Longreads

Writer and photojournalist Deborah Copaken Kogan on her career and her experience with gender bias:

"It's 1999. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary. I'm thrilled when I hear this: a new job; self-reliance; the gift of time to do the work I've been dreaming of since childhood. The book is sold on the basis of a proposal and a first chapter under the title Newswhore, which is the insult often lobbed at us both externally and from within our own ranks—a way of noting, with a combination of shame and black humor, the vulture-like nature of our livelihood, and a means of reclaiming, as I see it, the word 'whore,' since I want to write about sexual and gender politics as well. Random House changes the book's title to Shutterbabe, which a friend came up with. I beg for Shuttergirl instead, to reclaim at least 'girl,' as Lena Dunham would so expertly do years later. Or what about Develop Stop Fix? Anything besides a title with the word 'babe' in it. I'm told I have no say in the matter."

From our first member exclusive: An excerpt from New York Times writer Charles Duhigg's bestselling book, The Power of Habit, which examines the science behind how we form and change our habits, and how companies are profiting off of them (sign up here to join):

"'Some doctors were fine, and some were monsters,' one nurse who worked at Rhode Island Hospital in the mid-2000s told me. 'We called it the glass factory, because it felt like everything could crash down at any minute.'

"To deal with these tensions, the staff had developed informal rules — habits unique to the institution — that helped avert the most obvious conflicts. Nurses, for instance, always double-checked the orders of error-prone physicians and quietly made sure that correct doses were entered; they took extra time to write clearly on patients' charts, lest a hasty surgeon make the wrong cut. One nurse told me they developed a system of color codes to warn one another.

"'We put doctors' names in different colors on the whiteboards,' she said. 'Blue meant 'nice,' red meant 'jerk,' and black meant, 'whatever you do, don't contradict them or they'll take your head off."'"