Search Results for: The Nation

Giuliani exits national stage

Longreads Pick
Source: Politico
Published: Dec 23, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,701 words)

Can One Good Man Redeem a Nation for the Sins of Guantánamo?

Longreads Pick

As the Obama administration prepares to try the 9/11 plotters in military tribunals, David Iglesias stands at the ready to prosecute them — and maybe just save the legacy of the White House that fired him #Sept11

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Dec 1, 2009
Length: 14 minutes (3,642 words)

Grave offenses at Arlington National Cemetery

Longreads Pick

A criminal investigation and allegations of misplaced bodies and shoddy care have roiled the famous burial ground

Source: Salon
Published: Jul 16, 2009
Length: 9 minutes (2,417 words)

One Girl’s Hope, a Nation’s Dilemma

Longreads Pick

A Cambridge firm’s drug worked wonders, but was hugely costly – more than Costa Rica thought it could spend on one child among so many

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jun 14, 2009
Length: 12 minutes (3,234 words)

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 6, 1995: Live, Bush & Alanis

Longreads Pick

Alanis haters relished pointing out how many of the examples of irony in the lyrics to “Ironic” were, in fact, not really ironic. On this point I’m going to defend Morissette, if only because these are the same awful people that circle typos in newspapers and mail the clippings anonymously to editors with smug putdowns such as, “Maybe you should consider hiring copy editors,” or some equally non-clever bullshit. I’m right next to you flipping the bird at those a-holes, Alanis.

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Dec 14, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,292 words)

Tramp Like Us

Photo by Alia Smith, courtesy of the author / Little, Brown and Company

Dan Kois | excerpted from How to Be a Family | Little, Brown and Company | September 2019 | 24 minutes (6,373 words)

 

“Is there a way I could chaperone,” I asked my daughter’s teacher, “that doesn’t include snorkeling in freezing-cold water?”

We were in New Zealand to learn how the lives of Kiwi families differed from our own east coast suburban bubble. One way, it turned out, was that my 9-year-old was taking a school field trip to snorkel in the little bay by our house in Wellington. It was an example of EOTC, education outside the classroom, a crucial part of Kiwi schooling, ranging from day trips like this to secondary-school tramps across the Tongoriro Alpine Crossing.

When I’d volunteered to chaperone, I hadn’t known that chaperones were expected to bring their own wet suits in order to get in the water with the kids. Now, I like snorkeling, but the very idea of owning my own wet suit was patently absurd. So that’s why I asked if there was some other way I could help.

“On the snorkeling trip?” she replied dubiously. “Errr . . . we do need a few people to stand at the shore keeping an eye on everyone. Perhaps you could do that?”
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Could Paulette Jordan of Idaho Become the Country’s First Native American Governor?

LAS VEGAS, NV - JANUARY 21: State Rep. Paulette Jordan (D-ID) speaks during the Women's March "Power to the Polls" voter registration tour launch at Sam Boyd Stadium on January 21, 2018, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Demonstrators across the nation gathered over the weekend, one year after the historic Women's March on Washington, D.C., to protest President Donald Trump's administration and to raise awareness for women's issues. (Photo by Sam Morris/Getty Images)

For BuzzFeedAnne Helen Petersen profiles Idaho gubernatorial candidate and former state representative Paulette Jordan, whose left-of-center views are an anomaly in a region that has been a Republican stronghold for decades. She’s a woman of color in a state that is 82% white, and at 38, nearly half the age of A.J. Balukoff, her opponent for the Democratic nomination. Jordan grew up in a ranching family on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation, began her political career on a tribal council, and developed a reputation in the state legislature for reaching across party lines. She’d become the U.S.’s first Native American governor if elected; Petersen describes how Jordan represents a new model of leadership.

When people meet [Paulette] Jordan, they often assume she’s younger than her 38 years. But she emphasizes that she has more than a decade of experience, on the local, state, and national levels — it’s just that much of that experience was tribal, and often ignored as a form of governance, leadership, or service. Words like “tribal” and “Indian” aren’t included within the (white, male-dominated) spheres of “experience,” especially when it comes to preparation for political office. (Natives aren’t the only ones who see their experience cut out of those definitions. As A’shanti Gholar, political director for Emerge America, told Newsweek, “When people think about a successful candidate, they still tend to imagine a straight white man as the person to get the job done.”)

“I have ten years of elected experience,” Jordan emphasizes. “For [opponent] [Balukoff] to try and suggest otherwise is dishonest. I think women — and men! — should be disgusted for him to say that a woman with leadership experience should step aside. That I should ‘wait my turn.’”

“I think we’re done with that,” Jordan said. “This is a generation that says, we’re not going to tolerate old white men telling us to step aside anymore. This is when it’s time for us to take action — and to lead.”

As much as her name, and her campaign, is preceded by “first Native American woman,” Jordan doesn’t see herself uniquely in those terms. “I never really bring it up,” she told me. “Other people do. Maybe they like the idea. Which is fine. I want people to see beyond my race and my color and know that I actually have had a strong career. I want them to understand that when I do make a decision, they might slightly disagree, but they’ll know why I made it.”

The chance to support a history-making candidate is an effective hook, and one that Jordan’s own campaign has embraced in its online rhetoric. Sometimes, however, it can elide, or displace, her greater policy ideas. When asked what they liked about Jordan, attendees at her Boise fundraiser responded with variations on, “Wouldn’t it be incredible for Idaho to have a female governor?” and “I like what she stands for.” Most also identified as progressives and early supporters of Bernie Sanders, who won the Idaho Democratic caucus with 78% of the votes.

While Jordan’s policy positions have been labeled progressive, she resists comparisons to Sanders. And it’s hard to evaluate the aptness of the comparison, as Jordan’s positions, like many candidates still in the primary, remain vague. She’s for increasing the minimum wage in the state, which is currently the lowest in the West, but is more focused on promoting educational training opportunities for highly skilled, more sustainable jobs. She wants to invest more in education, especially in rural areas, as a means of attracting businesses and sustaining the rural economy. She vows not to “shy away from the topic of discrimination” and to “promote legislation that ensures people feel safe and heard.”

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Brit Bennett Reflects on Living the Past Year in “Trump Time”

380887 34: A young African American woman listens during a civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial August 28, 1963 in Washington. (Photo by National Archive/Newsmakers)

On the night Trump was elected president, I sat at home alone feeling winded; just hours earlier, I’d been at a polling site in Bed Stuy where black and brown people, many of them women, smiled and waved and high-fived each other, certain that we’d soon be celebrating a national milestone just like we had eight years before.

Writer Brit Bennett, whose debut novel The Mothers will be adapted for film with actress Kerry Washington as producer, reflects on her experience of reality in the past year since President Trump’s election in a poignant personal essay for Vogue. Back to back scandals, large and small explosions of racial animus, and the whiplash-like event of Trump following the nation’s first black president have “compressed time,” Bennett writes, and have made the author, and her mother, who grew up in Jim Crow-era Louisiana, question the notion of progress.

In Trump Time, the clock moves backward. The feeling that time itself is reversing might be the most unsettling aspect of a most unsettling year. What else is Make America Great Again but a promise to re-create the past? Through his campaign slogan, Trump seizes the emotional power of nostalgia, conjuring a glorious national history and offering it as an alternative to an uncertain future. He creates a fantasy for his base of white Americans but a threat for many others. After all, in what version of the past was America ever great for my family? “The good ol’ days?” my mother always says. “The good ol’ days for who?”

Last September, I traveled with a publicist who is also black to a warehouse in Westminster, Maryland, in order to sign books. As we left Baltimore and headed toward a city that is, according to the latest census, 87 percent white, we began to see red Make America Great Again signs on lawn after lawn. “When I see those signs, I feel the same way as when I see a Confederate flag,” I said. She understood what I meant—that visceral sense of dread. Both symbols represent a racialized nostalgia that, to me, only evokes fear.

I did not realize then that, within the year, those two symbols would collapse into each other.

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The He’s-Got-to-Be-the-Help-Because-He’s-Brown Mistake

Lithub has a searing personal essay by poet Patrick Rosal — an excerpt of We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America, edited by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page. The piece is framed as a letter to a white woman who mistook him for a server at the black-tie National Book Awards gala, which he had attended in support of a friend who was being honored.

The experience prompts him to reconsider his choice of a $90 suit for the occasion, and also to reflect on the kinds of mistakes white people often make about people of color — in this case what he calls “the He’s-Got-to-Be-the-Help-Because-He’s-Brown Mistake.”

After the first round of drinks, after introductions and small talk with my tablemates, after the courses of salad and soup, I stand up, excuse myself, and walk across the swanky hall, winding my way through the other big round tables to find my way toward one of my dear friends, who is among tonight’s honorees. And you—sitting at a table not far from where my homeboy is sitting—stand up too. Surely, by the way you crane your neck forward and to the side, stepping slightly left into my path just enough to intercept me, I must know you from somewhere else, right? I lift my chin a little to see if I can link a name to your face. And surely you think you know me too, don’t you? I’ve traveled only from the other side of the room to walk toward you and for you to walk toward me. But doesn’t something break just then, when you and I approach? All the festive shimmering in the space. These eyes. This face. I think I’m even smiling now, when you point back at your seat to tell me you need a clean linen to dab the corner of your mouth. You need a knife for the beef cheeks. A refill of your cabernet. Maybe you need me to kneel down and shim one of the table legs to keep it from bobbing.

So this is how you and I have been walking toward each other maybe this entire time.

When at first I don’t respond, maybe you think it’s too loud for me to hear you clearly. Or maybe you think my English isn’t too good—for you ask me the same thing once more before you clip your request short and say: “You’re one of the servers, right? . . . You’re with the servers? . . .” And I stand there absolutely still so we might stare at each other for one long second exactly like that. “You’re not with them?” You are pointing at the line of workers in white jackets and bow ties, a tray hoisted over some of their shoulders. That’s when my face gets unfixed quick. I twist the whole thing—top right eyebrow to bottom left lip. I crinkle the bridge of my nose and suck my teeth once before I blow out a pffffh! You open your mouth and maybe if there were not the thousands around us chattering, pricking each other with their literary wit, the fine chime of restaurant china like a four-hour avalanche of muted porcelain, I think I might hear you whisper, “Oh . . .” You spin on one heel and dash back to your chair.

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The Panic in Twin Falls, Idaho

(Otto Kitsinger/AP Photo)

Twin Falls, Idaho is perhaps one of the best well known small towns in America when it comes to the resettlement of refugees. The billionaire owner of Chobani, Hamid Ulukaya, made it a personal mission to use the low-skill jobs available at his yogurt factory in Twin Falls as a jobs program for refugees, and he currently employees 400 of the recently resettled. Idaho has been a destination for refugee resettlement since 1975, when California governor Jerry Brown refused a planeload of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon. Idaho stepped in and established the Idaho Office for Refugees, and today resettles people primarily from Iraq, Congo, Burma, Bhutan, and Somalia.

The panic in Twin Falls began when the local newspaper reported that Syrian refugees would be resettled in the town. As Caitlin Dickerson reports for The New York Times Magazine, when a report surfaced of a sexual assault involving two boys, a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old (the boys were refugees from Iraq and Sudan) and a 5-year-old girl, a thread of misinformation began to tear the town apart. Since those involved in the assault were juveniles, the police couldn’t release the details, and the lack of information created a void into which people poured their rage about Muslims and refugees. Then Lee Stranahan, a reporter for Breitbart, came to town.

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