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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week October 11, 2013 View this in your browser
 
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Also from Longreads this Week:
Reading List: Stories from the Working Class
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1. Failure Is Not an Option Mimi Swartz | Texas Monthly | Oct. 3, 2013 | 52 minutes (13,126 words)As head coach for women's track and field at the University of Texas, Bev Kearney won six NCAA championships and coached athletes who later competed at the Olympics. An affair with a student forced her to resign and her legacy is being tarnished:
"She was a magnetic, inspiring presence, and not only because of her success in Austin. In a near-fatal car accident in 2002, Kearney had been paralyzed from the waist down, and yet she now walked with two canes, like a mountain climber in a blizzard. Added to her already impressive life story—she had risen from a poor and rootless childhood, overcoming countless obstacles—the accident made her a formidable role model and a universal symbol of perseverance. 'Failure is not an option,' she liked to say, and she was living proof of her own maxim.
"That is, until this past spring, when Kearney was nowhere to be found at the 2013 Texas Relays. She didn’t ride onto the track on her burnt-orange scooter. No Divine Divas or Gents of Distinction were honored by her Pursuit of Dreams Foundation. At the parties held that weekend, there was no sign of the woman who had inspired so many people. That’s because right after Christmas, to the shock of many in the world of track and field and beyond, UT and Kearney had bitterly parted ways."
More Swartz: "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives" (July 2012)
Books by Swartz on Amazon
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2. The Secrets of Jeff Bezos Brad Stone | Businessweek | Oct. 10, 2013 | 29 minutes (7,280 words)In an excerpt from his new book The Everything Store, Brad Stone explores how Jeff Bezos turned Amazon into an online retailing giant—and tracks down Bezos's biological father:
"I found Ted Jorgensen, Jeff Bezos’s biological father, behind the counter of his bike shop in late 2012. I’d considered a number of ways he might react to my unannounced appearance but gave a very low probability to the likelihood of what actually happened: He had no idea what I was talking about. Jorgensen said he didn’t know who Jeff Bezos was and was baffled by my suggestion that he was the father of this famous CEO.
"I mentioned Jacklyn Gise and Jeffrey, the son they had during their brief teenage marriage. The old man’s face flushed with recognition. 'Is he still alive?' he asked, not yet fully comprehending.
"'Your son is one of the most successful men on the planet,' I told him. I showed him some Internet photographs on my smartphone, and for the first time in 45 years, Jorgensen saw his biological son. His eyes filled with sorrow and disbelief."
From the Longreads archive: Stories by Brad Stone
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3. All Is Fair in Love and Twitter Nick Bilton | The New York Times | Oct. 9, 2013 | 24 minutes (6,149 words)An excerpt from Bilton's new book, Hatching Twitter: The untold story of Twitter's true origins—and the contributions of Noah Glass, the co-founder who disappeared from the picture:
"What Glass didn’t know was that Dorsey was the one who wanted him out. Perhaps it was because he sensed vulnerability or perhaps it was because Glass was the only person who could rightly insist that the status updater was not Dorsey’s idea alone. Whatever his reasons, Dorsey had recently met with Williams and threatened to quit if Glass wasn’t let go. And for Williams, the decision was easy. Dorsey had become the lead engineer on Twitter, and Glass’s personal problems were affecting his judgment. (For a while, portions of the company existed entirely on Glass’s I.B.M. laptop.) After conferring with the Odeo board, around 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 26, 2006, Williams asked Glass to join him for a walk to South Park. Sitting on a green bench, Williams gave his old friend an ultimatum: six months’ severance and six months’ vesting of his Odeo stock, or he would be publicly fired. Williams said the decision was his alone."
See also: "An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic's Lens" (Austin Carr, Fast Company, 2012)
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4. 44 Million Ways to Say I’m Sorry Marisa M. Kashino | Washingtonian | Oct. 1, 2013 | 20 minutes (5,106 words)A profile of former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who spent time in prison for corruption and fraud charges. Abramoff is back in the public eye and wants to help with government reform, but it's unclear if his intentions are completely sincere:
"Many who knew Abramoff in his past life view his reform efforts with skepticism. I could almost hear some of them rolling their eyes on the other end of the line when I called. A couple of them sighed loudly when I explained what I was working on. One suspected I was just a pawn in Abramoff’s comeback strategy, asking if he was 'pushing' me to do the story. (For the record, I approached Abramoff for this article, not the other way around.)
"'Time will tell whether Jack’s doing this to get a seat at the big-boy table again in Washington,' says Neil Volz, who worked with him at Greenberg Traurig. 'He likes to win. He wants to engage in politics in probably the only issue that he currently can—and win.'"
More Washingtonian: "How Do You Explain Gene Weingarten?" (Tom Bartlett, 2011)
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5. Death of a SalesmanSam Sweet | The Paris Review | Oct. 10, 2013 | 6 minutes (1,553 words)On the genius of Cal Worthington, the legendary Southern California car dealer and TV pitchman who died Sept. 8 at age 92:
"Worthington’s long-running series of self-produced spots never deviated from a formula. The slender cowboy—six foot four in beaver-skin Stetsons and a custom Nudie suit—always preceded his hyperactive sales pitch with a gambol through the lot of his Dodge dealership, accompanied by an escalating succession of exotic animals. Originally it was an ape, then a tiger, an elephant, a black bear, and, finally, Shamu, the killer whale from SeaWorld—each of which was invariably introduced as Cal’s dog, Spot. Not once did he appear with a canine. The banjo-propelled jingle (set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”) exhorted listeners to 'Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal,' a catchphrase that became the basis for the most infamous mondegreen in Golden State history. To this day, Pussycow remains a nostalgic code word exchanged among Californians who came of age in the era before emissions standards."
More Paris Review: "Child Mortality" (Rachael Maddux, June 2013)
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Transport: On Leaving New York for Rehab in MinnesotaEmily Carter Roiphe | Seal Press | 2013 | 10 minutes (2,409 words) From Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, a new collection of essays edited by Sari Botton:
"I wouldn’t miss the culture; New York winnows out a lot of mediocrity, but I was only interested in heroin at that moment in time, of which, I admit, New York did have the very best, and it was cheap, too, its price being only ten dollars a unit and my integrity. It probably cost quite a bit of my future as well, but that was something I was clearly not constitutionally capable of taking into consideration. I did not, however, want to be associated with the horrid troops of well-off Caucasian poseurs who were using heroin as an expression of fashionable, expensive anomie while thousands of hardworking people had to deal with it as a blight on their neighborhoods and families. I didn’t particularly care if I died at that point since I was clinically depressed, but the thought of being associated with the whole heroin-chic thing made me wish I had never existed in the first place. That being the case, I got my wealthy Caucasian family to send me to a fashionable, expensive treatment center in Minnesota."
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Drew Grossman @DrewGrossman12
Drew is a writer living in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared on MensHealth.com, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, and his hometown paper, The Tallahassee Democrat. |
"My Longreads pick this week is Diane Roberts's 'Game of Tribes' for The Oxford American. The piece is an excerpt from a longer project, a book on the culture of college football and how it contributes to and reflects the extraordinary polarization of American life. Roberts—a native of Tallahassee, Fla. and professor in the English department at Florida State University—writes a beautiful and honest essay about the contradictory, but overwhelming love of college football in the American South. We know it’s not perfect, but we can’t help ourselves. Game of Tribes is part history, part ode, and part fight song. In preparation for week 7 of college football season, read Roberts’s Game of Tribes."
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