Search Results for: China

The Story of the Longest Held American Prisoner of War

Longreads Pick

The incredible story of former CIA agent John T. Downey, who was captured during the Korean War and imprisoned in China for more than twenty years.

Source: Slate
Published: Sep 24, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,812 words)

Is ‘Garden City’ Urbanism the Answer?

Could garden cities help fix these problems? Advocates think so. They argue that garden cities can deliver the humane, sustainable, equitable communities that people want and the planet needs, by slashing emissions, preserving green space, and encouraging neighborly interaction.

Today, garden-city projects are popping up from England to India to Cambodia. In particular, China, where construction rates have exploded since the early 2000s, has become a petri dish for garden cities. Among several planned communities is Heart of Lake, designed by Stern’s firm and currently being built on an island in Xiamen. “We are being asked to do interpretations of it in other Chinese cities,” Stern says.

But many, if not most, of these new garden cities and suburbs will look nothing like Forest Hills Gardens. They will be bigger, taller, and denser. Heart of Lake, for instance, will pack 2 million square feet of construction into a mere 25 acres and include high-rise apartments. It’s also unclear that these projects will adhere to core garden-city values, including community ownership and the mixing of social classes. What’s more, there is little data to prove definitively that garden cities are in fact the right solution for urban ills; firm figures on their environmental, social, and other impacts are hard to come by when no two projects look alike.

Amanda Kolson Hurley writing for Foreign Policy about the history of ‘garden cities,’ and their unlikely resurgence.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Trail of Medical Missteps in a Peace Corps Death

Longreads Pick

The tragic death of Nick Castle, a young volunteer in China, has raised serious questions about Peace Corps medical care.

Published: Jul 25, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,710 words)

A Family, a Fruit Stand, and Survival on $4.50 a Day

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Douglas Haynes | Orion | Summer 2014 | 22 minutes (5,391 words)

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Morning

“It’s like this here every day,” Dayani Baldelomar Bustos tells me as her dark eyes scan the packed alley for an opening. People carrying baskets of produce on their heads press against our backs. Read more…

Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List

When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to map a cartography of loneliness. Published in 2012, Laing writes, “What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal.” Four years into my New York experiment, the pang of loneliness has dulled and has been exchanged for a desire to retreat from an overstimulating city with my close friends and a bag of salted caramel.

This brief list takes a dive into the discussion about loneliness and solitude in our contemporary lives—what it is, how we cope, and how it affects our bodies. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, if you have them.

 

1. “American Loneliness” (Emma Healey, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2014)

I’ve been watching MTV’s reality show, Catfish in awe for the past two seasons. I vacillate between heavy feelings of eager empathy and awkward amusement. Healy explores what Catfish reveals about our common loneliness, longing and vulnerabilities as well as how easily we suspend logic in the pursuit of companionship.

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What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?

Longreads Pick

How the expansion of refrigeration in China is affecting climate change.

Published: Jul 25, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,699 words)

A History of Scorpion Venom in Medicine

The new issue of Wired has a story about Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can help detect cancer cells in our bodies. Injecting our bodies with scorpion venom may sound somewhat outlandish, but it’s been used in medicine for quite a long time:

Ancient practitioners of medicine were well aware that scorpion venom could heal as well as harm. In imperial China, for example, the cloudy fluid was used to treat ailments ranging from mumps to tetanus. And in certain rural corners of India, whole scorpions were dipped in mustard oil and then rubbed on arthritic joints. Scorpion venom has more recently become an object of fascination for developers of pesticides, who dream of protecting crops using the neuro­toxins that scorpions employ against locusts and beetles.

Today pharmaceutical companies regularly obtain venom for commercial use by milking deathstalkers—that is, jolting the yellow arachnids with electricity, then collecting the droplets that dribble forth from their tails. Courage is an essential trait for the technicians who handle this sort of work, for the deathstalker is among the most dangerous scorpions in the world: In certain instances, L. quinquestriatus venom can cause cardiac arrest.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born

Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words)

 
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler’s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community.

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Springtime in Tiananmen Square, 1989

Longreads Pick

While teaching English in Beijing, the author witnessed one of the most tumultuous protests in modern history.

We were young, and maybe a little naive, and we were angry at injustice. Whenever a group of us foreign teachers got together to share a meal or some beers, Chuck, the most cantankerous of our lot, would find an opportunity to say, “America is a toilet that flushes itself with five times more water than any other toilet in the world.” We were disenchanted with the me-first materialism of Reagan/Bush America. We wanted to live conscientiously. China in 1988 was a slumbering giant just beginning to awake. None of us expected our lives there to be easy, or profitable, or flashy like those of other young English teachers in trendier, booming Japan, but we were intrigued by the country’s recent reopening, and up for a challenge.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 29, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,657 words)

Jesus Land

Julia Scheeres | Jesus Land | 2012 | 21 minutes (5,152 words)

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For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share the opening chapter of Jesus Land, the bestselling 2012 memoir by Julia Scheeres about her strict Christian upbringing in Indiana, her relationship with her adopted brother David, and the stint they did in a Christian reform school together in the Dominican Republic. Our thanks to Scheeres and Counterpoint Press for sharing this story with the Longreads community.  Read more…