Diving Deep into Danger

It’s one of the most dangerous jobs in the world—working as a deep-sea diver:

“Most offshore divers aspire to work saturation jobs (‘Sat is where it’s at,’ says Newsum), but after graduating diving school and passing an extensive physical, a diver must begin as a ‘tender,’ or apprentice diver. A tender will serve on the support staff for deeper divers, and work at depths as shallow as four feet of water. Often a tender will assist on jobs involving oil pipelines, which tend to be buried four to six feet below the mud line in order to avoid contact with ships or marine life. A tender might be called upon to bury a repaired pipe, using hand jets to displace the bottom so that the pipe will sink belowground. Or he might excavate a pipe, in preparation for a more experienced diver to repair it. An apprentice makes about $40,000 a year.”

Published: Jan 19, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,582 words)

Rebel Towns

Small towns like Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, are fighting unwanted development by practicing “municipal disobedience”:

“Thus, Sugar Hill became one of dozens of communities nationwide—mostly villages but also the city of Pittsburgh—that have reacted to environmental threats by directly challenging the Constitution and established case law. The leading champion of this confrontational strategy—which has its share of critics, even among progressives who share the sense of desperation that is driving it—is a bearish 43-year-old attorney named Thomas Linzey. These skirmishes, Linzey believes, are the first steps in a long campaign to wrest power from corporations and strengthen American democracy. He refers to the strategy as “collective nonviolent civil disobedience through municipal lawmaking.”

Source: The Nation
Published: Jan 19, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,638 words)

Theater of Pain

A look at the culture of playing through your injuries in the NFL:

“But when you’re always hurting, how do you know when you’re hurt?

“You don’t. Not always, anyway. ‘A lot of times you don’t know exactly when the injury happens, because you’re taking drugs like Toradol or another kind of anti-inflam, so you’re feeling good,’ says Tennessee Titans quarterback Matt Hasselbeck. ‘Or maybe you’re dealing with a previous injury, like an ankle, and you’re taking Toradol, so you’re feeling a little bit better, but now all of a sudden everything is feeling a little bit better. Plus, you have the rush of adrenaline — so the injury might hurt a little, but you don’t really realize it. You might not feel it till the next day, or you may feel it that night. Because your mind-set is to play through everything you can, unless you cannot. And usually, it’s been my experience that when you come off the field after an injury, the trainer or the team doctor is meeting you. They’re like, ‘You haven’t moved your arm in thirty seconds. What happened?’ And you’re like, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine — leave me alone.”‘”

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Jan 19, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,947 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: Forever Young, by Jason Johnson & Kill Screen Magazine

This week’s Longreads Member Exclusive is “Forever Young,” a story by Jason Johnson for the literary video game magazine Kill Screen. Johnson tells us how he first discovered a group of Hungarian developers who have spent more than 20 years developing a game for the Commodore 64: 

“This wasn’t supposed to happen. As originally conceived, my account of Newcomer, a Commodore 64 game from Hungary, had no business in a publication that hangs its hat on lengthy works of journalism. My assignment was a paltry 1,500 words. The initial interview wasn’t fruitful. However, as is the case with many who’ve stumbled upon this fascinating lifework––now twenty-three years in the works, and counting––one thing led to another, and I was in it for the long haul.

“I was interested in profiling István Belánszky, Newcomer‘s torchbearer, but like so many merely adequate polyglots, István doesn’t speak English very well. He was hesitant to interview verbally. I wasn’t able to get to Budapest to meet him, so I interviewed extensively, both with and around István, relying on the convenience of email and instant messaging. The result was a scroll of text, some 27,918 words, the majority typed by István, with long intervals between our exchanges as he painstakingly hammered out, to the best of his ability, the ins and outs of writing software for a computer that, quite honestly, was outdated in 1992, when development on the game began. The longest of these sessions lasted for an insufferable seven hours. By the end, I was ready to cry. But every now and then, amidst the barrage of technical talk and ‘b0rked English,’ a morsel of information would appear in the text window so peculiar and surprising that it made everything worthwhile.”

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

Source: Kill Screen
Published: Jan 18, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,679 words)

Experience

[Fiction] A woman whose marriage is ending finds a new place to live:

“When my marriage fell apart one summer, I had to get out of the little flat in Kentish Town, where I had been first happy and then sad. I arranged to live for a few months in another woman’s house; she agreed to let me stay there rent-free, because she was going to America and wanted someone to keep an eye on things. I didn’t know Hana very well; she was a friend of a friend. I found her intimidating—she was tall and big-boned and gushing, with a high forehead and a curvaceous strong jaw, a mass of chestnut-colored curls. But I liked the idea of having her three-story red brick London town house all to myself.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 17, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,466 words)

How Good Does Karaoke Have to Be to Qualify as Art?

A writer goes to Portland, Ore. where the karaoke scene is vibrant and taken seriously:

“‘Karaoke in Portland is just different from other places,’ said his friend Bruce Morrison. ‘There’s a lot of showmanship.’

“Mulkern swept his long hair over his shoulders and put his top hat back on. ‘People in Portland,’ he declared, ‘are sillier than in other places.’

“In the corner of the booth, a woman with dark-rimmed eyes and black lipstick leaned forward suddenly and took my pen from my hand. She wrote a phone number in my notepad. ‘Do you know,’ she asked, staring intently into my eyes, ‘about puppet karaoke?'”

Author: Dan Kois
Published: Jan 17, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,839 words)

Is PTSD Contagious?

A look at the families who are not just affected by returning veterans, but display similar symptons:

“Brannan and Katie’s teacher have conferenced about Katie’s behavior many times. Brannan’s not surprised she’s picked up overreacting and yelling—you don’t have to be at the Vines residence for too long to hear Caleb hollering from his room, where he sometimes hides for 18, 20 hours at a time, and certainly not if you’re there during his nightmares, which Katie is. ‘She mirrors…she just mirrors’ her dad’s behavior, Brannan says. She can’t get Katie to stop picking at the sores on her legs, sores she digs into her own skin with anxious little fingers. She is not, according to Brannan, ‘a normal, carefree six-year-old.'”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jan 17, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,091 words)

Scientific Families: Dynasty

A look at ecologist Bob Paine, whose mentorship has produced a long line of influential scientists throughout his five-decade career:

“Soon, Paine’s students were growing up and embarking on careers of their own. Few have spawned as rich a legacy as Jane Lubchenco and Bruce Menge. They met as graduate students in Paine’s lab in 1969, married two years later and began a partnership that has generated more than 31 students and 19 postdocs. After the pair left Paine’s lab, they took his experimental approach to the US east coast; she focused on plants and herbivores, while he concentrated on predators. By enclosing, excluding and removing species at different points along the New England shore, they showed that fierce waves can keep predators such as starfish at bay, allowing mussels to dominate. But in sheltered areas, predators kept mussels under control, allowing Irish moss (Chondrus crispus), a type of red alga, to take over. The work revealed how the environment can control interactions between species.”

Author: Ed Yong
Source: Nature
Published: Jan 16, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,293 words)

Tupac Lane Welcomes You: The Street Names Of Las Vegas

How an era of rampant expansion—and sloppy spelling—led to the creation of strange or questionable street names in Las Vegas:

“With all this rapid expansion came strange civic issues. As Rothman notes in his book, police officers were given new maps of the city every week. Some of the streets on the map, he points out, had been misspelled—not on the map, but on the street sign itself. As a particular instance of this, he cites Jane Austin Avenue, in North Las Vegas—like the snout-nosed McMansions that call it home, Jane Austin Avenue is an ugly and misguided gesture at Old World luster. If you take a closer look at this particular subdivision, which has streets named for dead Europeans and luxury automobiles, you’ll notice Jane Austin isn’t the only spelling error around. We also have Alfa Romero [sic] Ave and De [sic] Vinci Ct. The developer’s carelessness is stunning. They’re not alone.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 16, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,975 words)

Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax

A college football star learns about the death of his grandmother and girlfriend on the same day and has inspirational stories written about him by major media outlets. But there’s a problem: His girlfriend never existed:

There was no Lennay Kekua. Lennay Kekua did not meet Manti Te’o after the Stanford game in 2009. Lennay Kekua did not attend Stanford. Lennay Kekua never visited Manti Te’o in Hawaii. Lennay Kekua was not in a car accident. Lennay Kekua did not talk to Manti Te’o every night on the telephone. She was not diagnosed with cancer, did not spend time in the hospital, did not engage in a lengthy battle with leukemia. She never had a bone marrow transplant. She was not released from the hospital on Sept. 10, nor did Brian Te’o congratulate her for this over the telephone. She did not insist that Manti Te’o play in the Michigan State or Michigan games, and did not request he send white flowers to her funeral. Her favorite color was not white. Her brother, Koa, did not inform Manti Te’o that she was dead. Koa did not exist. Her funeral did not take place in Carson, Calif., and her casket was not closed at 9 a.m. exactly. She was not laid to rest.

“Lennay Kekua’s last words to Manti Te’o were not ‘I love you.'”

Source: Deadspin
Published: Jan 16, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,763 words)