Turning 14 in Cincinnati: ‘I worry about surviving’

A look at three neighborhoods in Cincinnati—Avondale, Evanston and Walnut Hills—through the eyes of 14-year-olds who routinely witness violence and poverty:

“I don’t understand how somebody can take somebody else’s life.”

Jalen Owensby says out loud what students at her school have been thinking since two of their Withrow classmates, Jashawn Martin and Tyann Adkins, were shot and killed in March.

But Jalen, who lives in Evanston, has been trying to make sense out of losing people to violence since she was six years old.

Published: Jun 8, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,895 words)

The Life and Death of a Master of the Universe

How the suicide of a Blackstone unit CEO shows the difficulties of doing well and doing good.

Bruce Wrobel’s body was found by a friend on Dec. 10, 2013, at about 1 a.m. in a Mercedes-Benz CLK550. Police called to the West 20th Street scene—a quiet, tree-lined stretch of townhouses in Manhattan’s affluent Chelsea neighborhood—discovered suicide notes to family and friends. The New York City medical examiner concluded the 56-year-old poisoned himself inside the parked car with carbon monoxide by mixing sulfuric acid and other toxic chemicals.

Colleagues and friends were shocked and heartbroken. Why would Wrobel, a visionary businessman who succeeded through a forceful blend of hard work and passion, kill himself at the peak of his career?

Source: www.cnbc.com
Published: Jun 8, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,472 words)

How Ronald Reagan Changed Bruce Springsteen’s Politics

How Born in the U.S.A. transformed Bruce Springsteen himself from a relatively apolitical performer from an avowedly working-class background to a passionate advocate for the rights of the disenfranchised— all thanks to Ronald Reagan.

In 1984, President Reagan was running for his second term. Early on, his team had decided that the president’s core supporters would vote for him no matter what. The reelection campaign would therefore be more about wooing moderate and independent voters than about shoring up the committed Republican base. It would be about images rather than issues and would attempt to co-opt as much of mainstream U.S. culture as it could. If rock ‘n’ roll had been anathema to an earlier Republicans like former vice president Spiro Agnew—or even to then-current, musically clueless Secretary of the Interior James Watt—it was perfectly fine with most of the Reagan re-election team, particularly if the music in question could be viewed as inspirational. “If we allow any Democrat to claim optimism or idealism as his issue,” one adviser noted very early in the campaign’s planning, “we will lose the election.”

Author: Marc Dolan
Source: Politico
Published: Jun 4, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,763 words)

The Day I Left My Son in the Car

A mother recalls a temporary lapse in judgment and how it has affected her as a parent:

Over the past two years, I’ve replayed this moment in my mind again and again, approaching the car, getting in, looking in the rearview mirror, pulling away. I replay it, trying to uncover something in the recollection I hadn’t noticed at the time. A voice. A face. Sometimes I feel like I can hear something. A woman? A man? “Bye now.” Something. But I can’t be sure.

We flew home. My husband was waiting for us beside the baggage claim with this terrible look on his face. “Call your mom,” he said.

I called her, and she was crying. When she’d arrived home from driving us to the airport, there was a police car in her driveway.

Author: Kim Brooks
Source: Salon
Published: Jun 3, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,125 words)

Food For Thought: A Reading List

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Lucky Peach, Modern Farmer, Ars Technica, The Billfold, and The Walrus.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 8, 2014

Insuring the Dead

Inside the business of corpse-repatriation insurance:

It is said, by people who would know, that at its peak, Colombia’s infamous Medellín drug cartel was spending $2,500 a month on rubber bands to wrap around bricks of cash. The arithmetic of human excess begins to acquire mythic status when money becomes nearly impossible to count and we are left to communicate chiefly through estimates and legends, like the one in which Pablo Escobar set fire to $2 million in cash to create a fire for his daughter when they were on the run and she got cold. During Colombia’s dark and bloody 1980s, the cartels’ pecuniary abundance was not only the stuff of legendary proportion. Death, too, became grimly innumerable—and at the intersection of cartel, guerrilla, and paramilitary violence was the question of how to respond to the ubiquity of death.

Source: The New Inquiry
Published: May 20, 2014
Length: 6 minutes (1,505 words)

The Thin Blue Privatized Line

Unsettled by the reality that the cops can’t help them, Oakland residents are hiring private patrols. Crime is down. But is the cure worse than the disease?

Picking himself up, Ward was approached by Rico Thomas, the 26-year-old security guard who had stumbled upon the break-in—and would soon draw a gun and shoot the suspect with it. Thomas had become a beloved fixture to the Upper Dimond and Oakmore residents who had hired him to patrol their streets months earlier. He would later tell police that his scrap with Ward happened in a flash: Ward lunged at him with an iron pry bar, he said, and tried to kill him. The two men wrestled, and then Ward ran away. But instead of heading downhill, the easier escape route, Ward ran uphill after the SUV, perhaps hoping that it would stop.

Published: Jun 3, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,707 words)

For a Respected Prosecutor, An Unpardonable Failure

Evidence of a convicted murderer’s possible innocence sat buried in a case file for more than two decades. Now, a prosecutor in Brooklyn will have to answer for the mistake.

On the afternoon of July 18, 1990, James Leeper, a newly minted homicide prosecutor in Brooklyn, had to make a challenging closing argument. The man he had charged with murder had mounted a substantial defense—offering plane tickets and video footage indicating he had been vacationing at Disney World when a man named Darryl Rush was shot dead in front of a Brooklyn housing project. Leeper acknowledged to the jury that it seemed like the “perfect alibi.”

Source: Pro Publica
Published: Jun 4, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,960 words)

The Secret Life of an Obsessive Airbnb Host

Determined to quit his tired government job, one D.C. office drone saves $25,000 by renting his apartment nightly and secretly sleeping on the office floor.

I was on track, according to a slap-dash Excel budget, to resign in a year. An extra $1,350 a month was flowing into my coffers. Although it wasn’t raining cash, I was matching what I made with what I saved by paring down my lifestyle expenses. The final factor in my favor was that my plan coincided with Airbnb’s asymptote-like upsurge in popularity. After receiving my first batch of positive reviews, the reservations poured in. Sleep came easier on my camping mat, and I dreamed in eighties montages about being a runaway Airbnb success story.

But there is a reason it’s not called Murphy’s Theory.

Source: Narratively
Published: May 22, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,550 words)

The Disappearing Physicist and His Elusive Particle

On March 25, 1938, 31-year-old physicist Ettore Majorana boarded a ship and seas never seen again. His work made him a pioneer in neutrino physics and the quantum mechanics of spin:

No one around Majorana even remotely understood what he was up to: the other Boys, for all their gifts, were much more down-at-heel. Like most physicists at the time, they regarded Majorana’s constructions as pure mathematics, without any relevance to physics. Applying group theory to physical problems, as Majorana had done, was just embellishment, or as the English like to say, “over-egging the pudding.”

Majorana didn’t care. Part of his strength was a sense of self-deprecation with which he smeared everything he did; indeed he was even more negative about his own ideas than about the others.’ He could try out unusual avenues because he didn’t take himself seriously, and so wasn’t constrained by a fear of failure. In a letter to a friend regarding his early efforts on symmetry and its toolbox, he said, “As for myself I do nothing sensible. That is, I study group theory with the firm intention of learning it, similar in this to that Dostoyevsky character who started one day to set aside his small change, fully persuaded that soon he’d be rich like Rothschild.”

Source: Nautilus
Published: May 8, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,886 words)