Portrait of a Ten-year-old Girl

An intimate look at the life of Caitlyn Pinto, a ten-year-old girl living in Canada who loves Justin Bieber and has thoughtful ideas about racism and bullying:

“Caitlyn has an iPod touch, which allows her to surf the Internet, though she uses it mostly for iMessage, and FaceTime, a kind of one-on-one video chat. She and her friends message several times a day, about dumb stuff: school, music, what are you eating, whatever. On Fridays, they group-message, with everyone texting online at once. The family rule is that Facebook is not allowed until grade seven, and Caitlyn is fine with that. After much discussion at school about cyberstalking and cyberbullying, the prospect of sharing too much in cyberspace makes her nervous. Friends talk about the suicide of Amanda Todd, the BC teen bullied so callously across the Internet and at school. Caitlyn has heard stories about grade seven girls being teased online, and this is scary: an electronic footprint fixes a young girl’s identity when she is most in flux, and it can’t be erased. ‘I like texting more than Facebook, because you know where it’s going. It’ll just go to one friend, and you can’t forward things.'”

(Related: Susan Orlean’s classic profile, “The American Male at Age Ten,” which was published in Esquire in 1992)

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Sep 11, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,622 words)

Roosevelt the Revisionist

On Teddy Roosevelt’s early life as an author, and the making of his book The Naval War of 1812:

“What Roosevelt sheepishly omits is that he started working on the book just after Thanksgiving as a way to cope with a broken heart. He’d fallen head over heels for Alice Hathaway Lee, a golden-haired girl with a sharp mind who loved to laugh. ‘As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me,’ he wrote of their first meeting in October 1878. Alice had gently refused his marriage proposal, tendered at the end of his junior year. When Roosevelt returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1879, he believed their romance would continue. Instead, he found her cold to his attentions. ‘Oh the changeableness of the female mind!’ he complained in a letter home. His grief at losing her led to terrible bouts of insomnia, during which he read voraciously about the War of 1812. He found the differing accounts offered by American and British historians hard to reconcile, both in terms of fact and approach, so he decided to write 
his own.”

Published: Sep 16, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,390 words)

The Plot to Kill Obamacare

Why are Republicans still fighting it? A history of the conservative strategies to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, and what’s left in their playbook:

“The right’s actuarial guerrilla war begins with the underlying reality that hardly anybody knows about the exchanges. Polls show that fewer than six in ten Americans even know the law still exists, with the remainder believing it’s been repealed or struck down, or unsure. Of those aware that the law remains in effect, few understand how it works. Yet to succeed, Obamacare requires a critical mass of uninsured Americans not only to grasp what the law does but to act on it.”

Published: Sep 15, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,700 words)

In D.C., Bullets Leave Another Child Fatherless

David Robinson grew up in Washington D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood where young men often died in street violence. He tried to escape it, but ended up dead at 19. “His killing, still unsolved, is the story of gun violence in Washington”:

“‘I told him, “Guns don’t make you a man!” I told him, “Guns make you a coward!” And he was like, “Unc, man, I know, I know, but these dudes out here, they’re carrying guns, talking about they’re going to do this, they’re going to do that.”

“‘He was like, “Unc, it ain’t safe out here.”‘”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Sep 15, 2013
Length: 30 minutes (7,562 words)

Reading List: Believe in Your Selfie

New reading list from Emily Perper featuring picks from The Morning News, Textual Relations, Full Stop, and Pacific Standard.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 15, 2013

Why Is Zambia So Poor?

Zambia has no dictators, child soldiers, nor widespread occurrences of crime or violence, yet more than half its population lives on $1 per day. Why? An international development NGO worker examines the various economic drivers that is keeping Zambia poor:

“Just when you think you’ve got the right narrative, another one comes bursting out of the footnotes. It’s the informality. No, it’s the taxes. No, it’s the mining companies. No, it’s the regulators.

“And that’s what makes fixing it so difficult. Does Zambia need better schools? Debt relief? Microfinance? Nicer mining companies? Better laws? Stronger enforcement? Yes. All of them. And all at the same time.”

Published: Sep 12, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,478 words)

Inside the National Suicide Hotline: Preventing the Next Tragedy

Behind the scenes of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the debate over what policies and programs are effective when it comes to preventing suicide and saving lives in the U.S.:

“Studies done by Columbia University’s Dr. Madelyn Gould have found that about 12 percent of suicidal callers reported in a follow-up interview that talking to someone at the lifeline prevented them from harming or killing themselves. Almost half followed through with a counselor’s referral to seek emergency services or contacted mental health services, and about 80 percent of suicidal callers say in follow-up interviews that the lifeline has had something to do with keeping them alive.

“‘I don’t know if we’ll ever have solid evidence for what saves lives other than people saying they saved my life,’ says Draper. ‘It may be that the suicide rate could be higher if crisis lines weren’t in effect. I don’t know. All I can say is that what we’re hearing from callers is that this is having a real life-saving impact.'”

Source: Time Magazine
Published: Sep 13, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,686 words)

How Chris McCandless Died

Jon Krakauer updates the story that became Into the Wild—and the question of how Chris McCandless died in the Alaskan wilderness:

“The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. But last December, a writer named Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings fascinating new facts to the discussion. Hamilton, it turns out, has discovered hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless’s death.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 12, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,629 words)

The Spy Who Loved Frogs

A young scientist retraces the work of Edward Taylor, a prolific herpetologist (a zoologist who studies reptiles and amphibians) who also led a double life as a spy:

“Taylor was called to duty again in 1944, when he was 54 and war raged in the Pacific. According to records in the US National Archives, he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to train agents in Sri Lanka — then a British territory that provided ready access to Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia and other areas that the Japanese had infiltrated. Scientific work, an OSS officer explained to one of Taylor’s superiors, was ‘excellent cover.’

“Taylor taught jungle survival at Camp Y, a steamy settlement on the coast. With a penetrating stare and a lantern jaw, he seemed more imposing than his 1.8 metres. In his spare time, he occasionally dodged gunfire to nab specimens, which he studied for two monographs published after the war. ‘Have just described five new forms of blind snakes from the island,’ he wrote to S. Dillon Ripley, a young ornithologist who served with him and would later lead the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. In a later letter, he offered ‘some 500 species’ of mollusc shells to the Smithsonian.”

Source: Nature
Published: Sep 11, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,211 words)

What Life Is Like for an Executioner’s Family in the 16th Century

An excerpt from the book The Faithful Executioners, by Joel F. Harrington, which was recently featured as a Longreads Member Pick. Thanks to our Longreads Members for making these stories possible—sign up to join Longreads to receive more great stories like this. 

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 11, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,723 words)