Search Results for: Review

What the Tech Industry Can Teach Agriculture

Myers contends that, when applied to plants, patents are stifling. They discourage sharing, and sharing is the foundation of successful breeding. That’s because his work is essentially just assisting natural evolution: He mates one plant with another, which in turn makes new combinations of genes from which better plants are selected. The more plants there are to mix, the more combinations are made, and the more opportunities there are to create better plants. Even some breeders who work for the companies that are doing the patenting still believe in—indeed, long for—the ability to exchange seed.

“It’s this collective sharing of material that improves the whole crop over time,” Myers told me. “If you’re not exchanging germplasm, you’re cutting your own throat.”

If all of this seems like the concern of a specialized few, consider that plant breeders shape nearly every food we eat, whether a tomato from the backyard or the corn in the syrup in a Coke. Because of intellectual-property restrictions, their work increasingly takes place in genetic isolation and is less dynamic as a result. In the short term, that can mean fewer types of tomatoes to plant in the garden, or fewer choices for farmers and, by extension, consumers. In the long term, it could hinder the very resilience of agriculture itself.

Lisa Hamilton, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, on how plant breeders are adapting open source principles from the tech industry to guarantee the sustainability of our food systems.

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VQR in the Longreads Archive

Photo: Agriculture in Israel, Wikimedia Commons.

The Trouble with IBM

Longreads Pick

A legendary American tech company faces new challenges, and new competition, in areas where it once dominated:

It would have been better to walk away. As the Government Accountability Office reviewed the award, documents showed the CIA’s opinion of IBM was tepid at best. The agency had “grave” concerns about the ability of IBM technology to scale up and down in response to usage spikes, and it rated the company’s technical demo as “marginal.” Overall, the CIA concluded, IBM was a high-risk choice. In a court filing, Amazon blasted the elder company as a “late entrant to the cloud computing market” with an “uncompetitive, materially deficient proposal.” A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of winning” the contract. The corporate cliché of the 1970s and ’80s, that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, had never seemed less true. IBM withdrew its challenge.

Source: Businessweek
Published: May 23, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,251 words)

Adrift

Longreads Pick

As NASA seeks their next mission, Russia holds the trump card: access to the International Space Station.

Mastracchio’s unglamorous return home last week in a Soyuz capsule has been described by some veteran astronauts as akin to going over Niagara Falls, in a barrel, on fire.

Around the world, in Houston, mission control could only watch for critical signs of success, such as parachute deployment, listen to Russian flight directors and review the data being relayed from Kazakhstan.

When he finally reached the ground Mastracchio remained far from home, but at least it was spring, and the landing spot on. All Soyuz astronauts undergo two nights of winter survival training in case their spacecraft landing goes awry, and they’re stranded in the central Asian hinterlands for a couple of days. It’s a far cry from the handshake with the NASA administrator on a sunny Florida runway that awaited most shuttle astronauts.

Published: May 18, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,923 words)

The Fault in Our Canon: A Reading List About Problems in the Literary Canon

This brief list is but a glimpse of the complex, crucial and ongoing discussion about the importance of inclusivity and the problems with privilege in the literary canon. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, books you wish the canon could accept, etc.

1. “On ‘The John Green Effect,’ Contemporary Realism, and Form as a Political Act.” (Anne Ursu, Terrible Trivium, May 2014)

Realism’s literary privilege in America, the diminishment of other genres, the erasure of minority voices and the weird fact that everyone seems to have forgotten that fantastic YA fiction was around for a long time before John Green took pen to paper.

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The Good Girls Revolt

Lynn Povich | The Good Girls Revolt, Public Affairs | 2012 | 14 minutes (3,368 words)

 

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“Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint”

On March 16, 1970, Newsweek magazine hit the newsstands with a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement titled “Women in Revolt.” The bright yellow cover pictured a naked woman in red silhouette, her head thrown back, provocatively thrusting her fist through a broken blue female-sex symbol. As the first copies went on sale that Monday morning, forty-six female employees of Newsweek announced that we, too, were in revolt. We had just filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging that we had been “systematically discriminated against in both hiring and promotion and forced to assume a subsidiary role” simply because we were women. It was the first time women in the media had sued on the grounds of sex discrimination and the story, irresistibly timed to the Newsweek cover, was picked up around the world:

• “‘Discriminate,’ le redattrici di Newsweek?” (La Stampa) “Newsweek’s Sex Revolt” (London Times)
• “Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint” (Newsday)
• “Women Get Set for Battle” (London Daily Express)
• “As Newsweek Says, Women Are in Revolt, Even on Newsweek” (New York Times)

The story in the New York Daily News, titled “Newshens Sue Newsweek for ‘Equal Rights,’” began, “Forty-six women on the staff of Newsweek magazine, most of them young and most of them pretty, announced today they were suing the magazine.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Britney Spears's Lost Album

A decade ago, Britney Spears worked on an album called “Original Doll” that she hoped would prove herself as a songwriter. Her record label denied the album existed even though Spears did a radio interview where she previewed one of the songs. At Buzzfeed, Hunter Schwarz writes about Spears’s lost album:

On “Take Off,” Spears sang about tolerance, love, and peace. Bell called it her version of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White.” “It was about being tolerant about gay people. It was gay people, discrimination, basically loving yourself and being connected,” Bell said. “I think it was ahead of Lady Gaga. I think people would have looked at her and thought she had something to say. It was ahead of its time. She talked about war and how war is wrong.” In 2013, Bell tweeted some lyrics from the song: “They say get ready for the revolution / I think we oughta find some sorta solution.”

But Jive wasn’t impressed. “I think maybe they thought it was not close enough to her brand,” Bell said. She called In the Zone “the filtered-down version of Original Doll, or the more pop version.” She “wanted to make a record that was more vibey and more personal and honest,” Bell said. Ultimately, Spears still hoped her songs would have their day. “I think she knew, I can come back to these songs later,” Bell said.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A Professional Writer Never Skips Exercise

Back from dropping off the kids, and ready to write! Except I definitely have to exercise first. It’s going to be 90 degrees out there today and the dogs need to run and I don’t want to kill them—or worse, maim them and then decline chest-cracking at the billion-dollar emergency dog cancer spa.

I know you think I should skip the exercise, and get straight to work already. That shows how much you know. OK, listen the fuck up for once: If there’s one thing you must do as a highly esteemed professional freelance beggar, it’s exercise. Otherwise you will sit and stew in your schlubby juices all day. You’ll pull up Grantland and read a TV review that’s pure brilliance, delightful and peppy, and you’ll think about the fact that you should’ve been a teenage fashion guru making videos on YouTube but you were born at the wrong fucking time so now you have… 8,201 Twitter followers instead of 1.43 million. And you never actually get paid like that high-fashion fuck does.

Heather Havrilesky, in The Awl, on the life of a professional freelance writer.

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Photo: fanofretail, Flickr

We No Longer Drop Dead as Frequently as We Used to

Jacob M. Appel practices medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and his writing has appeared in numerous literary journals. In the Kenyon Review, Appel’s “Sudden Death: A Eulogy” examines living in a world where we no longer suddenly drop dead as frequently as we used to:

The exact rate at which we are not dropping dead is difficult to calculate: while the government keeps meticulous records on the causes of our deaths, and the ages at which we perish, it makes no effort to estimate the speed of our grand finales. Nonetheless, as a physician, my anecdotal sense is that we’re not dying nearly as suddenly as we once did. “When I started as an intern,” an elderly colleague recently observed at a staff meeting, “most patients only stayed in the hospital for a day or two. Either you got better or you didn’t. Lingering wasn’t part of the protocol.” Today, in contrast, lingering is the norm. Insurance companies force you out of the hospital, not rigor mortis. Where a generation ago, the expectation was for men to retire at sixty-five and keel over at sixty-seven—the basis for the pension plans now bankrupting municipal governments—a massive myocardial infarction in one’s fifth or sixth decade is no longer inevitable. Stress tests and statins and improved resuscitation methods mean we are more likely to survive to our second heart attack, live beyond our third stroke. Life ends with a whimper, not a bang.

That is not to say that the Grim Reaper never arrives on a bolt of lightning: I’ve lost a medical school mentor to a plane crash, a neighbor to suicide, a childhood friend to a brain aneurysm. Thousands of Americans, smoking less but eating more, still do succumb to heart attacks in their fifties and sixties. But we greet these swift departures not only with grief, as we have always done, but also with a sense of indignation simmering toward outrage. In an age of prenatal genetic testing and full-body PET scans and rampant agnosticism, all varieties of death strike many of us as anathema. Death without fair warning becomes truly obscene.

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Photo: Pargon

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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