Search Results for: Internet

'Orange is the New Black' is Back: A Reading List on the Representation of Prison

Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show. The first two pieces cover season one, for all you newbies out there. The second two address the most recent season.

1. “Five Formerly Incarcerated Women on Prison, Relationships, and Orange is the New Black.” (Kat Stoeffel, The Cut, August 2013)

Read more…

The Tech Boom, Then and Now

In Guernica, Nathan Deuel visits the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and daughter and writes about how the recent tech boom has changed the city. Here, Deuel recalls being in college during the first dot-com boom when working for a website felt like a novel idea, and before, as he later writes in his essay, “income inequality in San Francisco [became] reportedly on par with Rwanda”:

For me, the Internet in the mid-’90s was a place for email. Later a place to download songs. I suppose I did buy some stereo equipment, using up the last of some money I’d earned working on a fishing boat in Alaska. But the idea of working for a website—like as a career?—this felt to me like deciding to drop out of college to play a video game.

I remember watching the Super Bowl—at the geeky fraternity next to the one that had the secret pot-smoking chamber with the amphitheater seating—and all the commercials were for these fanciful new websites. Pets.com would sell you items for your…pet and it was worth $82 million, far less than grocery delivery service Webvan.com, which earned a valuation of $1.2 billion, despite having made only $5 million in revenue. That spring, in an English lecture class, someone had a Snickers bar delivered to his seat by a service called Kozmo. The delivery person had this orange messenger bag. It cost nothing extra to have a candy bar delivered to your desk.

Then 9/11 and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For a while, we didn’t care much about valuations of websites. I flew out of SF a few times en route to Asia. The airport felt unloved and the city once again ranked in my mind among our nation’s second tier. We had eight years of a Bush presidency and then the massive financial collapse of 2008, followed by the inauguration of our first black president. From a great distance, California was Schwarzenegger and Boxer and Pelosi. My family had moved to Saudi Arabia, and homesick one afternoon, I surfed the Web, trying to remember what it was like in 2000, and I felt the rush that comes from encountering icons of an older age, in this case a Kozmo messenger bag, which you could buy on eBay. In 2013, we moved back to America, and judging purely on the sort of ambient feeling I could sense—Democrat in power for a second term, prosperity returning, for some—the nation felt primed, ready again to allow for the lightness (and the irrationality and the exuberance) of another boom.

Read the story

See also: A full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008.

Photo: Frank Vervial

Privacy Policy

As part of our commitment to transparency and data privacy, the Longreads is now using the same Privacy Policy as our parent company, Automattic.

Your privacy is critically important to us. Longreads is part of Automattic, where we have a few fundamental principles:

  • We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We can’t stand services that ask you for things like your gender or income level for no apparent reason.)
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  • We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services.
  • In our blogging products, we aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what’s visible to the public, seen by search engines, kept private, and permanently deleted.

Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals: (Note, we’ve decided to make this privacy policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use, just make sure to replace references to us with ones to you, and if you want we’d appreciate a link to Automattic.com somewhere on your site. We spent a lot of money and time on the below, and other people shouldn’t need to do the same.)

If you have questions about deleting or correcting your personal data please contact our support team.

Automattic Inc. (“Automattic”) operates several websites including longreads.comautomattic.comwordpress.comgravatar.com,intensedebate.com, and akismet.com. It is Automattic’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Website Visitors

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Aggregated Statistics

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Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Automattic discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Automattic’s behalf or to provide services available at Automattic’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Automattic’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Automattic will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, Automattic discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when Automattic believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Automattic, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an Automattic website and have supplied your email address, Automattic may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Automattic and our products. We primarily use our various product blogs to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Automattic takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

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Business Transfers

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Comments

Comments and other content submitted to our Akismet anti-spam service are not saved on our servers unless they were marked as false positives, in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the service to avoid future false positives.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Automattic may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Automattic’s sole discretion. Automattic encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If you have a WordPress.com account, you should also check your blog’s dashboard for alerts to these changes. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

Change log:

  • September 18, 2013:  Added that blog commenter email addresses are disclosed to administrators of the blog where the comment was left.
  • February 1, 2011: Clarified subpoena language and added Business Transfers paragraph
  • January 3, 2011: Added court order and subpoena clarification
  • July 1, 2010: Revised paragraph about IP addresses to explain when they are collected and that commenter IPs are visible to blog administrators
  • October 29, 2009: Added Comments paragraph to explain Akismet comment storage policy
  • March 10, 2009: Added Ads paragraph to alert users that ads from third parties may use cookies

Press

2014

2011

2010

Meet the Man Hired to Make Sure the Snowden Docs Aren’t Hacked

Longreads Pick

Micah Lee is the digital bodyguard who protects Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and other reporters working on the Snowden documents.

Since the beginning, Greenwald had stored the files in a computer completely disconnected from the Internet, also known as “air-gapped” in hacker lingo. He let Lee put his hands on that computer and pore through the documents. Ironically, Lee used software initially designed for cops and private investigators to sift through the mountain of seized documents.

Sitting inside Greenwald’s house, famously full of dogs, Lee spent hours reading and analyzing a dozen documents containing once carefully guarded secrets.

Source: mashable.com
Published: May 28, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,400 words)

Monica Lewinsky's Vanity Fair Essay, Now Online

Yes, we’re all connected now. We can tweet a revolution in the streets or chronicle achievements large and small. But we’re also caught in a feedback loop of defame and shame, one in which we have become both perps and victims. We may not have become a crueler society—although it sure feels as if we have—but the Internet has seismically shifted the tone of our interactions. The ease, the speed, and the distance that our electronic devices afford us can also make us colder, more glib, and less concerned about the consequences of our pranks and prejudice. Having lived humiliation in the most intimate possible way, I marvel at how willingly we have all signed on to this new way of being.

In my own case, each easy click of that YouTube link reinforces the archetype, despite my efforts to parry it away: Me, America’s B.J. Queen. That Intern. That Vixen. Or, in the inescapable phrase of our 42nd president, “That Woman.”

It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.

-Vanity Fair has posted its Monica Lewinsky essay, “Shame and Survival.”

Read the story

More from Vanity Fair in the Longreads Archive

I Placed a Jar in Tennessee

Longreads Pick

“A case of reinvention through preservation.” Sullivan’s friend leaves the celebrity world to go back to his roots to work in canning:

These days when you say someone becomes “obsessed” with something it usually means they spent four hours reading about it on the Internet last night, but it seems accurate to say that Kevin became obsessed with preserves. It gradually became not the only thing he talked about, but the thing you could tell he was always thinking about. He started making cross-country trips to track down fruits that supposedly “put up” well. He tried to preserve things he’d never seen preserved, stuff that would have made his grandmother have to lie down and fan herself. He sent me a picture of a Buddha’s hand citron one time. It was an unearthly yellow and looked like a squid. If one of the ghosts in Pac-Man had been bright yellow and was preserved in a specimen jar, where it got all distended over time, it would have looked like this thing. “Found this last night at the Altadena farmer’s market,” he wrote. “My first thought was, I wanna get that, I wanna preserve it.”

Source: Lucky Peach
Published: May 12, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,779 words)

Reading List: Leslie Jamison, Author of ‘The Empathy Exams’

“When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say ‘all kinds,’ but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.” – Leslie Jamison

This week, Choose Your Own Adventure with Leslie Jamison. I’ve compiled a collection of interviews with and essays and short stories by the author of The Empathy Exams. But the way you approach this list is up to you. Ready? Let’s begin.

To read Jamison’s interview with the Virginia Quarterly Review, proceed to number 1 (this is a good introduction to the author, if you’ve never heard of her or only know her a bit).

To read Jamison’s interview with Flavorwire, proceed to number 2 (best if you’ve already read The Empathy Exams, or are about to).

To read Jamison’s interview with The Paris Review, proceed to number 3 (best if you love the particular flavor of Paris Review interviews and have not read The Empathy Exams yet, because a version of this interview appears there).

Want to get to know Jamison through her writing first? To skip these interviews altogether, proceed to numbers 4 or 5.

1. “An Interview with Leslie Jamison.” (John Lingan, VQR, April 2014)

 

2. “‘The Empathy Exams’ Author Leslie Jamison on the Empathy of the Internet and the Limits of Opinion.” (Elizabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire, March 2014)

 

Read more…

The History of the Future: a Reading List

Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, journalist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He also writes and produces radio about the lives of stuff and the stuff of life.

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Journalism has been called the first draft of history. Here are 5 technology stories that belong in the second draft. Like a lot of technology journalism, they’re each focused on an emerging future, which at times makes them a bit breathless with excitement. But unlike most technology journalism, these stories have only gotten better with age. They’re sprinkled with uncanny predictions and unexpected depth about the devices we’ve come to take for granted. Read more…

Longreads Is Joining the Automattic Family

This month, Longreads is celebrating its fifth anniversary. I started this service in April 2009, and it has grown into an incredible global community of readers, writers and publishers. Together, we helped create a thriving ecosystem for longform storytelling and helped reverse the myth that the Internet has shortened attention spans or diminished our appetite for reading. Read more…