Search Results for: American Prospect

Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: Monica Potts on the Homeless Families of 'The Weeklies'

The Weeklies

Monica Potts | The American Prospect | March 2013 | 29 minutes (7,360 words)

Monica Potts is a senior writer for The American Prospect.

I did the reporting for ‘The Weeklies,’ about homeless families living in a suburban hotel outside of Denver, Colorado, a year ago. I lived with in the Ramada Inn alongside the weeklies during December 2012, and five of the families there shaped my story. Two of them are still living in hotels.

In May, the Ramada Inn was upgraded and converted into a Super 8 Motel. It became more expensive. Bonnie, Andy, and their son Drew, the main subjects of the story, moved into an Extended Stay closer to Drew’s school in Denver. Bonnie and Andy have been telling me since last spring that they’re doing renovation work on a rental property owned by a family friend, and that they will move in when it’s done. They don’t have a firm date, however.

After the story was published, I heard from a lot of people who said they saw school buses in their towns picking up school kids in hotel parking lots. Schools nationwide have reported a rise in student homelessness: some states have seen it double. The housing crash and the recession that followed had the odd effect of creating both vacant housing and a homelessness crisis, neither of which is likely to be solved soon.


Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

***

Photo: dno1967b, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Time Jason Zengerle and a Gorilla Stalked Michael Moore for Might Magazine

Photo by Jimmy Hahn

Jason Zengerle | Might magazine | 1997 | 19 minutes (4,685 words)

 

Introduction

Thanks to our Longreads Members’ support, we tracked down a vintage story from Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine. It’s from Jason Zengerle, a correspondent for GQ and contributing editor for New York magazine who’s been featured on Longreads often in the past. Read more…

Longreads Guest Pick: Christine Kim on 'What's Killing Poor White Women?'

Christine Kim is a civil rights advocate studying at Duke University School of Law.

My favorite longread of the week is ‘What’s Killing Poor White Women,’ by Monica Potts, in The American Prospect. Health care is on the national stage. From Obamacare to health care costs to new state-run health exchanges, it seems that each news day is packed with analysis of our governmental strategy on health care. The stories of the individuals and minority groups who are suffering and—in this story—passing away without clear explanation do not often make it to the front page. Monica Potts discusses the alarming drop in life expectancy of low-income white women with humility, candidness, and understanding. Her story makes the research and data accessible all while reminding the reader to remember the women being affected. My close friend recently lost his mother suddenly without any warning or explanation. While the article is not entirely consoling, it places our grief into a greater context and made me realize that more information may be revealed to us in the future through further study and research.

•••

Get the Top 5 Longreads free every week

“The Weeklies.” —Monica Potts, American Prospect

From our Top 5 Longreads of the Week.

Longreads Member Pick: Jason Zengerle's First Assignment for Might Magazine

image

This week, we’re thrilled to feature Jason Zengerle, a contributing editor for New York magazine and GQ who has been featured on Longreads many times. Our Member Pick is Jason’s 1997 story on Michael Moore for Might magazine: “Is This Man the Last, Best Hope for Popular Liberalism in America? And, More Importantly, Does He Have a Sense of Humor?”

Jason explains:

This was the first story I wrote that could qualify as a long read—and it certainly wasn’t by choice. I’d just graduated from college and was doing an internship at The American Prospect, but I spent most of my time daydreaming about being an intern at The New Republic, which hadn’t seen fit to hire me. Hoping to change their mind, I’d routinely pitch TNR freelance stories, and one day I got the idea to write a takedown of Michael Moore: I sent in at a tightly-argued, perfect-for-TNR 1,000 words; TNR sent back its customary 20-word rejection. That would have been the end of it, but I showed the piece to my friend Todd Pruzan, who offered to show it to his friend Dave Eggers, who was then editing a little magazine called Might.

It turned out that Eggers didn’t share my dim opinion of Moore, but he did see the potential for a fun stunt. He said Might would be willing to take my 1,000 words arguing that Moore was a hack, if I’d be willing to embed them in a much longer shaggy-dog story of trying to track down and meet with Moore himself. By now, of course, the idea of pulling a Roger & Me on Michael Moore is pretty played-out, but at the time, I don’t think anyone had thought of it yet. And so on MLK Day weekend of 1997, I took a Peter Pan bus from Boston to New York, rented a gorilla suit for my unemployed actor friend Morgan Phillips, and set off on our little adventure.

The rest is history. By the end of that year, Might was out of business. Eggers was writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and on his way to becoming the voice of a generation. And I was an intern at TNR.

Read an excerpt here.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Photo by Jimmy Hahn

Elizabeth Warren has energized Democrats in Massachusetts during her 2012 Senate race against Republican incumbent Scott Brown, but has also faced many difficulties as a first-time candidate. The race remains very close:

Lydon brought up an anecdote he’d heard: Warren, while she served on the bankruptcy panel during Clinton’s presidency, had known the first lady, Hillary Clinton. Clinton had supported Warren’s work and opposed changes to bankruptcy law. But later, when Clinton was in the Senate, she’d turned around and voted for changes Warren opposed. Lydon quoted what Warren had said at the time: ‘If she can’t take the heat, who can?’ Later, Lydon asked Warren if she thought she could withstand the same pressures Hillary had sometimes caved to, or whether she’d just join the old boy’s club of the Senate. ‘Nobody’s fooled about what I stand for,’ she started to answer. He interrupted: ‘No one was fooled by what Hillary stood for.’ He was trying to raise, in a roundabout way, a concern that Warren’s fans had worried about since the race with Brown had begun: Was it possible to enter politics without being compromised? Warren knew what he was getting at. ‘Oh, I think there’s a real question about what people run for,’ she replied. She added that she got into the race to uphold her principles, ‘not because this was a great career move for me.’ The implication was that other politicians, including Clinton, were in it for themselves. It was a pretty harsh dig at a Democrat admired by many in Massachusetts, whether or not Warren meant it to be. Like Obama on occasion, she was trying to sound self-effacing but ended up being self-aggrandizing.

“The Political Education of Elizabeth Warren.” — Monica Potts, The American Prospect

More from the Prospect

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The American Prospect, Outside Magazine, New York Magazine, The Awl, McSweeney’s, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Krysti Lesch.

"My So-Called Ex-Gay Life."

What it was like for a teenager to go through “ex-gay” therapy—and how the movements associated with such practices have fallen apart:

After our initial  meeting, I spoke with Nicolosi weekly by phone for more than three years, from the time I was 14 until I graduated high school. Like a rabbi instructing his student in understanding the Torah, Nicolosi encouraged me to interpret my daily life through the lens of his theories. I read in one of Nicolosi’s books, Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, that he tries to position himself as a supportive father figure, typifying the sort of relationship that he believes his patients never had with their own father. I indeed came to see him this way.

We mostly talked about how my damaged masculine identity manifested itself in my attractions to other boys. Nicolosi would ask me about my crushes at school and what I liked about them. Whether the trait was someone’s build, good looks, popularity, or confidence, these conversations always ended with a redirect: Did I wish I had these traits? What might it feel like to be hugged by one of these guys? Did I want them to like and accept me?

“My So-Called Ex-Gay Life.” — Gabriel Arana, The American Prospect

Featured Longreader: Jaime Fuller, assistant web editor at The American Prospect. See her story picks from Washington Monthly, New York Review of Books, Esquire, plus more on her #longreads page.

In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a “force for good” — even for teenagers — this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States. “There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed,” said Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”

Across the country, the approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”

“Teaching Good Sex.” — Laurie Abraham, The New York Times Magazine

See also: “Exit Strategy.” The American Prospect. May 26, 2009