The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
August 10, 2012

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1. How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
Mat Honan | Wired | August 6, 2012 | 14 Minutes (3,573 words)

How one writer lost everything on his iPhone, his iPad and his Mac—including all of the photos from the first year and a half of his daughter's life—after a hacker infiltrated his Amazon, Apple, Gmail and Twitter accounts:

"Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

"Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.

"But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices."

See also: "The Hacker Is Watching" (David Kushner, GQ, Jan. 2012)

2. Cyborg America: Inside the Strange New World of Basement Body Hackers
Ben Popper | The Verge | August 10, 2012 | 20 Minutes (5,016 words)

A writer meets with "grinders"—people who are obsessed with human enhancement through the manipulation of their body with technology—and then decides to implant a magnet in his finger:

"I chatted with Warwick from his office at The University of Reading, stacked floor to ceiling with books and papers. He has light brown hair that falls over his forehead and an easy laugh. With his long sleeve shirt on, you would never know that his arm is full of complex machinery. The unit allows Warwick to manipulate a robot hand, a mirror of his own fingers and flesh. What’s more, the impulse could flow both ways. Warwick’s wife, Irena, had a simpler cybernetic implant done on herself. When someone grasped her hand, Prof. Warwick was able to experience the same sensation in his hand, from across the Atlantic. It was, Warwick writes, a sort of cybernetic telepathy, or empathy, in which his nerves were made to feel what she felt, via bits of data travelling over the internet."

See also: "Man as Machine" (Max Byrd, Wilson Quarterly, Feb. 2012)

3. The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Joe Hagan | Rolling Stone | August 4, 2012 | 24 Minutes (6,027 words)

In Arizona's Maricopa County, 80-year-old Joe Arpaio has made a name for himself "for being not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America." He's now being sued by the Justice Department for civil rights violations against Latinos:

"Arpaio began focusing on illegal immigration about six years ago, after he watched an ambitious politician named Andrew Thomas get elected chief prosecutor of Maricopa County by promising to crack down on illegal immigrants. In 2006, shortly before the Department of Homeland Security empowered local law-enforcement agencies to act as an arm of the federal immigration effort, Arpaio created a Human Smuggling Unit – and used Thomas' somewhat twisted interpretation of the law to focus not on busting coyotes and other smugglers, but on going after the smuggled.

"The move may have been indefensible from a legal standpoint, but it was political gold: Arpaio quickly ramped up his arrest numbers, bringing him a round of fresh media attention. The sheriff made a splash by setting up roadblocks to detain any drivers who looked like they could be in the U.S. illegally – a virtual license to racially profile Hispanics. Reports of pull-overs justified by little or no discernible traffic violations were soon widespread: Latinos in the northeastern part of the county, one study shows, were nine times more likely to be pulled over for the same infractions as other drivers. Arpaio's men, the Justice Department alleges, relied on factors 'such as whether passengers look "disheveled" or do not speak English.' Some stops were justified after the fact: A group of Latinos who were photographed sitting in a car, neatly dressed, were described in the police report as appearing 'dirty,' the ostensible rationale for the pull-over. Testifying on the stand on July 24th in a federal trial over his department's blatant record of racial profiling, Arpaio himself acknowledged that he once called the crackdown a 'pure program to go after the illegals and not the crime first.'"

More Hagan: "Truth or Consequences" (Texas Monthly, April 2012)

4. Urban Meyer Will Be Home for Dinner
Wright Thompson | ESPN | August 9, 2012 | 29 Minutes (7,279 words)

The new Ohio State football coach made a promise to his family that he'd put them first. Will he keep it?

"Eighty or so people filed into the school cafeteria. Urban and his wife, Shelley, joined their daughter at the front table, watching as Gigi stood and spoke. She'd been nervous all day, and with a room of eyes on her, she thanked her mother for being there season after season, year after year.

"Then she turned to her father.

"He'd missed almost everything. You weren't there, she told him.

"Shelley Meyer winced. Her heart broke for Urban, who sat with a thin smile, crushed. Moments later, Gigi high-fived her dad without making eye contact, then hugged her coach. Urban dragged himself back to the car. Then -- and this arrives at the guts of his conflict -- Urban Meyer went back to work, pulled by some biological imperative. His daughter's words ran through his mind, troubling him, and yet he returned to the shifting pixels on his television, studying for a game he'd either win or lose. The conflict slipped away. Nothing mattered but winning. Both of these people are in him -- are him: the guilty father who feels regret, the obsessed coach who ignores it. He doesn't like either one. He doesn't like himself, which is why he wants to change."

More Thompson: "The Life and Times of Harvey Updyke" (May 2011)

5. Sleeping Through the Slaughter
Jessica Hatcher | Vice | August 8, 2012 | 8 Minutes (2,102 words)

A trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, joining a UN mission to investigate the massacres there:

"In the last few months, I’ve spent time in the Democratic Republic of Congo where I used an embarrassing fuck-up by one of the world's most publicly accountable organizations as a bargaining tool to get a story. A mistake by the United Nations means I saw something I shouldn't have*, and when I agreed to agree it never happened, they reluctantly allowed me to join a massacre investigation mission in the most damaged part of what is, if their own statistics are to be trusted, the most damaged country in the world.

"I was to accompany a three-person Human Rights Team into one of the remotest parts of the Masisi district in Eastern DRC. I was expecting something like the cast of The Matrix, but what I got was a Head of Mission who wore Prada loafers, a spherical Congolese lady with a kind smile and another guy who wore a Thailand tourist T-shirt and fell asleep all the time. The UN histrionics surrounding our departure made it seem like we'd be spat out into an as yet unseen sequel of a Hollywood blockbuster, but in truth, we were middle-class happy campers on holiday."

More Vice: "Paintballing with Hezbollah" (Mitchell Prothero, March 2012)

Fiction Pick: My Brother in the Basement
Richard McCann | Blackbird | 2004 | 41 Minutes (10,408 words)

A closeted gay man's self-perception shifts through the experiences of his almost-twin brother:

"He was dark; I was fair.

"He was slender and shy; I was stocky and talkative.

"As children our mother dressed us as twins. Matching woolen pea coats and Buster Brown lace-ups, khaki shorts and striped T-shirts, pajamas imprinted with pictures of cowboys and Indians, Davy Crockett coonskin caps. For Easter, matching sailor suits with starched white middy blouses.

"Even so, the neighbors often strained to see the resemblance between us. 'You're brothers?' they asked. 'You're really brothers? Which one of you is older?'

"People imagined I was, because I was larger. But in fact he was older, by fifteen months. The bassinet into which I was placed was still warm from his having so recently lain there.

"Was it paradise, living like that, with someone made of the same flesh and blood as I? When Davis and I were little, we lay awake at night in our bunk beds, devising a language only the two of us could understand. 'Peanut butter' meant 'I'm sorry.' 'Bongo bongo' meant 'Go to sleep.' 'Applesauce' meant 'Laugh!'"

(Thanks, Instafiction)

Books by McCann on Amazon

More Longreads fiction picks

Joanna Lin @joannalin Joanna is a reporter covering K-12 education at California Watch, a project of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting.

"The cover of this week's New York Times Magazine shows a photo of a boy dressed entirely in pink, his sheer, ruffled robe and shoulder-length hair flowing behind him, and asks: 'What's Wrong with a Boy Who Wears a Dress?' Ruth Padawer's story on gender-nonconforming boys inspires dialogue and introspection on our collective discomfort with boys who have a proclivity for pink or who play with Barbies — boys who do not fit cleanly into our understanding of male, female or even transgender. As one mother, whose son does not want to be called either a boy or a girl, tells Padawer: 'I just want to be able to wrap my head around some concept.' Whatever that concept may be, Padawer takes us on a search that is touching, wrenching and intimate."

What's So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?
Ruth Padawer | New York Times Magazine | Aug. 8, 2012 | 23 minutes (5,700 words)

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