Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser]( We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (Or Just Insane) New Mothership Steven Levy | Wired ON JUNE 7, 2011, a local businessman addressed a meeting of the Cupertino City Council. He had not been on the agenda, but his presence wasn’t a total surprise. Earlier in the year the man had expressed his intention to attend a meeting in order to propose a new series of buildings along the city’s northern border, but he hadn’t felt up to it at the time. He was, as all of them knew, in dire health. Before the start of the meeting, Kris Wang, a Cupertino council­member, looked out the window at the back of the room and saw him walking toward the building. He moved with obvious he day before when he’d introduced new products to the world—which is to say, the same outfit that anyone had ever seen him wear. When it was his turn to address the council, he walked to the podium. He began to speak, tentative at first before clicking into the conversational yet hypnotically compelling tone he used in keynotes. [Read More]( The death of reading is threatening the soul By Philip Yancey | The Washington Post I am going through a personal crisis. I used to love reading. I am writing this blog in my office, surrounded by 27 tall bookcases laden with 5,000 books. Over the years I have read them, marked them up, and recorded the annotations in a computer database for potential references in my writing. To a large degree, they have formed my professional and spiritual life. Books help define who I am. They have ushered me on a journey of faith, have introduced me to the wonders of science and the natural world, have informed me about issues such as justice and race. More importantly, they have been a source of delight and adventure and beauty, opening windows to a reality I would not otherwise know. [Read More]( Norm Macdonald On Politics In Late Night And The Art Of Doing Great Interviews Jason Tabrys | UPROXX Few comedians have earned the sincere reverence that Norm Macdonald has, but David Letterman qualifies, and in the season premiere of Macdonald’s YouTube talk show on JASH (which you can subscribe to here), the two shared a soundstage for the first time since Macdonald’s teary farewell performance near the end of Letterman’s Late Night run in 2015. In the interview (which you can watch in full down below), Macdonald and Letterman trade compliments and discuss Letterman’s early career in stand up and his late night run. It’s catnip for comedy nerds, but it also presented a challenge and a bit of uncomfortableness for Macdonald, as he tells us in our own interview, which touches on Letterman, people’s persistent fascination with SNL, politics in late night, and the lost art of late night long form interviews. This all over the phone while he was caddying as penance for an awful golf game. [Read More]( First Support for a Physics Theory of Life Natalie Wolchover | Quanta Magazine Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing. --------------------------------------------------------------- The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” [Read More]( Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, and Music’s Most Successful Alliance Matthew Lynch | Vanity Fair Director Allen Hughes discusses his upcoming HBO documentary which tracks the careers and friendship of the legendary producers-turned-executives. --------------------------------------------------------------- “Every one of these people has got their own fucking weather pattern,” says director Allen Hughes when asked about lining up interviews for The Defiant Ones,his upcoming four-part HBO documentary on the careers and incredibly fruitful business partnership of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. Individually and together, Iovine and Dre (born Andre Young) have provided the double-helix backbone upon which a staggering portion of American popular music released since 1975 stands. Take away their work as producers, and Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Cube surrender crucial portions of their respective catalogues. Strike out their roles as record executives, and who’s to say if Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, Eminem, or Kendrick Lamar ever crosses over? You get those sorts of subjects on camera when you get them, Hughes says with a laugh. But, he says, “everyone who sat down, whether it was Springsteen or Snoop, they sat down and they were in no rush to go anywhere. . . . I just looked and said, ‘Damn, these people really love Jimmy and Dre.’ ” [Read More]( THE DRUG RUNNERS Ryan Goldberg | Texas Monthly The Tarahumara of northern Mexico became famous for their ability to run incredibly long distances. In recent years, cartels have exploited their talents by forcing them to ferry drugs into the U.S. Now, with their land ravaged by violence, they’re running for their lives. --------------------------------------------------------------- IT WAS A HALF hour after midnight and Silvino Cubesare Quimare was approaching the ghost town of Separ, in southwest New Mexico. Tall and lithe, his skin browned from years of laboring under the desert sun, he strode through the darkness. Strapped to his back were two homespun burlap packs, one filled with 45 pounds of marijuana bricks and the other with enough burritos and gallon jugs of water to survive another week in the wilderness. With him were five cousins and a nephew, each shouldering a similar load. They trudged silently past the scars of an old copper mining trail, long-gone railroad tracks and trading posts that once upon a time exchanged men, minerals, and equipment across the border to Chihuahua. Up ahead, they saw the lights of a highway and knew they were within a dozen miles of their drop-off. They’d reach it before daybreak. [Read More]( Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. Our mailing address is: The Federalist 8647 Richmond Highway Suite 618 Alexandria, VA 22309 [Add us to your address book]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( The Federalist · 8647 Richmond Highway · Suite 618 · Alexandria, VA 22309 · USA