Search Results for: New York Times

Reading List: A Bizarre Institution

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

What do Scientology, child abuse, financial exploitation, and millionaire parents have in common? They’ve all got a niche in the education system.

1. “Surviving a For-Profit School.” (Stephen S. Mills, The Rumpus, July 2013)

A strip-mall “college” that exploits the underprivileged, veterans, and abused housewives for hundreds of thousands of dollars: Who wouldn’t want to work there?

2. “For Their Own Good.” (Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore, Tampa Bay Times, April 2009)

Reports of child abuse and other atrocities spurred two talented reporters to investigate the Florida School for Boys.

3. “Inside Scientology High.” (Benjamin F. Carlson, October 2011)

A two-part profile of the practices of the Delphian School, a boarding school in the hills of Oregon that integrates aspects of Scientology into teaching its students.

4. “Is Avenues The Best Education Money Can Buy?” (Jenny Anderson, The New York Times, May 2013)

Parents are partners in the everyday operations of the $85 million start-up school Avenues: The World School.

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Photo by Cliff

Reading List: A Bizarre Institution

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 the The Rumpus, Tampa Bay Times, Benjamin Carlson, and The New York Times.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 21, 2013

Gagged by Big Ag

Longreads Pick

Meat industry lobbyists are attempting to push through legislation that would make it difficult for whistle-blowers to report animal abuse at farm facilities. Many states already have so-called ag gag provisions:

“Recognizing that, in the era of smartphones and social media, any worker could easily shoot and distribute damning video, meat producers began pressing for legislation that would outlaw this kind of whistleblowing. Publicly, MowMar pledged to institute a zero-tolerance policy against abuse and even to look into installing video monitoring in its barns. And yet last summer, at the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, MowMar’s co-owner Lynn Becker recommended that each farm hire a spokesperson to ‘get your side of the story out’ and called the release of PETA’s video ‘the 9/11 event of animal care in our industry.’

“As overheated as likening that incident to a terrorist attack may seem, such thinking has become woven into the massive lobbying effort that agribusiness has launched to enact a series of measures known (in a term coined by the New York Times’ Mark Bittman) as ag gag. Though different in scope and details, the laws (enacted in 8 states and introduced in 15 more) are viewed by many as undercutting—and even criminalizing—the exercise of First Amendment rights by investigative reporters and activists, whom the industry accuses of ‘animal and ecological terrorism.'”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jun 17, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,559 words)

Our Longreads Member Pick: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner

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This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner‘s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains: 
 

“On the morning of October 11, 2009, I encountered the 616-word newspaper story that would change my life. It was a New York Times report about a man named Luis Armando Peña Soltren, a former Puerto Rican nationalist who had helped hijack a Pan Am jet to Cuba in 1968. After spending the next 41 years living in Fidel Castro’s socialist ‘paradise,’ he had decided that he could no longer bear to remain apart from the wife and daughter he had left behind. So at the age of 66, Soltren had voluntarily returned to the United States. He had been arrested the moment he stepped off his plane at JFK Airport; he now faced a possible life sentence if convicted of air piracy.
           
“I was first struck by how much Soltren’s longing for his family had slowly swelled as the years flew by; it had taken him over four decades to muster the courage to risk his freedom for a chance to see his wife and daughter again. (I’ve always been drawn to tales of fugitives and exiles, who must often pay a steep psychological price in order to reinvent themselves.) But the more I thought about Soltren’s predicament, the more I was intrigued by its historical element—namely, the fact that he and two comrades had actually managed to hijack a Boeing 707 to Cuba in the first place. The New York Times piece gave the impression that such crimes were run-of-the-mill during the Vietnam Era. Given the airport security gauntlets we’re forced to endure these days, that seemed an almost unfathomable notion.
           
“Yet using a little Google-fu, I unearthed a lengthy list of dramatic skyjackings from the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time period I have romanticized ever since watching Mean Streets. There were plenty of fascinating characters who seemed to beg for deeper study, such as the Marine who fled to Rome to escape a court-martial, or the Mexican immigrant who just wanted to give a 34-minute speech about his troubles. But there was one name that tugged at my heart more than any other: Catherine Marie Kerkow.
           
“Why her? Well, for starters, she was a woman—skyjacking was almost exclusively a male pursuit. She was also high-school classmates with legendary miler Steve Prefontaine. But most important, she didn’t seem to have any obvious reason for getting involved in a spectacular hijacking—she was, by all accounts, just an aimless 20-year-old kid with no political ties, nor any history of criminality.
           
“So why did Cathy Kerkow turn her back on everything she’d ever known in order to hijack Western Airlines Flight 701? As my infinitely patient wife and kids can attest, my obsession with answering that question has now gobbled up a significant chunk of my life. The Skies Belong to Us is what I have to show for all those countless hours holed up with the keyboard, surrounded by teetering piles of marked-up documents.”

Read an excerpt here

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College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Light from Darkness,' by Mary Kenney, Indiana University

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Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher is helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Recent Indiana University journalism student Mary Kenney used her study-abroad experience in India to test her abilities as a foreign correspondent. In “Light From Darkness,” Kenney profiles a sex worker named Akshaya. Akshaya was a rural girl who sought a new life in a big city. But like so many other impoverished women around the world, Akshaya’s life turned violent. Kenney relies on Akshaya’s own voice to provide the story’s tone and cadence, but without the soft-focus indulgence that can turn such narratives into overwrought Lifetime movies. Her willingness to spend time with a subject, and earn her trust, is evident in this piece.

Kenney is spending her first post-graduate summer on the sports desk at The New York Times, where she is a James Reston Reporting Fellow.

“Light from Darkness”

Mary Kenney | Inside Magazine | March 2013 | 2,932 words

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

Longreads Guest Pick: Elise Foley on 'The Girl Who Turned to Bone'

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Elise Foley is an immigration and politics reporter for The Huffington Post.

“My favorite longread this week was Carl Zimmer’s ‘The Girl Who Turned to Bone’ in the Atlantic, which is about a very rare disease that causes people to form a second skeleton. It reminded me, in a great way, of ‘The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly’ in the New York Times last year—both of them are stories about dealing with a rare disease on your own, then finding a doctor and network of people like you that make you feel like you’re not alone. The entire piece is a fascinating look at the science behind the disease and the people who helped to discover it.”

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Pulitzer Prize Winners, 2013

Longreads Pick

Longreads presents: A collection of stories awarded the Pulitzer, including The New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and more.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 15, 2013

“Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s Post-Scandal Playbook.” Johnathan Van Meter, New York Times Magazine.

A Mother Jones Reading List: Fashion #Longreads

Longreads Pick

A collection of stories from Salon, Jane, The New Yorker, New York Times and more.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Mar 30, 2013
Length: 3 minutes (996 words)

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Mo Yan, SF Weekly, The Hairpin, fiction from Electric Literature and the Coffin Factory, and a guest pick by Jia Tolentino. 

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