Search Results for: Jonathan Cohn
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week


Illustration by Glenn Harvey
Along with the Top 5 Longreads of the week, we’re proud to bring you an “Atlas of the Cosmos” by Shannon Stirone.
If you love space and exploration and maps, you’re going to enjoy Shannon’s story. She travels to Kitt Peak observatory to meet DESI, the high-powered telescope that’s working on mapping the entirety of the cosmos, one galaxy at a time. Yes, the entire cosmos.
Shannon’s written previously for us on space. Be sure to read “The Hunt for Planet Nine.”
The quest might seem a bit nonsensical. Why does it matter when or how the universe began? Why does it matter when or how it ends? It matters for the same reason your locations throughout your life carry context for who you are. We exist on a timeline together — we pop into existence and then one day we stop. It matters for the same reason one of the first questions you learn to ask in another language is, “where are you from?” To know where you are at any given time is a frame of reference in which to measure your life in some way and in many ways those locations, those slices of time, hold a great deal of meaning.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Hannah Dreier, Doug Bock Clark, Samanth Subramanian, Michael Hobbes, Jonathan Cohn, Kate Sheppard, Alex Kaufman, Delphine D’Amora, Chris D’Angelo, and Emily Peck, and Kris Willcox and Michelle Ruiz.
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1. What to Do About Ahav?
Hannah Dreier | The Washington Post | October 24, 2020 | 18 minutes (4,600 words)
“A mother’s fight to save a Black, mentally ill 11-year-old boy in a time of a pandemic and rising racial unrest.”
2. Arrested, Tortured, Imprisoned: The U.S. Contractors Abandoned in Kuwait
Doug Bock Clark | The New York Times Magazine | October 28, 2020 | 34 minutes (8,500 words)
“Dozens of military contractors, most of them Black, have been jailed in the emirate—some on trumped-up drug charges. Why has the American government failed to help them?”
3. Data Disappeared
Samanth Subramanian, Michael Hobbes, Jonathan Cohn, Kate Sheppard, Alex Kaufman, Delphine D’Amora, Chris D’Angelo, Emily Peck | HuffPost Highline | October 29, 2020 | 46 minutes (11,700 words)
Over nearly four years, the Trump administration has “defunded, buried, and constrained dozens of federal research and data collection projects across multiple agencies and spheres of policy: environment, agriculture, labor, health, immigration, energy, the census.” This is an accounting of the damage.
4. The Alhambra
Kris Willcox | Kenyon Review | October 28, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,639 words)
“A long time ago, I took a vacation because I thought I was irreparably broken, when, in fact, I was simply normal. Lonely, and waiting for the future. In other words, alive.”
5. AOC’s Next Four Years
Michelle Ruiz | Vanity Fair | October 28, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,611 words)
“The history-making congresswoman addresses her biggest critics, the challenges that loom no matter who wins, and what she’s taking on next.”
Day Care (and Its Discontents): A Reading List

Even the most self-congratulatory conversations about parenting young children are often tinged with an unmistakable air of guilt. Its source lies in a fundamental contradiction: We might be obsessed with our kids’ food, activities, and intellectual development, but in order to provide these things in the first place, many parents also need to outsource the feeding, playing, and teaching to people who are more or less strangers. We work; they go to day care.
Child care is a minefield of a topic, and navigating it inevitably detonates questions of class and gender, labor and social justice. It’s where politics and geography become not just personal, but also emotional (and, sometimes, heartbreaking). Here are eight stories about day care: a place working parents know all too well, but never quite well enough.
1. “The Hell of American Day Care.” (Jonathan Cohn, New Republic, April 14, 2013)
Cohn’s retelling of a fire at a Houston day care facility is harrowing; four children died because of the owner’s negligence. But his story goes beyond one specific incident, chronicling a long history of policy failure that keeps producing horrific tragedies. (As a companion piece, read Dylan Matthews’ interview with Cohn on his reporting.)
Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.
Happy holidays! Read more…
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But a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, have shown how adversity during this period affects the brain, down to the level of DNA—establishing for the first time a causal connection between trouble in very early childhood and later in life. And they have also shown a way to prevent some of these problems—if action is taken during those crucial first two years.
The first two years, however, happen to be the period of a child’s life in which we invest the least. According to research by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, children get about half as many taxpayer resources, per person, as do the elderly. And among children, the youngest get the least. The annual federal investment in elementary school kids approaches $11,000 per child. For infants and toddlers up to age two, it is just over $4,000. When it comes to early childhood, public policy is lagging far behind science—with disastrous consequences.
The Worst Case: How the Courts Might Decide On Health Care Reform
The Worst Case: How the Courts Might Decide On Health Care Reform
It revolves around a novel philosophical twist: a distinction between activity and inactivity that, repeal advocates say, makes the insurance requirement an illegitimate exercise of federal authority. It’s an arcane legal point, but, suddenly, a consequential one, and not just because of its relevance to health care. Some experts believe that a ruling striking down part of the Affordable Care Act could render vulnerable wide swaths of the regulatory state, breathing new life into a notion of limited government this country rejected a very long time ago.
It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)
Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.
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