Search Results for: The Nation

The Supreme Court Nominee, The Video Store, and the Changing Face of Consumer Privacy

Potomac Video, the last remaining video rental store in Washington D.C., will be shutting its doors after 33 years in business. Though there are surely plenty of good stories to be found in the some 60,000 DVDs now on sale at Potomac, perhaps the most interesting story is the role the Washington institution played in consumer privacy laws, specifically in terms of the creation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). From the Washington Post:

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to the Supreme Court. Bork was a pretty controversial fellow — he had ties to the Watergate scandal and faced an aggressive wave of criticism from Democrats in the Senate.

But it was Bork’s position on privacy that caused Michael Dolan, who was then a writer with the Washington City Paper, to start looking into his video rental records. You see, Bork was a strict constitutionalist and generally did not believe that individuals were guaranteed privacy protections beyond those specifically outlined in legislation.

So one day, Dolan walked into Potomac Video and asked the manager on duty whether he could have a peek at Bork’s rental history — something that no specific legislation at the time barred. He walked out with a photocopy revealing the 146 tapes the judge had checked out in the past two years.

Other than the sheer number of tapes, Dolan didn’t uncover anything too shocking. (Bork appears to have had a special taste for Hitchcock and costume dramas.) But Dolan’s acidic prose and the fact that he was able to get the records at all became a huge story, prompting Congress to pass the VPPA in 1988 — after Bork’s nomination had been voted down 58 to 42.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Read the story here.

'The Most Stoned Kids on the Most Stoned Campus on Earth'

Above photo: Not Moppy and Molly

***

What exactly did 4/20 look like on a college campus a decade ago? In 2004’s “The Fully Baked Adventures of Moppy and Molly,” published in Rolling Stone (pdf), Vanessa Grigoriadis profiled a young couple celebrating at UC Santa Cruz:

The first 4:20 for Molly and Moppy came at 4:20 A.M.—they set the alarm next to Molly’s bed for 4:12, which was enough time to pack celebratory bong loads and snuggle back under the covers. Later that day, after classes are over, Moppy and Molly pass a couple in the middle of a fight, something about who should be taking care of the dog. “It’s 4/20!” Molly shrieks. “It’s a good day, man!” They link up with a couple of friends who are having a long, involved conversation about the etymology of 4/20: Ideas range from a police code fro possession; the number of chemicals in THC; the number of molecules in marijuana; the address of the Grateful Dead’s home in Haight-Ashbury; the date Haile Selassie first visited Jamaica. It’s also Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of Columbine. “I think it’s a marketing tool for the big pot growers, who harvest on 4/20,” says one guy.

“Crazy, dude,” says Moppy.

Students are swarming into the meadow from every direction. From the top of the hill, there’s a cloud of marijuana smoke hanging just under the tree line, and you can hear the drum circles going and everyone hollering and hugging one another. The guy who had shaved a marijuana leaf and the number 420 into his hair last year is nowhere to be seen, but there’s a freshman dressed up like Cheech and a much-discussed twelve-inch joint. Molly, who’s wearing a fuzzy white Kangol hat that looks like a snowball, dropped a few of her cupcake on the way, which is a nice ground-score for someone, but she passes around the rest to Sasha and some bongo players. “I just got here,” says Sasha. “We were at home doing solar rips [lighting a bong with a magnifying glass and sunlight], trying to tell from the angle of the sun what time it was. We thought it was 2:30, and it was almost four, dude.”

Four-twenty itself is like New Year’s at a party without a TV. People start spontaneously hugging. “My fuzz is attracting weird frequencies,” says a guy with a white fuzzy hat identical to Molly’s, and they rub heads together. At 4:25, a cop car pulls into the meadow at about a mile an hour. The cop gets out and stands next to the car. There’s only one of him. But half the people in the meadow start streaming out nonetheless, like a videotape run in reverse. “Run for the woods!” Molly screams.

Read the story (pdf)

Photo: Flickr, US National Archives

Darfur and a 'Web of Lies'

The web of lies that various parts of the United Nations has woven about Darfur is vast. Orwellian doublespeak deliberately disguises reality and distorts words. U.N. reports on the region, for instance, typically and euphemistically use “air strikes” for indiscriminate bombing of civilians, “sporadic clashes” for continuous war, and “sexual and gender-based violence” for systematic rape. As for their references to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s “regular forces,” I often wondered how there could be anything “regular” about the hordes of fighters who operate lawlessly and jointly with the Janjaweed death squads. They make no distinction between civilians and combatants, bomb children and terrorize adults, rape women, and loot and burn everything they find to the ground.

Former UN spokesperson Aicha Elbasri, in Foreign Policy, on the failure and corruption of the UN/African Union mission in Darfur. Read more on Darfur.

The Private Lives of Public Bathrooms

Longreads Pick

The public collides uncomfortably with the private in the bathroom as it does nowhere else. How psychology, gender roles, and design explain the distinctive way we behave in the world’s stalls:

The vulnerability and exposure of using a urinal seems to create the need for additional social boundaries, in place of even “flimsy” physical ones. A famous, though ethically questionable, study from 1976 found that invading this socially agreed-upon bubble of personal space made it much more difficult for men to pee. To discover this, one researcher hid in a bathroom stall and watched men at the urinals through a periscope, timing the “delay and persistence” of urination when a confederate came into the bathroom and stood right next to or one urinal removed from the unknowing participant. The closer the confederate was, the longer the delay before the man was able to go, and the less time he peed overall. Whether he would have been able to go at all had he known someone was spying on him through a periscope, no one can say.

Author: Julie Beck
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Apr 16, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,520 words)

This Book Is Now a Pulitzer Prize Winner: An Excerpt from ‘Toms River’ by Dan Fagin

Dan Fagin | Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation | 2013 |  9 minutes (2,153 words)

This year’s Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction was awarded yesterday to Dan Fagin, an NYU science journalism professor, for Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. According to the Pulitzer committee, Fagin’s book, which chronicles the effects of chemical waste dumping on a small New Jersey community, “deftly combines investigative reporting and historical research to probe a New Jersey seashore town’s cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution.” Thank you to Fagin and Bantam Books for allowing us to reprint the excerpt below.

***

It is no small challenge to spend long days and longer nights in a place where children die, but Lisa Boornazian had the knack. She began working at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1991, during the summer of her senior year of nursing school at Villanova University. The following year she found a home in the cancer ward at CHOP. Back then she was Lisa Davenport, and not much older than some of her patients. “I loved working in oncology. I saw plenty of nurses who came to work at the unit and it wasn’t what they expected. They just couldn’t stay. But I loved it,” she remembered. The ward was a surprisingly lively place, where little kids dashed down the wide hallways with their wheeled intravenous stands clattering beside them. The older children, though, were much more difficult to deal with. “The teenagers had a grasp of death, and what the diagnosis meant,” Boornazian said. “The younger kids mostly had no idea.” Those with brain or bone cancers faced long odds. Survival rates were better for children with blood cancers, principally leukemia and lymphoma, but their treatments took many months and were brutal: chemotherapy, often followed by radiation and bone marrow transplants.

The work shifts on the oncology ward were organized in a way that made it impossible for the nurses to keep an emotional distance from their assigned patients, since the same three or four nurses would take care of a child for months on end. Their relationships with parents were equally intense. Many parents practically lived in the ward and went home only to shower and change clothes before rushing back. The nurses worked under the unforgiving gaze of mothers and fathers driven half-mad by lack of sleep and the sight of their children enduring a pitiless cycle of excruciating needle sticks, nausea attacks, and dressing changes. Parents would frequently take out their anger on the nurses, and the nurses who lasted on the ward learned to respond without rancor or condescension. The long shifts, especially the sleepless overnights, created an intimacy among nurse, parent, and child that no one else could share—certainly not the doctors and social workers, who were mere transients by comparison. The nurses were family. And when it was time for a funeral, the nurses did what family members do: They showed up, and they mourned.
Read more…

The History of the Future: a Reading List

Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, journalist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He also writes and produces radio about the lives of stuff and the stuff of life.

* * *

Journalism has been called the first draft of history. Here are 5 technology stories that belong in the second draft. Like a lot of technology journalism, they’re each focused on an emerging future, which at times makes them a bit breathless with excitement. But unlike most technology journalism, these stories have only gotten better with age. They’re sprinkled with uncanny predictions and unexpected depth about the devices we’ve come to take for granted. Read more…

The 2014 Pulitzer Prize Winners

This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners are outThe Washington Post and The Guardian shared a Pulitzer for public service for their reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks and widespread NSA surveillance, the Boston Globe was honored for its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity won for his black lung investigation, and Will Hobson and Michael LaForgia received a Pulitzer for the Tampa Bay Times’ investigation of a homeless housing program. Read more…

Suffering Children and the Christian Science Church

Longreads Pick

The unwillingness of many Christian Science parents to seek help from physicians for their critically ill children has led to many painful and unnecessary deaths and, increasingly, to legal actions that have become burdensome to the Church and its members:

On May 5 Detective Edwin Boehm, of the Paradise Valley Police Department, came to the house; he believes himself to have been the first person other than her parents to see Ashley in months. When I reached Boehm recently and asked him if he remembered Ashley King, he said, “You work on a case like that, you don’t forget it.” He said it had taken some time before he “gained entry,” because Catherine King at first refused to answer the door. He described seeing Ashley: “I knew first thing looking at her that she was dying.” He couldn’t see her leg, because “she had a pillow on it under the covers–she was hiding it.” He would eventually tell a grand jury, “She was extremely white, ashen colored–to be specific, death color.” The next day Child Protective Services received a court order allowing them temporary custody of Ashley for the purpose of medical examination.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Apr 1, 1995
Length: 46 minutes (11,542 words)

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…

Meet the Bagman

Longreads Pick

How to buy college football players, in the words of a man who delivers the money:

The Bag Man excuses himself to make a call outside, on his “other phone,” to arrange delivery of $500 in cash to a visiting recruit. The player is rated No. 1 at his position nationally and on his way into town. We’re sitting in a popular restaurant near campus almost a week before National Signing Day, talking about how to arrange cash payments for amateur athletes.

“Nah, there’s no way we’re landing him, but you still have to do it,” he says. “It looks good. It’s good for down the road. Same reason my wife reads Yelp. These kids talk to each other. It’s a waste of money, but they’re doing the same thing to our guys right now in [rival school’s town]. Cost of business.”

Source: SB Nation
Published: Apr 10, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,602 words)