Nancy Scola | Next City, Forefront magazine | November 2013 | 26 minutes (6,561 words) Illustration by Kjell Reigstad Longreads Members support this service and receive exclusive stories from the best publishers and writers in the world. Join us to receive our latest Member Pick—it’s a new story from journalist Nancy Scola, published in Next […]
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Posted inCollege, Nonfiction
The Pain of Rural Poverty: Our College Pick
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Colleges share symbiotic relationships with their neighboring towns, and economic disparities tend to strain those relations. At Dartmouth, the school’s wealth and privilege overshadows the surrounding area’s rural poverty. In a detailed report by Charlie Rafkin […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Truth About Aliens, According to Ronald Reagan
“It was in the White House screening room and Reagan got up to thank me for bringing the film to show the President, the First Lady and all of their guests, which included Sandra Day O’Connor in her first week of as a Justice of the Supreme Court, and it included some astronauts… I think […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Most Difficult Age to Be When You Work in Hollywood
“The Writer’s Guild of America has a term for my situation: They call it ‘The Gap.’ It’s the time period between when your years as a working writer end and your retirement begins. I actually have an excellent pension for when I finally retire. The Guild is a strong union and it has negotiated an […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Couple Who Started the Textbook Wars
“Mel and Norma Gabler founded Educational Research Analysts in 1961. Funded through donations, they hired serious-minded believers like Neal Frey, a professor at a small Christian liberal arts college in New York, to help them page through mountains of material. In a 12-by–15-foot bedroom next to the garage in the Gablers’ house, Frey and a […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
One Thing We'll Miss About Blockbuster
“The death of Blockbuster is the death of the employee favorite shelf. With Netflix and Hulu and Amazon having rightfully eclipsed video rental stores, the recommendation is now largely accomplished by algorithm. If you didn’t agree with my taste in movies, there was definitely another employee you would agree with. There was someone for every […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Early Technologies That Were Supposed to Disrupt Education
“The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Far We're Going to Save Youth Football
“You’re talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what’s going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game […]
Posted inProfiles & Interviews, Quotes
Doris Lessing on What It Means to Be a Writer
“I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Growth of Financial Services in the U.S.
“The financial services sector as a whole accounts for more than 20 percent of US GDP, and this share has grown by around 10 percentage points since the 1970s. Additional expansion has taken place in the business services sector, encompassing law and accounting firms and other outgrowths of a financialized economy. Overall, it seems reasonable […]
