This Is Our House
In Haiti, the country’s first little league team is inspiring hope for a young generation:
“There are typical boyhood illusions drifting through the minds of those riding in the truck through the streets of Port-au-Prince. There are would-be rappers, of course—young Eminems and 50 Cents, little Lil Waynes, and in a few years, tiny Drakes are sure to arrive in the slums of Tabarre. There are most certainly one-day-Messis and -Balotellis clinging to this shaky ride. And yes, today, there are future ball players, too. There is at least one young man who sleeps next to Jose Bautista’s bat and dreams of slugging a home run out of the Rogers Centre a world away from Haiti. A home run for his mom, perhaps. And another one for Tabarre and its Tigers.”
Longreads Member Pick: The Last Freeway, by Hillel Aron
This week’s Longreads Member Pick comes recommended by Longreads contributor Julia Wick: It’s “The Last Freeway,” a story by Hillel Aron, published in Slake in 2011, about the construction of a freeway interchange and a judge whose decisions shaped its scope.
Rhumba
The writer and her husband, who live in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, deal with a rattlesnake problem:
“Nineteen-year-old Faith comes in the door after a bit, hunting her camera. ‘There’s a snake coiled in the yard,’ she says, her voice remarkably calm. Little eight-year-old C.C. marches to the living room, stands in front of my snake-phobic mom, and announces: ‘There’s a big snake in the yard, Grandma. We think it’s a rattling one.’
“Daddy is up from his easy chair and out the door like a shot. I hurry around trying to locate my phone to take pictures while the rest of the family troops out to see it—except for my mother, of course, who wouldn’t go out there on a dare.
“By the time I reach the porch, the rattler has uncoiled and begun crawling away from the house toward a flat nest of sandstone slabs and boulders beside the pond path. I catch a glimpse of it gliding rapidly through the dead grass, its diamond markings mottled, but distinct. Its size is almost beyond belief: even winding S-like that way, the rattler is longer and thicker than any I’ve ever seen.”
College Longreads Pick: ‘Without Rules: The Untold Story of the Johnny Bright Incident’ by Kyle Fredrickson, Oklahoma State University
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
The Social Life of Genes
How our environment, our sense of support, and our feelings of loneliness can activate or turn off specific genes in our bodies that affect things like how we fight or heal wounds. An examination of the “social science of genetics”:
“Scientists have known for decades that genes can vary their level of activity, as if controlled by dimmer switches. Most cells in your body contain every one of your 22,000 or so genes. But in any given cell at any given time, only a tiny percentage of those genes is active, sending out chemical messages that affect the activity of the cell. This variable gene activity, called gene expression, is how your body does most of its work.
“Sometimes these turns of the dimmer switch correspond to basic biological events, as when you develop tissues in the womb, enter puberty, or stop growing. At other times gene activity cranks up or spins down in response to changes in your environment. Thus certain genes switch on to fight infection or heal your wounds—or, running amok, give you cancer or burn your brain with fever. Changes in gene expression can make you thin, fat, or strikingly different from your supposedly identical twin. When it comes down to it, really, genes don’t make you who you are. Gene expression does. And gene expression varies depending on the life you live.”
The Woman Who Counted Fish: Conservation, Domestication and the Future of the Animal Kingdom
From the opening chapter of Jon Mooallem’s book Wild Ones, as recommended by Maria Popova, a look at the lengths we go to preserve the animal kingdom:
“At the furthest, most mundane reaches of this almost incomprehensibly sprawling program to protect the fish, the government has even hired ordinary Americans—retirees, housewives, at least one moonlighting concert clarinetist—to work as census takers in a cramped office inside the dam, several stories down, staring through an underwater window to count each and every fish that swims past the glass, an average of 4.5 million fish every year. On the morning I visited, a rail-thin woman named Janet was sitting at an old-fashioned metal desk, six hours into her eight-hour shift, scrunching her eyes with unshakable concentration as fish dribbled by the window one at a time, or swarmed through in rapid-fire mobs. Janet frequently dreams about counting fish, she told me. Once, she sat straight up in bed next to her husband and screamed, ‘Did you see the size of that one?'”
Mind Over Misery
A profile of psychiatrist David Burns, who wrote Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, “one of the most successful psychotherapy books ever written” that has helped transform the field of psychiatry:
“Equally surprising: Burns tells the therapists he wants them to fail. Time and again. They can afford to do this because—unlike when he was a psychiatric resident in the 1970s and not one of his patients improved appreciably over an entire year—he now has 50 techniques they can try to cause ‘dramatic change’ in patients. ‘Right away. Not in five or six years.’ Burns wants them to fail at technique after technique until they find the ones that work for each patient.
“To some of the therapists, it sounds too good to be true. Burns reassures them that the techniques he’s about to teach, once dismissed by the mainstream, are becoming the mainstream.
“I know what he says is true. I’ve read his books and used his methods and have experienced the relief of having my own acute depression evaporate in an instant.”
Massive Resistance in a Small Town
After the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned the mandate that “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional, Prince Edward County in Virginia closed its public schools to resist integration. The story behind the small town that resisted integration and the legal battles that ensued during the Civil Rights movement:
“After the 1954 Brown ruling, there were efforts across the South to block integration. In Virginia, the governor closed public schools in several cities to prevent them from integrating. In 1959, the courts ruled that the closings were unconstitutional, and those schools reopened—at the same time, Prince Edward County refused to integrate and locked its doors.
“For five years, Prince Edward schools remained closed while legal challenges bounced between courts. During that time, most white children attended the new private school created by segregationist leaders and funded by state tuition grants and private donations. About 1,700 black and lower-income white students tried to find schooling elsewhere or stayed home, waiting.”
12 Minutes of Freedom in 460 Days of Captivity
In August 2008, Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan were kidnapped and held hostage in Somalia. They spent 460 days in captivity. This is the story of their escape attempt, which is excerpted from Lindhout’s book A House in the Sky:
“One afternoon, a light rain began to dapple the concrete wall across the alleyway from my window. The sky darkened to a powdery gray. A wind gusted, rushing through trees I couldn’t see, causing the rain to spray sideways on the wall.
“‘God, it’s beautiful,’ a voice said, clear as day, articulating my exact thought at the exact moment I had it.
“The voice wasn’t mine. But it was a voice I knew. ‘Nige?’
“The voice said, ‘Trout?’ Trout was a nickname I had since high school.
“For a shocked second, we were both silent. He was maybe 10 feet away from me at the window in his room. Because the alleyway was narrow and the tin roof of our house overlapped slightly with that of the house behind it, the acoustics were perfect.”
Reading List: Travel and Self-Discovery
New reading list from Emily Perper featuring picks from Emily Anderson, April Xiong, Jamaica Kincaid, and Armin Rosen.
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