Search Results for: Washington Post

In the Grand Scheme of Things

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Hana Schank | From ‘The Edge of Normal’ | June 2015 | 11 minutes (2,634 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from The Edge of Normal, Hana Schank’s story about what it’s like to raise a child with albinism, a genetic condition whose most striking characteristic is white blonde hair and pale skin. Many people with albinism are also legally blind. Writes Schank, “The story is not just one of life with an unusual special need, but also the story of how I’ve changed, and continue to change, as I help my daughter navigate the world.”

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Two weeks after the pediatrician had introduced the word “albinism” to my vocabulary, my husband and I sat in the stuffy waiting room at the neurologist’s, gently rocking my daughter’s car seat. This was the man who would tell us what was going on with my perfect-imperfect daughter. There was still a chance the pediatrician was wrong. After all, everyone else agreed it was probably nothing. Or a brain tumor or cancer. Those were also things that could cause nystagmus or visual impairment. But it was probably nothing. Or albinism. Or nothing. It was probably nothing. Read more…

The Mysteries and Truths of Illness: A Reading List

Photo: NVinacco

In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work.” What happens when that long work is disrupted, when an irregularity appears? What if the irregularity is chronic, terminal, fatal? Here, I’ve collected 10 stories about authors reckoning with illnesses—some without cause or cure. Read more…

Go to Sleep

Longreads Pick

Homeless and searching for a bus driver named Mr. Wonderful: An award-winning 2005 Washington Post story by DeNeen L. Brown.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Sep 20, 2005
Length: 14 minutes (3,500 words)

#NoShame in Mental Illness: A Reading List

Photo: Kelsey

Even though I’ve lived with mental illness for years, I’m still learning about self-care, support systems and valuable resources. One of these resources is No Shame Day, initiated by poet and mental health advocate Bassey Ikpi. Ikpi founded The Siwe Project, which provides special mental health support for the Black community and other minority groups. On the first Monday in July, people take to social media and use the hashtag #NoShame to talk about living with mental illness and overcoming stigma and silence. Here, I’ve collected several stories about mental illness, many written by writers of color.

1. “Disrupting Domesticity: Mental Illness and Love as a Fact.” (Ashley C. Ford, The Toast, July 2015)

Ashley C. Ford interviews her partner, Kelly, about living with a person with mental illness–how to love her better, comfort her during panic attacks and hold her accountable. Kelly’s love for Ashley is so strong: “I love you for who you are. Anxiety is part of you. That part of you also shaped the person I love.” Read more…

‘We Have to Do Better’: A Reading List on the Charleston Church Massacre

Yesterday, Marc Lamont Hill tweeted, “I’m going to need all White people to denounce this ugly act of racist domestic terrorism.” This reading list is me denouncing the actions of a white supremacist terrorist, who visited a Wednesday night Bible study at one of the most important, sacred sites of Black religious and political freedom with the exclusive intention of killing attendees in cold blood. White people: we have to do better. We can’t deflect responsibility for this tragedy; we can’t blame this on mental illness (many of my friends and I deal with mental illness every day; none of us have murdered anyone). We have to demand accountability from one another and stand up for people of color—in the streets, in our Facebook feeds, in our offices and homes.

1. “Charleston Church Massacre: The Violence White America Must Answer For.” (Chauncey Devega, Salon, June 2015)

White Americans will not have to look in the mirror and ask, “what does it feel like to be a problem.” In the aftermath of recurring mass shooting events, and right-wing domestic terrorism, it is essential that they start to practice such acts of introspection in the interest of the Common Good.

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How the World’s Biggest Food Chain Got Its Start

Subway debuted as Pete’s Super Submarines in Bridgeport, Conn., in the summer of 1965, when a Brooklyn-born 17-year-old named Fred DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from a family friend, a doctor named Peter Buck. De­Luca, an aspiring doctor who is now worth $2.6 billion, hoped slinging sandwiches would help him pay his way through medical school.

The duo slogged through several slow years of sandwich-making until, in 1974, they started selling franchises under a new name, Subway. (One theory: The old name, on radio ads, sounded confusingly like “Pizza Marines.”)

In the decades that followed those first shops, Subway franchises have expanded, yeast-like, onto what seemed like every street and strip mall in America. By 2013, Subway was opening 50 new shops a week. Today, Subways serves nearly 2,800 sandwiches every minute, data from industry researcher IBISWorld shows.

Still owned by Doctor’s Associates, the founders’ holding company, Subway has opened inside hundreds of U.S. colleges, malls, military bases and other, less-predictable locations: a car showroom in California, a Goodwill thrift store in South Carolina, a church in Buffalo.

Washington Post national business reporter Drew Harwell examines the troubles facing the ubiquitous sandwich franchise as it nears its 50th birthday.

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‘Herr Blatter, Have You Ever Taken a Bribe?’

In a recent piece for the Washington PostMichael E. Miller profiled Andrew Jennings— a doggedly obsessed, “curmudgeonly” investigative reporter who helped expose the FIFA scandal that brought down Sepp Blatter. According to Miller’s piece, if Blatter’s downfall can be traced to a single moment it was when Jennings grabbed the microphone at a Zurich press conference after Blatter’s 2002 reelection. After the FIFA President was done speaking, Jennings asked a “deliberately outrageous question,” hoping to attract a source within the secretive soccer association: 

“I’m surrounded by all these terribly posh reporters in suits and silk ties and buttoned up shirts, for God’s sake,” he remembered. “And here’s me in me hiking gear. I get the mike and I said, ‘Herr Blatter, have you ever taken a bribe?’”

“Talk about crashing the party,” Jennings recalled Tuesday. “Reporters are moving away from me as if I’ve just let out the biggest smell since bad food. Well, that’s what I wanted. Thank you, idiot reporters. The radar dish on top of my head is spinning around to all these blazers against the wall, saying, ‘Here I am. I’m your boy. I’m not impressed by these tossers. I know what they are. I’ve done it to the IOC, and I’ll do it to them.’”

The outcome was doubly golden. Blatter denied ever taking a bribe, which gave Jennings a great headline. But he also got the goods. “Six weeks later I’m in the dark at about midnight down where the river in Zurich widens out into the lake, standing by a very impressive looking 19th-century office block, wondering why I’ve been asked to go there by somebody I don’t know when the door opens and I’m dragged in,” Jennings recalls. “I’m taken into a very posh set of offices … and within half an hour a senior FIFA official arrived carrying a wonderful armful of documents. And it ran from there. And it still does.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo via Google Maps

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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How the Clinton Foundation Was Born on a Private Plane En Route to Davos

Chevy Chase was on the plane with Bill Clinton. So was a former president of Brazil. The founders of Google. A former president of Mexico. And John Cusack.

They were all going to Davos, the Swiss resort that holds an annual conclave of the wealthy and powerful. The jet — arranged by a Saudi businessman — provided a luxurious living-room setting for a rolling discussion: Couldn’t the big names at Davos be doing more to solve the world’s big problems?

In the background, a Clinton staff member named Doug Band had an idea that would change the ex-president’s life.

“Only Bill Clinton could bring a group like this together,” Band thought.

Bill Clinton didn’t need Davos. He could do this himself.

David A. Fahrenthold, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman writing for the Washington Post about the evolution of the Clinton Foundation, which has transformed from a humble nonprofit centered on the ex-president’s library to a $2 billion global empire over the past decade.

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Thought Catalog and First-Person Essay Industrial Complex

Thought Catalog homepage

And it has predicted a remarkable rise in juicy, first-person writing on the Internet. Consider the success of xoJane, which launched in 2011, or of The Washington Post’s “PostEverything” blog. On Medium.com and Jezebel, memoirish personal essays win big. CNN ramped up its “First Person” project in 2013. And Vox.com just recently followed suit. As of press time, the Ezra Klein-run explainer site is hiring a deputy editor for “Vox First Person.”

But Thought Catalog takes the self-expression emphasis a step further. Tellingly, staffers like senior writer/producer Kovie Biakolo don’t take the title Editor because, as she puts it, “I don’t actually perform edits to people’s work.” Biakolo says that the lack of editing can encourage writers to improve on their own. “My kind of attitude to that, especially because of how I allow my contributors to publish and how I deal with them, is that it’s going to make you a better writer if you are embarrassed by what you see,” Biakolo says. “Because you always want your name to be attached to good things. And you don’t want people to be humiliated. So I will edit for them after the fact, but I always tell them, ‘I’m not going to edit your work because I want you to do work.’ Like after it’s published, when they’re like, ‘Oh, could you please change this sentence, it’s really bad.’” She adds, “I think that writers should get in the habit of [editing their own work] again. I think the pen is being spoiled by the Internet.”

 Zach Schonfeld writing in Newsweek about the rise of Thought Catalog, an online publication that has seen “unimaginable growth” over the last five years.

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