Fallen Dean’s Life, Contradictory to Its Grisly End

On the life and death of Cecilia Chang, a former dean at St. John’s University who was accused of using students as servants and stealing more than $1 million from the college. Chang was also accused of hiring a gunman to kill her husband in 1990:

“Mr. Tsai was shot in front of a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, by a man dressed all in white. Three bullets struck him in the shoulder and back, with two hitting internal organs. Mr. Tsai somehow stumbled inside, where the police found him sitting in a chair.

“‘I know the man, I do not know his name,’ Mr. Tsai said then. ‘Cecilia Chang was the person that paid the guy to shoot me.’

“Mr. Tsai was taken to Elmhurst Hospital, where detectives from the 83rd Precinct visited him the next day. Unable to speak, he wrote that his wife wanted him dead so she could control the hosiery business that they shared, instead of dividing up the property in divorce court. He died 11 days after the shooting.”

Published: Dec 10, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,880 words)

Inside the Greatest Writers Room You’ve Never Heard Of

Scovell, a former writer for Spy magazine, joins a group of up-and-coming writers to work on a Fox late-night show called The Wilton North Report:

“In October 1987, I was offered a job on a new, late-night variety talk show and, without thinking twice, I relocated from New York City to Hollywood, where the sunshine and palm trees seemed cartoonish. When Thanksgiving rolled around, I wanted to head back East, but with the premiere two weeks away, we had only Thursday off. The best I could do was spend the day with two other Wilton North writers who were also New England expats. We headed to Westwood, home of UCLA, saw a movie, and looked for a restaurant. Most places were closed or too fancy, so we landed at a bar patterned after an English pub. It was dark, smelly, noisy — everything the Pilgrims had tried to get away from when they came to the New World. The hostess directed us to the one open table on the second floor. We trudged up the steep steps and plopped down. The evening could have been depressing. In fact, it should have been depressing. But it wasn’t. I got to spend Thanksgiving with Conan O’Brien and Greg Daniels.”

Source: Splitsider
Published: Dec 11, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,192 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Esquire’s Chris Jones

Chris Jones is a writer for Esquire and ESPN and the winner of two National Magazine Awards.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 11, 2012
Length: 2 minutes (648 words)

Operation Delirium

Colonel James S. Ketchum oversaw years of research into new methods of chemical warfare—which included testing on U.S. soldiers:

“Today, Ketchum is eighty-one years old, and the facility where he worked, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings attached to a military proving ground on the Chesapeake Bay. The arsenal’s records are boxed and dusting over in the National Archives. Military doctors who helped conduct the experiments have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science? As veterans of the tests have come forward, their unanswered questions have slowly gathered into a kind of historical undertow, and Ketchum, more than anyone else, has been caught in its pull. In 2006, he self-published a memoir, ‘Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten,’ which defended the research. Next year, a class-action lawsuit brought against the federal government by former test subjects will go to trial, and Ketchum is expected to be the star witness.

“The lawsuit’s argument is in line with broader criticisms of Edgewood: that, whether out of military urgency or scientific dabbling, the Army recklessly endangered the lives of its soldiers—naïve men, mostly, who were deceived or pressured into submitting to the risky experiments. The drugs under review ranged from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX, a substance developed at Edgewood and, later, sought by Saddam Hussein. Ketchum’s specialty was a family of molecules that block a key neurotransmitter, causing delirium. The drugs were known mainly by Army codes, with their true formulas classified. The soldiers were never told what they were given, or what the specific effects might be, and the Army made no effort to track how they did afterward. Edgewood’s most extreme critics raise the spectre of mass injury—a hidden American tragedy.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 11, 2012
Length: 57 minutes (14,350 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Doree Shafrir

Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, “Can You Die from a Nightmare?” was featured on Longreads in September.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 10, 2012
Length: 1 minutes (383 words)

Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard

On trailblazing geneticist Pardis Sabeti, who balances being in a rock band with her work in computational genomics:

“There’d be plenty of people eager to talk to Sabeti before long. That October, she was the lead author on a paper published in Nature that laid out her discovery’s ‘profound implications for the study of human history and for medicine.’ For the first time, researchers could look for evidence of positive selection by testing common haplotypes even if they didn’t have ‘prior knowledge of a specific variant or selective advantage.’ By applying this approach to pathogens, there was the possibility of identifying how diseases had evolved to outwit the human immune response or develop drug resistance—knowledge that would open up new avenues to combating disease.

“All of a sudden, the previously unknown 26-year-old was a superstar. David Hafler, a Yale neurologist and immunobiologist who has worked with Sabeti, compares her approach to that of a preternaturally gifted athlete, the hockey great Wayne Gretzky. ‘He was asked, ‘Why are you always where the action is?’ And he responded, ‘I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be.’ That’s the reason she’s able to make all of these fundamental contributions.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Nov 20, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,962 words)

The Dream and the Myth of the Paperless City

The city of Chicago is looking to go paperless, but digitizing won’t be easy:

“‘You can’t move forward with technology in government if you’re redundantly moving around multiple copies of pieces of paper,’ he says. ‘To me, it’s shocking that we’re still talking about forms.’

“But Hillman also acknowledges that there are major roadblocks. Cost is less an issue, he surmises, than overcoming the governmental status quo.

“To make a paperless government work, ‘you would need a paradigm shift,’ Hillman says. ‘You have entire departments — the fire department, the Department of Revenue — that run with their paper. This is how they do things. So when you shift to a paperless government, you have major staffing changes. You have people saying, ‘Well this is not how we do this.’ So that’s going to be the biggest hangup.’

“But it may be more than a mere hangup.”

Source: The Verge
Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,041 words)

Literally

[Fiction] Two young boys temporarily go missing:

“‘You want to play hooky with Isaac?’ Richard asked Danny. Isaac smiled shyly from the doorway, his silver front tooth catching the light. Whenever Richard spotted that tooth, he had the same thought: if his wife had still been alive when the tooth was knocked out, she’d have seen to an ivory replacement.

“‘This morning, but not this afternoon,’ Danny said. ‘Can you go this afternoon?’ he asked Isaac. ‘It’s pizza-party day, remember?'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 3, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,030 words)

Four Hours With John McAfee

A reporter meets with John McAfee, the eponymous creator of the McAfee antivirus software who has been on the run from authorities in Belize for the past several months:

“The obvious question was, why run at all? After all, the police had said that there were no charges against McAfee yet. ‘He is still just a person of interest’ in the investigation, Raphael Martinez, a police spokesperson, told me. ‘We are still looking for him.’ (Asked why they had not found him, Martinez said, ‘It beats the hell out of me.’)

“Besides, McAfee insisted that he had nothing to do with Faull’s murder and that in spite of being neighbours – their houses were about 300 yards apart – he barely even knew the man. ‘He drank and I don’t hang with people who drink,’ he said. He also reminded me that Belize was not as safe as people thought. I had already checked the statistics: according to United Nations figures, the country’s murder rate has risen rapidly, from about 16 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2000 to more than 41 in 2010.

“For many people, the answer was that McAfee was paranoid. Or as Dean Barrow, Belize’s prime minister, suggested a couple of weeks ago in statements made in Belize City to a local reporter, McAfee might simply be ‘bonkers’.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Dec 7, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,749 words)

Parents of Micro Preemie Face Heart-Wrenching Decisions

The writer faces the prospect of giving birth to a child at 23 weeks—when the odds are slimmer that the baby will survive, and the family must look for clear answers on what’s medically possible to save the child:

“We learned her gender in week 16, cataloged her anatomy in week 20. I scrubbed the baseboards in the spare bedroom and stopped buttoning my jeans. I tried to imagine her as a real child, in my hands and in my life. I drew, in ballpoint pen, her cartoon outline on my skin — with big eyes, a sprout of hair, and an umbilical tether to my navel that made her look like a startled space walker. That was the extent to which I understood her: only in outline, the details waiting to be filled in.

“Suddenly there was blood. Blood on my hands. Blood on a thin cotton hospital gown. Blood in red rivulets and blood in dark clumps. Bright beads of blood on the doctor’s blue latex gloves. Blood in such startling quantity we could only imagine there was no life, no baby, not anymore.”

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: Dec 7, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,985 words)