The Longreads Blog

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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First Chapter: Dave Eggers’ Novel, ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?’

Dave Eggers | Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? | June 2014 | 23 minutes (5,800 words)

 

BUILDING 52

—I did it. You’re really here. An astronaut. Jesus.
—Who’s that?
—You probably have a headache. From the chloroform.
—What? Where am I? Where is this place? Who the fuck are you?
—You don’t recognize me?
—What? No. What is this? Read more…

The True Story of the G.I. Bill

Three months later, on October 27, 1943, Roosevelt turned his idea into a concrete proposal, formally asking Congress to enact legislation that would finance one year of educational or vocational training for all who served in World War II. Those deemed to have academic potential would be eligible for support for four years. “For many, what they desire most in the way of employment will require special training and further education,” wrote Roosevelt. “As a part of a general program for the benefit of the members of our armed services, I believe that the Nation is morally obligated to provide this training and education and the necessary financial assistance by which they can be secured.”

Roosevelt envisioned long-term benefits for the country. “The money invested in this training and schooling program will reap rich dividends in higher productivity, more intelligent leadership, and greater human happiness. We must replenish our supply of persons qualified to discharge the heavy responsibilities of the postwar world. We have taught our youth how to wage war; we must also teach them how to live useful and happy lives in freedom, justice, and decency.”

Meredith Hindley, in Humanities, on how the G.I. Bill was born, and how it initially faced opposition from some veterans groups.

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Photo: FDR Library

The Pros and Cons of Praising Children

At Aeon, Carlin Flora looks at the pros and cons of praising children and what psychologists say to avoid:

Over-praising children (You’re amazing!) can make them feel your standards are very high, causing the fear that they won’t be able to keep living up to them, say the psychologists Jennifer Henderlong Corpus of Reed College and Mark Lepper of Stanford. Praising them for easy tasks can make children suspect that you are dumb (don’t you know how easy this is?) or that you think they are dumb. Here’s an especially tricky finding: praising them for things they naturally enjoy can backfire if you do it too much, sapping motivation instead of urging the child on.

Doing it all wrong, I was a worthy recipient of this self-professed rant by the University of San Francisco psychologist Jim Taylor: ‘Good job? Well, it’s lazy praise, it’s worthless praise, it’s harmful praise… If you’re going to be lazy with your praise, at least say Good effort! because it focuses them on what they did to do a good job… The reality is that children don’t need to be told Good job! when they have done something well; it’s self-evident… Particularly with young children, you don’t need to praise them at all.’

But the discussion about overpraising our children is drawing away from the real problem, says a child psychologist from Cornell, which is the way we criticize them:

‘I have met many discouraged, angry, and unhappy children. I have met demoralised kids who were unable to sustain effort when they encountered even mild frustration or disappointment, and others who had developed attitudes of entitlement. And the culprit is not praise, but criticism. Most of these children were over-criticised; very few were overpraised.’

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Photo: U.S. Army

Anxiety, Depression and OCD: Inside America's Zoos

Zoos contact Virga when animals develop difficulties that vets and keepers cannot address, and he is expected to produce tangible, observable results. Often, the animals suffer from afflictions that haven’t been documented in the wild and appear uncomfortably close to our own: He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobic zebras. “Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states,” Virga told me. “But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.” …

Virga believed that BaHee, an 11-year-old gibbon, was clinically depressed. The cause was grief, which is the reason Virga didn’t pursue an aggressive course of treatment for the gibbon’s symptoms, instead prescribing “concern, patience and understanding” and advising BaHee’s keepers to not overreact. The worst of the depression lasted three or four months, a span similar to the acute phase of human grief after the sudden death of a family member. By the summer of the next year, BaHee’s symptoms had mostly disappeared. When I asked Kim Warren, another of his keepers, about the episode, she said: “BaHee was grieving. You could see it on his face.” Then she reconsidered. “I shouldn’t say that,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “because that’s anthropomorphism. I should say instead that BaHee was displaying withdrawal behaviors.”

-Alex Halberstadt, in the New York Times Magazine, on the work of Dr. Vint Virga.

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More animals in the Longreads Archive

Photo: jameslaing, Flickr

State of the #Longreads, 2014

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

Trust Us: The Ethics of Our Automated Future

"You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but to someone who is not from this landmass we call Silicon Valley or part of the tech-set, that comment is about the futility of their future.

Automation of our society is going to cause displacement, no different than mechanization of our society in the past. There were no protections then, but hopefully a century later we should be smarter about dealing with pending change. People look at Uber and the issues around it as specific to a single company. It is not true — drones, driverless cars, dynamic pricing of vital services, privatization of vital civic services are all part of the change driven by automation, and computer driven efficiencies. Just as computers made corporations efficient — euphemism for employed fewer people and made more money — our society is getting more “efficient,” thanks to the machines.

-Om Malik, on the conversations we are still not having about personal data collection and our automated future.

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More tech in the Longreads Archive

Photo: sylvain_latouche, Flickr

Does Writer's Block Exist?

At Pacific Standard, Ted Scheinman talks to his favorite writers about how they deal with writer’s block. Some step away from their work and return to it later, while others look to their favorite writers for inspiration. One of the most interesting responses came from The Awl’s Choire Sicha, who says he hasn’t had to deal with writer’s block:

A minority of respondents, comprising one man named Choire Sicha, does not believe in writer’s block. Effacing himself and everyone else (such is his way), Sicha writes: “I, like … don’t ever have writer’s block? I SHOULDN’T JINX MYSELF. HEH. Generally I just figure when people have ‘writer’s block’ they should either go to therapy or get sober or break up with their boyfriend or just figure out they’re not cut out for being a writer and should go get a job folding scarves.” In this respect, Sicha resembles a certain J. Alastair Frisby, who once told P.G. Wodehouse the humorist would “never [finish] a book” and suggested Wodehouse “get a job selling jellied eels.” Scarves at least represent a less slimy option.

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Photo: Drew Coffman

On the Mistakes We Make as New Writers

In the upcoming Sunday Book Review, Anna Holmes discusses some of the rookie mistakes she made as a new writer:

I regret many things, including, but not limited to:

Inserting myself into reported narratives where I didn’t belong.

Crafting long, complex sentences that I thought made me sound intelligent and sophisticated.

Assuming that aggressive, masculine-sounding prose was the ideal style of writing because it was so frequently rewarded in my literature and composition classes.

Taking too long to get to the point.

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The Pre-Internet Small Town

Mary Karr
Mary Karr. Photo: AP Images

Mother—crazy as she was—had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.

-Mary Karr, in The Paris Review (2009), on growing up in Southeast Texas.

Read the full interview