Posts tagged longreads

The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi Via Slate: Mohamedou Ould Slahi began to tell his story in 2005. Over the course of several months, the Guantánamo prisoner handwrote his memoir, recounting what he calls his “endless world tour” of detention and interrogation. He wrote in English, a language he mastered in prison. His handwriting is relaxed but neat, his narrative, even riddled with redactions, vivid and captivating. In telling his story he tried, as he wrote, “to be as fair as possible to the U.S. government, to my brothers, and to myself.” He finished his 466-page draft in early 2006. For the next six years, the U.S. government held the manuscript as a classified secret. When his pro bono attorneys were allowed to hand me a disk labeled “Unclassified Version” last year, Slahi had been a Guantánamo detainee for more than a decade. I sat down to start reading his manuscript nearly 10 years to the day from the book’s opening scene: “[Redacted] July 2002, 22:00. The American team takes over. The music was off. The conversations of the guards faded away. The truck emptied.” We’re in the middle of the action. Slahi’s life in captivity had begun eight months earlier, on Nov. 20, 2001, when Slahi, then 30, was summoned by Mauritanian police for questioning. He had just returned home from work; he was in the shower when police arrived. He dressed, grabbed his car keys—he went voluntarily, driving himself to the police station—and told his mother not to worry, he would be home soon. Overview: How the United States kept him silent for 12 years. Part 01: Endless Interrogations. Part 02: Disappeared. Part 03: Family. Timeline of Slahi’s detention. Image: Handwritten page from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir (PDF), via Slate.

The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Via Slate:

Mohamedou Ould Slahi began to tell his story in 2005. Over the course of several months, the Guantánamo prisoner handwrote his memoir, recounting what he calls his “endless world tour” of detention and interrogation. He wrote in English, a language he mastered in prison. His handwriting is relaxed but neat, his narrative, even riddled with redactions, vivid and captivating. In telling his story he tried, as he wrote, “to be as fair as possible to the U.S. government, to my brothers, and to myself.” He finished his 466-page draft in early 2006. For the next six years, the U.S. government held the manuscript as a classified secret.

When his pro bono attorneys were allowed to hand me a disk labeled “Unclassified Version” last year, Slahi had been a Guantánamo detainee for more than a decade. I sat down to start reading his manuscript nearly 10 years to the day from the book’s opening scene:

“[Redacted] July 2002, 22:00. The American team takes over. The music was off. The conversations of the guards faded away. The truck emptied.”

We’re in the middle of the action. Slahi’s life in captivity had begun eight months earlier, on Nov. 20, 2001, when Slahi, then 30, was summoned by Mauritanian police for questioning. He had just returned home from work; he was in the shower when police arrived. He dressed, grabbed his car keys—he went voluntarily, driving himself to the police station—and told his mother not to worry, he would be home soon.

Overview: How the United States kept him silent for 12 years.

Part 01: Endless Interrogations.

Part 02: Disappeared.

Part 03: Family.

Timeline of Slahi’s detention.

Image: Handwritten page from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir (PDF), via Slate.

No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks A few weeks ago EJ Fox wrote a piece for us exploring longform storytelling and adopting magazine experiences for the Web. In it, he discusses how JavaScript and CSS techniques can introduce full screen images and video, parallax effects and responsive design to amplify and support storytelling.  Importantly, he also writes about how producers of these longform pieces must break out from the templates and general style guides that control the rest of their sites. SBNation’s coverage of the Yukon Quest Race is a great, new example of harnessing these techniques. Created with Vox Media, it’s an elegant display of wrapping a 5,500-word longread in a delightful presentation package. Check it: SBNation, No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks.

No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks

A few weeks ago EJ Fox wrote a piece for us exploring longform storytelling and adopting magazine experiences for the Web.

In it, he discusses how JavaScript and CSS techniques can introduce full screen images and video, parallax effects and responsive design to amplify and support storytelling. 

Importantly, he also writes about how producers of these longform pieces must break out from the templates and general style guides that control the rest of their sites.

SBNation’s coverage of the Yukon Quest Race is a great, new example of harnessing these techniques. Created with Vox Media, it’s an elegant display of wrapping a 5,500-word longread in a delightful presentation package.

Check it: SBNation, No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks.

Who reads music writing? There’s obviously a core of readers invested in what reviews and think pieces have to say — they debate on Twitter and in specialist havens like I Love Music, on their Facebook feeds and even sometimes in the comment sections. The economics of the web, which are both more directly tied to traffic numbers and lower-margin than those of print, make that audience too small to make any economic sense as a core demographic; readers outside the Best Music Writing-obsessed have to be reached as well.

Maura Johnson, NPR Music. What Happened To Music Writing This Year?

Johnson is on to something, and it’s not just about music writing — it’s about journalism as an increasingly porous activity. Lists and lightweight news bites regularly become the day’s most shared content. And many people who would be receptive to more in-depth, thoughtful content are likely banging out article-worthy ideas in online conversations.

She continues, asking a question all up-and-comers should ask themselves:

And this is where the larger quandary comes in. If the idea is to “serve the reader,” does that mean exposing them to new things they haven’t heard and ideas that might not have been aired yet, or does it mean pivoting off the conventional wisdom in some way?

H/T: Jay Rosen.

Michael Jackson’s Thriller Turns 30

Billboard has an interesting history about the November 30, 1982 release of Thriller. In it, we learn of technology disruption (FM was replacing AM radio) and the audience fragmentation that occurred because of it.

We also learn about CBS Records’ concern over the album’s potential success:

Since the start of the [80s], black music had been increasingly banished from most white-targeted radio stations. This was partially due the virulent, reactionary anti-disco backlash that resulted in the implosion of that genre at the end of 1979. As the 80’s dawned, programmers increasingly stayed clear of rhythm-driven black music out of fear of being branded “disco,” even when the black music in question bore little resemblance to disco. This backlash was greatly magnified by the demise of AM mass appeal Top 40 radio at the hands of FM, which led to black artists being ghettoized on urban contemporary radio, while disappearing from pop radio, which focused on a more narrow white audience.

How dramatic was the decline of black music on the pop charts in that period? In 1979, nearly half of the songs on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 pop chart could also be found on the urban contemporary chart. By 1982, the amount of black music on the Hot 100 was down by almost 80%.

Also, and notably, MTV had just launched. But the music videos the station played were very white as it followed the playlists occurring on the FM charts. They too were very hesitant to give Jackson airtime.

[MTV executives at the time] concede that the channel initially assumed it would not play the video, as its thumping beat and urban production did not fit the channel’s “rock” image. They contend however that in mid-February, after seeing the clip—which was possibly the best that had ever come across their desks—they began to re-think things.

Good thing they did.

Billboard, Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ at 30: How One Album Changed the World.

The Hackers of Damascus

Via Businessweek:

Taymour Karim didn’t crack under interrogation. His Syrian captors beat him with their fists, with their boots, with sticks, with chains, with the butts of their Kalashnikovs. They hit him so hard they broke two of his teeth and three of his ribs. They threatened to keep torturing him until he died. “I believed I would never see the sun again,” he recalls. But Karim, a 31-year-old doctor who had spent the previous months protesting against the government in Damascus, refused to give up the names of his friends.

It didn’t matter. His computer had already told all. “They knew everything about me,” he says. “The people I talked to, the plans, the dates, the stories of other people, every movement, every word I said through Skype. They even knew the password of my Skype account.” At one point during the interrogation, Karim was presented with a stack of more than 1,000 pages of printouts, data from his Skype chats and files his torturers had downloaded remotely using a malicious computer program to penetrate his hard drive. “My computer was arrested before me,” he says.

Much has been written about the rebellion in Syria: the protests, the massacres, the car bombs, the house-to-house fighting. Tens of thousands have been killed since the war began in early 2011. But the struggle for the future of the country has also unfolded in another arena—on a battleground of Facebook pages and YouTube accounts, of hacks and counterhacks. Just as rival armies vie for air superiority, the two sides of the Syrian civil war have spent much of the last year and a half locked in a struggle to dominate the Internet. Pro-government hackers have penetrated opposition websites and broken into the computers of Reuters and Al Jazeera to spread disinformation. On the other side, the hacktivist group Anonymous has infiltrated at least 12 Syrian government websites, including that of the Ministry of Defense, and released millions of stolen e-mails.

The Syrian conflict illustrates the extent to which the very tools that rebels in the Middle East have employed to organize and sustain their movements are now being used against them. It provides a glimpse of the future of warfare, in which computer viruses and hacking techniques can be as critical to weakening the enemy as bombs and bullets. Over the past three months, I made contact with and interviewed by phone and e-mail participants on both sides of the Syrian cyberwar. Their stories shed light on a largely hidden aspect of a conflict with no end in sight—and show how the Internet has become a weapon of war.

Stephan Feris, Businessweek. The Hackers of Damascus.

We were on the brink of changing the world before we got stuck in this legal muck.

Michael Phillips, founder of a voice recognition software company called Vlingo, on being sued in 2008 for patent infringement.

At the time, Vlingo was in partnership discussions with Apple and Google but both stopped negotiations because of the suit.

While Vlingo was eventually exonerated, it cost the company $3 million in legal fees and they eventually agreed to be bought by the company that sued them.

The New York Times, The Patent, Used as a Sword.

In the smartphone industry, according to the article, ”as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions.”

Cuba beyond Havana: a reading list

fjp-latinamerica:

Here is a worth-sharing hand-picked selection of five longform journalism pieces on Cuban daily life beyond Havana. Good mix, take a look.

Via The Electric Typewriter:

On Tipping in Cuba by Chris Turner - A writer discovers the uncomfortable socio-macroeconomics of the cheap beach vacation

In Purusit of the Wild Cohiba by Ginger Strand and James Wallenstein - The world’s best cigars straight from the source.

Recruiting for the Big Parade by Terry Southern - ”How I signed Up for $250 a Day for the Big Parade Through Havana Bla Bla Bla and Wound Up Working for the CIA in Guatemala.”

The Happiest Man in Cuba by Rebecca Barry - How the U.S. blockade has made Cuba a trainspotter’s paradise.

Hitchhiker’s Cuba by Dave Eggers - Getting to know Cuba by picking up strangers from the side of the road.

FJP: TETW is well worth the follow for your longread pleasure.

tetw

From Mcluhan to viruses, 150 Essential Science and Tech Reads.

929 plays

Playing Games with the President

Vanity Fair contributor Michael Lewis is doing the radio circuit to discuss the Barack Obama profile that appears in the magazine’s October issue.

The article comes in at over 14,000 words and we recommend setting aside the time to give it a read.

What’s particularly interesting to us is how Lewis reported the story: he basically hung out with the president a number of times over a period of months. Instead of doing traditional policy Q&A’s on, say, Medicare, they played games. Basketball is one that’s getting a lot of attention (Lewis was benched) but more interesting are the simple role plays that helped Lewis better separate Obama the person from Obama the media character.

As Lewis explains in this short clip from WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show, gamification plays a role in the interview process because “things are revealed in a character when doing things.”

The full interview can be heard here. And if Terry Gross is more your style, her interview with Lewis is here.

In it, Lewis tells Gross that his proposal to the White House went something like this: “I’ve got to basically come and loiter and just kind of get to know him. It’s going to be very free-flowing; I want to do things like play basketball with him… I said I wanted to caddy for him on the golf course. I wanted to be in meetings, I just wanted to be around, and no one had ever done this.”

My foray into fart science is a bit timid. The mere inclusion of the topic threatens to lower my intellectual tone. A confluence of circumstances forced the subject on me. While recording laughter for an earlier study, one of my subjects laughed so hard that he farted. Since I already had it on tape and was in a sound lab, why not check out the acoustics of farting? This was a defining moment. Would I lose resolve, as did Galileo when he was “shown the instruments” by his inquisitors? With tenure safely in hand, I forged ahead. What started as a playful acoustic analysis led to the quite serious consideration of why we speak through the mouth instead of the rectum. Along the way, I discovered a quirky and amusing literature that may elevate the status of the lowly fart as a topic in scientific discourse.

Throughout the ages, farting (flatulation) has generated jokes, folklore, etiquette, and a few legal sanctions, but little research. The legendary Hippocrates (460–377 BCE) considered the medical affliction of too much gas in The Winds, advising, “It is better to let it pass with noise than to be intercepted and accumulated internally” (1.24–25). The topic has been treated more often in popular fare, including the humorous writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, Benjamin Franklin, and Mark Twain. Fart jokes earn a place in the opening scene of Aristophanes’ The Clouds and the memorable closing scene of “The Miller’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Although passing gas is usually considered ill-mannered, it’s usually laughed off as a minor offense. But this has not always been the case. The Roman Empire once had laws against farting in public places, a sanction that must have caused a lot of fanning and finger-pointing in the Forum. The law was lifted during the reign of Claudius, one of the most flatulent of emperors.

Consider the sad fate of Pu Sao of the Tikopia in Polynesia, who was so overcome with shame after farting in the presence of the chief that he committed suicide by climbing a palm tree and impaling himself through the rectum with a sharply pointed branch. Sanctions are less severe among the Chagga of Tanzania, but feminists have a lot of work to do there. If a husband breaks wind, the wife must pretend that it was really she who discharged, and she must submit to scolding about it. Failure to accept responsibility can cost the negligent wife three barrels of beer.

Robert R. Provine, Author, Curious Behavior. Via Salon, Passing gas is an art and science

FJP: I don’t post just because I’m puerile, but because this is actually a fascinating read about farts throughout the ages, from a famed French performer who dominated the stage with gassy butt tricks, to the thoughts of St. Augustine, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, Mark Twain and Chaucer, to the science of flatulence, human and otherwise. Well worth the read. — Michael

The World's Most Successful Digital Media Companies

paidContent just published their top 50 list of the world’s most successful digital media companies.

And it isn’t your ordinary list. Instead, after an overview, it runs some 103 pages from Google and its $36.4B in revenue at the top to Japan’s Hakuhodo DY and its $719.22M in revenue rounding things out.

Taken together, paidContent reports, the fifty companies that make up the list generate $150-billion-a-year in digital revenue.

Via paidContent:

This year’s paidContent 50, for the first time, looks at companies outside the U.S. and in segments not considered last year, like business information and advertising. As a consequence, several U.S. companies fell off this year’s list — including CareerBuilder, ValueClick, WebMD, GameStop, Hulu, the New York Times, Ancestry.com and Demand Media…

…Indeed, opening the gates to the rest of the world adds some new perspective on the success of some of the largest U.S. digital players. Zynga, for example, suddenly falls 24 places, while Netflix sinks 14 places despite adding about $500,000 in revenue in an error-strewn year. Almost half of our list this year (23 companies) comes from outside the U.S.

A hundred plus pages is tough to get through so to shorten the task — or to help motivate — see paidContent 50: 6 big takeaways from this year’s list.

paidContent, The world’s most successful digital media companies.

The 101 Book Summer Reading List Flowchart Teach.com created this very clever flowchart for high school students but there’s plenty in it for readers of all ages. Especially those of us who missed our assignments the first time around. Image: Detail from Which Books Should You Read This Summer, via Teach.com.

The 101 Book Summer Reading List Flowchart

Teach.com created this very clever flowchart for high school students but there’s plenty in it for readers of all ages. Especially those of us who missed our assignments the first time around.

Image: Detail from Which Books Should You Read This Summer, via Teach.com.

Forty years ago, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 was published. At the time, The New York Times called it “the best account yet… of what it feels like to be out there in the middle of the American political process.” An anniversary edition was recently released with a forward from Matt Taibbi that begins like so: I doubt any book means more to a single professional sect than Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 means to American political journalists. It’s been read and reread by practically every living reporter in this country, and just as you’re likely to find a dog-eared paperback copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop somewhere in every foreign correspondent’s backpack, you can still spot the familiar red (it was red back then) cover of Fear and Loathing ’72 poking out of the duffel bags of the reporters sent to follow the likes of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Barack Obama on the journalistic Siberia known as the Campaign Trail. Decades after it was written, in fact, Fear and Loathing ’72 is still considered a kind of bible of political reporting. It’s given birth to a whole generation of clichés and literary memes, with many campaign reporters (including, unfortunately, me) finding themselves consciously or unconsciously making villainous Nixons, or Quislingian Muskies, or Christlike McGoverns out of each new quadrennial batch of presidential pretenders. Even the process itself has evolved to keep pace with the narrative expectations for the campaign story we all have now because of Hunter and Fear and Loathing. The scenes in this book where Hunter shoots zingers at beered-up McGovern staffers at places like “a party on the roof of the Doral” might have just been stylized asides in the book, but on the real Campaign Trail they’ve become formalized parts of the messaging process, where both reporters and candidates constantly use these Thompsonian backdrops as vehicles to move their respective products. Every campaign seems to have a hotshot reporter and a campaign manager who recreate and replay the roles of Hunter and Frank Mankiewicz (Karl Rove has played the part a few times), and if this or that campaign’s staffers don’t come down to the hotel bar often enough for the chummy late-night off-the-record bull sessions that became campaign legend because of this book, reporters will actually complain out loud, like the failure to follow the script is a character flaw of the candidate. Slate, Fear and Loathing 40 Years Later. Image: Chapter 1, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

Forty years ago, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 was published. At the time, The New York Times called it “the best account yet… of what it feels like to be out there in the middle of the American political process.”

An anniversary edition was recently released with a forward from Matt Taibbi that begins like so:

I doubt any book means more to a single professional sect than Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 means to American political journalists. It’s been read and reread by practically every living reporter in this country, and just as you’re likely to find a dog-eared paperback copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop somewhere in every foreign correspondent’s backpack, you can still spot the familiar red (it was red back then) cover of Fear and Loathing ’72 poking out of the duffel bags of the reporters sent to follow the likes of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Barack Obama on the journalistic Siberia known as the Campaign Trail.

Decades after it was written, in fact, Fear and Loathing ’72 is still considered a kind of bible of political reporting. It’s given birth to a whole generation of clichés and literary memes, with many campaign reporters (including, unfortunately, me) finding themselves consciously or unconsciously making villainous Nixons, or Quislingian Muskies, or Christlike McGoverns out of each new quadrennial batch of presidential pretenders.

Even the process itself has evolved to keep pace with the narrative expectations for the campaign story we all have now because of Hunter and Fear and Loathing. The scenes in this book where Hunter shoots zingers at beered-up McGovern staffers at places like “a party on the roof of the Doral” might have just been stylized asides in the book, but on the real Campaign Trail they’ve become formalized parts of the messaging process, where both reporters and candidates constantly use these Thompsonian backdrops as vehicles to move their respective products.

Every campaign seems to have a hotshot reporter and a campaign manager who recreate and replay the roles of Hunter and Frank Mankiewicz (Karl Rove has played the part a few times), and if this or that campaign’s staffers don’t come down to the hotel bar often enough for the chummy late-night off-the-record bull sessions that became campaign legend because of this book, reporters will actually complain out loud, like the failure to follow the script is a character flaw of the candidate.

Slate, Fear and Loathing 40 Years Later.

Image: Chapter 1, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

Pitifully paid workers, weak environmental policies, supply chains that allow manufacturers to abdicate responsibility. Simon Brew asks: is it even possible to buy ethically sound technology?

Via PC Pro UK:

In the past, when people have voiced ethical concerns surrounding technology, it’s typically been centred on environmental issues. Such issues, as we’ll see, are still relevant, but it’s increasingly the human consequences of manufacturing technology that are coming under the microscope.

How is the end user supposed to know just how their shiny new product came to be? Do they even care that there’s a sporting chance the manufacturer itself couldn’t tell you where every last component came from? And if they did, how is it possible to have confidence that the product they’ve just bought conforms to any kind of ethical standard? Or do we all just want to buy the cheapest product available?

Is it even possible to buy any technology with a clean conscience, without bankrupting ourselves in the process?

As I post this I think of the phones, laptops, tablets, cameras and assorted gear that allow us to do what we do. I don’t know the answers — and don’t want to use that as an excuse to abdicate the issue — but am glad we’re seeing more tech reporters tackling where our shiny things come from and the consequences of our having them. — Michael