→
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Stanford Magazine, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, fiction from The Atlantic, plus a guest pick from Damien Joyce.
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Stanford Magazine, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, fiction from The Atlantic, plus a guest pick from Damien Joyce.
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: New York Magazine, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, #fiction from The New York Review of Books, plus a guest pick from Eva Holland.
A call for women and men to have a more honest conversation about work-life balance:
Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference.
After a few months of this, several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. ‘You have to stop talking about your kids,’ one said. ‘You are not showing the gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.’ I told them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together.
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” — Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Matt Might, ThePostGame, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, fiction from Roxane Gay, plus a guest pick from Mike Dang.
Once an enemy of the U.S., Vietnam is growing as a country, and has become a key ally “as a counter to China’s rising power”:
Nothing better illustrates the Vietnamese desire to be a major player in the region than the country’s recent purchase of six state-of-the-art Kilo-class submarines from Russia. A Western defense expert in Hanoi tells me that the sale makes no logical sense: ‘There is going to be real sticker shock for the Vietnamese when they find out just how much it costs merely to maintain these subs.’ More important, the expert says, the Vietnamese will have to train crews to use them—a generational undertaking. ‘To counter Chinese subs,’ the expert says, ‘they would have been better off concentrating on anti-submarine warfare and littoral defense.’ Clearly, the Vietnamese bought these submarines as prestige items, to say We’re serious.
[Fiction] The pressure of exams and college acceptances, and the decisions that stem from it:
In the first quarter of sophomore year, Cindy got an A-minus in Chemistry, and Paul Takahashi caught up to her. We liked Paul okay, but once he’d won the top spot, we had trouble maintaining our good feelings toward him. By the midway point of second quarter, most of us had added him to our Mono Wish List.
This wasn’t ill will; it was a calculation of survival. Sometimes late at night, writing a paper or studying for an exam, we reflected that if Dmitri Alexandrov should fall ill or slip into a months-long depression, his grades would suffer and we’d move up in the class ranking. We imagined the same thing happening to Cindy and Paul, and to everyone else who was ranked above us. Occasionally, we imagined it happening to our closest friends.
Ethan Imboden is founder of Jimmyjane, a Bay Area company that is aiming to bring design standards and mainstream acceptance to a product that has long been hidden away from the public:
Within Sharper Image, that neck massager became known jokingly as ‘the Sex and the City vibrator,’ but in 2007, Imboden approached the company with the Form 6. Literally the sixth in a series of vibrator sketches — Imboden believes in minimalist names — the Form 6 has a curved, organic shape that is suggestive without being representational. It is wrapped completely in soft, platinum silicone, making it completely water-resistant, and charges on a wall-powered base station through a narrow stainless steel band, a novel cordless recharging system that Imboden patented. For these features, the Form 6 earned an International Design Excellence Award, the first time a sex toy had earned such a distinction. It comes in hot pink, deep plum or slate—non-primary, poppy colors that he believes convey sophistication. It is packaged in a hard plastic case inside a bright white box — ‘literally and figuratively bringing these products out of the shadows,’ Imboden said. And it has a 3-year warranty (this may not seem remarkable, but is for a sex toy).
“Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?” — Andy Isaacson, The Atlantic
The political battle over the disappearance of the menhaden, a silvery, six-inch fish that’s food for larger fish and farmed for omega-3 oils and fertilizer:
Harvested by the billions and then processed into various industrial products, menhaden are extruded into feed pellets that make up the staple food product for a booming global aquaculture market, diluted into oil for omega-3 health supplements, and sold in various meals and liquids to companies that make pet food, livestock feed, fertilizer, and cosmetics. We have all consumed menhaden one way or another. Pound for pound, more menhaden are pulled from the sea than any other fish species in the continental United States, and 80 percent of the menhaden netted from the Atlantic are the property of a single company.
The political battle over the disappearance of the menhaden, a silvery, six-inch fish that’s food for larger fish and farmed for omega-3 oils and fertilizer:
“Harvested by the billions and then processed into various industrial products, menhaden are extruded into feed pellets that make up the staple food product for a booming global aquaculture market, diluted into oil for omega-3 health supplements, and sold in various meals and liquids to companies that make pet food, livestock feed, fertilizer, and cosmetics. We have all consumed menhaden one way or another. Pound for pound, more menhaden are pulled from the sea than any other fish species in the continental United States, and 80 percent of the menhaden netted from the Atlantic are the property of a single company.”
The quest for the perfect dairy cow—starting with Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie, a bull who has 50,000 markers on his genome that make him the best sire at the moment:
While breeders used to select for greater milk production, that’s no longer considered the most important trait. For example, the number three bull in America is named Ensenada Taboo Planet-Et. His predicted transmitting ability for milk production is +2323, more than 1100 pounds greater than Freddie. His offspring’s milk will likely containmore protein and fat as well. But his daughters’ productive life would be shorter and their pregnancy rate is lower. And these factors, as well as some traits related to the hypothetical daughters’ size and udder quality, trump Planet’s impressive production stats.
One reason for the change in breeding emphasis is that our cows already produce tremendous amounts of milk relative to their forbears. In 1942, when my father was born, the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk.
You must be logged in to post a comment.