We Brought Tomorrow Until Today Was Gone

Frank Bill usually traffics in fiction that hits with the revelatory power of fact—the stories of his debut book, Crimes in Southern Indiana, have the power of bristling frontline reports on the havoc methamphetamines have wreaked on the American heartland. But here Frank steps out from behind his fiction to tell us about a time in southern Indiana when meth was but an exotic treat that came in the mail to only the most enterprising drug dealers. The intervening years would bring all variety of twisted darkness to Corydon, Indiana, but as Frank makes clear here, even in that more innocent time, those looking for trouble—and even those running away from it—had a pretty good chance of finding it.

Author: Frank Bill
Published: Sep 15, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,512 words)

Kind

(Fiction) Years later, Ann saw one of the daughters. She ended up seated beside her on a flight from New York to Chicago, the odds who knows how many million to one. As strangers will in transit, they began talking. Ann learned that the woman taught high school English and was just now trying her hand at playwriting, that she had never married but had lived with someone off and on for years. After a while, exchanging names seemed beside the point. Ann wondered why this woman seemed familiar, but now that she was seventy-seven, almost everyone she met reminded her of someone she used to know. Still, still there was something about her: an expression that was both discerning and compassionate, those pale eyes of no discernible color, those graying curls poised to spring from their clip.

Source: Missouri Review
Published: Jan 1, 2007
Length: 26 minutes (6,596 words)

My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.

Published: Sep 17, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,263 words)

At Huawei, Matt Bross Tries to Ease U.S. Security Fears

For all its recent success, Huawei’s accession to the global scene has been awkward. Its corporate culture tends to come off somewhere between xenophobic and absurd to local critics. Sample headline published last year in the Times of India: “Huawei Technologies Bans Indians in India.” (Huawei says there’s no discrimination at its Indian facilities.) More pressing, though, is the reputational baggage tied to the company’s founder. Pundits wonder whether China’s premier technology company, a privately held organization run by an ex-deputy director of the army’s engineering corps and former delegate to the Communist Party’s national congress, can overcome suspicions among politicians, security officials, and would-be customers outside China. “Huawei is a large company with state-owned interests involved, and also Chinese military linkages,” says Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor at the Center for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “So one of the concerns is what these guys are up to.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Sep 17, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,324 words)

Greetings from Helen

(Featured Longreader Justin Heckert’s pick of the week.) Every September, Helen, a town of 750 people clustered on two square miles in a mountain valley, braces to accommodate up to 300,000 guests over the course of this uber-party. Steins will be hoisted; spindly, pale thighs will chafe under lederhosen; and someone inevitably will fall and sprain an ankle while doing the ungainly “chicken dance,” providing onlooking buddies with enough snickering material for another Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Other spectacles just as memorable, but not likely to be remembered clearly, will unfold in the tavern parking lots, including fist-fights, heaving expurgations, and acts of urgent carnal release—sometimes all involving the same two people. In a strange hybrid of highland folkways, Helen is where gemütlichkeit—the arm-linking, swaying-together fellowship of the Alps—abets the hell-raising volatility of Appalachia.

Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 14 minutes (3,717 words)

The Teenage Brain

These studies help explain why teens behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday. Along with lacking experience generally, they’re still learning to use their brain’s new networks. Stress, fatigue, or challenges can cause a misfire. Abigail Baird, a Vassar psychologist who studies teens, calls this neural gawkiness—an equivalent to the physical awkwardness teens sometimes display while mastering their growing bodies. The slow and uneven developmental arc revealed by these imaging studies offers an alluringly pithy explanation for why teens may do stupid things like drive at 113 miles an hour, aggrieve their ancientry, and get people (or get gotten) with child: They act that way because their brains aren’t done! You can see it right there in the scans!

Published: Sep 16, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,055 words)

Trust Issues

Thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.” The mossy stone walls and ivy-covered brickwork of Hartwick College were a ticking time-bomb of compounding interest—a very, very slowly ticking time bomb. One suspects they’d have rather gotten a new squash court.

Published: Sep 15, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,730 words)

Offline: Teacher Loses Job for Pushing Boundaries IRL and on the Web

A day after he deleted his Facebook account last month, Terry Braye — exiled public school teacher — called SF Weekly in a panic. “I’m in trouble,” he said. “They may arrest me.” It wouldn’t be the first time. More than a year earlier, the 61-year-old music instructor had been arrested for accusations that he’d had improper contact with female students who played in the guitar band program he built at Visitacion Valley Middle School. Braye denied the accusations, but finally pleaded no contest in May to two nonsexual misdemeanor charges. He’s banned from contacting anyone from the district, especially his former students. For Braye, that’s no easy feat.

Source: SF Weekly
Published: Sep 13, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,050 words)

The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills

Something was killing Hmong men in their sleep, and no one could figure out what it was. There was no obvious cause of death. None of them had been sick, physically. The men weren’t clustered all that tightly, geographically speaking. They were united by dislocation from Laos and a shared culture, but little else. Even House would have been stumped. Doctors gave the problem a name, the kind that reeks of defeat, a dragon label on the edge of the known medical world: Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome. SUNDS. It didn’t do much in terms of diagnosis or treatment, but it was easier to track the periodic conferences dedicated to understanding the problem.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 14, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,078 words)

Jon Stewart and the Burden of History

Stewart isn’t just being a bully here. He is being disingenuous, and he knows it. Worse, he’s tapping into the collective fantasy without knowing it. He’s the gunslinger saying he’s going back to the farm while at the same time putting notches in his belt. More precisely, he’s the presumptive Edward R. Murrow saying that he’ll go back to comedy once he cleans up journalism. But he can’t go back. He can’t go back to the pleasures of fart jokes and funny faces — the pleasures of comedy — because he’s experienced the higher pleasure of preaching to weirdly defenseless stiffs like Jim Cramer. He’s saying once again that he’s outgrown comedy and is no longer a comedian. But he’s not saying what he actually is, because then he’d be judged. And Jon Stewart, to a degree unique in the culture, exists outside the realm of judgment.

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 15, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,393 words)