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“The more you use an antibiotic, the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, we put into livestock, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant. …We also know that we’ve greatly overused antibiotics and in overusing these antibiotics, we have set ourselves up for the scenario that we find ourselves in now, where we’re running out of antibiotics.

“We are quickly running out of therapies to treat some of these infections that previously had been eminently treatable. There are bacteria that we encounter, particularly in health-care settings, that are resistant to nearly all — or, in some cases, all — the antibiotics that we have available to us, and we are thus entering an era that people have talked about for a long time.”

-Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on “the end of antibiotics” (via Frontline). Read more on Medicine from the Longreads Archive.

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Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers

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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.

For cosplayers, dressing up isn’t just once a year on Halloween. It’s part of a complex identity and community lifestyle.

1. “Cosplayers are Passionate, Talented Folks. But There’s a Darker Side to this Community, Too.” (Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku, January 2013)

The author interviews two (female) cosplayers who share why they cosplay and what motivates them, despite sexual harassment and other injustices.

2. “I’m a Black Female Cosplayer … and Some People Hate It.” (Chaka Cumberbatch, February 2013, Racialicious)

“After my pictures started making the rounds on deviantArt, Tumblr, and 4chan, it became pretty clear that my cosplay brings all the racists to the yard, and they’re, like, white cosplay is better than yours.”

3. “Meet the World’s Most Intense Disney Fans.” (Jordan Zakarin, Buzzfeed, August 2013)

A WHOLE NEW WOOOORRRRRRRLLLLLD of costly cosplay in California.

4. “Magical Girls, Heroines, and Anime Amazon: Field Notes from Otakon 2013.” (Rose, Autostraddle, August 2013)

Rose explores how women are represented in panels and treated in person at one of the most popular anime convention in the United States.

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Photo: Pat Loika

“In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object, valued by how many times it’s been bought—or, in our electronic age, how many times it’s been clicked on. ‘Images of a certain kind of successful woman proliferate,’ British philosopher Nina Power observed of contemporary faux-feminism in her 2009 book, One-Dimensional Woman. ‘The city worker in heels, the flexible agency employee, the hard-working hedonist who can afford to spend her income on vibrators and wine—and would have us believe that—yes—capitalism is a girl’s best friend.’”

Susan Faludi, in The Baffler, on the Lean In movement and the history of feminism and capitalism. Read more on Sheryl Sandberg here.

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“All humans want to be narrators, but many have difficulties finding listeners. Illness is often a time of vulnerability and loneliness. Narrating stories during this time of vulnerability is a way to connect to fellow human beings, which helps overcome the loneliness. The listeners can be family members, friends or even strangers. Unfortunately, many people who are ill do not have access to family members or friends who are willing to listen. This is the reason why healthcare professionals such as nurses or physicians can serve a very important role.”

Jalees Rehman on the benefits of listening and being heard. Read more from Rehman in the Longreads archive.

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A Longreads Guest Pick: Andrew Pantazi on Michael Kruse's 'The Last Voyage of the Bounty'

Andrew Pantazi writes for his hometown newspaper, The Florida Times-Union.

From the gripping first paragraph in the first chapter of the first part of this longread, ‘In the dark, in the wet, whirling roar of Hurricane Sandy, on a ship tipping so badly the deck felt like a steep, slick roof …,’ Michael Kruse drew me into a tale of desperation and desire.

And that’s just Part 1. I didn’t want to feature a story that wasn’t fully published, but The Tampa Bay Times’ The Last Voyage of the Bounty was too good to pass up. The web design is beautiful and fairly non-distracting. Kruse churns out telling details. He slows the story when the crew has to make a decision, and then he moves the story along faster and faster and faster, as the storm gets closer and closer. Also check out the reporter’s notes where he annotates how he got all the details.

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“‘We are going to be poised to benefit from the aging of America, the baby boomers,’ Foley said. Deaths in the U.S. are forecast to increase at an average annual rate of 1.1 percent over the next five years. At SCI, earnings per share rose 26 percent in the first half of 2013. ‘This growth,’ Foley said, ’was driven in large part due to the strong flu season’—i.e., a lot of old people got sick and died last winter.”

Meet the company that’s taking over the funeral industry. Then read more Longreads picks from Bloomberg Businessweek.

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“I’ve said this before, and it was said to me, but life is choice, and choice is loss. And it’s very easy I think when you’re a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what’s special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process. I will say, Arrested, I had to remind myself that it was a great joy, that even when we did it, we were both making fans and upsetting fans. It did sort of die, and like anything that dies young, nobody goes back and says, ‘You know who wasn’t a very good actor? James Dean.’ ”

Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz (via Vulture). Here are more TV stories from the Longreads Archive.

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“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other. … By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

Paul Krugman, 1998 (via New York Review of Books). Read more on the past, present and future of the Internet.

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“My grandmother and I still haven’t spoken about what happened during the summer of 1999, or why it was the last time I visited her by myself, and how it came to be that she watched a pastor put a curse on her youngest daughter.”

-In case you missed it, here’s Saeed Jones’s essay from BuzzFeed. It’s also featured in our Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Starting in the last part of the nineteenth century, Washington made periodic regulatory efforts to curb the power of big business, including the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act and Clayton Act of 1914, and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The intended effect of these measures was to prevent corporations from colluding with one another to fix prices and otherwise manipulate the markets. The unintended effect, according to historian Christopher McKenna, was to accelerate the creation of an informal—but legal—way of sharing information among oligopolists. Who could do that? Consultants.

-Duff McDonald on the birth of modern management consulting. Read more from our latest Member Pick, “The Making of McKinsey,” from his new book, The Firm

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