Like Any Normal Day

An excerpt from Mark Kram Jr.’s book about the life of Buddy Miley, a high school football star who became a quadriplegic after a game injury. Buddy’s brother Jimmy would later help him end his life:

“Calling out the signals as the P-W defense edged in closer to the line, Buddy leaned over center at the Tennent 40-yard line. The play he called in the huddle was a handoff to running back Mark Dougherty. But Buddy also had the option to run with the ball, and that is precisely what he did as he spotted a hole open up off left tackle. From his safety position, Dippolito chose not to drop back into coverage but to stop any possible run. Buddy dodged him, but Dippolito remembers he clutched a handful of his jersey as Buddy sped by. Six or seven yards up field, P- W defensive tackle Grant Hudson caught him by the foot. But it was Frangiosa who had an angle on him. With an 8- to-10-yard running start, he plowed into him at chest level with the rage that had been building in him since Charters had handed him the game plan. Buddy flipped over and landed on his neck. Under a pile of squirming bodies, Buddy emitted an anguished squeal.

“‘EEEOOOWWW!

“Then… ‘I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.’

Published: Oct 2, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,717 words)

Inside the Obama Campaign’s Hard Drive

Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level:

“By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just know you were a pro-choice teacher who once gave $40 to save the endangered Rocky Mountain swamp gnat; they also could have a data firm sort you by what type of magazines you subscribed to and where you bought your T-shirts. The fifth source, the increasingly powerful email lists, track which blasts you respond to, the links you click on, and whether you unsubscribe.

“In the past, this information has been compartmentalized within various segments of the campaign. It existed in separate databases, powered by different kinds of software that could not communicate with each other. The goal of Project Narwhal was to link all of this data together. Once Reed and his team had integrated the databases, analysts could identify trends and craft sharper messages calibrated to appeal to individual voters. For example, if the campaign knows that a particular voter in northeastern Ohio is a pro-life Catholic union member, it will leave him off email blasts relating to reproductive rights and personalize its pitch by highlighting Obama’s role in the auto bailout—or Romney’s outsourcing past.”

Author: Tim Murphy
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Oct 2, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,417 words)

The Plot Against Occupy

Did the feds break up a dangerous terror plot in Cleveland—or did they manufacture a threat from a group of impressionable Occupy followers?

“The crux of the Cleveland Five’s defense will likely rest on whether Azir’s aggressive role in the crime constituted entrapment – a strategy which Baxter’s defense attorney John Pyle foreshadowed at an early court appearance. ‘They couldn’t blow their noses, let alone blow up a bridge,’ he said of his clients, ‘were it not for what this provocateur did.’ Yet the government has had no problem overcoming the entrapment defense to win convictions in similar cases. The legal definition of entrapment is actually rather narrow: Even though enticing people into committing crimes might seem unjust, that doesn’t make it unlawful. Prosecutors typically argue that defendants’ histories show they were predisposed to commit the crime. And juries frightened by the magnitude of the foiled plots are inclined to bring down the hammer.

“In the case of the Cleveland Five, defense attorneys have also signaled their intention to reveal Azir’s extensive criminal history, which could undermine his credibility. Azir has been causing prosecutors plenty of headaches since the arrests. After his identity was outed by the Smoking Gun, the FBI scuttled him into the ­witness-protection program, reportedly in response to a threat. But living life under federal protection hasn’t kept him out of trouble. In May, Azir – who still faces two outstanding bad-check cases he picked up during his time with Occupy – was arrested in Cuyahoga County for theft. He’s out on $5,000 bail.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Oct 2, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,799 words)

Member Exclusive: Escape from Evil

Our latest Exclusive comes from writer and Longreads Member Maria Bustillos, whose own work has been featured on Longreads in the past. She’s chosen Chapter 8 from Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Becker’s 1975 book Escape from Evil. Maria explains:

“Becker won a Pulitzer for his previous book, The Denial of Death, but this one, published posthumously and building on ideas from that earlier work, is far, far better, to my mind, more compact, more advanced, more compelling. This book is pragmatic synthesis of multiple disciplines in the science of man, the place where humanities and science collide. Theories about Becker’s work abound, but for me his great gift was the way he seemed to have led us to the threshold of a new enlightenment, clear-eyed, undeceived, ready to take the next step. It’s a step the reader may be able to intuit, and perhaps even gain, and make practical use of in his or her own life: ‘[W]e have to take a full look at the worst in order to begin to get rid of illusions. Realism, even brutal, is not cynicism.'”

Source: Free Press
Published: Jan 1, 1975
Length: 51 minutes (12,899 words)

I Don’t See You

A writer examines issues of racism he witnessed while growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, and running a grocery store with his father:

“When I went back for an event for my college fraternity, I introduced myself to one of the new guys, my brother who is the first ‘black guy’ in my fraternity. When I asked him where he was from, he said, ‘From South America originally.’ I laughed and said, ‘No, I meant where from in the US—St. Louis, Kansas City?’ The suburban kid from St. Louis didn’t want to be considered ‘African American.’ For him, being South American was a safer play in a predominately white fraternity.

“I’ve wondered whether an African American would have gotten a small business loan like my father did.

“In 1989 when the movie came out, a reporter asked Spike Lee a question about what viewers ‘should learn’ from Do The Right Thing. Lee smiled and quipped that maybe black folks should be able to get financing to run their own pizzerias.”

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Sep 26, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,032 words)

Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?

Moderately successful indie rock groups like Grizzly Bear have found it difficult to earn a living that would place them solidly in the middle class:

“For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. ‘People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,’ says Droste. ‘Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.’ Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with ‘a nice little “Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.” ’ They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (‘Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage’), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. ‘I just think it’s inappropriate,’ says Droste. ‘Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.'”

Published: Oct 1, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,854 words)

Chasing A Ghost

Two cold case investigators uncover a serial killer’s trail in Colorado:

“Yearling turned to his computer and pulled up a map. The site where Ramey’s body was dumped—an area southeast of East 56th Avenue and Havana Street—was now a jumble of loading docks, and strips of asphalt and concrete. The detective typed Ramey’s name into a Google search. After a few minutes clicking through different websites, Yearling stumbled upon a message board devoted to cold case investigations. In one comment thread dedicated to unsolved Colorado homicides, he found a simple who-what-when on a young woman who disappeared in August 1979. Her name was Norma Jean Halford. Yearling scrolled down the page and found a copied and pasted, 21-year-old newspaper story that included Ramey’s name on a list of women who were murdered or disappeared across the Denver metro area from 1979 to 1988. According to police at the time, the story said, one man might have been responsible: a man named Vincent Groves.”

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: Sep 28, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,753 words)

My Life as a Replacement Ref: Three Unlikely Months Inside the NFL

[Not single-page] An interview with Jerry Frump, who left his job as a Division I college football referee to work as a replacement official in the NFL during a labor dispute between the NFL and the NFL Referees Association.

“What was the most surreal moment in this whole experience?

“I suppose it was – not when it happened, but afterwards – there’s been a number of pictures that have appeared in the newspaper and the Internet and so forth, but I think the one that seems to be most popular is me signaling intentional grounding on Ben Roethlisberger and him with his hands on his hips looking down on me. You know, he’s a very big man. I’m only about 5’9” or 5’10”. So it was – I had to look at it with some amusement myself.

“And was that the right call?

“Yes, I actually got the correct call on it.

“Was there a low moment?

“I suppose you really felt bad for your colleagues when they blew a call, or there was one that was getting a lot of negative media attention. Again, everybody goes out there and they work hard, and we kind of stand side by side. When somebody makes a call, obviously, the microscope is very big at this level. I think the NFL in one of our conference calls indicated that ‘there will probably be no one in history has gone through such a high level of scrutiny, and the microscope has never been as big as it is on you guys at this time.'”

Source: Time Magazine
Published: Sep 28, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,563 words)

An Abandoned and Malignant Heart

In 2009, 14-year-old Emily Ball called her ex-boyfriend, 17-year-old Travis White, and asked him to come over to her apartment, where he was beaten and murdered by two men. A look at the case:

“Ball’s attorneys have done what all public defenders try not to do: They’ve become emotionally involved with their client. Amanda Jarrells Mullins handled Ball’s case from her office in sleepy Maysville, Kentucky; co-counsel Casey Holland is based in Frankfort. Where others may see a shameless, even evil girl—as the prosecution does—Mullins and Holland see a scared child who was in over her head. The attorneys quickly became attached to the tall, fair-skinned pre-teen with auburn hair and wide-set eyes not unlike those of a kewpie doll. ‘She was just a young girl that [Golsby and Dodson] used to facilitate their own agenda to beat this kid up,’ Mullins says. ‘Those two individuals are your classic bad guys.’ Indeed, what Golsby and Dodson did to Travis White was unimaginably brutal, which is perhaps Ball’s best defense. ‘There’s no question in my mind that she had no idea of the extent of it,’ Holland says. ‘The brutality of this shocked everyone. And Emily is no exception to that.’

“Whatever her motives were for calling White to the home, Ball played an undeniable role in his slaying. She witnessed the beginning of his physical assault and left him alone with his would-be killers, walking past the Covington Police Department on two separate occasions while the beating was going on without seeking help. She returned to the house at 1805 Madison during and after the attack, saw White’s beaten body in her bedroom, and left again. Later, she acted as a lookout with her friend, 19-year-old Amber Goerler, while Kasey Dodson, Brian Golsby, and two others—friends Dale Eastman and David Thompson—moved Travis’s body to the empty lot behind Jess & Sons Towing.”

Published: Sep 26, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,648 words)

Branded for Life

What it’s like for an actor to become a TV commercial megastar—forever associated with a brand, for better and worse:

“On the day of the audition, roughly 30 actors showed up. When it was Olcott’s turn, he flashed his big, ecstatic smile. The director loved it, and Olcott got the job. In February, on a bare-bones budget of roughly $100,000, a first commercial was shot touting the herbal product Enzyte. It boiled down to 30 seconds of campy innuendo. Olcott was shown breezing through life flashing his blissed-out smile at breakfast, at work, and while waving happily to his neighbor, a guy holding a sagging hose. ‘This is Bob,’ went the voice-over. ‘Bob is doing well. Very well indeed. That’s because not long ago, with just a quick phone call, Bob realized that he could have something better in his life. And what did he get? Why, a big boost of confidence, a little more self-esteem, and a very happy Mrs. at home.’ Toward the end of the commercial, viewers were given a telephone number for Enzyte.

“A couple months later, Olcott got a phone call from the advertising team in Los Angeles. The commercial was a huge hit in the U.S. The phones at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, the Cincinnati-based maker of Enzyte, were ringing like crazy. They wanted more ads, more Bob, more smiles. Spear rushed back to Vancouver. By the time they stopped shooting in 2005, Olcott had starred as Smiling Bob in 18 different Enzyte commercials. Ultimately, Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals spent more than $125 million on airtime, the company’s founder would later tell GQ. Smiling Bob was famous.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Sep 27, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,957 words)