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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Globe and Mail, Air & Space magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Inc. Magazine, New York Magazine, plus a guest pick from Guardian executive producer Stephen Abbott.
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Globe and Mail, Air & Space magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Inc. Magazine, New York Magazine, plus a guest pick from Guardian executive producer Stephen Abbott.
Heyman found an apartment in Rio with a bunch of twentysomething international travelers and slipped easily into the singles beach and party scene. When we spoke by phone in mid-November, he confided that his old life at Infosurv seemed a distant memory. “Going back there is not Plan A,” he said. “It’s very possible that that part of my life is behind me.” His biggest frustration: Because he was spending so much time with non-Brazilians, he wasn’t picking up Portuguese as quickly as he would have liked. So he moved after a month or so. By December, he was on the island of Florianópolis, in southern Brazil. His days consisted of riding a rented motorcycle to the beach, practicing his kite surfing, and then working out—mainly yoga and a regimen called P90X. His Portuguese was improving, thanks to a widening circle of Brazilian friends. “I have the vocabulary of a 5-year-old, but I can get my point across,” Heyman said. “The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that I have a gear I didn’t know existed. I look back on my life, and I’ve always been a very go-go person. I have been very achievement oriented all my life. And it is surprising to me that I can get into this gear where it is not about achievement. Maybe I was due for a break.”
“Inside the Mind of a Runaway CEO.” — Amy Barrett, Inc. Magazine
Featured Longreader: Writer Kevin Lincoln. See his story picks from Jim Romenesko, Ben Cohen, Poetry Magazine and more on his #longreads page.
Serpell told me that those handicaps can be easily masked by an outgoing, playful personality. “Bulldog breeders will insist that their dogs are happy and have a very good life,” Serpell said. “But a dog can love its owner and be happy at times, but that doesn’t mean his life isn’t needlessly compromised. In many ways, dogs are their own worst enemy. They don’t complain. They just kind of plod along, trying to make the best of things. That’s how I see many bulldogs. They are severely handicapped because of what we have done to them, but they still have these amazing personalities that shine through despite it all.”
“Can the Bulldog Be Saved?” — Benoit Denizet-Lewis, New York Times Magazine
See also: “Gary Francione: Animal Advocate.” The Believer, Feb. 2011
Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization on Mars. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September, he outlined the business plan—if that’s the right term for something that looks decades into the future. “If you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class home in California—maybe to around half a million dollars—then I think enough people would buy a ticket and move to Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure. But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there’ll be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that’s still eight thousand people. And I think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.” Talking about a city on Mars by the middle of this century—even as SpaceX has yet to fly its first cargo mission to Earth orbit—is one of the reasons space professionals are skeptical about Musk’s claims.
“1 Visionary + 3 Launchers + 1,500 Employees = ?” — Andrew Chaikin, Air & Space magazine
Featured Longreader: Jalees Rehman, associate professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. See his story picks from National Geographic, Intelligent Life Magazine, n+1 and more on his #longreads page.
[Not single-page.]
Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes, and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent.
It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.
“When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?” — David Frum, New York Magazine
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Grantland, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, plus a guest pick by The Daily’s arts & life editor, Claire Howorth.
In Amwell Township, your opinion of fracking tends to correspond with how much money you’re making and with how close you live to the gas wells, chemical ponds, pipelines and compressor stations springing up in the area. Many of those who live nearby fear that a leak in the plastic liner of a chemical pond could drip into a watershed or that a truck spill could send carcinogens into a field of beef cattle. (According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, 65 Marcellus wells drilled this year have been cited for faulty cement casings, which could result in leaks.) But for many other residents, including Haney’s neighbors, the risks seem small, and the benefits — clean fuel, economic development — far outweigh them.
On a Saturday morning in July 2011, Bill Hartley’s Styling Shop bustled with clients — a truck driver, a leaseholder, a landowner — all of whom profited from the gas boom. One was Ray Day, 64, a ginger-haired farmer, who, along with his brothers and sisters, owns nearly 300 acres of Amwell Township. Thanks to the money he received from allowing Range Resources to drill, build a compressor station and dig a chemical pond on his land, he has been able to reroof two barns, buy a new hay baler and construct an addition to his house for his 94-year-old mother. “I only buy something if I can pay cash,” Day said later. And he still has plenty of money left over. Was he planning a vacation, maybe to Florida? Day snorted good-naturedly. “Farmers don’t go to Florida,” he said.
“The Fracturing of Pennsylvania.” — Eliza Griswold, The New York Times Magazine
In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a “force for good” — even for teenagers — this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States. “There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed,” said Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”
Across the country, the approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”
“Teaching Good Sex.” — Laurie Abraham, The New York Times Magazine
See also: “Exit Strategy.” The American Prospect. May 26, 2009
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