Search Results for: Chronicle of Higher Education

Reading List: Stories From the Working Class

Longreads Pick

This week’s reading list from Emily Perper includes stories from The Kenyon Review, The Billfold, This Ain’t Livin’, Forbes, The Washington Blade, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 6, 2013

Reading List: Sunrise, Sunset

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

A few weeks ago, I was reading my weekly horoscope, courtesy of The Rumblr’s Madame Clairvoyant. The last three words of Leo’s outlook caught in my mind: “Don’t even worry.”

“Don’t even worry,” I whispered over and over. So many people have told me not to worry about the future in one breath, only to interrogate me about my future plans in the next. “Don’t even worry,” I say to myself. These are pieces that make me feel hopeful about the future — not in the naive hope that it will be easy, but with calm assurance that good things will happen to mediate the bad.

1. “The ‘Handicap Icon’ Gets New Life.” (Jennifer Grant, Christianity Today, June 2013)

A philosophy professor and an artist collaborated to create a “symbol of access,” angered by the stigma and ignorance directed toward differently abled citizens.

2. “The Empty-Nest Yard Sale.” (Kevin Sampsell, The Rumpus, June 2013)

Sampsell, a bookseller and independent publisher, considers his son’s teenage tendency toward aloofness and his own desperate, emotional response.

3. “Internship From Hell.” (Michael McGuire, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2013)

Once an intern at El Nuevo Heraldo in Miami, McGuire’s internship sums up a lot of what today’s working youth face: disgust, exhaustion, disillusionment, bouts of hysterical laughter and sweet relief at the end of it all.

4. “Slouching Towards Babylon.” (Anna McConnell, Rookie Magazine, June 2013)

Her hippie peers sneer at her New York upbringing, and sometimes, she does, too. But nature’s sublimity is no match for homesickness.

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Illustration by Kim

Reading List: Sunrise, Sunset

Longreads Pick

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. This week’s picks include stories from Christianity Today, The Rumpus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rookie.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 7, 2013

How a semiliterate University of Memphis football player educated himself while facing countless obstacles:

You can’t hide for long in college when you’re semiliterate. But somehow Mr. Cathey slipped through his freshman year with just under a C average, taking classes like elementary algebra and music appreciation. Then he saw the syllabus for HIST 2010: U.S. to 1877, his sophomore history class. How would he ever finish five books in four months?

He knew there was only one way: He had to go back to the beginning.

After practice every night, he would close the door to his room in the Carpenter Complex, reach under his bed, and pull out his 10 learn-to-read books. Twenty minutes, he thought, looking down at his watch. I’ve got to beat 20.

“The Education of Dasmine Cathey.” — Brad Wolverton, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Photos: Lance Murphey

More from the Chronicle

Featured Longreader: Writer/teacher/musician Matt Cardin. See his story picks from Gadfly Online, Wired, Chronicle of Higher Education and more on his #longreads page.

Amy K. Nelson's Top 6 Longreads of 2010: Murder mysteries, baseball, The Price Is Right

Amy K. Nelson is a writer for ESPN.com. (She and Elizabeth Merrill also wrote this great longread about sports and infidelity.)

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Longreads asked me to compile my Top 5 of 2010. An impossible task, and I know a few of mine are on other people’s lists. Here’s what I drew up:

The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
By Mark Bowden
Vanity Fair

Can’t get enough of murder-esque mysteries; this is one that stayed with me.

Dodgers Tap into ‘V energy’
By Bill Shaikin
Los Angeles Times

The most amazing baseball story of 2010. Hands down. One of those you wish you had written.

TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome
By Chris Jones
Esquire

I’m biased because this is my all-time favorite game show (Bob Barker only). Even without my bias, it’s just a kickass story.

Last Drop
By Brad Melekian
Outside

This was an amazing quick-turn of a difficult story with reluctant sources.

Art of the Steal
By Joshuah Bearman
Wired

Murder mysteries and thieving stories battle it out for closest to my heart.

*EXTRA CREDIT

The Shadow Scholar
By Ed Dante
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Michelle Legro: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Michelle Legro is an editor for Lapham’s Quarterly (who you should be following on Tumblr!)

michellelegro:

If you aren’t one of the more than 10,000 people who follow @longreads on Twitter, or get the Longreads Instapaper feed on your iPhone or iPad, then do so immediately. Every day there are perfectly curated features of long-form journalism, new and old, to discover and send along to others.

1. Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer” (NYRB) + Clive Thompson, “What is IBM’s Watson?” (NYT Magazine)

Did you know that 2010 is the year grandmaster Garry Kasparov declared man’s battle for chess supremacy over machines at an end? Instead, the machine must take on a new game, and the subtle questions of Jeopardy are the next ambitious goal for IBM programmers. 

2. Veronica Mittnacht, “An Advice Columnist Asks for Advice” (The Rumpus)

Of the many, many essays about navigating life after college, this one really takes to heart the essential contradiction of youth: “How did we become so ambitious and afraid?”

3. Ed Dante, “The Shadow Scholar” (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Speaking of fear, be afraid. Not of the skills of this professional paper writer—who can charm a twenty-five page essay about any topic you like from mid-air. Be afraid of everyone out there who has ever used him. Doctors, nurses, businessmen, teachers, seminary students, everyone

4. Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?” (NYRB) + Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook Opens Up” (The New Yorker)

It’s really worth getting to the dark heart of the Zuckerberg in this NYer profile before reading Smith’s screed about Facebook and the Social Network, if just to get some perspective. 

5. And the best Longread of 2010 is, without a doubt, the very insightful, funny, and of course frustrating look into the Senate by George Packer, “The Empty Chamber” (The New Yorker) Please, just give him all the National Magazine Awards right now. 

The Power and Business of Hip-Hop: A Reading List on an American Art Form

De La Soul, Posdnuos, Torhout/Werchter Festival, Werchter, Belgium, 1990. Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

Ever since Black and Latino Americans created hip-hop at south Bronx block parties during the 1970s, this highly original, uniquely American music has continued to evolve, while simultaneously taking root in countless countries throughout the world.

As cultural critic Harry Allen once said: “hip hop is the new jazz.” But like jazz, hip-hop is more than music. It’s a culture. “’Hip-hop,’ once a noun,“ Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker, “has become an adjective, constantly invoked, if rarely defined; people talk about hip-hop fashion and hip-hop novels, hip-hop movies and hip-hop basketball. Like rock and roll in the nineteen-sixties, hip-hop is both a movement and a marketing ploy, and the word is used to describe almost anything that’s supposed to appeal to young people.“ Beyond marketing and corporatization, hip-hop culture has always included dance, rap, fashion, design, stretching language, reclaiming public spaces, and its creative, genre-spanning approach has allowed artists to represent their lives in a world that often ignores or misrepresents them. In the San Francisco Gate in 2003, Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F**k To Sleep described hip-hop culture as “assembled from spare parts, ingeniously and in public. Paint cans refitted with oven-cleaner nozzles transformed subway trains into mobile art galleries. Playgrounds and parks became nightclubs; turntables and records became instruments. Scraps of linoleum and cardboard became dance floors. Verbal and manual dexterity turned kids into stars, and today’s artists grew up listening to the first strains of the musical form.” As Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, put it, hip-hop culture is “naturally interdisciplinary” and composed of “mix signifiers, we break everything down to bits and bytes and rebuild something new.” I love the description.
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Stalin’s Scheherazade

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Brian J. Boeck | an excerpt adapted from Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov | Pegasus Books | February 2019 | 29 minutes (8,255 words)

Between April of 1926 and September of 1927 Mikhail Sholokhov performed a literary miracle. Never before — and never again — would a similar feat be accomplished. During those incredible months he managed to generate hundreds of typed pages of some of the most engaging prose ever to appear in Russia, a country blessed with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and numerous other gifted writers. On an epic scale he narrated events that occurred in far-flung trenches of World War I, distant centers of power, and revolutionary meetings. He described multiple historical figures he had never met, and he painted vivid verbal pictures of battles that took place when he was still a boy. Brief periods of mad, feverish writing were sandwiched between moves, multiple trips to Moscow to meet with editors, and the birth of his first child.

His literary output during those months exponentially exceeded the accomplishments of his whole career up to that point and most decades of his career afterward. The improvement in quality was incredible. None of his colleagues wept with rapture when they read his early, formulaic, communist short stories. Early editors sometimes had to apply a heavy, corrective hand just to get some of them into print. Suddenly seasoned editors were in awe of his prose. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that this rapid, unexpected literary metamorphosis occurred at the age of twenty-two.

How did he manage to pull off such an improbable literary feat? Some locals insisted that he acquired manuscripts that were left behind when the Cossack side was routed by the Red Army during the civil war. At a minimum the archive he acquired appears to have included an unfinished novel that ended around 1919 and a trove of scrapbooks consisting of stories, sketches, newspaper clippings, and articles spanning over a decade of Cossack history. Read more…

Traveling While Black Across the Atlantic Ocean

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Ethelene Whitmire | Longreads | January 2019 | 19 minutes (4,642 words)

“Welcome aboard!” the Cunard agent exclaimed, and I suddenly felt a clichéd warm tingling sensation. After hesitating for several weeks, I finally…booked a passage? I got a berth? I do not know the lingo. So let us say I got a ticket for a seven-day, eastbound, transatlantic crossing on Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 from New York City (technically the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal) to Southampton, England for June, 2018, the first leg of a trip to Denmark. I was committed — or semi-committed. I placed a 10% deposit (fully refundable for a few weeks) to hold my space, and immediately made a note in my electronic calendar for two days before the deadline to remind myself to cancel if I changed my mind. I’d visited Denmark 12 times since my initial trip in May and June, 2010, including a year as a Fulbright scholar, but I’d always flown there.

I am writing a book about African Americans in 20th century Denmark. During the past few years I followed in their footsteps by visiting Danish cities, towns, villages, islands, a prison, numerous castles, jazz clubs, an educational institution, and the homes and studios where they lived, visited, performed, toured, and studied. A friend suggested I more accurately recreate the experience of the people in my book who lived in the first half of the 20th century, when the only way to get to Denmark from the United States was to cross the Atlantic Ocean by ship. I’d read much of what they’d written about their experiences in letters home, in memoirs, and in one case, in a newspaper column.

They traveled abroad during the Jim Crow era in the United States, and many feared they would face racism and even possible segregation on the ships. Perhaps they were familiar with the oft-told tale of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ 1845 crossing. He was almost thrown overboard by some Americans after the captain invited him to make an anti-slavery speech. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor called Douglass’ voyage “harrowing” in Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. William M. Fowler, Jr. wrote in Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins, and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic that although Douglass booked a first-class cabin, once he was on the Cambria he “discovered that he had been reassigned to quarters in the forecastle, separate from the other passengers, and he was advised to remain secluded there during the crossing.”

I did not worry about segregation during my 21st century transatlantic crossing, but wondered about and anticipated possible microaggressions — slights and condescending comments often based on racial stereotypes. I did not see many images in Cunard’s brochures and website featuring Black people among the passengers. I was educated in predominantly white institutions and worked at similar institutions as an administrator and as a professor, so I was used to being in white spaces. And I live in Wisconsin — one of the whitest states in the nation. I wondered what would my journey be like on the Atlantic Ocean?
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