This week, we’re excited to feature a Longreads Exclusive from David Kushner (@DavidKushner), a contributing editor to Rolling Stone whose work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired. He’s been featured many times on Longreads, and he’s the author of Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto. “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse” is Kushner’s 2007 […]
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Excerpt: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto
David Kushner’s new book explores the origins of the infamous videogame, which began as a straitlaced driving simulation: “By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor. “When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through […]
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When Kruse IM’d Kim to see if she was done babysitting, no response came. But he didn’t expect one. The instant message was a cover. Kruse knew Kim had never made it to her job. She was right there in his house with him and Cam. Bound. Beaten. Raped. And, by the next morning, stuffed […]
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When Kruse IM’d Kim to see if she was done babysitting, no response came. But he didn’t expect one. The instant message was a cover. Kruse knew Kim had never made it to her job. She was right there in his house with him and Cam. Bound. Beaten. Raped. And, by the next morning, stuffed […]
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New York Times Writer Jenna Wortham: My Top Longreads of 2011
Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former America’s Next Top Model contestants in Brooklyn. She can be found on Twitter and Tumblr. *** SO many of my favorites have already been called out—Mindy Kaling’s “Flick Chicks,” Dan P. Lee’s “Travis the Menace” and […]
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Thirty-two-year-old Luis Mijangos hacked into his victims’ computers, accessing their hard drives and even turning on their webcams: Mijangos was an unlikely candidate for the world’s creepiest hacker. He lived at home with his mother, half brother, two sisters—one a schoolgirl, the other a housekeeper—and a perky gray poodle named Petra. It was a lively […]
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Meet Martin, the I.T. guy who’s helped everyone from drug dealers needing to dodge wiretaps, to restaurants looking to inflate their Foursquare numbers: If you’ve seen that episode of The Wire, you know principle behind Martin’s system: ‘Burners,’ prepaid cell phones drug dealers use for a short time then abandon to thwart wiretaps. Prepaid phones […]
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David Kushner’s new book explores the origins of the infamous videogame, which began as a straitlaced driving simulation: By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor. When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through […]
Posted inUncategorized
Chris Chaney was a 33-year-old loner in Florida who decided to shake up his boredom by breaking into celebrities’ email accounts. Soon he discovered nude photos of Scarlett Johansson and other stars, and then the FBI came calling: While perusing the e-mail of celebrity stylist Simone Harouche in early November 2010, he stumbled across photos […]
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How George Hotz, a teenager from New Jersey, kicked off a hacker war that pitted Sony against Anonymous and the group LulzSec: That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it. Hotz posted his announcement online and once again set about finding […]
