Search Results for: The Nation

The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics

Longreads Pick

Consumers were warned about plastic bottles with BPA, but are plastics from BPA-free bottles releasing the same synthetic estrogens? An investigation into the scientific research and public relations campaigns over replacement plastics like Tritan:

The center shipped Juliette’s plastic cup, along with 17 others purchased from Target, Walmart, and Babies R Us, to CertiChem, a lab in Austin, Texas. More than a quarter—including Juliette’s—came back positive for estrogenic activity. These results mirrored the lab’s findings in its broader National Institutes of Health-funded research on BPA-free plastics. CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that “almost all” commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren’t exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun’s ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner’s research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Mar 4, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,114 words)

Television vs. the Novel

Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, writing in The New York Times Book Review, about television vs. the novel:

Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel.

In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.

Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.

Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence: One is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe. Their destinations may converge, but television and the novel travel in opposite directions.

Read the story

Photo: medhius, Flickr

Tell Me A Story: A Reading List

These four fantastic fiction pieces will take you far away from this perpetual winter.

1. “Lost in Transit.” (Leon, The Swan Children Magazine, March 2014)

This story is a beautiful, haunting example of the work produced by the Swan Children, a collective of artists expressing their experiences under “homeschooled, Quiverfull, and conservative Christian upbringing.” The first issue debuted March 1. It is not to be missed.

2. “Touchdown!” (Jerad W. Alexander, Pithead Chapel)

An afternoon of watching football is disrupted by the implications of a kitchen injury.

3. “Conversion.” (Sara Novic, Guernica, February 2014)

Carter isn’t sure what to make of his mother’s fascination with the local evangelical congregation — until it’s too late.

4. “The Unraveling.” (A.N. Devers, Electric Literature, 2013)

A mysterious real estate agent promises a young Brooklyn couple that his unorthodox methods will find the perfect apartment — if they cooperate, that is.

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Photo: Sergey Yakunin

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What Silicon Valley Is Really Selling Us

Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes:

One of the most toxic memes to waft out of the industry recently has been the idea of quasi-secession, whether it was Peter Thiel’s dream of floating hacker communities or Tim Draper’s plan to make Silicon Valley its own state or Balaji Srinivasan’s vision of an “ultimate exit” to someplace where engineers could build a world “run by technology.” But they’ve got it entirely backward. People don’t crave technology like drugs, wanting it so bad they’ll wire bitcoins to the offshore plutocracy of Libertaristan just to get it. They adopt technology when they’re seduced by the communities that grow up around it, often for love rather than money. If inventing new modes of communication or collaboration was seen as a mercenary act—as no nobler than drilling a well or devising a mortgage-backed security—then such platforms would never thrive, because their value tends to arise from a long, slow, unprofitable process of experimentation.

If anything, the public love affair with Silicon Valley is more crucial today than ever.

There’s a reason why web giants adopt slogans like “Don’t be evil” or endorse “the Hacker Way”: The entire business models of Google and Facebook are built not on a physical product or even a service but on monetizing data that users freely supply. Were either company to lose the trust and optimism of its customers, it wouldn’t just be akin to ExxonMobil failing to sell oil or Dow Chemical to sell plastic; it would be like failing to drill oil, to make plastic.

When William Gibson envisioned cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination,” he was right. Unsettle the consensus about the social web and you don’t just risk slowing its growth or depopulating it slightly. You risk ending it, as mistrust of corporate motives festers into cynicism about the entire project.

Read the full story at Wired

Read more on Silicon Valley

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Photo: itia4u, Flickr

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Follow The Blood Money

Longreads Pick

Adam L. Penenberg investigates the international cash-for-martyrdom industry, wherein secret US banking operations help fund suicide bombers:

What struck Osen was how organized the whole process was: the banal evil of the international cash-for-martyrdom industry. After a suicide attack, a caseworker from one of Hamas’s social welfare institutions would sit down with family members and take down information on a standard set of forms. The documents resembled the kind of forms a mortgage applicant might fill out, except with a cover page that translates into something like “The Martyrs Receive Reward from their Lord, They and Their Light.” The caseworker recorded the applicant’s closest relatives, family income, number of dependents, whether they were particularly in need of money, as well as banking and contact information, including cell phone numbers and home address.

Source: pando.com
Published: Feb 23, 2014
Length: 2 minutes (600 words)

Revolutions and the Public Square

Ukraine is the size of Texas, but for the last three months its burgeoning protest movement has largely crowded into the space of 10 city blocks.

The name for the movement itself, Euromaidan, is a neologism fusing the prefixeuro, a nod to the opposition’s desire to move closer to the EU and away from Russia, with the Ukrainian (and originally Persian and Arabic) word maidan, or public square. And the term is about more than situating the demonstrations in Kiev’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti). Ukraine may be located in Europe geographically, but many of the protesters also see Europe as an idea, one that “implies genuine democracy, trustworthy police and sincere respect for human rights.”

The name speaks to an increasingly universal phenomenon as well: the public square as an epicenter of democratic expression and protest, and the lack of one—or the deliberate manipulation of such a space—as a way for autocrats to squash dissent through urban design.

—Matt Ford, writing on the revolutionary dimensions of public space in a The Atlantic.  According to Ford, although the use of urban design for political purposes dates back to early 19th century Paris, the symbolism of the public square gained new potency during the Arab Spring. His piece also explores how public space influenced events in Tahrir Square and Tripoli. Read more from The Atlantic in the Longreads archive. 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

 

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The Business of Being Born: A Reading List

Beyond the tired binaries of midwife vs. doctor and home birth vs. hospital birth.

1. “How We Made Our Miracle.” (Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC, Feb. 2014)

After political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry shared pictures of her newborn daughter on Valentine’s Day, she wrote about her past health problems, her history with childbirth, and making the decision to pursue IVF and surrogacy.

2. “Why We’re So Obsessed With Natural Childbirth: A New History of Lamaze Explains the Origin of the Mythology.” (Jessica Grose, The New Republic, Feb. 2014)

In her review of Lamaze: An International History by Paula S. Michaels, Grose explores the origins of the desire for an “ecstatic” birth experience and the belief that hospital births are industrial and insensitive. She explains the roots of Lamaze in the the philosophy of a 1930s British doctor, the countercultural movement of the ’60s and ’70s and more.

3. “Why We Must Destroy the Myth of Miscarriage as Women’s Failure.” (Glosswitch, The New Statesmen, Feb. 2014)

“Miscarriage will not be made easier to cope with without changing the way we talk about pregnancy, bodies and women’s roles. The physical work of gestation and labour remains undervalued, yet in parallel with this the superficial celebration of pregnancy insinuates that those who can give birth are more virtuous, more real and more womanly than those who supposedly ‘fail.'”

4. “The Disturbing, Shameful History of Childbirth Deaths.” (Laura Helmuth, Slate, Sept. 2013)

“If you are pregnant, do not read this story.”

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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How Japan Prepared to Care for Its Rapidly Aging Population

As far back as the early 1960s, the government became aware of the imminent ageing problem and began to establish nursing homes and home helpers. In the 1970s, benefits for retirees were more than doubled and a system of virtually free healthcare for older people was established. In 1990, Japan introduced the “Gold Plan”, expanding long-term care services. Ten years later, it started to worry about how to pay for it, and imposed mandatory insurance for long-term care. All those over 40 are obliged to contribute. The scheme’s finances are augmented with a 50 per cent contribution from taxes and recipients are charged a co-payment on a means-tested basis. Even then, there have been financing problems and the government has had to scale back the level of services provided. Still, Campbell calls it “one of the broadest and most generous schemes in the world.”

As a result of these and other adaptations, he argues, Japan has struck a reasonable balance between providing care and controlling costs. Other countries, including Britain, have studied Japan closely for possible lessons. Of course, 15 years of deflation have left Japan’s overall finances in lousy shape, with a public debt-to-output ratio of 240 per cent, the highest in the world. Spending on healthcare per capita, however, is among the lowest of advanced nations, though outcomes are among the best. That is partly down to lifestyle. Most Japanese eat a healthy, fish-based diet and consume less processed food and sugary drinks than westerners. Obesity is far less common. So are violence and drug abuse. But even taking into account such factors, Japan gets a big bang for its healthcare buck. Every two years, the government renegotiates reimbursement fees with doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, routinely imposing restraints or reductions. Primary care is given priority over specialist treatment: the Japanese visit the doctor far more often than Americans but receive far fewer surgical interventions.

In the Financial Times, David Pilling looks at Japan’s aging population and what the country has done to take care of their elders. More stories about Japan.

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Photo: George Alexander

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Scientology’s Vanished Queen

Longreads Pick

After the wife of Scientology leader David Miscavige disappeared from public view, in 2007, those who asked questions were stonewalled, or worse. Now interviews with former insiders provide a grim assessment of her fate:

This cryptic explanation only fueled the mystery. Had Shelly fled the church? Was she in hiding? Some Scientology defectors believe she was exiled to one of several secretive and heavily guarded bases the church owns in remote western locales. There, the sources say, those who are banned endure lives of isolation, menial labor, and penury. The reason, they claim, is simple. “The law [in Scientology] is: The closer to David Miscavige you get, the harder you’re going to fall,” says Claire Headley, an ex-Scientologist who, along with her husband, Marc, worked closely with the Miscaviges. “It’s like the law of gravity, practically. It’s just a matter of when.” (The church of Scientology declined Vanity Fair’s repeated requests to interview the Miscaviges. In so doing, church representatives dismissed most of V.F.’s sources as disgruntled apostates, and called V.F.’s questions “ludicrous and offensive.” Additionally, the representatives described Shelly Miscavige as a private person who “has been working nonstop in the church, as she always has.” They also point out that I have written critically about the church in the past.)

Author: Ned Zeman
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Mar 1, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,446 words)