Search Results for: The Nation

The Truth About Tinder and Women Is Even Worse Than You Think

Longreads Pick

Reporter Nick Summers on what he discovered when he first covered Tinder—a company now embroiled in a sexual harassment and discrimination case involving one of its co-founders. “What gives these allegations even greater sting is Wolfe’s contention that she was not just any employee but a Tinder co-founder—and was stripped of the designation as a result of the treatment she endured.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jul 2, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,813 words)

A History of Scorpion Venom in Medicine

The new issue of Wired has a story about Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can help detect cancer cells in our bodies. Injecting our bodies with scorpion venom may sound somewhat outlandish, but it’s been used in medicine for quite a long time:

Ancient practitioners of medicine were well aware that scorpion venom could heal as well as harm. In imperial China, for example, the cloudy fluid was used to treat ailments ranging from mumps to tetanus. And in certain rural corners of India, whole scorpions were dipped in mustard oil and then rubbed on arthritic joints. Scorpion venom has more recently become an object of fascination for developers of pesticides, who dream of protecting crops using the neuro­toxins that scorpions employ against locusts and beetles.

Today pharmaceutical companies regularly obtain venom for commercial use by milking deathstalkers—that is, jolting the yellow arachnids with electricity, then collecting the droplets that dribble forth from their tails. Courage is an essential trait for the technicians who handle this sort of work, for the deathstalker is among the most dangerous scorpions in the world: In certain instances, L. quinquestriatus venom can cause cardiac arrest.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Why Tim Howard Doesn't Enjoy Soccer Games

“In goal, you’re taking in all the movement, all the runs,” Howard said. “You see everything. You’re yelling. You’re tense. You’re so wired-in. To tell you the truth, I don’t enjoy the game—I’ve never actually had fun within the course of those ninety minutes.” Because the object is always a shutout—a “clean sheet,” as the British call it—he can never relax. “As long as there’s time on the clock, there’s still danger,” he says. “When the whistle blows, I’m completely exhausted, physically and mentally. I get in the locker room and I sit down and I just exhale. Finally, the danger is over.”

-Tim Howard, U.S. men’s national soccer team goalkeeper, in The New Yorker (2010). Howard had a World Cup record 16 saves in the U.S.’s 2-1 loss to Belgium.

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More New Yorker in the Longreads Archive

Photo: nathanf, flickr

A Doctor’s Quest to Save People by Injecting Them With Scorpion Venom

Longreads Pick

A profile of Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can make cancer cells glow for easy removal:

A scorpion-venom concoction that makes tumors glow sounds almost too outlandish to be true. In fact, Olson explains, that’s what troubled the big grant-­making organizations when he came to them for funding. But when those organizations dismissed his ideas as too bizarre, Olson started accepting donations from individuals—particularly the families of current and former patients—quickly raising $5 million for his research. It was a bold and unprecedented tactic: Though patients and their families are often asked to donate to foundations with broad goals, Olson raised money for one specific, untested technology—a much riskier gamble. But thanks to his efforts, Olson’s fluorescent scorpion toxin is now in Phase I clinical trials, an impressive accomplishment for a compound with such a peculiar lineage. The University of Washington students are clearly awed by the work.

Source: Wired
Published: Jun 24, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,466 words)

Calling Their Mothers From the Front Lines

And in the middle of this tumult, I came back to the relative calm of my hotel room in the Hotel Palestine. There was no electricity. Sunlight slanted horizontally into the dusty, dim corridors and I saw at the end of the passage, outside my room, two figures silhouetted against the white glare of the sun. As I approached I saw that they were soldiers, their uniforms stained with the mud of the Tigris valley, Americans, for they were cradling US Army assault rifles in their arms.

They were an intimidating presence. Until they spoke. “Sir,” one of them said, and there was a quiet, shy deference in his voice. I saw that they were young, achingly young, perhaps 19 years old, lettuce-fresh faces above long, lean, loose-limbed frames – no more than boys in the grown-up garb of desert camouflage. “Sir,” he went on, “we heard that there was a satellite phone in this room. We haven’t been able to call home in four months.”

They were the first in a little trickle of young US servicemen who would come to my room for this purpose in the weeks that lay ahead. What struck me with great poignancy was this – that almost always they phoned their mothers. From the other side of the room you would hear the phone sound in some far place in Kentucky or Idaho. The boy would say “Hi Mom!” and then you would hear the excited, disbelieving scream of delight echoing down the line.

BBC correspondent Allan Little recalls a memory from the spring of 2003, during his time covering the war in Iraq. Little’s essay explores the role of civilian correspondents from the battle front, as well as the “magnetic pull that war has on the young male imagination.”

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Image: “Paths of Glory” by Christopher Nevinson, via Wikimedia Commons. The painting, which depicts a World War I battlefield, was deemed bad for morale and immediately censored. 

The Quest for Native American Voting Rights

What would Martin Luther King do? “About Native voting? He sure as hell wouldn’t dither about technicalities,” says Four Directions consultant Healy, a former head of the South Dakota Democratic Party. “Read Dr. King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on the subject of waiting for rights.” In the 1963 letter, King decries the man “who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

But hey, Democrats! How about winning elections? Controlling the Senate? Doesn’t the party want all those Native Democrats at the polls? Wiley says the DNC doesn’t see it that way. “We don’t look at [expanding the vote] as making sure that more Democratic voters vote. We don’t look at it as a program to make sure more African-American or Latino or Native voters can vote. It’s [about] making sure everyone can vote.”

Perhaps the DNC believes it can count on Native voters without taking sides in Wandering Medicine. This may be hubris, warns former Montana Democratic state legislator Margarett Campbell. Originally from Fort Peck Indian Reservation and now a Fort Belknap school superintendent, Campbell has fought for Indian rights for decades. She suspects that confidence in the Democratic Party may wane among tribal members, who may then stay home in 2014. “You can’t take a huge segment of your voting population and treat them like that without them feeling disenfranchised,” she says.

In These Times‘ Stephanie Woodard, on the voting rights discrimination that Native Americans still face.

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Photo: solarnu, Flickr

All Together Now

Longreads Pick

The Spice Girls were the biggest, brashest girlie group ever to have hit the British mainstream. Kathy Acker was an avant-garde American writer and academic. They met up in 1997 to swap notes—on boys, girls, politics.

They are here to rehearse for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Not only is this their first live TV performance, it’s also the first time they’ll be playing with what Mel C calls a ‘real band’. If the Girls are to have any longevity in the music industry, they will have to break into the American market; and for this they will need the American media. Both the Girls and their record company believe that their appearance here tonight might do the trick. There is a refusal among America’s music critics to take the Spice Girls seriously. The Rolling Stone review of Spice, their first album, refers to them as ‘attractive young things . . . brought together by a manager with a marketing concept’. The main complaint, or explanation for disregard, is that they are a ‘manufactured band’. What can this mean in a society of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and En Vogue?

Source: The Guardian
Published: May 3, 1997
Length: 16 minutes (4,211 words)

Why Do We Get Suspicious About ‘Extreme Morality’?

“Some thought people who appeared to be extremely ethical must be somehow cheating—that they couldn’t actually be doing all those good things. Others believed they were doing those things, but they found that so weird that they thought they must have some kind of mental illness—that they must lack the ordinary component of desires or feelings, or that there was something robotic about them.

“I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself—that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!”

-The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar, in conversation with the Boston Review’s David V. Johnson, on “extreme moral virtue.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Spirit and the Law

Longreads Pick

Hobby Lobby, a for-profit craft store with more than 23,000 employees, is fighting the provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires employers to provide no-cost birth control through their insurance plans. The case of corporations and religious rights:

It’s one thing to argue that a Catholic college’s daily operations are imbued with a religious ethos. It’s another to contend that a corporation, competing in a secular marketplace, is so fundamentally guided by its owners’ faith that it should enjoy religious-liberty rights.

Becket’s attorneys are applying a similar logic in other cases. Among their clients are religious business owners, almost always Christian, who face discrimination charges for refusing to provide services associated with same-sex weddings. These lawsuits are the cousins of the so-called conscience cases, in which a religious pharmacist who declines to sell emergency contraception runs afoul of state law. Becket is litigating a couple of those, too.

Published: Jun 19, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,029 words)