Copy
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week March 1, 2013    


View this in your browser
Longreads Member Exclusive: Graveyards, by Scott McClanahan


Become a Longreads Member for $3 a month and we'll send you full text and ebook versions of our latest exclusive stories. This week's Member pick: "Graveyards," a story by Scott McClanahan about a family visit to the cemetery, from his forthcoming book Crapalachia

With a Longreads Membership, you're also supporting our service. Here's how.
1. The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer Sabrina Rubin Erdely | Rolling Stone | February 27, 2013 | 28 minutes (7,041 words) A Navy intelligence analyst reports a rape and finds herself ostracized. She's not the only one, and the U.S. military still has not taken serious steps to address a culture that condones sex abuse:

"The scandal of rape in the U.S. Armed Forces, across all of its uniformed ser­vices, has become inescapable. Last year saw the military's biggest sex-abuse scandal in a decade, when an investigation at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio revealed that 32 basic-training instructors preyed on at least 59 recruits. In Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair is currently facing court-martial for sex-crimes charges, including forcible sodomy, for alleged misconduct against five women. In October, an Air Force technical sergeant filed an administrative complaint describing a work environment of comprehensive harassment – in which all women are 'bitches'; and claimed that during a routine meeting in a commander's office, she was instructed to take off her blouse and 'relax' – edged with menace and punctuated by violent assaults. In December, a Department of Defense report revealed that rape is rampant at the nation's military academies, where 12 percent of female cadets experienced 'unwanted sexual contact.' And an explosive series of federal lawsuits filed against top DOD brass on behalf of 59 ­service members (including Rebecca Blumer) allege that the leadership has done nothing to stop the cycle of rape and ­impunity – and that by failing to condemn sexual assault, the military has created a predators' playground."

More Erdely: "The Plot Against Occupy" (October 2012)
2. In the Footsteps of a Killer Michelle McNamara | Los Angeles magazine | February 27, 2013 | 32 minutes (8,054 words) A crime writer digs into the decades-long investigation of a serial killer in California, and she finds a growing online community of amateur sleuths trying to solve the case:

"The Golden State Killer, though, has consumed me the most. In addition to 50 sexual assaults in Northern California, he was responsible for ten sadistic murders in Southern California. Here was a case that spanned a decade and ultimately changed DNA law in the state. Neither the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960s and early ’70s, nor the Night Stalker, who had Southern Californians locking their windows in the ’80s, was as active. Yet the Golden State Killer has little recognition; he didn’t even have a catchy name until I coined one. His capture was too low to detect on any law enforcement agency’s list of priorities. If this coldest of cases is to be cracked, it may well be due to the work of citizen sleuths like me (and a handful of homicide detectives) who analyze and theorize, hoping to unearth that one clue that turns all the dead ends into a trail—the one detail that will bring us face-to-face with the psychopath who has occupied so many of our waking hours and our dreams."

More from Los Angeles magazine: "The Tip of the Spear" (Joel Sappell, December 2012)
3. How to Stop the Bullies Emily Bazelon | The Atlantic | February 20, 2013 | 24 minutes (6,218 words) How Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and members of Anonymous are finding ways to address cyberbullying:

"Lieberman is most interested in catching the egregious instances of bullying and conflict that go destructively viral. So another of the tools he has created is a kind of air-traffic-control program for social-networking sites, with a dashboard that could show administrators where in the network an episode of bullying is turning into a pileup, with many users adding to a stream of comments—à la Let’s Start Drama. 'Sites like Facebook and Formspring aren’t interested in every little incident, but they do care about the pileups,' Lieberman told me. 'For example, the week before prom, every year, you can see a spike in bullying against LGBT kids. With our tool, you can analyze how that spreads—you can make an epidemiological map. And then the social-network site can target its limited resources. They can also trace the outbreak back to its source.' Lieberman’s dashboard could similarly track the escalation of an assault on one kid to the mounting threat of a gang war. That kind of data could be highly useful to schools and community groups as well as the sites themselves. (Lieberman is leery of seeing his program used in such a way that it would release the kids’ names beyond the social networks to real-world authorities, though plenty of teenagers have social-media profiles that are public or semipublic—meaning their behavior is as well.)"

More Bazelon: "The Price of a Stolen Childhood" (New York Times Magazine, January 2013)

Books by Bazelon on Amazon
4. The Ghost Writes Back Amy Boesky | Kenyon Review | February 25, 2013 | 20 minutes (5,173 words) The writer reflects on her old part-time job—ghostwriting the Sweet Valley High book series:

"Sweet Valley High set its fables of 'same and different' in a 1980s world of new wealth and upward mobility, latching on to an innovative publishing reality: create a mass-market paperback series for young female readers, keep the price point low enough that it could be absorbed by a middle-class allowance, and use the books themselves to advertise each other by 'seeding' the plots of each subsequent book in the final chapters. After almost a decade of new realism offered to teen readers by Judy Blume, whose heroines had scoliosis or weight problems or pimples and worried about getting their periods and struggled about whether or not to believe in God, Sweet Valley High offered a pastel, romantic antidote: a world of action instead of contemplation, a world in which bodies were seen soft-focus, free of the slightest blemish or appetite. Mysterious illnesses aside, this was a disembodied world, where corporeality was hinted at solely through actions: the twins 'sped' in their shiny red Fiat Spider convertible; 'dashed' to the mall; or 'raced' upstairs to phone a friend. Rhetoric mattered here as much as action—the books were filled with dialogue, and talk was everywhere—gossip, confidences, promises, avowals, protests, demurrals. I never knew, before I started writing for Sweet Valley, how many synonyms there were for the verb 'said.' The twins by and large didn’t 'say' things—instead, they chuckled and giggled and whispered and murmured and sighed. They 'gasped' over good news or bad. They lived in a fantasy world, these girls, and as long as I was writing about them, to some extent, so did I."

More Kenyon Review: "The Stations of the Sun" (Reese Okyong Kwon, May 2011)
5. Miami Heist: The Brink's Money Plane Job's Messy Aftermath Daniel Grushkin | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 22, 2013 | 12 minutes (3,185 words) How a group of thieves stole $7.4 million from Brink's guards in a warehouse at Miami International Airport, and were caught by FBI investigators:

"Monzon’s plan, naturally, was to lie low. The crew sealed the money in vacuum packs and split up. Monzon stashed some of his money in PVC pipes and buried them under his family’s house in Homestead, a rural area halfway between Miami and the Florida Keys. Some went into the attic. He didn’t hide it all, though: He bought a Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle worth about $14,000. But the everyday dramas of ordinary life continued. Monzon kept his job at the rental company. Cinnamon kept working as well, as a receptionist at Vista magazine. 'I get up every day at six in the morning to come work like a slave,' she complained months later in a phone conversation tapped by the FBI."

"Boatwright took a different approach. He bought a Rolex and a set of gold caps for his teeth and began days-long drug binges at strip clubs. He dropped thousands of dollars partying with friends. Rumors spread to Monzon that he was doing drugs right out in the street."


More from Businessweek: "A Chinese Hacker's Identity Unmasked" (Dune Lawrence, Michael Riley, February 2013)
Fiction Pick: Something to Remember Me By Saul Bellow | 1990 | 50 minutes (12,684 words) A young man goes on a journey:

"When there is too much going on, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex. My first knowledge of the hidden work of uneventful days goes back to February 1933. The exact date won’t matter much to you. I like to think, however, that you, my only child, will want to hear about this hidden work as it relates to me. When you were a small boy you were keen on family history. You will quickly understand that I couldn’t tell a child what I am about to tell you now. You don’t talk about deaths and vortices to a kid, not nowadays. In my time my parents didn’t hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was sex. We’ve got it the other way around."

More Longreads fiction picks

Books by Bellow on Amazon
Featured Longreader
Moses Hawk @moseshawk
Moses is an artist, painter, alchemist, serial entrepreneur and frequent contributor to the Longreads community.
"My favorite Longread this week is 'Science and Gun Violence: Why is the Research So Weak?,' because of our ongoing disconnect between culture and science. This is a well-researched piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker who is the science editor at Boing Boing. The inadequate understanding of where gun violence stems from is clearly inhibiting our society toward making meaningful changes. We are in this fight with both arms tied behind our back and a blindfold on. It is critical that clear-thinking people stand up and voice support for science and research."
Science and Gun Violence: Why is the Research So Weak? Maggie Koerth-Baker | Boing Boing | Feb. 26, 2013 | 17 minutes (4,245 words)
Like Top 5 Longreads of the Week on Facebook
Thanks for subscribing to Longreads! We'll send you the best storytelling from across the web, as well as Longreads Exclusives and Originals.

Manage your profile | Unsubscribe <<Email Address>> from this list.

Copyright (C) 2012 Longreads / Automattic Inc. All rights reserved.

Forward this email to a friend