Search Results for: Outside

An Ex-Industrial Fisherman Rethinks His Job

Bren Smith. Photo by echoinggreen

Diane Ackerman | The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us | W. W. Norton & Company | September 2014 | 16 minutes (3,877 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us, by Diane Ackerman, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

The Unlikely Roots of Solitary Confinement

In a perverse tribute to human endeavor, solitary confinement began as a reform. Thinkers in Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries imagined that it might be possible to induce criminals to change from within, especially if they could be kept isolated from one another and from the corruptions of the outside world. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s famous design for a Panopticon—a circular prison with a central “inspection house” that allowed authorities to look into any cell at any time—was predicated on the idea that the prisoner under constant surveillance would internalize authority’s gaze, and cease misbehaving.

The Panopticon itself was never built, but Bentham’s ideas of solitary confinement and penitent reflection appealed to Pennsylvania Quakers, who incorporated them into an idea for a new kind of prison that was built. Philadelphia’s huge Eastern State Penitentiary, completed in 1829 and still standing, deviated from the Panopticon by making no cell visible to any other; rather, cells were located in corridors that radiated like spokes on a wheel from a central hall. Each cell had a Bible, and each prisoner was given piecework jobs. Cultivators of silence, the Quakers believed that isolation would help criminals mend their ways. The Pennsylvania system was copied all over the world, and the word “penitentiary” became universal.

One reason for the rapid spread is that the new penitentiaries appeared to be an advance over capital and corporal punishment, which had been the main penalties up to that time. As Michel Foucault observed, the locus of punishment shifted from a criminal’s body to a criminal’s mind. Reformers in England believed they had found in solitary confinement the “most terrible penalty” short of death that a society could inflict—and yet, in their view, the penalty was also “the most humane.” It turned out that the therapeutic value of isolation was negligible; in fact, solitary confinement made prisoners worse, to the point of driving many of them mad. The penitentiaries were successful, however, in inflicting punishment and keeping prisoners away from society—which, people felt, was on the whole a bargain.

Ted Conover, writing in Vanity Fair about the psychological horrors of solitary confinement.

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Committed: Stories About Stays in Psychiatric Facilities

In this week’s list, I wanted to share the experiences of those committed—voluntarily or not—to a psychiatric facility. From One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Nellie Bly’s 19th century expose to American Horror Story: Asylum, the “madhouse” occupies a weird space in America’s psyche, equal parts fascinating and feared. But the experiences of the patients and their caretakers are, obviously, very different than sensationalized cinematic accounts.

1. “Something More Wrong.” (Katherine B. Olson, The Big Roundtable, July 2013)

In this well-wrought essay, Katherine B. Olson profiles Alice Trovato, a woman and patient who mothers her unofficial charges and strives to make the most of her stay at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in the greens of Queens. Read more…

Budd & Leni

Photos via Wikimedia Commons

Bruce Handy | Tin House | March 2013 | 26 minutes (6,452 words)

 

They were fleeting and unlikely collaborators, for lack of a better word. He was a son of Jewish Hollywood royalty, she a Nazi fellow traveler and propagandist, though they had a few things in common, too: both were talented filmmakers, both produced enduring work, and both would spend the second halves of their lives explaining or denying past moral compromises. Which isn’t to say the debits on their ledgers were equal—far from it. Read more…

A Charles D’Ambrosio Reading List

Recently, we published “This is Living,” an exclusive excerpt from Charles D’Ambrosio’s most recent essay collection, Loitering: New & Collected Essays (Tin House). Because we just can’t get enough D’Ambrosio, here’s a reading list featuring interviews old and new, another essay featured in Loitering (“Seattle, 1974”), and more.

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1. “Seattle, 1974” (Charles D’Ambrosio, Front Porch, Issue 10, April 2009)

D’Ambrosio ruminates on Seattle and the dissonance in finding meaning, connection, and relevance in your own hometown:

“Seattle does have a suicide rate a couple notches above the national average and so does my family and I guess that earns me the colors of some kind of native. I walk around, I try to check it out, this new world of hope and the good life, but in some part of my head it’s forever 1974 and raining and I’m a kid and a man with a shopping cart full of kiped meat clatters down the sidewalk chased with sad enthusiasm by apron-wearing boxboys who are really full-grown men recently pink-slipped at Boeing and now scabbing part-time at Safeway.”

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‘Did We Have the Sense that America Cared How We Were Doing? We Did Not’

In The Atlantic in 2014, James Fallows examined how Americans and political leaders became so disconnected from those who serve in the military—and the consequences of that disconnect:

If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.

Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the military. Confidence in the military shot up after 9/11 and has stayed very high. In a Gallup poll last summer, three-quarters of the public expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. About one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and only 7 percent in Congress.

Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “Did we have the sense that America cared how we were doing? We did not,” Seth Moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the Iraq War. Moulton became a Marine Corps officer after graduating from Harvard in 2001, believing (as he told me) that when many classmates were heading to Wall Street it was useful to set an example of public service. He opposed the decision to invade Iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades. “America was very disconnected. We were proud to serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s work.”

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Autistic and Searching for a Home

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Genna Buck | Maisonneuve Magazine | Winter 2014 | 28 minutes (7,101 words)

MaisonneuveThis week we’re proud to feature a Longreads Exclusive from the new issue of Montreal’s Maisonneuve Magazine, about a young autistic woman who needs a home.
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Longreads Best of 2014: Science Stories

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in science writing.

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Virginia Hughes
Science reporter and soon-to-be science editor at BuzzFeed.

The Itch Nobody Can Scratch (Will Storr, Matter)

I’ve thought about this story (an excerpt from Storr’s book, The Unpersuadables) many, many times since reading it. It’s superficially about Morgellons, a disease in which people think that they’re infected with bugs or fibers. But it’s really about the nature of disease and diagnosis, evidence and belief. It’s creepy, fascinating, and profound. The best part about it is the way Storr describes these patients and their delusions. It would be easy to make them seem stupid or crazy or worse. But Storr’s writing creates empathy and understanding. The not-insignificant downside of this piece: it makes you feel itchy. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2014: Crime Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in crime reporting.

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Ashley Powers
Freelance journalist in Miami and a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

By Noon They’d Both Be In Heaven (Hanna Rosin, New York Magazine)

Kelli Stapleton is a Michigan mom who admitted to a particularly heinous crime: trying to kill her 14-year-old autistic daughter, Issy, via carbon monoxide poisoning. In a lesser journalist’s hands, she could have ended up a caricature, but Rosin tells her story solely in shades of gray. One minute your heart breaks for Kelli, and the next you fume at her apparent selfishness. Kelli spent years on an exhausting form of therapy for her daughter in hopes of coaxing out “the Isabelle that was in there.” Instead, Issy grew into a sometimes-violent teenager who repeatedly knocked Kelli unconscious. Kelli blogged about her struggles, ostensibly to raise awareness, but her look-at-me tone convinced her husband’s family she was more interested in fame than mothering. I’ve read the story several times, and I still don’t know what to make of Kelli. But I can’t stop thinking about her. Read more…

The Cost

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Rilla Askew | 2014 | 21 minutes (5,065 words)

 

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When my godson Trey was a toddler growing up in Brooklyn, every white woman who saw him fell in love with him. He was a beautiful child, sweet natured, affectionate, with cocoa-colored skin and a thousand-watt smile. I remember sitting with him and his mom in a pizzeria one day, watching as he played peekaboo with two white ladies at a nearby booth. “What a little doll!” the ladies cooed. “Isn’t he adorable?”

I told Marilyn I dreaded the day he would run up against some white person’s prejudice. “His feelings are going to be hurt,” I said. “He won’t know it’s about this country’s race history, he’ll think it’s about him. Because so far in his young life every white person he’s ever met has adored him.” Marilyn nodded, but her closed expression seemed to say I was talking about things I didn’t really understand. Read more…