The Pros and Cons of Culinary Education
The writer investigates the financial realities of attending culinary school, and the hard life of a working chef:
“Chef Brad Spence wouldn’t go culinary school if he had to do it all over again. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, the chef/partner of Philadelphia’s Amis moved to New York City, where he made $8 or $9 an hour. Even though he was getting help from his dad to pay off the student loans, Spence says he “could barely live” between the low salary, high rent, and regular loan payments. And that’s the norm for New York City line cooks. Dirt Candy’s Amanda Cohen says that generally cooks can expect a raise of $1 a year, meaning one can hope to be making $20 an hour 10 years into a career. That’s still not very helpful for someone who needs to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in culinary school debt.”
What Does It Take to Stop Crips and Bloods From Killing Each Other?
How community members like Cynthia Mendenhall, a former gang member, have teamed up with police and other leaders to negotiate peace in L.A.’s toughest neighborhoods:
“Causality is slippery, especially when it comes to crime. The L.A.P.D.’s decision to deploy 30 additional officers to Watts’s three largest housing projects has undoubtedly contributed to the area’s improvement. Research has shown that ‘hot-spot policing’ — flooding high-crime areas with police officers — effectively reduces crime without simply displacing it. But the department’s efforts in Watts go beyond ‘cops on dots.’ In recent years, the L.A.P.D. has been conducting an unusual experiment in community policing in Watts. Its centerpiece, the Community Safety Partnership, is the department’s collaboration with a group of residents known as the Watts Gang Task Force. Every Monday morning, community leaders meet with top police commanders to discuss what’s happening in the Watts gang world — who’s feuding with whom, where criminal investigations stand, which are the issues residents are worried about. What makes the initiative unusual is that many of the task force’s participants have close ties to street gangs. Some, like Mendenhall, are former gang leaders. Others are the mothers and grandmothers of notorious gang leaders past and present.”
Longreads Member Exclusive: The Faithful Executioner (Excerpt), by Joel F. Harrington
For this week’s Longreads Member Pick (sign up here to receive it), we’re excited to share an excerpt from The Faithful Executioner, a book by Joel F. Harrington, Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
So Many Kinds of Longing: An Interview with Judy Blume
The beloved author on her work, early battles with school censorship, and whether she ever felt pressure to tone down the topics addressed in her books for young adults:
“I read that you voluntarily removed a scene about masturbation from the original manuscript of Tiger Eyes. The movie seems to restore this scene in a sneaky way, by showing [the protagonist] Davey in the shower in close-up, smiling. Can you talk about the decision to remove that scene from the book, and to include it in the movie?
“Oh, everyone reads that. That story hurt my editor terribly, and I’d never want to hurt him. [The manuscript originally] said: ‘For the first time, I explored my body.’ It was about Davey allowing herself to feel again after her father dies. There’s nothing explicit about it. My editor did say, ‘We want to have this read by as many readers as possible,’ so I took it out. Do I have regrets? I don’t know. The question was: How important was this to the character? My editor agreed that this was psychologically important to the character coming into the world again, to feel again. Does it have much to do with whether the book is good at all? No. It would have made a big difference with Deenie.”
Last Song for Migrating Birds
The writer investigates the killing of migrating songbirds in the Mediterranean and why there is little being done to prevent hunters from shooting the birds for sport:
“‘It’s become fashionable, and my friends talked me into it,’ the hunter explained to me, somewhat sheepishly. ‘I’m not a real hunter—you can’t become a hunter at 40. But being a new one, and feeling good about owning a licensed weapon, a very good powerful gun, and never having killed any birds before, it was fun at first. It was like when summer comes and you feel like jumping in the ocean. I would go out on my own and drive up into the hills for an hour. We don’t have well-identified protected areas, and I’d shoot whatever I could. It was spontaneous. But it gets less joyful when you think about the animals you’re killing.’
“‘Yes, what about that?’ I said.
“The hunter frowned. ‘I feel very uncomfortable with the situation. My friends are saying it now too: ‘There are no birds; we walk for hours without seeing any.’ It’s really scary. At this point I’d be happy if the government put a stop to all hunting for two years—no, five years—to let the birds recover.'”
The Other Person Is You
Can one find clarity at a Kundalini Yoga retreat? A first-person account from the Summer Solstice Sadhana Celebration:
“Japji was written sometime in the 16th century by Guru Nanak, the first of the ten Sikh gurus. It was written in Gurmukhi. It takes about twenty minutes to recite and what it mostly says is A. it is good to chant God’s name and B. you can’t comprehend how great God is so you need to chant his name and C. doing so is the only way you will really make any headway in life, so don’t bother trying to figure life out, really, it’s too complicated, so you should just chant God’s name.
“I don’t believe in God, really, or maybe I do. Either way, metaphorically, that all makes a lot of sense to me.”
College Longreads Pick: ‘Magazine Junkies,’ by Nolan Feeney, Northwestern
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick comes from Nolan Feeney of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern.
The Father You Choose
The writer on the man who became his father figure:
“A few years ago I was working on a book project, and the deadline was crushing me. I hadn’t given myself enough time to write, and I was panicking, so I left Jessica and the kids in New York and moved out to Princeton with Dieter for a month, to race the clock. I quickly established a routine of working day and night, and without a word being said, Dieter made himself my twenty-four-hour valet. Every morning as I awoke, he’d bring me a cup of coffee. ‘Would you like to see the menu?’ he’d ask. ‘Or shall we just have the chef whip up something for you?’ If I fell asleep on the couch, he would cover me with a blanket. It was the fall, and every morning he and I would take a walk in the changing colors, and we would talk through the day’s writing, and every couple days, Dieter would read pages for me and tell me what he thought.
“He knew that I’d given up on my own father, and he looked on me with a kindness for which I was not at all prepared, that it seemed he had been waiting for just this moment to bestow. Sometimes it was almost too much for me to bear. As he made us dinner, he would ask me about my life and say such encouraging things with love and without qualification, and I would look at him and think, Are you real?“
Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever Created
In the early 1990s, magician duo Penn & Teller decided to create “Desert Bus,” a satirical video game for the Sega CD game console that required players to spend hours driving a bus through Arizona and Nevada:
“Penn, Teller, and the game’s publisher, Absolute Entertainment, planned a lavish prize for any player that scored a hundred points, a feat that would require eight hundred continuous hours of play: a real-life trip from Tucson to Las Vegas on a desert bus carrying showgirls and a live band.
“‘But by the time the game was finished, the format was dead,’ said Teller. ‘We were unable to find anybody interested in acquiring the game.’ Imagineering went out of business, and Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors was never released. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995.”
The Curious Case of Nashville’s Frail Sisterhood
During the Civil War, the Union Army put more than 100 prostitutes onto a boat leaving Nashville, as a way to prevent troops from contracting syphilis and gonorrhea:
“It took a week for the Idahoe to reach Louisville, but word of the unusual manifest list had reached that city’s law enforcement. Newcomb was forbidden from docking there and ordered on to Cincinnati instead. Ohio, too, was uneager to accept Nashville’s prostitutes, and the ship was forced to dock across the river in Kentucky—with all inmates required to stay on board.”
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