Longreads Pick
What is the Littoral Combat Ship? Is it a heavily armed brawler meant to wade into bloody coastal battles and sacrifice itself while taking out multiple enemy missile boats? Is it a mine-clearer? A sub-hunter? A low-cost patroller ideal for slowly stalking pirates, drug runners and weapons smugglers and training alongside allied navies? … Is it an affordable version of the Navy’s large destroyers, meant for the export market? Is it the flagship of an industrial scheme designed to revamp American shipbuilding? The answer is … all of these things. And none of them.
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Published: Aug 3, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,011 words)
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Longreads Pick
(Fiction) Five days of trading the field glasses and taking turns crawling back into the trees to smoke out of sight. Five days on surveillance, waiting to see if by some chance Carson might return to his uncle’s farm. Five days of listening to the young agent, named Barnes, as he recited verbatim from the file: Carson has a propensity to fire warning shots; it has been speculated that Carson’s limited vision in his left eye causes his shots to carry to the right of his intended target; impulse control somewhat limited. Five days of listening to Barnes recount the pattern of heists that began down the Texas Panhandle and proceeded north all the way up to Wisconsin, then back down to Kansas, until the trail tangled up in the fumbling ineptitude of the Bureau.
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Published: Oct 25, 2010
Length: 12 minutes (3,235 words)
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Longreads Pick
Now, Lanstein and FireEye were chasing their mightiest target to date, the Web’s most sprawling and advanced spam machine, called Rustock—pusher of fake pills, online pharmacies, and Russian stocks, the inspiration for its name. Over the past five years, Rustock had quietly—and illicitly—taken control of over a million computers around the world, directing them to do its bidding. On some days, Rustock generated as many as 44 billion digital come-ons, about 47.5 percent of all the junk e-mails sent, according to Symantec, the computer security giant based in Mountain View, Calif. Although those behind Rustock had yet to be identified, profits from it were thought to be in the millions. “The bad guys,” is what Lanstein had taken to calling them.
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Published: Jun 16, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,415 words)
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Longreads Pick
I sincerely wish I remembered this better. It definitely had a pool table, because at some point there was a “jump over the pool table” contest, not that I have any recollection of what that entailed. In the car, Chris is enjoying explaining to everyone that at some point I decided to crawl out a window and wander off into the night. “So then my buddy’s like, ‘I think your friend is having some trouble,’ ” Chris says, “and I look over, and there’s Edith in the gutter!” (Not lying in the gutter. This I remember. Sitting on the curb, trying and failing to call a cab.)
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Published: Jun 14, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,665 words)
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Longreads Pick
The first thing Kiki Ostrenga saw as she ran out the front door of her family’s white ranch house were the neon-green words spray-painted across the front path: “Regal Slut.” She stopped short. Maybe this is just a dream, she thought. The 14-year-old took a few fearful steps forward. She gasped when she reached the driveway. Her parents’ home was splattered with ketchup, chocolate syrup and eggs. And across the garage door, big as a billboard, was scrawled the word “SLUT.”
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Published: Apr 18, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,281 words)
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Longreads Pick
A couple of years ago, a subsidiary of Massey Energy, which owns a sprawling mine operation behind and above the Richmond home, bought up Lindytown. Many of its residents signed Massey-proffered documents in which they also agreed not to sue, testify against, seek inspection of or “make adverse comment” about coal-mining operations in the vicinity. You might say that both parties were motivated. Massey preferred not to have people living so close to its mountaintop mining operations. And the residents, some with area roots deep into the 19th century, preferred not to live amid a dusty industrial operation that was altering the natural world about them.
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Published: Apr 12, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,774 words)
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Longreads Pick
Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that J.C. Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases? The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.
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Published: Feb 13, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,880 words)
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An Evening with J.D. Salinger
In the apartment, which was a brownstown further uptown, Salinger asked us what we would like to drink. I offered my help getting out the ice, but no, he’d prefer to do it himself. The bar’s bottles and glasses were arranged at one end of a counter between the small kitchen space and the living room, and we stood around while Salinger poured—whiskey for all, I think. Drinks in hand, Jill, Joe, and I sank into a long sofa across from the bar, Jill sitting between us. Salinger sat down on a chair facing us across a coffee table. In my buzzy contentment I looked around the room at the pictures on the walls, and I lost track of what Joe and Salinger were saying to one another until I heard Joe ask, “Where did you go to college, J. D.?”
By Blair Fuller, The Paris Review
(via michellelegro, awl)
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Night-Shifting For the Hip Fleet
Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. The flat-tire-with-no-spare-on-Eighth-Avenue-and-135th-Street is a good cab story. The no-brakes-on-the-park-transverse-at-50-miles-an-hour is a good cab story. The stopped-for-a-red-light-with-teen-agers-crawling-on-the-windshield is not too bad. They’re all good cab stories if you live to tell about them. But a year later the cab stories at Dover sound just a little bit more foreboding, not quite so funny. Sometimes they don’t even have happy endings. A year later the mood at shape-up is just a little bit more desperate. They gray faces and burnt-out eyes look just a little bit more worried. And the most popular cab story at Dover these days is the what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here? story.
By Mark Jacobson, New York Magazine (1975)
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Longreads Pick
Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. The flat-tire-with-no-spare-on-Eighth-Avenue-and-135th-Street is a good cab story. The no-brakes-on-the-park-transverse-at-50-miles-an-hour is a good cab story. The stopped-for-a-red-light-with-teen-agers-crawling-on-the-windshield is not too bad. They’re all good cab stories if you live to tell about them. But a year later the cab stories at Dover sound just a little bit more foreboding, not quite so funny. Sometimes they don’t even have happy endings. A year later the mood at shape-up is just a little bit more desperate. They gray faces and burnt-out eyes look just a little bit more worried. And the most popular cab story at Dover these days is the what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here? story.
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Published: Sep 22, 1975
Length: 17 minutes (4,482 words)
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