Iserotope Extras - Issue #49

This week in Extras, begin with Jia Toletino’s smart and sassy reflection on affirmative action, white privilege, and Fisher v. University of Texas. Then move to filmmaker Dawn Porter (my new hero), who highlights the courageous women and men fighting to protect reproductive rights in the South. After a photography break, get nerdy on journalism with an excellent profile of the Washington Post. Then finish this issue off by learning how ordinary citizens and wealthy individuals have sometimes teamed up to shape our most important Supreme Court decisions on civil rights.

All the Greedy Young Abigail Fishers and Me

Abigail Fisher lost her anti-affirmative action case last month at the Supreme Court. This essay is by a woman who regrets helping white high school students like Ms. Fisher on their personal essays so that they can get admitted into the University of Texas at the expense of similarly qualified students of color. I’m particularly frustrated that our conversation on affirmative action has not moved one bit for 20+ years. Conservatives, like Chief Justice John Roberts, continue to believe in a “color-blind Constitution” and incorrectly invoke the 14th Amendment as basis for their claim. I tend to agree with Justice Warren Burger when he wrote in 1971: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way.” (Just because there can’t be an Extras without Nikole Hannah-Jones, here’s her analysis of the case back in 2013.)

Abortion providers in places like Texas are heroically courageous

The Supreme Court last month invalidated state laws that made abortions harder to get, upholding the “undue burden” test that Planned Parenthood v. Casey established in 1992. After you read this article, consider watching Dawn Porter’s documentary, Trapped, reading Dr. Willie Parker’s op-ed about why he performs abortions, and listening to the Death, Sex, and Money podcast’s episode on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brooklyn. It has become clear to me, whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, that the movement against abortion is largely one waged by white men telling Black women what’s good for them.

An orchid from the summer.

The Good News at Trump’s Least-Favorite Paper

I like journalism; I like the news. A few years ago, newspapers and news magazines were dead. Then, they became “media companies,” and a few, like The Atlantic, have prospered. This article is about the Washington Post, and how, under the editorship of Marty Baron (see Spotlight) and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, it’s flourishing without becoming a Gawker.

The Imperfect Plaintiffs

I was lukewarm at first on More Perfect, Radiolab’s new podcast about the Supreme Court, until this episode, which focuses on plaintiffs in civil rights “test cases,” who may want nothing to do with becoming famous. I was fascinated by the backstories of Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which banned sodomy laws, and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which legitimized segregation. Sometimes, civil rights gains are heavily orchestrated.

You did it! Thanks for checking out this week’s Extras. Email me with your thoughts, and share this issue with your friends! Also, I’m encouraging you one more time to join the Forum (and introduce yourself!) so we can build this community and talk about one article per week. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am!

Iserotope Extras - Issue #48

Blockbuster of an issue this week for Extras #48: Thank you, loyal subscribers, for taking on the challenge! The first two articles — one about how our private prisons foster heinous conditions, the other about how our cities overlook rape by the thousands — are incredible and deserve your close attention. Then there’s a rainbow to break up the seriousness, after which things get (at least a little bit) lighter, with an interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates (actually, nope, still serious) and a primer on the latest trends in dating. Please enjoy these articles, and please check out the note on the bottom!

My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard

You’ve surely read articles about bad conditions at prisons, but you haven’t read this. In this 30,000-word exposé (yes, please reserve an hour or two), Shane Bauer goes undercover as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana. For four months, Mr. Bauer witnesses firsthand and reports on the grim reality that prisoners and guards face. When profit is the primary motive, the goal is to reduce costs, which means $9/hour for guards and few opportunities for prisoners. As a result, violence and barbarity follow.

11,431 Rape Kits Collected and Forgotten in Detroit

Thousands and thousands and thousands of rapes — particularly in cities, particularly when the survivors are poor women of color — go unprosecuted, totally forgotten, because rape kits, which include DNA evidence, are left untested. This is the heroic story of Ardelia Ali, a woman who was raped when she was 18, who was not afraid to come forward, and Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy, who was also raped as a young woman, who fought to ensure that every single one of the 11,431 rape kits that were lying around Detroit got tested. Their work led to the conviction, 20 years later, of Ms. Ali’s attacker. Their courage unfortunately could not erase the hundreds of rapes and murders, often by men committing multiple crimes each, caused by decades of negligence.

Morning rainbow over my hut in Kongolikoro, Mali.

The Playboy Interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates

Everyone knows about Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me and “The Case for Reparations.” (If you haven’t read his book and his article, I highly recommend both.) Here’s his latest interview, where Mr. Coates talks about writing, James Baldwin, Cornel West, the presidential election, his French, and white people, as always. He concludes with a hope that in the future, he’ll do less talking and let his work speak for itself. (Mr. Coates does a lot of interviews.)

‘Benching’ Is the New Ghosting

You know about ghosting, right, when the person you’re interested in all of a sudden stops responding, even though you thought he or she was into you (or was even dating you)? Well, that’s passé. More advanced than ghosting is “benching.” It’s very real. Has it happened to you?

Before you go: Iserotope Extras subscribers are a pretty great group. Don’t you think so? I think so. Therefore: Let’s make a space to build this community, to share ideas, and to talk about these articles. Are you in? If so, please introduce yourself (1 short paragraph will suffice) at the Iserotope Extras Forum! (Don’t worry, it’s not FB this time.) Let’s get to know each other!

Iserotope Extras - Issue #47

Welcome to Iserotope Extras! This week, I’m featuring articles and podcasts that help deepen topics that have emerged in previous issues. If you’ve been following the debate on the teaching of grit as a character skill, you’ll love the first piece. If you’re still reeling, as I am, from the horror of the attack in Orlando, you’ll find some solace in the second piece. If you care about race and education, and if you’re interested in the role that journalism can play to challenge inequity, you’ll appreciate the third piece. And finally, if your life is totally great right now, but you might be yearning for a change, you’ll be grateful for the last piece. Please enjoy!

The Limits of “Grit”

Grit is hot. In Issue #43, I highlighted Paul Tough’s article, “How Kids Learn Resilience,” which challenged Angela Duckworth’s research on grit and its consequences in schools. Now David Denby, author of Lit Up, goes further, excoriating Prof. Duckworth’s “bootstraps” philosophy as “corporate” and lacking in ethics and morality. (Meanwhile, we also learn that Denby, an old-time public schools kind of guy, does not like KIPP.)

A White Horse, The Memory Palace Podcast

Last week, Extras subscriber Kester sent me this excellent episode of The Memory Palace, which focuses on the history of the White Horse Bar in Berkeley. Established in 1933, the White Horse is the oldest gay bar in the United States. Poetically, this nine-minute ode reminds us how far the LGBT community has come, and how far we still need to go.

Friends & family updated 208+ Kindles this weekend! Thank you! (Also, Extras subscriber Abby suggested this "Update-o-Meter."

An Interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones

Part of the mission of Extras is making sure that you know about my favorite people. Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose latest article on school resegregation, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated School,” appeared in last week’s Extras, is my favorite education reporter. To learn more about her, please listen to this interview on the Longform Podcast. A journalist through and through, Ms. Hannah-Jones talks about reporting, race, her award-winning story on This American Life, and how to ask the right questions.

Screw Mastery

Accomplished writer and reporter Hanna Rosin, who wrote “The Silicon Valley Suicides” last December, ​writes this piece to explain her decision, in her 40s, to switch from print to podcast. Now a co-host on Invisibilia, Ms. Rosin explains why she left the Malcolm Gladwell definition of mastery to try something totally outside her comfort zone. Spoiler: It’s to feel “goofily, absurdly proud for figuring something out.”

That’s it for this issue! Your homework this week is to take an article or podcast you’ve seen in Extras and work it naturally into conversation with a friend or family member, at which point you let that person know about Iserotope Extras, and then you encourage them to subscribe. Great!

Iserotope Extras - Issue #46

Sunday morning’s attack on gay people in Orlando has left me stuck. Most people don’t seem to want to talk about it. Maybe this is because we’re grieving, or we’re numb, or we don’t know what to say. Very little good writing has emerged so far. This week’s first piece, “The Courage of Being Queer,” is a good start. Also highlighted this week is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s latest piece on school re-segregation. It’s excellent. After a photo of a soccer field, consider how our identity is changing as we outsource our memories to electronic devices, then try to take in, if you can stomach it, yet another story of police brutality and gun violence.

The Courage of Being Queer

My boyfriend Peter found this quiet and thoughtful piece about being gay, about being out, about living our lives fully as we are. The 49 people who were killed in Orlando on Sunday morning were mostly young and mostly Latino. Pulse was a safe space to be themselves. Unlike the victims, my race, my age, and where I live offer me tons of safety. This is not the case, however, for many people in many places across our country.

Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City

Sixty years after Brown v. Board, our country has abandoned the fight to integrate our schools. We no longer have the will to do what is morally and legally right. Nikole Hannah-Jones has reportedly extensively (here, here, and here) on re-segregation, and in this latest piece, she turns her attention to New York City and to the question she needs to answer: Where should I send my daughter to school?

A soccer field in Kongolikoro, Mali.

Head in the cloud

“For thousands of years,” Sophie McBain writes, “human beings have relied on stone tablets, scrolls, books or Post-it notes to remember things that their minds cannot retain, but there is something profoundly different about the way we remember and forget in the internet age. It is not only our memory of facts that is changing. Our episodic memory, the mind’s ability to relive past experiences – the surprising sting of an old humiliation revisited, the thrill and discomfort of a first kiss, those seemingly endless childhood summers – is affected, too.”

Tased in the Chest for 23 Seconds, Dead for 8 Minutes, Now Facing a Lifetime of Recovery

A police officer tased a young man in the chest for 23 seconds, causing cardiac arrest, leading to severe brain damage and a coma. This article is about police brutality, poor training, and the negligence of Taser International. (This story is also about how white people still get a better shot at justice than people of color.)

Thank you, loyal subscribers, for reading this 46th edition of Iserotope Extras. Please feel free to send it along to a friend or to email me with your thoughts. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am!

Iserotope Extras - Issue #45

Hi again! This week, I’m juxtaposing what’s happening in Chicago (horrific) with what’s happening in Juárez (wonderful). Why can one city solve its gun violence problem, while the other one remains intractably stuck? Then, after a beautiful photo of Hawaii, please enjoy articles about journalistic fraud (one of my favorite topics) and musical merriment. Have a great Thursday!

A Weekend in Chicago: Where Gunfire Is a Terrifying Norm

Over Memorial Day weekend, 64 people were shot in Chicago. Six people died. All but one victim was African American or Latino. There is so much gun violence in Chicago that one mother is happy her son is in jail. Otherwise, she says, “he was bound to be shot this summer.” This NYT special report dares you to read it in full, shooting after shooting after shooting. If you make it all the way through, you’ll be inspired to do something about it.

Once the World’s Most Dangerous City, Juárez Returns to Life

Meanwhile, 1,500 miles away, an entirely different story is happening in Juárez, Mexico. Just six years ago, Juárez had 3,766 murders, nearly 10 a day. That number has plummeted to 256. This article tells the story of how Juárez, through investing in criminal justice and local government, became safe again. One resident said, “People think someone’s going to come from outside and cure the problem. People think a messiah will come. No. The key to success is to strengthen what’s local.”

Kauai is beautiful!

The fabulist who changed journalism

Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict. Except she made the whole thing up. This article recounts how Ms. Cooke’s article had a lasting negative impact on the perception of journalists as trustworthy. My friend Michele and I like following plagiarists and fabulists like Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jonah Lehrer. (Shattered Glass, where Hayden Christensen plays Mr. Glass, is a great movie.)

Hamilton

Joe Posnanski, a dad, takes his 14-year-old daughter to see Hamilton. Good things happen.

joeposnanski.com

And that’s it for this issue! Hope you enjoyed. This week, if you have the time, check out this link and email me your thoughts. (It’s Extras, all in one place.) See you next Thursday!

Iserotope Extras - Issue #44

Thank you, loyal subscribers, for your kind words about last week’s issue (my favorite so far). Iserotope Extras is beginning to hit its stride! This week promises more great articles. The first one, about today’s college students, will put you through the wringer. (So many emotions.) If you manage to come out the other side, you’ll be rewarded with pieces on the life of a hyperconnected teenager, the inexorable truth that free will is a fraud, and the impending doom of the national spelling bee. Please enjoy!

The Big Uneasy

This is a masterful article on our current generation of college students. Nathan Heller writes about trigger warnings, allyship, intersectionality, and student unrest at Oberlin College and elsewhere. This piece brilliantly continues the conversation that The Atlantic Monthly started in “The Coddling of the American Mind” (previously in Extras). It’s a piece that will grab you, bother you, and make you want to talk to someone. (Continue the conversation on the Iserotope FB page!)

This is what it’s like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing

Katherine is 13. This is the story of a teenager who has an iPhone, an au pair, and hundreds of followers on Instagram and Snapchat. Instead of rolling her eyes when her dad suggests breakfast or a jacket to stay warm, Katherine just keeps looking at her phone. But tbh, if you read closely, there’s more here than a typical spoiled white teenage girl.

Two graduating seniors at Envision Academy in Oakland got Kindles to keep last week.

There's No Such Thing as Free Will

More and more scientists believe that humans do not have free will, that our brains begin performing an action before we have decided to do it. But what will happen to our society if “determinism” takes hold? Very bad things, it turns out. That’s why it’s better to believe in free will, or if you don’t, in “illusionism,” or the belief in free will, even when free will isn’t true. (If you read this article, be prepared to have an existential crisis.)

American kids are getting too smart for the Spelling Bee

I’m an above-average speller, to go along with my real skill in life (typing). (I have a friend and former colleague who was a spelling bee champion.) This year, the Scripps National Spelling Bee had its youngest contestant ever: 6-year-old Akash Vukoti. Check out the video that accompanies this article for a primer on how to pronounce “bondon” correctly.

Iserotope Extras #44 is done! Email me with your thoughts about this issue, or forward this digest to a friend to encourage them to become a subscriber. Have a great week!

Iserotope Extras - Issue #43

Welcome, new subscribers Michael, Clem, and Eileen! (And thank you for your word-of-mouth, Laura, Angelina, and Clare!) This week’s Iserotope Extras packs a punch. If you care about urban education, the first article is a must read. The second piece offers a human face to our country’s addiction to painkillers. The third article — if you choose to read it and can get through it — will stay with you for a long time. And the last piece is about two of my favorites, reading + dogs. Enjoy!

How Kids Learn Resilience

Grit is education’s latest four-letter word. Five years ago, I read about grit and its relationship to resilience in young people. It sounded pretty good. Then Paul Tough wrote a book about it, and then teachers got excited about it, and then schools started measuring it, and then critics bashed it, calling it racist, and then Angela Duckworth, the original researcher, warned schools not to measure it, then she wrote a book about it, and here we are — back to Paul Tough writing another book about it. Here’s an excerpt from Helping Children Succeed. (Mr. Tough knows how to write.) (See optional homework below!)

Hooked: One Family’s Ordeal With Fentanyl

This is a story of fentanyl, a relatively new opioid, 50 times more powerful than heroin, and how it’s destroying a 25-year-old man and his family. What’s not new, though, is how this story plays out: A middle-class dad loses his job, his son drops out of community college, a cycle of stealing and lying develops, and pretty soon, it’s too late. (Not in this article: how white people, when they’re on drugs, seem to get more second chances.)

It's cherry season, the second-best time of year. (Peach season is coming up.) Thanks Mom!

The Waco Horror

In 1916, 10,000 people watched the lynching of 17-year-old farmhand Jesse Washington. One hundred years later, his namesake travels to Waco, Texas, to find out that most white residents don’t know about the Waco Horror, while most Black residents do. He sits with relatives of Mr. Washington, and then relatives of the woman he confessed to killing. Is there anything that can be done to learn from this, to heal? Warning: There are disturbing photographs of Mr. Washington’s lynching, in addition to graphic descriptions of the event.

Therapy Dogs Work Wonders for Struggling Readers

If we really want young people to read, the answer isn’t more access to books, or an adult who really cares, or even Kindles. The answer is dogs! A middle school in Virginia partners dogs with eighth graders in a 1:1 reading program. (The eighth graders do the reading.) One student said, “Remy was neat. It was like he was really listening to me read. I will try to read to my dog at home.”

Thank you for reading Extras! Here’s the optional homework this week: As an experiment, in a few minutes, I’m going to post “How Kids Learn Resilience” on the FB Iserotope Page. If you like, after reading the article, add your thoughts there! (There is a lot to talk about.) For bonus points, share that post with your friends on FB, thereby causing a flurry of interest in Iserotope Extras. Have a great week, and see you next Thursday!

Iserotope Extras - Issue #42

Another great issue this week for YOU, Loyal Iserotope Extras Subscribers! The first article is for all you parents out there — so you can become even better parents! The second two articles focus on how we have retreated from desegregation and the promise of Brown v. Board of Education. Last up is a more hopeful story about the unflagging spirit of top-rate journalism. Enjoy!

“We Will Literally Predict Their Life Outcomes”

Neuroscientist Vivienne Ming believes that the decisions parents make shape their children for better or worse. Good thing she has an app that supports parents to raise their children right! “The potential problem,” the author writes, “is that businesses — unlike government and nonprofit institutions — are built to put profits first, not social good.”

How Segregation Has Persisted in Little Rock

I’ve walked up the steps of Central High in Little Rock, where nine brave students, along with 1,000 army paratroopers, courageously desegregated their school in 1957. Too bad our country has reversed its course. Nearly 60 years later, the schools in Little Rock — like most across the country — have resegregated. Why? A local judge says, “Down deep, many whites don’t want their kids sitting next to blacks.”

My colleague Marni Spitz (center) with her student Arvaughn and Bryan Stevenson.

Class Notes: The Closure of a Queens High School

Jelani Cobb graduated from Jamaica High School in Queens in the 1980s at the height of the school’s successful desegregation efforts. Once a beacon of the neighborhood, now the school is closed. (Yes, the last article and this one seem linked. Side note: Both blame charter schools for resegregation.)

Why people pay to read The New York Times

Yes, I’m a proud subscriber of The New York Times, and yes, this article is sort of a (very well-written) commercial. But this piece also gives me hope that maybe journalism isn’t dead after all, and perhaps we should go back to a time where we asked people to pay for high-quality goods and services. (Extras is free.)

That’s it for this issue! OK, I have homework this week for you. Think of someone who might enjoy reading Extras. Press “f” to forward this email to them, and add a quick two-sentence witty message that convinces them to subscribe. Thank you! The winner gets a prize.

Iserotope Extras - Issue #41

Hi! It’s Mark from Iserotope Extras. Have you enjoyed your week? I hope so. The topics are serious this week: miscarriage, sexual abuse, the achievement gap, and book eradication. But all the articles are well-written and worthy of your time. Please check out at least one of the pieces and let me know what you think! (We still need a subscribers’ forum.)

What I Gained from Having a Miscarriage

The author writes, “When it comes to pregnancy loss, there is no script to follow. To help a woman navigate it, you don’t need to offer advice or perspective. It is enough to show up, however awkwardly, and be there. To listen.”

Sexual abuse at New England boarding schools

The Spotlight Team at the Boston Globe (not the Mark Ruffalo movie version) is back at it again with another well-researched, disturbing special report. This time, the team focuses on sexual abuse by educators at New English private boarding schools. The investigation includes 200 victims and more than 90 legal claims. It’s terrible.

Giants mascot Lou Seal pays my mom and me a visit at the game.

Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares

This one came out last week, and no doubt many of you have seen it, but it’s still a punch in the gut. Educators everywhere are not surprised by this data — that 6th graders in the richest school districts are four grade levels ahead of children in the poorest districts — but it still hurts. Nevertheless, rather than giving up and calling the problem hopeless and intractable, teachers wake up every day and stay close to students and the work.

Weeding the Worst Library Books

A little-known secret is that it’s typical practice for librarians everywhere to get rid of books. It happens all the time. Libraries can’t thrive with old, crusty books taking up space on the shelves. This article recounts the recent Berkeley brouhaha the led to the library director’s resignation, plus it includes excerpts from the blog Awful Library Books, which calls attention to old texts of questionable value.

And that’s it for this edition! Thank you again for opening Iserotope Extras, for reading the blurbs, and for reading one or more of the articles. If you have an article that you’d like to see here, please let me know! See you next Thursday!

Iserotope Extras - Issue #40

Too much good stuff in this 40th edition of Extras! In this issue: Andrew Sullivan explains how our country is close to tyranny, Merel Kindt cures our bad memories, Melissa Harris-Perry celebrates African American women, Geri Taylor lets us experience with her the first years of Alzheimer’s, Kevin Hall uncovers why it’s hard to lose weight, and Angelenos like writing notes on your car. Please enjoy!

America is a Breeding Ground for Tyranny

Wow, from Andrew Sullivan — this article is about Plato, how tyranny follows democracy, Eric Hoffer’s ingredients for mass movements, and exactly how scary Donald Trump is. He writes, “Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event.”

The Cure For Fear

Bad memories — particularly traumatic ones — can be “neutralized” by re-experiencing them and then taking some propranolol, a drug used for heart disease. Prof. Merel Kindt believes that our brain “reconsolidates” memories every time they’re retrieved. This means if we think differently about what’s happened to us (and take a pill), we can cure our fears.

Pizza (here uncooked) is a very great thing.

Fraying at the Edges: Her Fight to Live With Alzheimer’s

Geri Taylor, a 72-year-old woman who has Alzheimer’s disease, says, “If you continue to think of who you were right up until the time you got Alzheimer’s, you will experience frustration, decline, failure, a lesser self.” Ms. Taylor courageously lets us into her world, how she copes day to day.

Black Girl Magic

Now editor-at-large for Elle magazine, Melissa Harris-Perry writes convincingly about how despite the challenges that African American women have faced over generations, “black girl magic” is always more powerful than oppression.

Lake Merced (as usual), all the time.

After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

“The Biggest Loser” is a great show, until you find out that contestants gain all their weight back (and more). A study helps explain why so many people fail to keep off the weight they lose. (Our bodies fight back.)

The Parking Letters

People in Los Angeles like their cars. They also like writing notes on other people’s cars. Check out these “parking letters” — you’ll enjoy the humor, passive-aggressiveness, and outright snark.

How many articles did you click on? If you like, email me with your number. (Don’t feel bad if you’re just a blurb-reader. :) ) Thank you for reading Iserotope Extras, and I’ll see you next week!