Students, Professors: We Want Your Best College Longreads

Throughout May and June, a new generation of reporters, writers, editors, and essayists make their way out of school and into the professional world. They come bearing clips, work samples produced for class or during an internship. Hundreds of media outlets at colleges and universities across the country publish student work, and an equal number of professors, instructors, and advisors help students report, write, and edit their best journalism. We’d like to encourage those writers to produce more and better work, and introduce these new voices to a wider audience of readers—and maybe even future employers and mentors.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 16, 2013

Longreads Member Exclusive: Someone Could Get Hurt (Chapter 1), by Drew Magary

For this week’s Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the first chapter of Drew Magary’s new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt  (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for  Deadspin and  GQ, has been  featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together.

Source: Gotham Books
Published: May 16, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,332 words)

Lyndon Baty and the Robot That Saved Him

A boy with kidney disease finds a way to thrive in high school thanks to a robot:

“‘His personality helps out a lot,’ says Kent Deville, Lyndon’s chemistry teacher. ‘A shier kid would have problems.’ Lyndon isn’t afraid to call out when he needs help, and he uses the bot’s tricks to his advantage. He can zoom in, take photos of the whiteboard and homework corrections and refer back to everything later. ‘It’s like H.G. Wells,’ Mr. Deville says. Kelsey Vasquez, a classmate, says Lyndon is actually more outgoing as the robot. ‘He’s shier in person,’ she says, at least until he’s had time to relax. ‘I don’t think I could be as happy as he is.'”

Author: Luke Darby
Source: Dallas Observer
Published: May 16, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,326 words)

Dirty Medicine

The inside story of Ranbaxy, a generic drug maker that committed criminal fraud by fabricating data to win FDA approvals:

“Thakur knew the drugs weren’t good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world’s poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who had almost no medical infrastructure and no recourse for complaints. The injustice made him livid.

“Ranbaxy executives didn’t care, says Kathy Spreen, and made little effort to conceal it. In a conference call with a dozen company executives, one brushed aside her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. ‘Who cares?’ he said, according to Spreen. ‘It’s just blacks dying.'”

Source: Fortune
Published: May 15, 2013
Length: 39 minutes (9,759 words)

Peter Worthington in His Own Words

The founding editor of The Toronto Sun died on Monday. He wrote his own obituary:

“It was nerve-wracking in 1967 to be mistaken for an Israeli prisoner by a Cairo mob and punched and battered until rescued by a brave Egyptian who defied the mob.

“There were the lethal streets of Algiers, where daily assassinations took place, and occasionally the French army opened fire on civilians. One afternoon a bullet went through the sleeve of my jacket and I didn’t know it until others pointed it out.”

Source: Toronto Sun
Published: May 13, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,083 words)

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?

The world is getting automated more quickly than we think—and when the robots take over it will throw our capital-labor balance out of whack and decimate the middle class:

“Until a decade ago, the share of total national income going to workers was pretty stable at around 70 percent, while the share going to capital—mainly corporate profits and returns on financial investments—made up the other 30 percent. More recently, though, those shares have started to change. Slowly but steadily, labor’s share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.”

Author: Kevin Drum
Source: Mother Jones
Published: May 14, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,423 words)

One in a Million

An excerpt from The Spark, a memoir about a mother who nurtures her autistic son’s genius:

“The ‘math people’ in our lives found Jake fascinating. One day I was having a cup of coffee with my aunt, a high school geometry teacher, while Jake sat at our feet, playing with a cereal box and a bunch of Styrofoam balls I’d gotten from a craft store so that the daycare kids could make snowmen. He was putting the balls into the box, taking them out, and then doing it again, and it sounded as if he was counting. My aunt wondered aloud what he was doing.

“Jake didn’t look up. ‘Nineteen spheres make a parallelepiped,’ he said.

“I had no idea what a parallelepiped was; it sounded like a made-up word to me. In fact, it’s a three-dimensional figure made up of six parallelograms. Jake had learned the word from a visual dictionary we had in the house. And yes, you can make one out of a cereal box. My aunt was shocked, less by the fancy word than by the sophisticated mathematical concept behind it.”

Published: Apr 24, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,670 words)

Is Baby a Luxury?

On being pregnant and uninsured—too rich to qualify for state-funded health insurance, too poor to afford private insurance:

“We looked into purchasing private insurance. Andrew could get insurance for himself as a small business owner and I could be included in his plan as his wife, but the pregnancy wouldn’t be covered. I found this stunning, but it is common: insurers can and very often do deny coverage to uninsured moms-to-be by defining pregnancy as a preexisting medical condition. This meant that my husband and I both would have to purchase our own separate insurance, which, we learned, would cost up to $275 dollars a month each and did not include copays at the obstetrician’s office or significant deductibles ($2,000, or more). To some people, $550 every month isn’t much to stress about, but we could not afford these plans. After rent, utilities and groceries, we had almost nothing left. Covering the premiums wasn’t just difficult, it was impossible.”

Published: May 13, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,035 words)

Searching For Anything But Bobby Fischer At School Scrabble Nationals

The writer visits the 2013 National School Scrabble Championship, a competition between children in the fourth through eighth grade:

“The two boys have a laugh at my complaints. Frankly, I’m in a no-win situation. If I lose, I’m a loser. If I win, I’m the heartless bastard who beat two middle schoolers. Sam’s mother agrees with my assessment.

“‘Oh, you have to lose,’ she says, laughing.

“‘I know, I know.’

“But then we draw tiles and I find that I have a bingo right at the start: FlOWERS. I put it down and suddenly I have an 82-0 lead. Then I draw the Q and the Z simultaneously and put down QUIZ to take a 124-24 lead. I’m crushing it. I’m killing it. I am killcrushslaying these kids. I have no interest in decorum anymore. The game has me. I want to win because I want to win.

Source: Deadspin
Published: May 13, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,258 words)

‘See You On the Other Side’

The short life of Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend her last days practicing journalism:

“Jessica hadn’t expected to win. The other finalists were teams of students, and she worked solo on her ‘Slab City Stories’ project—a multimedia report on the inhabitants of a former Marine base-turned-squatter-RV-park in the California desert (though not, she made sure to point out, without the support of her professors, classmates, and Kickstarter backers). Jessica didn’t enjoy being in the spotlight, either; she was more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. It took her only a few seconds longer to accept the award than it did to get to the stage. After a rush of thank-yous and a celebratory double fist-pump, Jessica returned to her seat—and to what appeared to be a bright future, one in which she’d tell many more stories and win many more awards.

“Less than four months later, on January 13, 2013, Jessica died. She was 25.”

Published: May 13, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,370 words)