Notes From a Unicorn

What it’s like to be a bisexual man in a world that wants you to choose between being either gay or straight:

“Recently, on OKCupid, a woman messaged me: ‘Are you truly into ladies, and if so, what type? Finding a truly bi man is like finding a unicorn.’

“If I’m a unicorn where I live now, in L.A., then I was a unicorn rocky mountain oyster when I moved to the old rustbelt city of Syracuse, New York to go to grad school and live for the first time as a fully out bi man. There was one other mythical bi man in the entire city, but try as I might, I never found him. At the gay bar, I sometimes got called a ‘half-breeder.’ Straight people treated me just as shittily as they treat gay people. Three times, gay men hit me in the back of the head when they saw my head turn for a women. For the most part, straight women wouldn’t date me because, as one said, ‘You’re just gonna leave me to go suck a dick.’ For the first time in my life, frat boys called me fag. My professor said, ‘The world just isn’t ready for gay marriage.’ I emailed him ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail.'”

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Feb 24, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,945 words)

A Scorsese in Lagos: The Making of Nigeria’s Film Industry

Filmmaker Kunle Afolayan is looking to push the boundaries of moviemaking in Nigeria—but it’s still too early to know whether the audiences can support a film with even a $500,000 budget:

“Twenty years after bursting from the grungy street markets of Lagos, the $500 million Nigerian movie business churns out more than a thousand titles a year on average, and trails only Hollywood and Bollywood in terms of revenues. The films are hastily shot and then burned onto video CDs, a cheap alternative to DVDs. They are seldom seen in the developed world, but all over Africa consumers snap up the latest releases from video peddlers for a dollar or two. And so while Afolayan’s name is unknown outside Africa, at home, the actor-director is one of the most famous faces in the exploding entertainment scene known — inevitably — as ‘Nollywood.’

“On a continent where economies usually depend on extracting natural resources or on charity, moviemaking is now one of Nigeria’s largest sources of private-sector employment.”

Published: Feb 24, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,712 words)

How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot

A weeklong investigation to discover who created the Twitter account that spits out “context-free nonsense” and in doing so has now amassed more than 40,000 followers and a devoted fanbase:

“The feed’s strangely poetic stream has been embraced like a life-preserver by internet users drowning in a sea of painfully literal SEO headlines and hack Twitter comedians. Since it appeared in August 2010, word of Horse_ebooks has spread steadily, propelled by blog posts and Twitter chatter by internet obsessives. But unlike many internet culture phenomenons, it never truly went viral. Horse_Ebooks is too weird, too much of an acquired taste to break into exponential growth.

“But these same qualities that have relegated Horse_ebooks to relative obscurity have inspired a passionate Twitter fanbase rivaled only by Beliebers. Followers have fashioned an elaborate fandom based on Horse_ebooks, comics, fan-fiction, merchandise, and inside-jokes. A browser plug-in that turned the text of any website into Horse_ebook-isms was the latest craze among fans. A characteristic Horse_ebook superfan boast is: ‘I unfollowed Horse_ebooks, because my friends retweet all its tweets anyway.’ We’re so deep into Horse_ebooks, you couldn’t escape it if you tried.”

Source: Gawker
Published: Feb 24, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,141 words)

Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software

Inside the making of the social network for programmers—which now has 1.3 million users and more than 2 million source code repositories:

“At first, GitHub was a side project. Wanstrath and Preston-Werner would meet on Saturdays to brainstorm, while coding during their free time and working their day jobs. ‘GitHub wasn’t supposed to be a startup or a company. GitHub was just a tool that we needed,’ Wanstrath says. But — inspired by Gmail — they made the project a private beta and opened it up to others. Soon it caught on with the outside world.

“By January of 2008, Hyett was on board. And three months after that night in the sports bar, Wanstrath got a message from Geoffrey Grosenbach, the founder of PeepCode, a online learning site that had started using GitHub. ‘I’m hosting my company’s code here,’ Grosenbach said. ‘I don’t feel comfortable not-paying you guys. Can I just send a check?'”

Source: Wired
Published: Feb 22, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,427 words)

Is Anne Marie Rasmusson Too Hot to Have a Driver’s License?

More than 100 police officers from 18 different agencies accessed the driver’s license records of Rasmusson, a former officer. She’s now suing for invasion of privacy:

“Rasmusson’s lawsuit, which will be filed in the coming weeks, alleges that not only was her privacy compromised, but that her story is merely a symptom of a larger culture of data abuse by police. Her attorneys charge that while police are trained to use the driver’s license database for official purposes only, in reality it’s more like a Facebook for cops.

“The agencies involved have maintained that this is an isolated incident. But one officer, who would not use his name for fear of further discipline, says that the practice is commonplace.

“‘I get Anne’s side of it,’ he says. ‘But every single cop in the state has done this. Chiefs on down.'”

Source: City Pages
Published: Feb 22, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,956 words)

The Way We Play the Game

High school hockey player Jack Jablonski was left paralyzed after a hit during a game—leading Minnesota to get tougher on rules, and leading families to rethink hockey’s risks:

“‘I forgot to tell you,’ he says. Something in his voice is strange. He looks at me. Cade and Raye are both staring at me now. Peter touches my hand.

“‘Jack Jablonski broke his neck last night.’

“Jack Jablonski—known as Jabby to his friends and the kids like Cade who grew up skating with him on the lakes around our homes—is not the first boy to break his neck playing this game. But he is the first one whom we who have kids still in Minneapolis youth and high school hockey programs have watched grow up.”

Published: Feb 22, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,817 words)

Burn All the Liars

Revisiting—and correcting—the stories of Frances Farmer. The star of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood was once thought to have been lobotomized after being involuntary committed to an institution:

“Let’s make something perfectly clear: Frances was not lobotomized. Granted, Dr. Walter Freeman did visit Steilacoom and perform lobotomies while Frances was incarcerated there—but correlation isn’t commission, obviously, and, more importantly, Frances’s medical records confirm that she wasn’t operated on for any reason whatsoever at Steilacoom. This according to Jeffrey Kauffman, a musician and historian, who describes himself as ‘the first person to obtain access to pertinent medical and court records [that] clarify many aspects of Farmer’s history.’ Furthermore, no one during Frances’s lifetime claimed or even implied that Frances had been lobotomized—not Frances, not her doctors, not her family, not her bitter former lovers, not her ex-husbands three, not even that veritable (albeit charming) bullhorn of calumny, movie gossip columnist Louella Parsons. No one.”

Author: Matt Evans
Published: Feb 22, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,977 words)

The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever

Scientists are discovering how chemicals can affect the way memories are formed, paving the way for a future where it could be possible to forget anything we wanted by taking a single pill:

“This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style mindwiping. In some ways it’s potentially even more effective and more precise. Because of the compartmentalization of memory in the brain—the storage of different aspects of a memory in different areas—the careful application of PKMzeta synthesis inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. Right now, researchers have to inject their obliviating potions directly into the rodent brain. Future treatments, however, will involve targeted inhibitors, like an advanced version of ZIP, that become active only in particular parts of the cortex and only at the precise time a memory is being recalled. The end result will be a menu of pills capable of erasing different kinds of memories—the scent of a former lover or the awful heartbreak of a failed relationship. These thoughts and feelings can be made to vanish, even as the rest of the memory remains perfectly intact. ‘Reconsolidation research has shown that we can get very specific about which associations we go after,’ LeDoux says. ‘And that’s a very good thing. Nobody actually wants a totally spotless mind.'”

Source: Wired
Published: Feb 17, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,263 words)

The Making of ‘Homer at the Bat’

Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics:

“Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him and Mrs. Krabappel to engage in Bull Durham-inspired extramarital shenanigans. Canseco’s wife rejected the scene, and the staff had to do a last-minute Saturday afternoon rewrite when Oakland came south on a mid-August road trip.

“Instead of Lothario, Canseco got to play hero, rushing into a woman’s burning house to rescue her baby, then cat, followed by a player piano, washer, dryer, couch and recliner combo, high chair, TV, rug, kitchen table and chairs, lamp, and grandfather clock. Requesting the new sequence turned out to be the wiser move. Canseco and his wife had nearly divorced earlier that year before reconciling, and a week before ‘Homer at the Bat’ aired, Canseco was arrested by Miami police for chasing down and ramming his wife’s BMW twice with his red Porsche at 4:30 a.m. After the chase ended, he allegedly got out of his car, came over to his wife’s driver-side window, and spit on it.”

Source: Deadspin
Published: Feb 21, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,980 words)

Shark in the Kiddie Pool

Nick Roses is a 22-year-old Hollywood agent who specializes in working with child actors. But former clients say he’s scamming families with promises of Disney stardom:

“Howard Meltzer, a longtime casting director, calls Roses ‘Bernie Brillstein in a 20-year-old’s body.’ Many others in Hollywood deem him either a gimlet-eyed child prodigy prone to the occasional youthful indiscretion or a shark-eyed huckster with the face of a Mouseketeer. Or both.

“Roses’s status as a communal lightning rod began in April, when the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office charged him with seven counts of, in essence, criminal Hollywood skulduggery. Parents of children that Roses represented complained that he, among other things, baited them into moving to Los Angeles and becoming clients at a poorly run management company which bilked them out of money. In July, the case was settled when he pleaded no contest to violating a new law prohibiting managers from charging fees to clients for the promise of work or auditions. Such fees are deemed red flags by the Hollywood Establishment; mainstream talent managers work on a commission basis—they don’t make a penny until the client does.”

Author: Ned Zeman
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Feb 14, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,001 words)