The Longreads Blog

Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate:

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a ‘carceral state,’ in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

“The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

See also: “A Boom Behind Bars: Private Jail Operators Profit from Illegal Immigrant Crackdown.” — Graeme Wood, Bloomber Businessweek, March 19, 2011

Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.

This week, Bruce Gillespie takes a look at Andrea Curtis’s “Small Mercies,” which was originally published in Toronto Life:

A compelling narrative and a richly detailed behind-the-scenes look at a NICU would, on its own, be enough to hook any reader. But Curtis doesn’t stop there. She ups the ante by introducing another element to the piece: the question of how much money and effort should be spent on high-risk preemies at a time when fertility treatments and other medical advances have made them increasingly common in North America.

“Why’s this so good?” No. 29: Andrea Curtis and the rhythm of mercy

Featured Longreader: Amy O’Leary, reporter for The New York Times. See her story picks from Feministe, National Affairs, ESPN, plus more on her #longreads page.

Self-driving car technology is advancing rapidly. But how comfortable can we get with the idea?

Beyond bureaucracy, there are deeper legal questions. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, which is studying the legal framework for quasi-autonomous vehicles, notes how active the liability landscape already is when it comes to cars’ safety features. ‘People sue over all kinds of stuff. People sue because some feature that was supposed to protect them didn’t. People sue because their car didn’t have a blind-spot warning when other cars at the same price point did.’ Imagine the complexity we’ll have when cars drive themselves. Who will be responsible for their operation—the car companies or the drivers? What happens, for example, when a highway patrol officer pulls over a self-driving car? Who gets the ticket?

“Let the Robot Drive.” — Tom Vanderbilt, Wired

See also: “Robots Say the Damnedest Things.” — Jon Ronson, GQ, March 8, 2011

[Not single-page] The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country: 

“A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ the man asked. ‘What are you doing to this country?’ The executive turned out to be an engineering consultant whom Ghonim pegged at around 50; he might have been Ghonim himself born twenty years earlier. Ghonim is both an interested listener and not great at getting out of conversations, and so he spent the flight absorbing his seatmate’s story: The older man had supported the protests at Tahrir Square and experienced ‘the epitome of happiness’ when Mubarak had been forced down on February 11. But as the revolution had barreled on, some of its demands seemingly extreme, and the country continued to falter, the consultant had come to resent all of it.

“The Lonely Battle of Wael Ghonim.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York magazine

See also: “On the Square: Were the Egyptian Protesters Right to Trust the Military?” — Wendell Steavenson, New Yorker, Feb. 21, 2011

Featured Publisher: History Today. See their stories about King John, the Treaty of Versailles, plus more on their longreads page.

The making of the album, on its 40th anniversary:

This is not a blues city. L.A. is about the concealment of appearance, but the blues is about its unraveling. The blues is the opposite of bullshit. And the psychic unrest of L.A. Woman is prominently placed on the album cover, which drops in April ‘71. Jim Morrison is shunted off to the side like a dwarf Russian woodcutter or an American werewolf about to ruin Paris. The border is blood red; the faces of the band, choleric yellow.

“Jim was seduced by the luxury and indulgences of fame,” Manzarek says now. Always bespoke and bespectacled, he has a voice as smooth as soy milk. In 1971, he splits time between a two-bedroom near the Whisky and a small penthouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “The more boorish the behavior, the more Morrison’s crew liked it. We confronted him, and he said he was trying to quit drinking. But he was a guy who would say, ‘I feel lousy. I need a drink.’ Conversely, ‘I feel great, I need a drink.’”

“L.A. Woman Was the Doors’ Bluesy Masterpiece, and Jim Morrison’s Kiss-Off to L.A.” — Jeff Weiss, LA Weekly

See also: “In Which There’s A Girl In New York City Who Calls Herself The Human Trampoline.” — Nell Boeschenstein, This Recording, April 8, 2011

A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process:

One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President a six-page letter detailing her complaints. Some in the White House saw the long letter as a weapon, something that could be leaked if Clinton didn’t get her way. ‘At the proposed funding levels,’ Clinton wrote, ‘we will not have the capacity to deliver either the full level of civilian staffing or the foreign assistance programs that underlie the civilian-military strategy you outlined for Afghanistan; nor the transition from U.S. Military to civilian programming in Iraq; nor the expanded assistance that is central to our Pakistan strategy.’

“The Obama Memos.” — Ryan Lizza, New Yorker

More Lizza: “Inside the Crisis.” New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009

U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them:

The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from the night of Pearl Harbor, when Eleanor Roosevelt told a radio audience, “I have a boy at sea on a destroyer, for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific.”

Instead, America now has its first generation of political and business leaders who have not served in the military, and it shows. With the Pentagon ordered to slash spending as part of wider government budget cutting, military benefits, such as pensions, and college education funding for veterans are on the chopping block.

“Veterans’ Struggle.” — Anna Fifield, Financial Times

See also: “The Last Two Veterans of WWI.” — Evan Fleischer, The Awl, May 3, 2011

[Fiction] A car stops at a light and never leaves: 

You saw him first. Of course you did. Back then, when you were six, you spent most of your time at the window looking down on the street. What else were you going to do when Mama fought with Johnny? The apartment was not that big. It still isn’t. But your room was yours.

They all stopped at the light. It was red, after all. It was always red, and it always had been, at least as long as you’d been alive. Mama told you once when you asked that there used to be a fire station next door and they could turn the light red and green whenever they wanted so they could get out and go fight the fires. That explained why there was a stoplight in the middle of the street even through there was no intersection. You liked that idea – being able to make the light go green or red at will.

“Red.” — Mike Landweber, Barrelhouse

See more #fiction #longreads

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