Author Archives

Founder of Longreads.

The Pain of Rural Poverty: Our College Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Colleges share symbiotic relationships with their neighboring towns, and economic disparities tend to strain those relations. At Dartmouth, the school’s wealth and privilege overshadows the surrounding area’s rural poverty. In a detailed report by Charlie Rafkin the region’s economic data is paired with the voices of low-income families. Rafkin doesn’t just point out the disparity, but also asks experts why the urban poor get all the press. (“There is no equivalent of The Wire for rural poverty,” says one.) Rafkin spreads the blame, too. International issues appeal more to students looking to change the world. Outreach efforts by universities can conflict with the community’s own ideas for improvement. And when Rafkin’s story gets a little bogged down by statistics, you’ll stick with it for lines like this: “Destiny finished her opiate binge, left the bathroom and returned to her high school class.”

Upper Valley Families Confront Rural Poverty

Charlie Rafkin | The Dartmouth | November 15, 2013 | 14 minutes (3,448 words)

Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.


We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Truth About Aliens, According to Ronald Reagan

“It was in the White House screening room and Reagan got up to thank me for bringing the film to show the President, the First Lady and all of their guests, which included Sandra Day O’Connor in her first week of as a Justice of the Supreme Court, and it included some astronauts… I think Neil Armstrong was there, I’m not 100% certain, but it was an amazing, amazing evening.

“He just stood up and he looked around the room, almost like he was doing a headcount, and he said, ‘I wanted to thank you for bringing E.T. to the White House. We really enjoyed your movie,’ and then he looked around the room and said, ‘And there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true.’

“And he said it without smiling! But he said that and everybody laughed, by the way. The whole room laughed because he presented it like a joke, but he wasn’t smiling as he said it.”

Steven Spielberg on E.T., the former president and UFOs. Read more on NASA in the Longreads Archive.

***

Photo: 42742849@N00, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Most Difficult Age to Be When You Work in Hollywood

“The Writer’s Guild of America has a term for my situation: They call it ‘The Gap.’ It’s the time period between when your years as a working writer end and your retirement begins. I actually have an excellent pension for when I finally retire. The Guild is a strong union and it has negotiated an excellent pension plan for writers who have more than seven consecutive years of service. When I finally hit 65, my WGA pension combined with Social Security means I should have a comfortable retirement.

“I was 46 when I had my last writing job in television. That meant I faced a 19 year Gap. As with other writers facing The Gap, my resume was a problem. I worked as a publishing executive before becoming a writer. I had a nice, solid resume that showed constant forward progress in my publishing career from financial analyst to business manager to circulation director. Which is great… except that progress ended in 1991 and I was applying in 2004.

“I sent off resumes and scored occasional interviews. But the interviewers mainly wanted to hear Hollywood stories and then said, ‘Thanks we’ll be in touch.’ I don’t blame them. I’d hire the person currently working in the magazine business instead of the guy who had a lot of amusing stories about comedy writing but hadn’t worked in a publishing environment for more than a decade.”

David Raether, a former sitcom writer who went from a $300,000 income to being homeless in Los Angeles, in a Priceonomics excerpt from his new book. Read more on being homeless.

***

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Couple Who Started the Textbook Wars

“Mel and Norma Gabler founded Educational Research Analysts in 1961. Funded through donations, they hired serious-minded believers like Neal Frey, a professor at a small Christian liberal arts college in New York, to help them page through mountains of material. In a 12-by–15-foot bedroom next to the garage in the Gablers’ house, Frey and a colleague spent as much as two months sifting through each textbook, searching not just for purely factual errors, but keeping an eye out for what they deemed relativist erosions of traditional, Judeo-Christian morality, free-market principles, patriotism and abstinence-only sex education. They decried a history textbook that paired Martin Luther, the 16th century theologian who sparked the Reformation, with Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights icon. ‘Martin Luther was a religiously dedicated, nonviolent man,’ the Gablers complained in one objection.

“Adoption by the state board at the time was vital to the success of a textbook, and publishers were willing to make almost any changes to earn a spot on Texas’ restrictive list of five approved textbooks per subject. With Texas, publishers could recoup the cost of production in a single state. Everything else after that was profit. It also meant that the peccadilloes of special interests like Mel and Norma Gabler reverberated not just through the Lone Star State but through much of the country.”

Brantley Hargrove, in the Dallas Observer, on how Texas creationists once changed the textbook industry, and how they’ve since lost power.

Read the story

One Thing We'll Miss About Blockbuster

“The death of Blockbuster is the death of the employee favorite shelf. With Netflix and Hulu and Amazon having rightfully eclipsed video rental stores, the recommendation is now largely accomplished by algorithm. If you didn’t agree with my taste in movies, there was definitely another employee you would agree with. There was someone for every customer to talk about movies with working at every video store in the country. Now we have Neflix’s ‘Top Picks for Erik,’ nearly always insultingly off-base. There’s some human involvement behind the scenes for these streaming services—at Netflix, 40 freelancers tag metadata, making associations between movies and TV shows that no computer can yet make on its own—but that person is so buried behind the work of 800 engineers that he or she doesn’t exist for modern consumers in any meaningful sense.”

Erik Bryan, in the Awl, on his early years working for Blockbuster and the death of the video-store chain (via Maria Bustillos). Read more from The Awl.

***

Photo: dno1967b, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Early Technologies That Were Supposed to Disrupt Education

“The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in the 1920s led such institutions as New York University and Harvard to launch so-called Colleges of the Air, which, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, prompted a 1924 journalist to contemplate a world in which the new medium would be ‘the chief arm of education’ and suggest that ‘the child of the future [would be] stuffed with facts as he sits at home or even as he walks about the streets with his portable receiving-set in his pocket.’ Udacity wasn’t even the first attempt to deliver an elite education via the Internet: In 2001, MIT launched the OpenCourseWare project to digitize notes, homework assignments, and, in some cases, full video lectures for all of the university’s courses.”

Max Chafkin, in Fast Company, on the difficulties of online education and the struggles of Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun. Read more from Chafkin in the Longreads Archive.

***

Photo: 29908091@N00, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

How Far We're Going to Save Youth Football

“You’re talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what’s going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game in the country?”

A quote from journalist Stefan Fatsis, from Patrick Hruby’s latest Sports on Earth story about parents, youth football and an important decision. Read more on concussions.

***

Photo: t_fern, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Doris Lessing on What It Means to Be a Writer

“I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on.

“It’s just habits. When I was bringing up a child I taught myself to write in very short concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I’d do unbelievable amounts of work. Now those habits tend to be ingrained. In fact, I’d do much better if I could go more slowly. But it’s a habit. I’ve noticed that most women write like that, whereas Graham Greene, I understand, writes two hundred perfect words every day! So I’m told! Actually, I think I write much better if I’m flowing. You start something off, and at first it’s a bit jagged, awkward, but then there’s a point where there’s a click and you suddenly become quite fluent. That’s when I think I’m writing well. I don’t write well when I’m sitting there sweating about every single phrase.”

Doris Lessing (1919-2013), in the Paris Review. Read more on Lessing from Hilary Mantel in the London Review of Books.

Read the interview
***

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Growth of Financial Services in the U.S.

“The financial services sector as a whole accounts for more than 20 percent of US GDP, and this share has grown by around 10 percentage points since the 1970s. Additional expansion has taken place in the business services sector, encompassing law and accounting firms and other outgrowths of a financialized economy. Overall, it seems reasonable to conclude that Wall Street in its various forms accounts for around 20 percent of total US income, a share comparable to that of the US government.”

John Quiggin, in Jacobin, on whether the growth of the financial sector has paid off for America. Read more on banking.

***

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Secret to a Successful Career, According to Cyndi Lauper's Makeup Artist

“It was for a new singer and it was for an Italian TV show called Popcorn, which was a music show. So they rented a flat and I walk in the next morning, and there’s this huge king-sized bed. And there’s Lou Albano and these other wrestlers and Cyndi and her mom. And I’m like, ‘Ugh, Jesus, what am I doing here? Who are these people?’ And then they start playing the song, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,’ and I’m like, ‘Ohhh, that’s… it.’ I just knew it was gonna be a hit. So I made myself indispensable. I mean, doting, putting her shoes on, everything. I really laid it on thick because I really wanted it. Two months before that, while I was still in school, I was watching MTV one night — which was just a few years old — and I thought that’s what I really want to do. I was telling people — trying to get the word out, put out some feelers — and they were like ‘That’s impossible, it takes years.’ And I wouldn’t hear it. People that I knew knew other artists who were just getting labels or trying to get labels, so I just thought I’d start there. But then I got the call from Cyndi.”

Patrick Lucas, on recognizing an opportunity and hanging onto it, in a conversation with Jane Marie in The Hairpin. Read more on music from the Longreads Archive.

***

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.