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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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Ship’s Fare

Longreads Pick

From Gourmet Magazine, a discussion of the advent of cuisine at sea, as well as the author’s personal experiences dining on the high seas.

Source: Gourmet
Published: May 17, 1949
Length: 12 minutes (3,200 words)

The 'Serial Abuse' of Our Armed Forces

The intensification of the War for the Greater Middle East after 9/11 revealed unsuspected defects in America’s basic approach to raising its military forces. Notwithstanding the considerable virtues of our professional military, notably durability and tactical prowess, the existing system rates as a failure.

The All-Volunteer Force is like a burger from a fast-food joint: it’s cheap, filling and tastes good going down. What’s not to like? Take a closer look, however, and problems with the existing U.S. military system become apparent. It encourages political irresponsibility. It underwrites an insipid conception of citizenship. It’s undemocratic. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. And it doesn’t win.

Dishonesty pervades the relationship between the U.S. military and society. Rhetorically, we “support the troops.” But the support is seldom more than skin-deep.

In practice, we subject the troops we profess to care about to serial abuse. As authorities in Washington commit U.S. forces to wars that are unnecessary or ill-managed or unwinnable — or, in the martial equivalent of a trifecta, all of the above — Americans manifest something close to indifference. The bungled rollout of a health care reform program might generate public attention and even outrage. By comparison, a bungled military campaign elicits shrugs.

-Andrew J. Bacevich, in Notre Dame magazine, on the history of U.S. war in the Middle East over the past 30 years, and why there’s no end (or strategy) in sight.

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Photo: usafe, Flickr

Dying With Dignity: A Reading List About the Right-to-Die Debate

Should patients suffering from terminal illnesses and unbearable pain be able to make the decision to end their lives? Helping the terminally ill end their lives is illegal in all but five states in the U.S. Here, five stories looking at the right-to-die debate.

1. “Helping Dad Die: A Daughter’s Story.” (Catherine Syer, Financial Times)

In the U.K., Britons with terminal illnesses or incurable diseases have nowhere to go if they want aid in dying. A daughter’s personal story about finding a way to ease her father’s suffering.

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The Early Friendship of the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC

Photo via YouTube

Horovitz: One night at the studio, me and Adam and Mike, we’re waiting outside, drinking beers, and we see Run running down the street screaming, and DMC is way behind him. They were so excited: They’d come up with the idea for our song “Paul Revere” on the way there. We loved Run DMC—and then we were on tour with them. It was like: “Wow, if we’re hanging around with these dudes, it must mean we’re all right.”

Run: They’d teach me about stupid white-boy stuff, like whippits. “What the hell is a whippit?” “Okay, you take this Reddi-wip thing, you push, you inhale it.” Stuff black people don’t do. I was like, “I don’t know the effects of this foolishness.” I don’t think I did it. With the Beasties, nothing was normal. Ad-Rock bugged me out: He was dating the actress [Molly Ringwald]. It was like, “Wow, now that I look at him, he kind of looks like a movie star.”

-From New York magazine’s 2011 oral history of the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill.

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When Baseball is the Most Dangerous Game to Watch

In Atlanta Magazine, Christine Van Dusen tells the story of the Fletcher family, who sat behind the dugouts at a baseball game at Turner Field and experienced the horror of having one of their children struck by a foul ball, fracturing her skull.

Cabrera’s swing, so quick and effortless as to seem almost an afterthought, connected solid but late.

On the telecast, the ball disappears from the screen as if it were never there. How fast was it going? We don’t know for sure, but a line drive from a major league batter can easily exceed 100 miles per hour. We know some other things. We know that a baseball weighs five ounces. We know that force equals mass times acceleration. We know that Fred Fletcher’s six-year-old daughter, whom he will identify only as “A,” was sitting precisely 144 feet from home plate. The laces on her sneakers were knotted in neat bows. And she—well, not just she, but everyone around her—had less than one second to react to Cabrera’s line drive.

Less than one second.

Fred Fletchers is suing the Braves with the hope that it’ll compel them to put up more safety netting to protect fans.

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Photo: Paul Dineen

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

Just Undo It: The LeBron James Profile That Nike Killed

Longreads Pick

A profile of LeBron James written in 2011 for Port, a men’s magazine, that was funded by Nike. Nike was unhappy with the profile and the story was killed, but appears now on Deadspin.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Jul 10, 2014
Length: 28 minutes (7,147 words)

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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Photo: jameslaing, Flickr