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

—E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. Forster’s magnificent treatise on the novel was published in 1927 and is compiled from a series of lectures he gave at Cambridge University.

We are excited to share a reading (and watching!) list on science and failure from guest contributor Louise Lief. In 2014 Louise Lief began the Science and the Media project, an initiative that explores how science relates to our everyday lives. She is the former deputy director of the International Reporting Project. Read more…

David Carr, the acclaimed journalist, media columnist for The New York Times, and author of the bestselling Night of the Gun, died February 2015 in New York at the age of 58.
Here is a brief reading list of stories by and about Carr, his life and work. It doesn’t even begin to cover it. We will miss him. Read more…

-From an essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson in The New York Review of Books. In it, Robinson explores the unknowability of Poe and his work, and the difficulty in interpreting Poe’s unusual and only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which, among other things, is considered to be one of the inspirations for Moby Dick.

—Eve Fairbanks writing in the New Republic about Uruguay’s José Mujica. Mujica’s straightforward and humble “truth to power” approach has brought him worldwide acclaim, but many Uruguayan progressives are disappointed by what he has actually accomplished.

Lucy McKeon | Longreads | February 2015 | 18 minutes (4,489 words)
With over 100,000 Instagram followers, photographer Ruddy Roye came of age in Jamaica, and has lived in New York City since 2001. He has photographed dancehall musicians and fans, sapeurs of the Congo, the Caribbean Carnival J’ouvert, recent protests in Ferguson and in New York, and the faces of the many people he meets and observes every day. Roye is perhaps best known for his portraits taken around his neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn—pictures of the homeless, the disenfranchised, and those who Roye believes aren’t often fully seen.
In Roye’s Instagram profile, he describes himself as an “Instagram Humanist/Activist,” and when looking at his portraits, the phrase that comes to mind is “up close.” Roye is closer to his subjects—who he calls his “collaborators”—than is typical in street photography, in terms of actual proximity as well as identification. Each picture, he says, contains a piece of him. With this closeness, Roye creates images that can be harrowing, disturbing, joyful and striking. If they are sometimes difficult to look at, one has more trouble looking away. Read more…

What might a more-efficient trial system look like? One collaboration in Chicago offers a possible way forward.
Working together, several of the city’s academic medical centers have established a joint network for conducting clinical trials. Participating institutions now routinely interview all of their hospitalized patients, regardless of diagnosis, to keep detailed records on their health status. With permission, those records are made available to researchers.
Over 15 years, the process has enrolled 100,000 patients, many of whom are then recruited for clinical trials, said David O. Meltzer, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Much of the data is collected by undergraduates, and the team has grown large enough that newcomers can be trained without the need to constantly rebuild for each new trial, Dr. Meltzer said. “It’s wildly cost-effective,” he said, “and it’s incredibly good for the students.”
Even more savings could be realized by reconsidering when trial participants are even needed. A dozen years ago, Benjamin A. Olken, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wanted to study corruption in Indonesia, to learn which of two strategies—threatening audits of government officials or giving community members a more direct role in monitoring—would do a better job of keeping road builders from “cheating.”

In a recent essay for Adbusters, Douglas Haddow posited that algorithms are the new “invisible hand” guiding our capitalist system. But before Haddow got to that conclusion, he explored the original idea of the invisible hand, and the man behind the phrase:

Journalists write about things they don’t have prior knowledge of all the time, but that doesn’t make it any less challenging—especially when what you’re covering seems so odd and obsolete. But through reporting, research, and a lot of listening, Spencer Hall writes convincingly of the appeal of cassette tapes, a media format that predates even his parents’ dusty old CD collection. To write such a story takes not only journalism skills, but also a pure love of music and its various subcultures. Good journalists can write about anything, but great journalists usually love what they write about.
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