Search Results for: new york times

How an Autistic Child Found an Important Connection with Disney Films

In the latest New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind explores how his autistic son Owen found a voice through the lessons and sidekicks in Disney films. The story is an excerpt from the journalist’s new book, Life, Animated:

Owen’s chosen affinity clearly opened a window to myth, fable and legend that Disney lifted and retooled, just as the Grimm Brothers did, from a vast repository of folklore. Countless cultures have told versions of “Beauty and the Beast,” which dates back 2,000 years to the Latin “Cupid and Psyche” and certainly beyond that. These are stories human beings have always told themselves to make their way in the world.

But what draws kids like Owen to these movies is something even more elemental. Walt Disney told his early animators that the characters and the scenes should be so vivid and clear that they could be understood with the sound turned off. Inadvertently, this creates a dream portal for those who struggle with auditory processing, especially, in recent decades, when the films can be rewound and replayed many times.

Disney provided raw material, publicly available and ubiquitous, that Owen, with our help, built into a language and a tool kit. I’m sure, with enough creativity and energy, this can be done with any number of interests and disciplines. For some kids, their affinity is for train schedules; for others, it’s maps. While our household may not be typical, with a pair of writerly parents and a fixation on stories — all of which may have accentuated and amplified Owen’s native inclinations — we have no doubt that he shares a basic neurological architecture with people on the autism spectrum everywhere.

Read the story.

Read more on autism

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All Aboard: Four Stories About Trains

Ah, the romance of the rails. I still bear vivid memories of my family’s post-Christmas train ride to New York City when I was an adolescent. I listened to my non-Apple mp3 player and watched, wide-eyed, the people and places passing by. Last year, I hopped commuter train after commuter train trying to bridge the unwieldy path of public transit from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. Today, my social media feeds are overrun with my writerly friends pining for a free Amtrak ticket and a quiet place to work. All aboard, indeed.

1. “Small Towns in Southwest Fear Loss of Cherished Train Line.” (Dan Frosch, New York Times, Feb. 2014)

The Southwest Chief train line is a historic fixture in small-towns in New Mexico, and its absence might bring about their demise.

2. “Train in Vain.” (Evan Kindley, n+1, March 2014)

A reality check for the writers salivating over the possibility of Amtrak’s writer residency.

3. “Starchitect Trio: The Men Behind Germany’s Building Debacles.” (Der Spiegel, June 2013)

Billions of euros, year-long delays in construction — just what is going on in Stuttgart’s train station?

4. “How to Spend 47 Hours on a Train and Not Go Crazy.” (Nathaniel Rich, New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2013)

Why do people choose to travel cross-country via train? Meet the passengers of the Sunset Limited.

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Photo: Feliciano Guimarães

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The Kidnapping Case: Seizure and Recovery

Solomon [Northup], the subject of the following narrative, is a free colored citizen of the United States; was born in Essex County, New York, about the year 1808; became early a resident of Washington County, and married there in 1829. His father and mother resided in the county of Washington about fifty years, till their decease, and were both free. With his wife and children he resided at Saratoga Springs in the Winter of 1841, and while there was employed by two gentlemen to drive a team South, at the rate of a dollar a day. In fulfilment of his employment he preceded to New York, and having taken out free papers, to show that he was a citizen, he went on to Washington City, where he arrived the second day of April, the same year, and put up at Gadsby’s hotel. Soon after he arrived, he felt unwell and went to bed.

While suffering with severe pain some persons came in, and, seeing the condition he was in, proposed to give him some medicine and did so. That is the last thing of which he had any recollection until he found himself chained to the floor of Williams’ slave pen in this City, and hand-cuffed. In the course of a few hours, James H. Burch, a slave-dealer, came in, and the colored man asked him to take the irons off from him, and wanted to know why they were put on. Burch told him it was none of his business. The colored man said he as free and told where he was born. Burch called in a man by the name of Ebenezer Rodbury, and they two stripped the man and laid him across a bench, Rodbury holding him down by his writs. Burch whipped him with a paddle until he broke that, and then with a cat-o’-nine tails, giving him a hundred lashes, and he swore he would kill him if he ever stated to any one that he was a free man.

– From the New York Times’ 1853 coverage of the Solomon Northup case. That same year, Northup published a best-selling memoir of his kidnapping into slavery, and remarkable escape. 161 years later, the film adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave won Best Picture at the Oscars.

Image: British Library, Flickr

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The Story of the Kitty Genovese Story

Longreads Pick

Nicholas Lemann looks at the implications of the media’s coverage of the Kitty Genovese story:

An excellent example is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old computer punch-card operator, just after three in the morning on Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens. The fact that this crime, one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year, became an American obsession—condemned by mayors and Presidents, puzzled over by academics and theologians, studied in freshman psychology courses, re-created in dozens of research experiments, even used four decades later to justify the Iraq war—can be attributed to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 10, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,347 words)

The Feel Of Nothing: A Life In America’s Batting Cages

Steve Salerno Missouri Review | Winter 2004| 24 minutes (6,016 words)

Steve Salerno’s essays and memoirs have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and many other publications. His 2005 book, SHAM, was a groundbreaking deconstruction of the self-help movement, and he is working on a similar book about medicine. He teaches globalization and media at Lehigh University. This essay first appeared in the Missouri Review (subscribe here!). Thanks to Salerno for allowing us to reprint it here.

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Observed on video at half-speed, through the metal lattice-work of the batting cage, it is a perfectly choreographed pas de deux of man and machine. While the machine readies the pitch, the man executes the idiosyncratic but vital preparatory movements of torso and hand that jump-start his batting rhythm; he leans forward, then rocks his weight back, the bat wavering in a narrow arc above his head much as the young palms visible in the background yield to the soft ocean breezes—slightly forward of true vertical, slightly aft, slightly forward again. As the dimpled yellow ball shuffles down that last segment of the feeder sleeve toward the pair of spinning wheels that will propel it homeward, the batter’s hands twist around the axis of the lower wrist in a subtle cocking mechanism; when the ball drops between the wheels and disappears for an instant, the batter’s front foot lifts, then returns to earth perhaps six inches beyond its initial resting place; the bat itself remains well back, high over the rear shoulder, in obeisance to an ancient admonition—“hips before hands.”

Even in slo-mo, the swiftness of the ball’s flight to the plate startles. At first it seems that there’s no way the man can snap the bat down and around his body fast enough to intercept the sphere (which actually, now, more resembles a yellow antiaircraft tracer) before it blurs by him…. But no, he starts his swing, his lower body leading the way, pivoting sharply on the front foot—now—and in fact, somehow manages to confront the pitch out
 ahead of the ersatz plate. If you pause the video at this precise point—that millisecond before impact—you marvel at the fact that, slicing through the strike zone, the bat, despite being molded from a single sheet of metal, is no longer a straight, rigid line. Rather, the bat- head clearly lags behind the handle in its travel to the ball, a vivid manifestation of the explosive torque all good hitters rely on for generating power. An instant later, post-contact, the ball too is misshapen, flattened on the impact side, shooting off the bat in a shallow upward arc with such velocity that it appears to leave a comet-like contrail in its wake.

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Television vs. the Novel

Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, writing in The New York Times Book Review, about television vs. the novel:

Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel.

In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.

Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.

Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence: One is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe. Their destinations may converge, but television and the novel travel in opposite directions.

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Photo: medhius, Flickr

The Big Problem with Financial Journalism

One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Andrew Ross Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explaining finance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.

The modern finance industry is at a loss when it comes to justifying its own existence. Its finest minds can’t explain why we wouldn’t be better off with a much simpler and more heavily circumscribed model of capital formation. Sorkin likewise can’t make his readers fully grasp why the current system—which turns large amounts of other people’s money and even more people’s debt into huge paper fortunes for a small super-elite, and in such a way as to regularly imperil the entire worldwide economic order—is beneficial or necessary. But the New York Times and Wall Street each need him to try.

Alex Pareene, in The Baffler (2014).

Read the story

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Innovation That Helped 'El Chapo' Create a Multi-Billion-Dollar Drug Trafficking Empire

But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be a water faucet outside the home of a cartel attorney in the border town of Agua Prieta was in fact a secret lever that, when twisted, activated a hydraulic system that opened a hidden trapdoor underneath a pool table inside the house. The passage ran more than 200 feet, directly beneath the fortifications along the border, and emerged inside a warehouse the cartel owned in Douglas, Ariz. Chapo pronounced it “cool.”

When this new route was complete, Chapo instructed Martínez to call the Colombians. “Tell them to send all the drugs they can,” he said. As the deliveries multiplied, Sinaloa acquired a reputation for the miraculous speed with which it could push inventory across the border. “Before the planes were arriving back in Colombia on the return, the cocaine was already in Los Angeles,” Martínez marveled.

Eventually the tunnel was discovered, so Chapo shifted tactics once again, this time by going into the chili-pepper business. He opened a cannery in Guadalajara and began producing thousands of cans stamped “Comadre Jalapeños,” stuffing them with cocaine, then vacuum-sealing them and shipping them to Mexican-owned grocery stores in California. He sent drugs in the refrigeration units of tractor-trailers, in custom-made cavities in the bodies of cars and in truckloads of fish (which inspectors at a sweltering checkpoint might not want to detain for long). He sent drugs across the border on freight trains, to cartel warehouses in Los Angeles and Chicago, where rail spurs let the cars roll directly inside to unload. He sent drugs via FedEx.

But that tunnel into Douglas remains Chapo’s masterpiece, an emblem of his creative ingenuity. Twenty years on, the cartels are still burrowing under the border — more than a hundred tunnels have been discovered in the years since Chapo’s first. They are often ventilated and air-conditioned, and some feature trolley lines stretching up to a half-mile to accommodate the tonnage in transit.

The New York Times reports that Joaquín Guzmán Loera—leader of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel—has been arrested. Nicknamed El Chapo, Guzmán’s cocaine and marijuana trafficking empire is believed to be worth several billion dollars. Patrick Radden Keefe closely examined the Sinaloa Drug Cartel and Chapo’s leadership of the organization for The New York Times Magazine in the summer of 2012.

See also: “Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Marijuana Railroad.” (GQ, Jan. 12, 2014)

And: “The Narco Tunnels of Nogales.” (Businessweek, Aug. 2, 2012)

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Photo of elaborate cross-border drug smuggling tunnel discovered inside a warehouse near San Diego via Wikimedia Commons

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What We Talked About on Campus This Week: A Reading List

Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower this week.

1. Professors, We Need You! (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, February 16, 2014)

Academics used to be a part of public discourse, and now they’re not. Blame them.

2. Why is Academic Writing So Academic? (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, February 21, 2014)

As usual, it’s about audience.

3. USC’s “Business Decision” to Ax Its Master of Professional Writing Program Leaves Unanswered Questions (Gene Maddaus, LA Weekly, February 20, 2014)

Graduate programs can be revenue generators, but not when enrollment goes down.

4. Is Faster Always Better? (Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2014)

High-school students take accelerated classes for college credit. But once on campus, they can struggle to keep up.

5. The Dark Power of Fraternities (Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, March 2014)

Fraternities thrive at colleges thanks to a culture that markets them and a risk-management system that protects them.

6. Sexual Assault at God’s Harvard (Kiera Feldman, The New Republic, February 17, 2014)

“How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?”

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Photo: Velkr0

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Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

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I.

In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…