Search Results for: The Atlantic

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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Here's One Way to Ace a Public School's Standardized Test

When a problem exists in Philadelphia schools, it generally exists in other large urban schools across the nation. One of those problems—shared by districts in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities—is that many schools don’t have enough money to buy books. The School District of Philadelphia recently tweeted a photo of Mayor Michael Nutter handing out 200,000 donated books to K–3 students. Unfortunately, introducing children to classic works of literature won’t raise their abysmal test scores.

This is because standardized tests are not based on general knowledge. As I learned in the course of my investigation, they are based on specific knowledge contained in specific sets of books: the textbooks created by the test makers.

All of this has to do with the economics of testing. Across the nation, standardized tests come from one of three companies: CTB McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, or Pearson. These corporations write the tests, grade the tests, and publish the books that students use to prepare for the tests. Houghton Mifflin has a 38 percent market share, according to its press materials. In 2013, the company brought in $1.38 billion in revenue.

-Meredith Broussard, in the Atlantic, on a data experiment revealing that public schools that use the “wrong” textbooks may be hurting their performance.

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Photo: cybrarian77, Flickr

Oh, the Humanities! A Reading List Pertaining to the English Major

In college, I rearranged my majors and minors, all in the humanities, for years. I loved everything. Finally, I majored in English. It was fate—second-grade me was constantly in trouble for sneaking books under her desk. Majoring in English was both the joy and bane of my life. I struggled with a Faulkner-heavy Southern Lit course, even though Faulkner remains beloved. I groused about Shakespeare. I wrote my senior thesis on Michael Chabon. And I transformed my love for editing into a prestigious position on the college newspaper. My Lit Crit class—a notorious gauntlet at my college—introduced me to Derrida’s jeu and the revelation of feminist theory. I spent my time studying and socializing in the English department suite. I TA’d for the head of the department. When I am nostalgic for college, I am nostalgic for the English suite—for the camaraderie among my fellow students and best friends, my professors and mentors, and the dusty books and teacups and flyers.

A confession: today, I whined to my boyfriend about the great gigs my journalist friends have procured. Daily papers! Grad school! Photography internships! New York City! On my worst days, I feel envy and inferiority. On my best days, I go to the library and check on a huge stack of books, remind myself to be grateful for my temp job and come home to write for Longreads. I remember that I did something right. If I remember that, I will continue to do something right, to do something, write.

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State of the #Longreads, 2014

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

When Creativity Comes in Pairs—Then Comes Apart

What ultimately brought their work together to a halt was not creative disagreements but business ones. During his power grab, John was sweet-talked by a canny, dubious manager named Allen Klein, with whom he promptly signed. George and Ringo followed—pure primate politics there. But Paul would not.

And so legend has it that the Beatles broke irrevocably apart.

Except that they never really did.

It’s tempting to think that a partnership ends like some scene in an opera, where two people come to dramatic conflict, sing emotionally in each other’s faces, and decide to separate, weeping. But more often a split happens like it does in one of those country songs about a person leaving home and never coming back, in which no one—not the one who left, not the one who was left, not the listener—really knows why.

Joshua Wolf Shenk, in The Atlantic, on the power of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s collaboration, and how it ended.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Vera Nabokov, Eugen Boissevain, Leonard Woolf: On Spouses Who Supported Their Famous Partner's Writing Careers

At the Atlantic, Koa Beck writes about the spouses of famous writers who supported their partner’s writing careers, often devoting their lives to it. Vera Nabokov epitomized this: She not only performed the duties of cleaning and cooking expected of her as a wife in her era, but also worked as her husband’s “round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary”:

To some writers, Vera Nabokov remains much more than “just a wife,” but rather a template for an enviable asset. It’s undeniably easier to prioritize one’s art with a 24/7 writing coach who also manages “the mini-country that is home,” to quote novelist Allison Pearson.

As Laura Miller recently pointed out in Salon, Virginia Woolf and Edna St. Vincent Millay each benefited greatly from truly anomalous marriages of their time, in which their respective husbands assumed a Vera-esque role. Millay’s husband, Eugen Boissevain, reportedly described himself as a feminist and “married the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay with the express purpose of providing her with a stable home life and relieving her of domestic tasks so she could write.” By the time Millay died, she had written six plays and more than a dozen books of poetry. While Leonard Woolf cared for Virginia during her bouts of mental illness, he also managed the household, tended to the garden, and co-founded the couple’s literary press. Throughout his dedication to his wife’s craft—and her general well-being—he also managed to have a literary career of his own, producing both novels and stories while maintaining editorships at several journals. Claire Messud wrote in The New York Times that the Woolf partnership was one of “extraordinary productivity.” In her lifetime, Woolf published nine novels, two biographies, and several collections of essays and short stories—among other works.

But not all gifted writers are blessed with Veras (or Leonards or Eugens for that matter). At a promotional reading of Bark at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, [Lorrie] Moore clarified to me—and a room’s worth of fans—that she absolutely does not have a Vera. “I do every little thing myself,” she said.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Subconscious Cues That Guide Visitors Through The World’s Busiest Airport

In a recent blog post for The Atlantic, David Zweig spoke with wayfinding expert and airport-sign designer Jim Harding about his work on the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson. According to Hartfield, the highest mark of success in Harding’s work is invisibility: if his job is perfectly executed, “you will never think of him or his work.” In Harding’s work, no decision is arbitrary; even the tiniest aesthetic choices are part of a carefully orchestrated ballet, subconscious triggers that point the visitor in the right direction without them even realizing that they are being guided. Even something as seemingly minor as the shape of a street sign takes on great weight:

When undertaking a major wayfinding project like the one at the Maynard Jackson Terminal, as the ripple effect on the maps shows, everything outside the core area must be tied in to the master plan. On the roads encircling Maynard Jackson the top of every street sign related to the terminal has a slightly curved edge, echoing the gentle undulating aesthetics of the terminal’s roofline. It’s a subtle, likely subconscious wayfinding cue, letting you know you are in the vicinity of the international terminal. Many of the interior signs share this shape as well. This distinguishes the area from the domestic terminal and concourses, where all the signs are a standard rectilinear shape. If you are ever in an airport or campus or hospital or other complex environment and suddenly something feels off, you sense you are going the wrong way, there’s a good chance it’s not just magic or some brilliant internal directional sense, but rather you may be responding to a subconscious cue like the change of shape from one sign system to another. “Signage isn’t only about consistency in terminology and typefaces,” says Harding, but also about placing the overall ecosystem in a particular frame. It establishes a sense of place.

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What Lawyers Have In Common With Auto Mechanics and Dentists

Because of its complexity, Hadfield points out, legal help is what economists call a “credence good”—a good “provided by an expert who also determines a buyer’s needs” because the buyer is “unable to assess how much of the good or service they need; nor can they assess whether or not the service was performed or how well.” The classic examples are auto repair and dentistry, but most legal services qualify, too. Just as the average consumer is unable to verify how many cavities he has or how many auto parts he needs replaced, he’s often unable to question a lawyer on just how many hours of lawyering will be sufficient to resolve his problem. The effect is a pernicious lack of transparency “about the actual value of a lawyer.” And since the costs are sunk in the event of a loss, there’s a strong incentive for already-paying clients not to skimp.

The legal profession also operates, Hadfield notes, within what is essentially a “monopoly on coercive dispute resolution”: If you have a legal issue you don’t really much choice about where to go. You have to deal with a system controlled by lawyers, all of whom have come up through the system.

Michael Zuckerman, in The Atlantic, on the challenges of an affordable legal system.

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The Self-Driving Revolution

Let’s be honest: Humans never should have been allowed behind the wheel in the first place. There’s so much that can go wrong, so much room for negligence—it’s incredible to think that we managed human-controlled cars for as long as we did.

Here’s a reading list covering the past, present and future of transportation. Read more…

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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Read more…