Longreads Pick
This week’s Longreads Member Exclusive is “Forever Young,” a story by Jason Johnson for the literary video game magazine Kill Screen. Johnson tells us how he first discovered a group of Hungarian developers who have spent more than 20 years developing a game for the Commodore 64:
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. As originally conceived, my account of Newcomer, a Commodore 64 game from Hungary, had no business in a publication that hangs its hat on lengthy works of journalism. My assignment was a paltry 1,500 words. The initial interview wasn’t fruitful. However, as is the case with many who’ve stumbled upon this fascinating lifework––now twenty-three years in the works, and counting––one thing led to another, and I was in it for the long haul.
“I was interested in profiling István Belánszky, Newcomer‘s torchbearer, but like so many merely adequate polyglots, István doesn’t speak English very well. He was hesitant to interview verbally. I wasn’t able to get to Budapest to meet him, so I interviewed extensively, both with and around István, relying on the convenience of email and instant messaging. The result was a scroll of text, some 27,918 words, the majority typed by István, with long intervals between our exchanges as he painstakingly hammered out, to the best of his ability, the ins and outs of writing software for a computer that, quite honestly, was outdated in 1992, when development on the game began. The longest of these sessions lasted for an insufferable seven hours. By the end, I was ready to cry. But every now and then, amidst the barrage of technical talk and ‘b0rked English,’ a morsel of information would appear in the text window so peculiar and surprising that it made everything worthwhile.”
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Published: Jan 18, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,679 words)
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Longreads Pick
An oral history of Freaks and Geeks, which received a huge cult following after its cancellation, and launched the careers of actors like Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and James Franco:
“PAUL FEIG: We did our infamous two weeks with the writers locking ourselves in a room and telling personal stories. I wrote a list of questions for everybody to answer: ‘What was the best thing that happened to you in high school? What was the worst thing that happened to you in high school? Who were you in love with and why?’
“JUDD APATOW: ‘What was your worst drug experience? Who was your first girlfriend? What’s the first sexual thing you ever did? What’s the most humiliating thing that ever happened to you during high school?’
“PAUL FEIG: That’s where most of our stories came from. Weirder stuff happens to people in real life than it does on TV. It was a personal show for me and I wanted it to be personal for everybody else.
“GABE SACHS (writer, ‘I’m with the Band,’ ‘The Garage Door’): We thought the questionnaires were a private thing between us and Judd and Paul, so we wrote really honest. And the next day at work we get them all bound together. We’re laughing with everyone but going, ‘Oh, man!'”
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Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,608 words)
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Longreads Pick
[Not single-page] How the album bridged a racial divide on MTV and radio in the early 1980s:
“Despite the obvious quality of the Jackson videos, MTV initially resisted playing them, claiming it was a rock station and Jackson didn’t fit the format. There is to this day some disagreement as to what led the channel to change its policy and add ‘Billie Jean.’ At the time, a story was widely circulated that CBS chief Walter Yetnikoff resorted to threatening to pull all of his label’s videos off the channel if MTV didn’t play ‘Billie Jean,’ but this claim has been refuted over the years by original MTV honchos Bob Pittman and Les Garland. They concede that the channel initially assumed it would not play the video, as its thumping beat and urban production did not fit the channel’s ‘rock’ image. They contend however that in mid-February, after seeing the clip–which was possibly the best that had ever come across their desks–they began to re-think things. Coupled with the fact that even without MTV, the song had just leaped in one week from No. 23 to No. 6 on the Hot 100, the MTV execs concluded they should give it a shot.”
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Published: Nov 30, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,240 words)
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Longreads Pick
The evolution of a Spanish basketball star turned NBA player, from the perspective of a fellow player:
“I was playing in Spain at the time, and was there as the nation slipped into inescapable Rubio-mania. In the grocery store people wanted to talk about him; in our locker room we laughed about the boy who turned the ACB, the second best league in the world, into his personal And1 mixtape. He was the next Pistol Pete, the next Magic. There wasn’t a comparison too far-fetched.
“I remember watching his team, DKV Joventut, on TV and mentioning to a friend that he played so calm and free, so relaxed under immense pressure. And it was striking, the way he played each game as if it was happening in the park before he had to race home to set the table for the family dinner. But it wasn’t just his highlights that fascinated me. He reminded me of the basketball I grew up watching. This was before APBRmetrics and Hollinger’s stats parsed every minutia of detail into digestible numbers, quantifying a lot but inevitably missing the raw, visceral effect of watching a player play. It was a time, in short, when it was easier to see the game purely subjectively, and as art. And it was impossible to see Rubio as anything but an artist.”
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Published: Nov 29, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,272 words)
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Longreads Pick
Georgia teenager Ashlyn Blocker is learning to navigate through the world despite not being able to feel pain:
“The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It was a school night; the TV was on in the living room, and her mother was folding clothes on the couch. Without thinking, Ashlyn Blocker reached her right hand in to retrieve the spoon, then took her hand out of the water and stood looking at it under the oven light. She walked a few steps to the sink and ran cold water over all her faded white scars, then called to her mother, ‘I just put my fingers in!’ Her mother, Tara Blocker, dropped the clothes and rushed to her daughter’s side. ‘Oh, my lord!’ she said — after 13 years, that same old fear — and then she got some ice and gently pressed it against her daughter’s hand, relieved that the burn wasn’t worse.”
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Published: Nov 15, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,802 words)
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Longreads Pick
An interview with the journalist (see his recent stories) about what makes a good story:
“I spent three months and I just couldn’t do it. And the reason was because I kept on meeting people who worked in the credit industry and they were really boring. I couldn’t make them light up the page. And, as I said in The Psychopath Test, if you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring. Journalists hate writing about boring people, because we want to look good, you know? So that was the most depressing one. To the extent that I would like get up in the morning—I’ve never really told this to anyone, but I’d get up in the morning, I’d go downstairs to breakfast and I’d, like, look at my cereal and burst into tears. And then I’d think, it’s only like nine hours until I can sit down and watch TV. After three months of that, I was thinking, I’m actually getting depressed here. So I abandoned it. My editor in New York keeps reminding me that, if I’d carried on with the credit-card book, it would have come out exactly when the banks collapsed and everyone would have turned to me. But I just couldn’t do it.”
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Published: Nov 12, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,654 words)
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A look at what led up to the passing of Amendment 64 in Colorado, which legalized recreational marijuana use in the state:
While the medical marijuana industry was evolving, activists continued to push for recreational use of marijuana. In 2005, Mason Tvert’s newly founded Safer Alternatives to Recreational Enjoyment pushed — and passed — resolutions at Colorado State University and CU demanding that cannabis penalties be no worse than penalties for alcohol offenses on campus. That same year, SAFER put a measure on the Denver ballot that would decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by anyone over the age of twenty. When Denver voters approved the proposal, the Mile High City became the first major city in the country to make such a move — even though it was mostly symbolic and simply reinforced the state’s 1975 decriminalization laws.
Still, it was seen as a win for the cannabis community, and it inspired SAFER to push for a similar statewide measure in 2006 that only received 40 percent of the vote. In 2007, SAFER again focused on Denver, which this time approved making marijuana possession the city’s lowest police priority.
And soon a lot more people would be possessing marijuana — legally.
“The History of Cannabis in Colorado … Or How the State Went to Pot.” — William Breathes, Westword
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Longreads Pick
A look at what led up to the passing of Amendment 64 in Colorado, which legalized recreational marijuana use in the state:
“While the medical marijuana industry was evolving, activists continued to push for recreational use of marijuana. In 2005, Mason Tvert’s newly founded Safer Alternatives to Recreational Enjoyment pushed — and passed — resolutions at Colorado State University and CU demanding that cannabis penalties be no worse than penalties for alcohol offenses on campus. That same year, SAFER put a measure on the Denver ballot that would decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by anyone over the age of twenty. When Denver voters approved the proposal, the Mile High City became the first major city in the country to make such a move — even though it was mostly symbolic and simply reinforced the state’s 1975 decriminalization laws.
“Still, it was seen as a win for the cannabis community, and it inspired SAFER to push for a similar statewide measure in 2006 that only received 40 percent of the vote. In 2007, SAFER again focused on Denver, which this time approved making marijuana possession the city’s lowest police priority.
“And soon a lot more people would be possessing marijuana — legally.”
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Published: Nov 1, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,852 words)
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Longreads Pick
A writer interviews her uncle, who worked as Cyndi Lauper’s makeup artist:
“It was for a new singer and it was for an Italian TV show called Popcorn, which was a music show. So they rented a flat and I walk in the next morning, and there’s this huge king-sized bed. And there’s Lou Albano and these other wrestlers and Cyndi and her mom. And I’m like, ‘Ugh, Jesus, what am I doing here? Who are these people?’ And then they start playing the song, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,’ and I’m like, ‘Ohhh, that’s… it.’ I just knew it was gonna be a hit. So I made myself indispensable. I mean, doting, putting her shoes on, everything. I really laid it on thick because I really wanted it. Two months before that, while I was still in school, I was watching MTV one night — which was just a few years old — and I thought that’s what I really want to do. I was telling people — trying to get the word out, put out some feelers — and they were like ‘That’s impossible, it takes years.’ And I wouldn’t hear it. People that I knew knew other artists who were just getting labels or trying to get labels, so I just thought I’d start there. But then I got the call from Cyndi.”
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Published: Nov 5, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,935 words)
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Longreads Pick
[Not single-page] The Comedy Central star on his TV character’s clash with reality, the pain of losing his father and brothers at a young age, and his fear of bears:
“PLAYBOY: How did bears become a recurring motif on the show? Was it just to have something to talk about that wasn’t topical?
“COLBERT: For the very first show, we were trying to find something that had a repeatable structure. We had this bit called ‘ThreatDown,’ when he talks about the number one threat to America that week. We were considering another story, something from Florida about a Burmese python that had grown to 13 feet long and swallowed an alligator and the alligator had eaten its way out of the snake. It was a really crazy story with horrible pictures. Then a bear story came up that wasn’t as flashy, but we went with it. Partly because bears are very resonant to me, because I really do have a bit of a bear problem. And it just seemed like a richer fear to us. We always said that anything my character is concerned about qualifies as news. If he says bears are the number one threat to America, then that is the case.
“PLAYBOY: He’s justifying his own anxieties?
“COLBERT: Exactly. ‘I want to make you afraid of the things I’m afraid of.'”
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Published: Oct 16, 2012
Length: 29 minutes (7,463 words)
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