Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

What the Libor and ISDAfix scandals reveal about manipulation of the global economy by banks:

“All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Apr 26, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,927 words)

Midnight In Dostoevsky

[Fiction] Two college friends speculate about a stranger in town:

“We were two sombre boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen. This was how we spoke of the local people: they were souls, they were transient spirits, a face in the window of a passing car, runny with reflected light, or a long street with a shovel jutting from a snowbank, no one in sight.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 30, 2009
Length: 30 minutes (7,599 words)

Unearthing the Complete and Total Disaster That Was ‘The Chevy Chase Show’

A reassessment of Chevy Chase’s failed late-night show for Fox:

“That fateful minute of time also showed just how not hip Chevy Chase had become by 1993. At that moment, everybody collectively realized that somebody messed up and let Ty Webb become a month away from turning 50 years old. Unlike David Letterman, who we were used to seeing age one day at a time, and Jay Leno, who had appeared on Letterman’s Late Night show and guest hosted Carson enough throughout the 80s and early 90s to where he also aged in front of the country, the lovable, scurrilous, charismatic bastard that made Ted Knight ca-razy was now just some nervous and overwhelmed middle-aged man.”

Source: Splitsider
Published: Apr 25, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,232 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: Watch Dog, by Kerri Anne Renzulli & Narratively

This week, we’re excited to share a Member Pick from Narratively, the New York-based (and Kickstarter-backed) storytelling site that launched last fall and has been featured on Longreads in the past.

“Watch Dog,” by Kerri Anne Renzulli, will be published in a two weeks, and they were kind enough to make the story available early to Longreads Members. Renzulli, a journalist and Columbia grad student, investigates the difficult task of training guide dogs for New York City—and helping develop relationships between the dogs and their future owners.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Source: Narratively
Published: Apr 25, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,425 words)

Justice’s Son

A profile of Ben Jealous, the president and CEO of the NAACP:

“‘Governor,’ said Jealous. ‘You know the death penalty is used exclusively on poor people.’

“‘Yes.’

“‘You know it’s used disproportionately against blacks and Latinos.’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Well, Governor, this is what I want you to do: imagine the person you most worry about in trying to explain why you abolished the death penalty. I want you to imagine telling that person this: “Every time a prosecutor seeks the death penalty, it pulls hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, out of our state treasury. Dollars that therefore cannot be used for anything else. And in our state, like any state, there are places where 30, 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of the homicides go unsolved every year. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and decided that we as a state would be safer if we spent that money on homicide units rather than killing the killers we’ve already caught and put in cages. So I’ve abolished the death penalty, and I’ve asked the counties to send their savings to the homicide units and get the uncaught killers off the street.”‘”

Author: Paul Hond
Published: Apr 23, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,530 words)

Murder in Black and White

The nearly forgotten story of Bernard Finch and his mistress Carole Tregoff, who were found guilty of murdering Finch’s wife in 1959:

“As Finch’s money dried up, he withdrew to the confines of his West Covina motel room and Tregoff’s one-bedroom Las Vegas apartment. Feeling aggrieved and persecuted, the couple decided to take action. On the Saturday night of July 18, Finch and Tregoff drove her car from Las Vegas to visit his estranged wife. The pair would later swear they had only wanted to persuade Barbara to move to Las Vegas for six weeks—just enough time to qualify for an amicable ‘quickie’ divorce. That didn’t quite explain why they parked a long block away at the South Hills Country Club, carrying with them an attaché case that contained, among other things, a carving knife, syringes, Seconal, and rope.”

Published: Apr 23, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,792 words)

Fertilized World

How modern fertilizer, and the nitrogen in it, have led to bountiful harvests with a larger environmental cost. Scientists are trying to find a balance:

“The nitrogen dilemma is most starkly visible in China, a country that loves its food and worries that supplies might run out. To the casual visitor, that anxiety seems misplaced. There’s a feast, it seems, on every street. In a restaurant called San Geng Bi Feng Gang, on the outskirts of Nanjing, I watch with wonder as dishes parade by: steamed fish, fried mutton chops, chrysanthemum-leaf-and-egg soup, a noodle dish made from sweet potatoes, fried broccoli, Chinese yams, steaming bowls of rice.

“‘Did you always eat this well?’ I ask Liu Tianlong, an agricultural scientist who’s introducing me to farmers nearby.

“His boyish smile fades, and for a second he looks grim. ‘No,’ he says. ‘When I was young, you were lucky to get three bowls of rice.'”

Published: Apr 24, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,929 words)

Celebrating Four Years of #Longreads

Longreads just celebrated its fourth birthday, and it’s been a thrill to watch this community grow since we introduced this service and Twitter hashtag in 2009. Thank you to everyone who participates, whether it’s as a reader, a publisher, a writer—or all three. And thanks to the Longreads Members who have made it possible for us to keep going.

To celebrate four years, here’s a rundown of some of our most frequent #longreads contributors, and some of their recent recommendations.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 24, 2013

I Packed My Knives & Went: Aboard the Top Chef Cruise

The author on his experience aboard the “Top Chef Cruise” and seeing former “chef’testants”:

“There were also live Quickfires. There were two of these a night, and they were always packed to the gills. Audience volunteers joined chefs onstage for challenges familiar to anyone that’s watched the show. The MC was shaky, and the whole enterprise exposed the cracks in the entire conceit of this trip; cooking on TV is compelling because of editing and human drama. The live Quickfires had neither. The closest thing to human drama was during a late-night Quickfire when Italian chef Fabio Viviani showed up a bit inebriated and swore and yelled. I thought it was charming, but I overheard guests say that his off-color language had lost him a few fans. And there was certainly no editing. During a sandwich Quickfire, a timer appeared on the screen counting down twenty minutes. These chefs don’t need twenty minutes to cook a sandwich, and I certainly don’t want to spend twenty minutes watching them make one with an arm tied behind their backs, literally, from 28 rows back. I walked out.”

Source: Eater
Published: Apr 23, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,047 words)

Behind the Longreads: Antonia Crane on ‘Yellow,’ Our Latest Member Pick

This week’s Member Pick is “Yellow,” a story by Antonia Crane about the days following the death of her mother. The piece will be featured in Black Clock #17 this summer and is adapted from her forthcoming book Spent. We asked her to tell us how the story first came together.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 23, 2013
Length: 1 minutes (279 words)