College Longreads Pick: “Nothing Was the Same: On Drake and the White Boy Imaginary” by Sam Rosen, Brown University
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
The Science of Citizenship
The writer, who was a K-12 educator for 10 years, on the decline of science education in the classroom and how it’s affecting students and the way they view the world:
Sometimes we planted seeds and bulbs in paper cups and left them to sprout on the windowsill, but mostly I didn’t worry about science. I was teaching them to read; I was working on their cultural literacy.
But science is cultural literacy, a fact that became apparent when a friend teaching in the same school told me about getting her fifth graders ready for their statewide science test. Preparation was hurried, last-minute, cursory: their scores would not be held against our Adequate Yearly Progress, after all. My friend, however, did not want her students to feel blindsided by the test, so she had photocopied some handouts and sample questions. “I was trying to explain photosynthesis,” she said, “and one of my kids asked me, ‘How does a plant make their food? Do they use a microwave?’ What do you say to that?”
The A-Team Killings
Did U.S. Special Forces commit war crimes in Afghanistan? Matthieu Aikins investigates the discovery of 10 missing Afghan villagers who had been buried outside a U.S. base. Officials say a translator was solely responsible, but he and other witnesses say there’s more to the story:
I tell Kandahari that multiple witnesses claim to have seen him participate in abusive interrogations, and that another had seen him execute Gul Rahim, but he flatly denies ever killing anyone. He says that he had left Nerkh soon after Batson was injured, after quarreling with Kaiser. The Americans were trying to frame him for their own crimes, he says. “They knew what was happening,” he says. “Of course they knew. If someone does something on the base, everyone sees it. Everyone knows everything that’s going on inside the team.”
Everpix Was Great. This Is How It Died.
When the math and business model don’t quite work out for a tech startup, even if the product is beloved:
While its talented team obsessed over the look and features of its product, user growth failed to keep pace. Starting in June, Latour tried to raise $5 million to give Everpix more time to become profitable. When those efforts faltered, he began pursuing an acquisition. Everpix had tentatively agreed last month to be acquired by Path, according to a source close to the social network. But Path’s executive team killed the deal at the last minute, leaving Everpix adrift.
How Local Leaders in China and India Shape Global Politics
All politics is local, even in the countries that are home to one-third of the world’s population. Antholis and his family traveled to China and India to explore how different regions operated, and how they each impact global politics:
The questions we asked fell into three categories: How do Chinese provinces and Indian states work? How do their leaders seek to balance local and national priorities and value systems? How do their citizens as well as their leaders view various global issues?
In Beijing and New Delhi, as in Shanghai and Mumbai, Chennai and Chengdu, Ahmadabad and Hangzhou, we often heard the same response: “Why do you care?”
The answer, in brief, is because local leaders are increasingly running much of India and China, which are home to a third of all humanity, from the bottom up. That is affecting how both countries act in the world, which means that these countries need to be understood from the inside out.
How to Spend Your Income Building a Car that Must Travel 100 Miles on a Single Gallon of Gas
The first chapter from Jason Fagone‘s new book, Ingenious, about the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million competition to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. Thanks to Fagone and Crown Publishing for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book here.
Down Town
The city of Wilmington in Ohio, a “poster child of the Great Recession,” saw its unemployment rate shoot up to 19 percent after DHL, one of its biggest employers, left. The story of how the city is bouncing back:
Ironically, Wilmington’s reputation as the face of the recession ended up working in its favor. The endless media attention—The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Jay Leno, Rachael Ray, Glenn Beck, 60 Minutes (twice) were among the dozens of outlets that covered DHL’s story—kept the politicians interested. And the political attention—from the governor’s office to the Oval Office, with two Congressional hearings thrown in for good measure—kept the focus on the crisis and possible solutions. “I wanted to stay on the front page,” Raizk said. “When you get pushed back to page 10, everybody forgets about you.”
At the Air Park, Kevin Carver put his energy into creating a functional Port Authority, which was essentially a shell when he was hired, with no staff, budget, or operating procedures. Then he turned to the central task: Figuring out how to redevelop a sprawling facility that was once the engine driving the local economy.
Vanity Fair, The Rebirth
Condé Nast executives, editors, designers and writers look back on the 1983 relaunch of Vanity Fair, which originally stopped publishing in 1936 and had been folded into Vogue:
As word leaked out that the company was pumping more than $10 million into the magazine, the sniping began. An enterprising Chicago Tribune reporter tracked down Clare Boothe Luce, who had been a V.F. managing editor in the 30s, and asked her what she made of the relaunch. “I do wish the new magazine could be as wonderful as the old,” she said, “but I don’t see how it can.” New York magazine also weighed in, long before the debut, with a skeptical piece reporting that Locke’s job was in jeopardy. Newsweek joined the fun, too, calling the prototype “aggressively ugly” and averring that there was an “uncertainty about Vanity Fair’s editorial focus.”
Oops, You Just Hired the Wrong Hitman
Meet the hit man who also teaches Sunday school. “Special Agent Charles Hunt” is paid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to pose as a hit man. He’s hired by people you might, and might not, expect:
There are of course lunatics who come up with painfully stupid ideas: A convicted rapist in Florida wants the judge who sentenced him killed, and so he orders a hit, from prison. But there are also people with higher standing in the community: An Air Force sergeant wants help eliminating someone who heard him threaten his squadron leaders. An entrepreneur in Kentucky, facing a financial setback, thinks about having the hit man blow up his movie theater with his business partner in it, but decides instead to just have him killed at home (tonight). Love often plays a predominant role in the stories of people who hire hit men. The jilted and the scorned. The hopeless and the desperate: A woman in New Jersey wants her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend shot in the head (“Gone, gone to the moon”) and the boyfriend shot in the foot. She’s already picked out her black funeral outfit. Women. Men. Old. Young. This race or that.
Why Russia’s Drinkers Resist AA
Alcoholism remains a national epidemic in Russia, but a treatment program like Alcoholics Anonymous has failed to take hold in the country. Leon Neyfakh explores why:
A further obstacle to AA’s growth in Russia is something more philosophical: At a basic level, its premise of sobriety through mutual support just doesn’t make sense to a lot of Russians. In the past, this has taken the form of anti-Western suspicion—“What are the Americans trying to get out of this?” is a question Moseeva used to hear regularly. But more fundamentally, the group-therapy dynamic collides with a skepticism about the possibility of ordinary people curing each other of anything. “The idea that another drunk can help you is asinine to most Russians,” said Alexandre Laudet, a social psychologist who has researched Russian alcoholism.
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