An Elegy for DNAinfo, Local Media’s First Responders

By Danielle Tcholakian

By Danielle Tcholakian

The nation’s third-largest state is currently engulfed by 17 separate wildfires, with more than a dozen people dead and additional 100 in the hospital. More than 80 percent of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, is still without electricity after Hurricane Maria devastated the island three weeks ago, and more than a third of the island’s population does not have access to drinking water. But the President of the United States, after throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans, is tweeting vindictively about a cable television host he dislikes.
ESPN Sportscenter host Jemele Hill, who Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders previously said should be fired for criticizing the president in a Twitter conversation, has been suspended for two weeks for violating ESPN’s social media guidelines for employees.
ESPN did not say exactly which of Hill’s tweets prompted her suspension, but it appears to stem from several tweets after Dallas Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones said that players who don’t stand for the national anthem — “disrespects the flag,” in his words — will not be allowed to play.
Before we go any further, here are some things to know about Jerry Jones. Read more…

Hugh Hefner was a complicated individual whose notions of sexuality and human relationships were at once woke and predatory, who stumbled upon a brilliant idea at a time when American culture was milquetoast. A loss of identity in the 1950s, particularly among men, was palpable for a generation who no longer had a war to fight. It took a magazine that paired the mind and the body, high culture and naked women, to shake the male from his slumber. Read more…

Pearl Abraham | Michigan Quarterly Review | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,007 words)
“The power of narrative stems from the narrator’s ability to be there and then, as well as here and now.”
— C. Fred Alford, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power
In 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment, my father, a man with rabbinic aspirations, was deep in his own pickle, indicted for conspiracy and fraud in the federal summer school lunch program.
Nixon was brought down by Deep Throat, the pseudonym given the informant who passed information to Washington Post journalists about his administration’s involvement in what came to be known as the Watergate Scandal. My father got off somehow.
With him in court for one of his hearings, I suffered his ashen face, then his palpable relief when the case was deferred or dismissed, I’m not now sure which. I also don’t know whether his case made headlines the way rabbinic and priestly scandals do these days, “Five NJ Rabbis Arrested for Fraud and Conspiracy” a recent one.

Chris Wiewiora | Longreads | September 2017 | 13 minutes (3,328 words)
Zoe looks right through me as she boards my bus. She was one of my best public speaking students at Iowa State and admirably focused on social justice, but on the bus, she doesn’t give me a hint of recognition. David keeps looking at my rearview mirror as he sits by the door, trying to figure out how he knows me. He was a guy who skimmed along through the academics of class, but emanated a genuineness and care about his work. It’s been only a year since I taught them. I still know their last names and their final grades. Past semesters blur together for me the way that I must blur together, in the minds of these students, with the other drivers who pick them up at the park-and-ride lot by the Alumni Center and chauffeur them to campus.
I justify their blindness with what I think of as my disguise; my CyRide uniform of a tucked in polo and slacks is nothing like my daily teaching outfit of button-ups and unbelted jeans. Under my ball cap, I wear black-framed glasses now. But I’m not Clark Kent and I wasn’t a Superman.
I never felt like a superhero in my classroom and I don’t feel like an everyday driver on the road. After my contract expired, I chose to leave behind sitting in a desk chair in front of students. I was haunted by my inability to protect them, one particular afternoon, from a danger more fearsome than speaking in public. Now I hide behind the wheel of a bus.

Sam Riches | Longreads | August 2017 | 18 minutes (4,650 words)
Bound by professional obligation, the announcer is feigning impartiality but a wobble in his lilt, a slip of exasperation, gives him away.
“He’s stolen the ball and here he comes again.”
It’s March, 2012, the third round of the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, and Royce White is running free.
He barrels up court, body wide and strong. He sprints past other players bound for the NBA, including Anthony Davis, who will soon enter the world’s top league as a transcendent number one pick, a uniquely defensive wunderkind that is representative of a shift in the way the game is played; positionless and facilitative and full-throttled.
White moves past him, over him, through him.
White, who stands 6’8” and weighs 270 pounds, moves with a lumbering fluidity, a grace that belies his size. He dribbles the ball like a guard, with hands that measure nearly a foot in width. He clears space with his frame, sometimes backing down his opponents from beyond the three point line, and then flicks passes to teammates at impossible angles. He rips rebounds from the sky and then floats the ball back into the basket with a feathery touch.
It is rare sight, to see a man that large that nimble, a combination of sheer force and astonishing agility and fortuitous genetics, but it is not rare for White. It is what he knows. He moves confidently, with purpose, with intention.
After the game, Kentucky’s head coach, John Calipari, a coach who has graduated 45 college players to the NBA, will say, “Royce is Charles Barkley.” It’s a comparison that comes up often, which is fitting since both players are anomalies, at once bullish and lithe, able to snatch rebounds from other gripping hands and then ignite a fast break with equal ease. But there are other comparisons. Jim Calhoun, one of the greatest college coaches of all time, says, “He’s got some Kevin McHale stuff inside.” One of Iowa State’s then assistant coaches, Matt Abdelmassih, goes a step further. “It’s unfair to Royce,” he tells Sports Illustrated, “but LeBron is the one guy you can compare him to.”
The NBA scouting reports are jotted with similar praise. “Legitimate playmaker.” “Big time rebounder.” “Crafty low-post scorer.” “NBA ready body.” His college coach, Fred Hoiberg, now coaching the Chicago Bulls, will say, “There are just so many things that he does. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a player like him.”
White is about to announce his own opinion on the matter. Davis swats at him, tries to slow him down, to knock him off his path, but it doesn’t work. White launches into the air, dunks the ball through the hoop and then bellows his own proclamation.
“I’M THE BEST PLAYER IN THE COUNTRY.”
At that moment, it’s hard to argue with him. In his lone season at Iowa State, White is the only player in the nation to lead his team in scoring, rebounding, assists, steals and blocks. He also led the team back into the NCAA tournament for the first time in seven years. In this game, he has thoroughly outplayed the future number one NBA draft pick.
Back on steady ground, White thumps his chest. He screams. He makes sure he will be heard, and here lies the problem.
Royce White has something to say. Read more…

Jacqui Shine | Longreads | July 2017 | 23 minutes (5,700 words)
Percy Ross was a trash-bag tycoon, a serial entrepreneur who had made millions in plastics in the 1960s and relished spending it. But in 1977 he staged an astonishing reinvention. Ross would become a philanthropist — and not just any philanthropist, but one for people like him: a “blue-collar millionaire,” as he put it. He’d give money away the way he’d gotten it, in bills small and large, and always when it was needed the most. He’d portion out his millions in cash, in checks, accompanied by the satisfying clink of a silver dollar. Percy Ross would become, as the newspapers called him, “America’s Rich Uncle.”
Ross always said — boasted, really — that he’d made and lost two fortunes. It was his third business that stuck, the one in plastics. Ross had been a fur auctioneer in the 1930s — he met the woman who eventually became his wife at a craps table in Las Vegas while in the company of Clark Gable — and an organizer of farm-equipment auctions. In 1958, the story went, Ross borrowed $30,000 to invest in a failing plastics company. He knew nothing about the industry, and within five years he’d filed for bankruptcy — but with hard work, the help of his family, and a little innovation, he eventually turned the company around. Poly-Tech, as he renamed it, made plastic garbage bags. He liked to tell people he sold Poly-Tech for $8 million on the same day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon: July 20, 1969.
The story of the trash-bag turnaround was part of Percy Ross’s pitch-perfect rags-to-riches tale. Born in 1916 in Laurium, Michigan, a small town on the state’s copper-rich Upper Peninsula, Ross was the son of immigrants, desperately poor Jews from Russia and present-day Latvia. His father was a junk dealer who worked constantly, and so did his three sons. By the age of 6, Percy had begun making weekly rounds through the neighborhood with a wagon of farm eggs his father had bought for 12 cents a dozen, which he then sold to neighbors at a 3-cent markup. He sold magazines. He started his own business rebuilding car batteries. He would have shined shoes at the country club if they hadn’t rejected him for being too poor and too Jewish.

In a sprawling essay at Guernica, writer and journalist Katherina Grace Thomas turns a lens on the three years Nina Simone spent in Liberia in the mid-1970s. Thomas paints a portrait of the nation before its Civil War, teeming with opulence and possibility. Black Americans like Simone, as well was artists and political leaders from newly independent countries in Africa, flocked to Liberia to exchange ideas and enjoy the high life at late-night discotheques.
In 1969, an author from Stockton, California published one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. He rarely talked publicly about it or why he never published another book. One poet spent the weekend strolling with the author through the old hotels and boxing rings of this inland port city, talking books, his inspiration and future possibilities.

For boxing fans, Cuba holds an outsize mystique. Since Castro took power in 1959, the island has won more Olympic gold medals in boxing than any other country, but its fighters have for the most part resisted the temptation to defect to the United States, turning down multimilliondollar offers in apparent loyalty to the revolution. Mr. Butler found the paradox worth exploring, and his book argues that the sport is as entwined with Cuba’s narrative of defiance toward America as much as anything else.
His adventures over the years were plentiful. He interviewed Cuba’s most decorated boxers, finding them living in poverty: Several had sold their gold medals because they needed the money; another agreed to train him for $6 a day, and another decreed he chug a glass of vodka as a test of character. The book chronicles Mr. Butler’s fling with one of Castro’s granddaughters and the time he bet his life savings on a fight (he won). He also retraced Hemingway’s footsteps, talking his way into his literary idol’s home and traveling to a small fishing town to find the old man who inspired “The Old Man and the Sea,” who was then 102.
These days, you can find him in Central Park. Another tune started to play as his student agonized through pushups. “You’d see these boxers dominate at the Olympics, and then they’d just disappear,” he said. “They were fighting for something more important than money. I had to go find out why.”
In The New York Times, Alex Vadukul tells the story of Brin-Jonathan Butler, a successful boxing writer who’s extensively documented boxing in Cuba, only to become part of the story by teaching the sport in New York’s Central Park.
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