antimeria

Five long-form pieces from Conor Friedersdorf’s best journalism of 2009 list. I’d read a fair number of them, but a lot slipped through the cracks. Authorial jealousy note: Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Blind Side) has three articles on the list, and they’re all great.

1. “Fatal Distraction” (Gene Weingarten, WaPo)
   “‘Death by hyperthermia’ is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just… forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall.”
2. “A Rake’s Progress: Marion Barry bares (almost) all” (Matt Labash, Weekly Standard)
   “Barry, now in his second postmayoral term as a councilman representing the city’s poorest ward, is these days something less than a political powerhouse, but my interest had recently been rekindled in the man universally known as one of the two or three finest crack-smoking politicians our nation has ever produced.”
3. Held by the Taliban (David Broder, NYT)
   “We reached a dry riverbed and the car stopped. ‘They’re going to kill us,’ Tahir whispered. ‘They’re going to kill us.’”
4. Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices (Sheri Fink, NYT Mag)
   “[I]nvestigators were surprised at the number of bodies in the makeshift morgue and were stunned when health care workers charged that a well-regarded doctor and two respected nurses had hastened the deaths of some patients by injecting them with lethal doses of drugs. Mortuary workers eventually carried 45 corpses from Memorial.”
5. The Man Who Crashed the World (Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair)
   “[N]early a year after perhaps the most sensational corporate collapse in the history of finance, a collapse that, without the intervention of the government, would have led to the bankruptcy of every major American financial institution, plus a lot of foreign ones, too, A.I.G.’s losses and the trades that led to them still haven’t been properly explained. How did they happen? Unlike, say, Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme, they don’t seem to have been raw theft. They may have been an outrageous departure from financial norms, but, if so, why hasn’t anyone in the place been charged with a crime?”

All the articles are worth reading. For that matter, so is Friedersdorf’s blog.

The impetus for this post (and the last one) were Ta-Nehisi Coates’ closing words in a post about feeling unqualified to give life and career advice:

[Writing] is about rolling the dice, and it’s paramount that you give yourself as many chances as possible to toss those bones. It was easy for me, I was either going to write or drive a cab–probably both. I wasn’t really capable of doing much else. So whenever I’m faced with a smart group of kids who could be doing something else, and making more money than me doing it, and they’re asking for advice it’s always weird. I feel like so much of my life is in spite of formal education.

I’d say this is true, as far as it goes, but it misses another important point, made by Dwayne Betts:

[F]rom reading this blog, and from hearing TNC talk about all the books he still reads – I think it’s pretty apparent that the actual education one puts into a job is always going to go beyond the walls of the university. … And that’s what I’ve found kids don’t always get.

This is a good time to point out that my career path owes as much to making Command and Conquer fansites as my B.A. in English. After the jump, Betts’ comment also gets at a second point I wanted to highlight from “The Recession’s Long Shadow“: (more…)

I meant to write about this earlier, but Don Peck’s “The Recession’s Long Shadow” talks about the consequences that recessions have on salaries:

[F]or every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.
[...]
[T]he unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.

The whole piece is expansive, so I’ll have more on other parts of it later. But, you know, here’s a depressing place to start.

Although I’m generally of the “cars shouldn’t go Herbie and start driving on their own” school of thought, stopping a runaway car really is, to quote Scott, “bush league material,” and although it’s certainly a bad look for Toyota, there are relatively few circumstances under which it should be fatal. So, if your car isn’t braking¹ or starts accelerating or solving crimes and talking back, here’s what you should do:

1. Shift into neutral for acceleration, or downshift for brake failure.
2. Apply the brakes. If your brakes are out, gently engage the emergency brake.
3. Hit your emergency flashers, find somewhere to pull over and kill the engine.

Oh, irony. You never disappoint.

The salient grafs from the three stories:

1. A top Toyota official claimed that a negotiated agreement with U.S. government auto-safety regulators prevented a widespread vehicle recall and saved the Japanese auto giant more than $100 million, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post after it was turned over to congressional investigators.
   [...]
   Under the heading “Wins for Toyota & Industry,” [Toyota North America president Yoshi] Inaba wrote: “Negotiated ‘equipment’ recall on Camry/ES re. SA, saved $100M+, w/ no defect found.” “SA” stands for “sudden acceleration.”
2. Kabul Bank’s boss has been handing out far bigger prizes to his country’s U.S.-backed ruling elite: multimillion-dollar loans for the purchase of luxury villas in Dubai by members of President Hamid Karzai’s family, his government and his supporters.

   The close ties between Kabul Bank and Karzai’s circle reflect a defining feature of the shaky post-Taliban order in which Washington has invested more than $40 billion and the lives of more than 900 U.S. service members: a crony capitalism that enriches politically connected insiders and dismays the Afghan populace.

3. A federal judge on Monday morning approved a $150 million settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bank of America over allegations that the firm lied to investors about bonuses and mounting losses during the financial crisis of fall 2008.
   [...]
   And although the bank will be able to put this episode aside, it faces another major lawsuit by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that charges both the bank and two former top executives with fraud. The SEC declined to charge any individuals.