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College Longreads Pick: 'School's Out Forever,' by Allison Pohle, University of Missouri

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Stories about people outside the margins of convention can have a “Check out these weirdos!” leitmotif. We write about these people because they are different. But a clumsy writer accentuates the differences instead of finding the common humanity. In her examination of the “unschooling” practice, Allison Pohle of the University of Missouri found families who seem pretty average, except in the educational choices they make for their children. There’s no eye rolling in this story, and it’s the mark of a writer who isn’t jaded. Try to stay that way.

School’s Out Forever

Allison Pohle | Inside Columbia magazine | April 2013 | 17 minutes (4,233 words)


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Reading List: Examining Technology

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

The following four pieces resist cliches about social media and its impact. These authors do not shame nor condone; they do not preach. They take a deeper look at the tendency and luxury to share our lives with each other.

1. “O.K., Glass.” (Gary Shteyngart, The New Yorker, August 2013)

Shteyngart presents a colorful report on his experience wearing Google’s latest brainchild and his predictions for the near future of technology. (Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, included technology eerily reminiscent of Glass.)

2. “A Tweetable Feast.” (Jared Keller, Aeon Magazine, May 2013)

The author posits that social media expands the dinner table and delves into the relationship among food, internet, and community.

3. “Tweeting Death.” (Meghan O’Rourke, The New Yorker, July 2013)

When his mother entered an ICU, NPR host Scott Simon live-tweeted the experience. What could’ve been garish was instead tender. O’Rourke posits that social media may be a safe, public space to mourn.

4. “Pics and It Didn’t Happen.” (Nathan Jurgenson, The New Inquiry, February 2013)

The New Inquiry turns its blend of astute observation, philosophical investigation and literary criticism to Snapchat.

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Photo by Xprize Foundation

Reading List: Examining Technology

Longreads Pick

New reading list from Emily Perper featuring picks from The New Yorker, Aeon Magazine, and the New Inquiry.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 25, 2013

Longreads Guest Pick: Nolan Feeney on 'The New New Girl'

Nolan is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic. 

Jada Yuan’s profile of Mindy Kaling for New York magazine is almost a year old, but it has been a major influence on the way I write. It moves effortlessly from funny to sad, and it captures Kaling so well that it’s hard not read her quotes in her voice. But I think the story’s structure is the best part. The piece mentions a sign in Kaling’s room that reads: STAKES MOTIVATION TURNS ESCALATION, which she says are the four pillars for a great comedy story. If you read closely, I think you’ll notice how Yuan’s article follows a similar organization that shows Kaling’s model works well for great journalism, too.

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Our Longreads Member Pick: 'For the Public Good,' by Belle Boggs

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This week’s Member Pick is from a brand new publication, The New New South, which has just published a new ebook by Belle Boggs, who’s been featured on Longreads in the past for pieces including 2012’s “The Art of Waiting.” Her latest, “For the Public Good,” looks at forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States and the story of victims in North Carolina.

Boggs explains:

Last summer I met Willis Lynch, a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children. Willis was one of 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, and one of the more outspoken and persistent advocates for compensation.

At the time I was struggling with my own inability to conceive, and the debate within my state—how much is the ability to have children worth?—was something I thought about a lot. It’s hard to quantify, the value of people who don’t exist. It gets even more complicated when you factor in public discomfort over a shameful past, and a present-day political climate that marginalizes the poor.

Read an excerpt here.

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full ebook.

Our Longreads Member Pick: ‘For the Public Good,’ by Belle Boggs

Longreads Pick

This week’s Member Pick is from a brand new publication, The New New South, which has just published a new ebook by Belle Boggs, who’s been featured on Longreads in the past for pieces including 2012’s “The Art of Waiting.” Her latest, “For the Public Good,” looks at forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States and the story of victims in North Carolina.

Read an excerpt here.

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full ebook.

Published: Aug 22, 2013
Length: 61 minutes (15,377 words)

The Producers: A Reading List on Musical Masterminds

From Matt Graves: Here are six of his story picks on the topic of music producers, the often-overlooked architects of the music we hear and love.

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1. “The Song Machine: the Hitmakers Behind Rihanna,” by John Seabrook (The New Yorker, March 2012)

In her ascent to the pop throne, Rihanna had some unlikely help: a singer from Muskogee, Oklahoma and a two-man team of Norwegian producers. Meet Ester Dean and Stargate, pop’s unknown puppeteers.

2. “Disco Architect: 12 x 12 with Brass Construction’s Randy Muller,” by Andrew Mason (Wax Poetics, Fall 2004)

The true story of how one 18-year-old, born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, became the unsung godfather of 1970s disco.

3. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee,” by Kembrew McLeod (Stay Free! Magazine, 2002)

Public Enemy burst onto the 1980s hip-hop scene with a sound unlike anything the world had ever heard. Their groundbreaking beats were supplied by The Bomb Squad, a two-man team who turned sampling into a complex, noisy and compelling new art form that changed hip-hop forever.

4. “Philippe Zdar: The French Touch,” by Amber Bravo (The Fader, June 2012)

Is Philippe Zdar the best producer you’ve never heard of? From Parisian disco and Phoenix’s “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” to records from Cat Power, Beastie Boys and Cassius, you’ve probably felt his influence, even if you didn’t know his name.

5. “Arthur Baker: From Planet Rock To Star Maker,” by Richard Buskin (Sound on Sound, June 1997)

How Arthur Baker, a failed disco DJ from Boston, made his musical mark on the 1980s—from hip-hop (Afrika Bambaata’s “Planet Rock”) and dance (New Order’s “Confusion”), to pop (New Edition’s “Candy Girl”) and rock.

6. “Rick Rubin: The Intuitionist,” by Will Welch (The Fader, 2004)

From Kanye’s “Yeezus” and Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” to Johnny Cash’s cover of NIN’s “Hurt”, Rick Rubin has been the music world’s (mad)man behind the curtain.

I Was Not a Pretty Child

Longreads Pick

Remembering what it was like to be ignored or mocked—and now, sometimes, being guilty of the same behavior:

“Female friendships are more complicated. There are nuances and there’s competition and there are magazines and men in bars who talk to your friend and not to you. You cannot take everything at face value. Hyper-analysis is the norm. I’m okay at making female friends. I love other women; they share their shoes. When you have conversations with women about sex, they almost never assume that you want to sleep with them. They drink wine and smell better than boys. I am not intelligent enough to put into words the intricacies of female friendships; there’s a physical intimacy, an immediate want toward sisterhood and trust. That’s how you can tell your friends from your acquaintances. With that openness and trust comes vulnerability, and with vulnerability comes conflict.”

Source: Medium
Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 6 minutes (1,684 words)

College Longreads Pick: 'Gym Class Heroes' by James Costanzo, Syracuse University

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Good reporting demands observation, but student journalists often struggle with the kind of focused hanging around you have to do with a subject to capture some accurate sense of them. How does the subject move? How do they interact with their environment, with other people? There’s so much information to gather before you ever ask a question, but the only way to get it is to shut up and watch. James Costanzo, who just completed a graduate journalism program at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, wrote about a parkour teacher in Manhattan earlier this summer for the tablet magazine Vertical Floor. It’s not only well reported but well written, because the writer took the time to observe.

Gym Class Heroes

James Costanzo | Vertical Floor Magazine | 7 minutes (1,668 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

Interview with My Mom, One Who Stayed Home

Longreads Pick

After reading the New York Times Magazine story on women who “opted out,” Gay asks her mom about her own experience:

Sometimes when people talk about women and the workforce, they say a woman cannot truly be equal to a man unless she has her own income. What do you think?

“Well. Equality. What a word. When we choose go outside in the world, when we come home, we’re still mommy. The second shift starts. Equality doesn’t exist, period, even when you share the chores. Some days it can be 70/30 and other days it is 30/70. I don’t think that’s what we should be fighting for.

What should we be fighting for?

“Men participating more in the home, but it’s petty to say 50/50, because life doesn’t allow that.”

Author: Roxane Gay
Source: The Hairpin
Published: Aug 13, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,650 words)