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We Need to Talk About Uber: A Timeline of the Company’s Growing List of Problems

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (Photo by Wang K'aichicn/VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

In a piece for the Financial Times titled “Fire Travis Kalanick,” Kadhim Shubber wrote of the founder of Uber: “One day we will look back at what will hopefully be the smouldering wreckage of Kalanick’s career and ask how a person so lacking in basic human and corporate ethics was allowed to run a company for so long.”

Founded in 2009, Uber was able to portray itself as an underdog “disruptor” into 2012, galvanizing support to beat back city lawmakers in Boston and Washington, D.C. who sought to impose regulations.

But then their practice of surge pricing during crises came under fire when ride prices doubled in New York City after Hurricane Sandy devastated the metropolis in 2012. When surge pricing reached nearly eight times the fare during a snowstorm in 2013, riders got angry.

At first, few reporters took to criticizing the company. When they did, Uber’s public relations machine responded by trashing those reporters in other outlets. When reports of assaults and misconduct by Uber drivers started to roll in, the company responded by claiming they were not responsible for the incidents because the drivers are “independent contractors.”

And since 2013, the missteps and scandals have only continued to pile up. Here is a not comprehensive timeline of all of the trouble Uber has gotten into to date:

January 2014: Pando reported that an Uber driver suspended after assaulting a passenger in San Francisco had a criminal record, including a felony conviction involving prison time. Uber has no explanation for why the driver cleared the background checks that California mandated they run. That same month, outlets nationwide report on the company getting hit with its first wrongful death suit stemming from a driver killing a 6-year-old girl in a San Francisco crash on New Year’s Eve. That driver also had a criminal record that included a conviction for reckless driving. Read more…

Arundhati Roy Doesn’t Care What You Think 

Arundhati Roy in 2009. (Photo by Satish Bate/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Seven thousand, three hundred days. Twenty years. Judging by the response to the release of Arundhati Roy’s long-anticipated follow-up to her first novel, 1997’s The God of Small Things, you’d think it had been two hundred. Reviews of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness are almost as ecstatic as the ones that accompanied Roy’s first book — and they almost always include a lament that it took her so damn long to produce.

The God of Small Things received a Man Booker Prize, bestseller status, and a whirlpool of accolades, but after its publication, Roy opted out of fiction altogether, pursuing a career as a political activist-cum reporter, unearthing the stories of society’s rebels and outcasts, advocating for a non-nuclear India, the independence of Kashmir, and criticizing prime minister Narendra Modi.

How dare she?

That’s the underlying question in nearly every interview with Roy that’s followed. Who wouldn’t give just about anything for a fawning debut New York Times book review, a public clamoring for the next book? Doesn’t she owe her readers another glimpse into her imagination? Read more…

A Witness to Other People’s Lives, Not Living My Own

Author portrait by Shaun Guckian

Jennifer Romolini | Weird in a World That’s Not | Harper Business | June 2017 | 10 minutes (2,475 words)

 

Long before author Jennifer Romolini’s name appeared high up on the mastheads of publications such as Time Out NY, Tina Brown’s Talk Magazine, and Lucky, and websites like Yahoo Shine, Hello Giggles and Shondaland, she struggled to find herself. She spent her early 20s waitressing in restaurants and hotels, and was soon rushed by a pregnancy that ultimately wouldn’t last into marriage that wouldn’t, either, with a summer fling who should probably have been no more than that. She felt lost and stuck. She felt limited by her working class upbringing with weird parents who fashioned themselves after the oddball parents in Bowie’s “Kooks,” and by her academic failures — mostly for lack of trying — first in high school, then in college, which she didn’t finish. A perennial misfit where ever life took her, she assumed doors would always be closed to her. But a few years later, after leaving her first husband, she committed to figuring out what she wanted, getting her life together, and finding a place for herself in a career she liked, without compromising who she was.

When she was struggling, none of the career books on the market quite spoke to her, or offered solutions for someone who’d never been on a traditional career track. Now, after years building her career as an editor, she’s decided to fill that void for younger women who find themselves in her old shoes. Weird in a World That’s Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures, out today, is the book she wished she’d had — an interesting addition to the growing category of Misfit Lit, a hybrid of memoir and self-help. What follows is an excerpt, recommended by Longreads Essays Editor Sari Botton.

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The Word Is ‘Nemesis’: The Fight to Integrate the National Spelling Bee

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, photo via State Archives of Florida

Cynthia R. Greenlee | Longreads | June 2017 | 2,900 words ( 12 minutes)

In 1962, teenager George F. Jackson wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy with an appeal: “I am a thirteen-year-old colored boy and I like to spell. Do you think you could help me and get the Lynchburg bee opened to all children?”

The long road to the National Spelling Bee has always begun with local contests, often sponsored by a local newspaper. Nine publications, organized by the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, banded together in 1925 to create the first National Bee in Washington, D.C.

Decades later, George Jackson was protesting the policies of the local newspaper that sponsored the Lynchburg, Virginia contest, which excluded black students from participating in the official local competition — the necessary step that might send a lucky, word-loving Lynchburg child to nationals. There was more at stake than a coveted all-expenses-paid trip to the capital, an expensive set of Encyclopedia Britannica, and a $1,000 cash prize. For local and national civil rights activists, keeping black children from the spoils of spelling fame was an extension of Jim Crow educational policies that should have ended, in theory, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

While the Warren Court decided in 1954 that “separate but equal” would no longer be the law of the land, there were still “Negro” schools and white schools educating children across the South less than a decade later. A patchwork of local responses met the desegregation orders that followed the Supreme Court ruling, including deliberate foot-dragging, some real confusion about how to undo what years of white supremacy had wrought in the nation’s schools, and full-throated defiance to educational equity.

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Pee and Fury: Testing the Limits of Bladder Control

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad (Images by Colorblind and ugurhan for iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Nina Sharma | Longreads | June 2, 2017 | 9 minutes (2,322 words)

 

The first night of our vacation, I wake up in the middle of the night needing to pee. I’m tired, nestled in the hotel bed, and I debate getting up or not. I have a love-hate relationship with my bladder. I hate how much I have to pee; it feels as if upon the hour sometimes. “Ugh, it’s at it again,” I often groan to my husband, Quincy. “But Nina, it’s your body,” he’ll say. In the rivalry between team Nina and team Nina’s bladder, he always sides with the bladder.

Lately, even if I wake up feeling like a dangerously over-filled waterbed has sprouted up inside of me, I can avoid the half-awake march to the bathroom and fall back to sleep. When I wake up a few hours later, my thought almost always is, “I won.” It’s a relief to know that should the apocalypse require me holding my bladder for an extended period of time, I can do it.

As I contemplate listening to my bladder this time or not, I hear commotion in the hallway. A man yells, “Get down on the ground! Now!” He is yelling this in a voice so certain and sturdy it feels like the scariest part of the whole thing.

A woman chimes in. “Why would you do that!” she screams. I try to imagine what “that” is but I can’t get past my body, which I realize is shaking now, head to toe, a shudder I would otherwise think is reserved for cartoons but it’s real and upstaging my bladder. I draw myself close to Quincy, who pulls me into his arms tightly.

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El Padre de Los Migrantes

El Padre Javier, director del albergue en Juárez durante los últimos siete años, sentado en su oficina entre pilas de libros. Fotos de Itzel Aguilera.

Alice Driver | Longreads | Junio ​​2017 | 22 minutos (5,698 palabras)

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“¿Qué tan buena es una frontera si no hay gente dispuesta a abrirla de par en par?”
— Hanif Willis Abdurraqib *cita del relato en vivo en el “California Sunday Popup” en Austin, Texas, 4 de marzo de 2017

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A la orilla de la tierra prometida se levantan tormentas de polvo provenientes del desierto obscureciéndolo todo, incluso los migrantes tienen que esperar frente a un complejo rodeado por una valla metálica coronada por alambre de púas. Pero el Padre Javier Calvillo Salazar es oriundo de Ciudad Juárez, México, y está acostumbrado a todo esto, así como a todos aquellos que llegan después de una jornada en la que bien pudieron haber transcurrido miles de kilómetros y cientos de días, casi todos llegan cubiertos de cicatrices, con huesos rotos o sin alguno de sus miembros, con heridas que dejan en evidencia la falta de humanidad que se encuentra a lo largo del camino. Son personas que llegan llorando, con rostros endurecidos, con embarazos, con enfermedades venéreas y hasta con historias que remiten a las de Gabriel García Márquez, en las que cuentan haber visto con sus propios ojos a un cocodrilo devorar a un recién nacido de una sola y tajante mordida.

Nicole fue entregada en los brazos de su madre, Ana Lizbeth Bonía de 28 años, en un hospital de la frontera norte de México. Después de una travesía de 9 meses, que inició en Comayagua, Honduras, Ana Lizbeth llegó al albergue de migrantes Casa del Migrante Diócesis de Juárez con su esposo Luis Orlando de 23 años, y su desnutrido hijo José Luis de 2 años, que tenía unos ojos redondos como platos que brillaban con emoción. Ana nunca terminó la primaria, y pasó su niñez en las calles, vendiendo verduras desde los 4 años.

El albergue para migrantes en Juárez está tan cerca de El Paso, Texas, que los migrantes sienten el agridulce llamado de una tierra que pueden ver pero en la que difícilmente pueden vivir de manera legal. El albergue cuenta con 120 camas para hombres, 60 para mujeres, 20 para familias, así como con un área aparte en donde los migrantes transgénero pueden quedarse si así lo desean. La mayoría de los migrantes que llegan son hombres solteros, y durante las entrevistas realizadas ellos mencionaron que la amenaza del presidente Trump de separar a los niños de sus madres ha provocado una caída en la migración de estos grupos. Inicialmente, cada migrante tiene permitida una estancia no mayor a tres días, pero pueden quedarse más tiempo dependiendo de su condición, como es el caso de Ana, que necesitaba tiempo para descansar y recuperarse después de haber dado a luz a Nicole. Read more…

Cookie Tasting with Trump’s Billionaire Backer

Star shaped cookies with red, white, and blue icing
Patriotic Cookies by US Department of State via Flickr (Creative Commons)

At Politico, Sara Dickerman samples Trump mega-donor Rebekah Mercer’s cookies. That’s not a metaphor — Mercer owns the bakery Ruby et Violette and “is viewed as the major player in her family’s political patronage, which includes ownership stakes in Breitbart News and data mining service company Cambridge Analytica.”

I have rarely come across so many white chocolate confections in a bakery (see their Instagram celebration of the substance here). It’s tempting to take a big haymaker at white supremacist politics amid all these white chunks: Just imagine Jeff Sessions nibbling at an all-white chocolate assortment of cookies as he tells big-city police departments to stop worrying about racial bias. The truth is, however, that there is a place for white chocolate in baking, which is to sweeten and offset other flavors when they get to be too intense. The problem is that most of the cookies I tasted are far from intense. In fact, they merge on meekness, like the Lemon White, a fine-in-theory lemon cookie studded with grainy white chocolate chunks. The best lemon desserts toy with you on the edge of astringency, but the lemon flavor here is just an echo of the actual fruit: more like the soft yellow sweetness of lemon Jell-O.

What’s the culinary equivalent of TL:DR, too long, didn’t read? Is it TL:DE? Tastes lousy, didn’t eat?

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner listens during a meeting with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, Wednesday, May 3, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Justin Heckert, Peter Vigneron, Michael Lista, and Anthony Breznican.

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A Chance Meeting With Mr. Rogers

Fred Rogers rehearses the opening of his PBS show "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" in 1989. (AP Photo / Gene J. Puskar)

When disaster strikes, people often quote Mr. Rogers: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” Did he really say that? It turns out, that yes, yes he did. And, as Anthony Breznican recounts after randomly meeting Mr. Rogers after the death of his grandfather, the ultimate neighbor was as kind and thoughtful in real-life as his cardigan-wearing, television alter-ego.

Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood ran until 2001, but I lost touch with it as I got older. That’s how it goes. But in college, one day, I rediscovered it, just when I needed it.

We rode down in silence, and when the doors opened, he let me go out first. I stepped out but quickly turned back around. “Mr. Rogers… I don’t mean to bother you. But I just wanted to say thanks.”

Then he opened the student union door and said goodbye. That’s when I blurted in a kind of rambling gush that I’d stumbled on the show again recently, at a time when I truly needed it. He listened there in the doorway, the bitter Pittsburgh winter wind flowing around him into the warm lobby bustling with students.

When I ran out of words, I just said, “So … thanks for that. Again.”

Mr. Rogers nodded. He looked down, and let the door close again. He undid his scarf and motioned to the window, where he sat down on the ledge.

This is what set Mr. Rogers apart. No one else would’ve done this. No one.

He said, “Do you want to tell me what was upsetting you so?”

So I sat. And I told him the truth. I told him my grandfather had just died. He was one of the few good things I had. I felt adrift. Brokenhearted.

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The Teenage Dreamland of ‘Twin Peaks’

A.N. Devers | Longreads | May 2017| 9 minutes (2,206words)

When the first episode of Twin Peaks aired, I didn’t see it. It was the spring of 1990 and I was in shock. My grandfather and grandmother had just died unexpectedly of different causes less than twenty-four hours apart, on April 1st and 2nd, respectively. I was 12 years old and felt as if I was in a fever dream. Their deaths were ghastly and remarkable and strange and heart wrenching and I felt like for two weeks my body had left the earth, a pre-teen balloon, floating above their home of Ft. Worth, Texas watching streams of mourners as they arrived with potato salad and Ricky’s BBQ and chocolate cake.
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