Search Results for: Harvard

American Horror, Ivy League Edition

Longreads Pick

“Perhaps what Will Hunting says to a pompous Harvard scholar is really true: ‘You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda’ picked up for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.’ Except, of course, an Ivy League education has become even more obscenely expensive in the 17 years since Good Will Hunting romanticized Southie autodidactism.” An examination of three books criticizing the Ivy League.

Source: Newsweek
Published: Aug 8, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,715 words)

Call It Rape

Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words)

The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.
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Still life with man and gun

Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high school dorm. It’s near midnight on a Saturday in early autumn, the leaves not yet fallen, the darkness thick. A man steps out of the woods. He is wearing a black ski mask, a hooded jacket, leather gloves. He has a gun. He tells the girls to follow him, that if they make a noise or run he’ll shoot. He makes them lie face down on the ground. He rapes first one and then the others. He walks away. Read more…

The Perfect Essay, Kafka’s Abyss, and My Mother

The relationship between writer and teacher is no simple thing. For John Kaag, a former professor of expository writing at Harvard, the most vital component of this relationship is intimacy. Despite the persistent image of the writer as solitary figure, Kang sees companionship–specifically critical companionship–as essential. For many writers, the search for a truly compatible teacher–the Gordon Lish to their Raymond Carver–can be a lifelong journey. But for Kaag, the tutelage began at home, under the watchful eyes of his mother, a high school English teacher. From the Opinionator:

The intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your psychic life is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they’re also the people who care enough to see you through the traumatic aftermath of this realization. For me the aftermath took the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer’s block.

Franz Kafka once said: “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective descent that writing requires you’re not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her sustained tutelage suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. “It’s a thing of no great difficulty,” according to Plutarch, “to raise objections against another man’s oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.” I’m sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mother’s guidance, but I can’t recall them. What I remember, however, is how she took up the “extremely troublesome” work of ongoing criticism.

Read the story here

Photo: Smithsonian, Flickr

The Last Living Recipient of VA Benefits from the Civil War

Ms. Triplett’s pension, small as it is, stands as a reminder that war’s bills don’t stop coming when the guns fall silent. The VA is still paying benefits to 16 widows and children of veterans from the 1898 Spanish-American War.

The last U.S. World War I veteran died in 2011. But 4,038 widows, sons and daughters get monthly VA pension or other payments. The government’s annual tab for surviving family from those long-ago wars comes to $16.5 million.

Spouses, parents and children of deceased veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan received $6.7 billion in the 2013 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Payments are based on financial need, any disabilities, and whether the veteran’s death was tied to military service.

Those payments don’t include the costs of fighting or caring for the veterans themselves. A Harvard University study last year projected the final bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would hit $4 trillion to $6 trillion in the coming decades…

A declaration of war sets in motion expenditures that can span centuries, whether the veterans themselves were heroes, cowards or something in between.

Michael M. Phillips, writing in the Wall Street Journal. Phillips profiled Irene Triplett, the last living recipient of VA benefits connected to the Civil War. According to Phillips, Triplett, who is 84, “collects $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs, a pension payment for her father’s military service—in the Civil War,” which ended in 1865.

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More stories from The Wall Street Journal

Photo: Library of Congress, Flickr

On Being Gay in Medicine

Longreads Pick

A leading Harvard pediatrician’s story:

During medical school, I was on the admissions committee. Two people interviewed each applicant and then presented to the rest of the committee. There was an applicant who was outstanding in every category; I gave him a 10 out of 10. The other committee member who in- terviewed him, a doctor at Children’s, gave him the worst score we’d seen. His record at one of the top schools in the country meant that he would have had to have confessed to murder, or worse, preferring Yale to Harvard, to get such a low score. We waited to hear the explanation. He said that he just didn’t feel “comfortable” with the applicant.

The committee was baffled. I wasn’t, because I had met the applicant. He was a man who was effeminate. I didn’t know if he was gay, but I did know that he was someone who was likely to have been called names or to have been roughed up because people thought he was. The doctor who had interviewed him already had a reputation at Harvard College, where he helped premeds put together their applications for medical school. Gay students knew to avoid being assigned to him.

Published: Mar 30, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,105 words)

Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story

Ned Stuckey-French | culturefront | 1999 | 21 minutes (5,289 words)

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story,” by Ned Stuckey-French, originally published in 1999 in culturefront, the former magazine for the New York Council for the Humanities. It’s a story that takes a closer look at the dynamics of a friendship, and the roles we play in each other’s lives.

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Alexander Woollcott fell in love with Harpo Marx the first time he saw him. It was the evening of May 19, 1924, and the Marx Brothers were making their Broadway debut in the slyly titled musical comedy I’ll Say She Is. Woollcott was there, reluctantly, to review it for the Sun. Another show, a much-hyped drama featuring a French music-­hall star, had been scheduled to open the same night, but when it was postponed at the last minute, the first­line critics decided to take the night off. Except for Woollcott. His career was in the doldrums, and hoping against hope for a scoop, he dragged himself over to see what he assumed were “some damned acrobats.” Read more…

The Color of His Presidency

Longreads Pick

On race and Obama’s presidency:

This has been Obama’s M.O.: focus on “the more important things.” He’s had to deal explicitly with race in a few excruciating instances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates’s controversial arrest. (Obama’s response to the incident was telling: He positioned himself not as an ally of Gates but as a mediator between the two, as equally capable of relating to the white man’s perspective as the black man’s.) After the Zimmerman shooting, he observed that if he had had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. In almost every instance when his blackness has come to the center of public events, however, he has refused to impute racism to his critics.

This has not made an impression upon the critics. In fact, many conservatives believe he accuses them of racism all the time, even when he is doing the opposite. When asked recently if racism explained his sagging approval ratings, Obama replied, “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.” Conservatives exploded in indignation, quoting the first sentence without mentioning the second. Here was yet another case of Obama playing the race card, his most cruel and most unanswerable weapon.

Published: Apr 6, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,946 words)

Once Upon a Time in the West

Longreads Pick

How Mark Twain turned frontier humor into literature:

It wasn’t easy. The notion that literature could emerge from the frontier’s barbaric yawp encountered violent resistance from America’s literary establishment. It didn’t help that tall tales abounded in vulgarity, drunkenness, and depravity, not to mention perversions of proper English that would make a schoolteacher gasp. Proving the literary power of the frontier would be a central part of Twain’s legacy, and a pie in the face of the New England dons who had dominated the country’s high culture for much of the nineteenth century. He wasn’t immune to wanting their approval, but he came from a very different tradition. His ear hadn’t been trained at Harvard or Yale; it was tuned to the myriad voices of slaves and scoundrels, boatmen and gamblers.

Published: Mar 21, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,653 words)

The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick

Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. And then there’s the culture clash between older (read as: 35+) coders and tech executives who have experience running companies and the younger entrepreneurs who may (or not) be on to the next big thing. In her story, Lu articulates the creeping angst of Silicon Valley: “the vague sense of a frenzied bubble of app-making and an even vaguer dread that what we are making might not be that meaningful.”

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

Yiren Lu | New York Times Magazine | March 16, 2014 | 28 minutes (6,989 words)

What We Talked About on Campus This Week: A Reading List

Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower this week.

1. Professors, We Need You! (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, February 16, 2014)

Academics used to be a part of public discourse, and now they’re not. Blame them.

2. Why is Academic Writing So Academic? (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, February 21, 2014)

As usual, it’s about audience.

3. USC’s “Business Decision” to Ax Its Master of Professional Writing Program Leaves Unanswered Questions (Gene Maddaus, LA Weekly, February 20, 2014)

Graduate programs can be revenue generators, but not when enrollment goes down.

4. Is Faster Always Better? (Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2014)

High-school students take accelerated classes for college credit. But once on campus, they can struggle to keep up.

5. The Dark Power of Fraternities (Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, March 2014)

Fraternities thrive at colleges thanks to a culture that markets them and a risk-management system that protects them.

6. Sexual Assault at God’s Harvard (Kiera Feldman, The New Republic, February 17, 2014)

“How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?”

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Photo: Velkr0

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