Search Results for: NPR

Saint of the Hood

Longreads Pick

A profile of Father Gregory Boyle, who launched Homeboy Industries 25 years ago to help formerly gang-involved men and women by providing them with job training, therapy and a strong, positive community:

“‘The beauty of Father Greg’s approach is eternal, unrelenting hopefulness for those young people,’ says Robert Ross, president and CEO of the California Endowment. ‘The curse is that it’s terrible for the balance sheet of a nonprofit, and it really can wreak havoc. Most nonprofits function with a very clear sense that resources and dollars are a constraint. They turn people away, put them on waiting lists, and send them to other programs. The money dries up and so do the services—end of story.'”

Published: May 21, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,426 words)

My Top 5 #Longreads on the Business of Film, Music and Books

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Mark Armstrong (that’s not him above) is the founder of Longreads, and editorial director for Pocket.

This past week’s Steven Soderbergh speech on “The State of the Cinema” isn’t as big a downer for film lovers as these choice quotes might have you believe:

“Shouldn’t we be spending the time and resources alleviating suffering and helping other people instead of going to the movies and plays and art installations? When we did Ocean’s Thirteen the casino set used $60,000 of electricity every week. How do you justify that? Do you justify that by saying, the people who could’ve had that electricity are going to watch the movie for two hours and be entertained—except they probably can’t, because they don’t have any electricity, because we used it.”

Or:

“When people are more outraged by the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos than some young girl being stoned to death, then there’s something wrong.”

Soderbergh does offer some encouraging news about the amount of independent films being distributed:

“In 2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films…”

The downside, of course, is that it’s harder to get them seen:

“…and yet, 10 years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.”

For further reading, the Soderbergh speech reminded me of a few other excellent #longreads about the business of art:

1. “Letter to Emily White at All Songs Considered” (David Lowery, June 2012)

Lowery, the founder of bands including Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, paints a bleak picture of the state of the music industry, particularly when it comes to professional studio musicians.

2. “The Business of Literature” (Richard Nash, VQR, Spring 2013)

Nash offers historical context for those worried about the future of books: “Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is.”

3. “Some Thoughts on Our Business” (Jeffrey Katzenberg, Letters of Note, 1991)

Katzenberg’s memo to colleagues at Disney, which in addition to having allegedly inspired the memo in Jerry Maguire, also addresses the blockbuster mentality.

4. “I’m for Sale” (Genevieve Smith, Elle, April 2013)

Smith searches for a balance between creative fulfillment and financial security. 

•••

What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

(Photo by Thore Siebrands, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Drug War Informer in No Man’s Land

Longreads Pick

Luis Octavio López Vega, who worked for both the Mexican military and as an informant to the DEA, is now in hiding:

“The reserved, unpretentious husband and father of three has been a fugitive ever since, on the run from his native country and abandoned by his adopted home. For more than a decade, he has carried information about the inner workings of the drug war that both governments carefully kept secret.

“The United States continues to feign ignorance about his whereabouts when pressed by Mexican officials, who still ask for assistance to find him, a federal law enforcement official said.

“The cover-up was initially led by the D.E.A., whose agents did not believe the Mexican authorities had a legitimate case against their informant. Other law enforcement agencies later went along, out of fear that the D.E.A.’s relationship with Mr. López might disrupt cooperation between the two countries on more pressing matters.”

Published: Apr 29, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,304 words)

“When Our Kids Own America,” Gene Demby, NPR.

Breaking the Silence

Longreads Pick

Zimbabwean activists are fighting against the violence and oppression their country has felt under president Robert Mugabe, who was named Foreign Policy’s “second worst dictator in the world,” after North Korea’s late leader Kim Jong Il:

“Mazvarira was abducted in 2000 from her home in Chivhu, a small town south of Harare, and raped by two ZANU-PF CIO officers after her 17-year-old daughter, an MDC organizer, was killed by a petrol bomb. Mazvarira contracted HIV from the assault. ‘They told me, ‘You and your daughter are Tsvangirai’s bitches.’’ When Mazvarira went to the police station to report the attack, the officer in charge refused to hear her case. ‘The police are only ZANU-PF,’ she said.

“The two women are not placid about what happened to them, but what converted them from victims into activists is that they were never able to hold their attackers to account. ‘The government won’t help us. No one can help us. It is up to us, ourselves, now. That is where we are.’ In 2009 Munengami launched Doors of Hope, a nonprofit organization that supports and speaks for victims of politically motivated rape. Doors of Hope now has 375 members from all over the country. ‘We are standing for women,’ Munengami said. ‘Those so-called war vets raped so many women during the liberation struggle, but they don’t want to talk about it. So we are going to talk about it. Whether it’s 1975, or now, we don’t want this to continue. We have had enough. We are sick and tired of being quiet. Where has silence got us?'”

Published: Apr 15, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,744 words)

Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College

Longreads Pick

Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs are currently being heralded as the future of affordable education. But what kind of education will it actually provide?

“Everybody loves the idea of lowering the barriers of entry to education; it’s the easiest sell in the world, and Khan Academy, a nonprofit, pushes all the right buttons. Khan’s success thus paved the way for MOOC providers to employ a rhetoric of inclusiveness, simplicity, low cost, and metrics, metrics, metrics: the same reasoning that today drives everything from ‘philanthrocapitalist’ foundation spending to high-stakes standardized testing.

“But the shortcomings of the Khan approach will be evident to anyone who cares to have a go at ‘US History Overview 1: Jamestown to the Civil War,’ the 18:28 minute video-with-voiceover class I chose at random from the Khan website. Within the first two minutes Khan has disposed of over a century, blowing past Jamestown (‘a kind of commercial settlement’) and Plymouth Rock (‘we always learned this in school, you know, the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sailing the oceans blue and all the rest’) and ‘fast-forwarding’ to 1754. It’s not even a flashcard approach; it’s a series of lacunae, startlingly free of insight or context, mentioning not one single book or author, and only one political or religious figure (George Washington) in the nine minutes I watched. I’ve seen more informative cereal boxes.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 31, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,608 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction, by Nate Silver

Longreads Pick

This week we're proud to share a Longreads Member pick from Nate Silver's new book The Signal and the Noise, published by The Penguin Press. Chapter 1, "A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction," comes recommended by Janet Paskin, editor of Businessweek.com, who writes:

"Could there be a more appropriate hero for our time than Nate Silver? We can quantify and track and poll and log almost everything—and so we usually do, even if we're not sure how to make sense of it all. But Silver is—or at least, he can tell you exactly how likely it is that he's right. 

"His nerd-god omniscience during the 2012 election cycle made him a blast to watch, read and retweet. He was consistent, and he was right, and it made a lot of people think a little differently about the relentlessness of our political pageantry and punditry. 

"Here, in the first chapter of his new book, he revisits the housing crash, and the failure of the ratings agencies to spot it. It's not new criticism. Even so, the prediction game is Silver's strength, and he makes the whole thing feel outrageous again. He takes to task the errors in the rating agencies' models and in their psychology. There are charts, graphs, and 101 footnotes, and in the end, it's reassuring: If Silver thinks we can avoid making the same mistakes again—well, even a skeptic like me wouldn't bet against him. After all, he knows the odds better than I do."

For more exclusives like this, become a Longreads Member for just $3 per month.

Published: Sep 1, 2012
Length: 36 minutes (9,052 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction, by Nate Silver

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This week we’re proud to share a Longreads Member pick from Nate Silver‘s new book The Signal and the Noise, published by The Penguin Press. Chapter 1, “A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction,” comes recommended by Janet Paskin, editor of Businessweek.com, who writes:

Could there be a more appropriate hero for our time than Nate Silver? We can quantify and track and poll and log almost everything—and so we usually do, even if we’re not sure how to make sense of it all. But Silver is—or at least, he can tell you exactly how likely it is that he’s right. 
His nerd-god omniscience during the 2012 election cycle made him a blast to watch, read and retweet. He was consistent, and he was right, and it made a lot of people think a little differently about the relentlessness of our political pageantry and punditry. 
Here, in the first chapter of his new book, he revisits the housing crash, and the failure of the ratings agencies to spot it. It’s not new criticism. Even so, the prediction game is Silver’s strength, and he makes the whole thing feel outrageous again. He takes to task the errors in the rating agencies’ models and in their psychology. There are charts, graphs, and 101 footnotes, and in the end, it’s reassuring: If Silver thinks we can avoid making the same mistakes again—well, even a skeptic like me wouldn’t bet against him. After all, he knows the odds better than I do.

Support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.   

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

The Winners’ History of Rock and Roll, Part 3: Bon Jovi

Longreads Pick

Rethinking the legacy of one of the most ridiculed hair bands of our time:

“I have no insight into the goings-on of Jon Bon Jovi’s headspace, but I like to imagine him having a ‘Once in a Lifetime’ moment during the Springsteen duet: ‘This is not my classic-rock staple, this is not my classic-rock backing band. Well, how did I get here?’ Maybe I’m projecting: In many people’s minds (certainly many critics’ minds), perceptions of Bon Jovi will forever be fixed in the late ’80s, the band’s most commercially successful period, when Slippery When Wet and 1988’s New Jersey spun off seven top-10 singles — an unprecedented run for what’s ostensibly a hard-rock band — including four no. 1’s. ‘Blaze of Glory,’ the breakout song from Jon Bon Jovi’s ‘solo’ soundtrack for Young Guns II, also hit the top of the charts during this period.

“Susan Orlean’s1 1987 profile of Bon Jovi for Rolling Stone was typical of how the press treated the band at the time. The piece begins with an extended, oddly reverential treatise on Jon Bon’s ‘fourteen inches’ of hair: ‘Its color is somewhere between chestnut and auburn, and the frosty streaks in it give it a sizzling golden sheen,’ Orlean writes. ‘Truth is, it would be safe to say that Jon Bon Jovi has the most wonderful hair in rock & roll today.’ Orlean describes Jon Bon’s locks as an oedipal metaphor for rebellion against his dad, a hairdresser, though her poker face doesn’t quite hold. She doesn’t really take this guy seriously, and the implication is that we shouldn’t either.”

Source: Grantland
Published: Jan 22, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,546 words)

Edge and the Art Collector

Longreads Pick

On Steven Cohen, an embattled hedge fund manager who is one of the biggest art collectors in the world:

“It was a startling request. The Art Collector wasn’t that interested in what we thought about companies or industries, competitive advantages or long-term growth. No, the Art Collector’s trading strategy was based on the thesis that one could make money trading stocks by anticipating whether Wall Street’s equity research analysts, collectively, were going to increase or decrease their estimates of how much a company was going to make the next quarter. The Art Collector didn’t invent the estimate revisions strategy. But the Art Collector had figured out that even if one worked tirelessly to discover the patterns of analysts’ opinions (or of the companies themselves), one still had no fundamental edge over other smart traders doing the same thing. What one could do—brazenly, unprecedentedly—was to pay the banks as much—more—than than any other client to get information first. This would potentially allow the Art Collector’s traders to hear some nuance from the analysts or the broker that would move a stock a sixteenth or two when the information was better propagated. This was not a restaurant’s biggest customer demanding a better table. This was a restaurant’s biggest customer demanding that other patrons get worse food.”

Source: n+1
Published: Jan 16, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,473 words)