Search Results for: tech

The Walls of Berlin: A Reading List

The Berlin Wall still exerts incredible power over our imaginations, 25 years after Germans on both sides of the city began the process of demolishing it. Its existence had always invited wildly divergent reactions, making it not only a physical structure, but also a canvas on which political and cultural dreams could be projected. This is as true today, for a generation that has never lived in its shadow, as it was during the Cold War. Here are four stories that attempt to trace its legacy.  Read more…

The Story, and Sounds, of a Chapel Hill Church: Our College Pick

In her story about a tiny church for locals in a student neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Megan Cassella merges the best of traditional journalism with the tools of today. Her narrative parallels a Sunday service, built on the familiar structural lessons of strong feature writing. She published the story on Creatavist, a publishing platform that allows journalists to create lush-looking multimedia pieces with limited technical resources. Cassella doesn’t use a ton of multimedia in the piece, but the strong photos and musical interlude complement her narrative without detracting from it.

The Little Church That Could

Megan Cassella | Synapse Magazine | November 3, 2014 | 13 minutes (3,285 words)

We Keep Testing, and Nothing Changes

It is worth noting that American students have never received high scores on international tests. On the first such test, a test of mathematics in 1964, senior year students in the US scored last of twelve nations, and eighth-grade students scored next to last. But in the following fifty years, the US outperformed the other eleven nations by every measure, whether economic productivity, military might, technological innovation, or democratic institutions. This raises the question of whether the scores of fifteen-year-old students on international tests predict anything of importance or whether they reflect that our students lack motivation to do their best when taking a test that doesn’t count toward their grade or graduation. …

Obama and Duncan used the latest international test scores as proof that more testing, more rigor, was needed. The Obama administration, acting out the script of “A Nation at Risk,” repeatedly treats our scores on these tests as a harbinger of economic doom, rather than as evidence that more testing does not produce higher test scores. Now, a dozen years after the passage of George W. Bush’s NCLB, it is clear that testing every child every year does not produce better education, nor does it raise our standing on the greatly overvalued international tests.

Diane Ravitch, in The New York Review of Books, on the politics of education reform and testing in America, and a review of Yong Zhao’s book on China’s history of testing: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.

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Photo: rzganoza, Flickr

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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Eight Days In a Hong Kong Hotel Room With Edward Snowden

Profiling documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras for The New Yorker, George Packer writes of her latest film, “Citizenfour,” which tells the story of N.S.A. whistleblower Edward Snowden. Packer describes the documentary as a political thriller in three acts, with the second act chronicling Snowden’s time in Hong Kong. Over the course of eight days Poitras filmed Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room for twenty hours, and “the act proceeds chronologically through the eight days in the hotel room, taking up a full hour of the hundred-and-thirteen-minute film.”

We watch Snowden explain his background, his motivations, the nature and extent of N.S.A. eavesdropping, and his fears for the future. His control under immense pressure is unnerving. “I am more willing to risk imprisonment,” he says, “or any other negative outcome personally, than I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me, whom I care for equally as I do for myself.” The interviewer is Greenwald, and, soon enough, he and Snowden become defiant collaborators against power. Snowden, explaining why he plans to reveal his identity, speaks as if he were confronting a government heavy: “I’m not afraid of you. You’re not going to bully me into silence like you’ve done to everybody else.” Greenwald exclaims, “You’re coming out because you want to fucking come out!” (It’s a moment of inadvertent and unregistered humor, since Greenwald is gay.)

Snowden watches the global fallout from Greenwald’s stories on the TV in his hotel room. Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, whom he left behind in Hawaii without a word of explanation, writes him that police have come to question her. He is shaken, imagining her realization that “the person that you love, that you spent the decade with, may not be coming back.” He types something on his laptop—presumably, a reply to Mills—but Poitras, respecting his privacy, doesn’t move the camera to show its content. As the days go by, Snowden’s anxiety increases, and the room becomes claustrophobic. A fire alarm keeps going off—routine testing, he’s told. The bedside phone rings—“I’m afraid you have the wrong room,” he says, and hangs up. “Wall Street Journal,” he explains. His chin is stubbled and his hair won’t lie flat. He seems to be growing visibly paler, and the many stretches of silence last longer; Poitras’s camera stays close to him, at once exposing and protective. In such a small space, from which there’s no exit, the presence of a camera has a distorting effect, and it turns Snowden into a character in a play. Unlike Dr. Riyadh and his family, who went about their lives as Poitras trailed them, Snowden can never forget that he’s being filmed. There are few moments of self-betrayal.

“How do you feel?” we hear Poitras ask.

“What happens happens,” he says. “If I get arrested, I get arrested.”

In shots of him sitting on his unmade bed—white sheets and covers, white headboard, white bathrobe, white skin—Snowden seems like a figure in some obscure ritual, being readied for sacrifice. At one point, we hear his heart beating against a microphone. Still, he keeps speaking in the hyper-rational, oddly formal sentences of a computer techie. And then he’s gone.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Publishing Startup at a Crossroads: ‘Maybe It’s Time to Embrace Something Old-Fashioned’

The iOS app, pending improvements, still might catch on, but if it doesn’t, we’ll have to figure out how to try to keep those subscribers as we fold them back into the original distribution system. We’re also in talks with an established indie publishing house, trying to figure out whether doing a handful of print and e-book Emily Books originals in collaboration could make financial sense for both us and them; I’m hopeful, but when I look at the profit and loss statements they’ve given us for reference, I get less so. The idea that print availability is the only difference between selling a few hundred and a few thousand books seems like a stretch. Then again, we have a built-in base. “Two hundred people who love you are more important than 2 million people who like you,” some startup guy or other once said. Startup guys say a lot of stuff, though.

When night fell on our retreat, we put away our laptops and curled up on the couch in front of the TV. The Devil Wears Prada was showing on Lifetime, as it always is, and we were delighted to sit down and rewatch it. Outsized caricature that it is, this monumentally great chick flick does seem in some ways to encapsulate my own journey from principled young striver to glamour-chasing young sellout and back again. As we watched Andi toss the cell phone that had tethered her to her dream-nightmare job into the fountain and put her terrible corduroys back on to work at some kind of scrubby newspaper, I wondered if the movie wasn’t an omen. Maybe it’s time to embrace something old-fashioned instead of something glitzy and new and untried. Maybe our future–and publishing’s future–isn’t to be found in technological advancements that change the way we read, but in advancements that change the way books reach their audience.

Emily Gould, in Fast Company, with an honest reflection on her own publishing startup, and questions about what to do next.

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Photo: nataliaromay, Flickr

“Oh, Jeff, that’s like asking which of my four grandchildren I prefer.”

JEFFREY ROSEN: What is the opinion that you’ve written that you think has done the most to advance civil liberties?

RUTH BADER GINSBURG: Oh, Jeff, that’s like asking which of my four grandchildren I prefer. There have been so many. Well, in the women’s rights arena, the Virginia Military Institute case. So many people said to me, “Why would women want to go to that school?” I wouldn’t, and perhaps you, a man, wouldn’t either, but there are women who are ready, willing, and able to undergo that form of education, so why should they be held back by artificial barriers?

There was a decision on the civil side that didn’t get much press, it’s called M.L.B. v. S.L.J. The Court’s precedent was, if you are too poor to afford counsel or to afford a transcript in a felony case, the state must provide legal assistance for you. M.L.B. was a woman facing a deprivation of parental-rights proceedings. She was charged with being an unfit mother. She lost in the first instance and wanted to appeal, but the state’s rule was, to appeal, you must purchase a transcript. M.L.B. didn’t have funds to pay for one. It was technically a civil case, but I was able to persuade a majority of the Court that depriving a parent of parental status is as devastating as a criminal conviction. The Court decided that, if she can’t get an appeal without a transcript, then the state must provide the transcript at no cost to her. That was a departure from the rigid separation of criminal cases, on the one hand, with the right to counsel paid by the state and a transcript paid by the state, and civil cases, in which you do not have those rights. You must be able to pay. I thought M.L.B. was a significant case in that regard, getting the Court to think about the impact on a woman like M.L.B. of being declared a non-parent. It is devastating, much worse than six months in jail.

—From Jeffrey Rosen’s recent interview of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which appeared in The New Republic. 

 

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Photo: Wake Forest University School of Law, Flickr

Interview: Vela Magazine Founder Sarah Menkedick on Women Writers and Sustainable Publishing

Cheri Lucas Rowlands | Longreads | Oct. 2 2014 | 10 minutes (2,399 words)

 

Three years ago, Sarah Menkedick launched Vela Magazine in response to the byline gender gap in the publishing industry, and to create a space that highlights excellent nonfiction written by women. Last week, Menkedick and her team of editors launched a Kickstarter campaign to grow Vela as a sustainable publication for high-quality, long-form nonfiction, to pay their contributors a competitive rate, and to continue to ensure that women writers are as recognized and read as their male counterparts. Menkedick chatted with Longreads about her own path as a writer, the writer’s decision to work for free, building a sustainable online publication, and the importance of featuring diverse voices in women’s nonfiction.

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Let’s talk about Vela’s origins. You created Vela in 2011 as a space for women writers in response to the byline gender gap — yet it’s not a “women’s magazine.” Can you explain?

Like so many women writers, I was discouraged by the original VIDA count in 2011. I was also a bit disenchanted with a certain narrowness of voice and focus in mainstream magazine publishing, which tended to be very male, because men tend to dominate mainstream magazine publishing. Talking about the alternative to that gets really dicey, because it’s icky to talk about a “womanly” or “female” voice. I wanted to say: nonfiction and literary journalism written by women doesn’t have to sound like this sort of swaggering male writing, or like the loveable snarky-but-sweet meta writing of John Jeremiah Sullivan or David Foster Wallace. It can be like . . . and there we run short on models, because there aren’t very many women being widely published whose work falls into that middle zone between “creative nonfiction” — which tends to be more academic, more experimental, more the types of essays appearing in literary magazines — and traditional journalism.

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An Intruder in Two Spaces: What It Feels Like to Be Biracial

This confusion at your own place is the essence of being biracial. Even though you owe no one an explanation, there’s a desire to explain, which comes from believing that just by being yourself you are a liar. You’re an intruder in either space, with no right to claim one or the other without a heavy caveat. You’re not really what you say you are, not “technically.” It’s my feeling the need to need to clarify at those weddings, to say “I’m not entirely part of this group” or “It’s ok that I’m wearing this because my dad is Indian,” before anyone could call me out on my trespass.

When you’re constantly being asked “what” and not “who” you are, this is a knee-jerk reaction. You’re ready for it before that puzzled look appears on a stranger’s face. Being biracial means having to justify why your skin is this color when your mom is that color, or why you know so much about Indian music because you don’t look like you should know about Indian music, or why you don’t know more because you look like you should be an expert.

And you’re told not to be mad, because these people are “just curious.” It’s still a rare thing! You’re making a big deal out of it, it’s just a joke. You should help them learn. Forgive them if they’re mad at you for wearing a bindi, they just thought you were appropriating. Understand when they see your name after your relatives’ “normal” names, they just want to know how you got there. They just want to explain to you that maybe you’re using the wrong words to describe yourself. It’s too much hassle to get mad, listen and answer their questions and save yourself the frustration.

— Jaya Saxena, in The Aerogram, writing about her experience with being biracial.

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Photo: anurag agnihotri

What Would Happen If We Lived on Mars

Cabin fever might set in quickly on Mars, and it might be contagious. Quarters would be tight. Governments would be fragile. Reinforcements would be seven months away. Colonies might descend into civil war, anarchy or even cannibalism, given the potential for scarcity. US colonies from Roanoke to Jamestown suffered similar social breakdowns, in environments that were Edenic by comparison. Some individuals might be able to endure these conditions for decades, or longer, but Musk told me he would need a million people to form a sustainable, genetically diverse civilisation.

‘Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,’ he said. ‘You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.’

I asked Musk how quickly a Mars colony could grow to a million people. ‘Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people,’ he said. ‘But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship.’

Ross Andersen, in an Aeon magazine interview with Elon Musk, on the future of colonizing Mars.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons