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Men rarely become porn stars, but James Deen has found a large following simply by being “average”:

James Deen, whose real name is Bryan Sevilla, grew up in Pasadena, California. His parents are both, after a fashion, rocket scientists. His father is a mechanical engineer for NASA. His mother does data analysis for the space agency. Deen, contrary to our notion of porn stars as survivors of sexual trauma, does not recall any sexual abuse or destructive misadventures, other than a teacher who Deen says tried to molest him when he was 8 or 9, but Deen “punched his testicles a lot” and made good his escape. 

Deen lost his virginity at age 12 during a sleepover at a Jewish camp. Not long after, in junior high school, he made enemies of the football team by having sex with a player’s sister in the school pool during gym. He had some drug escapades in junior high. He spent a couple of years in outpatient rehab. Around age 15, he left high school and moved out and spent two years more or less homeless, hanging around with a crew of gutter punks. Relations with his parents remained reasonably cordial. They furnished him with a cell phone, and he periodically snuck into his mom’s house to do laundry. (Deen’s parents are divorced.)

“The Well-Hung Boy Next Door.” — Wells Tower, GQ

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: New York Magazine, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, #fiction from The New York Review of Books, plus a guest pick from Eva Holland.

A look at the complicated afterlife of James Brown, and the battle over his estate among children he did, and did not, acknowledge:

Yet Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he’d drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his ‘personal and household effects’—his linens and china and such—to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear, too, that those were the only heirs he intended to favor. ‘I have intentionally failed to provide for any other relatives or other persons,’ he wrote in the will. ‘Such failure is intentional and not occasioned by accident or mistake.’

“Papa.” — Sean Flynn, GQ, April 2009

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Twenty years later, how Michael, Magic and the NBA’s best players sought to regain U.S. dominance in Olympic basketball:

Nathaniel Butler (official NBA photographer): We were sitting on the baseline. Magic is backing a guy down, and the guy on defense is yelling at his bench, “Now! Now!” And on the bench, one guy’s pulling a camera out of his sock and taking a photo of his teammate.

Hubbard: One time they were playing against Venezuela, and the guy who was guarding Magic kept on saying, “I need your shoes! I need your shoes!”During the game. And Magic goes, “Look, I need my shoes!”

“The Dream Will Never Die: An Oral History of the Dream Team.” — Lang Whitaker, GQ

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[Fiction] A couple returns home from Israel: 

It’s six-thirty now and the boys are back in bed; it’s early afternoon Israel time. For the moment, Noelle feels as if she’s in a bubble, lying awake next to Amram while the children are asleep. She presses her ear to the wall to see if her sisters are awake; it’s been a fitful night for them too.

She rolls over onto her stomach and back again. She wonders what she looks like from up on the ceiling, lying sleepless in her childhood bed. This is where she spent summer after summer. And Christmas vacation and spring break. Amram, who has risen, is in a T-shirt and cutoff jeans, his thighs thick as ham hocks, his prayer fringes sticking out from under his shirt, twisted as always around his belt loops. His yarmulke, blown by the breeze coming through the open window, flips over itself so that it’s barely hanging from a few tendrils of hair; it droops to the side like a single earmuff.

“The World Without You.” — Joshua Henkin, Guernica Magazine

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On the next Justin Bieber, 16-year-old Austin Mahone, and how pop stars are made:

Last October, for instance, he was in Chicago and decided to go to Millennium Park with his mom. He tweeted this information, hoping to meet a few fans who were in the area, then pulled on a gray hooded sweatshirt and a red baseball cap that said “Chicago” and strolled down the street. Nearly one thousand girls bolted into action and immediately encircled him like a swarm of bees. Local police, alarmed by the sudden mob of squealing youngsters jumping over picnic tables, swept in and extracted Austin as if he were an imperiled head of state.

Girls Love Me.” — Katy Vine, Texas Monthly

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An account of how hundreds of Taliban prisoners escaped from Kandahar’s Sarposa prison in Afghanistan through a tunnel in 2011:

At 5 a.m., hours after Rahim and his cohorts passed directly beneath his office, the warden of Sarposa Prison, General Dastagir Mayar, was awakened. One of his guards stood in the doorway. The entire political block was empty, the guard said. A stout 57-year-old Pashtun from Wardak Province with a neat helmet of dark hair and a matching mustache, Mayar speaks quickly and with urgency, liberally gesticulating. He wanted to know how.

‘You have to come and see,’ the guard told him. ‘There’s a hole.’

“The Great Taliban Jailbreak.” — Luke Mogelson, GQ

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, This Land Press, The New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, a fiction pick from Five Chapters, plus a guest pick from Ester Bloom.

The gifted R&B singer, who’s spent years fighting addiction, attempts a comeback:

Black stardom is rough, dude,” Chris Rock tells me when I reach him to talk about D. “I always say Tom Hanks is an amazing actor and Denzel Washington is a god to his people. If you’re a black ballerina, you represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?”

After Brown Sugar went platinum, Rock put D’Angelo on The Chris Rock Show. Later, when D was mixing Voodoo, Rock hung out some in the studio. No surprise, then, that the first thing out of Rock’s mouth after “Hello” is a joyful “He’s back!” But he adds a sobering downbeat: “D’Angelo. Chris Tucker. Dave Chappelle. Lauryn Hill. They all hang out on the same island. The island of What Do We Do with All This Talent? It frustrates me.

“Amen! (D’Angelo’s Back).” — Amy Wallace, GQ

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A writer investigates what it would be like if he never got married, had kids, or settled into a stable job. He decides to search for his carefree doppelgänger—a 39-year-old singer-songwriter named Kyle Field:

‘What time can I come by?’ I asked.

‘Oh, anytime. I’ll just be kicking it around the house.’

Kicking it. This is not a concept in our house. I drove out to the scruffy edge of southeastern Portland and pulled up to the place where my doppelgänger was staying, nervous about intruding. The house was everything I’d ever dreamed of—at least when I used to dream of such a life. There was a pile of construction lumber in the front yard, and the porch was covered in beer cans and Goodwill furniture and well-thumbed paperbacks, some of them as warped as giant clams.

“The Cooler Me.” — Eric Puchner, GQ

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