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College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Code Red: Struggling for Wellness in Computer Science,' from Kyla Cheung at Columbia University

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

While most good journalists are generalists, sometimes a background in the subject you’re covering helps add some perspective to your story. Kyla Cheung studied computer science and creative writing at Columbia, a combination that positions her to tell a particular story well. In “Code Red,” published in The Eye, Cheung looks at the dark side of computer science studies. There is no field hotter than computer science now, and public successes of people like Mark Zuckerberg and David Karp raise expectations for everyone. In this week’s #college #longreads pick, Cheung explores Columbia’s computer science program with a deep understanding of her peers, and a fascination with their unique culture.

Code Red: Struggling for Wellness in Computer Science

Reported and written by Kyla Cheung.

April 18, 2013 | 22 minutes (5,470 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.

Reading List: What's In A Dream? Writers Explore New York


Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

As my service year winds down and I begin to look for jobs, I’m simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the New York mythos. Here are four pieces that explore the romance, the real estate, the heartbreak and the hard-at-work.

1. “Here is New York.” (E.B. White, 1949)

White discusses the “nearness of giants,” the essential alone/never alone dichotomy and general spectacle of New York, N.Y.

2. ”Goodbye to All That.” (Joan Didion, 1967)

The yin to White’s yang, here is Didion’s quintessential emotional examination of New York.

3. ”I Want This Apartment.” (Susan Orlean, The New Yorker, February 1999)

The cutthroat Manhattan real estate market calls for a sharp-eyed guru. Enjoy pre-recession prices and capitalization of the word “internet.”

4. ”At Home on the Church Steps.” (Mindy Lewis, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, February 2013)

As apartment buildings are converted to condos, Lewis watches a dear neighbor become homeless and wonders at “a future where compassion is always trumped by enterprise.”

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Photo: JWPhotography2012

‘Children Are Dying’

Longreads Pick

Hospitals nationwide are experiencing drug shortages, including critical nutrients needed to keep premature babies and other patients alive. Are drug manufacturers and the FDA both at fault?

“Some hospitals have resorted to bartering with one another to secure even a small supply of nutrients, and many are rationing.

“At least one NICU in the District is administering some trace elements only three days a week instead of seven. At Atticus’s hospital, no patients heavier than 2½ kilograms (5½ pounds), including NICU babies, are getting intravenous phosphorous. ‘You could have a brand-new, full-term baby and they don’t qualify,’ a staff member says. ‘There are really sick babies and one-, two-, three-year-olds that don’t get anything at all because we’re rationing it for our tiniest preemies.’

“‘It almost makes me cry—our patients are starving because of drug shortages. How can this happen in this country?’ says ASPEN past president Jay Mirtallo, a professor of clinical pharmacy at Ohio State University. ‘In the last three years, there hasn’t been one PN product that hasn’t been in short supply. I’ve traveled all over the world talking about parenteral nutrition, and our colleagues in Europe, South America, and Asia just look astounded and ask how this can be such a significant problem when they have no issue whatsoever in any of their countries.'”

Source: Washingtonian
Published: May 22, 2013
Length: 30 minutes (7,538 words)

Everything in This City Must

Longreads Pick

Before returning to the U.S., the author is asked what he’ll miss about living in Leipzig, Germany and discovers that the answer is complicated:

“Why do I live there, I then ask myself. The recent revelation that the TSA may record every phone call, and hopes to record social media interactions as well, suggests we’re now a nation of suspects—America has become one big terrorist watch list. Everyone is on it. As I think about expatriating, if only to object to a life inside that complex, I know, if they’re monitoring me, it won’t matter if I expatriate. It would only continue, perhaps even increase, the move confirming whatever theory had put them onto me, should that even be the case. It would be enough that I would find it objectionable, and it shouldn’t be.

“I think of the Chinese dissident who, when he learned he was being spied on by the state, said, ‘I’ve been trying to get them to listen to me for years.’ If they were spying on me, I would want to take the TSA on a tour through the Stasi museum.

“See all they did to try to control their citizens, I would say.

“See how it failed them.”

Published: May 14, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,641 words)

Welcome to the Real Space Age

Longreads Pick

Despite fears that NASA and the United States have given up on space exploration, the focus has simply shifted to private companies like Virgin and SpaceX, which are preparing for commercial space travel:

“This was the International Symposium for Personal and Commerical Spaceflight. It had been co-founded eight years earlier by a New Mexico State professor named Pat Hynes, who had been studying and advocating for the commercial potential of space for twenty years. She has watched the conference grow in size and influence alongside the industry. Now, the facility buzzed with engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs and astronauts. Sponsors included Lockheed Martin and Boeing, a European company touting its ability to ‘launch any payload to any orbit at anytime,’ and another company claiming the authority to sell plots of land on the moon. Hynes, ecstatic, inaugurated the conference by shouting a ‘Let’s rock this house!’ welcome, before introducing Michael Lopez-Alegria, a recently retired space-shuttle astronaut who spoke of his conversion from ‘skeptic with outright disdain for the idea of commercial space” to a “Kool-Aid-pouring believer’ in the private space industry.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: May 20, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,219 words)

Reading List: Brave New Internet


Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

1. “The Vice Guide to the World.” (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 8 April 2013)

“My big thing was I want you to do stupid in a smart way and smart in a stupid way.” Vice pioneers methods of marketing, advertising and reporting while trying to mesh investigative journalism with its party image.

2. “‘There is no news industry’: An interview with media theorist Clay Shirky.” (Martin Eiermann, The European, August 2013)

Shirky talks about the nebulous definition of the journalist, the perilous combination of print and online news services, and the relationship between story and audience. Warning: somewhat jargon-y.

3. “The Secular C.S. Lewis: Neil Postman’s Unlikely Influence on Evangelicals.” (Arthur W. Hunt III. Second Nature Journal, May 2013)

Media theory classes have found an unlikely home in the hearts of Christian college students and other evangelical, primarily Reformed Christians. (I should know—the epigraph of this piece is from my Media Ecology professor, to whom I credit my deep unease toward Google Glass.)

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Students, Professors: We Want Your Best #College #Longreads

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Throughout May and June, a new generation of reporters, writers, editors, and essayists make their way out of school and into the professional world. They come bearing clips, work samples produced for class or during an internship. Hundreds of media outlets at colleges and universities across the country publish student work, and an equal number of professors, instructors, and advisors help students report, write, and edit their best journalism. We’d like to encourage those writers to produce more and better work, and introduce these new voices to a wider audience of readers—and maybe even future employers and mentors.

To help in this effort, we’ve teamed up with Aileen Gallagher, assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, to help search for and share outstanding student work.

Students, writers, publishers, professors: We need your help to find and share the best work of the past year.

If you’ve read (or written) something this school year, just tag it #college #longreads on Twitter or Tumblr, or email it to aileen@longreads.com.

Student publications are the easiest and best place to find college #longreads, like Mary Kenney’s account of an Indian sex worker, published earlier this year by Indiana University’s INSIDE magazine. Or Project Wordsworth, the outstanding new pay-what-you-want experiment from Michael Shapiro and students at Columbia University.

Sometimes a piece that a student writes for class, such as the one Syracuse University grad student Danielle Preiss wrote about high suicide rates among Bhutanese refugees, lands in a professional outlet. And of course, we’ll also tout good work produced by students as part of a fellowship or internship, like Columbia undergrad Jack Dickey’s investigation for Deadspin about Manti Te’o.

The only rules for #college #longreads are: Stories should be over 1,500 words and written by a student enrolled in a college or university at the time of publication.

Share stories worth reading by tagging them #college #longreads.

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Know of a writer or publication we should keep an eye on? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Peter Worthington in His Own Words

Longreads Pick

The founding editor of The Toronto Sun died on Monday. He wrote his own obituary:

“It was nerve-wracking in 1967 to be mistaken for an Israeli prisoner by a Cairo mob and punched and battered until rescued by a brave Egyptian who defied the mob.

“There were the lethal streets of Algiers, where daily assassinations took place, and occasionally the French army opened fire on civilians. One afternoon a bullet went through the sleeve of my jacket and I didn’t know it until others pointed it out.”

Source: Toronto Sun
Published: May 13, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,083 words)

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?

Longreads Pick

The world is getting automated more quickly than we think—and when the robots take over it will throw our capital-labor balance out of whack and decimate the middle class:

“Until a decade ago, the share of total national income going to workers was pretty stable at around 70 percent, while the share going to capital—mainly corporate profits and returns on financial investments—made up the other 30 percent. More recently, though, those shares have started to change. Slowly but steadily, labor’s share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.”

Author: Kevin Drum
Source: Mother Jones
Published: May 14, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,423 words)

Longreads Guest Pick: BKLYNR's Favorite Brooklyn Stories

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Thomas Rhiel and Raphael Pope-Sussman are the founding editors of BKLYNR, a new online publication that features in-depth journalism—including more than a few #longreads—about Brooklyn.

Thomas’s pick: “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” by Pete Hamill in New York magazine

It’s 2013—three long years since New York magazine asked “What was the hipster?”—and yet there are still people for whom Brooklyn means Bedford Avenue. It’s depressing that so played out a trope could displace, in the popular imagination, everything else that the borough is: more populated than Manhattan and three times as massive; a patchwork of neighborhoods, some of which, incredibly, aren’t Williamsburg or Park Slope; and a place whose history stretches as far back as the country’s.

A restorative for the trend piece du jour is Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” a New York magazine cover story from 1969. It’s an oldie but goodie, a look at the borough’s bounce back from what Hamill sees as its postwar (and post-Dodgers) decline. As a snapshot of an evolving Brooklyn from decades ago, the story’s a fascinating read today. And Hamill’s wide-angle view of the borough’s complexities, as well as his celebration of its energy and diversity, still rings true.

Raphael’s pick: “Gentrified Fiction,” by Elizabeth Gumport in n+1

There’s a story many Brooklynites tell in which the moment of their arrival in a neighborhood coincides with the last breath of its “authentic” life. Those who came after, this story goes, never knew the “real” neighborhood. They missed the junkies who hung out on the stoops down the block, the bodega on the corner that sold 40s, the drop ceilings and vinyl siding and linoleum. It’s a seductive story, to hear and to tell. But it’s also a destructive story—really a myth—that valorizes an arbitrary authenticity at the expense of a more complex understanding of the place we call home. What is the “real” Brooklyn—what is the “real” anywhere?

If you’re interested in interrogating that question, I strongly recommend Elizabeth Gumport’s 2011 essay “Gentrified Fiction,” which explores the fixation on authenticity in contemporary literature about Brooklyn.

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