Remembering the Life and Work of Journalist Matthew Power (1974-2014)

From a Facebook post by writer Tom Bissell, on his friend Matthew Power. Power died Monday in Uganda while on assignment for Men’s Journal. He was 39.


Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes:
***
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members: Join us.
The rags-to-riches tale of how Jan Koum built WhatsApp into Facebook’s new $19 billion baby:
Jan Koum picked a meaningful spot to sign the $19 billion deal to sell his company WhatsApp to Facebook earlier today. Koum, cofounder Brian Acton and venture capitalist Jim Goetz of Sequoia drove a few blocks from WhatsApp’s discreet headquarters in Mountain View to a disused white building across the railroad tracks, the former North County Social Services office where Koum, 37, once stood in line to collect food stamps. That’s where the three of them inked the agreement to sell their messaging phenom –which brought in a miniscule $20 million in revenue last year — to the world’s largest social network.

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)
Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)
In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…

–Writer Alexander Chee, on Twitter outrage. Read more from Chee in the Longreads Archive.
***
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

–The Awl co-founder Choire Sicha, in an interview with Full Stop, on the future of books, reading and the internet. Read more from The Awl in the Longreads Archive.
***
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Matthew McNaught | Syria Comment | June 2013 | 18 minutes (4,615 words)
Matthew McNaught taught English in Syria between 2007 and 2009. He now works in mental health and sometimes writes essays and stories. This piece first appeared in Syria Comment, and our thanks to McNaught for allowing us to republish it here. Read more…
Why is it so rare for audio to go viral?
It’s hardly a fair fight, audio vs. cat video, but it’s the one that’s fought on Facebook every day. DiMeo’s glum conclusion is an exaggeration of what Giaever reads as the moral of her own story: “People will watch a bad video more than [they will listen to] good audio,” she says.
Those in the Internet audio business tend to give two explanations for this disparity. “The greatest reason is structural,” says Jesse Thorn, who hosts a public radio show called “Bullseye” and runs a podcast network called Maximum Fun. “Audio usage takes place while you’re doing something else.” You can listen while you drive or do the dishes, an insuperable competitive advantage over text or video, which transforms into a disadvantage when it comes to sharing the listening experience with anyone out of earshot. “When you’re driving a car, you’re not going to share anything,” says Thorn.
Examining the case and trial of Gilberto Valle, AKA the “cannibal cop,” a New York police officer who fantasized about kidnapping, killing, and eating women he knew with strangers, but who never acted on any of his plans:
On August 24, they discussed ways that Valle might kidnap another woman, Kristen Ponticelli, a recent graduate of Valle’s old high school whom he never met personally (Valle’s lawyers assume he just noticed her photo on Facebook). The next day, they moved on to Andria Noble. “If Andria lived near me, she would be gone by now,” Valle wrote. “Even if I get caught, she would be worth it.”
But there was no physical evidence from Valle’s home suggesting he was getting ready to kidnap or cook anyone—no oven large enough for a human, no cleaver, no homemade chloroform. Prosecutors had no proof he had a place in the mountains. They had no proof that Valle knew the identities of the three people he was chatting with. Valle never divulged the last names of any of the people whose photos he passed along (not even his wife’s) and never gave out any of their addresses, even after Moody Blues specifically requested one, and he haphazardly switched up details about their life stories and college educations.
You must be logged in to post a comment.