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How a Mom Penetrated the Pen to Hack the Warden’s Computer

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John Strand didn’t think it was a great idea to allow his mom to attempt to break in to a South Dakota prison as part of a “penetration” or “pen” test of their security systems. But as Lily Hay Newman reports at Wired, Rita Strand, age 58, insisted. Armed only with a fake badge and some confidence, she posed as a health inspector doing a surprise inspection and managed to gain access — unaccompanied! — throughout the facility where she planted “rubber duckies” (USB sticks with code used to compromise computer security systems) on several computers, including the one belonging to the warden.

“She takes off, and I’m thinking in the back of my head that this is a really bad idea,” Strand says. “She has no pen testing experience. No IT hacking experience. I had said, ‘Mom, if this gets bad you need to pick up the phone and call me immediately.'”

Pen testers usually try to get in and out of a facility as quickly as possible to avoid arousing suspicion. But after 45 minutes of waiting, there was no sign of Rita.

“It gets to be about an hour, and I’m panicking,” he says. “And I’m thinking I should have thought it through, because we all went in the same car so I’m out in the middle of nowhere at a pie shop with no way to get to her.”

Suddenly, the Black Hills laptops began blinking with activity. Rita had done it. The USB drives she had planted were creating so-called web shells, which gave the team at the café access to various computers and servers inside the prison. Strand remembers one colleague yelling out: “Your mom’s OK!”

In fact, Rita had encountered no resistance at all inside the prison. She told the guards at the entrance that she was conducting a surprise health inspection and they not only allowed her in, but let her keep her cell phone, with which she recorded the entire operation. In the facility’s kitchen, she checked the temperatures in refrigerators and freezers, pretended to swab for bacteria on the floors and counters, looked for expired food, and took photos.

But Rita also asked to see employee work areas and break areas, the prison’s network operations center, and even the server room—all allegedly to check for insect infestations, humidity levels, and mold. No one said no. She was even allowed to roam the prison alone, giving her ample time to take photos and plant her Rubber Duckies.

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The Hate Is Coming From Inside the House

Image from Quote Catalog via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Body positivity, fat activism, intuitive eating: all of these things are meant, in part, to free us from the tyranny of diet culture. But if you’ve spent 50 years living your life according to the Gospel of Jenny Craig — each of those 50 in a world that doesn’t hate fat people any less — it’s hard to keep the self-love switch in the “on” position. In the New York Times, Sarah Miller takes a hard look at her relationship to her body and to body positivity.

I am not saying that no one has accepted her body, that it’s all a lie. I am just saying that I’m pretty sure we haven’t “arrived” anywhere. And why would we have? The material conditions of being a woman have not been altered in any dramatic way, and seem to be getting worse, for everyone. And while there is certainly more of what is called a “celebration” of different shapes, it is rare that those shapes are not proportioned in a fairly universally attractive way.

Even if by some miracle I were to accept being not thin, as I have many times — for five or 10 minutes or three whole days like when I finished Lindy West’s excellent memoir, “Shrill,” and naïvely thought I had finally been cured of my sickness — I would remain the sort of person destined for re-infection.

That person is always prepared for contempt from men who don’t find her physically attractive, and has been on high alert to general woman hatred since she was 4. (Honestly, I pity the women who are not.) At any rate, I’m 50 and I am way too scared of the world to stop dieting.

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Margery Kempe: Patron Saint of Writing Moms

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Sara Fredman observes that becoming a mother helped her perspective as a writer, much like Margery Kempe, a medieval mom with 14 kids who managed to write The Book of Margery Kempe — a treatise on her own spiritual reinvention that may very well have been the first memoir. Despite the sore boobs and the sleep deprivation, Fredman says being a mom sharpened her focus and motivated her to write within the small windows that having three small children allows. Read her essay at Electric Literature.

New motherhood blindsided me like a semi truck. There was the fact that breastfeeding physically tethered me to my child like one of those yo-yo balls from the ‘90s, able to extend only so far before I had to rocket right back.

There are some who would use motherhood as a cudgel or a cautionary tale in an attempt to convince us that becoming a mother—or too much of a mother—means locking ourselves out of the writing life. But the truth is that, like Margery, I found that motherhood unlocked something in me. Maybe it was surviving four days of labor or fourth months of no sleep, but when I emerged from the fog, I had more to say and an increasingly fiery need to say it,

Having children has simultaneously fried my brain and made it sharper and more focused. I don’t know how this is possible, but it is my truth. I see things differently now because growing and birthing a baby changes you. It can change your palate and your shoe size and it most certainly changes your brain. For Margery, this meant a series of divine visions that altered the course of her life. For most of us, the changes are far less spiritual, but they can be similarly revelatory.

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When Readers Support Longreads, We Can Nurture Strong Relationships with Writers

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As an editor, the biggest compliment a writer can pay me is to send a second pitch my way. Building a strong relationship with authors — the kind that lasts for years and transcends the vagaries of daily traffic and Twitter chatter — is my favorite thing about being a Longreads editor. Here’s the thing: none of it is possible without readers’ support. That’s why we’re aiming to raise $50,000 during our Winter Member Drive this year.

When you, our readers, become members, you not only show us your trust in our editorial choices; you also make it possible for us to nurture some incredible writers. Every contribution you make — especially when it’s a recurring (monthly or annual) one — goes directly to our story fund and gives us the space to think big, to commit to long-term projects, and to sustain some of our audience’s favorite reads.

Over the last few years, the Longreads team has doubled down on publishing longform series on topics ranging from history to music. There’s something very special that happens when a writer gets to return to the same topic and explore it, over the course of months and years, from new angles. Their connection to the subject matter deepens. Their authority becomes both more apparent and, at the same time, more laid back. Their voice develops and modulates as loyal readers keep coming back.

In Anne Thériault’s Queens of Infamy — going strong for two years now — this long-term commitment has led to a passionate following that eagerly awaits each new, darkly funny account of women rulers from centuries past. Tom Maxwell’s Shelved series, with 14 essays under its belt, has been unearthing the stories of unpublished albums by some of the most famous musicians on the planet. From perfume to mirrors, Katy Kelleher has been diving deep into the ugly history of beautiful things, a gorgeously written exploration of material culture.

There are more I could mention — from Rebecca Schuman’s scathing reevaluation of ’90s pop artifacts to Soraya Roberts’ brilliant weekly columns on the intersection of politics and culture (seriously, read them!). But the point I’m trying to make is simple: we need your support to make these relationships sustainable. Our readers’ commitment to Longreads is what makes it possible for Longreads to commit to writers and their work over time.

Thank you for contributing during our Winter Member Drive — every dollar helps, and every recurring contribution helps even more. If you’re ready to become a member (or re-up your previous contribution), you know what to do — just click below.

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If Miscarriage is So Normal, Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About It?

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Anna Lea Hand | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (6,996 words)

 

PART 1: If It’s So Normal, Why Aren’t People Talking About It?

The entire time I am pregnant, the entire three-and-a-half months, Jamie and I tell no one about it except for a couple people out of necessity. I tell no one because that’s what I’m supposed to do, and, honestly, because I didn’t want to be seen as a pregnant person and have people put their expectations on me, their joy on me, their definitions of how I must and should be feeling on me. I figure that for thousands of years people have been getting pregnant, and though this is certainly miraculous and empowering, I don’t need the Hallmark congratulations, not even from friends and family I trust and love. The entire time I am pregnant I watch and feel how my body is changing and feel normal. The entire time I am pregnant I know that a miscarriage could happen, and feel normal about that too, because I know that people have them. The trouble is that no one talks about them beyond repeating what they’ve been told, “Miscarriages are so common,” and none of this information tells me what it’s like to experience one. So here I am, pregnant, feeling how my body is transforming, and feeling equally light over the normalcy of a possible miscarriage, and heavy under the weight of what to expect.

And then it happens. Late on a Wednesday night I start to feel heavy, deep cramping and a heat and loosening near my cervix, a feeling similar to right before I get my period. Even though I’ve made it beyond the traditional 12-week-you’re-in-the-clear zone, I know something is not sitting right. I wake up at 3:00am Thursday morning and google “signs of a miscarriage,” and end up on Mayo Clinic’s website. I am bleeding a little, but I’m still unclear about what I’m experiencing. I call the obstetrics department of the hospital first thing in the morning and say, “I think I’m having a miscarriage,” and because I haven’t started my prenatal care with them, they ask me who has confirmed that I am pregnant as if I’m making things up. I am insulted that they think I don’t know my own body. They hesitantly agree to see me and tell me where to go. Already I feel like a problem. Already I feel out of place.
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25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses, including the novel coronavirus identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China in 2019, 2020. Courtesy CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from James Hamblin, Josina Guess, Edward Carey, Paraic O’Donnell, and Ruth Graham.

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Help us reach our fundraising goal of $50k

* Bundyville. (Deeply reported and up for a National Magazine Award.)
* Queens of Infamy. (Delightfully nerdy historical satire.)
* Fine Lines. (Thoughtful personal essays on aging.)
* Shelved. (Deep dives into ditched deep cuts.)
* Hive. (Women on the music that moves them.)

In 2009, Longreads started as a hashtag for sharing great reading on Twitter and we remain passionate about and committed to selecting and sharing the best writing on the web. 

We’re proud of our deeply reported stories and thoughtful personal essays, as well as excerpts of and commentary on the books we love. Read this note from our founder Mark Armstrong for more details on what we have planned this year.

We want to allow our writers the time and space to explore topics carefully so we can all benefit from their thinking and understand the world — and one another — a little better. Is that a mission that moves you too? 

Please chip in with a one-time or — even better — a monthly or annual contribution. We’re grateful for your support!

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1. You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus

James Hamblin | The Atlantic | February 24, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,045 words)

You might not know you have it, though.

2. The Wind Delivered the Story

Josina Guess | The Bitter Southerner | February 27, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,143 words)

In this haunting essay, Josina Guess confronts South Carolina’s violent racist past when she discovers, over time, newspapers in her yard telling the story of Willie Earle’s 1947 mass lynching and the subsequent acquittal of all 31 accused.

3. On Getting Lost

Edward Carey | Texas Highways | February 1, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,457 words)

A journey through the Big Thicket of Texas.

4. MS Is Meticulously Destroying Me. I Am Being Unmade.

Paraic O’Donnell | The Irish Times | February 11, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,757 words)

“It’s not that you surrender, in the end. Even surrender takes effort, and you just don’t have the energy.”

5. The Bible That Oozed Oil

Ruth Graham | Slate | February 27, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,852 words)

A small Georgia town, a prophecy about Donald Trump, and the story of how a miracle fell apart.

How Do You Live In a Body That Doesn’t Feel Like Yours? If You Have No Choice, You Just Do.

Photo by Ford Motor Company via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

It’s hard to choose a passage to highlight when every paragraph of an essay makes you stop to catch your breath because it’s so lovely, or candid, or difficult. Such is the case with Paraic O’Donnell‘s Irish Times essay that juxtaposes the progression of the seasons with the progression of his Multiple Sclerosis. I’ve chosen one particularly no-holds-barred section that’s both blunt and darkly comic, but I could just as easily have chosen one of dozens of other paragraphs.

In software engineering, there’s a concept called graceful degradation. That’s where, if something unexpected happens, the system doesn’t just silently lose its shit. It issues a brief statement and tries to get its affairs in order. Having performed these final acts of heroism, it can go tits up with a clear conscience. That’s graceful degradation. It’s an elegant term, I’ve always thought.

Anyway, with multiple sclerosis, graceful degradation is very much not a thing. It’s the opposite kind of deal, in fact. When you’re exhausted, which is most of the time, what happens instead is graceless degradation. There’s just no kind of showmanship or dignity to the proceedings. You’d see better performances, in the collapsing line, from a fucked deckchair or a condemned block of flats.

It’s a shitshow, seriously. You hurt yourself, sometimes, just trying to sit down. Actually injure yourself. It’s a fucking fiasco, is what it is.

And you feel, after exertion, like a crash test dummy. You feel like a shit zombie, like a tortured golem. You can’t cry any more – this is still a thing, for some reason – and you’re getting resentful about that, because sometimes you desperately want to.

You feel, sometimes, like a motherless child.

These, then, were the prevailing conditions in the spring of 2013. This was what I was up against. And faced with odds like these, I did what anyone would do. I bought a colossal number of plants, took a boatload of drugs and embarked on a massive construction project.

Twitter is often a festival of hate and ignorance and poop, but sometimes it also brings you links to pieces like this, pieces that you’d never have seen otherwise, and then you remember how being connected to the whole world can be a beautiful thing.

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Longreads Needs Your Support to Raise $50K During Our Winter 2020 Member Drive

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Longreads is celebrating its 11th anniversary this year. Nine years ago, we launched an optional membership—first for readers to support the service, and later to support our story fund for original reporting, essays, and podcasts.

Now, here we are in 2020—we’ve published stories from thousands of writers, and we’ve raised over $1 million from readers. Last month, Longreads earned its fourth National Magazine Award nomination, for the second season of Bundyville, Leah Sottile’s groundbreaking podcast in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. The stories you read on Longreads eventually became books, like Michele Filgate’s outstanding collection What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, and Jeff Sharlet’s This Brilliant Darkness.

Last year I shared a short Twitter thread about the early days of Longreads and its membership. Twitter has certainly changed a lot since the early days of the hashtag, but our mission has never changed, which is to support and celebrate great stories on the web, and organize this community of readers to fund new work.

Longreads is pushing to achieve long-term sustainability, and reader support is more critical than ever to ensure that we can keep publishing the stories and voices that challenge us and expand our understanding of the world. Our goal for this drive is $50,000. And your support means we can keep publishing this work with no paywalls—free for everyone to enjoy and share.

We have more exciting projects coming soon—starting with today’s launch of HIVE, a new series about women and the music that influenced them. Then in March we’ll debut a new podcast from the producers behind Bundyville, and an important new collaboration with The Marshall Project.

We can’t do any of this without you. You can become a monthly or yearly subscriber, or you can make a one-time payment. Just go to Longreads.com/join.

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Thank you, as always, for your continued support.

If you or your organization would like to make a contribution of $1,000 or more to sponsor our newsletter, or a specific topic, or a series, reach out to us at partners@longreads.com.

Mark Armstrong, founder, Longreads

How a Hurricane’s Trailing Winds Retold Willie Earle’s 1947 Mass Lynching

A lynch mob, with police, following the mob's unsuccessful attempt to lynch CY Winstead, who was in the county jail, Roxboro, North Carolina, August 19, 1941. (Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)

In this haunting essay at The Bitter Southerner, Josina Guess confronts South Carolina’s violent racist past.

When an Autumn hurricane’s trailing winds disturb old newspapers stored in her shed — blowing them around to lodge and rest in various places across her yard — the old sodden papers revealed themselves over time to tell her the story of Willie Earle’s 1947 lynching and the subsequent acquittal of all 31 accused, a pivotal event that marked a change in public opinion in South Carolina and the South against unchecked mob violence.

When my family and I started to settle into our northeast Georgia farmhouse two years ago, we found a box of Athens Banner-Heralds and Atlanta Journals and Atlanta Constitutions from the mid 1940s through the early 50s. I pored over the brittle yellow papers, a time capsule of this region’s attitudes on race, gender, economics, politics, and agriculture. I wondered at the treasures hidden in those stacks, and what coverage, if any, I might find of some of the racialized terror and lynchings of those waning days of overt American apartheid.

During a blustery autumn storm, the tailwinds of a hurricane, the wind whipped through the woodshed and stirred up some of the papers, littering them around the property. Each day we would pluck a few – a strange harvest of stories. Opinion columns about communists clinging to the blueberry bushes; by the smokehouse, a story of a man dying because a segregated hospital refused him treatment; in the kale I found the price of cotton: 36 cents per 1-inch middling. I would nibble on these stories, roll them over in my mind, then bury their empty husks beneath a pile of oak leaves.

Then a keeper appeared to Michael in the grass between the old well and the pecan tree. The front page of the Athens Banner-Herald from May 16, 1947 read, “State Seeks Death Sentence For All 31 Lynchers.” He lifted the dampened page and laid it to dry on the dining room table. The article gave graphic details and ample evidence, including confessions and incriminating accusations from the taxicab drivers who killed Willie Earle to avenge the fatal stabbing of a cab driver named Thomas Brown. Arrested, then almost immediately kidnapped from jail, Earle had no opportunity to stand trial – his guilt or innocence never proven.

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