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Mike Dang
Editor-in-chief, Longreads | Editorial, Automattic and WordPress.com

The Effects of Untreated PTSD on Neighborhoods Plagued by Violence

Over the past 20 years, medical researchers have found new ways to quantify the effects of the relentless violence on America’s inner cities. They surveyed residents who had been exposed to violence in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore and noticed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): nightmares, obsessive thoughts, a constant sense of danger. In a series of federally funded studies in Atlanta, researchers interviewed more than 8,000 innercity residents, most of them African-American. Two thirds of respondents said they had been violently attacked at some point in their lives. Half knew someone who had been murdered. Of the women interviewed, a third had been sexually assaulted. Roughly 30 percent of respondents had had symptoms consistent with PTSD—a rate as high or higher than that of veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Experts are only now beginning to trace the effects of untreated PTSD on neighborhoods that are already struggling with unemployment, poverty and the devastating impact of the war on drugs. Women—who are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—are more likely to show signs of anxiety and depression and to avoid places that remind them of the trauma. In children, PTSD symptoms can sometimes be misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kids with PTSD may compulsively repeat some part of the trauma while playing games or drawing, have trouble in their relationships with family members, and struggle in school. “School districts are trying to educate kids whose brains are not working the way they should be working because of trauma,” says Marleen Wong, Ph.D., the former director of mental health services, crisis intervention, and suicide prevention for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Men with PTSD are more likely to have trouble controlling their anger, and to try to repress their trauma symptoms with alcohol or drugs.

— From “Black America’s Invisible Crisis,” a joint collaboration between Essence magazine and Propublica.

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Photo: Michael Le Roi

Nick Hornby on the Difficulty of Working as a Junior Book Critic

And this is one of the strange things about life as a junior book critic (I was more than 30, but I was definitely a junior): you spend all your life reading, but you can never take part in a conversation about books with your friends. They want to talk about the new Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood; you haven’t got round to any of them, because nobody gives you the big books to review, and you’ve been ploughing through a 500-page first novel that shows only intermittent promise and that your friends will never embark upon, partly because you are about to tell them, in print, not to bother.

There were other reasons for stopping, too. It is uncomfortable being introduced to a writer whose work you have publicly slated, and when you are writing books of your own, that is more likely to happen, at literary festivals and parties and in BBC corridors. And in any case, writing books of your own exposes an uncomfortable truth: that even though you spend half your working life telling people how it should be done, you can’t do it yourself — or it’s not as easy as it looked, anyway.

— Nick Hornby, in The Sunday Times, on working as a junior book critic in the early ’90s and his book column for The Believer.

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Photo: Ministry of Stories

Jenny Diski on a Cancer Diagnosis and Keeping a Diary

We’d hardly got home before I said: ‘Well, I suppose I’m going to write a cancer diary.’ The only other thing I might have said was: ‘Well, I’m not going to write a cancer diary.’ Right there: a choice? I’m a writer, have been since I was small, and have earned my living at it for thirty years. I write fiction and non-fiction, but it’s almost always personal. I start with me, and often enough end with me. I’ve never been apologetic about that, or had a sense that my writing is ‘confessional’. What else am I going to write about but how I know and don’t know the world? I may not make things up in fiction, or tell the truth in non-fiction, but documentary or invented, it’s always been me at the centre of the will to put descriptions out into the world. I lie like all writers but I use my truths as I know them in order to do so.

— Jenny Diski in The London Review of Books on discovering that she has inoperable cancer and publicly writing about it.

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Photo: Suki Dhanda

Meet the Team That Tennis Pros Pay $40K a Year to String Their Racquets

During matches, Federer changes racquets each time the balls are changed, which happens after the first seven games and then every nine games thereafter. Nine racquets would be more than sufficient to see him through his opening match. The already strung rackets were arranged in a row against a dresser. Each had a small piece of white tape on its throat indicating the day it had been strung and the level of string tension. Federer had texted Yu the night before with his specifications: he had asked for three racquets to be strung at twenty-six kilos (“Roger wants it in kilos, not pounds,” Ferguson explained), five at 26.5, and one at twenty-seven. Spools of racquet string and rolls of grip tape were strewn across the dresser.

Yu, who was dressed in khaki shorts, a light-blue T-shirt, and sandals, was working at one of the four Babolat Star 4 stringing machines that he and Ferguson had brought to New York (they have two other stringers working with them during the Open). Although the Star 4 dates back to the nineteen-eighties and is no longer in production, they continue to use it because it is light and easy to travel with. “Once these break down, we’re retiring,” Yu joked, as he ran a strand of natural-gut string through the top of the racquet head (Federer was using natural gut for the sixteen main strings and polyester for the nineteen cross strings). After Yu finished, he clipped ten tiny plastic string savers into the string bed of each racquet. Federer likes the string savers because they supposedly reduce friction. Yu, who estimates that he has strung racquets more than five thousand times for Federer, is skeptical. “I don’t think it does much,” he said. “But these guys don’t like to change things,” Ferguson added. After punching in the string savers, Yu stencilled a red Wilson logo on each racquet, wrapped them individually in long plastic bags, sealed the bags with blue tape, then stuck a large decal bearing Federer’s logo (a stylized “RF”) on each bag.

— Michael Steinberger in a post for The New Yorker, on Priority 1, the stringing and racquet customization company that is used by tennis pros like Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. The players pay $40,000 a year for the service.

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Photo: Edwin Martinez

On Not Going to College After Excelling in School

I know that for the rest of my life, I’ll have to explain myself to future employers. My hope is that my work and life experience become of such high quality that my education (or lack thereof) will fall off the bottom of my résumé. I’m aware it will be an uphill battle. Traveling was always a part of my plan, and last year I applied to the Peace Corps. I was told I was rejected for one reason: my lack of a college education. It was a speed bump, but I wasn’t deterred. In fact, I recently left my real estate job for a nine-month volunteer community-service-focused exchange program in Israel. I’ll work in a school, learn about agriculture, and be immersed in different cultures.

— Grace Jay-Benjamin in Philadelphia Magazine on her decision not to attend college after excelling in two of Philadelphia’s best schools, and what life has been like for her since.

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Photo: Sholeh

Chaz Ebert on Becoming One With Roger During His Sickness

Chaz Ebert stopped practicing law when she married Roger, and ran the business side of things for him. They worked side-by-side throughout their marriage. As he became sicker, and was only able to communicate through a computer, Chaz’s role grew.

At some point, he asked me to be his voice. So we would do some things on the computer, and then he would say, but I want you to say this. It’s important for you to say this part. You know, and so we — when he was very sick, it felt like we became one person. There, I didn’t feel the boundaries that you feel with two people. And I know those boundaries so well because when he got better and he got stronger, those boundaries were resurrected. And I became my own person again and he became his own person. But the period where we became one was a very interesting period when I think back on it. Because I didn’t realize that that’s what was happening. I don’t even know how to explain it. But I actually did feel him in my soul when we became one person.

— Anna Sale interviewed Chaz Ebert for WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money podcast. You can listen to the interview, or read a transcript of it here. Life Itself, a documentary about Roger Ebert’s life up until his final days came out in theaters this summer.

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Photo Credit: From ‘Life Itself’

Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 4

Our latest collection is now live at WordPress.com, featuring stories from Gangrey, Indianapolis Monthly, The Hairpin, The New Inquiry, Carrying the Gun, the Washington Post, and more.

Virginia’s Unregulated Day Care Industry

Of the 43 deaths in unregulated homes, The Post’s review found that 22 were sleep-related, 10 involved physical abuse, three were accidental and one was natural. In seven cases, the causes were unclear in the available records. All but one of the sleep-related deaths involved risky actions taken by caretakers, records show. These included leaving infants to sleep in an unsafe setting or failing to check on them for extended periods.

In 2010, 7-month-old Finnigan Bales was found unresponsive in an upstairs bedroom in a Virginia Beach townhouse where Deborah Blaney ran an unregulated day-care operation. He had not been “checked on or fed for hours,” according to an investigation by the local branch of Child Protective Services.

Blaney had too many children in her care — seven — and eventually was convicted of operating a day-care program without a license, a misdemeanor. She was sentenced to serve 10 days in jail.

Finnigan’s mother, Megan Bales, said she and her husband interviewed Blaney and checked her references, but they learned that Blaney had no license only after Finnigan died.

“They don’t even know what time Finn passed away,” Bales said.

— A two-part investigation by The Washington Post looks into unregulated day care providers in Virginia. Since there is a the shortage of licensed day care providers in the state, unregulated day care providers—who don’t need to have any child care licenses or CPR training as long as they are caring for five children or fewer—fill in the gaps, especially for families who are unable to afford to place their children in licensed centers.

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Photo: U.S. Army

‘Must Be Hard to Live on That’: A Labor Day Reading List

According the the U.S. Department of Labor, the first Labor Day was celebrated in 1882 in New York City, and is now “dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” Here, five stories from the labor movement, and from workers just looking for a better opportunity for themselves.

1. “Temp Land: Working in the New Economy.” (Michael Grabell, ProPublica)

ProPublica’s Michael Grabell has been looking at the blue collar temp industry over the course of a year. His stories have included a look at the underworld of labor brokers, the lack of U.S. protections for temp workers, and the “temp towns” that dot America.

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‘I Did Not Have a Culture of Scholastic High Achievement Around Me’

Compared with my classmates on the second tier, my test scores were on the lower end. Each week, in my literature class, we were responsible for the recitation of some French poems (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lamartine) from memory, and each day we had to recite a stanza. This sort of exercise may well be familiar to readers of The Atlantic, but the rituals required to master it were totally new to me. I had never been a high-achieving student. Indeed, during my 15 or so years in school, I was remarkably low-achieving student.

There were years when I failed the majority of my classes. This was not a matter of my being better suited for the liberal arts than sciences. I was an English minor in college. I failed American Literature, British Literature, Humanities, and (voilà) French. The record of failure did not end until I quit college to become a writer. My explanation for this record is unsatisfactory: I simply never saw the point of school. I loved the long process of understanding. In school, I often felt like I was doing something else.

Like many black children in this country, I did not have a culture of scholastic high achievement around me. There were very few adults around me who’d been great students and were subsequently rewarded for their studiousness. The phrase “Ivy League” was an empty abstraction to me. I mostly thought of school as a place one goes so as not to be eventually killed, drugged, or jailed. These observations cannot be disconnected from the country I call home, nor from the government to which I swear fealty.

— The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates on his difficulty with learning French, and how he adapted while growing up in a mostly black and poor section of Baltimore that lacked the kind of social and academic capital that can create high achieving students.

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Photo: via YouTube/The Atlantic