Search Results for: High-School

‘I Will Try to Hold on to the Intense Feeling’

It’s been a meta-­adolescence. Tavi has enacted a camera-ready high-school life, one in which her fashion experimentations looked fantastic rather than just ill-fitting and strange, and the whole thing was seen as a lark, hilarity worth preserving. She’s been adopted by the pop intelligentsia, who perhaps see in her a younger version of themselves, either real or idealized and imagined. Zadie Smith, whom she met after speaking at The New Yorker Festival, wrote her an email urging her not to skip college, and Stevie Nicks, whom Tavi met after mentioning her in a TED talk, gave her a cashmere blanket to wrap herself in whenever she felt like she needed a hug. Ask her if she’ll miss being a teenager and she says, “I will try to hold on to the intense feeling. I will both be glad that that’s no longer happening and kind of miss it. When you’re 14, you’re basically on drugs all the time—the hormones in your body are so crazy. But I really loved and appreciated the intensity of that. And you’re experiencing everything for the first time, so everything feels like an epiphany. And, like, I really liked the experience of having a crush, because I was like, this is my thing and it doesn’t have to do with you and you’re just some dummy boy for me to project on.”

– Amy Larocca profiles Tavi Gevinson for New York Magazine’s fall fashion issue.

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Photo: YouTube/LA Review of Books

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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Is There Hope for the Survivors of the Drug Wars?

Longreads Pick

Men from Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods are turning to a family and job training center to keep themselves off the street dealing drugs and rebuild their lives after spending time in jail:

The men are what policymakers euphemistically call a challenging population: Lacking high-school education or formal work experience, they’re the most likely of any group in America to die young and to die from violence. Most of their life experience, the skills that have helped them survive the streets or prison, works against them in the legal world. The biggest problem the center has spent 15 years trying to solve isn’t how to get these guys jobs, or how to encourage them to be more involved in their children’s lives, or how make the streets safer, though those are tough enough. The problem is more profound: How do you give these survivors of the drug wars, men who are criminalized and discarded by society, who are at the bottom of every statistic, hope?

Published: Mar 24, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,059 words)

The Last, Disposable Action Hero

Longreads Pick

Hollywood studios are increasingly focusing on creating expensive action movies with less costly unknown actors. For some of these unknowns, it’s a chance to skyrocket into fame, but it’s not that easy:

Hollywood has gotten creative in its hunt for the next big action star. Producers have considered scouting high-school football games. Brett Norensberg, an agent at Gersh, decided to structure a significant part of his practice around recruiting mixed-martial-arts fighters, professional wrestlers and martial artists. His list includes a karate whiz named Leo Howard, the star of Disney XD’s “Kickin’ It.” “He’s just turning 16. He’s almost 6 feet tall, and he’s got an eight-pack. He’s a thicker Keanu Reeves. The sky’s the limit for him.”

These efforts, though, belie a truth about action heroes: Almost any actor, even some of Hollywood’s most scrawny, can be physically transformed for the part if he’s willing to put in the hard work. The studios know this, which is why any inexpensive unknown can be chosen. The cast for “300,” including a post-“Phantom of the Opera” Butler and the relative newcomer Fassbender, were put on a brutal program with Mark Twight, a trainer whose workouts incorporated medicine balls, kettlebells and rings to emphasize the athleticism of the Spartans.

Published: Feb 28, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,801 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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From the Garden of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll to the Yale English Department

You couldn’t see Skull and Bones from the seminar room in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, though it was directly across the street. But the building was much on my mind the afternoon of the reception and had been from the day I got to New Haven. To my 26-year-old self, it seemed nearly impossible that literature—Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Whitman—was sharing space with Skull and Bones. I did not know much about Bones, but I took it to be a bastion of reactionary America. The society reached out its withered hand to tap future Wall Street pirates, CIA agents, and the sort of State Department operatives who had leveraged us into Vietnam, where a number of my high-school buddies had gone to be maimed and worse.

At least the Skull and Bones building looked its part. They called it the Crypt—and it did look like it was designed by Edgar Allan Poe. It was all stone and metal, with no real windows, and doors of enormous weight. Those doors must have closed with the grimmest finality, though never in my five New Haven years did I see them open or shut.

Mark Edmundson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on his time at the Yale English department in the late 1970s. Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education in the Longreads archive. 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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What High Schoolers Should Be Reading

“Just maybe the novel is not the best device for transmitting ideas, grand themes, to hormonal, boisterous, easily distracted, immature teenagers. Maybe there is a better format and genre to spark a love of reading, engage a young mind, and maybe even teach them how to write in a coherent manner. Thankfully this genre exists: It’s called non-fiction.

“Journalism, essay, memoir, creative nonfiction: These are only things I started reading as an adult because of how little I enjoyed reading novels in high school. Surely, the un-made-up stuff would be more of a bore, I thought. Yet when I finally read In Cold BloodInto Thin Air, the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion, I continually pleaded aloud to my friends in their twenties, ‘Why didn’t anyone make me read this in high school?!'”

Natasha Vargas-Cooper eviscerates the high school reading list on Bookforum‘s blog.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About

For four years now, the Longreads community has celebrated the best storytelling on the web. Thanks for all of your contributions, and special thanks to Longreads Members for supporting this service. We couldn’t keep going without your funding, so join us today.

Earlier this week we posted every No. 1 story from our weekly email this year, in addition to all of the outstanding picks from our Best of 2013 series. Here are 10 stories that we couldn’t stop thinking about.

See you in 2014. Read more…

His Name Was Justice

Longreads Pick

Remembering a Anthony Colin, who made his high school a safer place for gay kids:

Colin finally had enough. Spurred by the murder of Matthew Shepard a year earlier, he decided to form a Gay-Straight Alliance club on campus, so he and anyone else at El Modena would have a place, even for a little while, that was free from hostility. Similar GSA groups were beginning to pop up on high-school campuses all around the country at the time—including one at Fountain Valley High, which this year celebrated its 20th anniversary—so, Colin thought, why not one at ElMo?

Jessie Colin thought it was a fantastic idea.

But there couldn’t have been a worse place to try to get one started.

Author: Rich Kane
Source: OC Weekly
Published: Dec 5, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,846 words)

The Decline of Book Reviewing

Longreads Pick

Hardwick’s classic 1959 essay on the dismal state of book criticism. (Robert Silvers has pointed it out as an early inspiration for founding the New York Review of Books.)

For the world of books, for readers and writers, the torpor of the New York Times Book Review is more affecting. There come to mind all those high-school English teachers, those faithful librarians and booksellers, those trusting suburbanites, those bright young men and women in the provinces, all those who believe in the judgment of the Times and who need its direction. The worst result of its decline is that it acts as a sort of hidden dissuader, gently, blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally. The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity — the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself — have made the New York Times into a provincial literary journal, longer and thicker, but not much different in the end from all those small-town Sunday “Book Pages.”

Published: Oct 18, 1959
Length: 14 minutes (3,566 words)