Search Results for: The Nation

Famous Cases of Journalistic Fraud: A Reading List

Washington Post Investigation of Janet Cooke’s Fabrications

Bill Green | Washington Post Ombudsman | April 19, 1981

In 1980, Janet Cooke made up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, won the Pulitzer Prize for it, then, two days later, gave it back. Here’s the internal investigation of how the Post leaned on her to get her to admit she faked it.

[Cooke’s] new resume claimed that she spoke or read French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Her original resume claimed only French and Spanish. The new form claimed she had won six awards from the Ohio Newspaper Women’s Association and another from the Ohio AP. […]

Janet was crying harder, and Bradlee began to check off her language proficiency. “Say two words to me in Portuguese,” he said. She said she couldn’t.

“Do you have any Italian?” Bradlee asked.

Cooke said no.

Bradlee, fluent in French, asked her questions in the language. Her answers were stumbling.

(The formatting is not that great, but if you save it in Instapaper and read it there, it’s easier to follow. Here’s a non-single-page link).

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Interview: Bernice King

Longreads Pick

An interview with Martin Luther King Jr.’s youngest child, Bernice King, on her family’s legacy:

In the popular history of your father, people remember “Dream” and his crusade for civil rights. But his other platforms—fighting poverty, antimilitarism—seem to get lost. Was that part of the reason behind your 50 Days of Nonviolence campaign?

You have to take this part in stages and steps. Baby steps. Whether we want it or not, we live in a violent culture. And I don’t mean only video games or people on the streets. I mean in our discourse. We scream and holler, make disparaging comments. It’s a violent culture. If you are going to shift it, you have to spoon-feed it like a little baby. So 50 Days was really about buzz, to get the notion of nonviolence out in the culture. This has been a tough 365 days in our nation.

Published: Aug 1, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,723 words)

The End of the Line: A Microbus Map of Damascus

Matthew McNaught | Syria Comment | June 2013 | 18 minutes (4,615 words)

Matthew McNaught taught English in Syria between 2007 and 2009. He now works in mental health and sometimes writes essays and stories. This piece first appeared in Syria Comment, and our thanks to McNaught for allowing us to republish it here. Read more…

How Japan Stood Up to Old Age

Longreads Pick

A quarter of Japanese are over 65. A look at how the country is supporting its aging population:

In 1990, Japan introduced the “Gold Plan”, expanding long-term care services. Ten years later, it started to worry about how to pay for it, and imposed mandatory insurance for long-term care. All those over 40 are obliged to contribute. The scheme’s finances are augmented with a 50 per cent contribution from taxes and recipients are charged a co-payment on a means-tested basis. Even then, there have been financing problems and the government has had to scale back the level of services provided. Still, Campbell calls it “one of the broadest and most generous schemes in the world”.

As a result of these and other adaptations, he argues, Japan has struck a reasonable balance between providing care and controlling costs. Other countries, including Britain, have studied Japan closely for possible lessons. Of course, 15 years of deflation have left Japan’s overall finances in lousy shape, with a public debt-to-output ratio of 240 per cent, the highest in the world. Spending on healthcare per capita, however, is among the lowest of advanced nations, though outcomes are among the best. That is partly down to lifestyle. Most Japanese eat a healthy, fish-based diet and consume less processed food and sugary drinks than westerners. Obesity is far less common. So are violence and drug abuse. But even taking into account such factors, Japan gets a big bang for its healthcare buck. Every two years, the government renegotiates reimbursement fees with doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, routinely imposing restraints or reductions. Primary care is given priority over specialist treatment: the Japanese visit the doctor far more often than Americans but receive far fewer surgical interventions.

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jan 17, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,294 words)

9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List

Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. Read more…

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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Is This Thing On?

Longreads Pick

Why is it so rare for audio to go viral?

It’s hardly a fair fight, audio vs. cat video, but it’s the one that’s fought on Facebook every day. DiMeo’s glum conclusion is an exaggeration of what Giaever reads as the moral of her own story: “People will watch a bad video more than [they will listen to] good audio,” she says.

Those in the Internet audio business tend to give two explanations for this disparity. “The greatest reason is structural,” says Jesse Thorn, who hosts a public radio show called “Bullseye” and runs a podcast network called Maximum Fun. “Audio usage takes place while you’re doing something else.” You can listen while you drive or do the dishes, an insuperable competitive advantage over text or video, which transforms into a disadvantage when it comes to sharing the listening experience with anyone out of earshot. “When you’re driving a car, you’re not going to share anything,” says Thorn.

Source: digg.com
Published: Jan 16, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,720 words)

My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art

Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words)

Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint it here, and for sharing an update on Nat’s life (see the postscript below).

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What High Schoolers Should Be Reading

“Just maybe the novel is not the best device for transmitting ideas, grand themes, to hormonal, boisterous, easily distracted, immature teenagers. Maybe there is a better format and genre to spark a love of reading, engage a young mind, and maybe even teach them how to write in a coherent manner. Thankfully this genre exists: It’s called non-fiction.

“Journalism, essay, memoir, creative nonfiction: These are only things I started reading as an adult because of how little I enjoyed reading novels in high school. Surely, the un-made-up stuff would be more of a bore, I thought. Yet when I finally read In Cold BloodInto Thin Air, the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion, I continually pleaded aloud to my friends in their twenties, ‘Why didn’t anyone make me read this in high school?!'”

Natasha Vargas-Cooper eviscerates the high school reading list on Bookforum‘s blog.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A Toast Story

Longreads Pick

The surprising, emotionally affecting origin story behind artisanal toast:

The smallness of her cafés is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it’s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. “No one can be mad at toast,” she said.

Carrelli’s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.

Published: Jan 13, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,967 words)