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The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Longreads Pick

A profile of Coates, whose book, Between the World and Me, has been hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading” and given him a comparison to James Baldwin. Coates has made a name for himself by pointing out how structural racism and white supremacy continues to pervade in the U.S. today.

Published: Jul 12, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,590 words)

Taking A Different Approach to Kids and Bad Behavior

Students in class, 1932. Photo via Iowa Digital Library

Writer Katherine Reynolds Lewis, in Mother Jones, examines the latest approaches to addressing children and discipline—most notably, that timeouts, negative consequences, and other traditional punishments might not be as effective in many cases as helping kids manage their own emotions. It’s based on “Collaborative and Proactive Solutions,” a program that was developed by psychologist Ross Greene (author of The Explosive Child):

In 2004, a psychologist from Long Creek Youth Development Center, a correctional center in South Portland, Maine, attended one of Greene’s workshops in Portland and got his bosses to let him try CPS. Rodney Bouffard, then superintendent at the facility, remembers that some guards resisted at first, complaining about “that G-D-hugs-and-kisses approach.” It wasn’t hard to see why: Instead of restraining and isolating a kid who, say, flipped over a desk, staffers were now expected to talk with him about his frustrations. The staff began to ignore curses dropped in a classroom and would speak to the kid later, in private, so as not to challenge him in front of his peers.

But remarkably, the relationships changed. Kids began to see the staff as their allies, and the staff no longer felt like their adversaries. The violent outbursts waned. There were fewer disciplinary write-ups and fewer injuries to kids or staff. And once they got out, the kids were far better at not getting locked up again: Long Creek’s one-year recidivism rate plummeted from 75 percent in 1999 to 33 percent in 2012. “The senior staff that resisted us the most,” Bouffard told me, “would come back to me and say, ‘I wish we had done this sooner. I don’t have the bruises, my muscles aren’t strained from wrestling, and I really feel I accomplished something.’”

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The Man Behind Moore’s Law

Gordon Moore in 2008. Photo by OnInnovation, Flickr

IBM has announced that it has made the world’s most powerful computer chip. The breakthrough “could lead to a 50% performance and power boost over chips that are on the market today, effectively keeping Moore’s Law more or less intact for the time being,” Quartz reported. This Scientific American excerpt of the biography Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary, by Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock and Rachel Jones, reveals the 86-year-old billionaire who made the observation 50 years ago, and went on to change the world:

He is one of the world’s most exceptional achievers, yet he has consistently avoided opportunities to raise his profile. When Intel was named Electronics Company of the Year, his right-hand man, Andy Grove, beamed straight into the photographer’s lens at the awards presentation. Moore— Intel’s CEO—was mostly out of the frame, doing “something inscrutable in the margins.” Internally driven and governed by the ticking of his watch, Moore believed his vision had global consequence yet worked quietly, within miles of where he was born and raised, eschewing the trappings of wealth and fame. His pursuit of revolutionary electronics brought extraordinary change, even as—with remarkable focus—he stuck to his knitting, doing one single important thing to the best of his ability. The logo “Intel Inside” speaks both of transistors and of Gordon Moore.

Whereas Larry Ellison, Andy Grove, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and a host of other immigrants to Silicon Valley command media attention, Moore has chosen to stay low-key. He has always known who he was, understood what he needed to do, and stayed on task. As far back as the mid-1970s, he was pointing to silicon electronics as “a major revolution in the history of mankind, as important as the Industrial Revolution.” With his immediate colleagues, he was at its leading edge and foresaw how the transistor would leverage the power of human intellect. With a modesty that belied his passion, tenacity, and clarity of vision, Gordon Moore built one of the world’s most successful companies, demonstrated the power of silicon technology, and established the relentless cadence of Moore’s Law.

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The First Five Chapters of ‘Saint Mazie’ by Jami Attenberg

UK website The Pool has an excerpt of Saint Mazie, the much-lauded new novel by Jami Attenberg, author of the New York Times Bestselling The Middlesteins. They’ve got not just one chapter, but the first five from this book of historical fiction about legendary “Queen of the Bowery” Mazie Phillips—an irreverent but kind figure known for handing out money and advice to men on the skids in Jazz Age New York City, and who was profiled by Joseph Mitchell in the December 21, 1940 issue of The New Yorker (see his collection, Up in the Old Hotel):

Mazie’s Diary, January 4, 1918
I wasn’t ready to go home yet but there was nobody left in the bar worth talking to. Talked to a bum on the street instead, an old fella. We split whatever was in his bottle and I gave him a smoke. I was feeling tough. I asked him how long he’d been on the streets.
He said: Longer than you’ve been alive, girlie. You gotta be tough to last that long.
He beat his chest.
I said: I could survive out here.
He said: You don’t want to try.
I said: I could do it. You wanna see me?
He said: You got a home, you’re lucky.
I said: Why don’t I feel that way?
Then he got gentle with me.
He said: If someone loves you, go home to them.
A bad wind blew in and I grew suddenly, terribly cold. I couldn’t bear the night for another minute. I handed him the rest of my smokes and wandered home.

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Letter to My Son

Longreads Pick

“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” An excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, Between the World and Me.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 6, 2015
Length: 33 minutes (8,442 words)

‘A Few Words About Breasts’ From Nora Ephron

I was about six months younger than everyone else in my class, and so for about six months after it began, for six months after my friends had begun to develop (that was the word we used, develop), I was not particularly worried. I would sit in the bathtub and look down at my breasts and know that any day now, any second now, they would start growing like everyone else’s. They didn’t. “I want to buy a bra,” I said to my mother one night. “What for?” she said. My mother was really hateful about bras, and by the time my third sister had gotten to the point where she was ready to want one, my mother had worked the whole business into a comedy routine. “Why not use a Band-Aid instead?” she would say. It was a source of great pride to my mother that she had never even had to wear a brassiere until she had her fourth child, and then only because her gynecologist made her. It was incomprehensible to me that anyone could ever be proud of something like that. It was the 1950s, for God’s sake. Jane Russell. Cashmere sweaters. Couldn’t my mother see that? “I am too old to wear an undershirt.” Screaming. Weeping. Shouting. “Then don’t wear an undershirt,” said my mother. “But I want to buy a bra.” “What for?”

I suppose that for most girls, breasts, brassieres, that entire thing, has more trauma, more to do with the coming of adolescence, with becoming a woman, than anything else. Certainly more than getting your period, although that, too, was traumatic, symbolic. But you could see breasts; they were there; they were visible. Whereas a girl could claim to have her period for months before she actually got it and nobody would ever know the difference. Which is exactly what I did. All you had to do was make a great fuss over having enough nickels for the Kotex machine and walk around clutching your stomach and moaning for three to five days a month about The Curse and you could convince anybody. There is a school of thought somewhere in the women’s lib/women’s mag/gynecology establishment that claims that menstrual cramps are purely psychological, and I lean toward it. Not that I didn’t have them finally. Agonizing cramps, heating-pad cramps, go-down-to-the- school-nurse-and-lie-on-the-cot cramps. But unlike any pain I had ever suffered, I adored the pain of cramps, welcomed it, wallowed in it, bragged about it. “I can’t go. I have cramps.” “I can’t do that. I have cramps.” And most of all, gigglingly, blushingly: “I can’t swim. I have cramps.” Nobody ever used the hard-core word. Menstruation. God, what an awful word. Never that. “I have cramps.”

The late, great Nora Ephron, writing for Esquire in May 1972. “A Few Words About Breasts” later appeared in Ephron’s classic 1975 essay collection Crazy Salad. 

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What Etgar Keret Learned About Storytelling from His Father

Photo by Garoa

Author Etgar Keret’s new memoir, The Seven Good Years, chronicles the time between the birth of his son and the death of his father. Keret’s parents were both Holocaust survivors, and in an interview with Fresh Air, Keret said that experience shaped his father’s stories:

My father was very charismatic and a very good storyteller but he couldn’t invent anything so he would tell me stories about things that had just happened. And these stories would be amazing and there was sometimes violence in them, many extreme things, but at the same time, they were full of love for mankind and even the people who would do those extreme things, you would still understand them and like them. The protagonist in those stories, they would always be prostitutes and mafia guys and drunk people.

As a 5-year-old I asked my father, “What’s a prostitute?” He said to me, “A prostitute is somebody who makes a living by listening to other people’s problems.” I asked him, “What’s a mafia guy?” He says, “A mafia guy is like a landlord but he collects money from houses that he doesn’t own.” And I asked him “What’s a drunk person?” He said, “It’s somebody who has a physical condition that the more liquids he drinks, the happier he becomes,” and at that stage I couldn’t really decide if when I grow up I want to become a drunk prostitute or a drunk mafia guy, but options seemed very attractive.

When I became 10 or 11 I understood that something was really wrong about the stories that my father had told me and I kind of confronted him about it and my father apologetically said to me, “Listen, when I wanted to tell you stories my first instinct would be to tell you stories from my childhood, but what kind of stories would I tell you? How the Nazis caught my kid sister and tortured her to death but she would still not tell where I was hiding? Or how we spent more than 600 days in a hole in the ground being afraid that we would be discovered and killed?” …

Those stories, for me, were always the model for the function of stories and storytelling in our lives — the idea is that you kind of look reality straight in the face, it doesn’t matter how ugly it is, and you try to find humanity in it, you try to find beauty in it, you try to find hope in it. So you can’t beautify it, but at the same time, you should find these tiny things that you know that would make sometimes very violent and unhappy occasions still human and emotional.

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Death Made Material: The Hair Jewelry of The Brontës

Portrait of Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (via Wikimedia Commons)

Deborah Lutz | The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects | W.W. Norton | May 2015 | 42 minutes (6,865 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Brontë Cabinet, by Deborah Lutz, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers.

* * *

Long neglect has worn away

Half the sweet enchanting smile

Time has turned the bloom to grey

Mould and damp the face defile

But that lock of silky hair

Still beneath the picture twined

Tells what once those features were

Paints their image on the mind.

—Emily Brontë, Untitled Poem

If the Brontës’ things feel haunted in some way, like Emily’s desk and its contents, then the amethyst bracelet made from the entwined hair of Emily and Anne is positively ghost-ridden. Over time the colors have faded, the strands grown stiff and brittle. Charlotte may have asked Emily and Anne for the locks as a gesture of sisterly affection. Or, the tresses were cut from one or both of their corpses, an ordinary step in preparing the dead for burial in an era when mourning jewelry with hair became part of the grieving process. Charlotte must have either mailed the hair to a jeweler or “hairworker” (a title for makers of hair jewelry) or brought it to her in person. Then she probably wore it, carrying on her body a physical link to her sisters, continuing to touch them wherever they were. Read more…

Vagabonds, Crafty Bauds, and the Loyal Huzza: A History of London at Night

Photo by Garry Knight

Matthew Beaumont | Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London | Verso | March 2015 | 37 minutes (10,129 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from Nightwalking, by Matthew Beaumont, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. In this excerpt, Beaumont describes the complex and transgressive act of nightwalking in London during the 16th & 17th centuries. He paints a vivid picture of the city at night and explains what nightwalking revealed about class, status, and the political and religious leanings of those who practiced it. The plight of the jobless and homeless poor in this era, which also witnessed the birth of capitalism, are dishearteningly familiar today.

Beaumont draws on a variety of compelling sources, which have been linked to when possible, such as Beware the Cat, a puzzling English proto-novel that features a man who attains cat-like superpowers, The Wandring Whore and The Wandring Whore Continued, and A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, which defines, among other things, the 24 types of vagabond.  Read more…

The Battery Breakthrough That Could Juice U.S. Manufacturing

In a new report, McKinsey describes a broad new age of manufacturing that it calls Industry 4.0. The consulting firm says the changes under way are affecting most businesses. They are probably not “another industrial revolution,” it says, but together, there is “strong potential to change the way factories work.”

For decades, the US has watched its bedrock manufacturing industries wither away, as they’ve instead grown thick in Japan, in South Korea, in China, Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the US lost about 5 million manufacturing jobs just from 1997 to 2014. This includes the production of lithium-ion batteries, which, though invented by Americans, were commercialized in Japan and later South Korea and China.

So Chiang’s innovation could be a poster-child for a new strain of thinking in the US. This says that, while such industries are not likely to return from Asia, the US can possibly reinvent how they manufacture. The country wouldn’t take back nearly as many jobs as it has lost. But there could be large profits, as the country once again moves a step ahead in crucial areas of technology.

To be clear, this is not Chiang’s goal. He is a professed universalist, divorced from scientific realpolitik. But should he succeed, as he plans to, then in addition to helping to decode the perplexing problem of batteries, he might contribute to continuing America’s political and economic dominance.

—Steve LeVine, Washington correspondent for Quartz and author of The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the Worldexplains how Yet-Ming Chiang’s startup 24M is reinventing lithium-ion battery manufacturing, potentially making the devices able to compete on cost with gasoline.

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