Moving Around

On being young and transgender:

“I’m in a bar on a date in the West Village. I’m twenty-two. It’s not that long ago.

“It’s my fifth, maybe sixth date with Molly. Far enough along, anyway, that I don’t even think to dress fancy, just a nice T-shirt and a skirt.

“After our second pitcher, I go to the men’s bathroom. I do this because I’m transgender and to most of the world I look like a man. Inside the bathroom, three tall white bros look up.

“‘You’re wearing a skirt, what the fuck?’ says one.

“‘Yep,’ I grunt and go to the urinal.

“‘We’re going to break your face off!’ The same guy says, once I’ve turned around.”

Published: Feb 5, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,363 words)

Confessions of a Corporate Spy

[Not single-page] A competitive intelligence consultant on how he acquires information about competitors for various companies:

“As the sales manager and I surfed Talbots’s website together, looking for the green mini my wife saw on the website earlier that day, I mentioned offhand that I had just graduated from business school. I talked about how tough it had been to find a ‘real’ job and said I did some business research now, casually identifying the analysts out in California who had hired me. I mentioned that I was really interested in retail stuff—that, heck, I was helping write a report on it for investors, in fact. And wow, isn’t the retail world weird these days with the recession and all? Thus began a conversation about the business.

“Apparently that store had been having a great year. Best in the region. Hitting its numbers. What numbers? Oh! You must be proud. Any younger folks biting on this new stuff?

“I fingered the cell phone in my front shirt pocket, to see if the voice recorder was still working. No, I didn’t tell the manager I was recording her. Legally, in Georgia, I didn’t have to.”

Source: Inc.
Published: Feb 2, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,373 words)

The Embassy of Cambodia

[Fiction] A maid from Ivory Coast works in northwest London:

“The only good thing that happened in Carib Beach was this: once a month, on a Sunday, the congregation of a local church poured out of a coach at the front gates, lined up fully dressed in the courtyard, and then walked into the pool for a mass baptism. The tourists were never warned, and Fatou never understood why the congregants were allowed to do it. But she loved to watch their white shirts bloat and spread across the surface of the water, and to hear the weeping and singing. At the time—though she was not then a member of that church, or of any church except the one in her heart—she had felt that this baptism was for her, too, and that it kept her safe, and that this was somehow the reason she did not become one of the ‘girls’ at the Carib Beach Resort. For almost two years—between her father’s efforts and the grace of an unseen and unacknowledged God—she did her work, and swam Sunday mornings at the crack of dawn, and got along all right. But the Devil was waiting.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 4, 2013
Length: 34 minutes (8,524 words)

Flynt Family Values

Jimmy Flynt has had a falling out with his infamous brother Larry, and is now striking out on his own:

“Jimmy doesn’t sugarcoat his time with Larry. His brother is narcissistic, a micromanager, and a publicity hound, he says. Does he feel liberated to no longer have to deal with such a difficult personality? He pauses for a few seconds and then says, ‘I miss him. I enjoyed that brotherly connection.’

“Theirs is a complex relationship, forged under extreme duress during years that encompass Larry’s struggles with drugs, prison, paralysis, and mental illness. Sure, Larry was a piece of work, Jimmy says. But his brother also was his hero. ‘When he cut me off,’ Jimmy says, ‘he cut off his best friend. He cut off his number-one fan.'”

Author: Dave Ghose
Published: Feb 1, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,968 words)

A Sin City Savior’s Quest To Cure The Common Hangover

An enterprising anesthesiologist is offering hungover people in Las Vegas an intravenous treatment:

“Burke set up an IV bag in his office and inserted a catheter into his foot. ‘That’s really the only place that’s easy to start an IV on yourself,’ he says. ‘I let probably 300 or 400 cc’s of fluid in.’ The hydration offered some relief, but not enough to declare victory over his hangover. ‘I said, “OK, it’s time to put the drugs in. Let’s see what’s going to happen with this.”‘

“First, he added Zofran, an anti-nausea medicine. ‘After about 10 minutes, the nausea started melting away.’ Then, he added Toradol. ‘When I get hangovers, it feels like there’s a vice on my head.’ The impact of the Toradol was dramatic, however. ‘Literally, within three minutes, it was like someone had unscrewed the vice. I was like, ‘Good God, I can’t believe I’ve been suffering all these years when I could have been done with it in 30 minutes.'”

Author: Greg Beato
Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Feb 1, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,490 words)

Drone Home

On the future of drones in America:

“But the drone industry is ramping up for a big landgrab the moment the regulatory environment starts to relax. At last year’s Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) trade show in Las Vegas, more than 500 companies pitched drones for filming crowds and tornados and surveying agricultural fields, power lines, coalfields, construction sites, gas spills and archaeological digs. A Palo Alto, Calif., start-up called Matternet wants to establish a network of drones that will transport small, urgent packages, like those for medicine.

“In other countries civilian drone populations are already booming. Aerial video is a major application. A U.K. company called Skypower makes the eight-rotored Cinipro drone, which can carry a cinema-quality movie camera. In Costa Rica they’re used to study volcanoes. In Japan drones dust crops and track schools of tuna; emergency workers used one to survey the damage at Fukushima. A nature preserve in Kenya ran a crowdsourced fundraising drive to buy drones to watch over the last few northern white rhinos. Ironically, while the U.S. has been the leader in sending drones overseas, it’s lagging behind when it comes to deploying them on its own turf.”

Source: Time Magazine
Published: Feb 2, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,623 words)

The Book of Coach

How late 49ers coach Bill Walsh wrote a 550-page book that became a bible for NFL coaches:

“So it was no surprise that Walsh instantly regretted retiring. Believing that he left at least one Super Bowl on the table, Walsh was ‘melancholy and terrible,’ according to Craig. That the 1989 49ers were more dominant in the playoffs under new coach George Seifert than they ever were under Walsh made it worse. Walsh hated that Seifert won a championship that year with his team, his West Coast offense, his philosophy; he so hated the ring that the team awarded him that he gave it away. ‘He didn’t want them to win,’ Craig says. ‘He couldn’t hand over the team he had created to someone else, because he wasn’t capable of it.’

“He tried broadcasting but quit in 1991. ‘I’m not going to sit for three hours and let some 27-year-old f– in my ear tell me about the game,’ he told Brian Billick, former Ravens coach and one of his many protégés. In 1992 Walsh returned to Stanford, where he had coached in the ’70s, but left after two losing seasons in three years, his magic gone. ‘He needed to be Bill Walsh,’ Billick says. ‘He needed to be a genius.’

“So he decided to write a book.”

Source: ESPN
Published: Jan 24, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,238 words)

Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College

Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs are currently being heralded as the future of affordable education. But what kind of education will it actually provide?

“Everybody loves the idea of lowering the barriers of entry to education; it’s the easiest sell in the world, and Khan Academy, a nonprofit, pushes all the right buttons. Khan’s success thus paved the way for MOOC providers to employ a rhetoric of inclusiveness, simplicity, low cost, and metrics, metrics, metrics: the same reasoning that today drives everything from ‘philanthrocapitalist’ foundation spending to high-stakes standardized testing.

“But the shortcomings of the Khan approach will be evident to anyone who cares to have a go at ‘US History Overview 1: Jamestown to the Civil War,’ the 18:28 minute video-with-voiceover class I chose at random from the Khan website. Within the first two minutes Khan has disposed of over a century, blowing past Jamestown (‘a kind of commercial settlement’) and Plymouth Rock (‘we always learned this in school, you know, the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sailing the oceans blue and all the rest’) and ‘fast-forwarding’ to 1754. It’s not even a flashcard approach; it’s a series of lacunae, startlingly free of insight or context, mentioning not one single book or author, and only one political or religious figure (George Washington) in the nine minutes I watched. I’ve seen more informative cereal boxes.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 31, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,608 words)

Sick

The writer pays a visit to a friend:

“I visit him on Tuesday nights at the only time they’ll let me see him. I show the receptionist my driver’s license, confirm my social security number and home address, and sign my name on a dotted line.

“‘Relationship?’ I’m always asked.

“‘Friend,’ I always say.

“The woman—it is the same woman every time—looks, at first, disinterested. She doesn’t even bother to raise her head. She types my name into her computer—click click, click click—but when she finds me, her face lights up.

“‘Oh, there you are,’ she says, smiling, as if it’s possible I’ve disappeared.”

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Feb 1, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,445 words)

What’s the Best Sentence You Read This Week?

We’re conducting a little experiment with Branch today. Share what you loved reading this week.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 1, 2013