Longreads Pick
Rajaratnam’s view of human nature was not so different from that of Willie Stark, in “All the King’s Men”: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.” … Once, his brash younger brother, Rengan, put out a feeler for inside information to a friend from Stanford’s business school who had become Kumar’s protégé at McKinsey. Rengan gleefully relayed to his brother that the young associate was “a little dirty.” When Rajaratnam shared this assessment with Kumar, Kumar asked him to lay off the associate, not wanting his protégé to be sucked into Galleon’s corruption. Later, Rajaratnam laughed with his brother over the episode. “I just wanted to show how your friend is—” “Scumbag!” Rengan said. “Everybody is a scumbag!”
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Published: Jun 20, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,851 words)
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Longreads Pick
John Elder Robison would stand out in a crowd even if he didn’t have Asperger syndrome. A gruff, powerfully built, tirelessly curious, blue-eyed bear of a man, he hurtles down a San Diego sidewalk toward a promising Mexican restaurant like an unstoppable force of nature. ”What’s keepin’ you stragglers?” he calls back to the shorter-legged ambulators dawdling in his wake.
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Published: May 18, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,658 words)
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Longreads Pick
Have Keith Theodore Olbermann spend a few seasons working at your television network and see how you feel. Sort of like Kansas after a twister. If Olbermann hadn’t been so brilliant and talented, few would have put up with him. But Olbermann has a talent that can’t be taught. He can relate to people on the other side of the camera and, indeed, relate to the camera itself in a way that comes across as second nature. And yet he once told an interviewer that on some level, he’s always making fun of television: “Like, ‘Look how ridiculous this is, me sitting here and you sitting on the other end, watching me—what are you doing that for?’ I think that’s always been my attitude.”
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Published: May 16, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,029 words)
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Longreads Pick
What E.O. Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard.
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Published: Apr 17, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,349 words)
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Longreads Pick
There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia. We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.
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Published: Mar 23, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,923 words)
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Longreads Pick
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. First the accident, then the predictable allegations in the postmortem: The design was flawed. Inspections were inadequate. Lines of defense crumbled, and reliable backups proved unreliable. Planners lacked the imagination or willpower to prepare for the very worst. There’s a way to break out of this pattern. Nuclear power plants will never be completely safe, but they can be made far safer than they are today. The key is humility. The next generation of plants must be built to work with nature—and human nature—rather than against them. They must be safe by design, so that even if every possible thing goes wrong, the outcome will stop short of disaster. In the language of the nuclear industry, they must be “walkaway safe.”
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Published: Mar 24, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,209 words)
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Meet the Twiblings: How Four Women (and One Man) Conspired to Make Two Babies
For many couples, the most crushing aspect of fertility treatment is not all the early morning blood-draws but the haunting feeling that the universe is telling them that their union is not — in a spiritual, as well as a biological, sense — fruitful. But I knew Michael and I were a great couple — I had pined so long for the elusive feeling of rightness, and now that I finally had it, I was damned if I was going to let biology unbless us. And I knew if we let biology become Mother Nature, we actually would be damned.
By Melanie Thernstrom, New York Times
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Longreads Pick
For many couples, the most crushing aspect of fertility treatment is not all the early morning blood-draws but the haunting feeling that the universe is telling them that their union is not — in a spiritual, as well as a biological, sense — fruitful. But I knew Michael and I were a great couple — I had pined so long for the elusive feeling of rightness, and now that I finally had it, I was damned if I was going to let biology unbless us. And I knew if we let biology become Mother Nature, we actually would be damned.
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Published: Dec 29, 2010
Length: 34 minutes (8,514 words)
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Paleo Fitness: The Workout that Time Forgot
“We live like zoo animals!” It’s an idea Erwan Le Corre borrowed from the British zoologist Desmond Morris, author of the 1967 classic “The Naked Ape,” and it’s central to his worldview: that we are essentially wild creatures ill-suited to desk jobs and processed foods. “We have become divorced from nature, trapped in colorless boxes,” Le Corre says. “We have lost our adaptability, and it’s threatening our health and longevity.”
By Nick Heil, Outside Magazine
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