The Two Year Window

But a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, have shown how adversity during this period affects the brain, down to the level of DNA—establishing for the first time a causal connection between trouble in very early childhood and later in life. And they have also shown a way to prevent some of these problems—if action is taken during those crucial first two years.

The first two years, however, happen to be the period of a child’s life in which we invest the least. According to research by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, children get about half as many taxpayer resources, per person, as do the elderly. And among children, the youngest get the least. The annual federal investment in elementary school kids approaches $11,000 per child. For infants and toddlers up to age two, it is just over $4,000. When it comes to early childhood, public policy is lagging far behind science—with disastrous consequences.

Published: Nov 9, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,921 words)

Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think

Bezos: If you go back to 1999, it’s hard to remember how effervescent the bubble was. People who really didn’t have any passion for technology or the Internet were giving up their careers as doctors and mining Internet gold. And when the bubble popped, a meaningful fraction of our people left. They realized they didn’t really want to be doing this. Some of them got laid off, some of them left of their own accord. Those were not happy days. This super-valuable person you really liked leaves. So your skin gets thicker. Not just me, but all of the executives who stayed.

Source: Wired
Published: Nov 13, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,820 words)

What Would Gabby Do?

[Not single-page.] For some, reclaiming her old seat has become the sine qua non of her recovery, part of its definition. In the book she offers a simple, heartfelt declaration: “I will get stronger. I will return.” But there are other options if it takes longer than expected. One of the daydreams floating through the corridors of Washington these days is that Kelly will step in. “He’s really accomplished. And there’s the popularity that both of them enjoy. Plus his biography would make him compelling,” said an influential Democrat. Kelly was already speaking for her, endorsing candidates on her behalf, which led to media reports like “Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords support …” It was a version of Bill Clinton’s buy-one-get-one-free boast about Hillary.

Published: Nov 12, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,914 words)

Rebecca Coriam: Lost at Sea

It’s a beautiful, clear night outside on deck 4. Ahead of us are the lights of another cruise ship. A few days later – when we reach Puerto Vallarta – I spot it again. It’s called the Carnival Spirit. Forty-three people have vanished from Carnival cruises since 2000. Theirs is the worst record of all cruise companies. There have been 171 disappearances in total, across all cruise lines, since 2000. Rebecca is Disney’s first. A few days ago, Rebecca’s father emailed me: “Would like to inform you the number of people missing this year has just gone up to 17. A guy has gone missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Carnival Conquest.” By the time I get off this ship, the figure will have gone up to 19.

When someone vanishes from a cruise ship, one of the first things that happens to their family members is they receive a call from an Arizona man named Kendall Carver. “When you become a victim, you think you’re the only person in the world,” Carver told me on the phone. “Well, the Coriams found out they aren’t alone. Almost every two weeks someone goes overboard.”

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: The Guardian
Published: Nov 11, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,510 words)

Companion

[Fiction] Since she’d arrived in America and got divorced, Ilona Siegal had been set up three times. The first man was not an ordinary man but a Ph.D. from Moscow, the friend who’d arranged the date said. When Ilona opened her door, she’d found the Ph.D. standing on her front steps in a pair of paper-sheer yellow jogging shorts. He was thin, in the famished way of grazing animals and endurance athletes, with folds of skin around his kneecaps and wiry rabbit muscles braiding into his inner thighs. Under his arm he held what, in a moment of brief confusion, Ilona took for a wine bottle. But when he stepped inside she saw that it was only a litre of water he’d brought along for himself. Their plan had been to take a walk around a nearby park and then go out to lunch. But the Ph.D. had already been to the park. It wasn’t anything special, he said. He’d just gone jogging there. He didn’t like to miss his jogs, and since he’d driven an hour and a half out of his way to meet her he’d got in a run first. Ilona poured him a glass of grapefruit juice and listened to him talk about his work at Bell Labs. He reclined in his chair, his knees apart, unaware that one of his testicles was inching out of the inner lining of his shorts. Ilona stared at his face, trying not to look down.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Oct 3, 2005
Length: 30 minutes (7,651 words)

Echoes from a Distant Battlefield

The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible for how the lifetime of competition between himself and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. He had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007 all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and he had fallen for it.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 1, 2011
Length: 53 minutes (13,492 words)

Grown-ups Must Act Like Grown-ups

As I read, something quite unexpected occurred, an “aha” moment in the quiet of my kitchen, with the dog asleep on the floor and coffee cooling in a cup. I leaned against the cooktop. I realized I was writing the wrong story.

Forty-one years ago, while an exchange student living at a convent school in Belgium, I was sexually assaulted by a teacher, a married woman with an 8-month-old son. This is not a newly recovered memory. This is a story I have told repeatedly, though not publicly, for years. I needed to tell it to convince myself it was true.

I choose to tell it here, not because I wish to detract in any way from the severity of the alleged abuse that took place at Penn State but because it illustrates the power of the mind, as psychologist Richard Gartner, author of the definitive book on the subject, Betrayed As Boys, told me, “to put experience in a kind of box so that it doesn’t disturb the rest of you.” Because, while I am a reluctant citizen of the confessional states of America, my experience, which pales in comparison to the trauma described by the grand jury, illustrates the banal ubiquity of sexual abuse and its insidious aftermath.

Author: Jane Leavy
Source: Grantland
Published: Nov 11, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,421 words)

Orphans

My father and I would take an annual walk on the sandbars in Provincetown to take stock of our lives together. After feeling that he was my nemesis for years, I began to appreciate how similar we were. He became more affectionate and emotionally expressive. By the late ’80s, his own mother and father were dead, and sometimes he would burst into tears, crying that he had become “an orphan.” He began talking about mortality, predicting that he would die at the same age as his father, 69. He told me that he didn’t believe in an afterlife and would be “annihilated” after his death, which seemed like an oddly vivid choice of words, as if he was describing the obliteration of atomic particles or an entire city. But his worst fear was becoming an invalid. If I’m ever a vegetable, he would say, just pull the plug.

Source: Fray
Published: Nov 10, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,570 words)

Mille Lacs Ojibwe Fighting Violent Offenders with Banishment

To fight back against the warring gangs and violent offenders, the tribe has revived an ancient form of punishment: banishment. Legally called “exclusion,” it forbids the offender from entering the reservation’s trust land for at least five years.

When it was used centuries ago, banishment was a thinly veiled death sentence. Without the rest of the tribe’s support, an exiled member rarely survived for long in the wilderness.

But modern banishment means something entirely different.

“Where are they banishing them to?” asks Clyde Bellecourt, an Ojibwe civil rights leader. “They just come down to Minneapolis.”

Source: City Pages
Published: Nov 9, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,846 words)

Why Americans Won’t Do Dirty Jobs

In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans and a do-rag to shield his head from the sun. He had lost his job prepping food at Applebee’s, and after spending a few months looking for work a friend told him about a Facebook posting for farm labor.

The money isn’t good—$2 per basket, plus $600 to clear the three acres when the vines were picked clean—but he figures it’s better than sitting around. Plus, the transportation is free, provided by Jerry Spencer, who runs a community-supported agriculture program in Birmingham. That helps, because the farm is an hour north of Birmingham and the gas money adds up.

Durr thinks of himself as fit—he’s all chiseled muscle—but he is surprised at how hard the work is. “Not everyone is used to this. I ain’t used to it,” he says while taking a break in front of his truck. “But I’m getting used to it.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Nov 9, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,414 words)