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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Guardian, Deadspin, Smithsonian magazine, New Yorker, Vela Mag, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Maggie Calmes.
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Guardian, Deadspin, Smithsonian magazine, New Yorker, Vela Mag, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Maggie Calmes.
James Erwin, a writer for software manuals in Des Moines, Iowa, responded to a Reddit thread wondering what would happen if the U.S. Marines battled the Roman Empire. His comments lit up the Internet:
The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes.
The section of Bagram where the 35th was gathered suddenly reappears in a field outside Rome, on the west bank of the Tiber River. Without substantially prepared ground under it, the concrete begins sinking into the marshy ground and cracking. Colonel Miles Nelson orders his men to regroup near the vehicle depot—nearly all of the MEU’s vehicles are still stripped for air transport. He orders all helicopters airborne, believing the MEU is trapped in an earthquake.
“How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big Budget Flick.” — Jason Fagone, Wired
See also: “Flick Chicks.” Mindy Kaling, New Yorker, Oct. 3, 2011
The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass:
To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. She found that a President’s powers of persuasion were strong, but only within his own party. Nearly four thousand of the votes were of the mission-to-Mars variety—they should have found support among both Democrats and Republicans. Absent a President’s involvement, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time, but when a President took a stand that number rose to more than half. The same thing happened with votes on more partisan issues, such as bills that raised taxes; they typically split along party lines, but when a President intervened the divide was even sharper.
“The Unpersuaded.” — Ezra Klein, New Yorker
See also: “Power and the Presidency, From Kennedy to Obama.” — Robert Dallek, Smithsonian, March 21, 2011
Brendan I. Koerner’s All-Time Favorite #Longreads
tetw:
As chosen by Brendan I. Koerner
A selection of all-time favourite articles from Wired contributing editor, former Slate and New York Times columnist, and the author of 2 excellent books, Brendan I. Koerner:
The Hunger Warriors by Scott Anderson – The story of Turkish women starving themselves to death for the most head-scratching of causes. Behold the sinister power of peer pressure.
Does a Sugar Bear Bite? by Lynn Hirschberg – A classic profile of Suge Knight at the zenith of his power. Maybe the best intro scene of any celebrity profile in history.
Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood by Evan Wright – Rob Capps, my editor at Wired, turned me onto Wright’s work. This is my personal favorite—a portrait of a man blessed with bottomless energy and ambition, though only the smallest trace of empathy for his fellow man.
Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser – A master class in narrative contrarianism. Deeply and elegantly reported, with a real human tragedy at its core.
A Bad Trip by Gary McLain (though doubtlessly ghostwritten by someone else) – Something I read as a boy, and which made me want to become a writer. Tough to have a better lead than this: “I was standing in the Rose Garden, wired on cocaine.” It gets better and more harrowing from there.
A Better Brew by Burkhard Bilger – Perhaps the best story ever by one of my favorite writers. (His piece on cockfighting from several years back is a classic, too.) Bilger does a tremendous job of creating real tension, while never losing sight of his primary duty as an explainer of business and science.
And a few you’ll need a subscription to read:
Rock is Dead by David Samuels – This is what it felt like to be young in the ’90s. A terrifying portrait of morality adrift in a sea of excess.
Gangland by Jon Lee Anderson – There is no more badass reporter working in journalism today. No one else could have set up an interview with the most violent (yet complex) gangster in all of Rio’s slums. Truly intrepid reporting.
What Young Men Do by Richard Lloyd Parry and “Eating Glass” by Alfred Lawrie (both from Granta 62) – I’m a huge Granta fan, and this is my fave issue of all time because it contains these two non-fiction classics. The Lawrie one, in particular, is a doozy—a seemingly lighthearted profile that goes to deep, dark places as it progresses.
After Welfare” by Katherine Boo – The story that got me into Boo’s now much-heralded work. Still haunted by the scene of the two kids eating ramen and boiled eggs.
For more from the man himself head over to his blog or sign up for updates via Twitter.
William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:
Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. ‘The Collapse of American Criminal Justice‘ was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.
“Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong.” — Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe
See also: “The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, Jan. 23, 2012
The evolution of how we recruit and train spies—starting with the OSS in the 1940s—and our changing expectations of what the job entails and what motivates those who sign up:
I remember him saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if you change your mind.” That’s because we had signed up for something illegal, even immoral, according to some people, he said.
It was called espionage. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but “case officers” — the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said — and betray people who trusted us, if need be. Anyone who objected, he concluded, could walk out right now.
He looked around. One man got up and left. The rest of us, a little anxious, stayed put.
“What Makes a Perfect Spy Tick?” — Jeff Stein, Washington Post
See also: “The Journalist and the Spies.” — Dexter Filkins, New Yorker, Sept. 19, 2011
Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate:
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a ‘carceral state,’ in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
[Not single-page] The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country:
“A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ the man asked. ‘What are you doing to this country?’ The executive turned out to be an engineering consultant whom Ghonim pegged at around 50; he might have been Ghonim himself born twenty years earlier. Ghonim is both an interested listener and not great at getting out of conversations, and so he spent the flight absorbing his seatmate’s story: The older man had supported the protests at Tahrir Square and experienced ‘the epitome of happiness’ when Mubarak had been forced down on February 11. But as the revolution had barreled on, some of its demands seemingly extreme, and the country continued to falter, the consultant had come to resent all of it.
“The Lonely Battle of Wael Ghonim.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York magazine
A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process:
One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President a six-page letter detailing her complaints. Some in the White House saw the long letter as a weapon, something that could be leaked if Clinton didn’t get her way. ‘At the proposed funding levels,’ Clinton wrote, ‘we will not have the capacity to deliver either the full level of civilian staffing or the foreign assistance programs that underlie the civilian-military strategy you outlined for Afghanistan; nor the transition from U.S. Military to civilian programming in Iraq; nor the expanded assistance that is central to our Pakistan strategy.’
“The Obama Memos.” — Ryan Lizza, New Yorker
More Lizza: “Inside the Crisis.” New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009
Featured Longreader: Lexi Mainland, social media editor for The New York Times. See her story picks from Vanity Fair, New Yorker, The Atlantic and more on her #longreads page.
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