Author Archives

Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

Why Warren Buffett Funds Birth Control Research

Quietly, steadily, the Buffett family is funding the biggest shift in birth control in a generation. “For Warren, it’s economic. He thinks that unless women can control their fertility—and that it’s basically their right to control their fertility—that you are sort of wasting more than half of the brainpower in the United States,” DeSarno said about Buffett’s funding of reproductive health in the 2008 interview. “Well, not just the United States. Worldwide.”

Karen Weise writing in Bloomberg Businessweek about Warren Buffett’s financial support of contraceptive research and access. Over the last decade, the Buffett Foundation has quietly funded a birth control revolution, becoming the most influential supporter of research on IUDs and expanding access to the contraceptive.

Read the story

The Company That Controls Elite Cheerleading

Texas—despite being America’s Cheer Capital—is one of thirty or so states that don’t recognize cheerleading as an official sport (other non-recognizers include the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations, both of whom also decline to classify cheerleading as a sport). The lack of official recognition created a regulation vacuum of sorts, with no single regulatory agency responsible for cheerleading safety. A for-profit Memphis-based company called Varsity Brands saw opportunity in the regulatory void and created an empire. In a recent feature for the Houston PressLeif Reigstad investigated Varsity Brands’s near total control of cheerleading:

Varsity runs all the major cheer competitions and camps. It publishes a cheerleading magazine and has its own online television network. It is the largest corporate sponsor of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which writes the rules for high school sports. It provides insurance for private competitive gyms and for college cheerleading teams in the NCAA. It controls cheerleading’s self-proclaimed governing bodies for safety and rules and international competition — seemingly independent nonprofits that lack transparency, do not enforce their own written safety rules and are financially bound to Varsity. And it is expanding worldwide.

Read the story

The ‘Stunt’ That Helped Pass a Barrier-Breaking Law

In 1990, a group of activists and legislators fighting for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) gathered on the steps of the Capitol to make a statement. Writing for Curbed about the act’s 1990 passage and its impacts over the last quarter century, Patrick Sisson details how the group dramatized the difficulties faced by people with disabilities using the 82 stone steps that lead to the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.:

On March 12, the Capitol Crawl, organized by ADAPT (Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit), gathered a crowd of hundreds of chanting supporters at the entrance of the country’s legislature. They watched 60 activists drop their canes or leave their wheelchairs and pull themselves up each of those steps. Dozens strained at the task, as friends and family offered them water and encouragement. Cameras focused on eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan, who had cerebral palsy. She made her way up, hands-to-knees. At one point, she told the dozens of reporters focused on her that “I’ll take all night if I have to!”

***

The “stunt,” as a handful of annoyed senators called it, proved to be an important turning point in the battle for the ADA. But more importantly, it dramatized the difficulties that the built environment poses for people with disabilities, who make up nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population. Wright, who herself was blind, wanted others to see how much design can change a person’s everyday actions and level of independence, and how poor design can create a form of what she called “second-class citizenship.”

Read the story

Pseudonyms, Sources, and Jon Krakauer’s ‘Missoula’

Photo by Hades2k, Flickr

Only one of the rape victims in Krakauer’s book, “Cecilia Washburn,” is identified with a pseudonym. “And I didn’t interview her,” Krakauer said. (Krakauer says he discussed the possibility of an interview with Washburn’s attorney multiple times, but she replied each time that her client likely would not consent to an interview.) The rest of the victims identified in Missoula spoke with him and consented to having their names used. Krakauer offered each victim he interviewed an opportunity before publication to review each chapter in which she appeared. If a victim changed her mind about participating, then Krakauer promised to remove all mentions of her from the book—a way of giving victims the control over their stories that judicial systems sometimes deny.

Krakauer also described for each victim he interviewed some of his own reporting practices and boundaries. “I told each of them, very explicitly, that except for withdrawal or correcting errors that clearly needed to be corrected, they would have absolutely no right to determine what I wrote about them,” Krakauer wrote during a follow-up. “I explicitly told each of them that if I discovered they had not been truthful, I would report it in the book. I also made it explicitly clear that I would try to get each of their alleged assailants to tell me his side of the story, and I would be including both sides in the book.”

Brendan Fitzgerald writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the scrutiny of reporters who cover rape and Jon Krakauer’s new book “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.”

Read the story

The Power of Reddit as a Public Health Advocacy Tool

Writing for Backchannel, Andrew McMillen recently profiled a woman named Tracey Helton. Helton—a former heroin addict who now works as a public health advocate—has taken to Reddit to advocate harm reduction strategies among addicts and to distribute the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Dubbed the “mother of r/opiates,” Helton’s program “illustrates the unexpected good that can emerge from darker corners of the internet.” But what makes the online forum so well-suited for outreach to addicts?

“There’s an anonymity involved with Reddit that I appreciate, because I know it’s really hard for people to come out if they’re involved with drugs,” she says. She has been open about her own past and identity because she wants her online companions to see her as living proof that recovery is possible. “I used my name so people could Google me and see I’m the same person,” she says. “I thought that, by being a semi-public figure willing to share my own experience, it would help people open up in a different way around their using.”

As her profile grew in this community of social outsiders and outcasts — many of whom feel stigmatized by the poor public perception of intravenous drug use — Tracey realized that her experience in running public health programs in San Francisco could offer another avenue of assistance on Reddit.“People were contacting me saying they had no access to naloxone, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s something I guess I could do.’” She mailed her first care package in August 2013. “I assumed a long time ago that somebody else would take over. I didn’t expect to be doing it for this long.”

Read the story

Cashing In On Tech’s Spiritual Awakening

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that many tech workers in San Francisco turn to psychics for a glimpse of the future. Or that psychics, in turn, are rebranding themselves as spiritual therapists, executive coaches, and corporate counselors. The trend is common enough to be spoofed on HBO’s Silicon Valley, where the show’s fictional tech CEO confers with a spiritual guru. Meanwhile, real-life tech execs are increasingly candid about their spiritual hygiene: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff endorses yoga; LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner advocates mindful meditation; and the late Steve Jobs, a student of Buddhism, was mentored by a Zen priest.

The San Francisco Yellow Pages list 128 psychics and mediums in the city; there are 141 listings for astrologers (with some overlap between the categories). In the Bay Area at large, psychics are keen to cash in on tech’s spiritual awakening.

Jeremy Lybarger writing in San Francisco Weekly about the astrologers and mystics who minister to Silicon Valley’s elite.

Read the story

Obama’s Typographic Legacy

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The relative distinctiveness of campaign logos is a recent development: There was a time when they all looked basically the same, give or take a star, often featuring the same stylized, waving flag.

The 1990s and early 2000s were a different time, with less media noise and fewer shiny objects vying for voters’ attention, so there was less need for candidates to distinguish themselves through symbolism and color—and perhaps a hesitation to do anything that stood out too much. Instead, virtually all of them opted for similar shades of red and blue, and used similar fonts and imagery.

It was the 2008 election, and that famous letter “O,” that changed everything, says designer Sagi Haviv, a partner in the New York firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv who has designed logos for the Library of Congress, Armani Exchange, and Harvard University Press, among other clients.

Ali Elkin writing for Bloomberg Politics about campaign logo design. Elkin posits that President Barack Obama’s iconic “O” logo fundamentally shifted the way candidates think about design and branding. Her piece also includes a wonderful critique of the 2016 campaign logos from designer Sagi Haviv.

Read the story

The Democratic Fame of Silent Movie Stars

Fredric March and Clara Bow in "The Wild Party," 1929. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The period known as “Classic Hollywood” began in the late ‘20s/early ‘30s, with the gradual consolidation of the studios, and ends at a nebulous point in the 1950s. In the earliest days of the so-called “movie colony,” you could get a job in the moving pictures if you a) had a great face (Clara Bow); b) did an effective job of using exaggerated face and hand motions to make up for the lack of sound (Theda Bara); c) had a special vaudevillian talent, like slapstick comedy or dancing (Buster Keaton); or d) were in the right place at the right time (Loretta Young).

You could have a thick accent, you could barely speak English, you could have classic British elocution — it didn’t matter, because with silent film, the audiences would never hear your voice. Most stars came from nothing or next-to; very few had anything that we’d consider an education. In many ways, it was fame at its most democratic.

Anne Helen Petersen writing for Buzzfeed about the actor Mark Wahlberg, and how his career  has borrowed from the old Hollywood playbook.

Read the story

A Black Woman’s Body on the Tennis Court: Claudia Rankine on Serena Williams

What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” This appropriated line, stenciled on canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter stencils, smudging oil sticks, and graphite to transform the words into abstractions, seemed to be ad copy for some aspect of life for all black bodies.

Hurston’s statement has been played out on the big screen by Serena and Venus: they win sometimes, they lose sometimes, they’ve injured, they’ve been happy, they’ve been sad, ignored, booed mightily (see Indian Wells, which both sisters have boycotted since 2001), they’ve been cheered, and through it all and evident to all were those people who are enraged they are there at all—graphite against a sharp white background.

—Poet Claudia Rankine, writing in Citizen: An American Lyric.  Rankine’s book—a form-shifting treatise on race, primarily composed of prose poems—includes a lengthy essay on Serena Williams’s place in the lily-white world of professional tennis. Citizen has been hugely lauded since its October 2014 publication, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and the 2015 Pen Open Book Award, among others. Williams won her sixth Wimbledon title on Saturday and is currently the top-ranked female tennis player in the world.

Buy the book

Covering the ‘Black Twitter’ Beat

Asking how am I going to cover Black Twitter is like asking how I’m going to cover American culture. I’m never going to get all of it, but I’m going to pull what I find interesting.

Dexter Thomas, as interviewed by Chava Gourarie in the Columbia Journalism Review. Earlier this week the Los Angeles Times hired Dexter Thomas to cover Black Twitter and other online communities.

Read the story