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Reading List: What's in an Ally?

Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

In light of the recent Zimmerman trials, I’d like to share these four pieces. I’ve thought a lot about this blog post by Mary, who writes“Another thing I’ve noticed is that people are more concerned with being the best ally than they are with the concerns/oppression of the marginalized group(s) that they’re allying with. When the focus becomes about you and your feelings instead of the people facing discrimination, you’re being a really shitty ally.”

Here are four pieces for you to ponder:

The first is Questlove’s response to the George Zimmerman verdict…

The second is a response to Questlove’s piece by Kim Foster, a white woman and mother living in Harlem.

The third is “Ally-phobia: The Worst of Best Intentions.”

And the fourth is “Why the Foster Article Exposes Our Racism.”

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Photo: Brennan Schnell

Two Emmys and $57,000 in Debt

‘They don’t teach us about money in high school.’

Today’s video pick is Modern Comedian’s short documentary on comedian Sara Schaefer, who fell deep into debt even while she was pursuing her dream career and earning two Emmys as a writer for Jimmy Fallon. (Schaefer now co-hosts the MTV series Nikki & Sara LIVE, which has its second season premiere on July 30.)

For further reading on debt from the Longreads archive:

“Why I’m Grateful I Got Sued by American Express and What you Can Learn From My Experience” (Nathan Rabin, June 2013)

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Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

Longreads Pick

“Modern journalism is a kind of video game…to be silent is to lose points.” How social media editors for mainstream media sites, feeding off the Reddit community, incorrectly identified a missing 22-year-old Brown University student as one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. The family of Sunil Tripathi, who was later found dead, has now been forced to pick up the pieces:

“At 2:43 a.m., a Twitter user named Greg Hughes (@ghughesca), who was previously tweeting things like, ‘In 2013, all you need [is] a connection to the Boston police scanner and a Twitter feed to know what’s up. We don’t even need TV anymore,’ shifted the now-fervid speculation to established fact: ‘BPD scanner has identified the names,’ Hughes tweeted. ‘Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.’ (Hughes has since all but disappeared from the Internet, and where he got this information is unclear.) Seven minutes later, Kevin Galliford, a journalist for a TV station in Hartford, relayed the same information to his own followers; Galliford’s tweet was retweeted more than 1,000 times in a matter of minutes. The next multiplier came from Andrew Kaczynski, another journalist at BuzzFeed, who sent out the police-scanner misinformation to his 90,000 followers and quickly followed up with: ‘Wow Reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner. Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi.’

Published: Jul 26, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,381 words)

When 772 Pitches Isn’t Enough

Longreads Pick

Via Travelreads: Chris Jones on the unique culture of Japanese baseball and 16-year-old pitching phenom Tomohiro Anraku, seen as “a real-life Sidd Finch, his story so impossible that he’s been spoken about only in whispers or exclamations”:

“There has been talk in America that Anraku’s arm had been destroyed weeks earlier, in April, stripped of its powers at Koshien — a high school tournament that happens twice a year in Japan, in spring and in summer. Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa and one of the West’s principal translators of Japanese culture, has a hard time capturing the meaning of Koshien, first held in 1915. ‘It’s like the Super Bowl and the World Series rolled into one,’ he says. ‘It’s the closest thing Japan has to a national festival.’ In the spring, 32 teams from across the country arrive at Koshien, the name of a beautiful stadium near Kobe but also the de facto title of the tournament that’s played there. (In the summer, 49 teams participate, one from each of Japan’s 47 diverse prefectures, plus an additional team from Tokyo and Hokkaido.) They meet in a frantic series of single-elimination games until a champion emerges. At any one time, 60% of Japan’s TV sets will be tuned in to the drama. More than 45,000 fans will be packed into the stadium, and if the games are especially good, many of those fans will be weeping.

“‘It’s not just baseball,’ says Masato Yoshii, who pitched in two Koshiens long before he joined the New York Mets. ‘It’s something else. It’s something more.'”

Source: ESPN
Published: Jul 24, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,986 words)

Video Pick: The Journey of Transgender Rocker Laura Jane Grace

If you’ve been following Longreads for a while, you may have seen this excellent Rolling Stone story from last year by Josh Eells, “The Secret Life of Transgender Rocker Tom Gabel”, about Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace’s transition.

This MTV House of Style short reveals more about her life, and the small things she’s discovered with regard to clothing, makeup and style. And as Grace notes at the end of the clip, “A lot of tips I picked up were from other trans women on the Internet… When I was 14 years old if I was watching House of Style watching a transsexual being interviewed and talking about that, it would have completely changed my life. I would have felt saved.”

Read more from the Longreads archive: Stories by Josh Eells

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Lap Dogs of the Press

Longreads Pick

A 2006 essay by White House reporter Helen Thomas, who died Saturday at 92, on how the press failed to do its job in the run-up to the Iraq war. She recalls one exchange with former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan:

“‘Did we invade those countries?’

“At that point McClellan called on another reporter.

“Those were the days when I longed for ABC-TV’s great Sam Donaldson to back up my questions as he always did, and I did the same for him and other daring reporters. Then I realized that the old pros, reporters whom I had known in the past, many of them around during World War II and later the Vietnam War, reporters who had some historical perspective on government deception and folly, were not around anymore.”

Source: The Nation
Published: Mar 27, 2006
Length: 6 minutes (1,515 words)

Video Pick: The Journey of Transgender Rocker Laura Jane Grace

Longreads Pick

If you’ve been following Longreads for a while, you may have seen this excellent Rolling Stone story from last year by Josh Eells, “The Secret Life of Transgender Rocker Tom Gabel”, about Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace’s transition.

This MTV House of Style short reveals more about her life, and the small things she’s discovered with regard to clothing, makeup and style. And as Grace notes at the end of the clip, “A lot of tips I picked up were from other trans women on the Internet… When I was 14 years old if I was watching House of Style watching a transsexual being interviewed and talking about that, it would have completely changed my life. I would have felt saved.”

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 20, 2013

The Wisdom of Mr. Rogers

The below YouTube video recently resurfaced on Twitter to remind me about everything I loved, and still love, about Mr. Rogers. It’s a clip from the 1997 Daytime Emmys, where Fred McFeely Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award:

In just three minutes, he reduced Linda Dano to tears and reminded us how conscientious we can strive to be when it comes to recognizing the important people in our lives and telling them how much they mean to us.

The clip brought me back to one of my all-time favorite stories: Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire profile or Mr. Rogers:

Can You Say… Hero?

“Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, ‘The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.’”

Read Junod’s 2003 eulogy for Mr. Rogers

…and it then sent me on a Mr. Rogers YouTube-watching binge. Here he is defending PBS before Congress in 1969:

Mr. Rogers Defending PBS before the U.S. Senate (1969, 7 minutes)

Black & Blue

Longreads Pick

Damien Echols spent 18 years on death row as part of the “West Memphis Three” before being freed in 2011. He’s now adjusting to domestic life in Salem, Mass.:

“Lucia Coale and her husband, Ed Schutte, found out about their new neighbors back in September, not long after Davis and Echols had signed the papers on the 1810 Colonial a few houses down. Someone on the street sent out an email: ‘Oh my gosh, guess who’s moving here?’ Coale remembers it saying. ‘We all went through a period where we checked [Echols] out on the Internet and watched Paradise Lost.’ Coale herself began to follow Echols on Twitter, which is how she learned that weeks after they’d moved in, he and Davis still didn’t own a TV, which meant that every time Echols had a television appearance, which in those days was often, they were heading down to the Hawthorne Hotel to watch it.

“Some time later, Coale and Schutte were out on a bike ride when they saw Echols and Davis out walking. ‘I tend to be a very chatty person, so I just kind of walked up and I said, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m your neighbor,’’ Coale recalled. They invited Echols and Davis over to watch TV whenever they wanted. ‘I didn’t know we would become friends with them,’ Schutte said. ‘Are you going to be friends with someone who was in solitary confinement for years? How would that work?'”

Source: Boston Magazine
Published: Jun 24, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,612 words)

‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.

“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995. Read more…