Our latest first chapter comes from Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, who has chosen Janet Fitch’s 1999 novel White Oleander. If you want to recommend a First Chapter, let us know and we’ll feature you and your pick: hello@longreads.com.Read more…
In August 2008, Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan were kidnapped and held hostage in Somalia. They spent 460 days in captivity. This is the story of their escape attempt, which is excerpted from Lindhout’s book A House in the Sky:
“One afternoon, a light rain began to dapple the concrete wall across the alleyway from my window. The sky darkened to a powdery gray. A wind gusted, rushing through trees I couldn’t see, causing the rain to spray sideways on the wall.
“‘God, it’s beautiful,’ a voice said, clear as day, articulating my exact thought at the exact moment I had it.
“The voice wasn’t mine. But it was a voice I knew. ‘Nige?’
“The voice said, ‘Trout?’ Trout was a nickname I had since high school.
“For a shocked second, we were both silent. He was maybe 10 feet away from me at the window in his room. Because the alleyway was narrow and the tin roof of our house overlapped slightly with that of the house behind it, the acoustics were perfect.”
A community in Texas grapples with the deaths of two high school students:
“The Friday night before that Sunday at Possum Kingdom Lake, Coppell played an away game at Hebron High School in Carrollton. Jacob went up to Solomon and said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You haven’t gotten any sacks all season!’ The two had worked out a signature move: Solomon, after a sack, would bring his palms together and bow to the crowd. The very next play, Solomon got a sack and took his bow. ‘Jacob went crazy,’ Solomon says. ‘He chest-bumped me and said, ‘That was the sickest celebration!’ He was screaming and laughing and so pumped up.’
“Cam McDaniel, Gavin’s older brother, a running back at Notre Dame, was the first to reach Solomon on the phone that Sunday afternoon to give him the terrible news. ‘What should I do?’ asked Solomon, shaken. Cam said, ‘Solly, pray. And just keep the faith.’ The 6-foot-3, 260-pound athlete hung up the phone and fell to the floor.
“As word spread, CHS students flocked to the one place they felt closest to Jacob—Buddy Echols Field, where hundreds held a prayer vigil Sunday night.”
After their teenage daughter is killed in a tragic accident, two grieving parents grapple with the events leading up to her death:
“Inside, Jason realizes he’s been thrown into the backseat. He looks up at Taylor still strapped into the front, hair and shorts splashed with blood. Dustin is still buckled in the backseat.
“The girls are missing.
“Neighbors rush to the wreck as the boys climb out of the Blazer. Dustin starts breaking bottles, mumbling about getting in trouble, before eventually running off. Jason and Taylor find Jamie lying on the ground beneath the U-Haul, groaning.
“One of the witnesses tries to reassure them: ‘The four of you are okay.’
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:
Good reporting demands observation, but student journalists often struggle with the kind of focused hanging around you have to do with a subject to capture some accurate sense of them. How does the subject move? How do they interact with their environment, with other people? There’s so much information to gather before you ever ask a question, but the only way to get it is to shut up and watch. James Costanzo, who just completed a graduate journalism program at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, wrote about a parkour teacher in Manhattan earlier this summer for the tablet magazine Vertical Floor. It’s not only well reported but well written, because the writer took the time to observe.
A visit to the Sierra Blanca checkpoint in Texas that has busted Willie Nelson, Snoop Lion, Fiona Apple, Nelly, Armie Hammer and many other travelers passing through with pot in their cars:
“Meanwhile, my fingerprints were recorded on an inkless electronic touch pad such as I’d never seen on a television cop show, and my picture was taken with one of those egg-shaped digital cameras that nobody would use but a government agency with no interest in flattering you. Then I sat there in handcuffs for hours while my prints and mug shot were circulated to cop databases around the nation. This is a worrisome process for anyone. Who among us can ever be sure we haven’t pissed off a government computer somewhere?
“The rationale for all this effort was later explained to me by Carry Huffman, the deputy chief patrol agent of the Big Bend sector. “Every pothead isn’t a bad guy,” he said. “But every bad guy is a pothead.” By detaining people for a couple of joints, the Border Patrol, which since 2003 has been part of the Department of Homeland Security, is able to investigate everything about them, and this can occasionally lead to catching some genuinely bad guys. Car thieves and fugitives and completely clueless big-time smugglers—not to mention terrorists—all can be snared in the follow-up to the canine alarm. Of course, that happens only rarely; nationally, the Border Patrol has caught just one so-called terrorist, a University of Houston student practicing paramilitary operations in the Big Bend. But it’s not backing off.”
Last week we lost a pioneer of early computing, Doug Engelbart, and Tom Foremski has an excellent short backstory about the inventor of the mouse. It was Engelbart’s 1968 demo of computer graphical user interfaces that inspired everything we now use today—yet despite his many accomplishments Engelbart struggled in later years to get attention or funding for his work.
Now seems like an appropriate time to look back at some of the early computer demos, and for further reading, check out “Creation Myth,” Malcolm Gladwell’s 2011 New Yorker story on the work of Engelbart, Xerox PARC and Apple.
1. The Early Days of ‘Cloud Computing’ at MIT, 1963 (28 min.)
This is a 1963 interview with professor Fernando J. Corbato at the MIT Computation Center, where he explains the concept of “timesharing,” which they developed to allow teams to work on individual consoles that attach to one centralized computer.
3. Doug Engelbart, Stanford Research Institute, 1968 (1 hr., 15 min.)
This two-hour demo from Engelbart, who founded SRI’s Augmentation Research Center, not only introduces the mouse, but also everything from the graphical user interface to hyperlinking, cutting-and-pasting and collaborative editing.
4. Early Digital Teleconferencing, University of Southern California, 1978 (6 min.)
USC’s Informational Sciences Institute produced this filmed demonstration of early digital teleconferencing technology over ARPAnet, complete with guy-who-nearly-misses-the-call-because-he-was-yachting.
5. Xerox Star User Interface, 1982
It was Xerox PARC where Steve Jobs saw the future for Apple, when he visited and got a demo of the Alto personal computer. Xerox released its Star Professional Workstation in 1981, and this clip features Star designers Charles Irby and David Canfield-Smith explaining how the system worked.
Behind the scenes of a live mermaid show in Weeki Wachee Springs State Park in Orlando, Fla.:
“I sat down next to Crystal Videgar on a bench in front of a mirror that ran along one wall. She wore a black fishnet stocking pulled down over her face, which she used to create a scale pattern as she dabbed metallic green and purple eye shadow around her temples. The conversation had turned to whether everyone should meet up at Hooters or Applebee’s after work, but Videgar worked on her makeup with quiet focus. When she pulled off the stocking, I could see in between the fish scales that her skin was lightly freckled from life in the Florida sun. ‘We love that we get to dress up all day long,’ she said. ‘It’s like reliving your childhood.’
“Videgar and her co-workers earn $10 to $13 per hour. They punch timecards when they arrive at Weeki Wachee an hour before the first show and again when they leave after the last show of the day, usually by 5 p.m. In between performances, they train new recruits, scrub algae off the theater windows, do laundry and clean their locker room, bathroom and showers. They take breaks on a rooftop sun porch, where a surprising number of them smoke; their joke is that inhaling is good practice for holding your breath underwater.”
Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.
“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995.Read more…
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