Search Results for: The Nation

Appetite of Abundance: On the Benefits of Being Eaten

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J.B. MacKinnon | Orion | July 2013 | 12 minutes (2,875 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick comes from Orion magazine and J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World.

Thanks to Orion and MacKinnon for sharing it with the Longreads community. They’re also offering a free trial subscription here.

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Solving an Old Problem: Our College Longreads Pick

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

If only all universities had someone like Jesse Flickinger to explain their research projects to the masses. Flickinger takes his readers on an intellectual adventure that begins in a Kabul café and ends in a library in Missoula. He describes the problem of creating a legal system for emerging nations and how the University of Montana became a home base for the solution: Legal Atlas. “Legal Atlas is a fusion of Wikipedia, Google Maps and tomes of law knowledge offered in a slick interface freely available through the internet,” Flickinger writes. A local company developed the platform and students research and input data into the atlas. It’s an ideal research project for a university. There are hundreds of similar activities going on at schools all over the country. We’d know all about them if they had a better explainer.

Solving an Old Problem: Mapping the Law

Jesse Flickinger | Montana Kaimin | November 22, 2013 | 11 minutes (2,545 words)

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Writers and the Fear of Failure

“Failure was something that these novelists all kept talking about, which is a weird thing with the Nobel Prizes and endowed teaching positions and everything. It’s easy to look at them and think, you’re establishment; but most of them, I think, if they are any good, still see themselves as outsiders. They still feel like they’re one bad sentence away from failure; and they feel like they’re living on the edge, and I think that comes from the fact that they’re projecting the very limits of their imagination and mind out into the world. The things if I said to you now, they would probably be uncomfortable and socially awkward, but they’re doing it by themselves, in the dark. Yes, they have editors and publishers waiting for these books but they never know if they’ve completely gone off the reservation. And so, when you sit down with as a journalist with someone like that, and their book’s not yet out—you’re a month ahead of schedule, sometimes two—and you’re one of the early readers you develop intimacy quickly because you’re one of the first people outside of the inner circle when you’re a novelist of some success you wonder how much they get criticized by their friends anymore, and that’s a very exciting couple hours.”

How to Read a Novelist author John Freeman, in conversation with Robin Sloan, at City Lights, talking about the art of the author interview.

Read the interview

(h/t contexual_life)

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Photo: Deborah Treisman

Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: Monica Potts on the Homeless Families of 'The Weeklies'

The Weeklies

Monica Potts | The American Prospect | March 2013 | 29 minutes (7,360 words)

Monica Potts is a senior writer for The American Prospect.

I did the reporting for ‘The Weeklies,’ about homeless families living in a suburban hotel outside of Denver, Colorado, a year ago. I lived with in the Ramada Inn alongside the weeklies during December 2012, and five of the families there shaped my story. Two of them are still living in hotels.

In May, the Ramada Inn was upgraded and converted into a Super 8 Motel. It became more expensive. Bonnie, Andy, and their son Drew, the main subjects of the story, moved into an Extended Stay closer to Drew’s school in Denver. Bonnie and Andy have been telling me since last spring that they’re doing renovation work on a rental property owned by a family friend, and that they will move in when it’s done. They don’t have a firm date, however.

After the story was published, I heard from a lot of people who said they saw school buses in their towns picking up school kids in hotel parking lots. Schools nationwide have reported a rise in student homelessness: some states have seen it double. The housing crash and the recession that followed had the odd effect of creating both vacant housing and a homelessness crisis, neither of which is likely to be solved soon.


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In the Belly of the Beast

Longreads Pick

Animal rights activists uncover the dark underbelly of factory farming:

Carlson’s secretly recorded footage, compiled over more than a month, triggered a cruelty indictment and cost the dairy a major buyer. The takedown, in 2008, was Carlson’s first assignment. Hired out of college by Kroll Advisory Solutions to gather business data, he left to find work at a nonprofit firm devoted to social justice. Neither the Polaris Project nor the Environmental Investigation Agency called back, but Mercy for Animals did. After several weeks of training, he hired on at Willet, a giant dairy in Locke, New York, that churned out 40,000 gallons of milk a day. So damning was his footage of standard factory-farming practice – chopping the tails off calves without anesthesia; gouging the horns off their heads with hot branding irons, also without anesthesia; punching cows, kicking calves, beating desperately sick downers – that Nightline ran it on national TV, confronting Willet’s CEO on camera. “Our animals are critically important to our well-being, so we work hard to treat them well,” droned Lyndon Odell of the 5,000 cows standing in lagoons of their own shit. Shown tape of the tortured calves, and pressed on whether a cow feels pain, he rolled his shoulders and mumbled, “I guess I can’t speak for the cow.” It bears saying here that nothing would have come from the tape if left to the whims of Jon Budelmann, the Cayuga County DA. “We approached him with our evidence and he told us to fuck off – he wasn’t going to take on Big Dairy,” says Carlson. “It was only after we went to the media with the tape that he got off his ass and brought charges.” (Budelmann later cleared Willet of any wrongdoing, telling the Syracuse Post-Standard that while Willet’s practices might seem harsh to consumers, they’re “not currently illegal in New York state.”)

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Dec 10, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,298 words)

Longreads Best of 2013: Best Listicle By Another Name

A Pianist’s A-V

Alfred Brendel | New York Review of Books | July 2013 | 17 minutes (4,233 words)

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Robert Cottrell is editor of The Browser.

The best writers about classical music are professional musicians: think of Jeremy Denk, Stephen Hough, Nico Muhly. (The exception that disproves the rule is Alex Ross.) Charles Rosen, whose contributions were one of the many reasons for reading the New York Review of Books, died this year; Alfred Brendel, another Review contributor from the very highest end of the keyboard, thrives still, though he has given up playing piano publicly. His absence from the stage makes his presence on the page all the more precious: and his “Pianist’s A-V” is evidence of the sensibility, intellect and capacity for delight needed to underpin great interpretative art. His note on Liszt is worth a hundred pages from a lesser hand; he brings Beethoven’s piano concertos to life in a single sentence.

 

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Good to the Last Drop

Longreads Pick

What’s the connection between caffeine, the finish line, and marathon deaths? An investigation of how much caffeine is too much for runners, and the explosion of caffeine-related products handed out at races:

Starting three years ago, the International Marathon Medical Directors Association (IMMDA) has warned runners to ingest no more than 200 mg of caffeine before and during a race, based on research that has shown that during exercise, caffeine affects the heart in ways that can send someone into cardiac arrest. “Every incident is disturbing,” says Dr. Lewis G. Maharam, chairman of the board of governors for the IMMDA and medical director of the Leukemia Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training. There was no single incident that led the group to put out the warning in 2010, but it stemmed from a “constant conversation on how to be safer.”

So far this year, four cardiac-related causalities have fit the pattern: Alain Rettig, 45, in the TCS Amsterdam Marathon, 1 km from the finish line; Ricki Savage, 27, in the Dublin Marathon at the finish line; Jake Zeman, 35, in the Rock ’n’ Roll Savannah Marathon, feet from the finish line; and Kyle Chase Johnson, 23, in the Pittsburgh Half Marathon, less than a mile from the finish line.

Source: The Magazine
Published: Dec 7, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,430 words)

Fast Food, Minimum Wage, and an Industry Engineered for the ‘Interchangeability of Workers’

Longreads Pick

Thomas Frank on striking fast-food workers, many living in poverty:

Now, everyone knows how poorly fast-food jobs pay. They also know why this is supposed to be okay: fast-food workers are teenagers, they don’t have kids or college degrees, and it’s an entry-level job. Hell, it’s virtually a form of national service, the economic boot camp that has replaced the two years our fathers had to give to the armed forces.

Every one of these soothing shibboleths was contradicted by what I saw in North Carolina. These days, fast-food workers are often adults, they often do have children, and I met at least one college grad among the protesters in Raleigh. Why are things like this? Because a job is a job, and in times as lean as ours, the Golden Arches may be the only game in town, regardless of qualifications and degrees.

What people who repeat these things also don’t know is how much effort has gone into keeping fast-food pay so low, despite the enormous profits raked in by the chains.

Published: Dec 6, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,605 words)

Tupac Shakur and the Origins of Thug Life

“My mother was a woman, a black woman, a single mother raising two kids on her own. She was dark-skinned, had short hair, got no love from nobody except for a group called the Black Panthers.

“I don’t consider myself to be straight militant. I’m a thug, and my definition of thug comes from half of the street element and half of the Panther element, half of the independence movement. Saying we want self-determination. We want to do it by self-defense and by any means necessary. That came from my family and that’s what thug life is. It’s a mixture.”

Tupac Shakur, in a 1994 interview with Entertainment Weekly, resurfaced by Blank on Blank. Read more on Tupac.

Longreads Best of 2013: My Favorite Stories About Taxes (and Twist-Ties)

Photo: 59937401@N07, Flickr

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a writer and an editor.

Taxes aren’t boring—they’re just supremely difficult to write about in a compelling way. These three stories stand out because they illustrate the far-reaching consequences of different countries’ tax policies through a few very influential people:

1. “Marty Sullivan figured out how the world’s biggest companies avoided billions in taxes. Here’s how he wants to stop them” (Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 2013)

In his affectionate profile of tax expert Marty Sullivan, Steven Pearlstein breaks down everything that’s wrong about the US tax code in Sullivan’s nonpartisan, almost technocratic view—and goes on to explain why politics make it so hard to alter, let alone fix, the system. Not exactly action-movie material, but it’s handled so deftly that I couldn’t put it down.

2. “A Tale of Two Londons” (Nicholas Shaxson, Vanity Fair, 2013)

In Vanity Fair, longtime tax writer Nicholas Shaxson shows how the City of London became a hub for tax-free global capital through the story of One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential building, its fabulously wealthy and faceless owners, and the offshore accounts they used to buy and register the properties anonymously.

3. “Man Making Ireland Tax Avoidance Hub Proves Local Hero” (Jesse Drucker, Bloomberg, 2013)

Finally, Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker profiles Feargal O’Rourke, the man who helped transform Ireland into a “hub for tax avoidance” for multinationals like Apple and Facebook. Drucker withholds judgment (this is Bloomberg, headline and all) but O’Rourke’s mercenary wiles shine through a few well-chosen anecdotes. Choice quote, on Breaking Bad: “I don’t know what it says that we can be rooting for a guy on the dark side of the law.”

Bonus Pick: Most Fascinating Thing I Learned from a Story This Year

Twist-Ties vs. Plastic Clips: Tiny Titans Battle for the Bakery Aisle” (Paul Lukas, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2013)

My favorite business stories are the ones that reveal how much time, energy and thought goes into seemingly mundane consumer goods. This Businessweek article about the ‘bakery bag closure and reclosure market’ is a great example of that. Did you know bag closures generate about $10 million in sales per year? That studies have failed to resolve whether consumers prefer clips or twist-ties? And that there are people whose job it is to sell commercial bakeries on the virtues of these objects? All of this makes perfect sense, of course (hi, capitalism!) but it takes a story like this one to get you thinking.

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