Search Results for: The Nation

Day’’s End

Longreads Pick

It was “the day that changed everything,” until it didn’t. Even in the immediate aftermath, you could see that 9/11 was less momentous for some ­Americans who were at a safe remove from the carnage and grief. By late September, the ratings at CNN, then 24/7 terror central, had fallen by more than 70 percent. As I traveled across the country that grim fall to fulfill a spectacularly ill-timed book tour, I discovered that the farther west I got, the more my audiences questioned me as though I were a refugee from some flickering evening-news hot spot as distant and exotic as Beirut. When I described the scent of burning flesh wafting through Manhattan, or my ­sister-in-law’s evacuation by the National Guard from her ash-filled apartment on John Street, I was greeted with polite yet unmistakable expressions of disbelief. #Sept11

Author: Frank Rich
Published: Aug 27, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,034 words)

Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?

Longreads Pick

This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools. “Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Aug 18, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,515 words)

God’s Own Warden

Longreads Pick

Everyone was there except the person I had come to see: Warden Burl Cain, a man with a near-mythical reputation for turning Angola, once known as the bloodiest prison in the South, into a model facility. Among born-again Christians, Cain is revered for delivering hundreds of incarcerated sinners to the Lord—running the nation’s largest maximum-security prison, as one evangelical publication put it, “with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.” To Cain’s more secular admirers, Angola demonstrates an attractive option for controlling the nation’s booming prison population at a time when the notion of rehabilitation has effectively been abandoned.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jul 25, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,033 words)

Climbers

Longreads Pick

(Featured Longreader Joe Spring’s pick of the week.) In 2007, a national cycling team was established, and shortly before Gasore began riding his taxi-bike the team set up its training camp twenty-five miles east of Sashwara, in the town of Ruhengeri. As he plied his trade routes, Gasore watched the helmeted racers whiz by, dazzling in their tight Team Rwanda jerseys and shorts—in the national colors of blue, yellow, and green—crouched over the curved handlebars of their slender road bikes, pedalling in close formation. “I would chase them,” he told me. “Even when I had a passenger, I would race after the racers.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 11, 2011
Length: 52 minutes (13,087 words)

The Secret Sharer

Longreads Pick

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state.

Author: Jane Mayer
Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 23, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,157 words)

Free Science, One Paper at a Time

Longreads Pick

On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, had published 40-some-odd papers by the time that he died by suicide at age 45. That had been in Febuary 1987, while Jonathan, a sophomore at college, was on the verge of discovering his own love of biology. At the time, virtually all scientific papers were just on paper.

Source: Wired
Published: May 11, 2011
Length: 4 minutes (1,033 words)

The Making and Remaking of Malcolm X

Longreads Pick

Alex Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm—tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm’s life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, born in Omaha to troubled parents whose salve against racist harassment and violence was the black-nationalist creed of Marcus Garvey; to Detroit Red, a numbers-running hustler on the streets of Boston and New York; to a convicted felon known among fellow-prisoners as Satan; to Malcolm X, a charismatic deputy to the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the most electrifying proponent of black nationalism alive.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 18, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,981 words)

City of Dreams

Longreads Pick

An outsider might imagine that the novel that captures China’s current gilded-age mood would be set in Shanghai, the financial capital elbowing its way into competition with New York and London, or Shenzhen, the megalopolis built on marshland. But Shanghai was punished by the Communist party for the city’s history of cosmopolitanism, and is still shaking off the effects of that cultural paralysis. Shenzhen, for its part, is a transient place that sanctifies commerce, not ideas. Beijing, by contrast, stands alone in China as simultaneously the center of authority and a hotbed of creative thinking. It is home to thousands of apparatchiks in the machinery of the Communist party, as well as to many of the nation’s most provocative artists, writers, activists, and filmmakers.

Author: Evan Osnos
Published: Apr 12, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,801 words)

NPR Amps Up: Can Vivian Schiller Build a Journalism Juggernaut? (2010)

NPR Amps Up: Can Vivian Schiller Build a Journalism Juggernaut? (2010)

NPR Amps Up: Can Vivian Schiller Build a Journalism Juggernaut? (2010)

Longreads Pick

Schiller has animated the place with the energy of renewed ambition, a rededication to producing serious journalism. Her strategy rests on three pillars: expand original reporting at the national and local levels; provide free access to public media content regardless of platform; and serve audiences of all backgrounds and interests. To do all that, she wants to work in partnership with NPR’s member stations as well as independent producers and some of the new nonprofit journalism units springing up around the country.

Author: Jill Drew
Published: Mar 1, 2010
Length: 23 minutes (5,935 words)