Search Results for: Outside

Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: Monica Potts on the Homeless Families of 'The Weeklies'

The Weeklies

Monica Potts | The American Prospect | March 2013 | 29 minutes (7,360 words)

Monica Potts is a senior writer for The American Prospect.

I did the reporting for ‘The Weeklies,’ about homeless families living in a suburban hotel outside of Denver, Colorado, a year ago. I lived with in the Ramada Inn alongside the weeklies during December 2012, and five of the families there shaped my story. Two of them are still living in hotels.

In May, the Ramada Inn was upgraded and converted into a Super 8 Motel. It became more expensive. Bonnie, Andy, and their son Drew, the main subjects of the story, moved into an Extended Stay closer to Drew’s school in Denver. Bonnie and Andy have been telling me since last spring that they’re doing renovation work on a rental property owned by a family friend, and that they will move in when it’s done. They don’t have a firm date, however.

After the story was published, I heard from a lot of people who said they saw school buses in their towns picking up school kids in hotel parking lots. Schools nationwide have reported a rise in student homelessness: some states have seen it double. The housing crash and the recession that followed had the odd effect of creating both vacant housing and a homelessness crisis, neither of which is likely to be solved soon.


Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

***

Photo: dno1967b, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

What Happened When We Discovered What Mattered

“Besides nearly killing me, college taught me several things. Namely, that external identity mattered. Being black mattered. It determined where to get off the Boston subway without receiving a baseball bat to the head. Being the biracial child of a single, white mother determined which whites would beg me, breezily to integrate certain spaces and which black would turn their back, stage-whispering about ‘messed-up Oreos.’ Being female determined the number of times I would cross my professors’ minds, and the number of men who would grope me, curious for integration of a sort. Being from the rural Northwest encouraged peers to smile at my accent and unfamiliarity with the New York Times. Being on financial aid meant I spent my vacations huddled in dormitory rooms with the heat turned off, my afternoons serving Faculty Club highballs to pinstripe-suited recruiters who placed their tips wearily in my hand with a whispered confession: ‘You’re probably better off where you are.’ Yes, the outside mattered, and it all mattered more than what I believed did.”

From Meeting Faith: An Inward Odyssey, the award-wining memoir by Faith Adiele, who venures to Thailand on a Harvard scholarship in order to fully understand—well, everything. Read more memoirs.

***

Photo: adiele.com

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Where It Hurts: Steve McQueen on Why ’12 Years a Slave’ Isn’t Just About Slavery

Longreads Pick

Dan P. Lee on the director and Oscar contender:

I’d seen 12 Years the night before, at the huge cineplex in downtown L.A. My friend sobbed quietly through a good portion of it. At least one black couple left midway. As we walked out of the ­theater, no one seemed to be speaking; breaking the ice, one stranger next to me said, “Well, that was intense,” which made us all laugh anxiously. As we stared at the Figueroa clips, I told McQueen how much I admired the film, and how it made me think about nihilism. He was having none of this. We made our way quickly to the courtyard outside the museum, where a lively conversation ensued.

He stammered and stuttered, organizing his thoughts. “The world is perverse,” he conceded; it is “chaotic.” Still: “Within that, one is always trying to find that calm, that focus. That’s why we have societies. It drives some sort of structure within that sort of environment.” Slavery was not proof of senselessness. It was about “money and power obviously, and within that you get human suffering.” But goodness overwhelms. “The only reason I’m here talking to you,” he said, “is because my family held on to that love, even if it sounds corny.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: Dec 10, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,274 words)

Invisible Child: Dasani’s Homeless Life

Longreads Pick

An incredible story about the system failing our children—through the eyes of one of New York’s 22,000 homeless children:

Dasani’s own neighborhood, Fort Greene, is now one of gentrification’s gems. Her family lives in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless. It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers.

It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.

Published: Dec 9, 2013
Length: 88 minutes (22,000 words)

Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

Happy holidays! Read more…

Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there are stories of people leaving cities outside of New York. Here are four essays about leaving some of these cities, and maybe coming back to them.

1. “The Last City I Loved: Omaha, Nebraska.” (Gene Kwak, The Rumpus, June 2013)

I found myself floating in the details of Kwak’s friendships and favorite places. I’ve never been to Omaha, but now I want to go. It doesn’t need promotion, though — I just need to remember it’s there. And you just need to read this essay.

2. “London’s Great Exodus.” (Michael Goldfarb, The New York Times, October 2013)

Middle-class London residents can’t afford to live in a city where property is currency and international moguls move in.

3. “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” (Elizabeth Minkel, The Millions, July 2013)

A well-written meta examination on the classic Leaving New York essay: “But New York, though — maybe it’s the preponderance of writers here, the narcissism and the navel-gazing, that turns our comings and goings into a series of extended metaphors? … When we manage to leave, if we manage to leave, escape becomes a genre in and of itself.”

4. “Why I Am Leaving New York City.” (Mallory Ortberg The Toast, November 2013)

Let’s end on a lighter note: Mallory Ortberg (perhaps the funniest human on the internet?) hasn’t lived in NYC before, but she’s not going to let that stop her from writing an essay about leaving.

***

Photo: Don O’Brien

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

How a Calf Head Roasted in a Pit Became a Popular Mexican Delicacy

“The historical method of preparation of calf head developed from the practice of baking an entire calf in the ground overnight, a practice designed to feed a significant number of people with a single large protein source, baked in the only structure available everywhere for free: the earth itself. This was a crude but effective technique: a hole was dug in the ground and lined with porous or volcanic stones or bricks to absorb heat, then a large bonfire was set alight inside it and allowed to burn down to coal, at which point the calf would be wrapped in leaves and tossed in and the cover sealed so no oxygen could enter the pit. The fuel, the material used to line the pit, and the material used to cover the pit all vary from culture to culture, but the basic principles are found in native cookeries the world over, from the Polynesian brick-lined pits used to cook entire pigs to the tandoors used across the Indian subcontinent.

“Where did the below-ground method originate? It’s difficult for either archaeologists or anthropologists to pinpoint, but in the New World, the method tends to correspond to a map of Spanish colonialism, so it isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that Native Americans, who had previously been roasting their kills over an open fire, learned to bake whole animals in the earth from the conquistadores. On the other hand, the method also shows up in places like Maine, where they cook beans and clams in the earth, and I don’t think Cabeza de Vaca quite made it up to Bangor, so the origins remain firmly in the scope of speculation.

“At any rate, the traditional method of preparation, which included the entire animal, eventually gave way to a predilection for the soft tissues of the head. The word ‘barbacoa’ is actually a corruption of the phrase ‘de la barba a la cola,’ which translates into ‘from the beard to the tail.’ In South Texas bricks or stones line the pit, mesquite is the heat source, and the whole thing is covered with sheet metal. When I was a kid, the barbacoa that emerged was composed of three parts: cachete (cheek), lengua (tongue), and mixta (a mixture of brains, lips, eyeballs, and probably, if you’re not careful, ears).”

– In Texas Monthly, National Book Award finalist Domingo Martinez recalls eating barbacoa with his family in South Texas, and examines how the meat was traditionally cooked and served. Read more food stories in the Longreads Archive.

***

Photo: Neil Conway

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Why Would Anyone Want to Lower the Working Age for Children in Bolivia?

“I’d gone to Bolivia because some NGOs and activists there have been trying—seemingly against all good sense—to lower the legal working age from 14 to six years old. And this was not the doing of mine owners or far-right politicians seeking cheap labor like one might expect. Instead the idea has been floated by a group of young people ages eight to 18 called the Union of Child and Adolescent Workers (UNATSBO)—something like a pee-wee version of the AFL-CIO—who have proposed a law that aims to allow young children to legally work. Bolivia’s congress is slated to vote on a version of the law as soon as this month.

“Why would an organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of young workers want to lower the legal working age? Current regulations state that youth can begin work no younger than 14, but these laws are rarely followed. Bolivia is a nation of fewer than 11 million people. This includes approximately 850,000 children who work full-time, nearly half of whom are under 14.

“‘They work in secrecy,’ Alfredo, a 16-year-old who since the age of eight has worked as a bricklayer, construction worker, and currently as a street clown, told me when I met him at a cafe in El Alto, the teeming slum city just outside of La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. Outside in the street, children known as voceadores—’barkers’—leaned from buses and called out their respective destinations in the hopes of earning a few coins from sympathetic or illiterate passengers unable to read the signs. ‘And that secrecy,’ he continued, ‘pushes these kids into the shadows, as if they were criminals.’”

Wes Enzinna, in Vice magazine, on child laborers working inside the mines in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. Read more from Vice in the Longreads Archive.

***

Photo: scropy, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Meet the Child Laborers Working in Bolivia’s Mines

Longreads Pick

Despite all the progress in stamping out child labor and exploitation around the globe, kids are still working in dangerous conditions. In Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, has one out of every three children working, and there is even an organization working to relax restrictions for those working under age 15:

I’d gone to Bolivia because some NGOs and activists there have been trying—seemingly against all good sense—to lower the legal working age from 14 to six years old. And this was not the doing of mine owners or far-right politicians seeking cheap labor like one might expect. Instead the idea has been floated by a group of young people ages eight to 18 called the Union of Child and Adolescent Workers (UNATSBO)—something like a pee-wee version of the AFL-CIO—who have proposed a law that aims to allow young children to legally work. Bolivia’s congress is slated to vote on a version of the law as soon as this month.

Why would an organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of young workers want to lower the legal working age? Current regulations state that youth can begin work no younger than 14, but these laws are rarely followed. Bolivia is a nation of fewer than 11 million people. This includes approximately 850,000 children who work full-time, nearly half of whom are under 14.

“They work in secrecy,” Alfredo, a 16-year-old who since the age of eight has worked as a bricklayer, construction worker, and currently as a street clown, told me when I met him at a cafe in El Alto, the teeming slum city just outside of La Paz, Bolivia’s capital.

Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Nov 19, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,638 words)

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side

Mark Oppenheimer | The Atlantic Books | November 2013 | 88 minutes (22,700 words)

 

Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, about Eido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk accused of sexually exploiting students.

We’re excited to feature the first chapter below, free for everyone. If you’re not a Longreads Member, join today to receive the full story and ebook, or you can also purchase the ebook at Amazon

***

EIDO SHIMANO, a Zen Buddhist monk from Japan, arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 31, 1964, New Year’s Eve. He was 32 years old, and although he had just spent four years in Hawaii, part of the time as a university student, his English was poor. Besides his clothes, he brought with him only a small statue of the Buddha and a keisaku, the wooden stick a Zen teacher uses to thwack students whose posture sags during meditation. Before flying east, he had been offered temporary lodging by a couple who lived on Central Park West. Not long after he arrived—the very next day, according to some versions of the story—he began to build his sangha, his Zen community. He did this, at first, by walking the streets of New York. The followers just came.

“It was the middle of the 1960s, full of energy,” Shimano recalled when we met for lunch in 2012. “And all I did was simply walk Manhattan from top to the bottom. And in my Buddhist robe. And many people came. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ So I said, ‘I am from Japan and doing zazen practice’”—Zen meditation. It was a kind of Buddhism, he told the curious New Yorkers. Now and again, somebody asked to tag along. Yes, Shimano told them. Of course. Before long, he had a small space to host meditation sessions, and all were invited. “Little by little, every single day, I walked entire Manhattan,” Shimano told me in his still-fractured English. “And every single day I picked up two or three people who were curious. And that was the beginning of the sangha.”

Read more…