Search Results for: California

Silicon Chasm

Longreads Pick

Charlotte Allen (who graduated from Stanford) examines the massive income inequality and “new feudalism” in Silicon Valley—as a sign of what’s happening across the United States:

Google is visually impressive, but this frenzy of energy and hipness hasn’t generated large numbers of jobs, much less what we think of as middle-class jobs, the kinds of unglamorous but solid employment that generates annual household incomes between $44,000 and $155,000. The state of California (according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California) could boast in 1980 that some 60 percent of its families were middle-income as measured in today’s dollars, but by 2010 only 48 percent of California families fell into that category, and the income gap between the state’s highest and lowest earners had doubled. In Silicon Valley there has actually been a net job loss in tech-related industries over the past decade. According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000fewer jobs than existed in 2001.

Source: Weekly Standard
Published: Nov 27, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,470 words)

How to Steal a House

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“They described what amounts to a methodical moneymaking scheme in which Setad obtains court orders under false pretenses to seize properties, and later pressures owners to buy them back or pay huge fees to recover them.

“‘The people who request the confiscation … introduce themselves as on the side of the Islamic Republic, and try to portray the person whose property they want confiscated as a bad person, someone who is against the revolution, someone who was tied to the old regime,’ said Hossein Raeesi, a human-rights attorney who practiced in Iran for 20 years and handled some property confiscation cases. ‘The atmosphere there is not fair.’

“Ross K. Reghabi, an Iranian lawyer in Beverly Hills, California, said the only hope to recover anything is to pay off well-connected agents in Iran. ‘By the time you pay off everybody, it comes to 50 percent’ of the property’s value, said Reghabi, who says he has handled 11 property confiscation cases involving Setad.”

A Reuters investigation into the Iranian supreme leader’s $95 billion economic empire, run through an organization called Setad, which makes some of its money by confiscating citizens’ property. Read more on Iran in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The Way Out of a Room Is Not Through the Door

Longreads Pick

The story of Charles Manson, from Jeff Guinn’s new book Manson:

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson is a cradle-to-grave treatment, though the graves belong to other people. The subject remains in California, an inmate at Corcoran State Prison, where he issues statements his followers disseminate via the website of his Air Trees Water Animals organisation. A recent example: ‘We have two worlds that have been conquested by the military of the revolution. The revolution belongs to George Washington, the Russians, the Chinese. But before that, there is Manson. I have 17 years before China. I can’t explain that to where you can understand it.’ Neither can I. Guinn explains a lot in his usefully linear book. The standard Manson text, Helter Skelter, the 1974 bestseller by his prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, and true-crime writer Curt Gentry, is a police and courtroom procedural, with no shortage of first-person heroics (‘During my cross-examination of these witnesses, I scored a number of significant points’); the first corpse is discovered on page six. No one is murdered in Guinn’s book until page 232. He brings a logic of cause and effect to the madness.

Published: Nov 8, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,620 words)

Should This Inmate Get a State-Financed Sex Change Operation?

Longreads Pick

Michelle Kosilek, a transgender woman in prison for the 1990 murder of her wife, is fighting for the right to have the state provide sexual-reassignment surgery. Kosilek’s battle touches on what is covered under the Eighth Amendment:

We enter into a kind of compact with the people we incarcerate. Much as we might like to put them out of mind—behind 20-foot-tall, quarter-mile-long, immaculate walls erected in the middle of nowhere—we are, by the act of imprisoning them, bound more closely to them than ever. They are entirely dependent on us for food, clothing, shelter. Is it right that we brandish that dependence over them like a threat? Is it ethical for us to treat some legitimate medical conditions but not others? What does society owe to the worst among us? “Eighth Amendment protections are not forfeited by one’s prior acts,” wrote future Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1979. Yet there is a point at which even progressive legal scholars hesitate to champion those protections. Dolovich teaches her law students about a bank robber in California who received a heart transplant in 2008 while serving a 14-year sentence. The cost of the operation, including follow-up care, was more than a million dollars. The fact that the bank robber got the heart meant that someone else, someone law-abiding, didn’t.

Published: Oct 31, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,285 words)

Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

For cosplayers, dressing up isn’t just once a year on Halloween. It’s part of a complex identity and community lifestyle.

1. “Cosplayers are Passionate, Talented Folks. But There’s a Darker Side to this Community, Too.” (Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku, January 2013)

The author interviews two (female) cosplayers who share why they cosplay and what motivates them, despite sexual harassment and other injustices.

2. “I’m a Black Female Cosplayer … and Some People Hate It.” (Chaka Cumberbatch, February 2013, Racialicious)

“After my pictures started making the rounds on deviantArt, Tumblr, and 4chan, it became pretty clear that my cosplay brings all the racists to the yard, and they’re, like, white cosplay is better than yours.”

3. “Meet the World’s Most Intense Disney Fans.” (Jordan Zakarin, Buzzfeed, August 2013)

A WHOLE NEW WOOOORRRRRRRLLLLLD of costly cosplay in California.

4. “Magical Girls, Heroines, and Anime Amazon: Field Notes from Otakon 2013.” (Rose, Autostraddle, August 2013)

Rose explores how women are represented in panels and treated in person at one of the most popular anime convention in the United States.

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Photo: Pat Loika

Death of a Salesman

Longreads Pick

On the genius of Cal Worthington, the legendary Southern California car dealer and TV pitchman who died Sept. 8 at age 92:

“Worthington’s long-running series of self-produced spots never deviated from a formula. The slender cowboy—six foot four in beaver-skin Stetsons and a custom Nudie suit—always preceded his hyperactive sales pitch with a gambol through the lot of his Dodge dealership, accompanied by an escalating succession of exotic animals. Originally it was an ape, then a tiger, an elephant, a black bear, and, finally, Shamu, the killer whale from SeaWorld—each of which was invariably introduced as Cal’s dog, Spot. Not once did he appear with a canine. The banjo-propelled jingle (set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”) exhorted listeners to ‘Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal,’ a catchphrase that became the basis for the most infamous mondegreen in Golden State history. To this day, Pussycow remains a nostalgic code word exchanged among Californians who came of age in the era before emissions standards.”

(via The Browser)

Author: Sam Sweet
Published: Oct 10, 2013
Length: 6 minutes (1,553 words)

The Scorched Earth Solution: Solitary Confinement in America

Longreads Pick

By many definitions, solitary confinement is torture—despite being widely embraced in America’s prisons:

“Take Gabriel Reyes, one of the class action plaintiffs, who was originally convicted of housebreaking and sentenced under California’s draconian three strikes law. He was thrown into solitary 17 years ago, based on the mere fact that he was seen exercising with known gang members. Since then, everything from his tattoos to his Mexican-themed artwork has been held against him as evidence of gang association. He has not hugged his daughters in two decades, since they were in preschool, a startling deprivation for a man without a violent record. Some time ago, Reyes described to his lawyers how he and his fellow inmates were ready to ‘explode.'”

Published: Oct 7, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,558 words)

Lone Wolf

Longreads Pick

The first wild wolf to enter California in more than eighty years sparks a debate about conservation:

“The return of wolves to the West has indeed resulted in a trophic cascade of benefits to the ecological landscape. In Yellowstone, for example, the absence of wolves meant the park’s elk and deer were fat, slow, and stupid. They destroyed streambeds, overgrazed grass, and overbrowsed the shrubs and aspens. When wolves were reintroduced, the days of deer and elk lazing around riparian areas like hoofed couch potatoes were over. Yellowstone’s aspen groves made a comeback, streambeds are in better shape, shady shrubs have increased oxygen levels in creeks and streams, thus improving fish habitats, berries are dropping, seeds are scattering, grasses are growing. A case can be made that wolves are far better wilderness managers than humans will ever be.

“But for Sykes it’s a moral issue as well. ‘For one hundred years, wolves were hounded, hunted, trapped, hacked, and poisoned until every single one was exterminated. They were extirpated in a brutal, vindictive, ignorant campaign,’ he says. ‘I would like to see this wrong righted. I would like to see some compassion and understanding for our most persecuted wildlife.'”

Source: Orion Magazine
Published: Sep 12, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,492 words)

The Summer of Love and Newsweek

Longreads Pick

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg reflects on his early career working as a correspondent for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering Jefferson Airplane, Ronald Reagan and hippies:

“If the S.F. music scene (I quickly learned that ‘Frisco’ was a no-no) was scarcely known outside the Bay Area, and neither was the larger cultural phenomenon it drew strength from. The word ‘hippie’—derived from ‘hipster,’ the nineteen-forties bebop sobriquet revived sixty years later in Brooklyn, Portland, and food co-ops in between—had been coined only a few months earlier, by Herb Caen, the Chronicle’s inimitable gossip columnist. (At the time, as often as not, people spelled it ‘hippy.’) Ralph J. Gleason, the Chron’s jazz critic, was the scene’s Dr. Johnson. (Pushing fifty, he was too old to be its Boswell.) Gleason’s protégé was the pop-music critic for the U.C. Berkeley’s student paper, the Daily Californian, Jann Wenner. But the national press had not taken much notice, if any. So getting something into Newsweek was a coup.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 15, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,143 words)

The Jockey

Longreads Pick

A multimedia story about a life dedicated to horse racing. Russell Baze, 55, is the winningest jockey in North American history. But few know his name—he stayed close to home in Northern California, where the purses are smaller and there are fewer opportunities to get into the big races:

“Very few great horses come out of Northern California, and that has meant Baze rarely has been in America’s biggest races. ‘Every jockey’s dream is to win the Kentucky Derby,’ he said, describing the thrill of being at the center of so mammoth a crowd. But he has ridden in the event only twice, both times on long shots. Semoran finished 14th in 1996; Cause to Believe was 13th in 2005.

“A third horse, Event of the Year, was a Derby favorite in 1998. ‘I had the big one,’ Baze said, recalling the momentous opportunity, a chance to be the jockey among jockeys in the race of all races. But the horse — the best he had ever ridden — fractured a knee a week before the race.

“Because Baze has primarily worked in the Bay Area, some horseplayers put a mental asterisk beside his name, likening his record for wins to a baseball home run king given credit for round-trippers in Class AAA.

“That is a reasonable observation, as Baze would acknowledge. ‘I’m not the greatest jockey, and I’ll be the first one to tell you that,’ he said.”

Published: Aug 13, 2013
Length: 40 minutes (10,213 words)