Let’s Eliminate Sports Welfare
Cities are slashing school budgets to pay for professional sports stadiums, and the NFL is still a nonprofit. An argument for cutting off all public funding for professional sports across the U.S., which could save taxpayers billions:
“Consider stadium subsidies. When Kubla Khan built his stately pleasure dome above a sunless sea, he did not strong-arm the Xanadu County Board of Directors into funding the project by threatening to move to Los Angeles. His mistake. He wouldn’t last five minutes as an American sports owner. According to Harvard professor Judith Grant Long and economist Andrew Zimbalist, the average public contribution to the total capital and operating cost per sports stadium from 2000 to 2006 was between $249 and $280 million. A fantastic interactive map at Deadspin estimates that the total cost to the public of the 78 pro stadiums built or renovated between 1991 and 2004 was nearly $16 billion. That’s enough to build three Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Or fund, in today’s dollars, 15 Saturn V moon rocket launches — three more than the number of launches in the entire Apollo/Skylab program. It’s also more than what Chrysler received in the Great Recession-triggered auto industry bailout ($10.5 billion), and bigger than the 2010 GDP of 84 different nations. How does this happen? Simple. Team owners ask for public handouts and threaten to move elsewhere unless they get them, pitting cities against in each other in corporate welfare bidding wars — wars rooted in the various publicly granted antitrust exemptions that effectively allow sports leagues to control and maintain a limited supply of teams to be leveraged against widespread demand.”
Reply to a Dead Man
[Fiction] A man receives a letter from his deceased brother:
‘My brother hired you to give me a message after he was dead?’
Harding smiled and nodded.
‘He died six and a half months ago,’ I said. ‘What took you so long?’
‘His wish was for us to execute his instructions not less than half a year after his demise.’
‘Is this some kinda legal thing?’
‘It is a simple agreement between FRC and your brother,’ Lance Harding said, maintaining an aura of imperturbable patience. ‘Often individuals wish to pass on knowledge outside of the rubric of wills and other legal formats. Some leave a spoken message, others might wish to pass along a note or a small package.’
‘Seth didn’t have much,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t have anything to hide.’
‘We all have something to hide, Mr. Vaness. Either that or something is hidden from us.’
Longreads Member Exclusive: Call It Rape
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This week's Longreads Member Exclusive comes from Margot Singer, whose essay "Call It Rape" was published in the Fall 2012 issue of The Normal School. Jeffery Gleaves, an editorial assistant for the magazine, writes:
"Located at California State University at Fresno, The Normal School is a biannual magazine of literary intrigue that is distributed throughout the U.S. and Canada. Through etymological and personal history, Margot Singer's 'Call it Rape' examines the very complicated position of living in a world where gender power dynamics seem to pervade every part of our lives. The essay seems to tangle, more than untangle, sex and violence. It messes with your head and leaves you feeling something real, something complicated and messy. Good essays are fueled by the contradictions of everyday living; and essays like 'Call it Rape' threaten to stick with you and unsettle you, to keep you awake at night."
Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she directs the Creative Writing program.
Longreads Best of 2012: Andrea Pitzer
Andrea Pitzer is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov.
The Way Life Should Be: The House of E. B. White
A writer goes searching for the Maine home of E.B. White:
“I knocked on the front door. No one answered so I knocked again, harder. There was a barn just off the side of the house, so as Andrew and the dogs watched wide-eyed from the car, I tiptoed around towards it. That’s when a dog that wasn’t mine barked loudly and rapidly and I became painfully aware of the fact of what I was doing and how quickly I’d been discovered: I was trespassing, and not just trespassing, but trespassing in Maine.
“‘I’m coming out,’ someone called. My heart skipped. He said something else, words I couldn’t make out over the dog. I felt like a jerk, and I stood there feeling that way for what felt like twenty minutes before a tall, owl-faced man pushed open the screen door. I mumbled some kind of jumbled explanation and speedy apology. The man frowned. I kept rambling and after I mentioned I was a writer, he turned and motioned Andrew to get out of the car.”
Homies: What Happened to Everyone I Went to Middle School With?
Two friends meet up in Bangkok and talk about what became of their childhood friends from the wealthy Seattle neighborhood where they grew up:
“Tim keeps naming mutual acquaintances, and they keep having the same dire fates. There’s Pete Stanton, who in seventh grade had a mustache and was the biggest 13-year-old on the planet. When he was a sophomore at Grant, Pete stabbed a homeless guy under a bridge in a Seattle park, and is serving a life sentence.
“‘I guess he said in court that the homeless guy owed him money,’ Tim says. ‘Even at 15, we were like, damn, this fool needs to rethink his business plan.’
“Then there’s Chaewon. I don’t know his last name and I don’t even know if that’s the right way to spell his first name. He had a face that looked like he was being hung from the ceiling by his hair, and he was always smiling a gummy smile, even when he was slamming his chest up against yours or calling you a faggot. He was always surrounded by five or six other kids our age who looked so similar to each other they can only be called henchmen.
“Chaewon’s in jail now too.”
Longreads Best of 2012: Emily M. Keeler
Emily M. Keeler is a writer and the founding editor of Little Brother Magazine.
The Poetry Audition
[Fiction] Two brothers coming of age:
“Bahram and Jamshed were dressed alike as children because their father believed it to be the best way of preventing sibling rivalry. Rather than make them better friends though, their identical wardrobes led to some petty confusion. The brothers often wore each other’s clothes by mistake. In family photographs of the time Bahram appeared scowling in shorts that hung down to his knees, while Jamshed smiled bravely in collars that nearly choked him.
“Their sartorial semblance did not however extend to their character. Jamshed was a brash, bold, willful young boy. Bahram possessed the timidity of a provincial boy, a flaw that his mother could hardly tolerate. Jamshed was sent to a Cadet College, where he thrived, whereas it was a struggle to send Bahram to the posh day school a few streets from their home.”
A Eulogy for #Occupy
Wired’s Occupy Wall Street correspondent reflects on her year of covering the movement:
“Standing next to an older officer after one eviction, telling him what I’d seen and listening to him worry about how he was going to send his kids to college, I overheard the police talk to each other. Of the protestors they kept saying the same thing, the same three words to each other and walked away: ‘They’ll be back.’ Some said it with scorn, lips curled. Some said it with fear, some excited for the action. Some said it with the watery voices of drowning hope: ‘They’ll be back.’
“Please, let something matter again, let something change.
“The policing of protest in America makes it clear that protest has become mere ritual, a farce, and that, by definition, it becomes illegal if it threatens to change anything or inconvenience anyone. In time, all the police announcements came to say the same thing to me. ‘You may go through your constitutional ritual,’ they intoned, ‘but it must stop before anything of consequence happens.’ We must, above all, preserve everything as it is.”
My Parents Adopted a Murderer
From Doree Shafrir’s Best of Longreads picks: A woman looks back on her father’s abuse—and how their relationship changed when her family adopted a teen who had killed his adoptive parents:
“He is sending these virtual photo bombs because I have stopped speaking to him. Three months ago, my sister and I mutually agreed that we were breaking off all contact — divorcing him, disowning him — and by extension, our mother, who apparently just doesn’t have it in her to defy him. We did this over email (admittedly, perhaps not the best way to do it, but you try verbally telling a parent it’s over — it’s hard, y’all) and held our breath. After an initial barrage of angry emails, which devolved into apologetic emails, we’ve arrived at the photo bomb stage. No actual email, just the photos.
“The thing is, though, those happy little children in the photos? They’re nothing but ghosts, tiny spirit-girls haunting old Polaroids. When you are used to pretending that everything is ok, that you are a normal family with loving parents, you develop a really excellent false smile. You can do it on command, like a trained dog. But if we’re going to get real, if we’re to bring any semblance of verisimilitude into this, let’s look at the true pics: my father drunk and vicious, smashing up a bedroom suite, or beating the dog, or whipping my sister and me with a belt, or getting blind drunk and forcing us into the car, where he’d drive and scream at us for hours, or, in a series of nightmarish images, like some flipbook from hell, let’s see my father wrap his hands round my mother’s throat and strangle her. See me and my sister punching and kicking at his legs, trying to stop him? See our little teeth biting ineffectually at his pant cuffs?”
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