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The story of an immigrant student, Maria, and how one “failing” San Francisco high school is helping her get ahead: 

Maria’s middle-school experience all but ensured she’d join the 52 percent of foreign-born Latinos who drop out of high school. She graduated from eighth grade without learning to speak English. She had a hard time writing in Spanish and didn’t know how to multiply.

And then everything changed. At Mission High, the struggling school she’d chosen against the advice of her friends and relatives, Maria earned high grades in math and some days caught herself speaking English even with her Spanish-speaking teachers. By 11th grade, she wrote long papers on complex topics like desegregation and the war in Iraq. She became addicted to winning debates in class, despite her shyness and heavy accent. In her junior year, she became the go-to translator and advocate for her mother, her aunts, and for other Latino kids at school. In March, Maria and her teachers were celebrating acceptance letters to five colleges and two prestigious scholarships, including one from Dave Eggers’ writing center, 826 Valencia.

But on the big state tests—the days-long multiple-choice exams that students in California take once a year—Maria scored poorly. And these standardized tests, she understood, were how her school was graded. According to the scores, Mission High is among the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in the country, and it has consistently failed to meet the ever-rising benchmarks set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

“Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong.” — Kristina Rizga, Mother Jones

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[Fiction] A teacher ventures north for a new position:

On the bench outside the station, I sat and waited. The station had been open when the train arrived, but now it was locked. Another woman sat at the end of the bench, holding between her knees a string bag full of parcels wrapped in oiled paper. Meat—raw meat. I could smell it.

Across the tracks was the electric train, empty, waiting.

No other passengers showed up, and after a while the stationmaster stuck his head out the station window and called, ‘San.’ At first I thought he was calling a man’s name, Sam. And another man wearing some kind of official outfit did come around the end of the building. He crossed the tracks and boarded the electric car. The woman with the parcels stood up and followed him, so I did the same. There was a burst of shouting from across the street, and the doors of a dark-shingled flat-roofed building opened, letting loose several men, who were jamming caps on their heads and banging lunch buckets against their thighs. By the noise they were making, you’d have thought the car was going to run away from them at any minute. But when they settled on board nothing happened. The car sat while they counted one another and worked out who was missing and told the driver that he couldn’t go yet. Then somebody remembered that the missing man hadn’t been around all day. The car started, though I couldn’t tell if the driver had been listening to any of this, or cared.

“Amundsen.” — Alice Munro, New Yorker

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How timing and creativity can reignite interest in a toy:

Not long ago, three inventors—toiling at home, unaware of one another’s existence—set out to reimagine the pogo. What was so sacred about that ungainly steel coil? they wondered. Why couldn’t you make a pogo stick brawny enough for a 250-pound adult? And why not vault riders a few feet, instead of measly inches? If athletes were pulling ‘big air’ on skateboards, snowboards and BMX bikes, why couldn’t the pogo stick be just as, well, gnarly?

When I reached one of the inventors, Bruce Middleton—who studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and describes himself as an ‘outcast scientist’—he told me that the problem had been a ‘conceptual basin.’”

‘Normal people, someone tells them a pogo stick is a thing with steel springs, they go, “That’s right,”’ Middleton said. ‘If that’s your basin, you’ll never come up with a very good pogo. An inventor is someone who recognizes the existence of a conceptual basin and sees that there’s a world outside the basin.’

“How the Pogo Stick Leapt From Classic Toy to Extreme Sport.” — Ariel Sabar, Smithsonian

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A look at the power, money and politics behind building the Freedom Tower that has delayed its completion:

The PA is run by a board of twelve unpaid commissioners, six appointed by New York’s governor, six by New Jersey’s. Traditionally, the board chair is a New Jersey commissioner, and the executive director — effectively the Port’s CEO — is selected by the governor of New York. In theory, the idea — a product of the Progressive Era of American politics — was to create a quasi-governmental corporation, self-supporting, free of corruption, and insulated from partisanship.

In practice, the PA has yielded to the surrounding political culture. From 1942 until 1971, the PA’s executive director was Austin Tobin, the strongman who built the World Trade Center. More powerful than any elected official, Tobin used the PA’s power of eminent domain to seize those sixteen acres and erect the Twin Towers, the world’s two tallest buildings when they were completed in 1973, steamrolling the city’s private real estate developers, who found it unsporting that a regional transportation agency would flood New York with more than ten million square feet of office space for lease.

Austin Tobin answered only to himself, and his PA was a monolith, omnipotent, opaque. The opacity alone remains; the Port Authority these days is little more than a punching bag, patronage pit, and piggy bank for politicians and those who own or are owned by them. Its stewardship of Ground Zero — in substance and as symbol — has been a bumbling puppet show and an obscene gold rush.

“The Truth About the World Trade Center.” — Scott Raab, Esquire

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A son attempts to get an unpublished manuscript of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle for his dying mother, an avid science fiction and fantasy reader:

Mom is completely nonplussed. I am a little hurt, but then I realize I haven’t seen Mom once the past several weeks with her hands on a paperback or her Kindle.

I decide that if things come through with the Paolini book—and I spend a lot of time thinking about this, more time than I probably should, because it’s an easy and hopeful thing to think about—I will read it to her myself. Out loud, while she lies in bed too weak to hold the pages up in her hands. When my grandfather was dying of pancreatic cancer, my aunt rubbed lotion into the cracked skin on his feet. She guided a straw from a glass of ice water to his lips. I imagine my reading to Mom will be just like performing these tasks, only different.

“An Epilogue to the Unread.” — Chad Simpson, The Rumpus

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This fall, Mo Isom is trying out for LSU’s football team as a kicker, and would like to prove that her athletic ability outshines the fact that she is a woman. She has already proven to be resilient after overcoming personal struggles and experiencing tragedy:

In Isom’s family, her mom and her sister were ‘brains.’ She and her dad were ‘hearts.’ They were also giants (He was 6-foot-4, 300 pounds). Together, they worked with Special Olympians, tossed the football in the front yard, and whiled away Saturdays watching SEC football. They butted heads when she hit high school, and things got worse when Isom stopped eating. The more secrets she kept from her father, the less she could bear being around him. By college, however, she says she was back to being ‘the epitome of a daddy’s girl.’ But from a distance she couldn’t see how her absence had worn on him or how other, unspoken weights had left him lethargic and cold.

Spring passed. So did summer. Fall arrived, and with it, Isom’s freshman season. It took only two games before she showed up on ESPN.

Early in the second half of a home game against BYU, a foul was called just outside the goalkeeper’s box. Isom waved off her teammate so she could take the free kick. This was why she’d been recruited, after all. Not just for her defense in goal, but also for her leg.

She stepped back, struck the ball, and as she watched it, she thought, Whoa. It sailed over the awaiting players and landed just in front of the goalkeeper’s box. The opposing keeper rushed forward, but she misjudged the ball’s trajectory, then leapt as it bounced over her head.

“Let It Fly.” — Jordan Conn, Grantland

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A Longreads Member Exclusive: The Power of a Crisis

A Longreads Member Exclusive: The Power of a Crisis

President Obama is less skilled than Presidents Clinton and Bush when it comes to buttering up campaign donors. Is this a good thing?

As the Washington fund-raiser sees it, the White House social secretary must spend the first year of an Administration saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ Instead, the fund-raiser says, Obama’s first social secretary, Desirée Rogers—a stylish Harvard Business School graduate and a friend from Chicago—made some donors feel unwelcome. Anita McBride, the chief of staff to Laura Bush, says, ‘It’s always a very delicate balance at the White House. Do donors think they are buying favors or access? You have to be very conscious of how you use the trappings of the White House. But you can go too far in the other direction, too. Donors are called on to do a lot. It doesn’t take a lot to say thank you.’ One of the simplest ways, she notes, is to provide donors with ‘grip-and-grin’ photographs with the President. ‘It doesn’t require a lot of effort on anyone’s part, but there’s been a reluctance to do it’ in the Obama White House. ‘That can produce some hurt feelings.’

Big donors were particularly offended by Obama’s reluctance to pose with them for photographs at the first White House Christmas and Hanukkah parties. Obama agreed to pose with members of the White House press corps, but not with donors, because, a former adviser says, ‘he didn’t want to have to stand there for fourteen parties in a row.’ This decision continues to provoke disbelief from some Democratic fund-raisers. ‘It’s as easy as falling off a log!’ one says. ‘They just want a picture of themselves with the President that they can hang on the bathroom wall, so that their friends can see it when they take a piss.’ Another says, ‘Oh, my God—the pictures, the fucking pictures!’ (In 2010, the photograph policy was reversed; Rogers left the Administration that year.)

“Schmooze or Lose.” — Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

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John Fairchild turned his family’s dry fashion trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily into one of today’s most influential fashion publications. The 85-year-old looks back on his controversial career:

Unlike in Paris, where couture designers were revered, Seventh Avenue was then dominated by garmentos while the designers toiled in the back rooms as relative unknowns. Fairchild set out to change that dynamic. ‘John came back from Paris and went to the fashion houses here and said, “I don’t want to talk to the manufacturers—I want to talk to the person who makes the dresses,” ’ says de la Renta, who was working for Elizabeth Arden at the time. ‘For all of us, there’s a great debt to be paid to John Fairchild, because he’s the first one to put American designers on the map.’

WWD began publishing personality profiles of the designers, elevating them to celebrity status, writing about their travels, vacation homes, and, in titillating fashion, love lives. As one veteran WWD staffer puts it, ‘Mr. Fairchild always likes to know, “Who’s doing the boom-boom?” ’ The newspaper covered society in cheeky and irreverent fashion. Rummage through the archives of WWD and W at the company’s Third Avenue offices and, even a half-century later, the ‘Eye’ columns are deliciously entertaining, filled with gossip and photographs of ‘the ladies who lunch’ and ‘Jackie O’—phrases coined by Fairchild. He is widely credited with coming up with such catchy phrases as ‘hot pants,’ ‘walkers,’ the ‘social moth’ (for Jerry Zipkin), and ‘the Cat Pack,’ a takeoff on the Rat Pack. Fair­child and his writers went for the jugular, proclaiming that ‘Jackie O is now Tacky O,’ criticizing her taste in clothes and announcing that her jewelry had become vulgar. Fair­child launched the popular trend of running flattering and unflattering photos of socialites with suggestive captions such as: ‘It is hard to believe that the matronly frump in the white wool dress is the same tightly coiled Gloria Vanderbilt of today. Gloria swears that her metamorphosis has nothing to do with surgery but simply weight loss.’

“Fashion’s Most Angry Fella.” — Meryl Gordon, Vanity Fair

A high school basketball star’s career derailed by drugs and bad decisions. Jonathan Hargett also says he was offered $20,000 to attend West Virginia (a claim university officials deny):

Hargett wanted to go to Arizona. The Wildcats won the national title in 1997 and had recently had a string of star guards like Miles Simon, Mike Bibby and Jason Terry on their roster. Coach Lute Olson made two trips to watch Hargett in high school, but the Wildcats could not get Hargett to visit their campus. He said that Arizona refused to break N.C.A.A. rules and fly out his mother for a recruiting trip.

But West Virginia put together a more intriguing package for the Hargett family. Mike Hargett’s wife, Joy, said that West Virginia planned on hiring her husband for a low-level staff position, which was allowable under N.C.A.A. rules. Mike Hargett had worked for the West Virginia assistant Chris Cheeks at a Richmond high school years before. Jonathan Hargett did not want to go to West Virginia, but he said that he was offered $20,000 a year to go there and that he committed at Mike’s urging.

‘What Happened to Him?’ — Pete Thamel, New York Times

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