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The Great Fiber-Optic Fraudster of Alaska

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Why secure actual signatures from partners on multi-million dollar contracts to install fiber-optic cable at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean when you can just forge them? At Bloomberg Businessweek, Austin Carr reports on scam-artist extraordinaire Elizabeth Pierce, the former CEO of Quintillion Subsea Holdings LLC. Pierce created fictitious contracts to fund an Anchorage telecom startup, fleecing investors for a billion dollars before getting caught.

Arctic fiber has been an entrepreneurial fantasy for decades. Soaring demand for broadband helped drive companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon.com, to spend tons on high-speed underwater cables that keep customers watching Netflix and YouTube with minimal delay. But many of those lines run in parallel in the Atlantic and Pacific along well-established ocean routes, leaving the world’s internet vulnerable to earthquakes, sabotage, and other disasters both natural and human-made. A trans-Arctic route would help protect against that while offering a more direct path, potentially making internet speeds much faster.

Pierce scribbled her first forged signatures on contracts with the Matanuska Telephone Association, which services south-central Alaskan towns such as Wasilla, in May and June 2015. Although Matanuska CEO Greg Berberich had been reluctant to strike a deal, Pierce assured her investors in New York in an email that Berberich was “nervous but very committed.” The next day she uploaded a contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with what looked like Berberich’s signature to a personal Google Drive account she shared with Murphy, the CIP managing director. Pierce also said she was close to locking in another gigantic sale with the nonprofit Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative, whose customers include residents of remote Inupiat communities and the city of Utqiagvik. Soon she sent Murphy a contract with a phony version of the Arctic Slope CEO’s signature, too.

Pierce executed similar deceptions at least eight times, and the fraudulent contracts totaled more than $1 billion, according to court filings. Sometimes she completely fabricated deals; other times she negotiated real contracts, then changed key pages with more favorable terms.

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Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  8 minutes (2,066 words)

This will be impossible to tweet. It always is. How do you siphon 2,500 words into 280 characters? More importantly, how do you turn a measured thesis into something interesting, and by interesting I mean shareable, and by shareable I mean divisive. It’s one thing to say, I don’t know, “Todd Phillips is a no-talent ass clown;” it’s another thing to imply that over more than a thousand words analyzing the bottomless lack of depth in Joker. “It was literally like ‘Let’s make a real movie with a real budget and we’ll call it fucking Joker,’” the director told The Wrap in September, his defense against accusations that his film intentionally glorified a character who many considered an incel antihero. And it wasn’t just the critics. Victims of the 2012 Aurora shooting, which took place during a The Dark Knight Rises screening, even asked for donations to survivor funds and gun violence intervention programs. Phillips was confused by the controversy. “Isn’t it good to have these discussions about these movies, about violence?” he asked. “Why is that a bad thing if the movie does lead to a discourse about it?”

It’s not a bad thing, except this isn’t a discourse. To have a discourse you need a modicum of intellectual humility on both sides, which is to say, both sides need to have some idea that what they believe might be wrong in order to actually be receptive to the opposing opinion. Neither Phillips nor the social media mob he was taking issue with were having a discourse. It’s hard to blame the latter, since the thing getting in the way was not so much them as it was the medium. It’s easier to blame Phillips, whose party line is that he broke the mold by taking a simplistic trope and turning it into a profound piece of art that explores contemporary fears, when, in actual fact, it only signals depth while remaining superficial. In a similar display of contradictions, now that his clown movie is being swept up into a complex discourse, Phillips is refusing to engage with it, instead opting for reductive dismissal that mirrors the online critiques he so openly disparages. Read more…

Swipe Right: A Reading List about Online Dating

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They wrote you an intro

Wow and hello. You seem phenomenal and you probably receive four million messages but I just couldn’t resist…

Gorgeous woman, you are taller than me. I’m bummed.

I am capable of taking care of you financially, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I love unconditionally, with all my heart, and I love you as you are. 

Your hair looks nice. See ya.

My self-summary

Some days I log in and read introductory messages that ring hollow, like the promises of car salesmen. Others, I receive long and far too intense missives declaring love or making some other absurd commitment based on a quick glance at my photos. And most days, I receive a tepid “hey.” Most days, I ask myself why I bother maintaining a profile –– what am I hoping to find? And isn’t there a better way to date?

I had never used a dating app until a few months ago: a combination of introverted tendencies, a series of summers spent at an evangelical Christian camp, and a traumatic sexual assault in college made it so I was scared to form relationships with people I knew in real life, let alone strangers on the internet. But after my first long term relationship ended, I moved across the country to a town where I knew hardly anyone and made a profile for the first time. While uploading photos and answering questions, processes which underscore just how much artifice is involved with online dating, I grew a little nervous. I had heard stories from friends about men who ghosted them; who retaliated viciously via email and other social media platforms when rejected; or who showed up to the date and weren’t exactly who they said they would be. After being in a safe, committed relationship for so long, the idea of trusting someone to be kind and respectful on a first date was nerve-wracking, but I took precautions in my own way, and tried dating.

At first, it was fun, even exceeded my expectations. I met people I otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to find within the scope of my daily life. I explored parts of my new locale with people who have histories here, and enjoyed visiting places I’ll continue to return to. And the dates were lovely, for the most part. There was homemade pizza and wine in a park; dates who snuck away to secretly cover the bill without asking for anything in return; and hikes where we foraged for berries in spots only a local would know. 

But there was also the guy who lived at home, told me his mom cooked for him every night, and that he would expect his partner to do the same. There was the man who told me, after a few dates, that his friends had agreed I was “too smart” because I had earned my PhD. And, there was the date who leaned across the table to pet my hair and told me I would be “even hotter if I hunted,” though he had proselytized veganism to me just moments before. 

After some time, skimming profiles no longer excited me. Instead, the series of photos started to look like a grid of loneliness, in each answer some sort of want.

I spend a lot of time thinking about

Are dating apps the best way to meet people in this day and age? Do they even work?

Gina DiVittorio’s viral video about dating on Hinge.

How much of my relatively positive experience on dating apps is based on location? My identity as a straight, cis, white woman who has an invisible –– rather than visible –– disability?

Are there ways to improve online dating so that it is safer, more inclusive, and less discriminatory?

What I’m actually looking for

The same as everyone else, probably: to permanently log off these apps.

1. What I Learned Tindering My Way Across Europe (Allison P. Davis, March 21, 2016, Travel + Leisure)

I use them all—Tinder, chiefly, but also Hinge, Bumble, Happn, Desperat*n (I made that one up) 3nder, Flattr—and they are all swipes to nowhere. In boom times I experience a weak trickle of men; during drought, it’s like I’m in the dating version of The Martian—except Matt Damon did eventually receive messages from humans.

When Allison P. Davis left Brooklyn to travel across Europe, she wondered if dating would be any less lackluster, or if Tinder would offer her anything other than sex. In chronicling a variety of dating experiences and encounters in London, Berlin, and Stockholm, Davis ruminates on the differences between dating in the U.S. and abroad, particularly as a black woman. 

2. Diary (Emily Witt, October 25, 2012, London Review of Books)

Subletting an apartment for a week in San Francisco, Emily Witt goes to a bar alone in hopes of finding some form of human connection. Instead, she ends up perusing OkCupid. Witt, in this piece, offers a comprehensive history of online dating and ruminates about the specific kind of loneliness that beckons people to online dating apps. 

I wanted a boyfriend. I was also badly hung up on someone and wanted to stop thinking about him. People cheerily list their favourite movies and hope for the best, but darkness simmers beneath the chirpy surface. An extensive accrual of regrets lurks behind even the most well-adjusted profile.

3. ‘So Can You F*ck?’: What It’s Like to Online Date With a Disability (Sarah Kim, April 15, 2018, The Daily Beast)

It’s not news that lots of women receive ridiculous and misogynistic messages on dating apps, especially on Tinder. But as a 22-year-old with cerebral palsy, I get one at least twice a week.

‘So can you f*ck?’

‘But you look normal in your pictures.’

When Sarah Kim creates online dating profiles, she questions whether or not to immediately disclose her disability or to let potential suitors get to know her before sharing. By interviewing a range of experts like sexologist Dr. Mitchell Tepper and therapist Dr. Danielle Sheypuk, and other people with disabilities who have dated using apps before, Kim offers valuable insight and ultimately comes to the conclusion that how –– and when –– to disclose can be handled in a variety of ways, and decisions are best left up to each individual.

 

Related read: Online dating is hard enough. Try doing it with a disability. (Timothy Sykes, January 18, 2014, The Guardian)

 

4. How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love (Kevin Poulsen, January 21, 2014, Wired)

As summer drew to a close, he’d been on more than 55 dates, each one dutifully logged in a lab notebook. Only three had led to second dates; only one had led to a third.

Most unsuccessful daters confront self-esteem issues. For McKinlay it was worse. He had to question his calculations.

After largely striking out on OkCupid, Chris McKinlay decided to put his mathematical prowess to the test, using a Python script to create a database of women’s answers and subsequently analyze patterns. With his unconventional approach, he succeeded in going on far more first dates –– but not many at all led further. As Kevin Poulsen notes in this strange and fascinating story, McKinlay had to strike a balance between calculation and human intuition in order to find true love.

5. What It’s Like To Date Online as a Trans Person (Brittany Wong, October 29, 2018, Huffington Post)

Tinder only enabled users to select gender identities such as “‘transgender,’ ‘trans man,’ ‘trans woman’ and ‘gender queer’” three years ago. Slow to evolve, OkCupid, Tinder, and Grindr have put transgender users at risk in their failure to incorporate inclusive models, as Christiana Rose, Dawn Dismuke, and Jackson Bird explain in their interviews with Brittany Wong.

Though roughly 1.4 million Americans identify as transgender, there’s still a widespread lack of understanding of trans issues among the general public. And sadly, transphobia is on the rise; 2017 was the deadliest year for transgender people, with at least 28 deaths tracked by the Human Rights Campaign.

6. I Thought My Immigrant Mother Would Never Accept My Queerness. I Was Wrong. (Krutika Mallikarjuna, February 19, 2019, Bitch)

Of the many pitfalls of being a queer desi woman swiping through Tinder, I never expected to find myself getting trashed in a bar trying to forget that I was on a date with a white girl named India.

After a date unsettles her, Krutika Mallikarjuna finds herself reflecting on her mother’s reticence to accept her as queer, and experiences a deep depression. Mallikarjuna, in this essay excerpted from The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America, chronicles the ways her relationship with her mother has evolved as a result of therapy and phone calls, eventually leading to shared laughter over a date gone wrong.

7. ‘Least Desirable’? How Racial Discrimination Plays Out In Online Dating (Ashley Brown, January 9, 2018, NPR)

OkCupid released a blog post in 2014 showing dating that “most men on the site rated black women as less attractive than women of other races and ethnicities. Similarly, Asian men fell at the bottom of the preference list for most women.” Through interviews with people who have encountered racism on dating apps, and interviews with experts who consider how apps might evolve to become more inclusive, Ashley Brown offers a harrowing portrait of the harm caused by racist dating app users.

Other dating experts have pointed to such stereotypes and lack of multiracial representation in the media as part of the likely reason that plenty of online daters have had discouraging experiences based on their race.

8. Guys are Reporting Women On Tinder for the Crime of Not Being Into Them (Lauren Vinopal, September 10, 2019, MEL Magazine)  

After Lauren Vinopal politely declines a date with a man, he sends her a slew of rude text messages before reporting her to Tinder, resulting in her being banned from the platform. When Vinopal researches the cause, she discovers she’s not the only woman to be banned for rejecting a man –– in fact, there are a large number of others who share her experience.

Many other people have reportedly been banned for reasons that have nothing to do with terms and conditions — e.g., disclosing that they have herpes, identifying as transgender, or in the strangely specific case of 32-year-old Nichole, posting a picture with a dead deer during hunting season.

9. Why It’s So Hard for Young People to Date Offline (Ashley Fetters, September 5, 2019, The Atlantic)

Such a staggering number of millennials start dating because of connections made through apps that Camille Virginia wrote a book called The Offline Dating Method, which provides tricks and tips for potential daters to make conversation in public and frequent places where they might find a partner. Ashley Fetters, in addition to providing an overview of Virginia’s book, contemplates how much the era of “stranger danger” and the increasing prevalence of convenience in apps across the board –– in areas of food, services, etc., –– have contributed to people relying on online dating.

In the years since, app dating has reached such a level of ubiquity that a couples therapist in New York told me last year that he no longer even bothers asking couples below a certain age threshold how they met. (It’s almost always the apps, he said.)

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

It’s Time To Talk About Solar Geoengineering

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Holly Jean Buck | an excerpt adapted from After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration | Verso | 2019 | 24 minutes (6,467 words)

December in California at one degree of warming: ash motes float lazily through the afternoon light as distant wildfires rage. This smoky “winter” follows a brutal autumn at one degree of warming: a wayward hurricane roared toward Ireland, while Puerto Rico’s grid, lashed by winds, remains dark. This winter, the stratospheric winds break down. The polar jet splits and warps, shoving cold air into the middle of the United States. Then, summer again: drought grips Europe, forests in Sweden are burning, the Rhine is drying up. And so on.

One degree of warming has already revealed itself to be about more than just elevated temperatures. Wild variability is the new normal. Atmospheric patterns get stuck in place, creating multiweek spells of weather that are out of place. Megafires and extreme events are also the new normal — or the new abnormal, as Jerry Brown, California’s former governor, put it. One degree is more than one unit of measurement. One degree is about the uncanny, and the unfamiliar.

If this is one degree, what will three degrees be like? Four?

At some point — maybe it will be two, or three, or four degrees of warming — people will lose hope in the capacity of current emissions-reduction measures to avert climate upheaval. On one hand, there is a personal threshold at which one loses hope: many of the climate scientists I know are there already. But there ’s also a societal threshold: a turning point, after which the collective discourse of ambition will slip into something else. A shift of narrative. Voices that say, “Let’s be realistic; we’re not going to make it.” Whatever making it means: perhaps limiting warming to 2°C, or 1.5, as the Paris Agreement urged the world to strive for. There will be a moment where “we,” in some kind of implied community, decide that something else must be tried. Where “we” say: Okay, it’s too late. We didn’t try our best, and now we are in that bad future. Then, there will be grappling for something that can be done. Read more…

Why Karen Carpenter Matters

Karent and Richard Carpenter performing on the BBC's 'In Concert' series. Tony Russell/Redferns

Karen Tongson | Why Karen Carpenter Matters | University of Texas Press | May 2019 | 20 minutes (4,070 words)

 

Maria Katindig-Dykes and her husband, Jimmie Dykes, had finished a six-month stint at the Hyatt Regency in Singapore and were about to wrap up a six-month residency at the Playboy Jazz Club at Silahis International Hotel in Manila when a telegram appeared under the door early one morning in our Manila suite. It was for Jimmie: MOTHER ILL. CALL HOME. It was sent by his older brother Lee.

My dad called home to find out that his mother, Marion Dykes — the woman who sternly scattered the kids taunting me on the lawn during my first visit to Riverside, California; the woman who plied me with my very first taste of stewed tomatoes — was dying of brain cancer. It was late January 1983, and we made our preparations to leave Manila, unsure of whether or not we would return right away, or ever. I remember turning to my mom on one of the first nights we were in Riverside and asking her in Tagalog if we were ever going back home. She said she didn’t know, and we both cried quietly so as not to interrupt the other more urgent processes of loss and mourning happening under the same roof.

Read more…

Hello, Forgetfulness; Hello, Mother

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Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (4,770 words)

I can’t pinpoint when it began. Or whether what is happening to me is the same thing that happened to my mother. Is it the first signs of dementia or just your run-of-the-mill aging?

I had lived far away from Pennsylvania and only seen my parents intermittently for short visits since going away to college. With my mother, the first sign of change I noticed was that she couldn’t remember the titles of novels she had just read or television shows she had just watched. She’d search an invisible memory bank to identify the titles with a baffled look on her face when she found it empty, then shrug the moment of forgetfulness away. Her usually precise way of speaking, of being in the world, started to soften at the edges. She mumbled as if she were sucking on a lozenge she didn’t want to spit out or swallow. I thought she was just slowing down and this was what aging looked like. By the time she became a depressed person, the deterioration had been going on for years and it was something more than aging. Who knows for how long the changes had been fomenting, how far back I would have to go to ferret out the beginning — 10 years, 15? After all, she worked at hiding the slippage, handing the phone to my father when I called, laughing away the mistakes she made. She used her considerable charm, long honed, to divert attention from the truth, for example that the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle that she had been religiously completing for decades was now blank, the squares empty, folded in the bathroom where she thought no one would see it.

At a more advanced stage, she became resistant to change. My mother, who had loved nothing better than a shift in scenery, a drive, a travel expedition, became someone who didn’t even like walking out the front door. My father couldn’t get her in the car to make their seasonal pilgrimage back to Pennsylvania from their winter’s stay in Florida. She wouldn’t do it. I pictured my mother bracing her leg against the door, refusing to enter the car, and my father who wasn’t about to use force, though I’m sure he thought about it, trying to coax her as one would coax a child to do something they didn’t want to do. What did he promise her? A new ring? An ice cream cone? But nothing worked and weeks would pass with my father delaying their departure, carrying the suitcases back inside, until something broke and she got in the car. He’d call my sisters and me from a spot on the road to say they had finally started the drive home. What had eased enough for her to proceed? My father said he didn’t know what allowed him to hustle my mother into the car, but he wasn’t going to count on these sudden and unpredictable openings anymore. He was giving up, and thereafter they stayed holed up in their condominium in Pennsylvania and never went anywhere again.
Read more…

The Girl I Didn’t Save

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Cameron Dezen Hammon| Longreads | excerpt from This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession | September 2019 | 24 minutes (6,521 words)

 

“She’s saying ‘thank you’ when she blinks like that,” Hannah’s mother says.

Hannah is dying. She lies in her bed, in her bedroom, surrounded by cards and flowers. Her mother sits on the edge of the bed, stroking her hand. Hannah’s husband of one month is beside her, propped against pillows, cross-legged. A few close friends are here as well—they sit against the wall, knees pulled to chests, or lean against the window ledge. Every few seconds Hannah’s ribcage rises in a struggle for breath.

Matt and I met Hannah three years after Budapest, while we were working for the young Baptist at Koinonia. It was the first church we worked for with a congregation comprised of people roughly our own age, and Hannah, twenty-seven, fit perfectly into its little galaxy of artists, lawyers, and schoolteachers. She flitted easily between groups of friends, always smiling. The pastor often calls Hannah his favorite, but no one minds. Hannah is everyone’s favorite.
Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Prachi Gupta, Tess McClure, Anna Wiener, Ismail Muhammad, and Alex McLevy.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

All Hail Veruca Salt: The Oral History of American Thighs

Longreads Pick

With unprecedented speed after forming, the Chicago band recorded and released an album whose sound helped define the early 90s alternative era. This is the album’s story, timed to the album’s 25th anniversary.

Source: The AV Club
Published: Sep 25, 2019
Length: 42 minutes (10,651 words)

What Should Universal Basic Income Look Like?

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Livia Gershon | Longreads | September 2019 | 9 minutes (2,264 words)

Andrew Yang, presidential candidate, serial entrepreneur, and icon of Silicon Valley futurism, has a vision. As you know if you’ve ever heard his name, Yang supports a universal basic income, $1,000 a month paid by the government to every American citizen, from part-time baristas to millionaire bond traders. To Yang, the UBI, as it’s called, is the answer to nearly every question about the economy. For out-of-work machinists, it’s a cushion that would make it possible to reorient to a new job. For would-be entrepreneurs, it’s the cost of ramen and a bed while they hustle to get off the ground. For stay-at-home parents, it’s recognition and support for crucial unpaid labor. For down-on-their-luck towns, it’s an economic stimulus plan.

“This is the trickle up economy from our people, families, and communities—up,” Yang told Face the Nation in August. “It will create over two million new jobs in our communities because the money will go right into local mainstream businesses, to car repairs, daycare expenses, Little League sign-ups.” Read more…