The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick

Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, about Eido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk accused of sexually exploiting students.

We’re excited to feature the first chapter, free for everyone. If you’re not a Longreads Member, join today to receive the full story and ebook, or you can also purchase the ebook at Amazon

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Nov 15, 2013
Length: 90 minutes (22,700 words)

The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think

Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, is on a quest to redefine what we call artificial intelligence—saying that current advancements do not go far enough to understand the human mind:

Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had from the victory? “Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?” A brand of AI that didn’t try to answer such questions—however impressive it might have been—was, in Hofstadter’s mind, a diversion. He distanced himself from the field almost as soon as he became a part of it. “To me, as a fledgling AI person,” he says, “it was self-evident that I did not want to get involved in that trickery. It was obvious: I don’t want to be involved in passing off some fancy program’s behavior for intelligence when I know that it has nothing to do with intelligence. And I don’t know why more people aren’t that way.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Oct 27, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,486 words)

Murder by Craigslist

A killer enlists the help of a high school student to target unemployed, middle-aged men by luring them with a job listing on Craigslist:

“Jeff Schockling was sitting in his mother’s living room, watching Jeopardy, when he heard the doorbell. That alone was strange, as he’d later explain on the witness stand, because out there in the boondocks, visitors generally just walked in the front door. Besides, he hadn’t heard a car drive up. Schockling sent his 9-year-old nephew to see who it was, he testified, and the kid came back yelling, ‘There’s a guy at the door! He’s been shot and he’s bleeding right through!’ Schockling assumed his nephew was playing a prank, but when he went to the door, there was the stranger, holding his right arm across his body, his sleeve and pant leg soaked with blood. The guy was pale and fidgety and wouldn’t sit down at the picnic table outside. But he asked Schockling to call 911.

“Sheriff Stephen Hannum of Noble County arrived after about 15 minutes. He would later describe Davis as remarkably coherent for a man who had been shot and was bleeding heavily. But what Davis was saying made no sense. He claimed that he’d come to the area for a job watching over a 688-acre cattle ranch, and that the man who’d offered him the job had shot him.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 39 minutes (9,933 words)

The Killing Machines

How do we live with drones during wartime—and then after it’s over? A look at the ethical and legal implications, and the realities of what advantages drones have given the U.S. in the battle against al-Qaeda:

“Once the pursuit of al-Qaeda is defined as ‘law enforcement,’ ground assaults may be the only acceptable tactic under international law. A criminal must be given the opportunity to surrender, and if he refuses, efforts must be made to arrest him. Mary Ellen O’Connell believes the Abbottabad raid was an example of how things should work.

“‘It came as close to what we are permitted to do under international law as you can get,’ she said. ‘John Brennan came out right after the killing and said the seals were under orders to attempt to capture bin Laden, and if he resisted or if their own lives were endangered, then they could use the force that was necessary. They did not use a drone. They did not drop a bomb. They did not fire a missile.'”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 41 minutes (10,324 words)

The Girl Who Turned to Bone

Investigating a rare genetic disorder that causes those who suffer from it to grow a second skeleton:

“Within a few years, she would begin to grow new bones that would stretch across her body, some fusing to her original skeleton. Bone by bone, the disease would lock her into stillness. The Mayo doctors didn’t tell Peeper’s parents that. All they did say was that Peeper would not live long.

“‘Basically, my parents were told there was nothing that could be done,’ Peeper told me in October. ‘They should just take me home and enjoy their time with me, because I would probably not live to be a teenager.’

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 23, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,663 words)

How to Stop the Bullies

How Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and members of Anonymous are finding ways to address cyberbullying:

“Lieberman is most interested in catching the egregious instances of bullying and conflict that go destructively viral. So another of the tools he has created is a kind of air-traffic-control program for social-networking sites, with a dashboard that could show administrators where in the network an episode of bullying is turning into a pileup, with many users adding to a stream of comments—à la Let’s Start Drama. ‘Sites like Facebook and Formspring aren’t interested in every little incident, but they do care about the pileups,’ Lieberman told me. ‘For example, the week before prom, every year, you can see a spike in bullying against LGBT kids. With our tool, you can analyze how that spreads—you can make an epidemiological map. And then the social-network site can target its limited resources. They can also trace the outbreak back to its source.’ Lieberman’s dashboard could similarly track the escalation of an assault on one kid to the mounting threat of a gang war. That kind of data could be highly useful to schools and community groups as well as the sites themselves. (Lieberman is leery of seeing his program used in such a way that it would release the kids’ names beyond the social networks to real-world authorities, though plenty of teenagers have social-media profiles that are public or semipublic—meaning their behavior is as well.)”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 20, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,218 words)

What’s Inside America’s Banks?

It remains nearly impossible for investors to understand what’s going on inside the big banks—and what risks they’re taking on:

“When we asked Dane Holmes, the head of investor relations at Goldman Sachs, why so few people trust big banks, he told us, ‘People don’t understand the banks,’ because ‘there is a lack of transparency.’ (Holmes later clarified that he was talking about average people, not the sophisticated investors with whom he interacts on an almost hourly basis.) He is certainly right that few students or plumbers or grandparents truly understand what big banks do anymore. Ordinary people have lost faith in financial institutions. That is a big enough problem on its own.

“But an even bigger problem has developed—one that more fundamentally threatens the safety of the financial system—and it more squarely involves the sort of big investors with whom Holmes spends much of his time. More and more, the people in the know don’t trust big banks either.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 2, 2013
Length: 37 minutes (9,440 words)

Reply to a Dead Man

[Fiction] A man receives a letter from his deceased brother:

‘My brother hired you to give me a message after he was dead?’

Harding smiled and nodded.

‘He died six and a half months ago,’ I said. ‘What took you so long?’

‘His wish was for us to execute his instructions not less than half a year after his demise.’

‘Is this some kinda legal thing?’

‘It is a simple agreement between FRC and your brother,’ Lance Harding said, maintaining an aura of imperturbable patience. ‘Often individuals wish to pass on knowledge outside of the rubric of wills and other legal formats. Some leave a spoken message, others might wish to pass along a note or a small package.’

‘Seth didn’t have much,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t have anything to hide.’

‘We all have something to hide, Mr. Vaness. Either that or something is hidden from us.’

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 1, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,665 words)

The Bookstore Strikes Back

Author Ann Patchett on opening an independent bookstore in Nashville, Tenn. at a time when brick and mortar bookstores are considered dead:

“I was starting to understand the role that the interviews would play in that success. In my 30s, I had paid my rent by writing for fashion magazines. I found Elle to be the most baffling, because its editors insisted on identifying trends. Since most fashion magazines ‘closed’ (industry jargon for the point at which the pages are shipped to the printing plant) three months before they hit newsstands, the identification of trends, especially from Nashville, required an act of near-clairvoyance. Finally, I realized what everyone in fashion already knew: a trend is whatever you call a trend. This spring in Paris, fashionistas will wear fishbowls on their heads. In my hotel room in Australia, this insight came back to me more as a vision than a memory. ‘The small independent bookstore is coming back,’ I told reporters in Bangladesh and Berlin. ‘It’s part of a trend.’

“My act was on the road, and with every performance, I tweaked the script, hammering out the details as I proclaimed them to strangers: All things happen in a cycle, I explained—the little bookstore had succeeded and grown into a bigger bookstore. Seeing the potential for profit, the superstore chains rose up and crushed the independents, then Amazon rose up and crushed the superstore chains. Now that we could order any book at any hour without having to leave the screen in front of us, we realized what we had lost: the community center, the human interaction, the recommendation of a smart reader rather than a computer algorithm telling us what other shoppers had purchased. I promised whoever was listening that from those very ashes, the small independent bookstore would rise again.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Nov 29, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,590 words)

The Man Who Made Star Wars

A 1979 look inside the making of George Lucas’s blockbuster franchise—now owned by Disney:

Star Wars was manufactured. When a competent corporation prepares a new product, it does market research. George Lucas did precisely that. When he says that the film was written for toys (‘I love them, I’m really into that’), he also means he had merchandising in mind, all the sideshow goods that go with a really successful film. He thought of T-shirts and transfers, records, models, kits, and dolls. His enthusiasm for the comic strips was real and unforced; he had a gallery selling comic-book art in New York.

“From the start, Lucas was determined to control the selling of the film, and of its by-products. ‘Normally you just sign a standard contract with a studio,’ he says, ‘but we wanted merchandising, sequels, all those things. I didn’t ask for another $1 million-just the merchandising rights. And Fox thought that was a fair trade.’ Lucasfilm Ltd.,. the production company George Lucas set up in July 1971, ‘already had a merchandising department as big as Twentieth Century-Fox has. And it was better. When I was doing the film deal, I had already hired the guy to handle that stuff.'”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 1, 1979
Length: 20 minutes (5,033 words)