Search Results for: recession

Down Town

Longreads Pick

The city of Wilmington in Ohio, a “poster child of the Great Recession,” saw its unemployment rate shoot up to 19 percent after DHL, one of its biggest employers, left. The story of how the city is bouncing back:

Ironically, Wilmington’s reputation as the face of the recession ended up working in its favor. The endless media attention—The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Jay Leno, Rachael Ray, Glenn Beck, 60 Minutes (twice) were among the dozens of outlets that covered DHL’s story—kept the politicians interested. And the political attention—from the governor’s office to the Oval Office, with two Congressional hearings thrown in for good measure—kept the focus on the crisis and possible solutions. “I wanted to stay on the front page,” Raizk said. “When you get pushed back to page 10, everybody forgets about you.”

At the Air Park, Kevin Carver put his energy into creating a functional Port Authority, which was essentially a shell when he was hired, with no staff, budget, or operating procedures. Then he turned to the central task: Figuring out how to redevelop a sprawling facility that was once the engine driving the local economy.

Published: Nov 1, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,375 words)

Street Cop

Longreads Pick

A profile of Mary Jo White, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who is making a name for herself as a tough enforcer. But when it comes to regulating, can White keep Wall Street in check?:

As the country sank into a severe recession, many wondered why the major figures in the financial world, whose firms had received billions of taxpayer dollars at the height of the crisis, weren’t being punished for their misdeeds. Because the S.E.C.—unlike the Treasury or the Federal Reserve—is an enforcement agency, it became the focus of the frustration. It was publicly humiliated when, in 2009, and again in 2011, a federal judge in New York, Jed Rakoff, tartly rejected its proposed settlements in fraud investigations of Bank of America and Citigroup. The Bank of America settlement, Rakoff wrote, “does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality.” Rakoff’s Citigroup opinion concluded with a flourish: “In much of the world, propaganda reigns, and truth is confined to secretive, fearful whispers. Even in our nation, apologists for suppressing or obscuring the truth may always be found. But the S.E.C., of all agencies, has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges; and if it fails to do so, this Court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency’s contrivances.” As one person who worked in the S.E.C.’s enforcement division put it when I spoke to him, “Judge Rakoff was wagging a finger at the S.E.C.” He raised his middle finger.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 4, 2013
Length: 40 minutes (10,236 words)

Reading List: What's In A Dream? Writers Explore New York


Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

As my service year winds down and I begin to look for jobs, I’m simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the New York mythos. Here are four pieces that explore the romance, the real estate, the heartbreak and the hard-at-work.

1. “Here is New York.” (E.B. White, 1949)

White discusses the “nearness of giants,” the essential alone/never alone dichotomy and general spectacle of New York, N.Y.

2. ”Goodbye to All That.” (Joan Didion, 1967)

The yin to White’s yang, here is Didion’s quintessential emotional examination of New York.

3. ”I Want This Apartment.” (Susan Orlean, The New Yorker, February 1999)

The cutthroat Manhattan real estate market calls for a sharp-eyed guru. Enjoy pre-recession prices and capitalization of the word “internet.”

4. ”At Home on the Church Steps.” (Mindy Lewis, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, February 2013)

As apartment buildings are converted to condos, Lewis watches a dear neighbor become homeless and wonders at “a future where compassion is always trumped by enterprise.”

•••

What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Photo: JWPhotography2012

Confessions of a Corporate Spy

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] A competitive intelligence consultant on how he acquires information about competitors for various companies:

“As the sales manager and I surfed Talbots’s website together, looking for the green mini my wife saw on the website earlier that day, I mentioned offhand that I had just graduated from business school. I talked about how tough it had been to find a ‘real’ job and said I did some business research now, casually identifying the analysts out in California who had hired me. I mentioned that I was really interested in retail stuff—that, heck, I was helping write a report on it for investors, in fact. And wow, isn’t the retail world weird these days with the recession and all? Thus began a conversation about the business.

“Apparently that store had been having a great year. Best in the region. Hitting its numbers. What numbers? Oh! You must be proud. Any younger folks biting on this new stuff?

“I fingered the cell phone in my front shirt pocket, to see if the voice recorder was still working. No, I didn’t tell the manager I was recording her. Legally, in Georgia, I didn’t have to.”

Source: Inc.
Published: Feb 2, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,373 words)

America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead

Longreads Pick

Why are violent crime rates still dropping, even during the recession? The latest evidence suggests lead—in the air, in our gasoline, in our paint—was responsible for the rise in crime in the 1960s & ’70s, and the drop in the 1990s:

“And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to ‘fill ‘er up with ethyl,’ they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

“It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin’s paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it’s easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What’s more, a single correlation between two curves isn’t all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the ’80s and ’90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.”

Author: Kevin Drum
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jan 3, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,326 words)

Let’s Eliminate Sports Welfare

Longreads Pick

Cities are slashing school budgets to pay for professional sports stadiums, and the NFL is still a nonprofit. An argument for cutting off all public funding for professional sports across the U.S., which could save taxpayers billions:

“Consider stadium subsidies. When Kubla Khan built his stately pleasure dome above a sunless sea, he did not strong-arm the Xanadu County Board of Directors into funding the project by threatening to move to Los Angeles. His mistake. He wouldn’t last five minutes as an American sports owner. According to Harvard professor Judith Grant Long and economist Andrew Zimbalist, the average public contribution to the total capital and operating cost per sports stadium from 2000 to 2006 was between $249 and $280 million. A fantastic interactive map at Deadspin estimates that the total cost to the public of the 78 pro stadiums built or renovated between 1991 and 2004 was nearly $16 billion. That’s enough to build three Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Or fund, in today’s dollars, 15 Saturn V moon rocket launches — three more than the number of launches in the entire Apollo/Skylab program. It’s also more than what Chrysler received in the Great Recession-triggered auto industry bailout ($10.5 billion), and bigger than the 2010 GDP of 84 different nations. How does this happen? Simple. Team owners ask for public handouts and threaten to move elsewhere unless they get them, pitting cities against in each other in corporate welfare bidding wars — wars rooted in the various publicly granted antitrust exemptions that effectively allow sports leagues to control and maintain a limited supply of teams to be leveraged against widespread demand.”

Source: Sports on Earth
Published: Dec 14, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,530 words)

A trip to an oil boomtown transformed by thousands of young men arriving to find work: 

I’d heard Williston was a magical place. A small town where the recession didn’t exist, where you could make six figures driving a truck, and where oil bubbles straight up from the Earth’s Bakken layer like water from an elementary school fountain. Or at least that’s what I saw on the news.

Men came to Williston, worked hard, and saved their homes from foreclosure back in Texas, Florida, or Oklahoma. The women stayed home with the kids – there just wasn’t enough housing for the little ones. So mostly just manly men doing manly things. It all sounded so masculine.

And it was all because of the North Dakota crude coming out of the frozen ground at a rate of a half-million barrels a day. In 2010, for the first time in 13 years, the United States imported less than half its oil from foreign countries, and that’s largely because of extraction in the Williston Basin, an area that stretches from west North Dakota to eastern Montana and up north to Saskatchewan. Little ol’ Williston – preboom population 12,000 – had become the rump capital of an oil country.

“Greetings from Williston, North Dakota.” — Stephen Rodrick, Men’s Journal

More from Men’s Journal

Greetings from Williston, North Dakota

Longreads Pick

A trip to an oil boomtown transformed by thousands of young men arriving to find work:

“I’d heard Williston was a magical place. A small town where the recession didn’t exist, where you could make six figures driving a truck, and where oil bubbles straight up from the Earth’s Bakken layer like water from an elementary school fountain. Or at least that’s what I saw on the news.

“Men came to Williston, worked hard, and saved their homes from foreclosure back in Texas, Florida, or Oklahoma. The women stayed home with the kids – there just wasn’t enough housing for the little ones. So mostly just manly men doing manly things. It all sounded so masculine.

“And it was all because of the North Dakota crude coming out of the frozen ground at a rate of a half-million barrels a day. In 2010, for the first time in 13 years, the United States imported less than half its oil from foreign countries, and that’s largely because of extraction in the Williston Basin, an area that stretches from west North Dakota to eastern Montana and up north to Saskatchewan. Little ol’ Williston – preboom population 12,000 – had become the rump capital of an oil country.”

Source: Men’s Journal
Published: Jul 1, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,669 words)

An author meets a full-time gambler at the racetracks, who later ends up becoming his roommate:

The Scholar, the Human Computer, and I were interested in a horse named Keys to Astro. According to The Scholar’s speed figures, Keys to Astro was two or three lengths faster than the rest of the field. A horse that talented is likely to set off a bidding war. Keys to Astro opened at 6-5. The Scholar had an investment rule, which I’d learned to follow as well: Never bet a horse at less that 2-1. The risk isn’t worth the reward. It’s easy to follow when you go to the track every day, as The Scholar and I were doing. You can always wait for tomorrow’s 2-1 horse. But The Human Computer’s work interfered with his gambling; he couldn’t get to the track more than once a week.

When the track announcer intoned, ‘You have five minutes to wager,’ Keys to Astro was still 6-5. The Human Computer folded his arms.

‘I refuse,’ he shouted at the speakers.

“Gambling Through The Recession: A True Story Of Horses, Dreams & Sleeper Sofas.” — Edward McClelland, ChicagoSide

More #sports longreads

A trip around Italy, from Venice to Lampedusa, and how immigration is changing Europe:

A mere five or six years ago, foreigners in Italy, and indeed in Europe, did not pose the problem they do today. Anti-immigration, and in particular anti-Muslim hysteria, intensified after the publication of controversial caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2005, assuming serious proportions with the onset of the recession in 2008. The people of Bari were supportive and helpful, because at the end of the nineteenth century millions of Italy’s poor emigrated from the city and from the province of Puglia to America, the promised land, where in a matter of two or three generations they became completely assimilated. Some hundred years later, Italy had become the promised land to some other immigrants.

“The Tune of the Future.” — Slavenka Drakulic, Eurozine

See more #longreads about Italy