Search Results for: Obama

I Work in the Restaurant Industry. Obamacare Saved My Family’s Life.

Longreads Pick

Baker Allison Robicelli on the difficulty of offering insurance (or being insured) in the service industry, and how the Affordable Care Act started to change things — and saved her and her husband’s lives.

Source: Eater
Published: Jan 12, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,532 words)

Empathy and Escapism — Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books

Photo by Michael Pittman CC-BY SA 2.0

Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped — in his life, convictions and outlook on the world — by reading and writing as Barack Obama.

“At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” These two things, he added, “have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”

Writing was key to his thinking process, too: a tool for sorting through “a lot of crosscurrents in my own life — race, class, family. And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole.”

At The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reports on how reading and writing helped President Obama to “slow down and get perspective” from novelists, memoirists, and historical figures during the eight years of his presidency.

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Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books

Longreads Pick

A profile of Barack Obama as a reader, which includes a link to Kakutani’s 3,015-word interview with the outgoing president. He  discusses his love for reading, some authors he loves–plus short stories he’s written.

Published: Jan 16, 2017
Length: 8 minutes (2,018 words)

Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama

Longreads Pick

Have “postmodern” and “postwar” have become outmoded as classifications for novels? Lorentzen suggests it’s more useful to look at trends in fiction relative to the administration they were released under. During Obama’s, he says, novelists looked to answer questions of authenticity. During Trump’s, he anticipates dystopian narratives.

Published: Jan 11, 2017
Length: 22 minutes (5,640 words)

The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America

Longreads Pick

A response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “My President Was Black” from sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom: “My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 13, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,150 words)

‘For Eight Years Barack Obama Walked on Ice and Never Fell’

Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama—a black man with deep roots in the white world—was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable.

-From Ta-Nehisi Coates’s history of the Obama presidency, in The Atlantic.

Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency

Longreads Pick

David Remnick follows President Obama in the days leading up to, and after, a shocking presidential election.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 18, 2016
Length: 43 minutes (10,924 words)

President Barack Obama Says, ‘This Is What a Feminist Looks Like’

Longreads Pick

Feminist Dude/Dad in Chief, Barack Obama, has penned an essay for Glamour about how far women have come, how much farther they need to be encouraged to go, and how both men and women are limited by outdated gender stereotypes that need to be retired.

Source: Glamour
Published: Aug 4, 2016
Length: 6 minutes (1,615 words)

Obama’s Aesthetic of Cool

barack obama

On stage a young black man, the president of the United States, warmly embraced an older white woman in front of god and all the world. It is now an iconic photograph. If it had occurred on a weed-choked street in Mississippi within the lifetime of many of the people who were cheering the moment, the young man might have been beaten, burned, hung, thrown into a river with a cotton fan tied to his neck. A song began to rise through the history of the moment:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees…

But it was not those days any longer. The young man was the President of the United States and he has rung his changes on that song, and on an occasionally baffled democracy.

– Charles Pierce, writing in Esquire, on President Obama’s Democratic National Convention Speech and uniquely American brand of “cool.”

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