#Longreads of the Week: Competitive Eating, Michael Bay, Spam, Mormons, Louis C.K. + More

Ladies First
Sonya Thomas and the women’s movement in competitive eating.
Read it at Grantland

Blow-Up: An Oral History of Michael Bay, the Most Explosive Director of All Time
As America braces for the third chapter of Transformers—dozens of his collaborators and victims, from Will Smith to Steven Spielberg to Scarlett Johansson, reveal the secret genius behind a true Hollywood visionary. (And yes, we’re still talking about Michael Bay).
Read it at GQ.com

The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret
First Hormel gutted the union. Then it sped up the line. And when the pig-brain machine made workers sick, they got canned.
Read it at Mother Jones

Louis CK’s DIY TV
Inside a crowded apartment in upper Manhattan, the executive producer of the FX comedy Louie needs to confer with the director, the star, the writer and the editor. Fortunately, they’re all the same guy.
Read it at TIME.com

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace
It once promised to redefine music, politics, dating, and pop culture. Rupert Murdoch fell in love with it. Then everything fell apart.
Read it at Businessweek

The Bravest Woman in Seattle
For herself, for the woman she loved, and for justice, the survivor of the South Park attacks tells a courtroom what happened that night.
Read it at The Stranger

Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?
A series in which family history dovetails with the invention of e-mail begins with a look at the computer-programming revolution at MIT in the 1960s.
Read Part One at The New York Times

Inside ‘The Order,’ One Mormon Cult’s Secret Empire
America’s most twisted crime family – and the boys who dared to defy it.
Read it at RollingStone.com

Calvin and Hobbes and the Trouble with Nostalgia
My Calvin and Hobbes anthologies sat unread at home on the highest shelf of my parents’ living room bookcase for almost ten years.
Read it at Splitsider.com

Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News
According to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the “prejudices of network news” and deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers.
Read it at Gawker.com