Search Results for: China

Wokking the Suburbs

Longreads Pick

On the rise of Monterey Park, California, and other suburban Chinatowns.

Author: Hua Hsu
Source: Lucky Peach
Published: Dec 13, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,670 words)

They Have Miao

Longreads Pick

A reporter working in China works to free her detained assistant while navigating China’s Kafkaesque legal system.

Source: Die Zeit
Published: Jan 14, 2015
Length: 26 minutes (6,590 words)

Inside a Chinese Test-Prep Factory

Longreads Pick

Larmer visits Maotanchang High School in eastern China’s Anhui province, a “cram school” where 20,000 students train round the clock for the gaokao, the country’s college-entrance exam.

Published: Dec 31, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,547 words)

The Bureaucracy of Death: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

Although more and more countries are abolishing capital punishment, over half the world’s population lives in four of the countries that continue to use it: India, Indonesia, China — and the United States. U.S. public opinion continues to move against the death penalty, but while some states have overturned capital punishment (or never had it), most still sentence people to die. These four pieces examine the range of flaws in a system whose irreversible outcome can ill afford them.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 19, 2014

The Bureaucracy of Death: A Reading List

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Although more and more countries are abolishing capital punishment, over half the world’s population lives in four of the countries that continue to use it: India, Indonesia, China — and the United States. U.S. public opinion continues to move against the death penalty, but while some states have overturned capital punishment (or never had it), most still sentence people to die. These four pieces examine the range of flaws in a system whose irreversible outcome can ill afford them.

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For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.

Belle Boggs | The New New South | August 2013 | 62 minutes (15,377 words)

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We’re proud to present, for the first time online, “For the Public Good,” Belle Boggs‘s story for The New New South about the shocking history of forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States, and the story of victims in North Carolina, with original video by Olympia Stone.

As Boggs explained to us last year: 

“Last summer I met Willis Lynch, a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children. Willis was one of 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, and one of the more outspoken and persistent advocates for compensation.

“At the time I was struggling with my own inability to conceive, and the debate within my state—how much is the ability to have children worth?—was something I thought about a lot. It’s hard to quantify, the value of people who don’t exist. It gets even more complicated when you factor in public discomfort over a shameful past, and a present-day political climate that marginalizes the poor.”

Thanks to Boggs and The New New South for sharing this story with the Longreads Community, and thanks to Longreads Members for your helping us bring these stories to you. Join us.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Myth of Chinese Super Schools

Longreads Pick

Diane Ravitch on the politics of education reform and testing in America, and a review of Yong Zhao’s book on China’s history of testing: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.

Published: Nov 2, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,094 words)

We Keep Testing, and Nothing Changes

It is worth noting that American students have never received high scores on international tests. On the first such test, a test of mathematics in 1964, senior year students in the US scored last of twelve nations, and eighth-grade students scored next to last. But in the following fifty years, the US outperformed the other eleven nations by every measure, whether economic productivity, military might, technological innovation, or democratic institutions. This raises the question of whether the scores of fifteen-year-old students on international tests predict anything of importance or whether they reflect that our students lack motivation to do their best when taking a test that doesn’t count toward their grade or graduation. …

Obama and Duncan used the latest international test scores as proof that more testing, more rigor, was needed. The Obama administration, acting out the script of “A Nation at Risk,” repeatedly treats our scores on these tests as a harbinger of economic doom, rather than as evidence that more testing does not produce higher test scores. Now, a dozen years after the passage of George W. Bush’s NCLB, it is clear that testing every child every year does not produce better education, nor does it raise our standing on the greatly overvalued international tests.

Diane Ravitch, in The New York Review of Books, on the politics of education reform and testing in America, and a review of Yong Zhao’s book on China’s history of testing: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.

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Photo: rzganoza, Flickr

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…