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. Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks Helen Rosner | Eater The agony and the ecstasy of America’s favorite chain restaurant --------------------------------------------------------------- In the fall of 1889, when he was 41 years old, the painter Paul Gauguin was brutally, furiously alone. Famous now for his saturated, almost hallucinatory paintings of life in Tahiti, at the time he was living in Brittany, still two years away from his first visit to French Polynesia. He was penniless and adrift, trying to paint his way through the devastations of his dying marriage, his rejection by the cliques of the Parisian art establishment, and the precarity of his friendship with Vincent van Gogh, who shortly before Christmas had assaulted him with a razor and, after Gauguin’s departure that evening, used the same blade to cut off his own ear. [Read More]( Breaking Down: Up Chris Bowyer | Movie Forums The first time I saw Up was on May 31st, 2009: exactly eight years ago today. It was my girlfriend's birthday, and we went to see the film together. Our reactions embodied the quintessential movie poster trope: we laughed and we cried. Sometimes we laughed so hard that we cried, and sometimes we laughed at how much we were crying. It was difficult to say where one emotion ended and the other began; some experiences break down the difference between the two. To say that Up resonated with me would be an understatement. I was at a personal crossroads: 25 years old, in a long-term relationship, and confronting the tough questions about life, love, and commitment that every man of honor must eventually stare down. The film's message seemed tailor made for the moment. Three weeks later I proposed, she said yes, and we played the film's score at our wedding reception. It was the alarm that woke us up this morning, too. [Read More]( Why Information Matters Luciano Floridi | The New Atlantis When we use a computer, its performance seems to degrade progressively. This is not a mere impression. Over the years of owning a particular machine, it will get sluggish. Sometimes this slowdown is caused by hardware faults, but more often the culprit is software: programs get more complicated, as more features are added and as old bugs are patched (or not), and greater demands are placed on resources by new programs running in the background. After a while, even rebooting the computer does not restore performance, and the only solution is to upgrade to a new machine. Philosophy can be a bit like a computer getting creakier. It starts well, dealing with significant and serious issues that matter to anyone. Yet, in time, it can get bloated and bogged down and slow. Philosophy begins to care less about philosophical questions than about philosophers’ questions, which then consume increasing amounts of intellectual attention. The problem with philosophers’ questions is not that they are impenetrable to outsiders — although they often are, like any internal game — but that whatever the answers turn out to be, assuming there are any, they do not matter, because nobody besides philosophers could care about the questions in the first place. [Read More]( Death at a Penn State Fraternity Caitlin Flanagan | The Atlantic Tim Piazza fought for his life for 12 hours before his Beta Theta Pi brothers called 911. By then, it was too late. --------------------------------------------------------------- At about 3 p.m. on Friday, February 3, Tim Piazza, a sophomore at Penn State University, arrived at Hershey Medical Center by helicopter. Eighteen hours earlier, he had been in the kind of raging good health that only teenagers enjoy. He was a handsome, redheaded kid with a shy smile, a hometown girlfriend, and a family who loved him very much. Now he had a lacerated spleen, an abdomen full of blood, and multiple traumatic brain injuries. He had fallen down a flight of stairs during a hazing event at his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, but the members had waited nearly 12 hours before calling 911, relenting only when their pledge “looked fucking dead.” Tim underwent surgery shortly after arriving at Hershey, but it was too late. He died early the next morning. [Read More]( The Takeover Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker After a stranger became their guardian, Rudy and Rennie North were moved to a nursing home and their property was sold. --------------------------------------------------------------- For years, Rudy North woke up at 9 a.m. and read the Las Vegas Review-Journal while eating a piece of toast. Then he read a novel—he liked James Patterson and Clive Cussler—or, if he was feeling more ambitious, Freud. On scraps of paper and legal notepads, he jotted down thoughts sparked by his reading. “Deep below the rational part of our brain is an underground ocean where strange things swim,” he wrote on one notepad. On another, “Life: the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.” [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. 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