Search Results for: Tampa Bay Times

Reading List: A Bizarre Institution

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

What do Scientology, child abuse, financial exploitation, and millionaire parents have in common? They’ve all got a niche in the education system.

1. “Surviving a For-Profit School.” (Stephen S. Mills, The Rumpus, July 2013)

A strip-mall “college” that exploits the underprivileged, veterans, and abused housewives for hundreds of thousands of dollars: Who wouldn’t want to work there?

2. “For Their Own Good.” (Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore, Tampa Bay Times, April 2009)

Reports of child abuse and other atrocities spurred two talented reporters to investigate the Florida School for Boys.

3. “Inside Scientology High.” (Benjamin F. Carlson, October 2011)

A two-part profile of the practices of the Delphian School, a boarding school in the hills of Oregon that integrates aspects of Scientology into teaching its students.

4. “Is Avenues The Best Education Money Can Buy?” (Jenny Anderson, The New York Times, May 2013)

Parents are partners in the everyday operations of the $85 million start-up school Avenues: The World School.

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Photo by Cliff

Reading List: A Bizarre Institution

Longreads Pick

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. This week’s picks include stories from the The Rumpus, Tampa Bay Times, Benjamin Carlson, and The New York Times.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 21, 2013

Dirty Secrets of the Worst Charities

Longreads Pick

Reporters from the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting spent a year scrutinizing 5,800 charities nationwide that pay for-profit telemarketing companies to solicit donations on their behalf. As much as 90 cents for every dollar of those donations go directly to pay for the for-profit companies that are “dialing for dollars”:

Part One: Dirty Secrets of the Worst Charities

Part Two: A Failure of Regulation

Part Three: The Reynolds Family Empire

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: Jun 10, 2013
Length: 44 minutes (11,185 words)

3 Stories from Young Journalists Honored at the Livingston Awards

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The Livingston Awards are handed out every year to celebrate outstanding work from journalists under 35. Here are this year’s winning stories, honored this week in New York: 

“Slavery’s Last Stronghold” (John D. Sutter & Edythe McNamee, CNN.com)

International Reporting winner: A trip to Mauritania, where an estimated 10% to 20% of the population lives in slavery.

“The Things They Leave Behind” (Rachel Manteuffel, Washingtonian)

National Reporting winner: A closer look at the letters, mementos and other artifacts left behind at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“In God’s Name” (Alexandra Zayas and Kathleen Flynn, Tampa Bay Times)

Local Reporting winner: An investigation into the abuse of children at unlicensed religious group homes in Florida.

“The Divorce from Hell, The Battle for Alimony and Empty Pockets.” Leonora LaPeter Anton, Tampa Bay Times.

Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Kruse

Longreads Pick

Michael Kruse, an award-winning staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times who also contributes to ESPN’s Grantland, this year gave a  TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 2, 2013

Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Kruse

Michael Kruse, an award-winning staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times who also contributes to ESPN’s Grantland, this year gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.  

1. Chris Jones on the animals in Ohio. What a way to start: The horses knew first. And want to know how to make people keep reading? End paragraphs and sections with sentences like this: He saw what was unmistakably a bear, giving chase. And: Then Kopchak saw the lion. And: Next she called 911. And: … and they knew that they didn’t have enough time or tranquilizers to stop what was coming.

2. Michael Mooney’s Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever. Because of the question. Will he or won’t he? I had to know. But also because Mooney made me care about Bill Fong. He could’ve taken me anywhere. I would’ve read forever. And because come on—who doesn’t love a well-told tale with a twist at the end?

3. Kelley Benham’s Never Let Go. Granted, Kelley’s cubicle’s not too far from my cubicle, so maybe I’m not too impartial, but I feel like this is a fact: This story is one of the best things that ran in a newspaper in America in the last 12 months. Three parts. One miracle. Life.

4. Caballo Blanco’s Last Run by Barry Bearak. Classic quest story. Looking for True. Also, in print, it was beautifully designed. Which matters.

5. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Cocaine Incorporated. Details. Details like the ghostwriter composing letters to the mistress. Like the dope-stuffed submersibles floating down the Amazon. The Sinaloa pot farm … on U.S. National Forest land … in the remote North Woods of Wisconsin … surrounded by Mexican farmers with AK-47’s. The catapult! The chili-pepper business! The air-conditioned tunnels with trolley lines! Surprises are such intoxicants. Oh, and this sentence: In the trippy semiotics of the drug war, the cops dress like bandits, and the bandits dress like cops.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Longreads Best of 2012: Justin Heckert

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Justin Heckert is a writer living in Indianapolis. His work has recently been anthologized in the book Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists

  

Best Essay: Lisa Taddeo, “Why We Cheat,” Esquire

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Tampa Bay Times, Wired, The New Yorker, Splitsider, The Verge, fiction from The Atlantic and a guest pick by Preeti Desai.

Longreads Best of 2012: Andrea Pitzer

Andrea Pitzer is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

Best Innocence Story

“The Innocent Man” (Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly)

What if you were convicted of murdering your wife, and you didn’t do it? What if, after decades in prison, you learned that the prosecution had held proof of your innocence but never let it see the light of day? Lone Star State treasure Pam Colloff once again uses restraint to powerful advantage as she indicts Texas justice.

The last time he had seen her was on the morning of August 13, 1986, the day after his thirty-second birthday. He had glanced at her as she lay in bed, asleep, before he left for work around five-thirty. He returned home that afternoon to find the house cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. Six weeks later, he was arrested for her murder. He had no criminal record, no history of violence, and no obvious motive, but the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office, failing to pursue other leads, had zeroed in on him from the start. Although no physical evidence tied him to the crime, he was charged with first-degree murder. Prosecutors argued that he had become so enraged with Christine for not wanting to have sex with him on the night of his birthday that he had bludgeoned her to death. When the guilty verdict was read, Michael’s legs buckled beneath him. District attorney Ken Anderson told reporters afterward, “Life in prison is a lot better than he deserves.”

Best Southern Gothic Nonfiction

“Vietnam vet’s 300-pound emotional support pet — a pig — divides Largo neighborhood” (Will Hobson, Tampa Bay Times)

In just over 1200 words, Will Hobson stages a community drama with all the comedy and horror of a Flannery O’Connor story. Meet Bernie Lodico and his neighbors. You won’t forget them.

“It is our understanding that you have a pot belly pig living in your back yard,” wrote park manager Cliff Wicks on Sept. 26. “This is not allowed. Please place the pig somewhere else.”

Lodico replied with a letter from a psychiatrist at James A. Haley VA Medical Center in Tampa. Lodico, 59, was a Marine who served in Vietnam. The pig is his “emotional support animal,” the letter explained, a pet protected by federal law.

Best Campaign Season Story

“Fear of a Black President” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)

I can’t come up with another journalist whose insight and ability to think so motivate me to read his work. I know other Longreaders have picked and will pick this piece from two months before the election, but it really has to be included.

Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed.


Best ‘The World Is Not Simple’ Story

“Everyone Is an Immigrant” (Eliza Griswold, Poetry)

In the language of the poet and the conflict journalist that she is, Griswold ponders the business of refugees on the island of Lampedusa.

Luciforo has been driving this bus for more than a year. Before that, he worked for a Christian volunteer group called Misericordia. Workers collected on the dock during refugee season. The name Misericordia is familiar. I realize I heard it last week when I was with fellow Civitella artists touring the Umbrian town of Sansepolcro. There, in the famous Piero della Francesca triptych, a hooded man kneels at the base of the cross. He looks like a hangman, but in fact he’s a member of this group, Misericordia. While they were doing charity work among the sick and dying, they wore black masks to protect against disease, and to protect their identity so they couldn’t be thanked. I imagine Luciforo in his yellow hazmat suit and a hood.

“Luciforo, what have you seen that you can’t forget?” I ask.

“One night, I watched mothers throw their babies into the sea. They popped up like corks,” he says.

Best Story You Thought You Knew But Didn’t

“Did This Man Really Cut Michael Jordan?” (Thomas Lake, Sports Illustrated)

Everyone has heard the story of how Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team by coach Clifton “Pop” Herring. But it turns out we didn’t know the story at all.

We pull up at the ramshackle house and step into a blinding afternoon, 97º, vibrating with the song of cicadas. Pop carries the pizza box in one hand and the bag of King Cobra and cigarettes in the other. We walk toward the picnic table under the spreading oak, where several ragged men cool their heels in the fine gray sand. Collectively they are known as the Oak Tree Boys. They are here morning and night. Some are homeless. One has a wild shock of white hair and another is missing his middle lower teeth, so he seems to have fangs. They have nowhere else to go.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012