Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not
Susan Faludi’s takedown of “Lean In,” and a brief history of feminism and its relationship with capitalism: “In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object”:
“In 1834, America’s first industrial wage earners, the ‘mill girls’ of Lowell, Massachusetts, embarked on their own campaign for women’s advancement in the workplace. They didn’t ‘lean in,’ though. When their male overseers in the nation’s first large-scale planned industrial city cut their already paltry wages by 15 to 20 percent, the textile workers declared a ‘turn-out,’ one of the nation’s earliest industrial strikes. That first effort failed, but its participants did not concede defeat. The Lowell women would stage another turn-out two years later, create the first union of working women in American history, lead a fight for the ten-hour work day, and conceive of an increasingly radical vision that took aim both at corporate power and the patriarchal oppression of women. Their bruising early encounter with American industry fueled a nascent feminist outlook that would ultimately find full expression in the first wave of the American women’s movement.”
Cold Air. Then Heat. Then Terror.
A fire in Prince George’s County in Maryland nearly kills two firefighters. An account of how it happened:
“With temperatures climbing past 1,000 degrees, the shield on his helmet curled, and the liner inside his protective coat melted. His protective mask was so badly damaged that an analysis later concluded that it was on the verge of ‘immediate failure.’
“‘Everything was hot, everything was burning,’ O’Toole said. ‘It got hotter and hotter and hotter until the point where you just didn’t want to breathe anymore.’ Each breath he took ‘felt like someone was cutting your throat.’
“Outside, Sorrell was crying for help, desperate to save his friend. ‘Come on! Get that line in there!’ he shrieked, a bloodcurdling sound captured on a helmet-mounted video camera worn by a Riverdale firefighter. ‘My guy’s in there! Go!'”
20 Minutes at Rucker Park
Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr. is a 24-year-old kid from Sacramento who quit his job as a janitor at a Greyhound bus station for a chance to drive across country and play basketball at Harlem’s legendary Rucker Park:
“A couple of days before, he took me from his place to Roosevelt Park on 10th and P Street, a quiet well-manicured playground just south of downtown. Right away, he asked again if I wanted to play one-on-one. I had on jeans and low-top sneakers and hadn’t planned on playing, but he needed to prove to me he had game, so I agreed. He showed off his turnaround jumper, quick hops and sharp lateral quickness. The hours of hard work had paid off and we split two games to 11. But when more players showed up for the noontime run, the crater-sized holes in his game became obvious.”
Jay Z Has the Room
A profile of hip hop star Jay Z, who discusses his newly formed sports management venture and dispels rumors about his personal life:
“During our talk at Jungle studios, Jay said the sports agency ‘just evolved. All the athletes came through New York, came to the 40/40; we’d give them advice and we’d put them with great people. I was like, Where are your agents? And—this is a real quote—one of those guys said to me, “I haven’t seen my agent since I signed my contract, seven years ago.” Or a guy’s mother says she’s never even met the agent. In some cases they go through the family, but then again, it’s like: go through the family, charm the mother, tell her stuff … get him a car, and then … gone. Actually hoping to get fired so they can collect on the contract. This attitude that if you do one thing well you can’t do something else well is paralyzing for some people—but not for me. If people think that I only make music, they’re underestimating me. I’ve been a successful businessman my whole career. I can do more than one thing at one time. I can walk and chew gum.'”
The End of Illth: In Search of an Economy That Won’t Kill Us
The writer looks at a network of worker-owned businesses in Cleveland called Evergreen Cooperatives, which has created environmentally sustainable jobs in low-income neighborhoods and a work environment that gives workers real input into company decisions and a share of the profits:
“While about 11,000 U.S. companies offer some form of employee stock ownership, far fewer give workers real input into decisions. OCS operated on a one-worker/one-vote model, for everyone from the CEO to the newest hire. They all gathered at 7:30 on Monday mornings to discuss company business. ‘It’s like we’re part of the board,’ Bey told me. ‘We don’t look at Steve as a superior. He’s equivalent to us.’ And Kiel was paid accordingly, at least compared with the average American CEO, who makes 300 times more than the average employee at his firm. OCS’s bylaws, Kiel told me, stipulated that the highest-paid member of the cooperative could never be paid more than five times the earnings of the lowest-paid member.
“After a six-month apprenticeship period, OCS employees could apply to join the broader Evergreen Cooperatives. If voted in, they received a $3 per hour raise and began buying into the company through a payroll deduction of 50 cents per hour. In about three years, this would add up to $3,000, an ownership stake that, based on the co-op’s projections, could be worth $65,000 in another six years. (Median household income in the neighborhood is $18,000.) Still, Bey told me, ‘Being an owner is nice, but it isn’t the most important thing. We’re a team, and for a team to win, it has to be profitable. So everybody has to do the best they can to help the team. That’s what makes it work.'”
Longreads Member Drive Update: 400 New Members in Our First Day, plus Digg Buys the First Group Membership
Yesterday, we asked for your help, and you responded. Thanks to you, we welcomed 400 new Longreads Members.
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Embracing the Void
A trip to experience what sculptor Charles Ross is building in the New Mexico desert. Star Axis is a naked-eye observatory that he’s been working for more than 40 years:
“O’Bryan walked me slowly down the steep side of the mesa, to the desert floor, so I could see Star Axis in its entirety. The work’s centrepiece is a 10-storey staircase that lets you walk up through the rock of the mesa, your eyes fixed on a small circular opening that cuts through the top of the pyramid. The first section of the staircase is roofless and open to the sky, but the end of it has a stone overhang that makes it look and feel like a tunnel. This ‘star tunnel’, as Ross calls it, is precisely aligned with Earth’s axis. If you bored a tunnel straight through the Earth’s core, from the South Pole to North Pole, and climbed up it, you’d see the same circle of sky that you do when you walk through Ross’ tunnel. Gazing up through it in the afternoon glare, I saw a patch of blue, the size and shape of a dime held at arm’s length. But if the sun had blinked for a moment, fading the heavens to black, I’d have seen Polaris, glittering at the end of the tunnel, like a solitary diamond in the void.”
Nightmare in Maryville
When two teen girls are allegedly sexually assaulted by high school boys in the 12,000-population city of Maryville, Mo., sympathy is initially expressed for the girls and their families. And then a shift occurs:
“Two days after discovering her daughter on the front porch, Coleman says, she got a phone call from another mother warning her that online threats were being levied against the Coleman children, including a suggestion that her sons would be beaten up in the school parking lot.
“When she checked online, she discovered that many of the comments were aimed at Daisy. On Twitter, the brother of one of the boys at the Barnett home that night wrote that he hoped Daisy “gets whats comin.”
“Daisy was suspended from the cheerleading squad for her role in the night’s events. Barnett did not finish his senior year there, according to his lawyer.”
Announcing the Longreads Member Drive: Help Us Reach 5,000 Members
My name is Mark Armstrong, and four and a half years ago, I created Longreads.
What started as an afternoon project has now grown into something much bigger—a global community of readers, sharing what they love, across both nonfiction and fiction. Along the way we’ve built Longreads into a trusted service that recommends the best stories on the web, and tracks down stories never before published online.
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Now we need your help to keep this service running. We want to make good on our vision to build Longreads into a truly global hub for readers, writers and publishers.
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‘The pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin.’
On Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and an oral history of the “outlaw country” movement that coalesced in Austin as a reaction to the polished “countrypolitan gloss” in Nashville, led by RCA executive Chet Atkins:
“Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song ‘Mr. Bojangles.’ In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide.”
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