Erick Stoll

rtnt:

Read This, Not That is 6 Months Old!

Hope everyone here in the states had a pleasant holiday weekend. As of yesterday, we’ve been operating outside the newscycle to curate the finest long reads on the internet for half a year now.

The feedback we’re getting is great, and the follower count continues to grow, so we must be doing something right. And thanks to everyone, for reading and sharing and showing that there is an audience for long form content on the internet—yes, even on Tumblr!

To celebrate the occassion, we’ve updated our So What The Fuck is Read This, Not That? page and gathered our Top 10 Favorite RTNT Posts of all time. Read ‘em, and as always, let us know what you think:

1.  Trial By Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?
A sloppy investigation and a broken justice system lead to the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham for the alleged murder of his three children.
David Grann, New Yorker, September 2009

2.  Speak, Money
How power has shifted away from the electorate in the United States.
Roger D. Hodge, excerpt from The Mendacity of Hope, October 2010

3.  Within the Context of No Context
Brilliant exposition on the state of American culture and twentieth-century life.
George Trow, New Yorker, November 1980

4.  Debt: The First 5,000 Years
The development of our system of money was neither inevitable nor necessarily beneficial. 
Aaron Bady, New Inquiry, February 2012

5.  The Science of Why We Don’t Believe in Science
When confronted with evidence that contradicts their views, people have a worrying tendency to ignore the evidence. 
Chris Mooney, Mother Jones, June 2011

6.  Raise the Crime Rate
Reform isn’t enough—the prison system is a moral catastrophe and must be dismantled.
Christopher Glazek, n+1, January 2012

7.  The Elusive Big Idea
We have access to and consume more information than ever before, but it’s not doing us any good.
Neil Gabler, New York Times, August 2011

8.  Dumb Like a Fox
Fox News’ agenda isn’t political, but commercial—the network has simply mastered the cable news format better than its competitors.
Terry McDermott, Columbia Journalism Review, April 2010

9.  The Way it Was
Stories of what it was like for women before Roe v. Wade.
Eleanor Cooney, Mother Jones, October 2004

10.  Generation Why?
We limit our idea of what a person is when we reduce our complexities to the confines of Facebook.
Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books, November 2010

How about you? Has RTNT changed your reading habits? What are some of your favorite pieces you’ve read so far? Share them with us via the submit feature, and we’ll make a readers’ choice list this Friday!

And changes you would like to see to RTNT’s programming or any new features you’d like on the website? We have some ideas in the pipeline, but we want to hear from you!

We hope this audience continues to seek out the long form journalism that is so crucial to the well-being of our society. We also hope that you encourage those close to you—your co-worker who goes on about celebrity headlines, your friend who watches hour after hour of MSNBC, your relative who relays the partisan talking points of the day—-to alter their media diet, abandoning the junk in favor of something more substantial.

Thank you, and always remember, you are what you read.
 

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The Fall Of Public Housing

Ben Austen writes in Harper’s about the demolition of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing high-rises, as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s so-called Plan For Transformation. 

Deborah Hope lived in the Cabrini row houses for nearly twenty years before moving to a fourth-floor unit in the newly built Parkside of Old Town. … It all began, Hope said, when she was ten years old and her mother moved the family into the projects, to Rockwell Gardens on the West Side. That was the start of the disasters for them, the murders and drugs and alcohol and what they call the felonious society. Her sister was stabbed to death in the elevator, and Hope, at thirteen, took charge of raising her eight-month-old nephew. She pointed to a portrait of her sister on the wall above the dining room table, a pretty girl of eighteen, heavy-lidded, seated in a rattan lounge chair. A photograph on top of Hope’s television showed a brother who had died of AIDS. She counted off fifteen family members—including the sister, another brother, an aunt, and two of her own children—who got killed by guns or knives.

Hope later moved into an apartment on the North Side, in an all-white neighborhood. Yuppieville, she called it. They paid full rent, $1,500 a month, no assistance, food stamps, or medical card. She was raising four kids at the time, working three jobs, one for American Airlines at O’Hare, another at a skating rink, and the third as a school crossing guard. Hope would come home to drop off money and head right back out, riding the train or a bike. Then her mom died, at the age of fifty-two, Hope’s age now. And her brother went to prison, for being a “menace to society,” the court said. He got twenty years for selling drugs. Hope said there were weak men and strong men, and her brother was strong… But her landlords found out about her brother and said they didn’t want that kind. They raised the rent up so high Hope couldn’t manage, and she ended up in eviction court. She was given two weeks to get out and either head into emergency housing or be homeless. She didn’t want to go back to the projects, but she had no other choice.

Read the full article here. 

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Speaking In Tongues

Here’s something special for your Monday morning: In a lecture given just after the 2008 Presidential elections, Zadie Smith explores the stigmas associated with straddling different cultures and languages, and expresses hope that Obama’s ability to do so heralded a new politics of inclusivity.

We now know that Obama spoke of Main Street in Iowa and of sweet potato pie in Northwest Philly, and it could be argued that he succeeded because he so rarely misspoke, carefully tailoring his intonations to suit the sensibility of his listeners. Sometimes he did this within one speech, within one line: “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.” Awesome God comes to you straight from the pews of a Georgia church; poking around feels more at home at a kitchen table in South Bend, Indiana. The balance was perfect, cunningly counterpoised and never accidental. It’s only now that it’s over that we see him let his guard down a little, on 60 Minutes, say, dropping in that culturally, casually black construction “Hey, I’m not stupid, man, that’s why I’m president,” something it’s hard to imagine him doing even three weeks earlier. To a certain kind of mind, it must have looked like the mask had slipped for a moment.

Which brings us to the single-voiced Obamanation crowd. They rage on in the blogs and on the radio, waiting obsessively for the mask to slip. They have a great fear of what they see as Obama’s doubling ways. “He says one thing but he means another”—this is the essence of the fear campaign. He says he’s a capitalist, but he’ll spread your wealth. He says he’s a Christian, but really he’s going to empower the Muslims. … And when Jesse Jackson heard that Obama had lectured a black church congregation about the epidemic of absent black fathers, he experienced this, too, as a tonal betrayal; Obama was “talking down to black people.” In both cases, there was the sense of a double-dealer, of someone who tailors his speech to fit the audience, who is not of the people (because he is able to look at them objectively) but always above them.

Read the full article here. 

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RTNT On The Problems With KONY 2012

The deluge of social media attention that has been given to the simplistic KONY 2012 campaign and the surrounding haze of misinformation has reaffirmed our purpose at Read This, Not That. Joseph Kony is a warlord and a monster - this much cannot be denied. The present controversy swirls not around Kony himself, but rather around the substance of the campaign, and the intentions of the organization behind it: Invisible Children.

Conversations are raging across the web between supporters and detractors - conversations that suffer, in many instances, from a lack of understanding about the current state of Uganda and of Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (details of which are notably lacking from the film.)

There has been much resistance to criticism of the campaign, resistance founded in knee-jerk reactions meant to defend the perceived good intentions of Invisible Children. The appearance of a noble cause to mask questionable action is not anomalous in our world. As such, it is our responsibility to be skeptical, especially when engaged with propagandistic media that aims to affect us emotionally and prompt a very specific reaction: in this case, to give money to Invisible Children.

Our effort here is to offer articles that inform the debate surrounding KONY 2012 and to encourage everyone to embrace critical conversation, even when that gaze is directed at what appear to be good intentions. Things are rarely as simple as they are made out to be, and we can be sure that the state of Uganda and the LRA is not as simple as the KONY 2012 campaign makes it seem.

Michael Wilkerson, writing for Foreign Policy, asks what the video is meant to accomplish:

So the goal is to make sure that President Obama doesn’t withdraw the advisors he deployed until Kony is captured or killed. That seems noble enough, except that there has been no mention by the government of withdrawing those forces — at least any I can find. Does anyone else have any evidence about this urgent threat of cancellation? One that justifies such a massive production campaign and surely lucrative donation drive?

TMS Ruge, writing for Project Diaspora, pleads with us to respect the agency of Ugandans:

This IC campaign is a perfect example of how fund-sucking NGO’s survive…They are, in actuality, selling themselves as the issue, as the subject, as the panacea for everything that ails me as the agency-devoid African. All I have to do is show up in my broken English, look pathetic and wanting. You, my dear social media savvy click-activist, will shed a tear, exhaust Facebook’s like button, mobilize your cadre of equally ill-uninformed netizens to throw money at the problem.

Ugandan Journalist Angelo Izama, writing at This Is Africa, finds KONY 2012’s portrayal of Uganda outdated:

To call the campaign a misrepresentation is an understatement. While it draws attention to the fact that Kony, indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005, is still on the loose, it’s portrayal of his alleged crimes in Northern Uganda are from a bygone era.

Musa Okwanga, writing for The Independent, discusses the complexities the video left out:

What the narrator also failed to do was mention to his son that when a bad guy like Kony is running riot for years on end, raping and slashing and seizing and shooting, then there is most likely another host of bad guys out there letting him get on with it.  He probably should have told him that, too.

Guy Gunartne, writing for Codoc, questions the wisdom of Invisible Children’s preferred policy of military intervention:

The LRA is reported to be 90% made up of abducted children – military defeat would mean engaging in combat and targeting of the very victims of this war; these children are the LRA.

The author of Visible Children examines the armies on the other side of the war:

Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission.

Glenna Gordon, who took the photograph above, takes issue with the filmmakers’ self-aggrandizement in this interview for The Washington Post:

People who have lived there for years, bona fide aid workers who have studied foreign policy and other relevant fields like public health, who are really there because they are trying to solve problems — they see Invisible Children as trying to promote themselves and a version of the narrative. 

Eric Ritskes, writing at Wanderings, reminds us that it is not about us:

It falls into the trap, the belief that the problem is ignorance and the answer is education. When we tell more people about Kony and the LRA, something WILL happen. It’s not true…More education does not change the systems and structures of oppression, those that need Africa to be the place of suffering and war and saving…We need to learn: It’s not about us.

Patrick Wegner, writing at Justice in Conflict, offers some final thoughts:

To conclude, the Kony 2012 campaign is a reminder why we should see advocacy campaigns to interfere in conflicts with some scepticism, no matter how good the cause…. It also challenges us to think of ways how to design advocacy campaigns that mobilise many people without dumbing down the problem and its purported solution.

We put in a lot of work reading, reviewing, compiling, and excerpting these pieces for you, and hope you will consider them in this debate.

 - The RTNT Team

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womaninthedunes:

MEDIACAT

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Read This, Not That: The Auditory Life of Sperm Whales

The sperm whale is one of conservation’s success stories. Hunted near extinction for its spermaceti, the oily substance secreted from its head, the population has begun a slow recovery towards pre-whaling population levels. The end of whaling, however, has forced scientists to invent new ways to study the lives of these animals. Eric Wagner, writing for Smithsonian Magazine, uncovers how researchers use acoustic imaging to investigate the whales’ relationship with that other mythical giant of the deep, the squid.

The most celebrated natural antagonism between sperm whales and squid, conjuring up images of the Leviathan grappling with the Kraken in the abyssal trenches, almost certainly involves the jumbo squid’s larger cousin, the giant squid, a species that grows to 65 feet long and closely resembles the creature described in Moby-Dick. In the novel’s “Squid” chapter, Starbuck, the first mate, is so discomfited by a squid that floats up in front of the Pequod—“a vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre”—that he wishes it were Moby-Dick instead.

The nonfictional relationship between sperm whales and squid is pretty dramatic also. A single sperm whale can eat more than one ton of squid per day. They do eat giant squid on occasion, but most of what sperm whales pursue is relatively small and overmatched. With their clicks, sperm whales can detect a squid less than a foot long more than a mile away, and schools of squid from even farther away. But the way that sperm whales find squid was until recently a puzzle.

Read the full article here.

rtnt:

Read This, Not That: The End of Ideas

Writing for the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine, Neal Gabler looks at what is best described as the death of thought.  We’ve become a culture of information collectors, consuming and sharing more than ever before, but failing completely to use what we’re filling our heads with for anything at all, choosing instead to use information as distraction. Gabler illustrates the seriousness of this problem by highlighting the ways in which “big” ideas have not just diminished but nearly vanished from our society.

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

Read the full article here.

(via atomvincent)

rtnt:

Read This, Not That: Why Jeff Jarvis Is Wrong

A vanguard of new media gurus have emerged out of the collapse of the newspaper industry, preaching that large journalism institutions are dead, and that they will be replaced for the better by a collaborative network of journalists and citizens. Those who disagree with their diagnosis or oppose their prescriptions are dismissed as Luddites, or worse, old-media elites. Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman takes issues with their prophecies, arguing that they devalue substantive journalism, and are only inevitable if we allow them to be:

According to this consensus, the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.

… 

The blossoming of new voices, the explosion of conversation, has in fact been breathtaking, a modern marvel. News outlets have been forced to step down from their pedestals, and that’s mostly a good thing. The idea of communities reporting on themselves, pooling knowledge in service of journalism, is indeed attractive. But if the FON consensus is right, then the public has a problem. You can call it the Ida Tarbell problem, or you can call it the Nick Davies problem. The problem is that journalism’s true value-creating work, the keystone of American journalism, the principle around which it is organized, is public-interest reporting; the kind that is usually expensive, risky, stressful, and time-consuming. Public-interest reporting isn’t just another tab on the home page. It is a core value, the thing that builds trust, sets agendas, clarifies public understanding, challenges powerful institutions, and generates reform. It is, in the end, the point.

Read the full article here.