Search Results for: ProPublica

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Rukmini Callimachi, Annie Waldman and Joshua Kaplan, Jesmyn Ward, Hillery Stone, and Alice Driver.

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1. Breonna Taylor’s Life Was Changing. Then the Police Came to Her Door.

Rukmini Callimachi | The New York Times | September 3, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,500 words)

Two months before she was killed in her home in Louisville, Breonna Taylor tweeted triumphantly, “2020 deff gonna be my year WATCH!”

2. Sent Home to Die

Annie Waldman, Joshua Kaplan | ProPublica | September 2, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,029 words)

In New Orleans, hospitals sent infected COVID patients into hospice facilities or back home to die — to family members untrained and unprepared to care for them — and in some cases discontinuing treatment against the family’s wishes.

3. On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed By Pandemic

Jesmyn Ward | Vanity Fair | September 1, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,146 words)

“The acclaimed novelist lost her beloved husband—the father of her children—as COVID-19 swept across the country. She writes through their story, and her grief.”

4. Fever in the Woods

Hillery Stone | Guernica Magazine | August 26, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,691 words)

“Tucked far away with my children, this is where I feel safest and most afraid.”

5. Back to the Land

Alice Driver | Oxford American | August 25, 2020 | 8 minutes (1,914 words)

Alice Driver shares the story of her dad’s wish to build his own tomb on his own land. “He wanted his death, like his life, to be a work of art—a tomb he designed and filled with ceramics—and one that would allow him to define death on his own terms.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Central American migrants heading in a caravan to the US- cross the Suchiate River from Tecun Uman, Guatemala, to Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas State, Mexico, on January 23, 2020. (Photo by ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Abrahm Lustgarten, Michele Harper, Laura Paskus, Samiya Bashir, and Raven Leilani.

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1. Where Will Everyone Go?

Abrahm Lustgarten | ProPublica | July 23, 2020 | 38 minutes (9,536 words)

As temperatures and sea levels rise, populations flee from regions that are no longer livable, and the United States and other nations choose to build walls and keep migrants out, where will the world’s climate refugees go?

2. The Police Tried to Make Me Medically Examine a Man Against His Will

Michele Harper | Zora | July 6, 2020 | 18 minutes (4,611 words)

On racism in medicine, body autonomy, and one Black doctor’s experience in the ER.

3. Memory of a River

Laura Paskus | Santa Fe Reporter | July 13, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,360 words)

The adorable eucalyptus-eaters are on the front lines of research for a chlamydia vaccine.

4. Letter from Exile

Samiya Bashir | LitHub | July 23, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,809 words)

“In another hot year, we fail the Rio Grande.”

5. The Void Witch

Raven Leilani | Aquifer: The Florida Review Online | June 10, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,488 words)

“She was in pursuit of what all black girls were supposed to be born with—a jovial, ironclad self-esteem, a sense of rhythm, and a witchy finesse with jojoba and coconut oils. She was in pursuit of that inalienable right to say whether or not someone was, in fact, down.”

The Promised Land

Trans activist Karla Avelar poses for a portrait in San Salvador, El Salvador in 2018. (Danielle Villasana)

Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)

“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar

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Home was 16 by 26 feet. When Karla, 41, lay on her single bed at night, she could stretch out her left arm and grab her mother Flor’s* hand. She and her mother, who was 64, hadn’t lived together for 32 years: Now they practiced French together and her mother, who never learned to write, carefully traced the letters of the French alphabet in cursive well into the night. Neither of them had finished elementary school; Flor, born in rural El Salvador, was forced to leave school after first grade to work and help support her family and Karla was forced out of school in eighth grade due to bullying from teachers and students who told her she had to dress like a man in order to attend class, who once tried to hold her down and cut her hair and who frequently beat her up. Home was the name she had chosen for herself — Karla Avelar — one that was first legally recognized when she was 41 and requesting asylum in Switzerland. When the weight of memories of her previous life haunted Karla, she went outside to search for a place to cry alone.

When I first met Karla in San Salvador, El Salvador in July 2017, her home was a place I couldn’t safely visit. Karla, a renowned LGBTQ activist, had been nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights, which would come with a large cash prize if she won. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha in Karla’s neighborhood, part of an international gang known as the MS-13, had become aware of the news and had threatened to kill her if she won and didn’t hand the money over to them. She had even been forced to change houses due to the threats, but she still felt her neighborhood wasn’t safe for me to visit, so we met at the offices of COMCAVIS TRANS, an NGO that was the culmination of her life’s work as an activist. Like so many trans women in El Salvador, she had survived more violence than most of us could imagine — rapes, assassination attempts, being unjustly imprisoned — and after being released from prison, she founded COMCAVIS TRANS as the first openly HIV positive trans woman in the country. I interviewed Karla for a story about the reasons why trans woman flee El Salvador, neither of us knowing that Karla would eventually become the story.

On October 6, 2017, roughly a month-and-a-half after we bid each other farewell in San Salvador, Karla and her mother flew to Switzerland to attend the awards ceremony for Martin Ennals Award nominees. When they arrived in Switzerland, Flor broke down and told Karla that members of the MS-13 gang had come to her house, beat her up and forced her to watch a video in which they were torturing a man, telling her that they would do the same thing to Karla. Before leaving, they told Flor that they would rape her in front of Karla and then kill her if Karla didn’t hand over the prize money. And then they asked her to confirm the date that Karla would return to El Salvador after her trip to Switzerland.

Karla relayed the threats to the members of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights who were worried that she would be assassinated if she returned to El Salvador. They encouraged her and her mother to apply for asylum in Switzerland. At the awards ceremony, Karla was recognized for her activism and awarded a monetary prize plus an additional amount to donate to the NGO of her choice. Karla and Flor didn’t have time to celebrate — they needed a few days alone to consider what it would mean to never return to the land of their birth. Karla was proud that she had lived honestly in El Salvador, not hiding her past as a sex worker, as someone who had spent time in jail and was HIV+, even when it put her at risk, but she also knew many trans women who had been murdered for their activism. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Lucas Waldron, Nadia Sussman, Thalia Beaty, and Ryan Gabrielson, as well as Jamil Smith, Cynthia Tucker, Venkatesh Rao, and Sirin Kale.

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1. “Somebody’s Gotta Help Me”

Lucas Waldron, Nadia Sussman, Thalia Beaty, Ryan Gabrielson
ProPublica | June 16, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,543 words)

“But abuse by law enforcement inside jails remains largely out of sight and harder to document.” Phillip Garcia was in psychiatric crisis. In jail and in the hospital, guards responded with violent force and restrained him for almost 20 hours, until he died.

2. The Power of Black Lives Matter

Jamil Smith | Rolling Stone | June 16, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,809 words)

“How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next.” Do you know the names Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi? You do now.

3. The Way of John Lewis

Cynthia Tucker | The Bitter Southerner | June 16, 2020 | 11 minutes (2,817 words)

“As federal troops and militarized police descended on protesters, John Lewis pleaded for nonviolence. Cynthia Tucker shares her hope that a new generation of activists can learn from his courageous and peaceful fight for ‘beloved community.'”

4. Pandemic Time

Venkatesh Rao | Noema | June 8, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,337 words)

“The distorted experience of time through the COVID-19 pandemic reveals it to be an atemporal liminal passage between two great historic eras.”

5. ‘It’s Bullshit’: Inside the Weird, Get-Rich-Quick World of Dropshipping

Sirin Kale | Wired UK | May 1, 2020 | 10 minutes (4,035 words)

“$750,000 of sales, and around $100,000 of profit for Despin, in just 11 months. To this day, he has never seen or touched the product.”

The Spectacular Explosion of Cannabis’ Ambitious Startup MedMen

AP Photo/Richard Drew

The collapse of MedMen is a tale for the microdosing, CBD-soda-drinking tech era. The company itself couldn’t always figure out if it was a tech company or a cannabis company. It just knew it was racing to capitalize off the lucrative opportunity presented by cannabis’ legalization. In an incredible, deep, absorbing investigation for ProPublica, Ben Schreckinger and cannabis policy reporter Mona Zhang narrate the rise and fall of this ambitious startup, which they call the “Apple of Pot.” MedMen modeled their stores after the Apple Store. They published a glossy culture magazine called Ember that ran articles like “Is CBD the New Tylenol?” In an attempt to reach the masses and normalize cannabis consumption, they ran expensive ad campaigns where they’d cross out the word ‘stoner’ and replace that loaded term with words like “Grandmother.” “One image,” the story says, “featured a uniformed police officer.” As the story put it, “MedMen stands as a cautionary tale of American Wild West capitalism.“ It all started simply enough.

At first, as he recounts the story in interviews, Bierman thought his new client had misspoken. The elderly woman with wild hair kept saying she brought in $300,000 in revenue monthly, when she meant to say annually. There was no way, he thought, that her run-down little pot dispensary on Sunset Boulevard could be raking in $3.5 million a year.

It was 2009, long before the advent of legal recreational weed, and Bierman was not aware of California’s mom-and-pop medical pot industry—if you could even call it an industry. At the time, he and his young business partner, Modlin, were running a branding firm, mashing up the names MODlin and bierMAN and calling it ModMan. ModMan helped small, wellness-related companies like the old lady’s dispensary upgrade their image.

When Bierman finally gathered that the old woman had her numbers right, he realized that he was in the wrong business. ModMan became MedMen, and Bierman’s trade became medical marijuana.

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The Can That Was Supposed to Help Save a City

Amy Sancetta / AP Photo

Like many cities whose economies once relied on manufacturing, sections of Youngstown, Ohio, have fallen into disarray. But the city had a plan to revive Youngstown’s East Side, where steel manufacturing once ruled: Joseph Co. International would build a $20 million dollar campus to produce Chill-Can, the world’s first self-cooling beverage can, create jobs, and revive the city. In a collaboration between Youngstown’s Business Journal and ProPublica, reporter Dan O’Brien writes about this ambitious, failed saga of product development and urban renewal, and the difficult bargain cities and corporations make. Youngstown bulldozed homes to build the campus. They gave Joseph a $1.5 million grant, which included funds officials took from sewer and water projects. “This is going to revolutionize the beverage industry,” Joseph’s CEO told one publication. “There will be no other facility like it in the world.” But as O’Brien reports, the facility remains unfinished, and no jobs have been created. The problem involves the city’s approach to redevelopment, which reaches far beyond Chill-Can.

While some firms failed to deliver, officials acknowledge, Youngstown’s program has ultimately leveraged private investments of more than $755 million and has helped create a total of 2,493 jobs out of a promised 2,861, according to city records. Still, The Business Journal and ProPublica found that more than half of those jobs were created by just five companies, including a Toys R Us distribution center and Exal Corp., which manufactures aluminum cans and bottles. Exal has since reduced its workforce, while the Toys R Us warehouse closed. (That facility is now occupied by HMS Manufacturing, which employs far fewer workers than the toyseller did at its peak).

Now, Youngstown’s approach to economic development is coming under greater scrutiny as the city’s former finance director and a prominent developer prepare to face trial on public corruption charges. At the heart of the case are allegations that officials steered taxpayer funds to favored projects in exchange for bribes. The defendants have pleaded not guilty. Separately, the state auditor has alleged that officials misappropriated money from the city’s water and wastewater funds and used it to spur a number of development deals, including Chill-Can. The city is now fighting a directive from that office to repay millions of dollars, arguing, in part, that such a move would plunge Youngstown into fiscal peril.

First Ward Councilman Julius Oliver, who represents a portion of the East Side neighborhood where Chill-Can is located, describes Youngstown’s incentives system as “broken” and has pushed for more accountability against companies that have not met their promised job goals.

“We have people within our city government that could be doing more, and quite frankly, they’re not,” Oliver said. “You can’t keep using the same excuse over and over again.”

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15 True Crime Longreads and the Questions We Should Ask Ourselves When Reading Them

(Armin Weigel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

“I think one of the reasons these stories are so popular — and they’ve been very popular since long before whatever true crime boom we’re currently in,” Rachel Monroe notes while discussing her book Savage Appetites, on our cultural fascination with crime, is that “they’re very emotionally engaging.”

“Whenever we’re telling these stories,” Monroe continues, “we’re participating in that emotional, social, political conversation, whether we want to admit it or not.”

For all that we can stream entire seasons of docudramas in a single day, true crime stories often take years to report out and get right. Whether the person facing the facts of any given case is a staff writer or a law enforcement official, even full-time, invested professionals can lack the bandwidth or the resources to investigate every life story that crosses their desks, with the undivided attention each of those lives deserves.

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS - JANUARY 30:M-209 is a light-weight portable pin-and-lug cipher machine, developed at the beginning of World War II by Boris Hagelin. Crypto AG, a predecessor of Crypto International, was a Swiss company that emerged from World War II with complex and secure code-breaking machines. The firm made hundreds of millions of dollars, selling equipment to nearly 130 countries. What none of those customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with German intelligence. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Greg Miller, Melissa del Bosque, Katherine Rosman, Laura Marsh, and Alexander Huls.

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1. ‘The intelligence coup of the century’

Greg Miller | The Washington Post | February 11, 2020 | 35 minutes (8,928 words)

The CIA, in a secret partnership with West Germany, used Crypto AG to sell encryption services to gullible governments and then promptly read all their clandestine communications.

2. A Group of Agents Rose Through the Ranks to Lead the Border Patrol. They’re Leaving It in Crisis.

Melissa del Bosque | Pro Publica | February 10, 2020 | 24 minutes (6,204 words)

How several agents from a small outpost in Arizona, including recently retired chief Carla Provost, climbed to the top of the Border Patrol, then one by one retired, leaving corruption, misconduct and a toxic culture in their wake.

3. The Chaos at Condé Nast

Katherine Rosman | The New York Times | February 12, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,135 words)

Responding to Details editor Dan Peres’s new recovery memoir, Katherine Rosman casts a jaundiced eye upon the lax culture and unquestioned expense accounts at Condé Nast Publications that allowed Peres (and several of his colleagues, who also have tell-alls in the works) to get away with gross acts of self-indulgence and mistreatment of their employees.

4. Infinite Jerk

Laura Marsh | The New Republic | February 12, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,859 words)

Within “the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and sexism in the publishing industry,” jerks are praised and women are erased. 

5. Family Business

Alexander Huls | Truly*Adventurous | January 28, 2020 | 31 minutes (7,773 words)

What do you do when all you ever really wanted was to be loved by your dad and all he wants is to use you to perpetrate crime? Vincent Moretti got wrapped up in his overbearing father’s penchant for organizing inside-job armoured car heists. When Archie Moretti refused to share the take fairly, Vincent decided he had had enough of the patriarchy.

Why the 9/11 Families May Never Get Closure

OSAKA, JAPAN - JUNE 29: U.S. President, Donald Trump (L) meets Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud (L) on the sidelines of the second day of the G20 Summit at INTEX Osaka Exhibition Center in Osaka, Japan on June 29, 2019. (Photo by Bandar Algaloud / Saudi Kingdom Council / Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks, 15 were Saudis, but what role (if any) did the Saudi government play in the scheme? While a small team of FBI agents has been trying to uncover the truth, other parts of the FBI are determined to keep possible Saudi connections secret. Why? As Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella report in a joint investigation by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, President Trump’s not keen on something that might imperil “good relations with Saudi Arabia.”‘ Will the families of those who died as a result of the attacks ever get closure?

On the morning of Sept. 11 last year, about two dozen family members of those killed in the terror attacks filed into the White House to visit with President Trump. It was a choreographed, somewhat stiff encounter, in which each family walked to the center of the Blue Room to share a moment of conversation with Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, before having a photograph taken with the first couple. Still, it was an opportunity the visitors were determined not to squander.

One after another, the families asked Trump to release documents from the F.B.I.’s investigation into the 9/11 plot, documents that the Justice Department has long fought to keep secret. After so many years they needed closure, they said. They needed to know the truth. Some of the relatives reminded Trump that Presidents Bush and Obama blocked them from seeing the files, as did some of the F.B.I. bureaucrats the president so reviled. The visitors didn’t mention that they hoped to use the documents in a current federal lawsuit that accuses the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — an American ally that has only grown closer under Trump — of complicity in the attacks.

The president promised to help. “It’s done,” he said, reassuring several visitors. Later, the families were told that Trump ordered the attorney general, William P. Barr, to release the name of a Saudi diplomat who was linked to the 9/11 plot in an F.B.I. report years earlier. Justice Department lawyers handed over the Saudi official’s name in a protected court filing that could be read only by lawyers for the plaintiffs. But Barr dashed the families’ hopes. In a statement to the court on Sept. 12, he insisted that other documents that might be relevant to the case had to be protected as state secrets. Their disclosure, he wrote, risked “significant harm to the national security.”

Washington’s efforts to keep secrets about possible Saudi connections to 9/11 have also intensified. Former F.B.I. agents who have made court statements in support of the 9/11 families have been warned by the bureau that they risk violating secrecy laws. Kenneth Williams — a retired agent who wrote a prescient memo before 9/11 about radical Arab students taking flying lessons in possible preparation for hijackings — said in a sworn declaration for the plaintiffs that an F.B.I. lawyer told him that the Trump administration did not want him to help them because it could imperil “good relations with Saudi Arabia.” (The F.B.I. declined to comment.)

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On Course for Certain Disaster

In this Aug. 21, 2017, file photo, damage is visible as the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain steers towards Changi naval base in Singapore following a collision with the merchant vessel Alnic MC. A number of sailors are missing. (Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Joshua Fulton/U.S. Navy photo via AP, File)

Nobody on the 8,300 ton destroyer USS John S. McCain — not even the captain — really understood how to use the new touch-screen steering system the navy installed in a bid to reduce the number of sailors required to safely guide the ship. As T. Christian Miller, Robert Faturechi, Megan Rose, and Agnes Chang report at ProPublica, the system was fraught with “false alarms” and problems, to the point where engineers called the system, which regularly encountered “multiple and cascading failures,” unstable. Then, the navy blamed Captain Sanchez and the sailors steering the ship for the accident in which 10 sailors died.

In August 2017, Sanchez and his crew steered the ship toward a naval base in Singapore, where technicians were waiting. The navigation system had indicated more than 60 “major steering faults” during the month.

“We were going to have the programmers,” Sanchez said, “give the system a full, a full check, a full clean bill of health.”

The McCain never reached its destination.

In the early hours of Aug. 21, 2017, the McCain was 20 miles from Singapore, navigating one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Sanchez was on the bridge to assist in the complex maneuvers ahead. He ordered Bordeaux to take over steering the warship while another sailor controlled its speed. The idea was to avoid distractions by having each man focus on a single task in the heavy maritime traffic.

To check that he had control, Bordeaux tugged the ship’s wheel slightly to the left. The McCain did not alter its course. Bordeaux rotated it slightly to starboard. Again, the McCain maintained its track. Bordeaux suddenly realized that the McCain was steaming uncontrolled toward the cargo ships sailing through the Singapore Strait.

“Loss of steering,” he called out.

The McCain began turning mysteriously to the left, slowly at first, and then faster. The ship drew closer and closer to the vessels plying the strait.

As Bordeaux remained glued to the screen before him, there was quiet in the dark of the bridge as sailors darted around, staring at gauges, flipping buttons, trying in one way or another to figure out what was happening. Sanchez’s eyes flew across the ship’s banks of screens in his own desperate attempt to avert disaster.

Three minutes and 19 seconds after Bordeaux’s cry, the McCain collided violently with a 30,000-ton Liberian-flagged oil tanker. Ten Navy sailors were killed and scores more were injured. It was the Navy’s worst accident at sea in 40 years.

Immediate responsibility, the Navy ruled, rested with Sanchez, his officers and senior sailors. They had been lax, even complacent, in their training of the sailors steering the ship. Sanchez had made a critical error in not adding more sailors to stand watch as the McCain navigated the treacherous strait. Sanchez was charged with homicide. A chief petty officer, responsible for training the sailors to use the navigation system, was charged with dereliction of duty. The chief petty officer had himself received less than an hour of instruction.

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