Search Results for: The Awl

Bill Gates and George Soros are handing out billions, but there are downsides to foundation giving:

The new focus on metrics has brought with it a new breed of nonprofit and for-profit partnerships. Foundations such as the Omidyar Network, established in 2004 by eBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, provide both investments in for-profit companies and charitable grants.

This approach is called by various names such as ‘social entrepreneurship,’ ‘venture philanthropy,’ and ‘philanthrocapitalism,’ but it all amounts to rather the same thing: controlling charitable giving in order to produce measurable, ‘sustaining’ and/or profitable results.

‘Philanthrocapitalism’ is an especially curious coinage, giving rise to a hitherto unarticulated contrast—namely, with the kind of capitalism that is not-philanthro-.

“Our Billionaire Philanthropists.” — Maria Bustillos, The Awl

More from Bustillos

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The American Prospect, Outside Magazine, New York Magazine, The Awl, McSweeney’s, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Krysti Lesch.

The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government:

What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the British government, which was attempting to drag the Roosevelt administration into WWII by any means necessary. De Wohl, who was employed by SOE (Special Operations Executive, the wartime sabotage unit), had been dispatched with instructions to present himself as a renowned astrologer with no connections to Britain, and to undermine America’s belief in the invincibility of Hitler. As the spy novelist William Boyd put it in a 2008 radio interview: ‘At the time, there was a perception of American people, in the minds of the British Security Services, that they were more gullible than us Brits.’

“The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5.” — Emma Garman, The Awl

See also: “CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split.” — Ian Shapira, Washington Post

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, New York Magazine, Inc. Magazine, The Awl, The New York Times Magazine, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Shellee O’Brien.

Helpful tips from a poet who lives in Brooklyn:

1. MOVE OUT OF BROOKLYN

I know not every novelist in America lives in Brooklyn, it just seems that way. There are a million stories on the L Train, and they’re all basically about dorky people doing dorky things. Which is fine. The best novel to come out of Williamsburg was obviously A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That was The Pre-ironic Brooklyn Age. And while Brooklyn might be a great place for other artists, poets and painters to live and interact and steal from each other, all your sad little Brooklyn novels end up sounding about the same. Novelists in packs are like Smurfs, except drunk and bitter.

“How to Write the Great American Novel.” — Jim Behrle, The Awl

See more #longreads from The Awl

A writer visits a fifth grade classroom at a northern California elementary school, where she observes the class’s anti-bullying curriculum:

“Stop it, you are bullying me,” he says. Then he lets his body go slack. He bows, then sits down.

“You labeled it, you said ‘stop,’ you stood up straight,” Linda says, “Good job.”

“Very good,” Efrain asks. “Any questions?”

“Yeah,” someone shouts. “What do you do if someone calls you a hobo?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Yes, I want to know what to do if someone calls me a hobo.” A pause as Efrain looks very mildly annoyed. “Okay. It’s not a serious question.”

“Hobo,” someone shouts.

“How to Bully Children.” — Sarah Miller, The Awl

The art of writing romance novels:

The romance heroine, though possessed of heart, intelligence and beauty, is at the mercy of her own self-criticism most of the time. As the story begins, she is scared and isolated, poor, or abandoned, or lonely. Not infrequently, the book opens with her having just suffered some terrible loss; her husband has just died in a plane crash, or her parents or beloved guardians have died, and now she is forced to work as a paid companion to a rich and disagreeable widow, maybe, or she’s just come to Australia from England to live with her grandfather, who is mean as a snake. Then she runs into an unusual and interesting man who openly demonstrates his dislike for her, or else pretty much ignores her entirely.

Difficulties will multiply. And almost always, as the tension builds, the heroine is beset with doubts about her own competence, attractiveness and worth.

That’s just how I feel! the reader cries inwardly.

“Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing.” — Maria Bustillos, The Awl

See more #longreads by Maria Bustillos

U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them:

The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from the night of Pearl Harbor, when Eleanor Roosevelt told a radio audience, “I have a boy at sea on a destroyer, for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific.”

Instead, America now has its first generation of political and business leaders who have not served in the military, and it shows. With the Pentagon ordered to slash spending as part of wider government budget cutting, military benefits, such as pensions, and college education funding for veterans are on the chopping block.

“Veterans’ Struggle.” — Anna Fifield, Financial Times

See also: “The Last Two Veterans of WWI.” — Evan Fleischer, The Awl, May 3, 2011

Stanford White and Harry Thaw’s battle for the heart of model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit in 1906:

One warm June night in 1906, Albert Payson Terhune could be found engaged in battle for a telephone booth in the old Madison Square Garden while wearing a tuxedo. He had forcibly removed a man mid-conversation, and now, as he shouted into the phone, he kicked out a leg and swung his free arm to fend off the displaced caller and another man wielding a chair. Moments before and one floor above, Terhune, filling in as a drama critic for the New York Evening World, had been a witness to the crime of the century, and he was calling in the scoop.

The movie version of his half of the conversation would go something like this: “Right, yes, that Stanford White. It’s about Evelyn Nesbit!”

“The Architect, The ‘It’ Girl And The Toy Pistol That Wasn’t.” — Evan Hughes, The Awl

See more #longreads from The Awl

Announcing the ‘Longreads: Best of 2011’ Ebook

Longreads Pick

Longreads: Best of 2011 includes seven of our favorite stories from the past year.

The ebook is a unique partnership with the writers and publishers—we want to help celebrate outstanding storytelling, and this is just another way for us to do it. Additionally, money from the ebook sales will be shared with the creators, and we’re excited to have them participating.

Publishers involved include: New York magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, This Recording, Popular Mechanics, The New York Times, GQ, and The Awl.

Source: longreads.com
Published: Jan 18, 2012