A mathematician uses data mining and algorithms to find the perfect match on a dating site:
When the last question was answered and ranked, he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Angeles sorted by match percentage. At the top: a page of women matched at 99 percent. He scrolled down … and down … and down. Ten thousand women scrolled by, from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in the 90s.
He needed one more step to get noticed. OkCupid members are notified when someone views their pages, so he wrote a new program to visit the pages of his top-rated matches, cycling by age: a thousand 41-year-old women on Monday, another thousand 40-year-old women on Tuesday, looping back through when he reached 27-year-olds two weeks later. Women reciprocated by visiting his profiles, some 400 a day. And messages began to roll in.
Thirty years after her suicide, Sylvia Plath continues to seduce the adolescent psyche. But her fans are just as likely to romanticize her death as they are her poetry:
Twenty-first-century teens’ belief that they’ve found a kindred outsider in Plath is evident in the thousands of Internet sites and Web logs that now celebrate the poet. Some girls dub their journals “bell jar” or “ladylazarus.” On plathonline.com, girls with e-mail addresses like sylviaaplath, plath2002 and LuvlySylviaPlath feel that the poet speaks the truth and speaks it only to them.
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
What does love look like and feel like and sound like to you? What have you read that changed the way you think about love? I’d like to know. Reblog your suggestions or comment or drop them in dietcoker.tumblr.com/ask.
Have you heard of Her? Spike Jonze’s latest is about a man who falls in love with his cell phone’s AI interface. Sound hokey? If you know anything about Jonze (and you will after reading this), then you know Her will be anything but.
So often Rumpus essays read like songs. This, thankfully, is no exception: “When you love someone, you will sacrifice everything for them, even if that means they never exist at all.”
For more from Next City, you can check out their site or subscribe here. For a limited time, Next City is offering the Longreads community a 20 percent discount on a one-year subscription. Enter the offer code: LONGREADS (case sensitive) for your discount at nextcity.org/subscribe.
For more from Next City, you can check out their site or subscribe here. For a limited time, Next City is offering the Longreads community a 20 percent discount on a one-year subscription. Enter the offer code: LONGREADS (case sensitive) for your discount at nextcity.org/subscribe.
***
Travis Kalanick, the 36-year-old CEO of the ride-on-demand company Uber, calls it the “palm to forehead” moment: That instant when you understand for yourself why a simple car hailing app has both captured people’s imaginations and churned up a queasy feeling in the stomachs of taxi industry power players. Here’s mine.
It was a rainy spring Friday in San Francisco, before five o’clock in the morning. Needing to catch a flight home to New York City, I’d asked my host the night before about the best way to get to SFO from Japantown. “Just go downstairs and Uber,” she’d said. Groggily I made my way to the cold and lonely lobby. Once there, I pressed a few buttons on the Uber app on my iPhone. Almost instantaneously, one of the tiny black car avatars on the live digital map on my phone screen swung around and started heading my way. I could hear it, even. A splashing sound.
Mesmerized, it took me a few beats to realize that it wasn’t the app making noise. It was my car itself, tracking through real puddles as I tracked it on screen. Before I knew it, Waqar, my driver, slid into view. I knew his name because Uber had texted it to me while I’d waited. Later, the company would email me the data on my trip. It had taken 19 minutes and 43 seconds. We had traveled precisely 14.35 miles. It had cost me $54.04, charged to the credit card whose details I’d inputted when I download the app months earlier in curiosity. But it was when said goodbye to Waqar and hopped out of the car at the terminal that I realized how deeply I had, in the past, hated taking a cab or black car to go anywhere. All that hailing or giving my address, giving directions, fumbling for money, calculating and recalculating the tip. Technology had taken care of all of it.
For less than 20 minutes, I’d had almost nothing to worry about. What else was I simply putting up with in life? What other broken systems could be fixed?
I’m hardly the first one to put my hand to my head and contemplate the universe upon taking Uber for the first time. The San Francisco-based company launched 4.5 years ago, introducing a select group to the patent-pending technology that allowed me to press the Uber button and experience the magic of a driver that seems to pop out of the ether. It is already up and running in 18 countries and counting around the globe. This summer, Google Ventures poured some $258 million into Uber, the most it had ever invested in a company.
But that explosive growth hasn’t come without friction. Americans have been hiring driven cars for more than a century. Laws have accumulated governing that exchange. But those laws never contemplated an Uber. And so the battle is on, all across the country, to determine whether Uber will remake the transportation market or whether the transportation market will remake Uber first. There’s no better place to understand that fight than where regulations are both business and sport: Washington, D.C.
“He couldn’t believe it. ‘Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches. If your love were—’
“‘I don’t understand the first one yet,’ Buttercup interrupted. She was starting to get very excited now. ‘Let me get this straight. Are you saying my love is the size of a grain of sand and yours is this other thing? Images just confuse me so—is this universal business of yours bigger than my sand? Help me, Westley. I have the feeling we’re on the verge of something just terribly important.’”
–The Princess Bride, by William Goldman (Or S. Morgenstern, if you prefer), the greatest love story ever told. Read more on love.
***
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.
“Though the murky concept known as ‘love’ has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. ‘Love was considered a reason not to get married,’ says Abbott. ‘It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.’”
Zadie Smith on her father, mourning, and the gardens of Italy:
“There is a sentimental season, early on in the process of mourning, in which you believe that everything you happen to be doing or seeing or eating, the departed person would also have loved to do or see or eat, were he or she still here on earth. Harvey would have loved this fried ball of rice. He would have loved the Pantheon. He would have loved that Rossetti of a girl with her thick black brows.
“In the first season of mourning there is a tendency to overstate. But still I feel certain that this was the garden that would have made us both happy.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.