Search Results for: Veterans

Meet the Honey Badgers: The Women For Men’s Rights

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” wrote Mark Twain, and he’s not wrong. Case in point: the coterie of outspoken women who believe men’s rights are being trampled. They call themselves the Honey Badger Brigade, and they have podcasts, conventions and vlogs. At Marie Claire, Jen Ortiz interviews these rabid defenders of men and subtly refutes their every point in her investigation:

Just over a year ago, some of these women assembled in a hall at the Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, as part of an inaugural international conference on human rights. (They were supposed to meet at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Downtown Detroit, but plans changed last-minute because of reported threats by critics.) It was the first-annual International Conference on Men’s Issues. “It was really fantastic for all of us to be in the same room together,” says Janet Bloomfield, 36, one of the most prominent female faces of the men’s rights movement. “The idea that the movement is comprised of a lot of angry white men who can’t get laid is just simply not true—there were so many women!”

Bloomfield, a former bank productivity analyst, juggles being a stay-at-home mom of three “deep in the woods in Northern Ontario” with her work as a writer and unofficial MRA spokesperson. She grew up on a farm, in a family organized by traditional gender roles, where she “could never buy that this was oppression or bad.” A difficult relationship with her mother showed her that women are human—in other words, a woman has the capability to be just as terrible (or presumably, as not-terrible) as a man. Three years ago, she began her blog as a sort of inside joke with a close friend, but it quickly landed her in the manosphere with her take-no-prisoners style of writing about gender and culture. See: “The moment I knew feminism was a crock of shit.”

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Relearning How to Talk in the Age of Smartphone Addiction

Photo: Peter Urban

Jessica Gross | Longreads | October 2015 | 17 minutes (4,263 words)

 

Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, has studied our relationship with technology for decades. While some of her earlier works highlighted the ways in which technology could help us construct self-identities, her more recent writing warns that we are overinvesting in our devices and underinvesting in ourselves and each other.

In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published in 2011, Turkle explored the implications of replacing real intimacy with digital connection. Her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, continues that thread. Turkle uses Thoreau’s three chairs—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society—as a framework, describing how our devices disrupt conversation and healthy development at every stage. When we turn to our phones constantly, we deny ourselves the capacity for solitude and identity development. This, in turn, blunts our ability to form healthy relationships. And vice versa: when we text instead of talk, or look at our devices instead of each other, we diminish our abilities to relate to other people as well as ourselves. Turkle ends the book with a discussion of what it means that we have begun to relate to machines as sentient beings when, in fact, they have no feelings, no experiences, no empathy, no idea what it means to be human.

Turkle—a psychoanalytically trained psychologist who founded and directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self—is no Luddite. But she argues for moderation, and for a deep look at how over-invested we’ve become in new technology. She is also optimistic that we are at just the right moment for this rceexamination, and for a return to conversation, reflection, and real intimacy. Turkle and I began our phone conversation by hailing that old thing, the landline.

Hi, this is Jessica Gross, calling from Longreads. Is this Sherry Turkle?

Yes, it is. I’ve been looking forward to hearing from you. But let me have you call back on a landline. I think the fidelity would be better and it’d just be easier. [Ring, ring.] Here I am. I love this old technology. I’m at a seaside cabin with this 1950 phone that works perfectly. [Laughter]

I got my own landline recently and it’s been really delightful.

I mean, there’s this thing where calls never get dropped, where you can hear in perfect fidelity! [Laughter] And it goes on even if the Wi-Fi is down! Read more…

The Responsibility of Being Both a Reporter and an Army Veteran

Photo by  US Army, Flickr

Veteran status cuts both ways. Because I’m an army veteran, other vets often tell me things they wouldn’t tell those who haven’t served. It is a privilege to be given this confidence, and yet I’m filled with an overwhelming obligation to get their stories right. Although I’m a longtime reporter, writing about veterans has been the hardest subject for me to cover, because their stories are so nuanced, and reporters, most of whom have never served in the military and have no connection with the armed services, frequently get their stories wrong and paint them as one-dimensional lunatics. I wanted to get Capps’s story right and not come off as a voyeur. There was some precedent for my concern: a month before our interview, Capps had spoken about his struggle with PTSD at the National Endowment for the Arts, which sponsors his NICoE seminar, and after his talk he told me he was destroyed for the rest of the day.

—Veteran and freelance reporter Kristina Shevory profiling Army combat veteran and former Foreign Service officer Ron Capps in The Believer. Capps was haunted by PTSD after serving in Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Kosovo; writing brought him relief and helped him make sense of his experiences. He formed the Veterans Writing Project in 2011.

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How Would You Design a Memorial for World War III?

Architect Maya Lin was a senior at Yale when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a 2000 essay for the New York Review of Books—which she began writing around the memorial’s completion in fall 1982 and then put aside for nearly two decades—she reflects on how she came to enter in the competition, and the concepts behind her design. After seeing a notice announcing a competition for a Vietnam veterans memorial, Lin’s funereal architecture seminar decided to adopt the design idea as their class’s final project. In the excerpt below, she delves into the class’s previous assignment:

At that point, not much was known about the actual competition, so for the first half of the assignment we were left without concrete directions for what “they” were looking for or even who “they” were. Instead, we had to determine for ourselves what a Vietnam memorial should be. Since a previous project had been to design a memorial for World War III, I had already begun to ask the simple questions: What exactly is a memorial? What should it do?

My design for a World War III memorial was a tomblike underground structure that I deliberately made to be a very futile and frustrating experience. I remember the professor of the class coming up to me afterward, saying quite angrily, “If I had a brother who died in that war, I would never want to visit this memorial.” I was somewhat puzzled that he didn’t quite understand that World War III would be of such devastation that none of us would be around to visit any memorial, and that my design was instead a pre-war commentary. In asking myself what a memorial to a third world war would be, I came up with a political statement that was meant as a deterrent.

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Graves of the Dead

Photo via Flickr

Ken Otterbourg | The New New South | April 2015 | 10 minutes (2,439 words)

 

 

After starting in Pittsburgh, the Ohio River heads north and then quickly loops south, as if realizing the error in its ways. It is a place to get lost and to get found. The river bends and twists here with energy, like a snake caught by its tail. There is an optimism in the current, movement and ambition, married with the skeletons of our built world and those worlds that came before that rise out of the fields and hills along the banks. Sometimes in the grace of dawn these structures appear as nearly flesh and blood. But that hope recedes as the sun climbs over the hill, past the chestnuts and maples. Time and gravity wait to do their parts. Read more…

When Mary Martin Was the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up

Ben Yagoda | Longreads | December 2014 | 12 minutes (3,094 words)

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One day early in 1954, Mary Martin and her husband, Richard Halliday, were driving on the Merritt Parkway, near their home in Norwalk, Connecticut. On the car radio came Frank Sinatra’s new hit, “Young at Heart.” It was perfect! That is, the song had the exact sentiment and feel they wanted for the pet project they’d long been planning, a musical version of J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan (original subtitle: “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”). Right on the spot, they decided they’d hire whoever had written the song to compose the score for their production.

It turned out that the words were by a young New Yorker, Carolyn Leigh, and the music by the veteran West Coast jazzman Johnny Richards. The next morning the phone rang in Leigh’s apartment, and a man who identified himself as Richard Halliday said that he and Martin wanted her to write the lyrics for Peter Pan. “Naturally, I thought somebody was kidding,” Leigh told a reporter. “That sort of thing just doesn’t happen. So I arranged to call him back at his office, and I did and it was him all right.”

Leigh told Halliday she had a new partner, a young composer named Morris “Moose” Charlap, and in short order the two had a meeting with Martin, Halliday, and Jerome Robbins, who was to direct and choreograph the show. Leigh, who at that point had only seen one musical in her life, recounted years later, “I remember singing a line to Jerry, ‘If I can live a life of crime, and still be home by dinnertime,’ and we got a nod of approval from him.”

She and Charlap went on to write the score (with a little help from some songwriting veterans), and on October 20, 1954, Peter Pan—with Martin as Peter—opened on Broadway to enraptured audiences and rave reviews. Several months later, NBC broadcast the production live on television. It was an even bigger sensation, attracting 65 million viewers—still the fourth biggest audience of all time for a scripted TV show. Read more…

For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.

Belle Boggs | The New New South | August 2013 | 62 minutes (15,377 words)

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We’re proud to present, for the first time online, “For the Public Good,” Belle Boggs‘s story for The New New South about the shocking history of forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States, and the story of victims in North Carolina, with original video by Olympia Stone.

As Boggs explained to us last year: 

“Last summer I met Willis Lynch, a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children. Willis was one of 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, and one of the more outspoken and persistent advocates for compensation.

“At the time I was struggling with my own inability to conceive, and the debate within my state—how much is the ability to have children worth?—was something I thought about a lot. It’s hard to quantify, the value of people who don’t exist. It gets even more complicated when you factor in public discomfort over a shameful past, and a present-day political climate that marginalizes the poor.”

Thanks to Boggs and The New New South for sharing this story with the Longreads Community, and thanks to Longreads Members for your helping us bring these stories to you. Join us.

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When Our Troops Are Abandoned and Neglected at Home: 6 Stories

This October 2014 New York Times investigation by C.J. Chivers is about more than just the discovery of old chemical weapons in Iraq—it’s about how shabbily we still treat our troops when they return home. We leave our all-volunteer army with inadequate medical care, emotional trauma, and fragile families. Here are six stories on our veterans.

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Sam Simon on Life After ‘The Simpsons’

“In the pressure cooker of a TV show, it’s a little bit of a witches’ brew. I completely think I’m capable of being crazy. I probably was crazy when I was doing The Simpsons. But my pulse used to be really low, my blood pressure used to be really low, and I could be screaming at someone on the phone, yelling at the network, I might even be throwing some stuff, but my blood pressure wouldn’t go up. My heartbeat wouldn’t go up. Because I was doing a bit. Shtick. Pretending to be that mad to get my way. Which is not a good way to do it. I don’t suggest it.”

And so, in the fullness of time, it came to pass that almost 100 episodes of The Simpsons were completed, most with Sam at the helm, thus ushering the show into the lucrative world of international syndication. Then, in 1993, he left. “I can’t honestly say we were getting along as well at that point as when the project started,” he says. (The terms of his departure included a non-disclosure agreement.) “But it worked out for everyone. Everyone should be happy.” His settlement gave him a percentage of everything relating to the show—including the licensing and merchandising—worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. “I make tens of millions of dollars a year, which may not sound like a lot, but over 25 years it adds up.” Sam laughs.

“I’m an atheist, but there’s a thing called tithing that a lot of religions do. Ten percent was the minimum you were supposed to give to charity every year. And I always outdid that,” Sam explains. In 2002 he started the multi-platform Sam Simon Foundation, one arm of which rescues animals from Los Angeles kill shelters and trains some of them to be service dogs for the hearing-impaired and veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Then there’s the mobile veterinary clinic, also in Los Angeles, which offers free surgery and free spay and neuter services. But it’s not just animals; another arm of the foundation funds the Feeding Families program, a vegan food bank that offers free meals to some 400 Los Angeles families a week. “We’re on track to distribute over a half-million pounds of food to more than 65,000 people this year,” its spokesman tells me. Sam is also the largest individual donor to Save the Children, which just announced a new global philanthropic community called the Simon Society.

— In Vanity Fair, Merrill Markoe profiled her friend Sam Simon, a co-creator of the Simpsons who was diagnosed with terminal cancer two years ago. He lived the only way he knew how: with good humor and by dedicating his life to philanthropic causes.

Sam Simon died today at the age of 59.

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Photo: Mercy for Anim

How to Spell the Rebel Yell

Elena Passarello | The Normal School | 2010 | 14 minutes (3,470 words)

The Normal SchoolOur latest Longreads Member Pick is a deep dive into the sounds of history, from Elena Passarello and The Normal School. The essay also is featured in Passarello’s book, Let Me Clear My Throat.
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“Yee-aay-ee!” “Wah-Who-Eeee!” -Margaret Mitchell

 

“Wah-Who-Eeee!” -Chester Goolrick

 

“Rrrrrr-yahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip!”

-H. Allen Smith

 

“More! More! More!” -Billy Idol

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