, Williams gave his old friend an ultimatum: six months’ severance and six months’ vesting of his Odeo stock, or he would be publicly fired. Williams said the decision was his alone.”

Published: Oct 9, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,149 words)

Running Blind

On jogging, recovery and cemeteries:

“The body is determined to let the mind know when enough is enough. And it doesn’t give up easily. The blister was followed by neck and back pain. Eczema began to stain my legs and a mysterious cold moved through my body, from head to chest to lungs and back. To assuage my disconcerted body, my doctors urged me to perform daily “low impact aerobics.” They tried to fool it with Xanax and Valium. This would make me relax and shrink the blister, they thought. Meds are okay, but aerobics? My ass. My daily trip to the cemetery would have to fulfill three things at once: Walking and jogging would strengthen my body and lower cortisol levels, and the army of tombstones would help me reconcile the heimlich with the unheimlich.”

Source: The Hairpin
Published: Oct 8, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,173 words)

The Andrew Wylie Rules

The renowned literary agent on his hatred of Amazon, commercial fiction, and the future of book publishing:

"I didn’t think that [in 2010] the publishing community had properly assessed—particularly in regard to its obligations to writers—what an equitable arrangement would look like.

"And I felt that publishers had made a huge mistake, because they were pressured by Apple and Amazon to make concessions that they shouldn’t have made.

“These distribution issues come and go. It wasn’t so long ago that Barnes and Noble was this monster publishing leatherette classics, threatening to put backlists out of print. Amazon will go, and Apple will go, and it’ll all go.”

Published: Oct 8, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,336 words)

An Excerpt From the Book the NFL Doesn’t Want You to Read

An excerpt adapted from League of Denial, about the National Football League’s long denial about the connection between football and brain damage:

“Nine months later came yet another NFL study in Neurosurgery. This one dealt with repeat concussions. Numerous previous studies had shown that one concussion left the brain vulnerable to another concussion if the brain wasn’t given time to heal. But that wasn’t a problem in the NFL, according to Pellman, et al. The league looked at how quickly players went back on the field and concluded that they were at no greater risk than if they had never been concussed at all. The logic was that because players returned to the field so quickly, they must have been O.K. or the medical staff wouldn’t have cleared them. This flew in the face not only of previous research but of widely known realities on an NFL sideline. First, players often didn’t report their injuries. Second, they hid their symptoms whenever they could. Third, NFL doctors often deferred to the wishes of coaches and players.

“For the first time, the NFL also took on the issue of football and brain damage, a growing concern among researchers. The league’s scientific opinion? This wasn’t a problem in the NFL either. Boxers got brain damage. Football players didn’t. It was as simple as that. ‘This injury has not been observed in professional football,’ Pellman and his colleagues wrote.

“That was technically true: No one had yet cut open the skull of a dead football player to examine his brain for signs of neurodegenerative disease. But that day was coming.”

Published: Oct 3, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,067 words)

Will Work for Inspiration

David Byrne on whether New York City can hold onto its creative class:

“This city doesn’t make things anymore. Creativity, of all kinds, is the resource we have to draw on as a city and a country in order to survive. In the recent past, before the 2008 crash, the best and the brightest were lured into the world of finance. Many a bright kid graduating from university knew that they could become fairly wealthy almost instantly if they found employment at a hedge fund or some similar institution. But before the financial sector came to dominate the world, they might have made things: in publishing, manufacturing, television, fashion, you name it. As in many other countries the lure of easy bucks Hoovered this talent and intelligence up—and made it difficult for those other kinds of businesses to attract any of the top talent.”

Published: Oct 8, 2013
Length: 7 minutes (1,950 words)

The Scorched Earth Solution: Solitary Confinement in America

By many definitions, solitary confinement is torture—despite being widely embraced in America’s prisons:

“Take Gabriel Reyes, one of the class action plaintiffs, who was originally convicted of housebreaking and sentenced under California’s draconian three strikes law. He was thrown into solitary 17 years ago, based on the mere fact that he was seen exercising with known gang members. Since then, everything from his tattoos to his Mexican-themed artwork has been held against him as evidence of gang association. He has not hugged his daughters in two decades, since they were in preschool, a startling deprivation for a man without a violent record. Some time ago, Reyes described to his lawyers how he and his fellow inmates were ready to ‘explode.'”

Published: Oct 7, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,558 words)

Rediscovering Russell Atkins

From the book Russell Atkins: On the Life and Work of an American Master: A revered poet is found in an apartment in Cleveland:

“Mr. Atkins is nearing 90. He can’t walk easily anymore and is sometimes attended to by a young, businesslike, very quiet nurse. He is thin and small, with a swirl of fluffy, uncombed gray hair. He has a slightly high-pitched, gentle voice, a voice that strains a bit to be heard. Visitors surprise him and he seems a little perplexed and astonished that several American poets think highly of his work. When he learned that we were planning a book that would reprint a wide selection of his writing and also include several essays about his life and work, he said, ‘Why, who would want to read about me?'”

Source: Belt Magazine
Published: Oct 7, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,340 words)

Sex and the Single Monk

A secretly recorded video of a monk having sex with a woman rocks a Cambodian community in Lowell, Mass. — just as plans for a $10 million temple to be built went underway to “help unite an immigrant community with a history of ugly feuding”:

“Meas would later tell me that his interest in the temple ‘was selfish in a way. I want to make Cambodian Americans proud of what we have. We don’t have a Cambodian school, we don’t have a cultural center to teach the Cambodian-American culture.’ The temple, he said, would be more than a place of worship, it would be a symbol of unity.:

“Instead, nearly three years after it was first conceptualized, the project has reopened old wounds and ripped Lowell’s Cambodian community apart. Lawsuits have been filed with sordid allegations of financial improprieties involving CKBM and, most shocking, videotaped sexual hijinks involving a monk. Far from making an emergent community proud, the temple has so far been a source of outrage and embarrassment for the city’s Cambodians.”

Author: Ted Siefer
Source: Boston Magazine
Published: Sep 24, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,883 words)