The Longreads Blog

How a Chris Rock Joke Led Melvin White To His Life's Work

“Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence,” says comedian Chris Rock in his live 1996 HBO special Bring the Pain. “Now what’s Martin Luther King? A street. And I don’t give a fuck where you are in America, if you on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there’s some violence going down.”

Later, Rock gives advice to anyone who finds themselves lost on an MLK-named street: “Run! Run! Run!”

Search any sizable town and there’s a good chance there’s a street named after King. Not all are awful, of course, but Rock’s generalization struck a national chord and made the street an emblem of everything gone wrong in America since the aspirational heights of the civil-rights era.

“The reality is that the street runs through some very damaged neighborhoods,” says Michael Allen, director of the St. Louis Preservation Research Office.

Danny Wicentowski, in the Riverfront Times. Wicentowski profiled Melvin White, whose St. Louis-based nonprofit “Beloved Streets of America” aims to improve not just the Martin Luther King Drive of his native St. Louis, but also ailing Martin Luther King streets across America.

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More stories from The Riverfront Times

Photo of St. Louis’ Martin Luther King Drive via Flickr; Marjie

What the Tech Industry Can Teach Agriculture

Myers contends that, when applied to plants, patents are stifling. They discourage sharing, and sharing is the foundation of successful breeding. That’s because his work is essentially just assisting natural evolution: He mates one plant with another, which in turn makes new combinations of genes from which better plants are selected. The more plants there are to mix, the more combinations are made, and the more opportunities there are to create better plants. Even some breeders who work for the companies that are doing the patenting still believe in—indeed, long for—the ability to exchange seed.

“It’s this collective sharing of material that improves the whole crop over time,” Myers told me. “If you’re not exchanging germplasm, you’re cutting your own throat.”

If all of this seems like the concern of a specialized few, consider that plant breeders shape nearly every food we eat, whether a tomato from the backyard or the corn in the syrup in a Coke. Because of intellectual-property restrictions, their work increasingly takes place in genetic isolation and is less dynamic as a result. In the short term, that can mean fewer types of tomatoes to plant in the garden, or fewer choices for farmers and, by extension, consumers. In the long term, it could hinder the very resilience of agriculture itself.

Lisa Hamilton, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, on how plant breeders are adapting open source principles from the tech industry to guarantee the sustainability of our food systems.

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VQR in the Longreads Archive

Photo: Agriculture in Israel, Wikimedia Commons.

How ‘Shawshank Redemption’ Keeps Paying, 20 Years Later

“Shawshank” only began to get moviegoers’ attention after the Oscars, where it received seven nominations (but won no awards) and promptly was rereleased in theaters. The second run grossed an additional $10 million and primed it for its debut on home video, which at the time was still a robust revenue source.

If Andy Dufresne was the movie’s on-screen hero, off screen it was Ted Turner, whose Turner Broadcasting System had acquired Castle Rock in 1993. His TNT channel took the cable-broadcast rights to the film in 1997 and made “Shawshank” an anchor of its “New Classics” campaign.

Over the next few years, TNT and other Turner channels ensured that “Shawshank” never again would suffer from a lack of exposure. “Mr. Turner, bless his heart, chose to show the movie every five minutes,” Mr. Darabont said.

Russell Adams, in the Wall Street Journal, on how a movie that failed to perform at the box office became a huge money maker anyway.

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More on Hollywood in the Longreads Archive

Ta-Nehisi Coates Calls for Reparations, and a 'Spiritual Renewal' for America

We must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic, on the history of slavery in America—in all its forms—and why reparations are necessary to make the country whole.

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The Atlantic in the Longreads Archive

Photo: Children of a sharecropper, 1935, Wikimedia Commons

From Boston To Outer Space: Our College Pick

Good journalism explains complicated subjects in ways that the audience can understand. Great journalism makes those subjects exciting. In his story about an organization at Boston University that’s trying to build a rocket, Jake Lucas conveys both why the students love what they do and what exactly is so difficult about it. When Lucas writes about the final test of the Mk IV Quasar, the audience shares a victory with the exceptional students who built it.

The Road to Space

Jake Lucas | The Quad | May 9, 2014 |10 minutes (2,488 words)

Heirs, Heiresses and Inheriting a Company

America is not kind to the heir. He is a stereotypical figure in our literature, and not an appealing one at that. He tends to be depicted as weak, pampered, flawed, a diluted strain of the hardy founding stock. America celebrates the self-made. Unless an heir veers sharply from his father’s path, he is not taken seriously. Even in middle age he seems costumed, a pretender draped in oversize clothes, a boy who has raided his father’s closet. The depiction may be unfair, but it is what it is.

But Arthur wasn’t just born to his position—the story is more complicated. He may have been the firstborn son in the line of succession, but he also staked his claim to the crown deliberately and dramatically, when he was only 14 years old. His mother, Barbara Grant, and Punch Sulzberger divorced when Arthur was just five. He lived throughout his early childhood on the Upper East Side with his mother and her new husband, David Christy, a warm and supportive stepfather. Punch is nominally Jewish, although not at all religious, while his son was raised Episcopalian. Arthur senior and Arthur junior were not close: Punch was generally aloof, even when Arthur was around. Yet, understanding what his famous name meant, and who his distant father actually was in the world, he packed up his things and moved himself the half-mile to his father’s home on Fifth Avenue, to live with Punch and his stepmother and their daughters. He was not pulled by any strong emotional connection. It seemed more like a career move. His biological father and his stepmother were wealthy, socially connected, and powerful; his biological mother and his stepfather were not. Arthur opted for privilege and opportunity. That his stepmother, Carol Sulzberger, despised Arthur—she would stick out her tongue at pictures of him—did not seem to matter. He was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and showing up on his father’s doorstep was a way of asserting, consciously or not, that when Punch changed wives he had not washed his hands of an obligation to his son. While the inheritance was his by birth, it was also very much Arthur’s choice.

From Mark Bowden’s 2009 Vanity Fair profile of fourth-generation New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.

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NYT in the Longreads Archive

Photo: jamescridland

Jesus Land

Julia Scheeres | Jesus Land | 2012 | 21 minutes (5,152 words)

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For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share the opening chapter of Jesus Land, the bestselling 2012 memoir by Julia Scheeres about her strict Christian upbringing in Indiana, her relationship with her adopted brother David, and the stint they did in a Christian reform school together in the Dominican Republic. Our thanks to Scheeres and Counterpoint Press for sharing this story with the Longreads community.  Read more…

The Gentrification of San Francisco, Circa 1985

Stories about San Francisco’s latest wave of gentrification—perhaps exemplified by the tech bus battles—have been everywhere as of late. But this isn’t the first time critics have mourned the end of San Francisco-as-bohemian-enclave. From “Gentrification’s Price: Yuppies In, the Poor Out” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1985:

In short, San Francisco has become perhaps the most gentrified large city in the nation. Districts that a decade ago were blue collar are now ghettos for young urban professionals, who have spawned a consumptive economy in which one highly successful new chain mass markets croissants, sort of a Yuppie version of Winchell’s doughnut shops.

The change has created a new vocabulary:  Yuppification, croissantification, Manhattanization. City Planning Director Dean Macris calls it the “boutiquing of San Francisco.”

Whatever its name, its result is spiraling housing costs, clogged traffic, an exodus of middle-class and poor families and declining black and Latino populations. And the trend seems certain to continue despite a new effort by the city to limit growth, restrain housing costs and preserve neighborhoods.

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More stories about gentrification

Photo: Wikimedia Commons 

Grief, Loss and the 9/11 Museum

The fact that everyone else here has VIP status grimly similar to mine is the lone saving grace; the prospect of experiencing this stroll down waking nightmare lane with tuned-out schoolkids or spectacle-seekers would be too much. There are FDNY T-shirts and search-and-rescue sweatshirts and no one quite makes eye contact with anyone else, and that’s just fine. I think now of every war memorial I ever yawned through on a class trip, how someone else’s past horror was my vacant diversion and maybe I learned something but I didn’t feel anything. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark. Annotated divorce papers blown up and mounted, interactive exhibits detailing how your mom’s last round of chemo didn’t take, souvenir T-shirts emblazoned with your best friend’s last words before the car crash. And you should have to see for yourself how little your pain matters to a family of five who need to get some food before the kids melt down. Or maybe worse, watch it be co-opted by people who want, for whatever reason, to feel that connection so acutely.

A heartbreaking reflection by Steve Kandell, in BuzzFeed, on the loss of his sister nearly 13 years ago, and his thoughts after visiting the new 9/11 Museum.

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Photo: tanenhaus

Author John Green on the Problem With 'Twilight'

John Green is the author of the wildly popular young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, which remained No. 1 on Amazon in the U.S. and Britain two years after its release. Guardian writer Emma Brockes profiled Green for Intelligent Life this month, and here Green discusses what is problematic about another wildly popular series: Twilight.

Green has firm moral views about the influence of teen fiction and the responsibilities that rest on its authors, particularly around the subject of sexual politics. “Twilight” bothers him a lot. Although impressed by the “world-building” in the story, he is “troubled by some of the relationships, and certainly troubled by the gender politics of that novel.”

In what way?

“I wanted a stronger, more defined Bella and I wanted an Edward who hadn’t been around for a century. I find it very problematic that you have a century to accrue experience of life and then you seduce a teenager.”

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See also: Emily’s reading list, “The Fault in Our Canon”

Photo: Genevieve