Search Results for: The Nation

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

Surrounded by thousands of people at the Washington Convention Center buying books from the Politics & Prose pavilion, taking pictures with Clifford, moving downstairs to sneak into a panel by Dav Pilkey or Louisa Lim or Cokie Roberts, and waiting in line to meet their literary heroes, I felt like I could levitate. I thought: These are My People—these people shoving through well-carpeted hallways to get coffee before sneaking into the back of a panel on books in translation or patiently sitting with their enthralled kids at a packed storytime session. 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.

1. “No-Man’s-Land.” (Eula Biss, The Believer, February 2008)

I screamed when I saw the “Creative Nonfiction Panel” on the Library of Congress website. Eula Biss and Paisley Rekdal: what a pair. I quaked with excitement as Eula said, “We don’t have a great vocabulary around truth. We need about 27 more words there.” I nodded and mmhmmed like I was in church, because, well, I was. This is Eula’s titular essay from her first collection. It’s about Chicago’s Rogers Park Neighborhood and the dangers of buying into the pioneer narrative. It is beautiful. (Oh, here is a picture of me meeting Eula and Paisley. I am the excited one.)

Read more…

Not Feeling Carolina: Depression on One of the Nation’s Happiest Campuses, Our College Pick

Longreads Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 13, 2014

Not Feeling Carolina: Depression on One of the Nation's Happiest Campuses, Our College Pick

Mental health issues have lost much of their stigma on college campuses, as they have in the rest of the world. Today’s college students self-medicate just as much as they always did, but they also seek professional help in a much more public way than you might remember from your own school days. You’ll find evidence of this openness in this week’s College Longreads pick, from the University of North Carolina. Every one of Claire McNeill’s sources went on the record about their pain, fear, and suicide attempts. But what makes the story stand out, in addition to thorough reporting, is a thoughtful angle.

The University of North Carolina, the story posits, is a college campus known for its positivity and student satisfaction. “From its radiant azaleas to its basketball fever, from its 700 student organizations to its ranking as Best Public Value School in the nation, from the University’s favored buzzwords — inclusivity, diversity, collaboration — to its unofficial motto in ‘The Carolina Way,’ it seems from a distance that UNC’s 18,500 undergraduate students are living the life of a college brochure,” McNeill writes. How do you live with depression in a place that keeps telling you how happy you ought to be? The angle is what makes an otherwise well-trod story compelling. Journalists rely on this no-duh skill of finding fresh angles so much that they forget it’s something they had to learn, to refine, over time.

Depression in the Southern Part of Heaven

Claire McNeill | Synapse Magazine | February 10, 2014 | 15 minutes (3,807 words)

Inside the National Suicide Hotline: Preventing the Next Tragedy

Longreads Pick

Behind the scenes of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the debate over what policies and programs are effective when it comes to preventing suicide and saving lives in the U.S.:

“Studies done by Columbia University’s Dr. Madelyn Gould have found that about 12 percent of suicidal callers reported in a follow-up interview that talking to someone at the lifeline prevented them from harming or killing themselves. Almost half followed through with a counselor’s referral to seek emergency services or contacted mental health services, and about 80 percent of suicidal callers say in follow-up interviews that the lifeline has had something to do with keeping them alive.

“‘I don’t know if we’ll ever have solid evidence for what saves lives other than people saying they saved my life,’ says Draper. ‘It may be that the suicide rate could be higher if crisis lines weren’t in effect. I don’t know. All I can say is that what we’re hearing from callers is that this is having a real life-saving impact.'”

Source: Time Magazine
Published: Sep 13, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,686 words)

The Things They Carried: At The National Wife-Carrying Championships

Longreads Pick

A writer and his wife participate in a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition known as “Wife-Carrying,” a sport where male competitors carry a female teammate while racing through an obstacle course:

“And then my wife and I are 15 yards up the hill, and I am breathing hard, making it work. This isn’t so bad, I think. Like John Candy in Spaceballs, I say to myself, ‘I could carry two or three of these.’ Maybe a wife and a kid (that’s not allowed yet).

“‘Divot,’ Megan shouts. I adjust. I’m a quarter of the way through. I’m a Wife-Carrying natural! This is the best decision that I, no that we, have made in… and I’m pitching forward into a swampy patch of October grass. Just like that, I’d broken a vow I’d made to my father-in-law. As if to maximize the surreal quality of this day, he’d driven up to watch the competition, and now I’d dropped his daughter. Seven-second penalty.

“‘It’s a lot more physical than people give it credit for,’ Darcy Morse, the organizer of the race, warned when I signed up, and all at once I believe her. Suddenly, I feel like John Candy in Spaceballs. But I throw Megan onto my back again and come to the first obstacle, the Pommel Log. I’m over it, but I’m behind the couple we’re racing against, and starting to hear sympathy cheers. ‘You can do it,’ say some good-hearted Mainers with the sweet inflection of wincing, hopeful mommies.”

Source: The Classical
Published: Oct 4, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,790 words)

Ebooks Are an Abomination

Longreads Pick

“Agreeing that books are a thing you read is easy enough. But what it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down.”

Author: Ian Bogost
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 14, 2021
Length: 13 minutes (3,328 words)

The Shadowy Business of International Education

Longreads Pick
Source: The Walrus
Published: Aug 18, 2021
Length: 29 minutes (7,330 words)

Inside the Pacheedaht Nation’s Stand on Fairy Creek Logging Blockades

Longreads Pick

“The Pacheedaht Nation has close to 300 members. About 120 live in the Pacheedaht community, less than a 15-minute drive from the blockades. And the inconvenient truth for the protesters, however well-intentioned in their inventive and prolonged efforts to save old-growth, however well-versed in the parlance of acknowledging the territories of Indigenous peoples, is that only a few Pacheedaht members have joined them.”

Author: Sarah Cox
Source: The Narwhal
Published: Aug 16, 2021
Length: 30 minutes (7,574 words)

‘It’s a national tragedy’: What a devastating Covid-19 outbreak at a California slaughterhouse reveals about the federal government’s failed pandemic response

Longreads Pick

“In the face of an unprecedented public health crisis, the federal agency responsible for workplace safety has essentially allowed meatpackers to regulate themselves—leading to chaos, confusion, and fear in facilities across the country.”

Source: The Counter
Published: Nov 24, 2020
Length: 22 minutes (5,691 words)

A Heart Is Not a Nation

Longreads Pick
Source: Bookforum
Published: Nov 4, 2020
Length: 14 minutes (3,729 words)