Search Results for: The Nation

‘Like Being in Prison with a Salary’: The Secret World of the Shipping Industry

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything on the current state of the shipping industry, which often gets underreported despite it driving our global economy:

“Yet the invisibility is useful, too. There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route. Look at the backside of boats and you will see home ports of Panama City and Monrovia, not Le Havre or Hamburg, but neither crew nor ship will have ever been to Liberia or Mongolia, a landlocked country that nonetheless has a shipping fleet. For the International Chamber of Shipping, which thinks ‘flags of convenience’ too pejorative a term (it prefers the sanitized ‘open registries’), there is ‘nothing inherently wrong’ with this system. A former U.S. Coast Guard commander preferred to call it ‘managed anarchy.'”

Published: Aug 25, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,213 words)

College Longreads Pick: 'Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal' by Isabelle Khurshudyan, University of South Carolina

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

Americans spend a lot of time with sports, so “healing power of sports” stories that elevate games beyond, well, games, have an undeniable appeal. But sports writing, when trying to transcend its subject matter, can run a little purple. Combine a sports-as-life story with a national tragedy, and you risk drowning your subjects in overwrought prose. With that in mind, there is much to admire in Isabelle Khurshudyan’s story on ESPN.com about a youth sports camp in Newtown, Conn. Kurshudyan, a student at the University of South Carolina who wrote this as a summer intern, demonstrates impressive restraint and respect for her subjects and their experience by letting them do the talking. Her straightforward, spare approach to writing gives the piece its own gravity.

Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal

Isabelle Khurshudyan | ESPN | 13 minutes (3,309 words)

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

Inside the Life of the Man Known as the ‘Spark Ranger’

Longreads Pick

The life and death of Roy Sullivan, a park ranger for Shenandoah National Park who was struck by lightning seven times:

“A gentle rain fell on April 16, 1972. The Spark Ranger was in a small guardhouse atop Loft Mountain, registering carloads of visitors who were arriving at the campground. Not so much as a coo of thunder riffled the air. Then … KABOOM! Lightning annihilated a fuse box inside the guardhouse. ‘The fire was bouncing around inside the station, and when my ears stopped ringing, I heard something sizzling,’ Sullivan told a Washington Post reporter who contacted him a week later. ‘It was my hair on fire.'”

Author: Tom Dunkel
Source: Washington Post
Published: Aug 15, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,142 words)

The Killing Machines

Longreads Pick

How do we live with drones during wartime—and then after it’s over? A look at the ethical and legal implications, and the realities of what advantages drones have given the U.S. in the battle against al-Qaeda:

“Once the pursuit of al-Qaeda is defined as ‘law enforcement,’ ground assaults may be the only acceptable tactic under international law. A criminal must be given the opportunity to surrender, and if he refuses, efforts must be made to arrest him. Mary Ellen O’Connell believes the Abbottabad raid was an example of how things should work.

“‘It came as close to what we are permitted to do under international law as you can get,’ she said. ‘John Brennan came out right after the killing and said the seals were under orders to attempt to capture bin Laden, and if he resisted or if their own lives were endangered, then they could use the force that was necessary. They did not use a drone. They did not drop a bomb. They did not fire a missile.'”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 41 minutes (10,324 words)

Longreads Guest Pick: Leigh Cowart on David Quammen's 'The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion'

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Leigh Cowart is the Sex and Science Editor at NSFWCORP. She exists solely on rage and strange cheeses.

Telling you how good David Quammen’s “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion” is feels like a spoiler. No, I’d much rather slide my copy of National Geographic across the table and let you discover, for yourself, one lion’s brutal, ceaseless struggle for sovereignty. With prose visceral enough to implant memories, and devoid of any anthropomorphic dilution, Quammen has delivered a true feat of intimacy. Simply put, to read his words is to know lions.

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What the Hell Are You Doing?!

‘I’m just Tess Vigeland. And I need to figure out how she’s remarkable.’

Our recent Longreads pick, Tess Vigeland’s speech at the World Domination Summit, is now up in video form. It’s our video pick of the day.


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Longreads Member Pick: 'This Town,' by Mark Leibovich

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This week’s Member Pick is from the new book by Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and a writer who’s been featured on Longreads frequently in the past.

This Town, published by Penguin’s Blue Rider Press, is Leibovich’s insider tale of life inside the Beltway bubble of Washington, D.C., and how the social lives of political lifers, journalists and hangers-on complicate the truth about what really goes on in the capital. The prologue and first chapter, featured here for Longreads Members, take place at the funeral for NBC Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert.

Read an excerpt here.

Become a Longreads Member to receive this week’s pick.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad; photo from Wikimedia Commons

Longreads Member Pick: In Washington, D.C., Where ‘We’re All Obituaries Waiting to Happen’

Longreads Pick

This week’s Member Pick is from the new book by Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and a writer who’s been featured on Longreads frequently in the past.

This Town, published by Penguin’s Blue Rider Press, is Leibovich’s insider tale of life inside the Beltway bubble of Washington, D.C., and how the social lives of political lifers, journalists and hangers-on complicate the truth about what really goes on in the capital. The prologue and first chapter, featured here for Longreads Members, take place at the funeral for NBC Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert.

Read an excerpt here.

Become a Longreads Member to receive this week’s pick.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 6, 2013
Length: 40 minutes (10,182 words)

Taken: The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture

Longreads Pick

Now happening in America: Police are using civil forfeiture laws to take money and property from people who haven’t been charged with a crime—and police even allegedly threatened to take their children away if they didn’t comply. In the Texas town of Tenaha, police pulled over drivers and used the roadside seizures to fund an assortment of unrelated items:

“More revelatory was a nine-page spreadsheet listing items funded by Tenaha’s roadside seizures. Among them were Halloween costumes, Doo Dah Parade decorations, ‘Have a Nice Day’ banners, credit-card late fees, poultry-festival supplies, a popcorn machine, and a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation that was said to be important to Lynda Russell’s reëlection. Barry Washington, as deputy city marshal, received a ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus from the fund. (His base salary was about thirty thousand dollars; Garrigan later confirmed reports that Washington had received a total of forty thousand dollars in bonuses.)”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 5, 2013
Length: 45 minutes (11,405 words)

Reading List: What's in an Ally?

Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

In light of the recent Zimmerman trials, I’d like to share these four pieces. I’ve thought a lot about this blog post by Mary, who writes“Another thing I’ve noticed is that people are more concerned with being the best ally than they are with the concerns/oppression of the marginalized group(s) that they’re allying with. When the focus becomes about you and your feelings instead of the people facing discrimination, you’re being a really shitty ally.”

Here are four pieces for you to ponder:

The first is Questlove’s response to the George Zimmerman verdict…

The second is a response to Questlove’s piece by Kim Foster, a white woman and mother living in Harlem.

The third is “Ally-phobia: The Worst of Best Intentions.”

And the fourth is “Why the Foster Article Exposes Our Racism.”

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Photo: Brennan Schnell