Taken for a Ride: Temp Agencies and ‘Raiteros’ in Immigrant Chicago
An investigation into the underworld of labor brokers or “raiteros” in Chicago, who are used by some of the nation’s largest temp agencies and charge temp workers significant fees:
“The system provides just-in-time labor at the lowest possible cost to large companies — but also effectively pushes workers’ pay far below the minimum wage.
“Temp agencies use similar van networks in other labor markets. But in Chicago’s Little Village, the largest Mexican community in the Midwest, the raiteros have melded with temp agencies and their corporate clients in a way that might be unparalleled anywhere in America — and could violate Illinois’ wage laws.
“The raiteros don’t just transport workers. They also recruit them, decide who works and who doesn’t, and distribute paychecks.”
Writers’ Second Thoughts
Authors revisit and annotate their own famous work:
“J.K. Rowling had only agreed to annotate a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on condition that it was a genuine first edition, from the first print run in 1997 of only 500 copies, 300 of which had gone to libraries. Gekoski had to find one of the remaining 200. ‘So she was quite surprised,’ he said cheerfully, ‘that two days later, I came up with a copy and said, “Let’s go ahead.”‘
“It had cost him £20,000 (he will be reimbursed after the sale). But now, “freely annotated” by its author, with more than a thousand words “on the process of writing, editorial decisions and sources of inspiration …” along with 22 illustrations, it is likely to go for a great deal more.
“Sotheby’s has released a short paragraph to give a flavour of what’s inside – though what she describes is so familiar, it’s already part of JKR mythology. ‘I wrote the book … in snatched hours, in clattering cafés or in the dead of night … The story of how I wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is written invisibly on every page, legible only to me. Sixteen years after it was published, the memories are as vivid as ever as I turn these pages.'”
Happy 10th Birthday, The Believer!
In celebration of its 10th anniversary, The Believer has just published a handful of classic stories for the first time on the web, and they were nice enough to share them with the Longreads community. Enjoy.
A Drug War Informer in No Man’s Land
Luis Octavio López Vega, who worked for both the Mexican military and as an informant to the DEA, is now in hiding:
“The reserved, unpretentious husband and father of three has been a fugitive ever since, on the run from his native country and abandoned by his adopted home. For more than a decade, he has carried information about the inner workings of the drug war that both governments carefully kept secret.
“The United States continues to feign ignorance about his whereabouts when pressed by Mexican officials, who still ask for assistance to find him, a federal law enforcement official said.
“The cover-up was initially led by the D.E.A., whose agents did not believe the Mexican authorities had a legitimate case against their informant. Other law enforcement agencies later went along, out of fear that the D.E.A.’s relationship with Mr. López might disrupt cooperation between the two countries on more pressing matters.”
Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.
Deinstitutionalization moved thousands of mentally ill people out of hospitals and into the prison system. States are cutting mental-health funding. A look at America’s mental health care crisis:
“‘Homelessmentallyilldeinstitutionalized was one noun in the media at the time,’ says SAMHSA’s Roth, who is the source of the oft-cited data point that a third of America’s homeless people are seriously mentally ill (helping to rebut the misconception then that they all were). In 1984, Dr. John A. Talbott, then president of the American Psychiatric Association, apologized for the association’s role in the disaster. ‘The psychiatrists involved in the policymaking at that time certainly oversold community treatment,’ he said, ‘and our credibility today is probably damaged because of it.’
“‘Think of it as haircuts,’ says Roth, who watched deinstitutionalization unfold in her 37 years as chief of evaluation and research at the Ohio Department of Mental Health. ‘In the age of the great gothic castle on the hill, mentally ill patients had everything taken care of. Health care, sleeping, eating, etc. When they got out, they were supposed to have everything. They got Medicare and Medicaid, but [policymakers] didn’t think about food. And haircuts. Clothes. How to find a place to live.’ How to do laundry; how to grocery shop. How to ensure people who need meds take them. What to do with people who had too many behavioral problems to avoid being evicted six times in a row.”
Longreads Guest Pick: Meaghan O’Connell on Ted Thompson and the Making of a Novel
Meaghan O’Connell is the editor-in-chief of meaghano.com.
If This Was a Pill, You’d Do Anything To Get It
A Medicare experiment is facing possible shutdown, despite its proven effectiveness. The secret? It’s nurses making frequent house calls to those with chronic diseases:
“But Health Quality Partners, with its emphasis on continuous nurse-to-patient contact, did work. Of the 15 programs, four improved patient outcomes without increasing costs. Only HQP improved patient outcomes while cutting costs. So Medicare extended it again and again — now it’s the only program still running under the demo. But Medicare has notified Coburn that it intends to end HQP’s funding in June.
“Medicare’s official explanation is carefully bureaucratic. ‘The authority that CMS had to conduct this specific demonstration, which predated the health care law, did not allow us to make the program permanent and limited our ability to expand it further,’ says Emma Sandoe, a spokeswoman for the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Services. ‘As we design new models and demonstrations, we are integrating lessons from this experience into those designs.'”
Out in the Great Alone
The writer follows the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska in a Super Cub plane:
It turned out that Martin Buser, the musher whom I’d watched start the race, had come up with a strategy that was blowing people’s minds. He wasn’t stopping. Conventional Iditarod tactics call for frequent voluntary rest periods in addition to the two eight-hour breaks and one 24-hour break mandated by the rules. Iditarod sled dogs are bred for stamina, but they need food and sleep. Mushers, who will be almost unimaginably sleep-deprived by the time they reach Nome in any event, need at least token periods of semi-unconsciousness. You know the story of the tortoise and the hare? Yeah, the hare definitely wins the Iditarod. Slow and steady is not the ticket in the long-distance dog-mushing game. You want a lot of naps punctuated by periods of hellish subzero hustling.
Buser, though? He ran from Willow to the Yentna checkpoint and stopped for just 21 minutes. Then he ran to Skwentna and stopped for half an hour. He ran to Finger Lake, in the snow country just before the mountains, and stopped for 26 minutes. Then he ran practically all the way over the Alaska Range on no rest. Through Rainy Pass on no rest. When he reached Rohn, just before 10 on the morning of Monday, March 4, he’d driven his dogs nearly 200 miles in less than 20 hours, and he hadn’t stopped for longer than it took to have a vet eyeball them at the checkpoints. It was demented, was the feeling on the trail. What the pound-sign-percent-asterisk-dollar-sign was the guy thinking?
Carjacking Victim Recounts His Harrowing Night
The story of the 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur who was carjacked following the Boston Marathon bombing:
“The man rapped on the glass, speaking quickly. Danny, unable to hear him, lowered the window — and the man reached an arm through, unlocked the door, and climbed in, brandishing a silver handgun.
“’Don’t be stupid,’ he told Danny. He asked if he had followed the news about the previous Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings. Danny had, down to the release of the grainy photos of suspects less than six hours earlier.
“’I did that,’ said the man, who would later be identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev. ‘And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.'”
My Mom
The Korean-born writer wrestles with her relationship with her mom—and how to tell her how she feels:
“I then did what any normal kid would do and yelled and yelled about how embarrassing it was to have her at school with me during lunch of all times. She presented me with a sack of cheeseburgers that I could give out to my friends. I refused the damp bag and screeched about how it was so cheap that she didn’t spring for bright red boxes with toys for them as well. I made her take the burgers back with her. If I were an actress and had to think of something sad to make me cry in a scene, I would think about this moment. This and the time I was 13 when I kicked my mom across a room and ran away for two days because she tried to ground me — for breaking curfew after my friend Jacinta stole money from her dying grandmother so we could rent out a nightclub and write the names of those blackballed on the sign outside. For the record: I don’t know why people have kids.”
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