The Case for Reparations

Coates traces the history of slavery in America, in all its forms, and how reparations can signal “a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal”:

We must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 21, 2014
Length: 63 minutes (15,836 words)

Project Wizard

Richard Nixon’s brazen plan to redeem himself after Watergate:

Now Nixon’s preoccupation, even obsession, after being forced from office was to become a respected figure. It wasn’t for him to live out the rest of his life in disgrace. He was determined to become someone people listened to—a senior statesman, a sage. And the best way to be considered a sage, Nixon understood, was to establish one’s credentials as an expert in foreign policy, a man known to world leaders. Domestic policy didn’t cut it the same way: Lectures and articles on education or the environment didn’t attract the Brahmins and the business leaders Nixon wanted to attract, didn’t occupy nearly as much space on the stage. No splashy trips.

In accordance with the Wizard plan, the former president first would write another memoir (because statesmen wrote memoirs), both to make money and to give his own version of events. Money wasn’t a new preoccupation but now Nixon feared expensive trials (until the pardon) and had just paid a heap in back taxes rather than risk impeachmment on the matter. Nixon’s book sold astonishingly well. To get some questions behind him and make still more money, Nixon also struck a lucrative deal for a series of interviews with the British talk-show host David Frost, which aired in 1977. Nixon was paid a whopping $600,000 for signing and was to earn from each sale of the interviews, an odd arrangement. On Watergate, which the deal held to one of the four sessions, Nixon wasn’t nearly as revealing as the play and movie Frost/Nixon had it, but interest in him was sufficiently strong and he said just enough—“I let down my country”—to draw great interest and line his pockets.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 15, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,919 words)

The Private Lives of Public Bathrooms

The public collides uncomfortably with the private in the bathroom as it does nowhere else. How psychology, gender roles, and design explain the distinctive way we behave in the world’s stalls:

The vulnerability and exposure of using a urinal seems to create the need for additional social boundaries, in place of even “flimsy” physical ones. A famous, though ethically questionable, study from 1976 found that invading this socially agreed-upon bubble of personal space made it much more difficult for men to pee. To discover this, one researcher hid in a bathroom stall and watched men at the urinals through a periscope, timing the “delay and persistence” of urination when a confederate came into the bathroom and stood right next to or one urinal removed from the unknowing participant. The closer the confederate was, the longer the delay before the man was able to go, and the less time he peed overall. Whether he would have been able to go at all had he known someone was spying on him through a periscope, no one can say.

Author: Julie Beck
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Apr 16, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,520 words)

Suffering Children and the Christian Science Church

The unwillingness of many Christian Science parents to seek help from physicians for their critically ill children has led to many painful and unnecessary deaths and, increasingly, to legal actions that have become burdensome to the Church and its members:

On May 5 Detective Edwin Boehm, of the Paradise Valley Police Department, came to the house; he believes himself to have been the first person other than her parents to see Ashley in months. When I reached Boehm recently and asked him if he remembered Ashley King, he said, “You work on a case like that, you don’t forget it.” He said it had taken some time before he “gained entry,” because Catherine King at first refused to answer the door. He described seeing Ashley: “I knew first thing looking at her that she was dying.” He couldn’t see her leg, because “she had a pillow on it under the covers–she was hiding it.” He would eventually tell a grand jury, “She was extremely white, ashen colored–to be specific, death color.” The next day Child Protective Services received a court order allowing them temporary custody of Ashley for the purpose of medical examination.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Apr 1, 1995
Length: 46 minutes (11,542 words)

Life of a Police Officer: Medically and Psychologically Ruinous

The intensely challenging job of law enforcement is linked to many health issues. Erika Hayasaki met a former officer who tried to protect her high school friend and learned the effect her death had on him:

Police officer Brian Post recognized the 16-year-old girl lying face down in the grass at the Whispering Pines apartment complex in Lynnwood, Washington. He had gotten to know her in recent weeks, helping her obtain a restraining order against her abusive ex-boyfriend. Now, here was Sangeeta Lal, unconscious, with two bullets in her chest.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 14, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,679 words)

My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Poor

After veteran reporter Joseph Williams lost his job, he found employment in a sporting-goods store. In a personal essay, he recalls his struggles with challenges millions of Americans return to day after day:

My plunge into poverty happened in an instant. I never saw it coming.

Then again, there was no reason to feel particularly vulnerable. Two years ago, I was a political reporter at Politico, and I spent my days covering the back-and-forth of presidential politics. I had access to the White House because of my reporting beat, and I was a regular commentator on MSNBC. My career had been on an upward trajectory for 30 years, and at age 50 I still anticipated a long career.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 11, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,914 words)

Oscar Night in Hollywood, 1948

The great Raymond Chandler writing about the Academy Awards, and the motion picture industry as whole, for The Atlantic Magazine in March 1948:

Show business has always been a little overnoisy, overdressed, overbrash. Actors are threatened people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a desperate gaiety. Some of these qualities prolonged beyond a strict necessity have passed into the Hollywood mores and produced that very exhausting thing, the Hollywood manner,which is a chronic case of spurious excitement over absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, and for once in a lifetime, I have to admit that Academy Awards night is a good show and quite funny in spots, although I’ll admire you if you can laugh at all of it.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 1, 1948
Length: 15 minutes (3,820 words)

The Dark Power of Fraternities

A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems—and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 19, 2014
Length: 60 minutes (15,228 words)

Our Numbered Days: The Evolution of the Area Code

Long-distance digits long ago shed their monetary worth, but they gained something else in its place: cultural value.

I grew up in Carmel, smack in the middle of the new code region; my first cell phone number—the only cell phone number I have ever had—bears that 831 preface. I have held on to those three digits through happily-multiple changes of location (New Jersey, New York, Boston, Washington) and through unhappily-multiple losses of handset. The powers that be—hardware salespeople, cell service representatives—have, at one time or another, tried to force me into a 609 and a 917 and a 617; each time, I have resisted. Because I am not, fundamentally, a 609 or a 917 or a 617. I am not even, my current residence notwithstanding, a 202. I am an 831, wherever I may be in body, and will remain an 831 until they pry those three otherwise totally meaningless digits out of my cold, dead iPhone.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 13, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,200 words)

The Secret Life of Grief

The writer on losing his mother to cancer, and on the science of grieving:

My mom died on July 18, 2013, of pancreatic cancer, a subtle blade that slips into the host so imperceptibly that by the time a presence is felt, it is almost always too late. Living about 16 months after her diagnosis, she was “lucky,” at least by the new standards of the parallel universe of cancer world. We were all lucky and unlucky in this way. Having time to watch a loved one die is a gift that takes more than it gives.

Psychologists call this drawn out period “anticipatory grief.” Anticipating a loved one’s death is considered normal and healthy, but realistically, the only way to prepare for a death is to imagine it. I could not stop imagining it. I spent a year and a half writing my mother a goodbye letter in my head, where, in the private theater of my thoughts, she died a hundred times. In buses and movie theaters, on Connecticut Avenue and 5th Avenue, on crosswalks and sidewalks, on the DC metro and New York subway, I lost her, again and again. To suffer a loved one’s long death is not to experience a single traumatic blow, but to suffer a thousand little deaths, tiny pinpricks, each a shot of grief you hope will inoculate against the real thing.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 3, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,466 words)