Off the Line

A profile of Chris Bolyard, chef de cuisine at Sidney Street Cafe in St. Louis, who works under celebrity chef Kevin Nashan:

“Living outside the spotlight is nothing new for Bolyard. As the chef de cuisine of St. Louis’ Sidney Street Cafe in Benton Park, he has long worked alongside its celebrated owner and executive chef, Kevin Nashan. While the story itself has been told many times – talented chef laboring quietly behind the scenes – Bolyard’s tale is different because of its length. He’s worked for Nashan for nearly a decade, playing right-hand man to a boss who collects James Beard nominations like Pokémon cards.

“When it comes to food, chefs, by their nature, are a narcissistic bunch, and many in Bolyard’s position would’ve left to spread their own culinary gospel. An executive chef position here. A small bistro there. But Bolyard has stayed rooted, happy in a situation that is not far from ideal.”

Source: Feast
Published: Aug 30, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,320 words)

College Longreads Pick: ‘The Red & Black Comes Back to Life’ by David Schick, University of Georgia

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

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 11, 2013

The Geeks on the Front Lines

The U.S. government is increasingly facing cyber threats that could affect our national security and economy. As a result, the government is courting hackers for cyber security jobs, but needs to overhaul its image to lure young talent, who can easily find well paid jobs in Silicon Valley and private security firms:

“To get a sense of just how weak our cyberdefenses are, I take a trip with Jayson Street, Chief Chaos Coordinator for another firm, Krypton Security, into the basement of a hotel in South Beach. We breeze past an open door with a taped sign that reads, ‘Doors must be closed at all times!!!’ This is where the brains of the building live – the computer network, the alarm system, the hard drives of credit-card numbers – but, as Street tells a brawny security guard, he’s here on the job, ‘doing a Wi-Fi assessment.’ Street, a paunchy, 45-year-old Oklahoman in a black T-shirt and jeans, flashes the hulk some indecipherable graphs on his tablet and says, ‘We’re good,’ as he continues into another restricted room.

“The doors aren’t locked. No one seems to be monitoring the security cameras. The wires for the burglar-alarm system are exposed, ready for an intruder to snip. We make our way to the unmanned computer room, where, in seconds, Street could install malware to swipe every credit-card number coming through the system if he wanted to. ‘They’re like every other hotel I’ve tried to go into,’ he tells me. ‘They fail.'”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Sep 10, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,808 words)

The Child Exchange

An investigation into America’s underground market for adopted children. Using online forums like Yahoo and Facebook groups, parents often advertise their unwanted children—who have a tendency to have been adopted abroad and have special needs—and give custody rights to strangers in a practice called “private re-homing,” which has little or no government regulation:

“As the Puchallas drove away, Melissa sobbed. She calls the decision ‘the hardest thing we’ve ever done in our lives.’ Quita still can’t reconcile it. ‘How would you give me up when you brought me to be yours?’ she asks.

“In the days that followed, two puppies scampered through the trailer, gifts from the Easons to Quita. The dogs lifted the teenager’s spirits, but they weren’t housebroken and no one cleaned up after them. No one did the dishes, either, or the laundry.

“More troubling, Quita says, was that the Easons took her into their bed: ‘They call me in there to sleep … to lay in the bed with them.’ In bed, “Nicole used to be naked and stuff. It was not right to me.'”

Source: Reuters
Published: Sep 9, 2013
Length: 91 minutes (22,903 words)

In Conversation: Michael Bloomberg

Entertaining and infuriating exit interview with New York City’s mayor, in which Bloomberg defends the rich, criticizes the current mayoral candidates, and trumpets his record across crime, education and quality of life:

A common theme in the campaign to succeed you has been that you’ve governed primarily for the rich.

“I’m fascinated by these comments—and it is just campaign rhetoric—suggesting that we haven’t done enough for the poor. The truth of the matter is we’ve done a lot more than anybody else has ever done. The average compensation—income—for the bottom 20 percent is higher than in almost every other city. Of course, the average compensation for the top 20 percent is 25 percent higher than the next four cities. But that’s our tax base. If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend, because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.

“Who’s paying our taxes? We pay the highest school costs in the country. It comes from the wealthy! We have an $8.5 billion budget for our Police Department. We’re the safest big city in the country—stop me when you get bored with this! Life expectancy is higher here than in the rest of the country—who’s paying for that? We want these people to come here, and it’s not our job to say that they’re over- or underpaid. I might not pay them the same thing if it was my company—maybe I’d pay them more, I don’t know. All I know is from the city’s point of view, we want these people, and why criticize them? Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”

Published: Sep 9, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,130 words)

The North Koreans Making It Down South

More than 25,000 North Korean defectors have escaped to South Korea to build new lives for themselves, but transitioning to a foreign way of living isn’t always so easy:

“Defectors arriving in South Korea are debriefed intensively by security agents before going to the Hanawon rehabilitation complex, where they are given training in the skills considered necessary to lead a normal life in the South. Adapting can still be a struggle: many North Korean defectors are dumbfounded by the slang they encounter in the South, with its plethora of loanwords from English, while their distinctive accent instantly marks them out from the rest of the population. They are also confronted by a maze of unfamiliar technology; one charity worker tells of the humiliation of a middle-aged female defector who stood prodding helplessly at an automated teller machine while those waiting behind her sniggered impatiently.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Sep 6, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,235 words)

Reading List: Interviews with Awesome Women Authors

New reading list from Emily Perper featuring picks from Guernica, Hazlitt, YALSA, and Bitch Magazine.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 8, 2013

Christmas in Thessaloniki

The writer travels to Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece, and talks to the mayor and other residents about they city’s social and economic life. Here, he speaks with Dora Seitanidou, a percussionist and university worker in her late 30s:

“‘If we become increasingly fascist—and Greek society is becoming increasingly fascist—you have to put the blame not only on the crisis but also on the educational system. The whole system is sick. Until recently everyone wanted to work for the government in Athens, because working for the government meant security, and it also meant you didn’t have to really work—it meant you could just set up a business for yourself on the side. Security is an obsession that was passed down from grandfather to father to son; maybe it can be explained by the fact that here in Thessaloniki, we’re almost all the descendants of refugees.’ (Many of the inhabitants of Thessaloniki are the descendants of Greeks who were run out of Turkey.) ‘Take my uncle and aunt, for example; they’re not incredibly rich people, but they have five houses. They have the house that they live in, three houses they rent out, and they also have a vacation home. The Greek is obsessed with property because he sees property ownership as security. My uncle and aunt have a son who’s confined to a wheelchair; they think that those houses are going to guarantee his financial security.'”

Source: The Believer
Published: Sep 6, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,163 words)

The Secret Life of Nuns

The writer stays with the Dominican Sisters of Houston and learns about the life they lead and the work they do:

“‘I think a lot of them want some kind of sign,’ Pat says of the choice to wear the habit. ‘They want people to know.’ She also cites ‘that romanticism,’ as in (and this almost makes me blush) ‘those old nun movies, you know, all that parading around looking the same.’ The cloister was never an attractive choice for her, as it wasn’t for Carol or most of the other Houston Dominicans. ‘Some say we can be in the world but not of the world,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s not the way Jesus worked. So we like to be a little bit more involved here—and freer.’

“The active Dominican sisters who stuck it out after Vatican II—particularly of the generation now in their seventies—were drawn deeper into the social activism the order’s women are known for. It’s something I see in action over the course of the week. I accompany Sister Ceil, the Dominicans’ ‘promoter of justice,’ to a grassroots press conference announcing an immigration rally (Ceil also represents the sisters in the fight against sex trafficking, and at death-penalty vigils at the state penitentiary in Huntsville); and I visit Sister Maureen at Angela House, the transitional center she’s set up for women just exiting prison (a former cop and counselor, Maureen also works with victims of sex abuse by clergy). I also learn about the Dominican sisters’ long history of political engagement. Back in 1987, they declared the motherhouse grounds a public sanctuary for El Salvadorian refugees, potentially risking prison themselves for harboring illegal immigrants. And over the last ten years, Dominican sisters in Colorado and Michigan have done prison time for breaking into nuclear facilities and spraying them with blood in protest.”

Author: Alex Mar
Source: Oxford American
Published: Sep 5, 2013
Length: 49 minutes (12,273 words)

The Jellyfish Are Taking Over

Jellyfish are wreaking havoc on human inventions like nuclear power plans and aircraft carriers—and they’re changing the ocean permanently, according to Lisa-ann Gershwin’s book Stung!:

“Japan’s nuclear power plants have been under attack by jellyfish since the 1960s, with up to 150 tons per day having to be removed from the cooling system of just one power plant. Nor has India been immune. At a nuclear power plant near Madras, workers removed and individually counted over four million jellyfish that had become trapped on screens placed over the entrances to cooling pipes between February and April 1989. That’s around eighty tons of jellyfish.

“As Gershwin says, ‘Jellyfish have an uncanny knack for getting stuck…. Imagine a piece of thin, flexible plastic wrapper in a pool, where it can drift almost forever without sinking, until it gets sucked against the outflow mesh.’ Chemical repellents don’t work, nor do electric shocks, or bubble curtains, or acoustic deterrents. In fact even killing the jellyfish won’t work as, dead or alive, they still tend to be sucked in. And everyone from concerned admirals to the owners of power plants that lose millions of dollars with each shutdown have tried very hard to deter them.”

Published: Sep 7, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,791 words)