Search Results for: Outside

A Universe of Failed Unions, Dreams and Abandoned Hopes

The young men frequented the kothas to learn the bearings of polite society, the older men to socialize, or rekindle the memories of their lost youth. Whenever one of them fell in love with a tawaif or a nayika, his affairs provided a spectacle and entertainment to the rest of them, until he was cured of his passion. Those who could not survive it did not return. A tawaif who fell in love had only two choices: she could either put an end to the association, or leave the kotha to pursue a life outside — if one was offered her. Implicit in the latter choice was the understanding that she would never be readmitted to the kotha if the promise of the new life failed her. There was a universe of failed unions, dreams, and abandoned hopes that started in the kothas and trailed off into the anonymity of the city’s dark alleys. It was said — with some justification — that only the fickle survived in the kothas, and only the pitiless prospered.

—From Between Clay and Dust by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, a novel with extraordinary characters in the twilight of their lives. Read more fiction in the Longreads archive.

Photo: British Library, Flickr

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Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

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I.

In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…

The Shadow Legal System on College Campuses, and What It Means for Reporting Sexual Assault

"Patrick Henry College is not alone in internally adjudicating sexual assault. Every college and university maintains its own shadow legal system—and many secular colleges have a terrible track record of investigating and punishing sexual assault. But Patrick Henry College is one of only four private colleges in the United States that eschews federal funds in order to avoid complying with government regulations. This poses financial hardships for students and their families—PHC students are prohibited from accessing FAFSA loans, Pell Grants, state funds, scholarships, or the G.I. Bill—and it makes the institution particularly dependent on its conservative evangelical donor base. Homeschoolers see this as a worthwhile price to pay for freedom from government intrusion. The financial-aid page on PHC’s website notes, “In order to safeguard our distinctly Christian worldview, we do not accept or participate in government funding.”

This also means PHC isn’t subject to the Clery Act, Title IX, or the more recent Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act. The Clery Act requires schools to issue campus crime reports. Title IX says schools must hold an investigation independent of a criminal investigation and ensure that victims can change dorms and class arrangements, get campus restraining orders, and receive help filing a police report if they choose to do so. The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act mandates that schools have prompt disciplinary proceedings and inform victims of their rights and options under Title IX. These regulations are no guarantee that sexual-assault accusations will be handled properly, and students at dozens of schools have recently filed Title IX and Clery Act complaints with the Department of Education that document widespread victim-blaming, mishandling of reports, and impunity for perpetrators. Yet, PHC students lack even that legal recourse. (The school says it tries to “generally follow the principles of those laws,” but it is not legally bound to comply with them.)

“As a private campus, it’s outside of federal influence. They can do whatever they want,” says Brett Sokolow, an attorney and president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management. “If you’re a female student, and you elect to enroll at a campus that does not provide any of the federal protections that attach to other colleges and universities, you need to know that going in.”

Kiera Feldman, in The New Republic, on Patrick Henry College, an evangelical school in Virginia accused by former students of victim-blaming and covering up reports of sexual assault. Read more from Feldman.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Memories of an Affair

Our love affair was chic from beginning to end; the rumpled intellectual and the skilled maîtresse. It was a done thing—the done thing.

Beginning to end. Was it the end? She kept things lively, he thought. I counted on that. I used to look forward to work, knowing I’d see her.

He pictured himself twined in the arms of various time-consuming professional women over the years. As long as Alice was content at home with the boys, it didn’t seem to matter if he had these little intrigues at work. They were never part of my real life, he reflected. They were part of work, part of the New York world I left behind when I boarded this train.

He had gotten in the habit of feeling fine about it, spotting a girl at party and deciding he would miss his train, lunching with an author and agreeing to meet again for drinks in the evening. Surely it made no difference to Alice? She never knew about any of it.

But Alice’s death made Richard feel ashamed of Laetitia. And of all the others, too. I always meant to spend more time at home. Work was so demanding, so all-absorbing.

Work and women. Where was the line between them? The compartments in Richard’s complicated life were collapsing into one another. The distinctions seemed fake, made-up. I devised them to suit myself, he thought.

But work is important to me. His discomfort increased. Work should have remained clear of emotional tangles. The integrity of the intellect, the rigor, the years of conviction and seeking after truth now seemed soiled.

He silently argued the case for the defense. I’m good at publishing, and I’m successful. It’s an exacting profession. No amount of time spent on any book is ever enough. Especially with non-fiction where you have the responsibility to be accurate. To be right.

He had been saying such things for years, to everyone at home when he left, and again when he was late returning. No amount of time spent on any book is ever enough.

He tried to see the dark landscape rushing by outside the glass. But his own reflection stared back at him. There was no penetrating it. And the past was the same. He couldn’t reach it now; he couldn’t change it.

—From the book +1 by Katherine BucknellRead more fiction.

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Photo: 25141069@N02, Flickr

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"Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank." —Shirley Temple Black, Child Star and Diplomat

”It wasn’t until the next day that my guide came back and told me: ‘You will not see Mr. Dubcek, and you will not leave from the airport today. We have been invaded.’ There were tears in her eyes.”

”I was hungry, and on the way up to the roof of the hotel to try to see what was happening, I took some of the leftover hard rolls from the breakfast trays people had put outside their rooms,” she said. ”I looked down and saw tanks all around the hotel, and their guns were pointing up.

”That night, after curfew, in the lobby looking out at the street, I saw a Czech middle-aged woman shaking her fist at the soldiers. She was shot in the stomach and went down. That was a bad sight.”

”Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank,” she observed. She was here for the subdued anniversary observances, marked by quiet demonstrations by a few thousand people and the police arrests of 350 of them.

—Craig R. Whitney interviewing Shirley Temple Black, the then newly minted US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, about her experience in Prague in the late 1960’s (“Prague Journal; Shirley Temple Black Unpacks a Bag of Memories,” Sept. 11, 1989).

Photo: Boston Public Library, Flickr.

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The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)

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For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press. Read more…

All’s Farrah In Love

Longreads Pick

Whom did Farrah Fawcett really love? A court battle over an expensive Warhol turns on matters of the heart:

It was a Monday morning in mid-December at the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the day of closing arguments in the matter of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System v. Ryan O’Neal, and the show was just minutes from getting under way. Outside the courtroom, the players milled about. O’Neal was strolling down the courthouse hallway in a navy blazer, an open-collared light-blue shirt, and dark pants. Seventy-two years old and still impossibly youthful, with only a touch of graying hair, he wore gold-rimmed sunglasses and held a plastic water bottle, which he wiggled before him as if he were going for a birdie putt on the eighteenth green at Riviera. “God, I’m nervous,” he said.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Feb 3, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,902 words)

A Brief History of Class and Waste in India

Rose George | The Big Necessity, Metropolitan Books | 2008 | 28 minutes (6,900 words)

Below is a full chapter from The Big Necessity, Rose George’s acclaimed 2008 book exploring the world of human waste. The book will be reissued later this year with a new afterword. George’s 2013 book 90 Percent of Everything was featured previously on Longreads, and we’re thrilled to spotlight her work again.  Read more…

A Botched Operation: How a Substandard Abortion Provider Stays In Business

Longreads Pick

Steven Brigham’s abortion clinics keep being sanctioned for offering substandard care. Why is he still in business?

Brigham began placing ads for abortion services in the Yellow Pages. The ads drew a steady stream of pregnant women to his office—and a steady stream of protesters, armed with placards and bullhorns. The commotion escalated, eventually prompting the owners of the building to petition a judge for a temporary injunction against the protesters; after the request was denied, they successfully obtained an injunction against Brigham, who, they claimed, had misrepresented the nature of his medical practice. The controversy attracted extended scrutiny in the local press. One morning, Brigham later recalled, he glanced at the front page of the Reading Eagle and spotted a story, below the fold, about a minor international development: the implosion of the Soviet Union. Above it was yet another story about the turmoil outside his clinic.

Author: Eyal Press
Source: New Yorker
Published: Feb 3, 2014
Length: 41 minutes (10,470 words)

Sponsored Longreads: Read the First Chapters of 'Challenger: An American Tragedy'

Harris_Challenger

The following is an excerpt from Open Road Media’s Challenger: An American Tragedy, the new book by Hugh Harris, NASA’s “voice of launch control,” who recounts the shuttle tragedy that occurred nearly 30 years ago. Buy the book now.

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Chapter One: A Look Back Twenty-Eight Years

Challenger was a spacecraft designed to transport, protect, and nurture its seven-member crew as it transported them beyond the limits of our home planet’s life-support system. There, they would conduct experiments to improve lives on Earth. Among its passengers was the first civilian crewmember, the “Teacher in Space” Sharon Christa McAuliffe (known as Christa), who was already inspiring a generation of school children.

I had watched from the firing room as the twenty-four previous shuttles rocketed upward and successfully returned to Earth. But on January 28, 1986, Challenger was engulfed in a fiery inferno in full view of thousands of people at the center and millions of others viewing the launch on television.

The tragedy produced a myriad of human emotions. For Todd Halvorson of Florida Today, it was an unforgettable introduction to space reporting. Hired the day before, but not yet on the job, he stepped out of the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn to watch. Burned into his psyche are the pitchfork contrails and the memory of a weeping young girl, pointing upward and crying over and over, “The teacher is up there! The teacher is up there!”

For some young astronauts, it was a “loss of innocence” that took some time to accept. Franklin Chang-Díaz flew on STS-61C, the shuttle mission just a few weeks before Challenger. He and his crew experienced the tragedy from a viewing room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“I think we were all unprepared to deal with this kind of event,” he says. “From my first flight before the Challenger disaster, to my second flight, after, it felt as if we had lost our innocence. When I went into my second flight—well, it was probably the same way a soldier goes into battle with a few scars. You don’t look at that battlefield the same way you did on the first day. I mean, it was still exciting, it was still wonderful, but we realized it was not child’s play anymore.”

Lisa Malone, then a young public information specialist who would become director of public affairs for the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) twenty years later, recalled, “At the time, I was angry. I was angry at the engineers. I didn’t yet realize how hard space flight was. Later, as I started to go to more technical meetings, I learned the difficulty of managing risk posed by a highly complex vehicle.”

The accident triggered in-depth investigations and denied the nation of human access to space for almost three years. Unmanned launches continued, but our astronauts stayed on the ground.

It brought into question the way management and technical experts worked together. It highlighted the role played by political decisions and uncertain year-to-year funding. It exposed the roadblocks to communication imposed by managers and organizational culture.

It was a chilling reminder that it is safer to sit on the ground than fly into space. But that’s not an option for the human race.

Ultimately, it helped enable 110 more space-shuttle flights and the construction of the International Space Station, which ranks near the top of human achievement.

Dozens of people gave the “go” to launch on that morning twenty-eight years ago, and tens of thousands more had worked on the hardware. Yet, despite all of the investigative probing and some rancorous finger-pointing in the months to follow, no one ever alleged less than a strong desire to do his or her job to the best of his or her ability.

It demonstrated, once again, how much there is to learn as humankind continues to advance the boundaries of science, technology, and human interaction.

On that day, I was the chief of public information for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the launch commentator. This piece will take you on the same journey I experienced in the hours before launch and then along the bumpy road to find the cause of the accident and heal the system.

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Chapter Two: A Cold, Cold Night

The night of January 28, 1986, was the coldest I can remember in Florida. But when I left my house in Cocoa Beach at two a.m., I wasn’t thinking of the cold. I was worrying about getting to the Kennedy Space Center on time.

Every time I served as “the voice of launch control” for a space shuttle launch—a responsibility I had held beginning with STS-1 in 1981—I worried that my car would be delayed by the hundreds of thousands of people who came to watch. If I didn’t get to the firing room on time, the launch would have happened anyway, but I would have felt like I’d let down the team.

But this morning, as I drove toward KSC, I did not find the usual congregation of cars. Very few were parked along the causeway over the Banana River. Normally, even at that early hour in the morning, and eight or more hours before a launch, the causeways were crowded. Families would leave their cars to make new friends or gather around radios to keep track of the progress of launch preparations. Cars would sport license plates from dozens of states—California, Washington, even Alaska. The space program was a source of national pride, and we who were privileged to work in it could not help but be inspired.

But this night was different. The few who had come were huddled inside their vehicles.

In the distance, Pad 39 B and Challenger were sparkling in the pure white light of the xenon searchlights. The thick shafts of light illuminated the rocket vehicle and slanted skyward for many miles.

As I drove toward the center along State Route 3 on Merritt Island, some of the orange groves huddled under blankets of smoke from large bonfires created to help protect the fruit from freezing. Most of the large groves had been flooded or sprayed with water. The temperature of fruit encased with ice does not drop below freezing. Smudge pots were no longer used due to pollution.

The air temperature was in the low thirties and dropping rapidly into the twenties. The smaller grove owners could not afford to protect their groves, and a week later their oranges would be thudding to the ground at the rate of a dozen per minute.

The officers at the first guard gate wore heavy jackets. “Do you think it will go, Mr. Harris?” one asked.

I told them the launch had already been postponed an hour and might be delayed further because of concern due to the cold. I said, “They’re supposed to start tanking around three a.m. If they tank, they’ll try to launch. They have about a two-hour window.”

In capitulation to the freezing cold, the press site looked pretty deserted when I arrived. Normally, the photographers and reporters would be walking between buildings or gathered in little groups for a smoke. This morning they were all indoors.

There were fewer press representatives than normal, as well. The shuttle launches had become routine through the years. About five hundred media had been accredited for Challenger—as opposed to five times that number for STS-1. As I recall, only one of the major networks was covering the launch live.

The science writers typically on hand for launch had a conflict this time. Press briefings were taking place at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where many of the most knowledgeable space reporters were learning what scientists were discovering as Voyager flew past Uranus. Laurie Garrett of National Public Radio described the experience by saying, “Every single minute Uranus was blowing our minds more than the minute before. The moons of Uranus were absolutely the most stupendously puzzling things any of us had ever covered.”

The twelve-acre press site is located at the Banana River Turn Basin, slightly more than three miles from the launch pads. During the Apollo program, barges bringing the rocket stages from Michoud Assembly Facility, just outside of New Orleans, unloaded at the turn basin; now it was the shuttles’ external tanks that were unloaded there. It is just across the road from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB), external tanks, and orbiters were bolted together on a mobile launch platform before being taken to one of the two launch pads, designated Pads 39 A and 39 B. The Challenger launch was taking place from 39 B.

A three- to four-acre, six-foot-high mound had been built along the back of the press site with material dredged up to deepen the turn basin. On top was a 350-seat grandstand fitted with long counters, telephone hookups, and folding chairs, as well as several permanent structures put up by NASA, the major television networks, and the wire services. Another half-dozen office trailers had been brought in by Florida Today, the Orlando Sentinel, the Nikon camera company, and others were split between the mound and the lower level.

The public information office, my home away from home, was located at the press site in a geodesic dome originally bought for the United States Bicentennial Exposition. It also provided working space for media who didn’t have their own facilities. KSC office spaces lined one inner wall of the dome; along the other were several rows of long, counter-like desks for the press with assigned spaces where they could order temporary phone hookups. There were bins for fact sheets and news releases and a bank of pay phones.

A waist-high counter separated the press from the information people and provided space for the press to ask questions. Members of the press were not allowed behind the counter unless they were invited in for an interview or other business.

The flags of the sixteen countries that were partners with the United States for the Spacelab missions and for the future International Space Station flew over the press area.

Down below the mound were several acres of grass and the large, iconic countdown clock at the water’s edge. Many news photographers had used the countdown clock in the foreground of pictures of previous launches. Thousands more posed with it as proof that they had covered history.

For each launch, temporary grandstands were trucked in to accommodate about a thousand VIP visitors. These included the extended families of the astronauts who were flying and guests invited by NASA headquarters or other centers. The immediate families of the astronauts and special guests, such as members of Congress, would watch from the roof of the Launch Control Center.

Approximately twenty thousand other invited guests would be taken by bus or given car passes to park on the causeway across the Banana River connecting KSC and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station about seven miles from the pads. Loudspeakers set up in each location allowed my commentary to keep them informed about what was happening. Public affairs representatives and car parkers at each location helped direct them and answer questions.

I reached the press site about eight hours before the then-scheduled launch time of 10:38 a.m. and went into my office after checking with the staff and saying hello to the press who had come in early. Almost everyone commented on the cold and speculated that we would postpone the launch for a third time.

The launch scheduled for two days earlier had been canceled because of the weather forecast. It turned out to be a perfect day. The attempt of the previous day, January 27, had been scrubbed because sensors showed that the crew ingress door on the Challenger was not securely closed. Once that was corrected, the handle used to latch the door could not be removed without drilling out the bolts. Time ran out, and crosswinds at the shuttle landing facility became unacceptable.

Finally we were at January 28. The day had everything going for it in terms of weather, except the bitter cold.

The first person I called was information specialist Andrea Shea King, who was in the firing room, keeping the press informed on the progress of loading liquid hydrogen and oxygen. “What are you hearing on the OIS?” I asked, referring to the Operational Intercom System, which tied all elements of the launch team together on more than thirty voice circuits.

“It’s been pretty smooth, except for concern about ice on the pad,” she reported. “The temperature is below thirty-two degrees. All the valves on the water lines on the pad have been open slightly all night so that they don’t freeze. Can you see the icicles?”

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From Challenger: An American Tragedy, copyright 2014, Open Road Media