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Learning to Live with a Panther in Your Backyard

Photo by monica_r

“The core message is: In the long run, the best thing for people and the best thing for wildlife will be the same,” he added. “We’re called to love our fellow man, and we’re called to be good stewards. So find a way to work together—either legislatively, through compensation, through whatever kind of programs—so that you want to have panthers on your property.”

In Florida for Orion magazine, Dean Kuipers examines efforts to manage the coexistence between homeowners and endangered panthers, without killing them.

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How Family Tragedy Shaped Steve Kerr’s Worldview

Steve Kerr

Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr — along with other NBA players and coaches — hasn’t shied away from speaking freely about President Trump’s rhetoric, including, this week, cracks about the “alternative facts” espoused by press secretary Sean Spicer.

As John Branch reported for the New York  Times Magazine in December, Kerr’s personal experience is unique: His family spent time in Beirut and his father, Malcolm Kerr, was assassinated while serving as the president of American University of Beirut in 1984:

Kerr also knows that sports are an active ingredient of American culture. He knows, as well as anyone, that players are complicated, molded by background, race, religion and circumstance.

And Kerr is, too: a man whose grandparents left the United States to work in the Middle East, whose father was raised there, whose mother adopted it, whose family has a different and broader perspective than most. The Kerrs are a family touched by terrorism in the most personal way. Malcolm Kerr was not a random victim. He was a target.

That gives Steve Kerr a voice. His job gives him a platform. You will excuse him if he has a few things to say.

“It’s really simple to demonize Muslims because of our anger over 9/11, but it’s obviously so much more complex than that,” he said. “The vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people, just like the vast majority of Christians and Buddhists and Jews and any other religion. People are people.”

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Seattle Met Magazine Releases Its ‘Sanctuary City’ Cover on the Same Day as Trump’s Executive Order

Just as President Donald Trump was signing an executive order threatening to halt funding for America’s sanctuary cities, Seattle Met magazine released its own statement — a cover celebrating its status as a place that welcomes all. I asked editor in chief James Ross Gardner how it came together so quickly:

The staff and I arrived at the office on the morning of November 9, the day after the election, knowing we needed to respond—we were wrapping up the January issue at the time and heading into the February production cycle. With the support and encouragement of our cofounder and CEO, Nicole Vogel, we dropped a feature (to be printed later) and set to work: Over the next three weeks we reported on how our city and our region was responding to the election of Donald Trump—and on how our readers could help make a positive difference. The result: “Hope and Resistance in Seattle,” addresses everything from Seattle’s involvement in Japanese internment during WWII to our more recent designation as a sanctuary city. The cover, we knew, had to rise to the occasion. We wanted language that stated our stance definitively and an image that reclaimed our shared American values. That Trump signed the executive order regarding sanctuary cities on the exact same same day our February issue dropped was a coincidence. But I’m glad our seemingly prescient cover, designed by art director Jane Sherman, is out there right now in response.

‘Thurgood’s Coming.’

Thurgood Marshall

Alice Stovall, Thurgood Marshall’s secretary at the NAACP, recalled the effect Marshall had on blacks when he showed up at courthouses in small Southern towns. “They came in their jalopy cars and their overalls,” she recounted. “All they wanted to do— if they could— was just touch him, just touch him, Lawyer Marshall, as if he were a god. These poor people who had come miles to be there.”

Southern juries might be stacked against blacks, and the judges might be biased, but Thurgood Marshall was demonstrating in case after case that their word was not the last, that in the U.S. Supreme Court the injustice in their decisions and verdicts could be reversed. He was “a lawyer that a white man would listen to” and a black man could trust. No wonder that across the South, in their darkest, most demoralizing hours, when falsely accused men sat in jails, when women and children stood before the ashy ruins of mob-torched homes, the spirits of black citizens would be lifted with two words whispered in defiance and hope:

“Thurgood’s coming.”

-From Gilbert King’s outstanding Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Devil in the Grove, about Thurgood Marshall’s civil rights work for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, and a case of gross injustice against falsely accused black men in the South.

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What Happens When a Tribe Cuts Ties with 306 of Its Own Members

Photo by rick_leche

In more than 30 years of membership, Annie’s descendants became interwoven in the life of the tribe. They married other Nooksacks and had kids; those kids had kids. But once the disenrollment process began, people chose sides. “It was just like a light switch,” Elizabeth Oshiro, one of the 306, told me. People she knew for years “all of a sudden had a different heart.” …

On the reservation, Michelle Roberts found that people who babysat for her as a child or attended her wedding would no longer make eye contact with her. “The most important thing isn’t friendship,” says Diane Brewer, who no longer speaks to her former best friend, one of the 306. “The most important thing is the tribe.”

In the New York Times Magazine, Brooke Jarvis chronicles the legal battle over the “Nooksack 306,” members of the tribe who were disenrolled over questions about their identity.

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‘Continue Panicking’: Samantha Bee’s Interview with Journalist Masha Gessen

“Really it’s the nuclear holocaust I’m worried about.”

One of my essay selections for Longreads Best of 2016 was by Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist and author of 2016’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, whose “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” in the New York Review of Books revealed in stark terms what happens when an autocrat takes power.

Gessen’s back in a new interview with Samantha Bee that is both funny and terrifying, as she predicts what happens next — and what she fears in terms of worst-case scenarios.

What Happened When You Invited Steve Jobs to Your Product Demo

Steve Jobs
Photo by dotmotion

“I think it’s coming along,” said Tim, “though we expect—” “I think it sucks!” said Jobs.

His vehemence made Tim pause. “Why?” he asked, a bit stiffly.

“It just does.”

“In what sense?” said Tim, getting his feet back under him. “Give me a clue.”

“Its shape is not innovative, it’s not elegant, it doesn’t feel anthropomorphic,” said Jobs, ticking off three of his design mantras.

You have this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional.” The last word delivered like a stab. Doug Field and Scott Waters would have felt the wound; they admired Apple’s design sense. Dean’s intuition not to bring Doug had been right. “There are design firms out there that could come up with things we’ve never thought of,” Jobs continued, “things that would make you shit in your pants.”

An excerpt from the 2003 book Code Name Ginger, the story behind Dean Kamen’s Segway scooter. Steve Kemper recounts the time Kamen introduced his invention (code-named Ginger) to Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. They immediately foresaw problems with the product. (via The Browser.)

 
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Longreads Is Teaming Up with The Stranger to Cover the Inauguration and Protests

Photo by Nate Gowdy

As we head into 2017, Longreads is more committed than ever to funding reporting with your financial support — and this week we’re excited to be teaming up with The Stranger to cover the presidential inauguration and protests in Washington, D.C.

Reporters Sydney Brownstone and Heidi Groover, along with photographer Nate Gowdy, will be on the ground, and we’ll be collaborating with The Stranger on stories (both #shortreads and #longreads, at both of our sites) coming from the nation’s capital.  Read more…

‘For Eight Years Barack Obama Walked on Ice and Never Fell’

Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama—a black man with deep roots in the white world—was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable.

-From Ta-Nehisi Coates’s history of the Obama presidency, in The Atlantic.

‘No Woman’s Career Is Straight’

Hillary Clinton

In conversations, though, with many of them over the past couple weeks, they all agreed: This, in the end, is probably how it had to be. A woman who operated purely as a feminist would have condemned herself to fighting a permanently outside fight. And a woman who never tested the limits of the role she agreed to play—tested it over and over—wouldn’t have built the thick skin and the savvy needed to keep going.

“Those experiences and changes she made to forge a path are so reflective of women of her generation,” said Sally McMillen, a 1966 Wellesley grad who recently retired as a professor of history, and women’s history, at Davidson College in North Carolina. “I have always maintained that our generation was the transition generation for women, pulled by traditions but grabbing for new opportunities as we could—constant compromises and even reinventing ourselves as needed.”

-At Politico Magazine, Michael Kruse has an outstanding history of Hillary Clinton’s career — and the compromises and concessions she had to make along the way.

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