Search Results for: The Nation

Benjamin C. Bradlee: 1921-2014

Legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who led the newspaper for 26 years and oversaw coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93.

“There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!” Ben Bradlee said, as he happily slammed a folded newspaper on his desk one morning in 1985 after I wrote a story that had his phone ringing off the hook.

Ben loved to stir things up, loved to get people talking.

— Some tributes: Editor Mary Jordan remembers what it was like to get praise from Bradlee. Former managing editor Leonard Downing reflects on working with Bradlee, and novelist Ward Just describes his relationship with Bradlee.

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When the Poor Pay $1,439.28 for an iPad

At Buddy’s, a used 32-gigabyte, early model iPad costs $1,439.28, paid over 72 weeks. An Acer laptop: $1,943.28, in 72 weekly installments. A Maytag washer and dryer: $1,999 over 100 weeks.

Abbott wanted a love seat-sofa combo, and she knew it might rip her budget. But this, she figured, was the cost of being out of options. “You don’t get something like that just to put more burden on yourself,” Abbott said.

Five years into a national economic recovery that has further strained the poor working class, an entire industry has grown around handing them a lifeline to the material rewards of middle-class life. Retailers in the post-Great Recession years have become even more likely to work with customers who don’t have the money upfront, instead offering a widening spectrum of payment plans that ultimately cost far more and add to the burdens of life on the economy’s fringes.

In the Washington Post, Chico Harlan looks at the proliferation of “rent-to-own” stores, which offer low-income Americans the chance to own items they can’t afford to buy outright, but at a much higher price.

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Photo: Steven Snodgrass

When Our Troops Are Abandoned and Neglected at Home: 6 Stories

This October 2014 New York Times investigation by C.J. Chivers is about more than just the discovery of old chemical weapons in Iraq—it’s about how shabbily we still treat our troops when they return home. We leave our all-volunteer army with inadequate medical care, emotional trauma, and fragile families. Here are six stories on our veterans.

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Eight Days In a Hong Kong Hotel Room With Edward Snowden

Profiling documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras for The New Yorker, George Packer writes of her latest film, “Citizenfour,” which tells the story of N.S.A. whistleblower Edward Snowden. Packer describes the documentary as a political thriller in three acts, with the second act chronicling Snowden’s time in Hong Kong. Over the course of eight days Poitras filmed Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room for twenty hours, and “the act proceeds chronologically through the eight days in the hotel room, taking up a full hour of the hundred-and-thirteen-minute film.”

We watch Snowden explain his background, his motivations, the nature and extent of N.S.A. eavesdropping, and his fears for the future. His control under immense pressure is unnerving. “I am more willing to risk imprisonment,” he says, “or any other negative outcome personally, than I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me, whom I care for equally as I do for myself.” The interviewer is Greenwald, and, soon enough, he and Snowden become defiant collaborators against power. Snowden, explaining why he plans to reveal his identity, speaks as if he were confronting a government heavy: “I’m not afraid of you. You’re not going to bully me into silence like you’ve done to everybody else.” Greenwald exclaims, “You’re coming out because you want to fucking come out!” (It’s a moment of inadvertent and unregistered humor, since Greenwald is gay.)

Snowden watches the global fallout from Greenwald’s stories on the TV in his hotel room. Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, whom he left behind in Hawaii without a word of explanation, writes him that police have come to question her. He is shaken, imagining her realization that “the person that you love, that you spent the decade with, may not be coming back.” He types something on his laptop—presumably, a reply to Mills—but Poitras, respecting his privacy, doesn’t move the camera to show its content. As the days go by, Snowden’s anxiety increases, and the room becomes claustrophobic. A fire alarm keeps going off—routine testing, he’s told. The bedside phone rings—“I’m afraid you have the wrong room,” he says, and hangs up. “Wall Street Journal,” he explains. His chin is stubbled and his hair won’t lie flat. He seems to be growing visibly paler, and the many stretches of silence last longer; Poitras’s camera stays close to him, at once exposing and protective. In such a small space, from which there’s no exit, the presence of a camera has a distorting effect, and it turns Snowden into a character in a play. Unlike Dr. Riyadh and his family, who went about their lives as Poitras trailed them, Snowden can never forget that he’s being filmed. There are few moments of self-betrayal.

“How do you feel?” we hear Poitras ask.

“What happens happens,” he says. “If I get arrested, I get arrested.”

In shots of him sitting on his unmade bed—white sheets and covers, white headboard, white bathrobe, white skin—Snowden seems like a figure in some obscure ritual, being readied for sacrifice. At one point, we hear his heart beating against a microphone. Still, he keeps speaking in the hyper-rational, oddly formal sentences of a computer techie. And then he’s gone.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

‘Mecca Today Is a Microcosm of Its Own History Replayed as Tragedy’

It seems only a matter of time before the house where Prophet Muhammad was born, located opposite the imposing Royal Palace, is razed to the ground, and turned, probably, into a car park. During most of the Saudi era it was used as a cattle market; the Hijazi citizens fought to turn it into a library. However, even to enter the library is apparently to commit an unpardonable sin—hence no one is allowed in. But even this is too much for the radical clerics who have repeatedly called for its demolition. Also in their sights is Jabal al-Nur, the mountain that contains the cave of Hira, where the Prophet used to retire for meditation and reflection and where he received his first revelations.

What I find particularly troubling is how few are willing to stand up and openly criticize the official policy of the Saudi government. Turkey, and the arch-enemy of the Kingdom, Iran, have raised dissenting voices about the erasure of history, but most Muslim countries are too fearful of the Saudis. There is real fear that their pilgrim quota will be cut—just as the Saudis refused to give visas to the Iranian pilgrims during the late 1980s. Popular vituperative complaint between consenting adults in private, though it is the norm in Muslim circles, is, as it always has been, inconsequential and irrelevant. Far from cautioning the Saudis, architects, including some who are Muslim, are actively colluding with the destruction of Mecca. Peace activists and archaeologists have raised concerns in newspapers and in the pages of learned journals, but the mass of believers are silent. Archaeologists fear that access to the few remaining sites open to them will be blocked. Would-be pilgrims understandably worry that they may be barred from performing a compulsory sacred ritual. Everything else for believers comes secondary to Mecca’s place as the destination for one of five ‘pillars’ of the practice of faith.

Mecca today is a microcosm of its own history replayed as tragedy. The city that has serially been remade in the image of the wealth and imperial splendour of whatever power was dominant is the plaything of its latest masters—who happen on this occasion to be lacking any aesthetic sensitivity, so that the underlying theme of naked power and wealth-driven consumer excess is brazenly exposed for all to see, devoid of saving graces.

Ziauddin Sardar, in Open, on Mecca’s history and future. Excerpted from Mecca: The Sacred City.

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Photo: aljazeeraenglish, Flickr

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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A Year With Nobel Peace Prize Recipient Malala Yousafzai

In one of our conversations, Malala told me that she once went to the theatre — a show called Tom, Dick and Harry in Islamabad — and loved it, so I got tickets for Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

As it starts, she is wide-eyed. She jumps at the gunshot as the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears, and I hope it doesn’t trigger anything. A long and violent Shakespeare play may not have been the perfect choice — more than three hours is a lot for anyone to sit through, and both Malala and my son fell asleep. But they woke for the swordfight at the end.

Afterwards, she says she loved it. “I think it’s a good lesson,” she says. “Hamlet does to Laertes [killing his father] the same as what happened to him and it gets him nowhere. I don’t seek vengeance against those who tried to kill me. They were led the wrong way. I just wish I could have talked to them.”

She is way too wise for a 15-year-old.

One day in mid-April, Time magazine arrives with Malala’s face on the cover, as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. She complains she doesn’t like the photo.

Sometimes when I go to their house I notice elaborate bouquets. When I ask where they come from, they say: “Oh, Angelina Jolie was over for dinner,” or: “The ex-prime minister of Norway dropped in for tea.” The family visits London and is taken to see Boris Johnson. He leaves Malala slightly baffled. “He just kept saying, ‘What’s it all about?’ ” she says. In the paper we read she is favourite for the Nobel Peace Prize. My son is astonished. “How can she win?” he asks. “She’s always fighting with her brother!”

— From, “My Year With Malala,” Christina Lamb’s 2013 Sunday Times profile of Malala Yousafzai, who became internationally recognized after she survived being shot in the head by the Taliban. Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi shared the Nobel Peace Prize today in recognition “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

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Photo: Southbank Centre

Coming Oct. 29, NYC: A Night of Storytelling with This Land Press

Present

A special night of storytelling with
This Land

Featuring:

Mark Singer (The New Yorker)

Rilla Askew (author, “Fire in Beulah”)

Ginger Strand (author, “Inventing Niagara”)

Kiera Feldman (writer, “Grace in Broken Arrow,” “This Is My Beloved Son”)

Marcos Barbery (journalist and documentarian, writer, “From One Fire”)

Wednesday, Oct. 29th, 7:00 p.m.
Free Admission


Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY 10012

RSVP on our Facebook page

Bios

Mark Singer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1974. Singer’s account of the collapse of the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City appeared in The New Yorker in 1985 and was published as a book, Funny Money.

Rilla Askew is an Oklahoma-born writer and author of the novel Fire in Beulah, set against the backdrop of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

Ginger Strand is the author of Inventing Niagara, the untold story of America’s waterfall. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, The Iowa Review, and the New York Times. Her articles for This Land magazine span fracking, Oklahoma’s water wars, and homicidal truck drivers.

Kiera Feldman is a Brooklyn-based reporter whose story “Grace in Broken Arrow” earned Longreads’ Best Non-Fiction article of the year in 2012. She’s written for n+1, The New York Times, Mother Jones, and a number of other publications.

Marcos Barbery is a journalist and documentarian. His This Land article “From One Fire” tells the story of an unlikely civil rights leader in the Cherokee Nation.

Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris (Flickr)

The Awful Emotional and Financial Toll of Dementia

Lost too often in the discussion about a cure has been a much more basic, more immediate, and in many ways more important question: How can we better care for those who suffer from the disease? Dementia comes with staggering economic consequences, but it’s not the drugs or medical interventions that have the biggest price tag; it’s the care that dementia patients need. Last year, a landmark Rand study identified dementia as the most expensive American ailment. The study estimated that dementia care purchased in the marketplace—including nursing-home stays and Medicare expenditures—cost $109 billion in 2010, more than was spent on heart disease or cancer. “It’s so costly because of the intensity of care that a demented person requires,” Michael Hurd, who led the study, told me. Society spends up to $56,000 for each dementia case annually, and the price of dementia care nationwide increases to $215 billion per year when the value of informal care from relatives and volunteers is included.

Tiffany Stanley, in National Journal, offers a heartbreaking first-person account of caring for her aunt, who had Alzheimer’s disease.

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Photo courtesy The Stanley Family

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…