Search Results for: The Nation

The Pain of Rural Poverty: Our College Pick

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

Colleges share symbiotic relationships with their neighboring towns, and economic disparities tend to strain those relations. At Dartmouth, the school’s wealth and privilege overshadows the surrounding area’s rural poverty. In a detailed report by Charlie Rafkin the region’s economic data is paired with the voices of low-income families. Rafkin doesn’t just point out the disparity, but also asks experts why the urban poor get all the press. (“There is no equivalent of The Wire for rural poverty,” says one.) Rafkin spreads the blame, too. International issues appeal more to students looking to change the world. Outreach efforts by universities can conflict with the community’s own ideas for improvement. And when Rafkin’s story gets a little bogged down by statistics, you’ll stick with it for lines like this: “Destiny finished her opiate binge, left the bathroom and returned to her high school class.”

Upper Valley Families Confront Rural Poverty

Charlie Rafkin | The Dartmouth | November 15, 2013 | 14 minutes (3,448 words)

Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.


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The Church That Doesn’t Believe in Seatbelts or Eyeglasses

“In the 20 years Nelson Clark has been First Century Gospel’s head pastor, the church’s message has also changed very little, especially in its core beliefs. Pastor Clark later sums these up in an email: how ‘the divine power of God … is able to heal our body without drugs or medicine; supply our needs without laid-up cash for the future; protect our family without firearms or anti-theft devices; bring about justice without legal action or attorneys; and to save our soul by a believing faith that endures to the end of our life.’

“As to what may seem idiosyncratic or even absurd, such as not wearing seatbelts or correcting bad eyesight with glasses, the explanations get interesting. The problem with seatbelts, Pastor Clark says, is that ‘anyplace we are told to do something in case something happens is a breach of faith or denying of faith in God to protect you.’ This same idea of trust applies to vision. ‘If God made eyes, obviously He can heal vision problems to see normally. We don’t use mechanical devices to make it better—it’s a matter of trusting God for normal vision.'”

-Robert Huber visits members of the First Century Gospel Church, who believe in the power of prayer over medicine, to get a sense of why a couple let two of their children die of illnesses that could have been treated by doctors.

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Photo: Lydur Skulason

Meet the Child Laborers Working in Bolivia’s Mines

Longreads Pick

Despite all the progress in stamping out child labor and exploitation around the globe, kids are still working in dangerous conditions. In Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, has one out of every three children working, and there is even an organization working to relax restrictions for those working under age 15:

I’d gone to Bolivia because some NGOs and activists there have been trying—seemingly against all good sense—to lower the legal working age from 14 to six years old. And this was not the doing of mine owners or far-right politicians seeking cheap labor like one might expect. Instead the idea has been floated by a group of young people ages eight to 18 called the Union of Child and Adolescent Workers (UNATSBO)—something like a pee-wee version of the AFL-CIO—who have proposed a law that aims to allow young children to legally work. Bolivia’s congress is slated to vote on a version of the law as soon as this month.

Why would an organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of young workers want to lower the legal working age? Current regulations state that youth can begin work no younger than 14, but these laws are rarely followed. Bolivia is a nation of fewer than 11 million people. This includes approximately 850,000 children who work full-time, nearly half of whom are under 14.

“They work in secrecy,” Alfredo, a 16-year-old who since the age of eight has worked as a bricklayer, construction worker, and currently as a street clown, told me when I met him at a cafe in El Alto, the teeming slum city just outside of La Paz, Bolivia’s capital.

Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Nov 19, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,638 words)

The Couple Who Started the Textbook Wars

“Mel and Norma Gabler founded Educational Research Analysts in 1961. Funded through donations, they hired serious-minded believers like Neal Frey, a professor at a small Christian liberal arts college in New York, to help them page through mountains of material. In a 12-by–15-foot bedroom next to the garage in the Gablers’ house, Frey and a colleague spent as much as two months sifting through each textbook, searching not just for purely factual errors, but keeping an eye out for what they deemed relativist erosions of traditional, Judeo-Christian morality, free-market principles, patriotism and abstinence-only sex education. They decried a history textbook that paired Martin Luther, the 16th century theologian who sparked the Reformation, with Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights icon. ‘Martin Luther was a religiously dedicated, nonviolent man,’ the Gablers complained in one objection.

“Adoption by the state board at the time was vital to the success of a textbook, and publishers were willing to make almost any changes to earn a spot on Texas’ restrictive list of five approved textbooks per subject. With Texas, publishers could recoup the cost of production in a single state. Everything else after that was profit. It also meant that the peccadilloes of special interests like Mel and Norma Gabler reverberated not just through the Lone Star State but through much of the country.”

Brantley Hargrove, in the Dallas Observer, on how Texas creationists once changed the textbook industry, and how they’ve since lost power.

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What It's Like When You Are Desperate for a New Life

“One thing was certain: neither Youssef nor Rashid, nor Anoush nor Shahla, were going to get to the place they believed they were going. Rashid would never be reunited with his wife and sons in some quaint Australian suburb; Youssef would never see his children ‘get a position’ there; Anoush would never become an Australian policeman; Shahla would never benefit from a secular, Western education. What they had to look forward to instead — after the perilous voyage, and after months, maybe years, locked up in an isolated detention center — was resettlement on the barren carcass of a defunct strip mine, more than 70 percent of which is uninhabitable (Nauru), or resettlement on a destitute and crime-ridden island nation known for its high rates of murder and sexual violence (Papua New Guinea).

“How do you tell that to someone who has severed himself utterly from his country, in order to reach another? It was impossible. They wouldn’t believe it.”

-From a stunning 2103 New York Times story by Luke Mogelson and Joel Van Houdt, who went undercover on a boat taking refugees from Indonesia to Christmas Island in Australian territory.

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Photo: diacimages, Flickr

 

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side

Mark Oppenheimer | The Atlantic Books | November 2013 | 88 minutes (22,700 words)

 

Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, about Eido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk accused of sexually exploiting students.

We’re excited to feature the first chapter below, free for everyone. If you’re not a Longreads Member, join today to receive the full story and ebook, or you can also purchase the ebook at Amazon

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EIDO SHIMANO, a Zen Buddhist monk from Japan, arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 31, 1964, New Year’s Eve. He was 32 years old, and although he had just spent four years in Hawaii, part of the time as a university student, his English was poor. Besides his clothes, he brought with him only a small statue of the Buddha and a keisaku, the wooden stick a Zen teacher uses to thwack students whose posture sags during meditation. Before flying east, he had been offered temporary lodging by a couple who lived on Central Park West. Not long after he arrived—the very next day, according to some versions of the story—he began to build his sangha, his Zen community. He did this, at first, by walking the streets of New York. The followers just came.

“It was the middle of the 1960s, full of energy,” Shimano recalled when we met for lunch in 2012. “And all I did was simply walk Manhattan from top to the bottom. And in my Buddhist robe. And many people came. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ So I said, ‘I am from Japan and doing zazen practice’”—Zen meditation. It was a kind of Buddhism, he told the curious New Yorkers. Now and again, somebody asked to tag along. Yes, Shimano told them. Of course. Before long, he had a small space to host meditation sessions, and all were invited. “Little by little, every single day, I walked entire Manhattan,” Shimano told me in his still-fractured English. “And every single day I picked up two or three people who were curious. And that was the beginning of the sangha.”

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Beating Rituals and Sex Ceremonies in Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church

“The central pillar of Moon’s theology held that Eve had a dalliance with Satan in the Garden of Eden and then slept with Adam, which is how human beings were burdened with original sin. Moon also believed that people, movements, and even entire countries embodied these biblical figures. He himself was the ‘perfect Adam,’ and his mission was to help humankind reclaim its original goodness by forging a new world order led by Korea, the ‘Adam nation.’ America, the ‘archangel’ nation, would play a key role in this mission by helping Korea to rout communism, after which it would bow down to the Korean-led regime, with Moon as its king and messiah.

“Moon told his followers that they could join his sin-free bloodline by marrying a spouse of his choosing and engaging in a series of rituals. First, the newlyweds would beat each other with a bat, and then they would perform a three-day sex ceremony involving prescribed positions in front of Moon’s portrait. After the final sexual interlude—in missionary position—the bride would bow down to the groom, a confirmation that they had restored the ‘lost ideal of goodness.’”

-From Mariah Blake’s latest story in The New Republic, on the rise and fall of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Read more from The New Republic.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, the Early Years

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“The first time Elizabeth Warren met Hillary Clinton was in 1998, when the then–first lady requested a briefing on an industry-backed bankruptcy bill. Warren was impressed by Clinton’s smarts and steel, and credited her when Bill Clinton vetoed the bill in 2000. But the following year Hillary Clinton was a senator and she reversed her position. Warren’s reaction was scathing. ‘Her husband was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions,’ Warren wrote in The Two-Income Trap. ‘As New York’s newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position.’ Warren never forgot the betrayal, invoking it as recently as her 2012 campaign.”

Noam Scheiber, in The New Republic, arguing that Sen. Elizabeth Warren could be a threat to Hillary Clinton when it comes to the 2016 presidential nomination. Read more on Elizabeth Warren.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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False Confessions: NYC Still Struggles in Aftermath of Central Park Five

Longreads Pick

In the spring of 1989, five teenagers from Harlem were convicted of raping and assaulting a woman jogging in Central Park after four of the five confessed to the crime. The confession of a convicted rapist and killer named Matías Reyes overturned the five men’s convictions in 2003. Since then, the NYPD announced it would adopt the practice of videotaping interrogations, but the rollout of the program has been minimal:

Five weeks after Browne spoke to The Journal, Kelly began an hour-long speech to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs by announcing that all precincts would adopt the videotaping of interrogations. The policy would also expand beyond just felony assaults, which Kelly said totaled around 300 interviews at the time, to include murders and sex crimes.

“We want to continue to stay ahead of the curve with the help of our recording initiative,” Kelly told the audience. He was not specific about a timeline for implementation, nor has the NYPD ever made that information public.

Published: Nov 7, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,240 words)

'The Power of a Name': Maya Lin on Making the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

“I made a conscious decision not to do any specific research on the Vietnam War and the political turmoil surrounding it. I felt that the politics had eclipsed the veterans, their service, and their lives. I wanted to create a memorial that everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of whether one thought our country should or should not have participated in the war. The power of a name was very much with me at the time, partly because of the Memorial Rotunda at Yale. In Woolsey Hall, the walls are inscribed with the names of all the Yale alumni who have been killed in wars. I had never been able to resist touching the names cut into these marble walls, and no matter how busy or crowded the place is, a sense of quiet, a reverence, always surrounds those names. Throughout my freshman and sophomore years, the stonecutters were carving in by hand the names of those killed in the Vietnam War, and I think it left a lasting impression on me…the sense of the power of a name.”

Maya Lin on the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in the New York Review of Books. Read more on veterans.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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