Peter Rubin

1 week ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

Physician Bryant Lin co-founded Stanford’s Center for Asian Health Research and Education, where he researched lung cancer in nonsmokers of Asian descent. Last year, he joined that cohort when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. His next move—other than beginning treatment—was to launch a class at Stanford in which patient became professor.

1 week ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

This feature appears online under the title “After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution,” but the print headline speaks to what makes it so compulsively readable. Whether you love or avoid Phish (mere tolerance doesn’t seem to be an option), the truth remains that no group of musicians so regularly seeks, let alone attains, a state of creative ecstasy. That state extends to the audience as well, many of whom are famously—and chemically—primed for the journey.

2 weeks ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

NBA athletes who retire generally find life to be easier than it was while they were active. Not so much with Dwyane Wade. For The Atlantic, D. Watkins traces Wade’s path from South Side Chicago to the heights of success, at which point the athlete’s real work began—on himself. An uncommonly vulnerable and forthright profile. Growing up, Wade saw competing versions of what a man was supposed to be. He saw men putting their hands on women, men fighting each other, men drawing guns.

2 weeks ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

The internet has already transformed the book work almost beyond recognition. Self-publishing and fan-fiction sites like Wattpad turned hobbyists into multimillionaires. The promise of big data spawned algorithm-driven publishers. Now, AI promises yet another turn of the screw. For Businessweek, Vauhini Vara (whose book about AI and selfhood drops this week) looks at Inkitt, a startup that’s wielding the technology with abandon—and raising some troubling questions in the process.

2 weeks ago | longreads.com | Peter Rubin

Eating during a hectic day of plane travel can feel like the search for the least terrible option: mediocre overpriced food on the plane or mediocre overpriced food from the airport? That calculus changes on the train; facing a multi-day journey, many opt to bring homemade options along. For Eater, Nylah Iqbal Muhammad talks to picnic-minded folks onboard Amtrak’s California Zephyr—and in the process teases out some fascinating links between the Anabaptist and Black Southern culinary traditions.