Search Results for: food

Yes, All Women Part II: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women

My last Yes, All Women reading list was a hit with the Longreads community, so here’s part two. Enjoy 20 pieces by fantastic women writers.

1. “When You’re Unemployed.” (Jessica Goldstein, The Hairpin, June 2014)

“The first thing to go is the caring…You develop a routine: changing out of sleeping leggings and into daytime leggings.”

2. “No Country for Old Pervs.” (Molly Lambert, Blvrb, June 2014)

Dov Charney, Terry Richardson…and the Iraq War? The 2000s were rough.

3. “For Writers with Full-Time Jobs: On the Work/Other Work Balance.” (Megan Burbank, Luna Luna Mag, June 2014)

Seven helpful tips for living practically and creatively. I’m particularly fond of “use your commute.”

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'Orange is the New Black' is Back: A Reading List on the Representation of Prison

Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show. The first two pieces cover season one, for all you newbies out there. The second two address the most recent season.

1. “Five Formerly Incarcerated Women on Prison, Relationships, and Orange is the New Black.” (Kat Stoeffel, The Cut, August 2013)

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Betrayal in Charlie Rangel’s Harlem

Longreads Pick

Rangel has been the face of the district for four decades. Then an ambitious preacher named Michael Walrond came along. Now they’re fighting over the future of America’s most symbolic black neighborhood.

At 11:30 a.m. sharp, Walrond, who normally preaches in jeans, arrived at St. John’s in a dark suit and tie, his bald head cleanly shaved. As the 30 or so people took their seats and the smell of waffles, bacon and salmon croquettes wafted in from the kitchen, Butts introduced his guest. Then, for 15 minutes, Walrond spoke about the various efforts he began at his church — an educational and wellness center, a program that feeds children before school, a food pantry that sought to serve 20,000 families a year — that he would like to expand, if elected to the House. He talked about his concerns with the local schools, particularly co-location, the disputed practice of housing several schools in one building. Then he threw open the floor to questions.

Published: Jun 18, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,304 words)

We Are More Dangerous to Sharks Than They Are to Us

In the Toronto Star, Sandro Contenta travels to the Bahamas to attend “SharkSchool” where a man named Erich Ritter teaches a one-week course on how to swim safely with sharks. Over the course of his reporting, Contenta learns that 63 people have been killed by sharks in the past decade, while scientists have estimated that 97 million sharks have been killed by humans during fishing-related activities in 2010 alone:

The scientists concluded that dozens of species of sharks were being killed at unsustainable rates. “The consequences of these unsustainable catch and mortality rates for marine ecosystems could be substantial,” they wrote. “Global total shark mortality, therefore, needs to be reduced drastically in order to rebuild depleted populations and restore marine ecosystems with functional top predators.”

Scientists warn of a “trophic cascade.” That’s when the disappearance of a top predator causes a cascading and dramatic impact on organisms at lower levels of the food chain until an entire ecosystem is transformed. The loss of sharks, for example, contributes to the death of coral reefs, because coral-eating fish that were part of a shark’s diet suddenly boom in numbers.

Worm and his colleagues echoed concerns by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, published in a landmark analysis by 23 leading scientists including B.C.’s Nick Dulvy, who co-chairs the union’s shark specialist group. Released in January, the 34-page report is based on the work of more than 300 scientists. It is the first systematic analysis of the global population status of more than 1,000 species of sharks, rays and chimaeras.
It found that one in four of these fish are threatened with extinction due to overfishing, either targeted or unintended, what the fishing industry calls bycatch. That amounted to 107 species of rays and 74 species of sharks, including angel and thresher sharks.

“There isn’t a part of the ice-free ocean surface that doesn’t contain a threatened shark,” Dulvy says. “That’s a lot of real estate with threatened biodiversity.”

As for what you should do if you ever found yourself being attacked by a shark? The answer is obvious: Fight for your life:

“In sharks you want to fight and fight like hell because they respect power,” Burgess says. “If you pop them in the nose, they veer off almost always, and then will come back around.

“I equate it to the neighbourhood bully: if you pop them in the nose first, more often than not they’ll back off because they weren’t expecting it. After the initial surprise wears off he’ll probably come back and beat the hell out of you, and you’d be smart to get out of the water while you’ve got your opening.

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Photo: Jeff

Beverly Cleary on Fatherhood, via 'Ramona and Her Father'

At Avidly, Stephanie Lucianovic rereads the ‘Ramona’ books from Beverly Cleary and gains a new appreciation for Cleary’s writing, as well as a new perspective on the theme of parenting found within the books. Here’s Lucianovic on Ramona’s father:

Running throughout the entire Ramona and Beezus oeuvre, and illustrated by Mr. Quimby’s ill-fated career, is the recognizably adult theme that quite often, parents set aside pre-kid dreams for post-kid necessities because making their kids’ dreams come true is the new dream.

What we learn in the Ramona books is that Mr. Quimby was once an art major, but when Mrs. Quimby got pregnant with Beezus, he dropped out of school and got a job. We can acknowledge that some of the Ramona books were a product of their time (Cleary wrote them between 1955-1999) when getting married while in college was not as mind-boggling as it might be today, yet also still recognize that having a baby at any stage of life forces a family to completely change their life around in order to accommodate it. Dropping out of college and not finishing his art degree is the first data point in Mr. Quimby’s realistic if depressing career trajectory.

Bit by bit we find out about all the jobs Mr. Quimby has held. In Beezus and Ramona, he has an unnamed position at Pacific Gas & Electric, and in Ramona and Her Father he loses his job in an office of a small moving and storage company, and everything appears to go downhill from there. For what feels like a painfully extended time (all of Ramona and Her Father), Mr. Quimby is standing in line at unemployment, waiting by the phone for interviews and job offers, and smoking. By the close of Ramona and Her Father, Mr. Quimby has finally secured a job as a checker at a grocery store chain with management potential. In other books, we’ll learn how much he hates his checker job — once again a concept which may not mean much to the kids for whom the books were written but one which resonates far too loudly for adults — and how he’ll leave that checker job to go back to art school and then get a teaching certificate while also working part-time at another hated job in a frozen foods warehouse.

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The $100 Billion Antioxidant Market, and Why You're Having Fish for Dinner

Health food trends continue to grow because they are a cash cow. It’s estimated that the global antioxidant market will generate nearly $100 billion in a few years, even though most of us have no idea what an antioxidant is, and their long-term benefits are far from certain. But that doesn’t stop the California Walnut Board, the pomegranate hucksters at POM and assorted vendors of sugar drinks (from Vitamin Water to 7-Up) from proudly slapping “antioxidant” on their packaging and ads, while subtly pushing the narrative that it might possibly be the cure for cancer.

On my last night in Los Angeles, my wife and I offered to cook dinner for our friend Josh, whom we were staying with. “That would be wonderful,” he said, but the meal could have no meat, dairy, eggs, white grains, sugar or salt. “Fish is great, though,” he added, as though we had another option. There was no dessert.

David Sax in the Los Angeles Times, on the futility of health food crazes.

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More from the L.A. Times

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for Al Jazeera America

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

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

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For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome

Longreads Pick

A father on his disabled son’s job search:

What is Jamie capable of doing for a living? Our first checklist filled us with despair: factory work, nope; food service, nope (not fast enough); hotel maid service, nope; machine and auto repair, nope. (Though Jamie expressed interest in auto repair — not a moment of astonishing self-awareness.) With one agency, Jamie had two CBWAs followed by detailed five-page write-ups: one doing setup for conferences and meetings (tables, chairs, A/V), the other doing shelving at a supermarket. Neither went well. He had trouble stacking chairs, dealing with the duct tape for the A/V setup, and attaching skirts to tables. At the supermarket he had trouble with the U-boat, the device that carts dozens of boxes out into the aisles — and besides, they were only hiring graveyard shift.

Published: May 25, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,549 words)

Linux for Lettuce

Longreads Pick

Can lessons from the tech industry help agriculture ensure the continued vitality of our food supply? On open-source seeds and protecting biodiversity:

“It’s this collective sharing of material that improves the whole crop over time,” Myers told me. “If you’re not exchanging germplasm, you’re cutting your own throat.”

If all of this seems like the concern of a specialized few, consider that plant breeders shape nearly every food we eat, whether a tomato from the backyard or the corn in the syrup in a Coke. Because of intellectual-property restrictions, their work increasingly takes place in genetic isolation and is less dynamic as a result. In the short term, that can mean fewer types of tomatoes to plant in the garden, or fewer choices for farmers and, by extension, consumers. In the long term, it could hinder the very resilience of agriculture itself. Having access to a large genetic pool is critical for breeders who are adapting crops to the challenges of climate change. Every time intellectual-property protections fence off more germplasm, that gene pool shrinks.

Source: VQR
Published: May 14, 2014
Length: 28 minutes (7,215 words)