Mind’s Eye
A look at how a cofounder of the Home Depot started the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta, Ga., which has been named an autism center of excellence by the National Institutes of Health. The center has hired a scientist from Yale who is looking at how eye-tracking technology can revolutionize autism treatment:
“Within ten months of arriving, Klin and his team competed with fifty-five other autism centers around the country for a National Institutes of Health award. Only three, including Marcus, won. Named an autism center of excellence, Marcus received an $8.3 million grant, much of which will be put toward continuing to research differences in ‘social-visual and vocal engagement’ among autistic infants. The center has built four eye-tracking labs in the last two years, where babies like Ansley Brane—who is low risk—can be tested for signs of autism. (The center’s fiscal health has improved too, though it still needs patrons: Since Children’s took over, operating losses have dropped from $3.2 million to $1.3 million per year.)
“‘It’s a very simple equation,’ says Klin. ‘You identify early, you treat early, you help these children fulfill their promise. It’s good for everybody. If you don’t do that, then we are stuck with the kinds of incredible treatment programs we have in the center, which I hope to put out of business one day.'”
Academy Fight Song
“The higher education mantra is possibly the greatest cliché in American public life.” Thomas Frank argues that greed has taken over at most universities in the U.S., causing costs to spiral out of control, administrators to proliferate, and professors’ work to be outsourced to instructors with no benefits or job security:
“We don’t pause to consider that maybe we’ve got the whole thing backwards—that the big universities expanded in their heyday to keep up with industry demand, not to build the middle class. Instead, what everyone agrees on is this: higher education is the industry that sells tickets to the affluent life. In fact, they are the only ones licensed to do this. Yes, there are many colleges one can choose from—public, private, and for-profit—but collectively they control the one credential that we believe to be of value. Everything about them advertises it. The armorial logos, the Gothic towers, even the names of the great colleges, so redolent of money and privilege and aristocracy: Duke and Princeton and Vanderbilt. If you want to succeed, you must go to them; they are the ones controlling the gate.”
How Family & Football Overcame Tragedy
A community in Texas grapples with the deaths of two high school students:
“The Friday night before that Sunday at Possum Kingdom Lake, Coppell played an away game at Hebron High School in Carrollton. Jacob went up to Solomon and said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You haven’t gotten any sacks all season!’ The two had worked out a signature move: Solomon, after a sack, would bring his palms together and bow to the crowd. The very next play, Solomon got a sack and took his bow. ‘Jacob went crazy,’ Solomon says. ‘He chest-bumped me and said, ‘That was the sickest celebration!’ He was screaming and laughing and so pumped up.’
“Cam McDaniel, Gavin’s older brother, a running back at Notre Dame, was the first to reach Solomon on the phone that Sunday afternoon to give him the terrible news. ‘What should I do?’ asked Solomon, shaken. Cam said, ‘Solly, pray. And just keep the faith.’ The 6-foot-3, 260-pound athlete hung up the phone and fell to the floor.
“As word spread, CHS students flocked to the one place they felt closest to Jacob—Buddy Echols Field, where hundreds held a prayer vigil Sunday night.”
The Last Ride of Legendary Storm Chaser Tim Samaras
Storm chaser Tim Samaras catapulted to fame for his scientific research studying tornadoes. The story of Samaras, his storm crew, and the tornado he couldn’t outrun:
“Samaras had an uncanny ability for finding twisters and for escaping them with his life. But the monster hiding in the rain that day was something he had never encountered before. What neither Robinson nor Samaras could have known was that in seconds it had grown from a mile to 2.6 miles wide, making it the largest tornado ever documented. And it was tearing toward them across the wide-open wheat fields at highway speed. The difference between escape and incomprehensible violence was measured in hundreds of yards on Reuter Road. And while Robinson never looked back, his rear-facing dash camera did, capturing the last living images of a legend.”
Longreads Member Pick: The Offline Wage Wars of Silicon Valley
For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from Next City’s Forefront magazine, by journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz. Aronowitz looks at the story behind the minimum wage increase in San Jose, which jumped to $10 per hour from $8 per hour after the city’s residents voted for the increase last November—”the single largest minimum-wage jump in the nation’s history.”
Picture Their Hearts
The writer on her parents’ interracial marriage during the Civil Rights movement:
“She remembered only a time when a taxi driver refused to pick them up. They were with her parents, and my grandfather was outraged by the slight. A Jewish Ukrainian immigrant, my grandfather held high ideals of justice in his adopted land. He took down the taxi’s medallion number and found a police officer to stand with them until they could hail another cab. A few months later, he took the offending driver to court. My mother couldn’t recall what had come of the charge.
“‘That’s it?’ I said.
“My mother’s eyes narrowed. She looked surprised by my disappointment.
“‘I mean, it must have been hard dealing with what people thought,’ I said.
“She didn’t hesitate in replying: ‘If we’d cared what other people thought, we wouldn’t have gotten married.'”
College Longreads Pick: ‘School’s Out Forever,’ by Allison Pohle, University of Missouri
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
Familiar Faces
On “super recognizers” — a small group of individuals with the ability to recognize nearly every face they have ever seen. Super recognizers are being studied to see if their recognition skills can be taught to other people:
“Police officers also may draw upon perceptional ability to ID suspects. Josh P. Davis, a psychologist at the University of Greenwich in London, is studying a group of police officers in London to see how perceptional ability aids in recognizing faces pulled from closed-circuit camera images. Davis began studying the officers for super recognition abilities after hearing of their near-superhuman perception abilities to match faces from such images.
“Only months after setting up his program to study the officers, riots broke out across London. A core group of 20 officers were able to ID more than 600 suspects from grainy and incomplete images collected by security cameras. One officer alone accounted for 190 identifications, pulling from memory faces he had seen before. In many cases, rioters wore heavy disguises — using scarves, bandannas, and hooded sweatshirts to protect their identities — leaving only the eyes visible. Tests of the 20 officers confirmed at least five are super recognizers, Davis says.”
Reading List: What Happens to Whistleblowers After They Speak Out
From Deep Throat to Thomas Drake: Julia Wick selects five classic stories from The New York Times, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair and more.
‘Like Being in Prison with a Salary’: The Secret World of the Shipping Industry
An excerpt from Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything on the current state of the shipping industry, which often gets underreported despite it driving our global economy:
“Yet the invisibility is useful, too. There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route. Look at the backside of boats and you will see home ports of Panama City and Monrovia, not Le Havre or Hamburg, but neither crew nor ship will have ever been to Liberia or Mongolia, a landlocked country that nonetheless has a shipping fleet. For the International Chamber of Shipping, which thinks ‘flags of convenience’ too pejorative a term (it prefers the sanitized ‘open registries’), there is ‘nothing inherently wrong’ with this system. A former U.S. Coast Guard commander preferred to call it ‘managed anarchy.'”
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