State of the #Longreads, 2014

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

-Om Malik, on the conversations we are still not having about personal data collection and our automated future.
More tech in the Longreads Archive
Photo: sylvain_latouche, Flickr
Heroin dealers catering to affluent suburban addicts have shifted their operations from back-alley deals in shady parts of town to delivery on demand at downtown offices, high-end malls and suburban homes. But as the heroin business branches out from sketchy back-alleys, tactics have also changed. Now, drugs are marketed, dealers are trained, and the whole operation has been injected with MBA-style techniques.

The new issue of Wired has a story about Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can help detect cancer cells in our bodies. Injecting our bodies with scorpion venom may sound somewhat outlandish, but it’s been used in medicine for quite a long time:
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

I had a beautiful childhood and a lovely childhood. I just didn’t like being a child. I didn’t like the rank injustice of not being listened to. I didn’t like the lack of autonomy. I didn’t like my chubby little hands that couldn’t manipulate the world of objects in the way that I wanted them to. Being a child for me was an exercise in impotent powerlessness. I just wasn’t—and I was never terribly good at that kind of no-holds-barred fun. I mean, you know, I’ve essentially made a career on not being good at no-holds-barred fun.
But, you know, I was just never sort of like, hey, yes, let’s go play. I was always more sort of like, does everybody know where the fire exit is and let’s make sure there’s enough oxygen in this elevator.
-The late David Rakoff, in a 2010 Fresh Air interview.
Photo: poptech2006, flickr
A profile of Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can make cancer cells glow for easy removal:
A scorpion-venom concoction that makes tumors glow sounds almost too outlandish to be true. In fact, Olson explains, that’s what troubled the big grant-making organizations when he came to them for funding. But when those organizations dismissed his ideas as too bizarre, Olson started accepting donations from individuals—particularly the families of current and former patients—quickly raising $5 million for his research. It was a bold and unprecedented tactic: Though patients and their families are often asked to donate to foundations with broad goals, Olson raised money for one specific, untested technology—a much riskier gamble. But thanks to his efforts, Olson’s fluorescent scorpion toxin is now in Phase I clinical trials, an impressive accomplishment for a compound with such a peculiar lineage. The University of Washington students are clearly awed by the work.

Here’s the first official edition of Longreads’ Best of WordPress! We’ve scoured 22% of the internet to create a reading list of great storytelling — from publishers you already know and love, to some that you may be discovering for the first time.
We’ll be doing more of these reading lists in the weeks and months to come. If you read or publish a story on WordPress that’s over 1,500 words, share it with us: just tag it #longreads on Twitter, or use the longreads tag on WordPress.com.
Photo: wallyg, Flickr

–In These Times‘ Stephanie Woodard, on the voting rights discrimination that Native Americans still face.
Photo: solarnu, Flickr

In MIT’s Technology Review, Antonio Regalado reports that paralyzed patients are participating in long-term studies of how putting implants in the brain to create brain-controlled prosthetics and computers may help paralyzed people in the future. Jan Scheuermann, 54, is one of these patients. After she awoke from her brain surgery, she was able to control a robotic arm within days. The findings from these studies were published in journals and made it onto the newsmagazine program 60 Minutes. But Scheuermann wasn’t expecting what would happen to her after she was out of the spotlight:
Photo: Joshua Zader

Mat Honan, in Wired, with a fictional account of living in the internet-connected home of the future.
More Wired in the Longreads Archive
Photo: jonathan_moreau, Flickr
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