Search Results for: The Nation

The Secrets Behind Your Flowers

Longreads Pick

In 1967 David Cheever, a graduate student in horticulture at Colorado State University, wrote a term paper titled “Bogotá, Colombia as a Cut-Flower Exporter for World Markets.” The paper suggested that the savanna near Colombia’s capital was an ideal place to grow flowers to sell in the United States. After graduating, Cheever put his theories into practice. He and three partners invested $25,000 apiece to start a business in Colombia called Floramérica, which applied assembly-line practices and modern shipping techniques at greenhouses close to Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jan 20, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,052 words)

Opium Wars: Can Afghan Farmers Really Stop Growing Poppies?

Opium Wars: Can Afghan Farmers Really Stop Growing Poppies?

Playboy Interview: Martin Luther King Jr.

Longreads Pick

I have a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn’t function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically. I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause. #MLK

Author: Alex Haley
Source: Playboy
Published: Jan 1, 1965
Length: 65 minutes (16,271 words)

Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City?

Longreads Pick

“Red Dawn 2,” the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the foreground of the half-destroyed office building, whose jagged entrails were visible through the holes opened by the wrecking ball. It was an uncanny spectacle: the very real rubble of the Motor City’s industrial economy serving as the movie backdrop for post-industrial America’s paranoid fantasies of national victimization.

Published: Jan 17, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,367 words)

AIDS and Media Coverage, the Early Years: A Longreads List

Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland.

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Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals 

1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman. 

903 words / 3.5 minutes 

No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of a new disease in 1981. 

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AIDS in the heartland

1987. St Paul Pioneer Press. Jacqui Banaszynski. 

21,000 words (est) / 84 minutes (note: not Instapaper-friendly)

This Pulitzer-winning three-part series follows Dick Hanson — farmer, political activist, and gay man — from diagnosis to death. The writer describes the piece as such: “I wanted to be able not just to write about a disease, but THIS disease and all that went with it … the prejudice, the fear, the distance, the judging, the legal, financial and moral consequences, the lifestyle and the love …” Many people cite this article as the first time they were really drawn in to the AIDS crisis. 

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Fighting AIDS all the way

1989. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs. 

3,695 words / 15 minutes

The harrowing plunge 

1990. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs. 

5,905 words / 24 minutes 

Larry Josephs, 34, writer about AIDS, dies of the disease 

1991. New York Times. Alessandra Stanley 

360 words / 1.5 minutes 

In these two essays, Josephs writes first about his diagnoses and treatment and then about what happens when he gets very sick. Heart-wrenching personal voice coupled with details and research from someone who desperately wanted and needed to know everything about the disease. Honest, brave first-person journalism. 

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Out of control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science 

2006. Harper’s. Celia Farber. 

12,163 words / 48 minutes 

From 1987 to 1995, Farber wrote a column in SPIN about AIDS called “Words from the front.” (Those articles can be found here.) She was one of the first and only journalists to cover scientists who questioned the link between AIDS and HIV and questioned the use of AZT to fight it. These scientists — including National Academy of Sciences member and Berkeley researcher Dr. Peter Duesberg — were labeled “AIDS denialists” by the scientific community, and Farber’s coverage of them put her in that pot, too. This article was published in 2006, but Farber had been writing about its topic for nearly 20 years. The piece provoked heated responses, including letters from the scientists who are credited with discovering  HIV. This response from the Columbia Journalism Review is in line with the criticism of the piece, the author, and its thesis. 

President Obama’s Address in Tucson

Longreads Pick

There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts. But know this: the hopes of a nation are here tonight. We mourn with you for the fallen. We join you in your grief. And we add our faith to yours that Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other living victims of this tragedy pull through.

Published: Jan 13, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,591 words)

Game of Her Life

Longreads Pick

[Profile Writing] She’s 14, lives in the slums of Uganda and is just now learning to read. But Phiona Mutesi’s instincts have made her a player to watch in international chess. “News eventually spread around Katwe that Katende was part of an organization run by white people, known in Uganda as mzungu, and Harriet began hearing disturbing rumors. ‘My neighbors told me that chess was a white man’s game and that if I let Phiona keep going there to play, that mzungu would take her away,’ she says. ‘But I could not afford to feed her. What choice did I have?'”

Source: ESPN
Published: Jan 10, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,103 words)

Afghanistan: Land of War and Opportunity

Afghanistan: Land of War and Opportunity

Afghanistan: Land of War and Opportunity

Longreads Pick

In Herat, Kabul, and cities large and small, Paul Brinkley serves as tour guide, ambassador, fixer, motivational speaker, and leader of the unofficial Afghanistan chamber of commerce. With all of his titles and duties, he prefers to think of himself primarily as a matchmaker, negotiating high-stakes unions between multinational companies like IBM and JPMorgan Chase and Afghan officials and entrepreneurs. Building a culture of business is the only way Brinkley and General David Petraeus, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, believe they can counteract the legendary forces of destruction here—from decades of war and deprivation to the brutal rule of the Taliban and a reliance on opium as a chief export.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jan 7, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,292 words)

Infopocalypse: The Cost of Too Much Data

Longreads Pick

Our nation is drowning in data. At any given time, federal agencies use more electronic storage units than could fill every NFL stadium from Oakland to Foxboro. At last count, the US government owns or leases at least 2100 data centers, and spends about half of its multi-billion dollar IT budget on digital storage. The United States Census Bureau alone maintains about 2560 terabytes of information — more data than is contained in all the academic libraries in America, and the equivalent of about 50 million four-door filing cabinets of text documents. In addition to the federal deluge, tens of thousands of municipal and state facilities maintain data ranging from driver’s-license pics to administrative e-mails — or at least they’re required to.

Source: Boston Phoenix
Published: Dec 29, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,264 words)