The Longreads Blog

The Moment Firestone Teamed Up with a Warlord

Below is an excerpt from ProPublica and Frontline’s investigation into how the U.S. tire and rubber company Firestone ended up partnering with warlord Charles Taylor, who was taking over Liberia during the civil war in the early 1990s. In 1992 the company agreed to pay taxes to Taylor’s rebel government, and “over the next year, the company doled out more than $2.3 million in cash, checks and food to Taylor”: Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Illustration by: John Ritter

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

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30,000 Words, 700 Jobs, One Year

A few months ago, a friend considering a freelance writing career asked me how much money I make as a writer. I wanted to say, “You mean, what’s the going rate for a human soul?” But I wasn’t close enough to this friend to be certain she’d realize I was mostly kidding. Instead I said, “This month, I made between $25 and $2,000 for individual stories that were about the same length,” to indicate how unpredictable rates are in an industry that is hemorrhaging money while flooded with qualified candidates.

I’ve produced more than 30,000 words of original and highly job-specific material without pay in an effort to prove myself a capable and good sport to the handful of companies that have reached back out to me from the black hole of resume inboxes to give me a chance.

– Prospective employers demand full-time freelancers to produce inordinate amounts of writing as part of their applications, in addition to the usual cover letter and resumé. From sample tweets to an entire magazine, Alana Massey experienced this firsthand. Read more about her experience and the ethics of freelancing at Pacific Standard. 

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Why One ‘Big Idea’ Won’t Save the World

In the late ’90s, an MIT economics professor named Michael Kremer wanted to find out if school kids in Kenya were better served by being given free textbooks or medicine that would eradicate stomach worms. Reports Michael Hobbes in The New Republic:

The deworming pills made the kids noticeably better off. Absence rates fell by 25 percent, the kids got taller, even their friends and families got healthier. By interrupting the chain of infection, the treatments had reduced worm infections in entire villages. Even more striking, when they tested the same kids nearly a decade later, they had more education and earned higher salaries. The female participants were less likely to be employed in domestic services.

And compared with Kremer’s first trial, deworming was a bargain. Textbooks cost $2 to $3 each. Deworming pills were as little as 49 cents. When Kremer calculated the kids’ bump in lifetime wages compared with the cost of treatment, it was a 60-to-1 ratio.

These findings led to the founding of an NGO called “Deworm the World” which went on to help 40 million children in 27 countries. But there has been little evidence that giving school children deworming pills in other countries have had similar effects. Hobbes writes:

In the 1980s and early ’90s, a series of meta-analyses found that textbooks were actually effective at improving school performance in places where the language issues weren’t as complex. In his own paper reporting the Kenya results, Kremer noted that, in Nicaragua and the Philippines, giving kids textbooks did improve their test scores.

But the point of all this is not to talk shit on Kremer—who has bettered the world more with his career than I ever have with mine—or to dismantle his deworming charity, or to advocate that we should all go back to giving out free textbooks. What I want to talk shit on is the paradigm of the Big Idea—that once we identify the correct one, we can simply unfurl it on the entire developing world like a picnic blanket.

There are villages where deworming will be the most meaningful education project possible. There are others where free textbooks will. In other places, it will be new school buildings, more teachers, lower fees, better transport, tutors, uniforms. There’s probably a village out there where a PlayPump would beat all these approaches combined. The point is, we don’t know what works, where, or why. The only way to find out is to test these models—not just before their initial success but afterward, and constantly.

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Related: Michael Hobbes talks about writing the story on his blog.

Photo: Susana Secretariat

‘The Most Difficult Essay I’ve Ever Written’: Meghan Daum on Her Mother

If you asked me what my central grievance with my mother was, I would tell you that I had a hard time not seeing her as a fraud. I would tell you that her transformation, at around the age of 45, from a slightly frumpy, slightly depressed, slightly angry but mostly unassuming wife, mother, and occasional private piano teacher into a flashy, imperious, hyperbolic theatre person had ignited in her a phoniness that I was allergic to on every level. I might try to explain how the theatre in question was the one at my very high school, a place she’d essentially followed me to from the day I matriculated and then proceeded to use as the training ground and later backdrop for her new self. I might throw in the fact that she was deeply concerned with what kind of person I was in high school because it would surely be a direct reflection of the kind of person she was […]

It was September. Autumn, New York’s most flattering season, was preparing to make its entrance. I had just got engaged to my longtime boyfriend, which had made my mother very happy.

“Our recommendation would be to transfer to another level of care,” the oncologist said.

Hearing this, I moved my chair closer and grabbed my mother’s hand under the blanket. I did this because I felt that if we were in a play this would surely be part of the stage directions. I was also afraid the doctor would judge me if I didn’t. If I just sat there with my arms crossed against my chest, as I was inclined to, the doctor would make a note in the file suggesting that I might not be capable of offering sufficient support to the patient.

I retrieved her hand from under the blanket and squeezed it in my own. She did not reciprocate. She didn’t pull away, but there was enough awkwardness and ambivalence coming from both sides that it was not unlike being on a date at the movies and trying to hold hands with someone who’d rather not. I think we were both relieved when I let go.

In the Guardian, Meghan Daum explores how to live and love in the wake of her mother’s dramatic, calculated persona and imminent death. “All About My Mother” is excerpted from Daum’s new essay collection, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, released November 18.

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Photo: Via Twitter

Profiling the Difficult Subject: Our College Pick

Journalists select profile subjects for any number of reasons. The person could be famous or newsworthy or simply serve as the face of a big, complex issue. Other times, they are just characters the community at large should know about. Those are the hardest ones to write because the writer has to hang the story on the individual instead of a news event or issue. And if the subject is not immediately likable, the writer has to work even harder to find the reader a way into the story. In his profile of a nontraditional student at George Mason University, writer Hau Chu does not try to make his subject, Ray Niederhausen, sound like anything other than he is: a 37-year-old undergraduate working to overcome a lifetime of addiction and bad choices.

A Second Chance at Life

Hau Chu | Fourth Estate | 13 minutes (3,184 words)

Mike Nichols: 1931-2014

Photo via Wikipedia

Mike Nichols, the beloved director of stage and screen—from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, to Barefoot in the Park and Working Girldied Nov. 19, 2014 at the age of 83. Here are four pieces on the life of the artist. Read more…

The Old Music Industry: ‘A System Specifically Engineered to Waste the Band’s Money’

Shellac, with Albini. Photo by goro_memo

During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out of the system and put it into things like houses and groceries and college educations. Or it could be paid to other operators within the industry, increasing the clout and prestige of the person doing the spending. It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands? It was a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band’s money.

Now bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and simpler. Promotion was usually down to flyers posted on poles, occasional mentions on college radio and fanzines. If you had booked a gig at a venue that didn’t advertise, then you faced a very real prospect of playing to an empty room. Local media didn’t take bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors.

International exposure was extraordinarily expensive. In order for your records to make it into overseas hands you had to convince a distributor to export them. And that was difficult with no means for anyone to hear the record and decide to buy it. So you ended up shipping promotional copies overseas at a terrific expense, never sure if they would be listened to or not.

Music producer and Shellac frontman Steve Albini’s reminder about what the “good old days” of the music industry were really like for artists.

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The Bureaucracy of Death: A Reading List

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Although more and more countries are abolishing capital punishment, over half the world’s population lives in four of the countries that continue to use it: India, Indonesia, China — and the United States. U.S. public opinion continues to move against the death penalty, but while some states have overturned capital punishment (or never had it), most still sentence people to die. These four pieces examine the range of flaws in a system whose irreversible outcome can ill afford them.

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When Dave Chappelle Met Rob Ford

I know this is the exact opposite of more privacy, but what would the world have to do for you to get active on Twitter or Instagram? Because that’d be hilarious.
I have a pretty dope selfie gallery.

Do you really?
Kanye, Kim, Jay and Beyoncé. Jessica Alba. There’s a great picture from Radio City of me, Chris Rock, and Aziz. Selfies are my shit. I love taking selfies…. Rob Ford.

Holy shit. Rob Ford?
Seriously, you can Google it. I was in Toronto for a few shows, and they told me I couldn’t smoke onstage. And I was like, “Well, can’t you just waive the rule tonight?” And they’re like, “It’s a citywide ordinance.” So I got up the next morning and went to the mayor’s office. This is before all that shit about him came out.

What happened? You actually met him?
I was like, “Is the mayor in? Could you tell him Dave Chappelle is here to see him?” He was in a meeting. I said, “I’ll wait for a few minutes.” So I just walked around his office. The walls were lined with all these disparaging political cartoons. And I asked somebody, “What is this?” They’re like, “He thinks that motivates him.” I thought that was an interesting character nuance. I had never seen him before, but he looked like Chris Farley in the pictures. He walked in and was like, “What can I do for you?” And I told him, “These ordinances exist in the United States, but they’re often waived in contexts of performance, because it’s an integral part of what I do.” He replied, “That’s it?” “That’s it,” I said. Then he told me, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. The laws of Toronto are the same for everybody. We appreciate you coming, we’re glad you’re here, but we can’t change the law because it disagrees with you.” He really gave me this whole speech. I should have said, “You didn’t let me finish: ‘smoke crack rocks onstage!’ ” Maybe a year after that was his first scandal.

— Dave Chappelle, in an interview with GQ Magazine, on the first time he met Rob Ford.

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Photos: Davej1006 and Shaun Merritt