College Longreads Pick: ‘Silenced Voices’ by Tyler Jett, University of Florida
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick comes from Tyler Jett, who wrote this story for the University of Florida’s Independent Florida Alligator.
What the Hell Are You Doing?!
Tess Vigeland spent 11 years at her dream job at Marketplace. And then she decided to leave for an uncertain future:
“You guys — I had fans. Yeah. I had fans. People who would recognize me in elevators just by my voice. Perfect strangers who thought I was awesome and had the coolest job in the world. Who doesn’t love that?!
“And after 11 years of that… 11 years at Marketplace… I walked away.
“What. The Hell. Are you doing.”
Video Pick: The Detroit Bus Company
A mini-documentary on one resident who took matters into his own hands after the city killed its light-rail plans. Plus: Detroit stories from the Longreads archive, from Mother Jones, GQ, Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica.
Longreads Member Exclusive: Something More Wrong, by Katy B. Olson
This week’s Member Pick comes from The Big Roundtable, a new site for narrative journalism founded by Columbia University professor Michael Shapiro. And they’re giving Longreads Members early access to a brand new story, which won’t go live on their site until next week.
“Something More Wrong,” by Katy B. Olson, is an in-depth look inside the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York.
Why Everybody Loves Tesla
How the electric car maker managed to survive, and even thrive, while pursuing new opportunities with a growing network of battery charging stations around the U.S.:
“While Tesla was figuring out how to keep its cars from exploding, it also had to come up with ways to get them to go farther and recharge faster. Higher-end versions of the Model S can go up to 300 miles on a charge, which has helped separate Tesla from rival vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf, which run about 75 miles before needing more juice. Musk has hinted that Tesla has a 500-mile battery pack in the works. At the company’s solar-powered Supercharger stations, Tesla owners can replenish about 200 miles of range in 20 minutes for free. (Most electric cars take hours to recharge.) Or customers can opt for the battery swap, which will cost about what they’d pay for a tank of gas, and be back on the road in 90 seconds. ‘The only decision that you have to make when you come to one of our Tesla stations is do you prefer faster or free,’ Musk said at the charging event. The company expects to have 100 stations along major highways in the U.S. and Canada by yearend, with more to follow.”
A Life-or-Death Situation
Margaret Pabst Battin, an expert in bioethics and right-to-die issues, comes to grips with the same questions in her own life, when her husband Brooke Hopkins is in a bicycling accident that leaves him quadriplegic:
“By the time Peggy arrived and saw her husband ensnared in the life-sustaining machinery he hoped to avoid, decisions about intervention already had been made. It was Nov. 14, 2008, late afternoon. She didn’t know yet that Brooke would end up a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down.
“Suffering, suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death — these were subjects she had thought and written about for years, and now, suddenly, they turned unbearably personal. Alongside her physically ravaged husband, she would watch lofty ideas be trumped by reality — and would discover just how messy, raw and muddled the end of life can be.”
Jahar’s World
An investigation into Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s troubled past:
“Yet he ‘never raised any red flags,’ says one of his history teachers, who, like many, requested anonymity, given the sensitivity of the case. Her class, a perennial favorite among Rindge students, fosters heated debates about contemporary political issues like globalization and the crises in the Middle East, but Jahar, she says, never gave her any sense of his personal politics, ‘even when he was asked to weigh in.’ Alyssa, who loved the class, agrees: ‘One of the questions we looked at was ‘What is terrorism? How do we define it culturally as Americans? What is the motivation for it – can we ever justify it?’ And I can say that Jahar never expressed to us that he was pro-terrorism at all, ever.’
“Except for once.
“‘He kind of did, one time to me, express that he thought acts of terrorism were justified,’ says Will. It was around their junior year; the boys had been eating at a neighborhood joint called Izzy’s and talking about religion. With certain friends – Will and Sam among them – Jahar opened up about Islam, confiding his hatred of people whose ‘ignorance’ equated Islam with terrorism, defending it as a religion of peace and describing jihad as a personal struggle, nothing more. This time, says Will, ‘I remember telling him I thought certain aspects of religion were harmful, and I brought up the 9/11 attacks.’
“At which point Jahar, Will says, told him he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Channel B
A new mother gets a glimpse into the life of another new mom—via her baby monitor. (The essay will be featured in the forthcoming Best American Essays 2013, edited by Cheryl Strayed):
“For the first few months after my son was born, I called him The Baby, or sometimes just Him with a capital H, huge proper nouns to illustrate how completely he took over my life. Is he eating, not eating? Pooping, not pooping? What color is the poop, how long ago was the poop, did I mark the poop on the spreadsheet? I had spreadsheets. I had stuff—white noise CDs and magnetic blocks and this super high-tech video monitor with a remote wireless screen and night vision, which made The Baby glow electric green in the dark like he was a CIA target. It was a little unnerving, actually. It had two frequencies, an A channel and a B channel, in case you had two kids in separate rooms, and what’s interesting about this is that one of my neighbors must have owned this same monitor, because on channel A, I saw my baby, and on channel B, I saw someone else’s.”
The Book of Roma
Choral director Catherine Roma is going into prisons to help inmates find their voice:
“This choir isn’t her first in a prison. She started the UMOJA Men’s Chorus (Swahili for unity) two decades ago at the Warren County Correctional Institution near Lebanon as part of a Wilmington College educational program. Under Roma’s leadership, that group has done well, recording three CDs and becoming the Cinderella story of the World Choir Games last summer. Roma approached Interkultur, the German organization that puts on the international event, about allowing UMOJA to compete, even though as a prison choir the men couldn’t perform in public. Interkultur agreed, sent judges to the close-security lockup to hear the inmates sing, and ended up awarding the choir gold diplomas (top honors) in the gospel and spiritual categories—a moment that, according to Der Offizielle Blog Von Interkultur, left observers ‘unable to dam up their tears.'”
The Gates Effect
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is spending millions to change the way we think about higher education. It includes potential changes on how students receive federal aid, and projects that aim to deliver a college degree that costs no more than $5,000 a year. But is it a good thing—and what really needs fixing?
“In higher education, many leaders and faculty members voice concerns about the Gates foundation’s growing and disproportionate impact. Many private-college presidents, in particular, feel shut out of discussions about reform. Yet few of those critics speak out in public, and some higher-education leaders, researchers, and lobbyists were reluctant to talk on the record for this article. The reason? They didn’t want to scotch their chances of winning Gates grants.”
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