Riders on the Storm

An examination of Colorado’s mental health care system after the Aurora theater shooting. The state passed a $25 million initiative to restructure its crisis system for mentally ill patients, but still has a lot of work to do:

Colorado has underfunded mental health care for decades. Exactly how much is uncertain because there are at least 34 separate mental health line items in the state budget. “At the state Legislature, we cut provider rates for Medicaid and for drug and alcohol [programs] in 2002, when we had the downturn,” says Moe Keller, who spent 16 years in the state Legislature and is now the vice president of public policy and strategic initiatives at Mental Health America of Colorado , the local outpost of a national group that advocates for mental wellness reform. “We cut beds, and we closed a couple of units around the state. We never really re-funded that when the economy came back.” Then in 2008, the state again cut Medicaid providers and closed more units along with consolidating and reducing services. “Today, the prison system is by default the largest behavioral health center,” Keller says. “Police are the first responders.”

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: Nov 26, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,839 words)

This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading

The author of nearly three dozen books on the decline of manufacturing in America, and a future in which innovation can’t save us but reducing our consumption might:

Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.

Look at LCD screens. Most of the advances are coming from big industrial conglomerates in Korea like Samsung or LG. The only good thing in the US is Gorilla Glass, because it’s Corning, and Corning spends $700 million a year on research.

Source: Wired
Published: Nov 26, 2013
Length: 7 minutes (1,807 words)

Animals Were Harmed

An investigation reveals that the “No Animals Were Harmed” credit at the end of movies has come to mean almost nothing, and the American Humane Association has faced complaints about its lack of oversight:

“Last week we almost f—king killed King in the water tank," American Humane Association monitor Gina Johnson confided in an email to a colleague on April 7, 2011, about the star tiger in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. While many scenes featuring “Richard Parker,” the Bengal tiger who shares a lifeboat with a boy lost at sea, were created using CGI technology, King, very much a real animal, was employed when the digital version wouldn’t suffice. “This one take with him just went really bad and he got lost trying to swim to the side,” Johnson wrote. “Damn near drowned.”

King’s trainer eventually snagged him with a catch rope and dragged him to one side of the tank, where he scrambled out to safety.

“I think this goes without saying but DON’T MENTION IT TO ANYONE, ESPECIALLY THE OFFICE!” Johnson continued in the email, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “I have downplayed the f— out of it.”

Author: Gary Baum
Published: Nov 26, 2013
Length: 28 minutes (7,075 words)

The Things They Buried

Domingo Martinez, a 2013 National Book Award finalist, recalls Sunday luncheons with his family in South Texas eating pit-roasted barbacoa:

As soon as I was old enough, which in rural Brownsville was around fourteen, it was my job to get up before anyone else those mornings and drive to the barbacoa place for our ration. I was expected to have the food on the table before the rest of the family woke up. Dad would leave $20 on the dining room table the night before, and I would find my favorite mixtape and then zoom off about seven-thirty or so in my sister’s Volkswagen Rabbit. I looked forward to those Sunday mornings—the simple rush of freedom as I pulled away, that transcendental sense of liberation when you lock into fourth gear and hit 55 on a dirt road, as some ageless punk rock blares from the speakers. It should give you a sense of how malnourished the rest of my life was that this was magical to me, this drive to some nearby colonia where Dad knew someone who was making backyard barbacoa in a burst of free enterprise that may or may not have been legal, churning out tortillas in their garage on a tortilla-making machine (I don’t know what those are called). I took my job very seriously, though I didn’t really understand why. I just wanted to take the car out for a spin.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,385 words)

The Opt-Outers

Parents in New York are joining a growing movement to opt out of high-stakes testing for their children:

In response to the growing criticism, Arne Duncan, the White House’s Education secretary, this month said it was “fascinating” that some of the Common Core’s detractors are “white suburban moms who—all of a sudden—their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” There was an uproar among parents and administrators. “Did he really say that?” wrote Long Island superintendent Joseph Rella in an open letter. Duncan later “regretted” his phrasing, but what was most telling about his comment was that it seemed to acknowledge that support for the Common Core is being derailed in part by how it plays into the culture of anxiety often associated with high-stakes testing.

Published: Nov 25, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,377 words)

Did Dorothy Parker Try to Steal ‘Lolita’ from Nabokov?

A literary mystery: Soon after Vladimir Nabokov began shopping his novel Lolita, Dorothy Parker published “Lolita,” a short story in The New Yorker with a very similar story and characters:

Edmund Wilson was a friend Nabokov shared with many people in American literary circles—including Dorothy Parker. Wilson had first learned about Nabokov’s Lolita in the summer of 1953, when he was contemplating an article about Nabokov and asked the novelist whether he had a new project in the works. “Yes,” Nabokov responded, “I will have … кое что [“something”] published by the fall 1954. I am writing nicely. In an atmosphere of great secrecy, I shall show you—when I return east—an amazing book that will be quite ready by then.” A year later, Nabokov offered to let Wilson read his new novel, which he said he considered “to be my best thing in English.”

Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,475 words)

On the Trail With the First Skiers

The writer joints a hunting party in the Chinese Altay Mountains, who come from seminomadic Tuvan-speaking clans that may have been the first to ski:

Serik describes a hunt when Tursen skied down on a bounding deer, leaped on its back, grabbed its antlers, and wrestled it down into the snow, the animal kicking and biting. It is a scene that has been repeated for thousands of years in these mountains. Within the Altay, a handful of petroglyphs have been discovered depicting archaic skiing scenes, including one of a human figure on skis chasing an ibex. Since petroglyphs are notoriously hard to date, it remains a controversial clue in the debate over where skiing was born. Chinese archaeologists contend it was carved 5,000 years ago. Others say it is probably only 3,000 years old. The oldest written record that alludes to skiing, a Chinese text, also points to the Altay but dates to the Western Han dynasty, which began in 206 B.C.

Published: Nov 21, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,609 words)

Reading List: Religion Gone Extreme

This week’s list by Emily includes stories from The New Republic, Philadelphia magazine, Susan J. Palmer, and Religion Dispatch Magazine.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 24, 2013

How to Build a Car and Car Company, in Three Notebooks

A look inside the early notebooks of the Dodge brothers, who broke away from Henry Ford to build their own startup 100 years ago:

While they already made two fortunes from their relationship with Ford, by 1913 they were not thrilled about continuing to make parts for the Model T. If you think automotive technology changes rapidly today, imagine how quickly things advanced a century ago. In five years the Model T went from state of the art to technologically lagging its competitors but Henry thought it was the perfect car. Ironically, by the time the T started selling in really huge numbers in the nineteen teens it was obsolete and being technologically surpassed by by more modern cars. The Dodges were good engineers, probably the best machinists in Detroit next to Henry Leland. The term “mechanical genius” could have been coined for Horace Dodge and his brother John was almost as adept with his own management skills. By 1914 the Dodge brothers, who already owned and operated what was probably most advanced automotive plant in the world in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, wanted to build modern machines.

Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 7 minutes (1,810 words)

Two Gunshots on a Summer Night

A Florida sheriff’s deputy’s girlfriend is found dead, and the investigation—led by his colleagues—is botched. The case sets off a battle between investigators over whether Michelle O’Connell committed suicide or was murdered:

In fact, though investigators collected the gun, clothing and other evidence, they never tested it for fingerprints, DNA or gunshot residue. Officers also failed to canvass neighbors; failed to file required reports on what officers had seen that night; failed to download Mr. Banks’s cellphone data or collect and test one of the shirts he wore that night and failed to isolate and photograph Mr. Banks before he was interviewed.

Published: Nov 23, 2013
Length: 43 minutes (10,933 words)