→
Featured Longreader: Sarah Zhang’s #Longreads page. See her story picks from the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Slate.com, plus more.
Featured Longreader: Sarah Zhang’s #Longreads page. See her story picks from the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Slate.com, plus more.
On making a move from the City to the South. Steven Boone and other New Yorkers have headed to Warner Robins, Georgia:
Like so many young black parents, she moved south not just to provide her children with a more secure environment but also to escape the punishing New York rents. In Warner Robins, entire homes in quiet areas rent for less than a single room in Bed Stuy. Townhouses on well-kept complexes, complete with pool and 24-hour gym access, go for as little as $450 a month and rarely higher than $850. In Macon, the college town next door (and geographically the true dead center of Georgia), gorgeous historic homes rent for as low as $400 a month and often no more than $650. (The local rumor is that, as lovely as the homes are, the ghosts in them insure frequent turnaround. Cool.)
This new wave of African-Americans heading south has been called the Second Great Migration or the Reverse Migration, in contrast to last century’s black exodus from a segregated, hostile South to opportunities in the North.
“A Reverse Migration from Post-Crack New York.” — Steven Boone, Capital New York
See also: “The Uprooted.” — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2010
Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy:
That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had poured lighter fluid into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and stoked a bonfire for at least five hours. Had he burned evidence? Hennis did go voluntarily to the police station, but Bittle told me that this was a tactic regularly employed by a certain class of criminal. “Why do people rob banks? They think that others didn’t know how to do it right. That was Tim Hennis’s attitude: ‘You can’t get me. I am smarter than you are.’”
“Three Trials for Murder.” — Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker (Nov.14, 2011)
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, a #fiction pick, plus a guest pick from @Kaisertalk.
Photo: shinya/Flickr
A Minnesota school district enacts a policy designed to stop teachers from discussing or acknowledging homosexuality. Gay students report bullying, but administrators do nothing. The result is a string of suicides that has shaken the community:
Sam’s death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a ‘suicide cluster,’ adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion; suicidal thoughts had become catchy, like a lethal virus. “Here you had a large number of suicides that are really closely connected, all within one school district, in a small amount of time,” explains Reidenberg. “Kids started to feel that the normal response to stress was to take your life.”
There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied.
“One Town’s War on Gay Teens.” — Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone
See also: “The Story of a Suicide.” — Ian Parker, The New Yorker
On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident:
An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a conversation, and the recipient must accept the request. But Ravi had tweaked his iChat settings so that the program could automatically accept incoming calls. According to Ravi, he had made this his computer’s usual setting. Whatever the case, that evening the program was set to auto-accept; he also turned off his monitor, or darkened it to black. At 9:13 P.M., he was beside Wei at her computer. He opened iChat, and clicked his name on her chat list. A few feet away, his computer accepted his request, and Ravi and Wei saw a live video image of Room 30.
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Wired, a #fiction pick, plus two guest picks from Jalees Rehman, Associate Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Photo: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr
Personal recollection of a life about to be transformed, from one day to the next:
In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.
“The Fourth State of Matter.” — Jo Ann Beard, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996
See also: “Chicago Christmas, 1984.” — George Saunders, The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2003
Featured Longreader: Writer Jess Weiss. See her story picks from Wired, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and more on her #longreads page.
Google and YouTube exec Robert Kyncl’s plans for the future of web TV—and the company’s big bet on professional content:
“Kyncl’s relationships in Hollywood would help in securing premium content; and, more important, he understood entertainment culture. He brought ‘the skill set of being able to bridge Silicon Valley and Hollywood—an information culture and an entertainment culture,’ he told me. The crucial difference is that one culture is founded on abundance and the other on scarcity. He added, ‘Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it. Entertainment works by withholding content with the purpose of increasing its value. And, when you think about it, those two are just vastly different approaches, but they can be bridged.’”
“Streaming Dreams” — John Seabrook, The New Yorker
See also: “The YouTube Laugh Factory: A Studio System for Viral Video.” — Wired, Jan. 2012
You must be logged in to post a comment.