The Death and Life of Chicago
An upsurge of abandoned, foreclosed homes in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods has inspired an activist group called the Anti-Eviction Campaign to fix up the properties and provide them to homeless families:
“The idea for the Anti-Eviction Campaign actually came from South Africa. Toussaint Losier had traveled there to study the direct-action tactics of an organization called the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. Its members had been putting their bodies in front of homes to block evictions, building their own squatter settlements on unused land. So J. R. and Toussaint (who got to know each other when the chairman of the South African group visited Cabrini-Green) started a Chicago chapter together. J. R. realized they didn’t need to build lean-tos in Chicago’s black community. They had all the empty homes they required. ‘We want to do what Roosevelt did,’ he said of the home takeovers. ‘If the government won’t provide public housing for the people, the people must provide it for themselves.'”
Ancient Gay History
Rich remembers Clayton Coots, a man who was his “surrogate parent,” and also one of the many closeted men and women who died before the cause of gay rights made such huge leaps in America:
“This history is not ancient. My own concern about its preservation comes not from some abstract sense of social justice but from my personal experience. I grew up in the Washington, D.C., of the sixties, where the impact of racism was visible everywhere, front and center in my political education. But gays—what gays? No one I knew ever saw them or mentioned them. Not until the eighties—when, like many Americans of that time, I was finally forced by the rampaging AIDS crisis to think seriously about gay people—did I fully recognize that a gay man had been my surrogate parent in high school, when I needed one most. Not that I ever thought to thank him for it.”
The Generator Society
In the 1970s, 19 families made their homes on Bald Head Island, one of North Carolina’s barrier islands:
“They went for jogs and spotted sunning alligators and foxes that seemed to wonder who they were and why they were there. They watched loggerhead sea turtles trudge up onto the sand to lay their eggs and then used mesh wire to protect the nests from hungry raccoons. They picked up the prettiest shells.
“They gathered frequently for cocktails, cherishing ice cubes, calling them ‘Bald Head diamonds.’
“They played golf in spikes and nothing else just because they could.
“Or so goes the story.
“So many stories.”
Stay Out of Syria!
The writer takes a closer look at the headlines, and sees the same people making the same case about Syria that they did for Iraq:
“On April 26, for example, a story by Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt was entitled ‘White House Says Syria Has Used Chemical Arms.’ The factual substance of the article was ambiguous, and its headline might more accurately have read: ‘Chemical Weapons Used in Syria. US Uncertain of Source.’ Again, on May 7 the headline delivered a judgment: ‘White House Sticks to Cautious Path on Syria.’ This would not, in most papers at most times, have qualified as a front-page story at all. That there has been no change of policy is hardly news unless a great many sensible persons are expecting a change. The headline implied that the common sense of the well-informed now favors armed intervention; yet the paper had carried the day before, in a corner of page 9, a Reuters dispatch of some significance. This was a report of a statement by a qualified investigator, Carla Del Ponte of the UN commission of inquiry on Syria, who flatly contradicted the rumors of the use of sarin by the Assad government: ‘This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.’ UN officials commented that there was ‘no conclusive proof’ about the use of chemical weapons. Astonishingly the Reuters story was neither analyzed nor incorporated in the lead Times story of the day’s events.”
Longreads Member Exclusive: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis
This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains.
College Longreads Pick of the Week: ‘Freefall Into Madness,’ from Students at Fresno State
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher will be helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. The inaugural pick was reported and written by Fresno State journalists Sam LoProto, Damian Marquez, Angel Moreno, Jacob Rayburn, Brianna Vaccari, Liana Whitehead and their professor Mark Arax.
This Is How the NRA Ends
Despite recent setbacks, there’s reason to believe that the gun-control movement is growing, and holding politicians accountable for their ‘no’ votes:
“But then something unexpected happened. Some of the senators who’d voted ‘no’ faced furious voters back home. Even before Erica Lafferty, the daughter of murdered Sandy Hook Elementary principal Dawn Hochsprung, confronted New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte at a particularly tense town hall, Ayotte’s disapproval rating in the state had jumped from 35 to 46 percent—half the respondents said her ‘no’ vote made them less likely to support her. In Pennsylvania, which has the second-highest concentration of NRA members in the country, the bill’s Republican co-sponsor, Pat Toomey, saw his approval reach a record high. One of the country’s best-known gun-rights advocates, Robert Levy, said the NRA’s ‘stonewalling of the background-check proposal was a mistake, both politically and substantively.'”
A Mother Helps Son in His Struggle With Schizophrenia
A week in the life of a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia and his mother who is caring for him:
“It has been 10 years since he began thinking his classmates were whispering about him, four years since he started feeling angry all the time, and two years since he first told a doctor he was hearing imaginary voices. It has been 20 months since he was told he had a form of schizophrenia, and 15 months since he swallowed three bottles of Benadryl and laid down to die, after which he had gotten better, and worse and, for a while, better again, or so Naomi had thought until an hour ago, when they were in the therapist’s office and Spencer said that his head was feeling ‘cloudy.’
“‘Wait —’ she said, interrupting. ‘You described it as a cloudy feeling?'”
In the Crosshairs
The story of Chris Kyle, a decorated sniper who wrote a best-selling memoir about his life as a SEAL. Kyle’s attempt to help a troubled veteran ended in tragedy:
“After Routh arrived at the Dallas V.A., Jodi and Jen visited him in the evenings. A week later, he did not seem much better. He was taking several medications, and Jodi felt that he could hardly carry on a conversation. She urged the doctors to keep him hospitalized, at least until he was stable.
“Ignoring Jodi’s request, the V.A. discharged Routh the next day; according to Jodi, the doctors shared this news over the phone, saying that Routh was an adult and wanted to leave. When she drove to the V.A. to pick up her son, he was already out, sitting in the lobby. She brought him home and told him about Chris Kyle, whom she had just met. ‘I said, ‘This guy has a big reputation. He’s a really good man and he really wants to help you.’ And then he’s like, “Mom, that is so awesome,” ‘ Jodi recalled. ‘Eddie was happy. He could feel that somebody wanted to help him, somebody that understood better than me.'”
Xmas in Hawaii
In 1982, author Linda Spalding served as a juror on Maryann Acker’s murder trial. She believed Maryann was innocent, but was dismissed from the jury after arriving late to the courthouse one morning. Acker ended up being convicted and has spent the next 30 years in prison. Spalding, whose feeling of guilt hasn’t subsided in the intervening years, writes about time, memory, and her quest to help Maryann regain her freedom after three decades.
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