Search Results for: education

The Bomb in the Bag

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jack El-Hai | Longreads | March 2015 | 14 minutes (3,509 words)

 

 

A New York City stockbroker named M. Leopold was working in his office at 84 Broadway shortly after noon on December 4, 1891, when he sensed vibrations, an odd rumbling. Looking outside, he saw flames and a cloud of smoke shooting out from a window of the Arcade Building directly across the street. A man’s body then flew out through the opening, landing on Broadway. Leopold raised his window and smelled the tang of dynamite. Read more…

‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party

Photo: Platon

Elaine Brown | A Taste of Power, Pantheon | 1992 | 30 minutes (7,440 words)

 

Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, lecturer and singer. In 1968, she joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member. Six years later, Huey Newton appointed her to lead the Party when he went into exile in Cuba. She was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Party.  She is author of A Taste of Power (Pantheon, 1992) and The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press, 2002)She is also the Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee and CEO of the newly-formed non-profit organization Oakland & the World Enterprises, Inc.

Her 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power is a story of what it means to be a black woman in America, tracing her life from a lonely girlhood in the ghettos of North Philadelphia to the highest levels of the Black Panther Party’s hierarchy. The Los Angeles Times described the book as “a profound, funny and…heartbreaking American story,” and the New York Times called it “chilling, well written and profoundly entertaining.” Our thanks to Brown for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here. Read more…

How Paul Rand Made Companies Care About Design—And Influenced Steve Jobs

NeXT Poster by Paul Rand: Flickr, Graham Smith

It was the success of [Paul] Rand’s corporate communications for IBM in the ‘50s that inspired future businesses, including Steve Jobs’s NeXT, to put design first. When Thomas Watson Jr. took over IBM in 1956, he was struck by how poorly the company handled corporate design. The aesthetic was inconsistent across various platforms–for example, “branches in different regions would use different stationery,” Albrecht says… “Watson Jr. was one of the first to say ‘good design is good business,'” Albrecht says.

Led by design consultant Eliot Noyes, previously of the New York Museum of Modern Art, this program ultimately hired Charles and Ray Eames to do IBM’s exhibitions and books, architect Errol Saarinen to design buildings, and Paul Rand to design new logo and graphics. “Rand made everyone use his logo and branding,” Albrecht says. At the time, this sort of visually cohesive communication across all platforms of a brand was just gaining traction as a business strategy.

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In the ’80s, the power of IBM’s visual communications program inspired Steve Jobs, a longtime admirer of Rand’s work, to hire Rand as a designer for NeXT, his educational computer company. “Rand was the first and only designer Jobs looked to,” Albrecht says. One reason for Rand’s success with clients, aside from the sheer beauty of his visual work, was that he was “one of the guys,” Albrecht says. “He wasn’t coming into boardrooms acting like an artiste. He was very down-to-Earth, and fit into this Brooklyn boys’ world of corporate advertising in New York.”

“In a way, what Apple does today with design is what IBM was doing in ‘50s,” Albrecht says. “It was about simplification and cohesiveness across all platforms of the brand–products, ads, stores. These are all ideas in the modern vein that came about with Rand’s work with IBM. It set a precedent.”

Carey Dunne, writing for Fast Co.Design about how the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand pioneered the era of design-led business. Rand created some of the most iconic American corporate logos, many of which are still in use today. László Moholy-Nagy described him as “an idealist and a realist,” fluent in both “the language of the poet and the businessman.” There is currently an exhibit of Rand’s work at the Museum of the City of New York, and Dunne spoke with Donald Albrecht, the exhibit’s curator for her piece. As a side note, Rand’s seminal—and famously hard to find—book Thoughts on Design is back in print for the first time since the 1970’s.

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The Holy Junk Heap

Solomon Schechter studying the fragments from the Cairo Geniza, Photo via Cambridge University Library.

Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole | Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza | Schocken | April 2011 | 18 minutes (4,838 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book Sacred Trash, by Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

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Cambridge, May 1896

When the self-taught Scottish scholar of Arabic and Syriac Agnes Lewis and her no-less-learned twin sister, Margaret Gibson, hurried down a street or a hallway, they moved—as a friend later described them—“like ships in full sail.” Their plump frames, thick lips, and slightly hawkish eyes made them, theoretically, identical. And both were rather vain about their dainty hands, which on special occasions they “weighed down with antique rings.” In a poignant and peculiar coincidence, each of the sisters had been widowed after just a few years of happy marriage to a clergyman. Read more…

On Playing Hooky From a Job at the Post Office to Read ‘Ulysses’

The summer after my freshman year I found myself working as a substitute mail carrier in one of the tony North Shore suburbs outside Chicago. The post office was an intriguing place (just see short stories by Eudora Welty and Herman Melville). I discovered, after a steep learning curve, that I could sort and deliver the mail on my route in less than the eight hours allotted for the job, but I made the mistake of returning to the post office early only once. I received a very colorful lecture from the chief clerk, who dragged me down to the employee lunchroom in the basement and explained how poorly my colleagues would regard me if I dared show up again before 3:15 p.m., when I was scheduled to punch out.

As a result, I hid in the only air-conditioned public building in town: the library. With an hour or two to spare each afternoon, I decided to improve myself by reading the Greatest Novel Ever Written. During my six weeks with Ulysses, I had a number of observations. First, I swooned over many of the most gorgeous sentences I’d ever encountered. Second, unlike other works by Joyce that I’d adored, like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or “The Dead” in Dubliners, Ulysses didn’t seem to be a novel in the narrow way I thought of that form, that is, as a story which would carry me along because of my emotional connection with one or more characters. I had to work at Ulysses, so much so that it seemed fitting that the taxpayers of the United States were paying me $2.52 an hour while I read it. Finally, it was startling but instructive that in an affluent community with a sky-high education level, the library’s lone copy of Ulysses was on the shelf every time I went to find it. I spent many years after that wondering whether Joyce’s book could really be the greatest novel ever written if no one else in town wanted to read it.

—Scott Turow, writing in the introduction to By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by internaz

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

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Homeward

Longreads Pick

Hugo Lucitante was 10 years old when his Amazon tribe sent him to Seattle to live with a 22-year-old college student. The tribe hoped that he would return to them with a Western education and the knowledge to help guide his people through a changing world.

Published: Feb 12, 2015
Length: 23 minutes (5,903 words)

Giving Visibility to the Invisible: An Interview With Photographer Ruddy Roye

Lucy McKeon | Longreads | February 2015 | 18 minutes (4,489 words)

 

With over 100,000 Instagram followers, photographer Ruddy Roye came of age in Jamaica, and has lived in New York City since 2001. He has photographed dancehall musicians and fans, sapeurs of the Congo, the Caribbean Carnival J’ouvert, recent protests in Ferguson and in New York, and the faces of the many people he meets and observes every day. Roye is perhaps best known for his portraits taken around his neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn—pictures of the homeless, the disenfranchised, and those who Roye believes aren’t often fully seen.

In Roye’s Instagram profile, he describes himself as an “Instagram Humanist/Activist,” and when looking at his portraits, the phrase that comes to mind is “up close.” Roye is closer to his subjects—who he calls his “collaborators”—than is typical in street photography, in terms of actual proximity as well as identification. Each picture, he says, contains a piece of him. With this closeness, Roye creates images that can be harrowing, disturbing, joyful and striking. If they are sometimes difficult to look at, one has more trouble looking away. Read more…

What Would a More Efficient Clinical Trial System Look Like?

Photo: Pixabay

What might a more-efficient trial system look like? One collaboration in Chicago offers a possible way forward.

Working together, several of the city’s academic medical centers have established a joint network for conducting clinical trials. Participating institutions now routinely interview all of their hospitalized patients, regardless of diagnosis, to keep detailed records on their health status. With permission, those records are made available to researchers.

Over 15 years, the process has enrolled 100,000 patients, many of whom are then recruited for clinical trials, said David O. Meltzer, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Much of the data is collected by undergraduates, and the team has grown large enough that newcomers can be trained without the need to constantly rebuild for each new trial, Dr. Meltzer said. “It’s wildly cost-effective,” he said, “and it’s incredibly good for the students.”

Even more savings could be realized by reconsidering when trial participants are even needed. A dozen years ago, Benjamin A. Olken, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wanted to study corruption in Indonesia, to learn which of two strategies—threatening audits of government officials or giving community members a more direct role in monitoring—would do a better job of keeping road builders from “cheating.”

Paul Basken writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education about what he learned over the course of seven years as a participant in a medical clinical trial.

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