Search Results for: Time

The Palpable, Yet ‘Incomprehensible Expanse of Time’: A Wilderness of Waiting

I am used to pausing beside train trestles, tilting my head to watch passing planes, perpetually looking forward to: to the evening, to the weekend, to the next year in a new place. But for the first time I find myself unable to fix my gaze on the horizon; I find my relationship to time and place and days transformed. I do not strike out in discovery but rather roam the same terrain over and over: woods of oaks and maples and beeches; grassy sloping pastures punctuated with dogwood; beds of red clay and teal slate in a creek animated by intermittent waterfalls; rocky, fern-covered hills that rise to open Midwestern sky.

Before gestation, I dominated time in the way I dominated my body. Long runs whittled the latter into sculpted hardness, and the discipline of schedules and fixed points – Saturday, summer, graduation – brought the former into focus as a series of arrows pointing always one towards the next. Time as trajectory, body as tool of the mind. And then this baby began growing and my body expanded into a force to which the “me” of my mind was subjugated, bobbing about unsteady and insignificant as a paper boat in surges of blood and hormones. Time yawned open, a vast canyon I fell into, with the erstwhile tidy arrows echoing off the walls.

But pregnancy is characterized by a total physical and psychological immersion in the present and the body. There is no room for nostalgia, regret, the lingering glance back, because the web of gestation is spun so tight that the past becomes inaccessible, so remote as to belong to another person’s life. The future is equally impossible to conjure: how can one imagine the brand new human built from scratch, the meteoric impact of her arrival? The boundaries of the world shrink to the parenthesis of the belly. There is no hiding the slow stubborn implacability of time and our rootedness in it beneath the decorations of tasks and substances, of retrospect and projection.

At Vela, Sarah Menkedick reflects on presence and the “incomprehensible expanse of time” in this incisive meditation on pregnancy and motherhood.

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Backlash: Richard Bernstein on the New York Times’ Nail Salons Exposé

At The New York Review of Books, former New York Times reporter—and current salon co-owner—Richard Bernstein takes the paper to task for its much-talked-about twopart 7000-word exposé on the exploitation and abuse of employees at nail salons in New York City.

He says the article—which led to a state-wide investigation and a new law instituted by Governor Andrew Cuomo—misrepresents the salon industry as a whole by focusing mainly on one undocumented and unlicensed worker. He also suggests it wasn’t as thoroughly reported as author Sarah Maslin Nir claims—although apparently he didn’t reach out to her for comment.

As a former New York Times journalist who also has been, for the last twelve years, a part owner of two day-spas in Manhattan, I read the exposé with particular interest. (A second part of the same investigation, which appeared in the Times a day later, concerned chemicals used in the salon industry that might be harmful to workers.) Our two modestly-sized establishments are operated by my wife, Zhongmei Li, and my sister-in-law, Zhongqin Li, both originally from China, and “mani-pedi” is a big part of the business. We were startled by the Times article’s Dickensian portrait of an industry in which workers “spend their days holding hands with women of unimaginable affluence,” and retire at night to “flophouses packed with bunk beds, or in fetid apartments shared by as many as a dozen strangers.” Its conclusion was not just that some salons or even many salons steal wages from their workers but that virtually all of them do. “Step into the prim confines of almost any salon and workers paid astonishingly low wages can be readily found,” the story asserts. This depiction of the business didn’t correspond with what we have experienced over the past twelve years. But far more troubling, as we discovered when we began to look into the story’s claims and check its sources, was the flimsy and sometimes wholly inaccurate information on which those sweeping conclusions were based….

… How to account for these evident flaws, the one-sidedness of the Times story? Recently the Times’s own Nick Kristof wrote in a column that “one of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it,” and, he might have added, consciously or not, ignore anecdotes and other information that doesn’t. The narrative chosen by the Times, what might be called the narrative of wholesale injustice, is one of the most powerful and tempting in journalism. Certainly, as Mr. Baquet put it, it had “impact.” It was read, he told an audience in mid-June, by 5 million people, which is five times the readership of the Sunday print edition, and produced an immediate government response.

Surely, Bernstein’s exposé-on-the-exposé isn’t the last word. Nir and others at the Times have taken to Twitter, and Times deputy Metro editor Michael Luo has Storified that activity and other developing aspects of the story. In a tweet, Nir suggests that Times executive editor Dean Baquet has a response in the works.

Stay tuned to find out whether it might in fact be okay to get inexpensive manicures after all…

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‘Dr. V’ Writer Caleb Hannan Speaks for the First Time About What Went Wrong

“It didn’t need to exist. And that was not something that occurred to me in the process of reporting.”

Out of everyone who read an early draft of “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” only Caleb Hannan’s wife asked him the most critical question of all: Did this story even need to exist?

Hannan spoke publicly for the first time on Saturday at the Mayborn narrative journalism conference in Texas, in a panel called “Anatomy of an Error,” to dissect what went wrong with his 2014 story for Grantland, which ended with the suicide of a transgender woman. The story led to massive public criticism—as well as an internal investigation at ESPN and a letter of contrition from editor Bill Simmons—about how Hannan and his editors handled the story, and whether the reporting pushed a woman to take her own life. Hannan was joined on the panel by writers Hanna Rosin and Michael J. Mooney, and Boston Magazine editor (and one of Hannan’s early critics) S.I. Rosenbaum.

Speaking in a room filled with hundreds of journalists, Hannan was both extremely self-critical and at times emotional as he went through the chronology of reporting and editing for the piece.

Late in the process of vetting the story, Hannan said he was contacted by one of Grantland’s freelance fact-checkers, who raised concerns about the story—the first time anyone other than his wife had voiced those concerns. “Some of the first words out of her mouth were, ‘There’s a chance this woman is going to hurt herself,’ and I said, ‘I know and I’m scared shitless, and I don’t know what to do,’ and she said, ‘Okay I just want to make sure I said that.’ And that’s a conversation I immediately should have taken to my editor, but I didn’t.”

Why not, he was asked.

“I don’t know.”

Hannan reflected on the ideas that journalists should hold people accountable or seek out the truth at all cost. But it’s not that simple. “At every point in the reporting I could justify myself going forward … ‘I’m doing my job.’ But part of the job was to assess whether it was worth it. And there were two people who saw that. In talking with my wife, in talking with this fact-checker, I said, ‘What happened?’ And they said, ‘You were in denial.’

“There’s this idea that it’s not going to happen to me. There is a momentum to a story that’s hard to stop. … It would have been a blow to my ego to set aside something I knew was going to be talked about. But I should have.”

Long-Time Listener, First-Time Caller

Longreads Pick

Welcome to sports call-in radio, the world’s cheapest therapy.

Source: Sportsnet
Published: Jul 12, 2015
Length: 10 minutes (2,729 words)

The Time Al Letson Got What He Wanted

Radio producer, writer, and storytelling all-’rounder Al Letson (State of the Re:Union, Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal) recently launched a new podcast called Errthang. The show is a personal outlet for Letson’s stories and diverse passions — a venue for “errthang” he wants to do. Kicking off in style, the first episode is built around the story of how Letson’s life changed when, at 7 years old, he got what he’d long wished for: a brother — but an older brother, who brought some strong older-brothering skills to his adoptive family: Read more…

A Sentimental Education

Longreads Pick

Two years ago, Tilda Swinton co-founded a school for her twins to attend—the kind of school with “no exams, no tests, no hierarchies, no sitting at desks whenever possible.”

Published: Jun 14, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,323 words)

The New York Times Investigates the Exploitation of Nail Salon Workers

Photo via Flickr

Salon workers describe a culture of subservience that extends far beyond the pampering of customers. Tips or wages are often skimmed or never delivered, or deducted as punishment for things like spilled bottles of polish. At her Harlem salon, Ms. Cacho said she and her colleagues had to buy new clothes in whatever color the manager decided was fashionable that week. Cameras are regularly hidden in salons, piping live feeds directly to owners’ smartphones and tablets.

Qing Lin, 47, a manicurist who has worked on the Upper East Side for the last 10 years, still gets emotional when recounting the time a splash of nail polish remover marred a customer’s patent Prada sandals. When the woman demanded compensation, the $270 her boss pressed into the woman’s hand came out of the manicurist’s pay. Ms. Lin was asked not to return.

“I am worth less than a shoe,” she said.

Sarah Maslin Nir, in The New York Times, on the low wages and abuse suffered by manicurists.

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‘I Knew They Loved Spending Time With Us…But I Also Knew We Were Good Cover.’

Bernardine Dohrn. Photo by Voyou Desoeuvre, Flickr

When Weathermen did get around to bombing things, the preparation and execution remained fraught with risk. Long-haired young people lingering outside courthouses and police stations late at night tended to draw attention in the early 1970s. It occurred to Dohrn, and to others in the leadership, that disguises alone wouldn’t ensure their safety. Thus the question arose: What could they take along to reliably deflect a policeman’s curiosity? One answer was children.

No beat cop, they reasoned, would suspect a family with kids out for an evening stroll. It was a brilliant idea; the only problem was, no one in Weather had children. A handful of supporters did, however, and this was how one of Dohrn’s friends, the Chicago attorney Dennis Cunningham, saw his family drawn into clandestineness…

***

“I went to L.A. a bunch of times,” Delia [Dennis Cunningham’s daughter] recalls. “I would play while they had meetings. There was a lot of time in cars. Bernardine and Billy always had cool cars, 50s cars. We would go to movies, old films, Chaplin films. Later I started going on trips, into the countryside, to other cities, trips on airplanes, on trains, cross-country, once or twice to upstate New York, where I think we stayed when Jeff Jones moved there. I knew they loved spending time with us, my siblings included, but I also knew we were good cover. The two things went together well. I know Mom was really into that, that we were helping. Did we scout out bombing targets? Yeah, I think so. I never actually saw anything explode, but it was always discussed. ‘We had a great action. We’re going to be discussing an action.’”

—Bryan Burrough writing in Vanity Fair about the Weather Underground, a radical leftwing organization known for detonating dozens of bombs across the country during the ’70s.

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The Fabulous (and Sometimes Dead-End) Opportunity of Being an Assistant

Photo by Peas

Nearly every exclusive field runs on assistants. The actor James Franco, like Buddha before him, had an assistant keep track of his meals and school assignments. The critic and writer Daphne Merkin has employed a steady stream of Ivy-educated elves. They’re tasked with everything from editing to returning dead houseplants. Bestselling novelist John Irving (The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany) has an assistant who types up his roughly twenty-five pages of handwritten manuscript a day. He recruits exclusively from liberal arts schools in cold climates like Middlebury and Vassar, to ensure his hires can survive the winter at his home in Dorset, Vermont. During the 2008 presidential season, recent Harvard grad Eric Lesser impressed senior advisor to the president, David Axelrod, with his color-coded system for tracking Obama’s campaign luggage. Lesser was taken on as Axelrod’s “special assistant,” assuming responsibility for everything from supervising his boss’s diet to organizing the first-ever presidential Seder.

—At Dissent, Francesca Mari examines the rise of the personal assistant. Creatives take assistant positions to network with professionals in their fields and to go behind-the-scenes in their craft. But it can’t last forever: Whereas internships might one day result in full-time employment, the role of the assistant stagnates in the end: “The worst thing to be called,” [Darren] Aronofsky’s assistant told me, long after he’d moved on, “is a really good assistant.”  (h/t Michelle Legro)

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McDonald’s and the Science of Drive-Through Lane Wait Times

Ten years ago, customers placing orders in the drive-through lane at McDonald’s would have their food in about two and a half minutes (or 152 seconds, if you want to get precise). Today, the same order takes a bit over three minutes (or 189.5 seconds) on average, according to analyst research from Janney Montgomery Scott. While a half-minute extra might not seem like a lot, it represents lost customers and revenue at a company that can ill afford to lose either.

When Richard Adams owned a string of McDonald’s franchises in Southern California, he liked to sit outside and do paperwork. It gave him great insight into the business, he said, and how all those seconds add up.

“My magic number was 13,” said Mr. Adams, who now has a consulting firm. “Once 13 cars had lined up in the drive-through, all the other cars would turn around and drive away. There was a point where people just wouldn’t wait. McDonald’s has ignored this problem for a long time.”

The longer wait times are primarily the result of efforts to make McDonald’s more varied and relevant in a premium, fast-casual world. And perhaps nothing exemplifies this problem better than the Premium McWrap.

Stephanie Strom, writing in the New York Times about the fast food giant’s current “identity crisis”—can McDonald’s appeal to more varied customers without losing their core base?

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