Now Free for Father’s Day: The Complete First Chapter of Drew Magary’s ‘Someone Could Get Hurt’

For Father’s Day, we’ve unlocked our recent Longreads Member Pick, chapter one from Drew Magary‘s new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books).

Source: Gotham Books
Published: Jun 12, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,332 words)

Modern Warfare

Inside the breakup of Activision Blizzard and its star game developers, Vincent Zampella and Jason West, who created the multi-billion-dollar franchise “Call of Duty”:

“During an hour-long interview in the summer of 2011, [CEO Robert] Kotick, sporting a sweater vest over a white T-shirt, waxed nostalgic about his past and emphasized that he’d negotiated in good faith. But he refused to respond to West and Zampella’s most explosive allegation: that Activision began trying to fire them only months after the 2008 contract had been signed. Court filings reveal that in an e-mail exchange between two executives charged with overseeing West and Zampella in January 2009, one warned that the risks of firing the pair would be great. ‘Is everyone ready for the big, negative PR story this is going to turn into if we kick them out?’ he asked. ‘Freaking me out a little.'”

“The apparent effort to find a pretext to replace West and Zampella became known within Activision’s top ranks as ‘Project Icebreaker’—the code name seemingly straight out of a video-game villain’s playbook. It was undertaken in part by a former I.T. director, Thomas Fenady, who in a deposition claimed he was ordered by Activision’s former chief legal officer, George Rose, to ‘dig up dirt on Jason and Vince.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jun 12, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,807 words)

Ghosts of the Rio Grande

Hundreds of immigrant corpses are found along the U.S.-Mexico border every year. Most are buried without being identified, but groups are emerging to work on identifying the remains of missing migrants:

“Compared to Arizona, which identifies most of its unknown remains, Texas lets the corpses pile up. Autopsies are rarely conducted, DNA samples are not taken, and bodies are buried in poorly marked graves. Shortly after medical examiner Corinne Stern started working in Laredo, she found a 12-year-old skull from an unknown Hispanic man sitting on a shelf in the evidence room of the sheriff’s office. It was devoid of any information about where it came from or how it ended up there. Mercedes Doretti of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which is working to identify the remains of missing migrants, calls the region from Houston to San Antonio and south to McAllen the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ for bodies.”

Published: Jun 11, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,265 words)

Behind Kanye’s Mask

An in-depth interview with Kanye West:

“I used to have tracks that sounded like Timbaland; I had tracks that sounded like [DJ Premier]. But Jay-Z was an amazing communicator that made the soul sound extremely popular. And because I could make the soul sound in my sleep, it finally gave me a platform to put the message that my parents put inside of me and that Dead Prez helped to get out of me and Mos Def and [Talib] Kweli, they helped to get out of me: I was able to put it, sloppily rap it, on top of the platform that Jay-Z had created for me.

“Before, when I wanted to rap, my raps sounded like a bit like Cam’ron; they sounded a bit like Mase; they sounded a bit like Jay-Z or whoever. And it wasn’t until I hung out with Dead Prez and understood how to make, you know, raps with a message sound cool that I was able to just write ‘All Falls Down’ in 15 minutes.”

Published: Jun 11, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,681 words)

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

An examination of Margaret Thatcher’s life as chronicled in the authorized biography by Charles Moore:

“It’s depressing to suppose that fortune favours the people who can keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as they do. But she is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps chopping and changing long after they have gone home. She didn’t outsmart or outperform her enemies. She outstayed them.”

Published: Jun 11, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,110 words)

The Long Con

Phil Ferguson conned hundreds of investors out of millions of dollars and then disappeared. The story of one of the Indiana’s biggest fraudsters:

“The FBI knew Ferguson had money. They knew he had been in Colorado, where he landed for a time after fleeing Indiana and did business with a man named Roy Vernon Cox while using the name “Al Russell.” They narrowly missed apprehending him. Later, they received a tip that Ferguson had brazenly returned to Marion, from someone who claimed to have seen him in a drugstore.

“The rest was just guesswork. How much did Ferguson have? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?”

Published: Jun 10, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,837 words)

Dirty Secrets of the Worst Charities

Reporters from the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting spent a year scrutinizing 5,800 charities nationwide that pay for-profit telemarketing companies to solicit donations on their behalf. As much as 90 cents for every dollar of those donations go directly to pay for the for-profit companies that are “dialing for dollars”:

Part One: Dirty Secrets of the Worst Charities

Part Two: A Failure of Regulation

Part Three: The Reynolds Family Empire

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: Jun 10, 2013
Length: 44 minutes (11,185 words)

Kodak’s Problem Child

A trip to Rochester, New York, to investigate the decisions that doom a company:

“Peter Sucy, another computer engineer at Kodak, describes the rarity of computers in the workplace in the late 1980s. ‘Almost no one had a computer at their desk,’ he recalls. When the Macintosh II was announced, packed with new state-of-the-art features, he had to buy one himself. With a $3,000 price tag, it allowed him to do things with images he could not do before, including digital photo editing. Based on those exhilarating experiences, he began making proposals for products that could expand Kodak’s reach in digital platforms.”

Source: Medium
Published: Jun 10, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,993 words)

Fixing the Digital Economy

On the hidden costs of giving our data away to the “Siren Servers,” and how we can make changes to help the Internet support a middle class:

“Siren Servers drive apart our identities as consumers and workers. In some cases, causality is apparent: free music downloads are great but throw musicians out of work. Free college courses are all the fad, but tenured professorships are disappearing. Free news proliferates, but money for investigative and foreign reporting is drying up. One can easily see this trend extending to the industries of the future, like 3-D printing and renewable energy.”

Published: Jun 10, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,400 words)

Playing at Violence

A young man who grew up experiencing years of violence in Burundi’s civil war is bewildered by the violent, war-like video games played by Americans when he encounters them in a prep school in Massachusetts:

“In the hallway at Deerfield, the boy, whom I’ll call Luke, went on talking about video games, as we waited for our classmates to join us for dinner. Almost everything Luke said was so confusing that I asked him: ‘What do you mean by saying you killed so-and-so?’

“‘Well, my enemies. Paci, how often do you play video games?’

“‘Actually, what are they?’

“The other students looked at each other and smiled.

“‘Come on, Paci!’ Luke led me to his room. He took up a little device in his hands and turned on his computer. He pointed at the computer screen, at images of people with guns. ‘Once you press this button, they start moving and you hunt them, see?’ Out of the computer’s speakers came the sound of shooting, the sound of war.”

Published: Jun 10, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,441 words)