The Longreads Blog

‘I Knew They Loved Spending Time With Us…But I Also Knew We Were Good Cover.’

Bernardine Dohrn. Photo by Voyou Desoeuvre, Flickr

When Weathermen did get around to bombing things, the preparation and execution remained fraught with risk. Long-haired young people lingering outside courthouses and police stations late at night tended to draw attention in the early 1970s. It occurred to Dohrn, and to others in the leadership, that disguises alone wouldn’t ensure their safety. Thus the question arose: What could they take along to reliably deflect a policeman’s curiosity? One answer was children.

No beat cop, they reasoned, would suspect a family with kids out for an evening stroll. It was a brilliant idea; the only problem was, no one in Weather had children. A handful of supporters did, however, and this was how one of Dohrn’s friends, the Chicago attorney Dennis Cunningham, saw his family drawn into clandestineness…

***

“I went to L.A. a bunch of times,” Delia [Dennis Cunningham’s daughter] recalls. “I would play while they had meetings. There was a lot of time in cars. Bernardine and Billy always had cool cars, 50s cars. We would go to movies, old films, Chaplin films. Later I started going on trips, into the countryside, to other cities, trips on airplanes, on trains, cross-country, once or twice to upstate New York, where I think we stayed when Jeff Jones moved there. I knew they loved spending time with us, my siblings included, but I also knew we were good cover. The two things went together well. I know Mom was really into that, that we were helping. Did we scout out bombing targets? Yeah, I think so. I never actually saw anything explode, but it was always discussed. ‘We had a great action. We’re going to be discussing an action.’”

—Bryan Burrough writing in Vanity Fair about the Weather Underground, a radical leftwing organization known for detonating dozens of bombs across the country during the ’70s.

Read the story

‘America’s Best Investment Ever,’ According to ‘Bowling Alone’ Author Robert Putnam

 America’s best investment ever, in the whole history of our country, was to invest in the public high school and secondary school at the beginning of the 20th century. It dramatically raised the growth rate of America because it was a huge investment in human capital. The best economic analyses now say that investment in the public high schools in 1910 accounted for all of the growth of the American economy between then and about 1970. That huge investment paid off for everybody. Everybody in America had a higher income.

Now, some rich farmer could have said, “Well, why should I be paying for those other kids to go to high school? My kids are already off in Chicago and I don’t care about [other kids].” But most people in America didn’t. This was not something hatched in Washington – small town people got together and said, “Look, we ought to do this for our kids… We ought to have a high school so that every kid who grows up here — they’re all our kids — gets a good high school education.”

Robert Putnam, in conversation with PBS NewsHour‘s Paul Solman. Robert Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone and a Harvard professor; he appeared on NewHour’s Making Sen$e to discuss his new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

Football as a Barometer of Italian Society

“Football is a very simple barometer of a society,” says Paddy Agnew, an Irish Times correspondent and former RAI television commentator who has covered Italian soccer since the 1980s. “And if the red light is flashing in society, the red light is flashing in football. That’s what it is here, they’ve run out of petrol. This is a society — and it is not just football — that has stood still for 30 years.”

You can see many the troubles of Italian life through a lens of Italy’s favorite sport. A struggling economy exerts pressure on the country’s social fabric. High unemployment means plenty of young men living in their parents’ homes with little to do. To cope, many simply dive deeper into their calcio [Italian for football].

Peter Simek, writing in SB Nation about Italian football culture and the Rome-based football club A.S. Roma.

Read the story

Alan Abramowitz’s Model Has Correctly Predicted Every Presidential Election Outcome Since 1992

The election model that’s most in vogue — that scored the highest when applied to presidential elections since World War II, correctly predicting every outcome since 1992 — is one created by Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz called “Time for a Change.” Abramowitz argues that the fundamentals in a presidential election are bedevilingly simple: the incumbent president’s approval rating in late June or early July, the rate of real GDP growth in the second quarter, and how many terms the party has been in the White House.

In 2012, for instance, Obama’s relatively lopsided victory may have shocked Republicans on Election Night, but by Abramowitz’s reckoning it was practically preordained. Although second-quarter real GDP growth was a relatively unimpressive 1.5 percent and Obama’s approval rating was a good-but-not-great 46 percent that June, he was seeking reelection, and, according to Abramowitz, “first-term incumbents rarely lose.” In fact, he believes that being a first-term incumbent is worth 4 percentage points. There was nothing in the Abramowitz model that looked good for John McCain in 2008 (bad economy, bad approval ratings of a second-term president from McCain’s party). In 1988, by contrast, George H.W. Bush was also running to give his party a third term, but Q2 real GDP growth that year was a booming 5.24 percent and Ronald Reagan’s approval rating was above 50 percent.

Jason Zengerle writing for New York about how Hillary Clinton stacks up as a candidate, and whether or not being a “good candidate” actually means anything in terms of winning the presidency.

Read the story

Can Greek Life Be Diverse? Our College Pick

Northwestern University’s Greek-life population resembles what you see at most other private schools: white and well-off. So when a fraternity and a sorority planned a philanthropy event making light of imprisoned women last year, campus critics raged. Public apologies and calls to action followed, like it always does. In a wide-ranging story with several introspective interviews, reporter Katherine Mirani followed up to find out if a system based on private membership can ever really be inclusive.

Changing Composition

Katherine Mirani | North by Northwestern | March 9, 2015 | 3,800 words (15 minutes)

How San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium Helped Launch Led Zeppelin

Whether by accident or design, [the Fillmore Auditorium’s Bill Graham] has succeeded in launching most of the international pop groups whose claim to fame is musical rather than fashionable. Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Who all owe a great deal to his fanatical championship. And at the beginning of January, he promoted a new group called, rather enigmatically, Led Zeppelin. If their LP is anything to go by, he has discovered a worthy successor to the defunct Cream.

They’re all in their 20s and extravagantly hirsute in the current manner. They started as a group in November last year and the LP now released is the product of their first improvisations together. They rely on formalised beginnings and endings and leave the rest to the mood of the moment, and they are complete masters of their material. They bend and twist the simplest of lines into architectural caverns of sound, careful but throbbing with violence. Their music crouches like a giant panther and shudders like a mighty jet waiting to leap down the runway.

Tony Palmer writing about the role San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium played in promoting Led Zeppelin during the band’s early days. Palmer’s article was originally printed in The Guardian on March 9, 1969; an edited excerpt was reprinted on their site this year.

Read the story

The Fabulous (and Sometimes Dead-End) Opportunity of Being an Assistant

Photo by Peas

Nearly every exclusive field runs on assistants. The actor James Franco, like Buddha before him, had an assistant keep track of his meals and school assignments. The critic and writer Daphne Merkin has employed a steady stream of Ivy-educated elves. They’re tasked with everything from editing to returning dead houseplants. Bestselling novelist John Irving (The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany) has an assistant who types up his roughly twenty-five pages of handwritten manuscript a day. He recruits exclusively from liberal arts schools in cold climates like Middlebury and Vassar, to ensure his hires can survive the winter at his home in Dorset, Vermont. During the 2008 presidential season, recent Harvard grad Eric Lesser impressed senior advisor to the president, David Axelrod, with his color-coded system for tracking Obama’s campaign luggage. Lesser was taken on as Axelrod’s “special assistant,” assuming responsibility for everything from supervising his boss’s diet to organizing the first-ever presidential Seder.

—At Dissent, Francesca Mari examines the rise of the personal assistant. Creatives take assistant positions to network with professionals in their fields and to go behind-the-scenes in their craft. But it can’t last forever: Whereas internships might one day result in full-time employment, the role of the assistant stagnates in the end: “The worst thing to be called,” [Darren] Aronofsky’s assistant told me, long after he’d moved on, “is a really good assistant.”  (h/t Michelle Legro)

Read the story

The Murky Origins of Burma’s Capital City

The city’s origins are clouded in rumour and speculation. Some describe it as a vanity project of Than Shwe, the former military leader of the country. Many believe the “audacious” name given to the city might reflect “illusions of grandeur or … perhaps another sign of [Than Shwe’s] possible dementia”, according to one 2006 US government diplomatic cable, released in the trove of documents published by Wikileaks.

Other theories have pointed to an increasingly paranoid junta wanting to move the capital away from the sea, fearing an amphibious US invasion. Instead, the seat of military and political power now sits closer to the restive regions where separatist movements and ethnic groups are pushing for greater rights for bitterly oppressed minorities, including the Karen and Rohingya.

The regime, and Than Shwe, pitched the move to Naypyidaw as akin to building a new Canberra or Brasilia, an administrative capital away from the traffic jams and over-population of Rangoon. Not many believe this story. “By withdrawing from the major city, Rangoon, Than Shwe and the leadership … sheltered themselves from any popular uprising,” suggest activists Benedict Rogers and Jeremy Woodrum in their book Than Shwe: Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant.

Matt Kennard and Claire Provost writing for the Pulitzer Center about Naypyidaw, the eerie, master planned capital of Burma. Located in the middle of one of the world’s poorest countries, grandiose Naypyidaw was built on a massive scale and is seemingly devoid of people.

Read the story

The King’s Last Game

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Steven Church | Ultrasonic: Essays | 2014 | 15 minutes (3,655 words)

 

 

Imagine this: It’s early in the morning at the Graceland estate, well before dawn on August 16, 1977, just a few hours before the end, and the crickets and cicadas are thrumming in the Memphis heat. The sun is on the rise somewhere in the east, but the light hasn’t yet reached this place. In the distance a small dog barks sharp, rhythmically, and steady. A siren wails and fades. All else is quiet, all except for the strange noise emanating from an outbuilding behind the main house. It’s a cacophonous noise. Unexpected. So you creep up closer. Tiptoeing now like a trespasser, a voyeur into the past. You shouldn’t be here at all. Yet in this lucid dream you press your ear against the locked door and listen, straining to catch the strands of a voice. The voice. His voice. Perhaps you’re hoping that he might be playing a guitar, jamming with his band. But instead you hear unexpected but familiar noise. You hear the sound of a different kind of playing. It’s the squeaking of shoes on hardwood, the pop and twang of a blue rubber ball rocketing off simulated catgut, followed by the resonant crack of it against a wall; and a different sort of music, that telltale pop and pong ringing out as the ball smacks off the back glass. You linger a while, listening to the high-pitched slap of a well-hit shot, and a short volley of forehand smashes going off like firecrackers. Boom, boom, boom. And laughter. Lots of laughter. Because Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is playing racquetball. And the King loves racquetball. You know this game but not this side of Elvis, not this part of the story. This is your game, your father’s game, a game of noise and speed. And more than anything you wish you could push the door open on that night and join the play. Read more…