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

Why Good Health Care Depends on Nurses

What personal care hospitalized patients now get is mostly from nurses. In the MGH ICU the nursing care was superb; at Spaulding it was inconsistent. I had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to patients’ safety and comfort, especially when they are very sick or disabled. This is a lesson all physicians and hospital administrators should learn. When nursing is not optimal, patient care is never good.

Even in the best of hospitals, with the best of medical and nursing care, the ICU can be a devastating psychological experience for patients—as it was for me. Totally helpless, deprived of cohttp://blog.longreads.com/2014/02/04/why-good-health-care-depends-on-nurses/ntrol over one’s body, ICU patients desperately need the comforting presence of family and loved ones. I was fortunate to have that support, but some others in the MGH ICU were not. I can only hope they received extra attention from their nurses.

Arnold Relman, a physician with more than six decades of experience, broke his neck and discovered what it’s like to be critically ill and cared for under today’s health care system. He wrote about the experience for The New York Review of Books.

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Photo: Army Medicine

Children Are the 'Forgotten Grievers'

The standard of care for decades for children who had suffered a loss did not help. Thinking it was best, adults urged children to move past their loss as quickly as possible. Mourning was broken.

“Children have always been the forgotten grievers,” said Andy McNiel, executive director of the National Alliance for Grieving Children. “The idea was that they would forget about it. That it was too much for them to handle, that they would be better off if we pretended it didn’t happen. None of that was true. They may stop talking about it, but they are always thinking about it.”

This, McNiel said, could make children withdraw or become angry. They might work through their feelings in unhealthy ways. Then, as adults, they might not trust people. They could become stuck in their grief.

“You hear about it all the time from adults who lost their parents when they were kids,” McNiel said. “It impacted my marriage, it impacted how I raised my kids, it impacted my work. It doesn’t stop.”

The Cincinnati Enquirer’s John Faherty looked at grief counselors at an all-boys school who work with teens who have lost loved ones. The counseling has helped the boys process their feelings.

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Photo: Eric Chan

'There are patterns in the language that are the language of suicide'

Back in the 1970s, as part of his own research, Shneidman asked a group of men at a union hall, “If you were going to commit suicide, what would you write?”

The union hall experiment was, by contemporary research standards, ethically ambiguous at best. “You couldn’t do that today,” Pestian says. But the notes turned out to be important. “We took the real notes and the pseudo-notes and we said, ‘We’ll see if we can tell the difference.’ ”

That meant creating software for sentiment analysis—a computer program that scrutinized the words and phrases of half the real suicide notes and learned how to recognize the emotion-laden language. They tested it by asking the computer to pick out the remaining real notes from the simulated ones. Then they had 40 mental health professionals—psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists—do the same. According to Pestian, the professionals were right about half the time; the computer was correct in 80 percent of the cases.

“So we said, ‘OK, we can figure this out,’ ” he recalls. “If the computer is taught how to listen, it will be able to listen to this database and say, ‘This sounds like it’s suicidal.’ Because there are patterns in the language that are the language of suicide.” Even if those patterns are not always apparent to a trained professional, the real note/fake note test held out the promise that a computer could learn to spot them.

In Cincinnati Magazine, Linda Vaccariello looks at the researchers who are using information from suicide notes to identify potentially suicidal people. Read more from Cincinnati Magazine in the Longreads archive.

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Photo: Ganeshaisis

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'The Lost Girls of Rocky Mount': A Guest Pick by Douglas Williams

Douglas Williams is currently a doctoral student in political science at the University of Alabama, where his research centers around public policy and politics as it relates to disadvantaged communities and the labor movement. You can find him on Twitter at @DougWilliams85, at a collaborative blog on Southern progressivism called The South Lawn, as well as at The Century Foundation, where he blogs about the labor movement.

The Lost Girls of Rocky Mount

Robert Draper | GQ | June 2010 | 22 minutes (5,382 words)

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This article, y’all. Whew.

I happened upon this article a couple of years ago while doing some unrelated research, and it is something that has stuck with me ever since. It is hard for a story like this to not have some effect on you, for the author provides the grim details of the murders and their investigation with such vividity as to allow readers to place themselves smack dab in the middle of the story. It was also an article that reinforced a lot of concepts that have lived with me since birth: the gut-wrenching despair of persistent poverty; the lack of importance placed on Black women’s bodies; and the fecklessness of law enforcement when it comes to investigating crimes in communities of color, particularly when there is such a large separation between those communities and the political establishment that represents them. It is all here for you to dissect, with few stones, if any, unturned.

This is one of the easiest recommendations that I have ever been able to make.

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Photo: Harris Walker

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Your Body Is a Composite of Other Beings

In recent years, research has shown that what people commonly think of as “their” bodies contain roughly 10 microbial cells for each genetically human one. The microbial mass in and on a person may amount to just a few pounds, but in terms of genetic diversity these fellow travelers overwhelm their hosts, with 400 genes for every human one. And a decent share of the metabolites sluicing through human veins originates from some microbe. By these measures, humanity is microbial.

In Science News, Susan Milius examines the world of microbes and looks at how animals are really “composite beings.” Read more science stories on Longreads.

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Photo: NIAID

How Horror Stories Are Being Created in the Digital Age

‘Daddy, I had a bad dream.’

You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness — it’s 3:23. ‘Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?’

‘No, Daddy.’

The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter’s pale form in the darkness of your room. ‘Why not, sweetie?’

‘Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy’s skin sat up.’

For a moment, you feel paralysed; you can’t take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.

In Aeon, Will Wiles examines the online cultural phenomenon of posting horror stories in online forums—creating urban legends for the digital age. The story above, titled “Bad Dreams,” is an example of one of those stories. See more stories from Aeon.

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Photo: Robert S. Donovan

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Why Soda Expires in the Houses of the Super-Rich

Getting the details right was especially important when there were several houses, so that consistency could be maintained from property to property in the remotes for television sets, the controls for lighting and security systems, the organization of kitchen and bathroom cupboards. Principals did not want to fumble around, lost in their own houses. Ms. Fowler used Excel spreadsheets to stock refrigerators with soft drinks, then lined up and photographed the contents so that a glance would tell what needed replenishment. She religiously checked the expiration dates on cans of soda: if you own seven houses and each has as many as six refrigerators—two in the kitchen, one in the garage or storeroom, one in the pool house, one in the master suite, one in the screening room—for a total of forty-two refrigerators, it’s possible that years could pass before a can of soda is opened.

— In Harper’s, John P. Davidson discusses his time at The Starkey Institute, a “butler boot camp” which certifies estate managers to work for the super-rich.

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Photo of Spelling Manor: Atwater Village Newbie

Longreads Best of 2013: My Favorite New Publisher Discovery

Roads & Kingdoms

David Weiner (@daweiner) is creative and editorial director at Digg.

Roads & Kingdoms makes me feel bad about myself in the best possible way.

Ostensibly a travel and food site, Roads & Kingdoms is more like a revolver of adventure—each story a bullet that enlightens and inspires, educates and informs. Through them, I’ve learned things like the code of bootleggers in Karachi, eavesdropped on a meeting of the world’s most politically-powerful chefs, and mastered the untranslatable concept of “lagom,” for which I don’t have the words.

I can’t think of another publisher that so consistently makes me want to quit my job to travel, explore, discover or really any verb that gets me out into the real world and a million miles away from a computer and the complacency of modern life. Simply put, Roads & Kingdoms is dangerous reading, especially in times like these.

So if you’re new to Roads & Kingdoms, tread carefully: you may find yourself buying a one-way ticket to another continent before you realize what hit you.

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Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

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What It's Like to Have a Transient Ischemic Attack

Recently, I suffered a brain attack—a few, in fact; so stealthy, they’re called transient. I’ve dropped stroke from my vocabulary, since it is too soft and soothing a word for an event that often goes unnoticed until it has choked your words and energy right out of you. A brain attack happens silently, and can be as shocking and devastating, or as deadly, as a heart attack. This is a comparison I wish I did not know how to make (since my heart launched an offensive of its own a few months after my brain attacked). Instead of the noun stroke, shouldn’t the verb form be used, as in my brain struck? Or if a noun, then why not a brain strike? Now, a few months of rehab and a stainless steel implantable cardiac device later, my heart is efficient and fortified. And I’m taking it on a test-drive this morning. My first real run since the repairs and the rehab and the recovery.

I try to concentrate on the beauty all around me instead of worrying about the mess inside me. I want to outrun my fears—baseless, according to my cardiologist—that my brain will slap me down again, harder than before.

In Ploughshares, Mary Winsor recalls an Easter weekend with her family after recovering from health issues. Read more about health.

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Photo: Laszlo

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Reading List: When We Fall In Love

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

What does love look like and feel like and sound like to you? What have you read that changed the way you think about love? I’d like to know. Reblog your suggestions or comment or drop them in dietcoker.tumblr.com/ask.

1. “Him and Her: How Spike Jonze Made The Weirdest, Most Timely Romance of the Year.” (Mark Harris, Vulture, October 2013)

Have you heard of Her? Spike Jonze’s latest is about a man who falls in love with his cell phone’s AI interface. Sound hokey? If you know anything about Jonze (and you will after reading this), then you know Her will be anything but.

2. “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School.” (Alex Morris, New York magazine, February 2006)

In this 2006 piece, privileged New York school kids navigate the lack of binary between friendship and romance.

3. “Love Love Love.” (Lizzy Acker, The Rumpus, September 2013)

So often Rumpus essays read like songs. This, thankfully, is no exception: “When you love someone, you will sacrifice everything for them, even if that means they never exist at all.”

4. “K in Love.” (Hannah Black, The New Inquiry, February 2013)

Cop goes undercover. Cop meets girl. Cop falls in love. Cop’s cover is blown. Cop sues his superiors. “Love is most private, most public, of all.”

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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