Demonstrating in the Cloud: Our College Pick

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

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 25, 2014

How Not to Get Your Kid into Kindergarten

Playing the DC Public Schools Lottery is a crazy, soul-crushing pursuit:

Consider the car-less Columbia Heights couple who applied to 16 schools and only got their kid into one, requiring a trek that adds two hours to their daily commute. Or the Mount Pleasant parents who went 0 for 6, four years running, for their eldest child, then lucked into one of the hottest schools in the city on their first lottery entry with their youngest. One mother I spoke to spent the first four years of her son’s life in her cramped premarriage one-bedroom apartment (and indefinitely delayed having another child) just so he’d have the right address when lottery time rolled around. Then there was the woman who seriously contemplated signing a lease on an English basement that was in-boundary for Maury, to increase her child’s chance of getting in there. (All right, I admit this last person was me.)

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Mar 24, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,802 words)

Watching Team Upworthy Work Is Enough to Make You a Cynic. Or Lose Your Cynicism. Or Both. Or Neither.

Abebe goes inside the viral site Upworthy to discover their motivations and their formula for reaching a huge audience:

Its choices are the ones you’d normally associate with a race to the bottom—the manipulative techniques of ads, tabloids, direct-mail fund-raising, local TV news (“Think This Common Household Object Won’t Kill Your Children? You’d Be Wrong”). It’s just that Upworthy assumes the existence of a “lowest common denominator” that consists of a human craving for righteousness, or at least the satisfaction that comes from watching someone we disagree with get their rhetorical comeuppance. They’ve harnessed craven techniques in the service of unobjectionable goals—“evergreen standards like ‘Human rights are a good thing’ and ‘Children should be taken care of’ ”—on the logic that “good” things deserve ads as potent as the “bad” ones have. “I think marketing in a traditional sense, for commercialism—marketing to get you to buy ­McDonald’s or something—is crass,” says Sara Critchfield, the site’s editorial director. “But marketing to get people’s attention onto really important topics is a noble pursuit. So you take something that in one context is very crass and you put it in another. People will say, ‘That’s very crass,’ but in the service of doing something good for humanity, I think it’s pretty great.”

Published: Mar 24, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,081 words)

Is There Hope for the Survivors of the Drug Wars?

Men from Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods are turning to a family and job training center to keep themselves off the street dealing drugs and rebuild their lives after spending time in jail:

The men are what policymakers euphemistically call a challenging population: Lacking high-school education or formal work experience, they’re the most likely of any group in America to die young and to die from violence. Most of their life experience, the skills that have helped them survive the streets or prison, works against them in the legal world. The biggest problem the center has spent 15 years trying to solve isn’t how to get these guys jobs, or how to encourage them to be more involved in their children’s lives, or how make the streets safer, though those are tough enough. The problem is more profound: How do you give these survivors of the drug wars, men who are criminalized and discarded by society, who are at the bottom of every statistic, hope?

Published: Mar 24, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,059 words)

Inside the Kafkaesque World of the US’s “Little Guantánamos”

Communication Management Units, or CMUs, are cloaked in secrecy. They segregate prisoners accused of terrorism, stripped of rights and held in isolation:

We sat together on her couch, her small, eight-year-old hands clutching a photo of her father, Yassin Aref. “My daddy only held me twice before I was five,” Dilnia told me. For the first five years of her life, she only knew him as the man on the other side of a plexiglass window in a communication management unit in an Indiana federal penitentiary.

Prisoners describe the communication management units, or CMUs, as “Little Guantánamos.” In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons created two of these units to isolate and segregate specific prisoners, the majority of them convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The bureau secretly opened these units without informing the public and without allowing anyone an opportunity to comment on their creation, as required by law. By September 2009, about 70 percent of the CMU prisoners were Muslim, more than 1,000 to 1,200 percent more than the federal prison average of Muslim inmates.

Source: m.vice.com
Published: Mar 20, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,300 words)

The Brutal Ageism of Tech

Scheiber meets founders and VCs who are fighting back against age bias in Silicon Valley:

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”

And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”

Published: Mar 23, 2014
Length: 28 minutes (7,020 words)

On the Trail of a Silver Thief

He ransacked the homes of America’s most wealthy families, stealing centuries-old heirlooms and sending them to the smelter:

The thief set the old window glass carefully against the side of the house and hoisted his body through the small hole. He had chosen only two rooms to rob. Crossing the hall into a living room, with pieces of silver on top of the baby grand and the bookshelves, could have set off the motion detectors. Still, the damage was devastating. He got the julep cups, three silver pitchers, and countless silver trays. Gone, too, were 150 pieces of Mary’s favorite flatware. Like so many Southern women
 of a certain generation, Mary was deeply attached to the spoons and forks that marked her table at dinner parties and holiday gatherings. What was on your table said everything about you.

Published: Mar 23, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,055 words)

Loving the Opera in HD

Once controversial, Metropolitan Opera broadcasts for movie-theater audiences have become a gateway for new (and returning) fans:

A few years ago, I attended a Met production of Verdi’s Macbeth. Despite superb singing, the production felt disjointed, as if it could not contain both a medieval thane with tragic ambition and a 19th-century composer sounding an impassioned call for a united Italy. Lady Macbeth went mad and danced on chairs, but I was more aware of her bravura than her metastasizing guilt.

It happened that my brother took my mother to the Met that afternoon, too, at a movie theater in Northern Virginia. They paid $24 apiece for their tickets; my seats had cost a couple of hundred dollars each. Afterward, I called my brother. “It was one of the greatest operas I’ve ever seen!” he exclaimed. “Did you see Macduff, when he read the letter telling him that his family has been murdered? He had tears in his eyes!” Well, no. I couldn’t see any tears. I was in the first ring, far from the stage. My brother was talking as if he had been to a different opera.

Published: Mar 21, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,913 words)

Wild Obsession

The debate over the ownership of wild and exotic animals:

After a hard day of chasing criminals or a boring day of ticketing cars, Harrison would change out of his uniform and drive home to his animals. He always went to the wolves first. His body aching, his mind numbed, he’d let the canines come to him, weaving around his legs. He’d drop down on his knees and then lie flat on his back, the wolves clambering over him. “I would just lie there and let them lick me,” Harrison says, “and it was one of the best feelings in the world.”

Now the animals are gone. Harrison will never again own anything wild or exotic. He believes ownership of all potentially dangerous exotic animals should be banned and is working to make that happen. He underwent a profound transformation, his entire outlook shattered and put back together again in a new way.

Published: Mar 21, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,312 words)

Experiences of Black Americans: A Reading List

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from TIME, Salon, The Toast, ThinkProgress, and Autostraddle.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 23, 2014