The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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The creator of online education juggernaut Khan Academy has started a brick-and-mortar school in Silicon Valley. But can tech’s disruption culture create a stable learning environment?

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Can a liberal arts college foster a culture of experimentation and personal growth while also ensuring the safety of its students? Connecticut’s Wesleyan University has long had a reputation for progressive students and politics (“Keep Wesleyan Weird” is a common refrain on campus), but after a headline-grabbing drug debacle this spring, the community finds itself grappling with the boundaries of freedom on campus. Writing for Rolling Stone, Emily Greenhouse reconstructs the events leading up to the Molly-induced hospitalization of twelve students and the subsequent drug busts while also asking broader questions about what it means to be a progressive institution:
Of course, encouraging a culture of personal experimentation is not always compatible with the age limits (and legal liabilities) present at a residential college. In the wake of the hospitalizations, law enforcement, with help from the university, launched a speedy investigation. When students learned the extent of the school’s cooperation, many felt rattled, even hurt. It was bad enough to know classmates and friends were suffering in hospital beds; for many, it was worse still to see their peers arrested on charges of drug dealing, and promptly dismissed from the school. How could a university ostensibly dedicated to fostering personal growth suddenly crack down?
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The university is back in session for a new academic year. Last month, freshmen students enjoyed gender-bending festivities, cross-cultural dancing and Italian ices. President Roth gave the first State of the School address. But as the arrested former students prepare for their day in court — and as colleges across the country struggle with controversies over sexual assault, racism, binge-drinking and drug use — a central question looms: When students at an educational institution that prizes experimentation want to experiment with risky behavior, how liberal can a liberal-arts college be?

There probably is no scientific explanation for Andrea and Giannetto’s love for caligù despite its harsh flavor, hairy texture, and visceral origins, nor the wider world’s continued love affair with cheeses and a host of other acquired, often challenging tastes. Instead, the transition from survival foods, eaten as a matter of necessity, to delicacies, preserved as a matter of identity, is just one of those muddy habits of the human psyche. History transmutes survival into culture, one of the most widespread and effective acts of alchemy we know how to work upon ourselves, using nothing but the blunt force of time and repetition.
It’s a magic that’s unconsciously taught to and practiced upon us when a fermented paste is smeared over our bread as children. Or when we drink a fermented, alcoholic swill as teenagers, emulating the adults around us. Or when we boast of our sophistication with pickled foods as adults. But it’s hard to work that same magic with traditions too far removed from our own times, origins, and experiences once a palate’s settled. That’s why, for many of us outsiders, eating a mouthful of caligù is an educational experience. It brings us back to the horrific roots of one of our most ubiquitous foodstuffs, giving us a sudden, stark window into the craft and evolution that stands between stomach milk and Kraft. But it’s not a taste we’re about to acquire for ourselves anytime soon.
— Mark Hay, writing in Roads & Kingdoms, travels to Sardinia to experience the (literal) underbelly of cheese, in an attempt to understand a hunk of rotten and fermented milk has become such a staple food for so many people.

In this 2014 piece for Der Spiegel, Claudia Voigt looks at the life of Astrid Lindgren, a Swedish author best known for her Pippi Longstocking books. If you haven’t revisited the books recently, the exuberant Pippi lives on her own, does as she pleases, and describes herself as “the strongest girl in the world.” In short, she’s a radically independent, fabulously liberated leading lady, particularly for a children’s book published in 1945. But what inspired Lindgren to create such an iconoclastic protagonist?
There has been a great deal of research and academic discussion on what induced Lindgren to develop such a revolutionary and modern children’s book character. [Lindgren’s daughter] Karin Nyman remembers all too well that “there was a permanent sense of fear hanging over all of our lives,” even in Sweden. “The world was gripped by horror, and Pippi was a reaction to it. The stories were a way to oppose it, to give us a chance to come up for air.”
Lindgren was an avid reader. The novel “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun helped her endure the poverty she experienced as a young woman in Stockholm. She later claimed that the novel’s wry humor spurred her to create her radical Pippi character. The author read many children’s books to her children, Karin and Lars, including classics like “Tom Sawyer” and many fairy tales. She would later mention having been familiar with the writing of Alfred Adler, the progressive teaching theories of A.S. Neill and Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on education.

On September 21, Eliel Cruz tweeted, “If you’re an LGBT journalist and you don’t produce even one piece of content for #BiWeek you’re not an LGBT journalist.” Cruz’s words hit me in the chest. I am: a) a journalist who covers feminist & LGBTQ issues, and b) a journalist who interrogates her own orientation and gender identity regularly.
Bisexual Awareness Week (Sept. 21-28) and Bi Visibility Day (Sept. 23) provide solidarity and support for the bisexual community. I was embarrassed I didn’t know about these holidays until this year. Founded in 1999, Bi Week serves as a catalyst for discourse about biphobia and monosexism, bi erasure, mental and physical healthcare, public policy and more.
All week, I’ve watched my favorite websites and my Twitter feed fill with stories, advice and encouragement. Now, it’s my turn to contribute. I’ve collected some of my favorite pieces about bisexuality–personal essays, queer theory, history, and interviews.
Spoiler: This interview blew my mind. Bitch sits down with Shiri Eisner, the bisexual, genderqueer author of Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. Eisner isn’t satisfied with merely overcoming stereotypes–she wants more for her community. Read more…

There are a number of suggestive parallels between [Elon] Musk and the Wrights, beyond the obvious ones to do with an interest in flight. The [Wright brothers’ father] had very high standards and set no limits on the intellectual curiosity he encouraged in his children; Musk’s father had the same standards and the same insistence on no limits, but was (is) a tortured and difficult presence, ‘good at making life miserable’, in Musk’s words: ‘He can take any situation no matter how good it is and make it bad.’ The Wrights were poorish, the Musks affluentish, but both grew up with an emphasis on learning things first-hand. ‘It is remarkable how many different things you can get to explode,’ Musk says about his childhood experiments. ‘I’m lucky I have all my fingers.’ One very odd thing is a parallel to do with bullies: Musk was set on and beaten half to death by a gang of thugs at his school in Johannesburg; Wilbur Wright was attacked so badly at the age of 18 – beaten with a hockey stick – that he took years to recover from his injuries and missed a college education as a result. His assailant, Oliver Crook Haugh, went on to become a notorious serial killer. Something about these very bright young men set off the bullies’ hatred for difference.
—John Lanchester, reviewing recent biographies of Elon Musk and the Wright brothers for the London Review of Books.

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, the founding director of the Asian American Literary Review and a lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, worked for years at Straight A Learning Center, where he taught SAT prep classes and helped build a college advising service. At The Offing, he describes the opportunity to give back to his community and offer support to Asian American students like him — and how it went all wrong:
But there was a deeper problem too that I began to notice: in Helena, that furious striving, and in me, a compulsion to fan it in troubling ways. To not only convince her she could get accepted to top schools, and show her how to get accepted, but to set a dollar value on that acceptance. We were coding high-end acceptance as fulfillment, coding fulfillment as an investment. Which was also, not coincidentally, at the heart of our essay coaching — value. Application writing at all levels works this way. Why should you select me, hire me, give me that scholarship, that fellowship, that grant, that money. It’s the ultimate in capitalist logic: the most fundamentally important skill is being able to articulate your own value. I was not simply teaching this skill to individual students, I was pitching the idea to their parents, threading its logic into the fabric of our communities, creating a market for our business out of thin air. This was not teaching, not learning, not education; it was sales. It was recoding everything as commodity and transaction. It meant asking our prospective clients, the parents, to re-understand themselves and everyone around them, most especially their children, in terms of success narrowly understood in terms of education narrowly understood in terms of value. I was on the floor of the model minority factory, imagining the assembly line into being.

Lisa Belkin | Show Me a Hero, Little, Brown and Company | 1999 | 25 minutes (6,235 words)
Below is the first chapter of Lisa Belkin’s 1999 nonfiction book Show Me a Hero, which was recently adapted by David Simon into a six-part HBO miniseries of the same title. Belkin’s book (and the miniseries) depict the fight to desegregate housing in Yonkers, New York during the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the story of a young politician named Nick Wasicsko. Read more…

Jill Lepore | Introduction to The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin | Everyman’s Library | September 2015 | 18 minutes (4,968 words)
Below is Jill Lepore’s introductory essay to the new Everyman’s Library edition of The Autobiography and Other Writings, by Benjamin Franklin, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…
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