Search Results for: language

L’amour, CA

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) My sister, Isa, speaks English and Tagalog. But one word, she could say in many languages: koigokoro, beminnen, mahal, amor. “It’s the most important thing,” she used to say, “the only thing. L-O-V-E. Love.” So when we learned that we would be moving to California, to a city called L’amour, she called it home, the place where we were always meant to be. I believed her. This was January of 1974, our final days in the Philippines. Isa was sixteen, I was eight, and we were from San Quinez, a small southern village surrounded by sugar-cane fields and cassava groves, with a single paved road winding through. Every house was like ours, made of bamboo and nipa and built on stilts, and every neighbor was somehow family. No one was a stranger where we lived.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 14, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,740 words)

The Troubled Life of Nim Chimpsky

Longreads Pick

Nim was born in a primate research center in Norman, Oklahoma. His mother, Caroline, was treated as a breeding machine—all her babies were taken from her for use in experiments. She knew the routine well enough to turn her back to humans as soon as her baby was born, presumably hoping that they would not notice him. But how can a chimpanzee hide her baby, when she lives in a bare cage? Nim was taken from her a few days after his birth, to be used in Terrace’s experiment testing whether sign language could be taught to a chimpanzee. (His full name, Nim Chimpsky, was a play on the name of the linguist Noam Chomsky, who had suggested that only humans have the ability to learn language.)

Published: Aug 18, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,320 words)

Something Better Than This

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) It’s one of those raw, wrung out Yonge Street Saturday mornings. The smog-gray sky is just congealing into blue over the buildings and concrete. A dozen or so kids in denim are lollygagging outside Mr. Submarine sandwich plaza. They’re wearing T-shirts with messages like “Have a shitty day” emblazoned on them, and they all look bewildered. They aren’t the only people in the street. The old men in coats are shuffling along, mumbling in a phlegy secret language and spitting all over the crusty sidewalk. Then there’s the woman in a short, pubis-gripping skirt and the occasional cop floating by in a yellow cruiser, eating a choco-cherry donut and beating out “Here Comes My Baby” on the dashboard.

Source: Fictionaut
Published: Sep 23, 2010
Length: 15 minutes (3,764 words)

Why Are Spy Researchers Building a ‘Metaphor Program’?

Longreads Pick

That’s right, metaphors, like Shakespeare’s famous line, “All the world’s a stage,” or more subtly, “The darkness pressed in on all sides.” Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to deal with how we use words.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 24, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,776 words)

Building a Better Reactor

Longreads Pick

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. First the accident, then the predictable allegations in the postmortem: The design was flawed. Inspections were inadequate. Lines of defense crumbled, and reliable backups proved unreliable. Planners lacked the imagination or willpower to prepare for the very worst. There’s a way to break out of this pattern. Nuclear power plants will never be completely safe, but they can be made far safer than they are today. The key is humility. The next generation of plants must be built to work with nature—and human nature—rather than against them. They must be safe by design, so that even if every possible thing goes wrong, the outcome will stop short of disaster. In the language of the nuclear industry, they must be “walkaway safe.”

Author: Peter Coy
Source: Businessweek
Published: Mar 24, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,209 words)

eamcintyre:

copyeditor:

The [New York] Times article was entitled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child.

Roxane Gay, The Careless Language of Sexual Violence

What I meant to say.

The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson

The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson

The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson

Longreads Pick

To a degree unique among the five major tribes in the South, the Cherokees used diplomacy and legal argument to protect their interests. With the help of a forward-looking warrior named Major Ridge, John Ross became the tribe’s primary negotiator with officials in Washington, D.C., adept at citing both federal law and details from a dozen treaties the Cherokees signed with the federal government between 1785 and 1819. In the 1820s, as they enjoyed one of the most promising periods in their history—developing a written language, adopting a constitution and building a capital city—Ross became the Cherokees’ principal chief, and Ridge was named his counselor. All the while, white settlers kept coming.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Feb 24, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,033 words)

Paul Brady: My Top 5 Travel Longreads of 2010

Paul Brady is an editor at Condé Nast Traveler.

***

This isn’t a list of the best travel writing of the year, but if this is what travel writing could be every time, the genre wouldn’t have such a shaky reputation. I didn’t pick anything from Traveler because that would be lame.

Pass the Bucks (Steve Boggan, The Guardian, Dec. 11, 2010)

The story of following the same $10 around the country for 30 days could’ve been hokey, but Steve Boggan set aside his own quest to write about the characters he meets, their lives and the places they live.

All Amanda Can Jet (Tumblr)

This was the second year JetBlue released its All You Can Jet pass, spawning a mountain of mediocre tweets and poorly-managed trip-diary blogs. But Amanda Mae got it absolutely right—and the constantly updated “local beers consumed” metric was a nice touch.

My Country, My Train, My K-Hole (Hugh Ryan, The Morning News, June 30, 2010)

I’m a sucker for stories about trains, but this is on the next level: “The train is a liberating K-hole, a moment of suspended animation where it’s entirely acceptable to not answer phone calls … There are an endless number of things you can not do.”

No Country for Old Men? (Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian, Jan. 25, 2009)

This Ed Vulliamy article is from 2009, but the full-length book that grew out of it, Amexica, came out this year. Driving the entirety of the Mexican-American border, he writes a little bit about everything that makes it one of the most fascinating places on the planet: tattoo parlors, Christianity, narcoterrorism, “right-wing windbag talk radio,” and what sounds like the best La Quinta in Texas.

Boom (Sean Flynn, GQ, July 2010)

Probably the best story I read about the biggest story of the year, the oil spill, and while I probably can’t argue that it’s “travel writing,” it certainly evokes a particular place.

Bonus:

The Whistling Language of La Gomera

I have no idea when this was written, but I found it this year while researching… something. I forget. I like it because while we may spend 18 hours a day on the internet, there are still fascinating things to find out about like this utterly unique whistling language invented in and still used in the Canary Islands.

Mallary Tenore: My Top 5 Media Longreads of 2010

Mallary Tenore covers media news for the Poynter Institute’s Poynter.org.

***

Timothy Lavin: The Listener, The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2010 

Refreshing to see well-written stories about lesser-known media phenomena like Coast to Coast AM.

James Verini: Lost Exile, Vanity Fair, Feb. 23, 2010 

Verini does a great job describing what the death of the paper (in this case, Russia’s English-language paper The Exile) means to the two men who started it and how this ties into the experience of loss. 

Richard Morgan: Seven Years as a Freelancer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup, The AwlAug. 2, 2010

Using humor and honesty to show how unglamorous the life of a freelancer can be.

Laurie Hertzel: News Reporting in Duluth: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, MinnPost, Aug. 26, 2010 

I’ve always loved stories about female journalists who aren’t afraid to advocate for gender equality in the newsroom, and I think this one is particularly good. I like the memories that Hertzel shares about working with Jacqui Banaszynski — arguably one of the most influential editors and coaches in the business. 

Frank Bruni: The Age of Laura Linney, The New York Times, July 28, 2010 

This story isn’t about the media, but I’m including it because it reminds me of the importance of being versatile as a journalist. Bruni has written about a wide variety of topics — Hollywood, politics, his struggles with weight,  etc. — and always does so in a way that makes me think he has studied that particular subject or source for years.