Search Results for: homeless

Interview: Maya Rao on Spending a Month Working as a Cashier in the Bakken

Western North Dakota—at the epicenter of the Bakken oil rush—has become a new Wild West of sorts, where fortunes are made, sought and lost with alarming speed. Thousands have been drawn to the Bakken over the last seven years, including Maya Rao, a talented reporter who has cut her teeth at dailies and currently covers regional issues at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She first ventured there to write a short piece for The Awl last year about the overwhelming experience of “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil.” After her first visit to the region Rao felt there were larger stories still untold, and she returned this past summer, spending a month working as a cashier at a truck stop just south of Alexander. Her efforts culminated in “Searching for the Good Life in the Bakken Oil Fields,” an immersive 6,000-word piece published by The Atlantic last month. Rao spoke with us about her gutsy decision to pick up and spend a month in the Bakken, her experience as a female reporter in a decidedly male-centric environment and carving out space for longer form enterprise reporting at daily papers. Read more…

When Our Troops Are Abandoned and Neglected at Home: 6 Stories

This October 2014 New York Times investigation by C.J. Chivers is about more than just the discovery of old chemical weapons in Iraq—it’s about how shabbily we still treat our troops when they return home. We leave our all-volunteer army with inadequate medical care, emotional trauma, and fragile families. Here are six stories on our veterans.

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Interview: Simon Rich on Guilt, Humor Writing, and Being the Worst Person Ever

Jessica Gross | Longreads | Oct. 2014 | 17 minutes (4,290 words)

By the time Simon Rich graduated from Harvard, where he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, he had a two-book deal from Random House. Less than a decade later, the humorist has written four short story collections and two comic novels. He also spent four years writing for Saturday Night Live (he was the youngest writer SNL ever hired) and about two years at Pixar, and is now at work on a film and a television series.

Rich’s level of productivity, impressive as it is, takes a backseat to the quality of his humor writing. His stories are crystalline, eccentric, and universally hilarious. Many of the stories in his new collection, Spoiled Brats are built on an unusual premise, or told from a surprising angle. In “Animals,” a hamster narrates his wretched existence as a class pet at an elementary school. In “Gifted,” a mother insists that her son—born as a monster, with horns and a tail—is exceptional. And in “Distractions,” a writer believes the whole world is out to get him, and they really are.

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How old were you when you started actively, seriously writing?

Well, I always loved to write. As early as kindergarten, I plagiarized Roald Dahl stories that I would try to pass off as my own. But I think it sort of shifted around when I was 17. That’s when I started writing every single day, whether or not I had an idea. Until then, I would only sit down and write a story if one occurred to me, and then I started to wake up every single day and write for a few hours whether or not I had anything worthwhile to say.

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The Forsaken

Longreads Pick

A rising number of gay teens are being cast out of religious families and onto the streets, where they become homeless and get discriminated against in local shelters.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Sep 3, 2014
Length: 26 minutes (6,543 words)

Southern Music’s Racial Double Standard

We believe automatically that Chris Knight is not — could never actually be — that homeless man with a gun.

Put the same lyric in Killer Mike’s mouth, though, and you think something different, don’t you? You do not assume instantly that Mike is merely inhabiting a character. No, in your mind, he is the man with the gun in his hand.

Think for a second about the history of Southern music. Our Appalachian musical heritage has a long and grand tradition of what the academics call “murder ballads” and what the musicians just call “killin’ songs.” The archetype, perhaps, is “Knoxville Girl,” in which the protagonist beats a girl with a stick “until the ground around her within her blood did flow,” then drags her by her hair into the river to drown.

Southerners have written and still sing hundreds of ballads about killings. We sing them at festivals and around campfires. Academic musicologists study them as cultural artifacts. Though they are dark indeed, no one finds them too objectionable. Johnny Cash “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” and we’re not scared. We just love Johnny more.

But when the gun in the song is in the hand of a black man, things get weird. The song becomes less cultural artifact and more an object of fear. We reflexively object. We worry about what the children will hear.

You think we have a little double-standard problem here? Yeah, me too.

Chuck Reece writing in the Bitter Southerner about the rapper Killer Mike.

Read the story here

Photo: Mads Danquah, Flickr

A Family, a Fruit Stand, and Survival on $4.50 a Day

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Douglas Haynes | Orion | Summer 2014 | 22 minutes (5,391 words)

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Morning

“It’s like this here every day,” Dayani Baldelomar Bustos tells me as her dark eyes scan the packed alley for an opening. People carrying baskets of produce on their heads press against our backs. Read more…

The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

“When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor.” So begins the dark tale of what it means to be an adjunct professor in the United States today, further explored in these essays and articles.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 17, 2014

The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List

“When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor.” So begins the dark tale of what it means to be an adjunct professor in the United States today, further explored in these essays and articles.

1. “The Teaching Class.” (Rachel Riederer, Guernica, June 2014)

In this excellent essay, Riederer, an adjunct professor herself, discusses the lack of support her peers face in the classroom, a lack of healthcare benefits, substandard pay, administrative hostility and more. With teachers this stressed, students should be concerned about the quality of their education. Riederer gives the dictionary definition for adjunct, but I would like to point out its synonyms: Subordinate. Auxiliary. Assistant. These terms and their connotations demean the work adjuncts do.

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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 Transgender Crucible

Longreads Pick

The story of how CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman who endured homelessness and other hardships as a teen, galvanized the trans and queer community and became a hero after defending herself in an attack.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jul 30, 2014
Length: 26 minutes (6,626 words)