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Officials at the Second Mile, the charity for at-risk children that Sandusky founded and that prosecutors say he used to target victims, reported that several years of the organization’s records were missing and had perhaps been stolen. The missing files, investigators worry, may limit their ability to determine if Sandusky used charity resources — expense accounts, travel, gifts — to recruit new victims, or even buy their silence, according to two people with knowledge of the case.

And in 2002, after McQueary had reported what he had seen to the university’s senior officials, those officials not only never told the police, but they also never even informed the university’s top lawyer. That lawyer, Wendell Courtney, said in an interview this week that he would have been duty bound to report to law enforcement officials any allegations of inappropriate conduct toward children by Sandusky.

Most disturbingly, investigators continued to identify possible victims — young men who had been boys when Sandusky befriended them through his foundation for troubled youngsters.

“Inquiry Grew Into Concerns of a Cover-Up.” — Jo Becker, The New York Times

See more #longreads about Penn State

[Fiction]

On Wednesday afternoon, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourthgrade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter — dazed and infrequent — sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see Mr. Hibler’s face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. I’l bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.” 

“Gryphon.” — Charles Baxter, American Story

See more #fiction #longreads

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Longreads Teams Up with Read It Later

Hi everybody. I wanted to share some quick personal news: In addition to my work on Longreads, I have joined Read It Later as an editorial advisor.

When I started Longreads two and a half years ago, one of the first people I met was a thoughtful, brilliant developer in San Francisco named Nate Weiner. He and I stayed in touch, and his app, Read It Later, in addition to being a beautiful complement to Longreads, has grown into a company that now helps nearly 4 million users save their favorite stories to “read later.” (You can get the free versions for iPhone/iPad and Android, or you can just sign up here.) He and I have always talked about ways we could do more together, and I’m thrilled to be representing from New York.

Of course, Longreads will continue as it always has, serving our growing community of readers, curators, authors and publishers, and continuing to improve our service. There’s obviously a lot that we’ll be able to build with the help of the Read It Later team, and their support means we can continue to grow. So that’s pretty exciting. 

(For anyone who’s curious: Ever since I created #Longreads in 2009, I’ve operated the service alongside other content strategy work. So, yes, I’ll still have plenty of time to read.)

There’s some amazing stuff in the works, and Nate, the team and I share a strong belief in the importance of developing new ways to support and encourage those who create the best content on the web. I’m thrilled to be a part of a team that’s dedicated to that mission.

Thanks again to the incredible #Longreads community for all of your support.

-Mark

Featured Longreader: Music blogger Damien Joyce. See his story picks from Bloomberg Businessweek, Nouriel Roubini, plus music stories on his #longreads page.

As Congress and the president have acknowledged, the way to meet the flood of new patients coming down the pike is to expand the nation’s existing network of community health centers— nonprofit clinics that offer primary care to the medically under-served, often in rural areas or inner cities. But to get this done, there’s no need to appropriate billions more in direct government spending. Rather, there is a way to lure skittish banks into lending private capital to finance a health center construction boom in all fifty states, simply by tweaking the language of an existing federal lending program. Doing so would save money in the long run by providing cost-effective primary care to those who desperately need it. And it would quickly create tens of thousands of jobs, many of them in the hard-hit construction sector. Moreover, unlike the roads, bridges, and other complex infrastructure projects the Obama administration wants to fund, few of which are shovel ready, health center projects could get the hammers swinging in months, not years.

“Shovel-Ready Clinics.” — Jeffrey Leonard, The Washington Monthly

See more #longreads from The Washington Monthly

In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a “force for good” — even for teenagers — this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States. “There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed,” said Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”

Across the country, the approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”

“Teaching Good Sex.” — Laurie Abraham, The New York Times Magazine

See also: “Exit Strategy.” The American Prospect. May 26, 2009

The following morning all four awake feeling not quite right. By lunchtime they are seriously ill. They consult a book in the kitchen – a guide to wild mushrooms – and leaf through until they find a photograph. Anxiously they scan the text, and see the chilling words: deadly poisonous.

The local GP is called urgently. The four are rushed into the local Highland hospital in Elgin. Ambulances race them down to the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. On the journey the man begins to convulse, his body shuddering and shaking uncontrollably. He fears he is about to die.

“Nicholas Evans: ‘Guilt is My Subject. I’ve Taken Research to an Extreme Degree’.” — Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian

See more #longreads from The Guardian

Featured Publisher: Atlanta Magazine: See their story picks, including an oral history of the movie “Deliverance,” on their #longreads page.

In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

“Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?” — Anthony Grafton, The New York Review of Books

See more #longreads from The New York Review of Books

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 Two Year Window.” — Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic

See more #longreads from The New Republic