Search Results for: The Nation

The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump

Longreads Pick

The National Enquirer has made political careers, but more often it has broken them. (John Edwards ended his presidential candidacy after the magazine revealed he’d had a child out of wedlock.) But during a presidency rife with scandal, the tabloid has remained quiet thanks to its owner David Pecker, who makes no secret of his love for his old friend Donald Trump.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 27, 2017
Length: 26 minutes (6,700 words)

The Word Is ‘Nemesis’: The Fight to Integrate the National Spelling Bee

Longreads Pick
For talented black spellers in the 1960s, the segregated local spelling bee was the beginning and the end of the long road to Washington, D.C.
Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 5, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,900 words)

The Word Is ‘Nemesis’: The Fight to Integrate the National Spelling Bee

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, photo via State Archives of Florida

Cynthia R. Greenlee | Longreads | June 2017 | 2,900 words ( 12 minutes)

In 1962, teenager George F. Jackson wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy with an appeal: “I am a thirteen-year-old colored boy and I like to spell. Do you think you could help me and get the Lynchburg bee opened to all children?”

The long road to the National Spelling Bee has always begun with local contests, often sponsored by a local newspaper. Nine publications, organized by the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, banded together in 1925 to create the first National Bee in Washington, D.C.

Decades later, George Jackson was protesting the policies of the local newspaper that sponsored the Lynchburg, Virginia contest, which excluded black students from participating in the official local competition — the necessary step that might send a lucky, word-loving Lynchburg child to nationals. There was more at stake than a coveted all-expenses-paid trip to the capital, an expensive set of Encyclopedia Britannica, and a $1,000 cash prize. For local and national civil rights activists, keeping black children from the spoils of spelling fame was an extension of Jim Crow educational policies that should have ended, in theory, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

While the Warren Court decided in 1954 that “separate but equal” would no longer be the law of the land, there were still “Negro” schools and white schools educating children across the South less than a decade later. A patchwork of local responses met the desegregation orders that followed the Supreme Court ruling, including deliberate foot-dragging, some real confusion about how to undo what years of white supremacy had wrought in the nation’s schools, and full-throated defiance to educational equity.

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When the National Bird Is a Burden

Longreads Pick

The bald eagle has long been a symbol of pride and freedom in the United States. But for one family farm in Georgia, it’s a real nuisance.

Published: Jan 19, 2017
Length: 14 minutes (3,603 words)

Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction

Longreads Pick

Several of this year’s nominees have been featured on Longreads before (see: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Johnson, Noelle Stevenson), and this reading list features the five nonfiction nominees. The winner will be announced on November 18, 2015.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 18, 2015

Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction

The National Book Awards, presented by the National Book Foundation, “celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America.” There are four categories: fiction, nonfiction, “young people’s literature,” and poetry. Several of this year’s nominees have been featured on Longreads before (see: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Johnson, Noelle Stevenson), and this reading list features the five nonfiction nominees. The winner will be announced on November 18, 2015.

1. The Radical: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, July 2015)

“Letter to My Son,” in The Atlantic, adapted from Between the World and Me

You must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

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The National Front’s Post-Charlie Hebdo Moment

Longreads Pick

The National Front, a French ultranationalist fringe party once known for its ties to anti-Semitism, is shedding its controversial image and gaining momentum.

Published: Feb 18, 2015
Length: 26 minutes (6,515 words)

The Nation’s Shame

Longreads Pick

Mandatory drug sentencing has long been criticized as oppressive and ineffective, yet tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders continue to languish behind bars.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Oct 7, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,273 words)

Stories From Writers From the National Book Festival: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

“We went to the National Book Festival for different things, but also the same thing: books and our love of them. Here are four essays and excerpts written by the authors I was lucky enough to see.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 31, 2014