This week’s Friday Longread is an essay by author Julian Gough, who is (among other things) the author of the epic final narrative poem that players see when they finish Minecraft. If your kids are like my kids, then the amount of time they spend playing that game may have caused you to wonder, as I do sometimes, if this is the most amazing or most devious thing ever created. And if you, like me, spent your youth playing video games that either uncritically reenacted the Cold War or else just let you brutally murder your friends for sport, you may also sometimes reflect happily on the rather more humanistic turn that at least this one, very popular, game has taken. But did you know that behind all that commercial success and undeniably addictive kid fun is a story about author’s rights, contract negotiation, and the public domain? Neither did I, but indeed, the full story of the “End Poem” in Minecraft has all those things and much much more. Worth your time this weekend: “I wrote a story for a friend” by Julian Gough.