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Russia's Battle with Alcoholism

“You can still see Russia’s drinking problem everywhere—in its cities and especially in its rural, less populated provinces. A 2011 report from the World Health Organization estimated that Russians were drinking an average of about 4 gallons of pure alcohol per year—about 70 percent more than their American counterparts. In 2009, the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that more than half of all Russians dying between the ages of 15 and 54 were dying from excessive drinking. More than half the children in a typical Russian orphanage, another study found, suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome.”

Leon Neyfakh, in the Boston Globe, explores Russia’s alcoholism epidemic and why Alcoholics Anonymous has failed to take hold in the country. Read more on Russia in the Longreads Archive.

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On Publicly Grieving

“Stories circulate among the 26 of those who, in stabs at empathy, have said entirely the wrong thing: ‘Move on,’ or ‘This too shall pass,’ or ‘Will you hug me for me?’ The rest of the town, even those very close to the grieving, find themselves on eggshells, constantly worried they’ll misspeak, or misstep. Nelba Márquez-Greene can feel how much other people in town want her to be better. ‘We are the face of every parent’s nightmare,’ she says. But nothing makes her feel better. ‘I feel terrible, and I’m giving myself permission to say I feel terrible.’ She is a tiny, neat person, with a dispassionate way of talking, and is working for Sandy Hook Promise now, busily giving keynote speeches and a TED talk, but the idea that her work life might console her, or ease her pain, is laughable. It’s as if, she tells me evenly, you needed a liver transplant and someone came up and gave you a heart.”

Lisa Miller, New York magazine, on the grieving families in Newtown, 11 months later—and the complications that have arisen from the money and sympathy that poured in from around the world.

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On Early Puberty

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“I stepped out of the bathroom, walked over to my mom, and placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Mom, I have something to tell you.’ I paused, letting the world slow down for one last moment. ‘I’m hemorrhaging.’

“She didn’t burst into tears, faint, or tear at her hair. She snorted. I was aghast. How could my mother respond so casually to the news of my mortality? When she stopped laughing, she turned to me and said, without preamble: ‘It’s your period.’”

Natasha Gardner, in 5280 Magazine, on early puberty in girls and what happens when they grow up. Read more from 5280 Magazine.

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U.S. Health Care Spending for Native Americans

“It’s well-documented that the government’s attempts to meet its obligations to the Native Americans have failed miserably; the primary cause is insufficient funding. Currently, prisoners receive significantly higher per capita health-care funding than Native Americans. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reports the federal government spends about $5,000 per capita each year on health care for the general U.S. population, $3,803 on federal prisoners and $1,914 on Indian health care.”

Tracie White, in Stanford Medicine Magazine, visits doctors on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Read more from Stanford Medicine.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Reading List: What We Believe

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

This week’s reading list explores religious understanding and our different beliefs.

1. “Your Belief Here.” (Joelle Renstrom, Killing the Buddha, October 2013)

Renstrom’s cross-wearing Christian classmates didn’t understand her agnostic Unitarian beliefs, which blend ethics, interfaith understanding, science and more.

2. “Dear Oprah: Atheists Exist.” (Nico Lang, Thought Catalog, October 2013)

The public erasure of atheistic beliefs belies a wariness of what we don’t want to understand. Hear that, Oprah?

3. “Study Theology, Even If You Don’t Believe in God.” (Tara Isabella Burton, The Atlantic, October 2013)

“A good theologian, he says, ‘has to be a historian, a philosopher, a linguist, a skillful interpreter of texts both ancient and modern, and probably many other things besides.’ In many ways, a course in theology is an ideal synthesis of all other liberal arts: no longer, perhaps, ‘Queen of the Sciences,’ but at least, as Wood terms it, ‘Queen of the Humanities.’”

4. “Being ‘Partly Jewish.’” (Susan Katz Miller, The New York Times, October 2013)

Raising an interfaith family and its surprisingly hopeful implications for Judaism.

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A Longreads Guest Pick: Rebecca Hiscott on Mark Harris's Profile of Director Spike Jonze

Rebecca Hiscott is a graduate student at NYU and a features writer for Mashable.

I’m still marveling at ‘Him and Her’ by Mark Harris from the Oct. 14 issue of New York magazine. The piece is both a nuanced profile of director Spike Jonze — despite Joaquin Phoenix’s stony-faced cameo on the cover — and an eye into the making of Her, the quasi-sci-fi movie that aspires to be ‘a cautionary meditation on romance and technology’ and ‘a subtle exploration of the weirdness, delusiveness, and one-sidedness of love.’ The narrative follows Jonze through the process of writing, shooting and editing the film, and his subsequent efforts to correct a cinematic gamble that hasn’t paid off. Harris’s lush prose mimics Jonze’s aesthetic as a filmmaker, which the author describes as ‘disarmingly sincere, and melancholy in surprising places”; the article also has an evocative opening scene that perfectly captures the spirit of the film and its enigmatic director.

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The Man Whose 'Nonfiction Novel' Came Before Truman Capote

“Rodolfo Walsh was a rare man of words and action, though by all accounts he struggled to reconcile the two. In a relatively short and restless life, he was a masterful chess player, a self-taught sleuth and code breaker, an award-winning fiction author turned investigative reporter, an artist and intellectual who took up a gun against his own government.

“Having famously declared, ‘The typewriter is a weapon,’ he had come to doubt that words alone were any real substitute for bullets in effecting change, and particularly the fine words of literary artists. ‘Beautiful bourgeois art!’ he later wrote. ‘When you have people giving their lives, then literature is no longer your loyal and sweet lover, but a cheap and common whore. There are times when every spectator is a coward, or a traitor.’”

Stephen Phelan, in Boston Review, on the extraordinary life of investigative reporter and activist Rodolfo Walsh, whose book Operation Massacre is viewed by many as the first “nonfiction novel,” despite the term being defined years later by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

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The Real History of Love & Marriage

“Though the murky concept known as ‘love’ has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. ‘Love was considered a reason not to get married,’ says Abbott. ‘It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.’”

Collectors Weekly on the non-romantic origins of marriage. More in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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What the Smartphone Is Doing to Fiction

“There’s nothing worse for plots than cellphones. Once your characters have one, there’s no reason for them to get lost or stranded. Or miss each other at the top of the Empire State Building. If you want anything like that to happen, you either have to explain upfront what happened to the phones or you have to make at least one character some sort of manic pixie Luddite who doesn’t carry one.”

Rainbow Rowell and other authors discuss the effect of technology on their work (New York Times). Read more on tech in the Longreads Archive.

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“To suffer from gender dysphoria (G.D.), as Michelle Kosilek does, is to exist in a real state for which our only frame of reference may be science fiction. You inhabit a body that other people may regard as perfectly normal, even attractive. But it is not yours. That fact has always been utterly and unmistakably clear to you, just as the fact that she has put on someone else’s coat by accident is clear to a third-grader. This body has hair where it shouldn’t, or doesn’t where it should. Its hands and feet are not the right sizes, its hips and buttocks and neck are not the right shapes. Its odors are nauseating. To describe the anguish a G.D. patient suffers, psychiatrists will allude to Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: For Michelle Kosilek, the gulf between human being and insect is precisely as wide as that between woman and man.”

Nathaniel Penn, in The New Republic, on convicted murderer Michelle Kosilek and her quest to have the state provide sexual-reassignment surgery. Read more from Penn in the Longreads Archive.

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