For Richard Family, Loss and Love

A family forever changed by the Boston Marathon bombings, one year later:

Bill, still in pain from an unsuccessful operation to repair his ruptured eardrums, continued to struggle making restaurant reservations for four and found himself instinctively grabbing five plates for dinner, having to put one back.

After a while, they were happy to see neighbors, but it wasn’t always comfortable. Some weren’t sure what to say to the Richards and felt strange talking about themselves, at times apologizing for carping about things that seemed so trivial by comparison, like a backache.

But Bill and Denise were buoyed by a steady flow of good will.

Author: David Abel
Source: Boston Globe
Published: Apr 13, 2014
Length: 54 minutes (13,683 words)

Putin’s Long-Term Strategy: The Eurasian Union

Neyfakh explores Vladimir Putin’s pursuit of a Eurasian Union, and the roots of Eurasianism:

Putin famously once said the breakup of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” and has also reportedly promised that the Eurasian Union would be based on the “best values of the Soviet Union.” But to say the project is simply an effort to reassemble the USSR is crude and incorrect, say Russia analysts. Instead, Putin’s efforts should be seen as a realization of an entirely different, and much less familiar idea called Eurasianism—a philosophy that has roots in the 1920s, and which grew out of Russia’s longstanding identity crisis about whether or not it should strive to be a part of Europe.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Mar 19, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,311 words)

The Botmaker Who Sees Through the Internet

A profile of Darius Kazemi, who is turning Twitter bots into an art form: He’s created dozens of automated programs whose purposes can run the gamut from cultural commentary to complete nonsense:

Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jan 28, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,258 words)

Why Russia’s Drinkers Resist AA

Alcoholism remains a national epidemic in Russia, but a treatment program like Alcoholics Anonymous has failed to take hold in the country. Leon Neyfakh explores why:

A further obstacle to AA’s growth in Russia is something more philosophical: At a basic level, its premise of sobriety through mutual support just doesn’t make sense to a lot of Russians. In the past, this has taken the form of anti-Western suspicion—“What are the Americans trying to get out of this?” is a question Moseeva used to hear regularly. But more fundamentally, the group-therapy dynamic collides with a skepticism about the possibility of ordinary people curing each other of anything. “The idea that another drunk can help you is asinine to most Russians,” said Alexandre Laudet, a social psychologist who has researched Russian alcoholism.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Nov 4, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,526 words)

Walter Willett’s Food Fight

Harvard professor Walter Willett is one of the most influential nutritionists in the world whose studies tracking hundred of thousands of health professionals have resulted in data shaping what we eat and how it affects our health:

“He’s tasting an almond-and-grape gazpacho when someone brings over a woman named Cindy Goody and, by way of introduction, says, ‘Walter, she’s trying to do good work at McDonald’s.’

“He phrases his greeting in the form of a question, ‘Why can’t you make a good veggie burger?’

“Goody, the senior director of nutrition for the 14,000 US outlets, appears taken aback. ‘We tried it,’ she says tentatively.

“‘Aw, that was a setup!’ Willett complains, waving his hand. He tasted one many years ago in an airport McDonald’s, and it was so awful he couldn’t finish it. ‘I’m convinced you guys made it bad to turn off people from veggie burgers.'”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jul 28, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,420 words)

Same-sex Couples in the South Left Out of Trend

Buoyed by marriage equality victories on the coasts, same-sex couples are fighting for equality rights in the South:

“Not only are gay couples in Mississippi not allowed to marry, they cannot legally adopt — even though a quarter of same-sex couples here are raising children together, the highest percentage of any state, according to the Williams Institute.

“Nor are gays and lesbians in Mississippi protected from being fired or otherwise discriminated against by employers for their sexual orientation. (A federal employment protection bill is pending in Congress.) Some employers have barred gay workers from participating in the marriage-license campaign, saying it would be ‘bad for business.’

“Yet, couples like Welch and Lockwood refuse to move to a more liberal environment. This is home. They know the battle for equality in the South is unlikely to be won politically — at the ballot box or through state lawmakers — or through state courts. All they can do is share their personal stories in hopes that, on some level, their families, co-workers, neighbors, even the clerk at the courthouse will come to understand.”

Author: Tracy Jan
Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jul 14, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,527 words)

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.'”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Apr 27, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,206 words)

The Story Behind Mitt Romney’s Loss

Campaign aides on both sides deconstruct where the Republican candidate went wrong:

“It was two weeks before Election Day when Mitt Romney’s political ­director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his ‘better ground game,’ could lose the key state of Ohio or the election. The race is ‘unmistakably moving in Mitt Romney’s direction,’ the memo said.

“But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called ‘state of the art’ crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day.

“To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong.”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Dec 24, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,599 words)

How to Fix America from Below

A Yale law professor argues that we’re not doing enough to empower the minority voices in America—and change should start at the local level:

“The ideas Gerken is known for first took shape, appropriately enough, as a disagreement. Several years ago, not long after she’d been hired as a young professor at Harvard, she sat in on a pair of lectures by Cass Sunstein, the influential law scholar who was then a professor at the University of Chicago. What she heard Sunstein say, in brief, was that societies in which dissenting voices are encouraged tend to be more prosperous than ones where they are not. Gerken sat in the back of the hall with a notepad and listened, writing furiously. “If you had looked back,” Gerken says, “you would have wondered, why is that junior professor sitting there scribbling like a crazy person? Is she transcribing this speech? But it was just the opposite.”

“In fact, Gerken was writing down all the ways in which she thought Sunstein was wrong. What Sunstein didn’t seem to realize, she wrote, was that in order for minority groups to have real influence in politics—in order for them to make meaningful contributions to the way society works—they had to have more than the right to make their voices heard. They had to have the power to actually do things their way.”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Oct 7, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,636 words)

Who Will Get PTSD?

Can we discover the impact of war on a soldier before they’re sent out to fight? And what does that mean for ethics and liability when it comes to addressing PTSD?

“Brian had spent part of his career at nearby Fort Hood, and in 2007 he and Telch approached Army leaders at the base about a study. Telch wanted to put soldiers through a battery of tests before they deployed, have them fill out online journals during their tour, and then follow them for a time after they’d returned to the States.

“Fort Hood agreed. Telch ran his tests and, once the soldiers had come home and he could analyze his results, found something intriguing: If soldiers exhibited certain physical and emotional characteristics before deployment, they were more likely to suffer from PTSD after it. As Brian Baldwin would have hoped, it appears as though PTSD can be predicted.”

Author: Paul Kix
Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jun 3, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,395 words)