Helping Dad Die: A Daughter’s Story

In the U.K., Britons with terminal illnesses or incurable diseases have nowhere to go if they want help to die. A daughter’s personal story about finding a way to ease her father’s suffering and the right-to-die debate:

Had my father lived in, say, Utrecht rather than the West Country, he could simply have turned to his GP for help. Both doctor-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia have been available since 1981 for Dutch people with a terminal illness or suffering severely from an incurable disease, and account for about 3 per cent of deaths in the Netherlands.

Other European countries have followed the Dutch lead: doctor-assisted suicide is available for the terminally ill and people with conditions like my father’s in Luxembourg and Switzerland, as is voluntary euthanasia in Belgium. And in the US, four states (Washington, Montana, Oregon and Vermont) offer doctor-assisted suicide to the terminally ill. Yet only one country is willing to help terminally ill, severely disabled or elderly and seriously ill foreigners – and, with the assistance of one of the three organisations non-nationals can access, more than 250 Britons have now died there. My father was right: he would have to go to Switzerland.

Source: Financial Times
Published: Mar 14, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,640 words)

Insult To Injury

Florida trauma centers charge outrageous fees the moment you come through the door:

Before any X-ray was taken, any blood collected, any medicine delivered to his broken body, crash victim Eric Leonhard was charged $32,767 just to pass through the doors of a Fort Pierce trauma center. The bill was not for the surgery Leonhard needed to piece together his shattered pelvis. In fact, after exactly 40 minutes, doctors decided to transfer him because they didn’t have the right specialist for the job. So they loaded Leonhard onto a helicopter and sent him to another hospital on Florida’s east coast. Lawnwood Regional Medical Center still charged Leonhard, an uninsured tour boat captain, nearly $1,000 for every minute he spent with the medical team that couldn’t fix him.

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: Mar 7, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,500 words)

The Secret World of Fast Fashion

From 1960s Korea, through Brazil, to today’s Los Angeles: Inside the world that brought you Forever 21—and those skinny jeans in your closet.

Over the past 15 years, the fashion industry has undergone a profound and baffling transformation. What used to be a stable three-month production cycle—the time it takes to design, manufacture, and distribute clothing to stores, in an extraordinary globe-spanning process—has collapsed, across much of the industry, to just two weeks. The “on-trend” clothes that were, until recently, only accessible to well-heeled, slender urban fashionistas, are now available to a dramatically broader audience, at bargain prices. A design idea for a blouse, cribbed from a runway show in Paris, can make it onto the racks in Wichita in a wide range of sizes within the space of a month.

Published: Mar 17, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,523 words)

Loving Animals to Death

The dilemma of The Food Movement: Can we be “conscientious carnivores” by humanely raising animals if the end result means butchering the animal for our own consumption?

Some skeptics have wondered whether any of the Food Movement’s reforms are even remotely achievable if reformers continue to ignore the ethical considerations involved in eating meat. Simply put, when it comes to the Food Movement’s long-term viability, could it be that changing what we eat is more important than improving its source? Might the only way to reform our food system—rather than simply providing alternatives—be to stop raising animals for consumption? Pollan has addressed these questions by explaining, “what’s wrong with animal agriculture—with eating animals—is the practice, not the principle.” But what if he’s got that backward? What if, when it comes to eating animals, the Food Movement’s principles are out of whack?

Published: Mar 17, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,486 words)

Hell On Earth

What happens to life sentences if the human lifespan is radically extended? A philosopher talks about future punishment:

Even in my most religious moments, I have never been able to take the idea of hell seriously. Prevailing Christian theology asks us to believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing being would do what no human parent could ever do: create tens of billions of flawed and fragile creatures, pluck out a few favourites to shower in transcendent love, and send the rest to an eternity of unrelenting torment. That story has always seemed like an intellectual relic to me, a holdover from barbarism, or worse, a myth meant to coerce belief. But stripped of the religious particulars, I can see the appeal of hell as an instrument of justice, a way of righting wrongs beyond the grave. Especially in unusual circumstances.

Source: Aeon
Published: Mar 13, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Stories About Ghosts: A Reading List

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Pacific Standard, Esquire, London Review of Books, and Bitch Magazine.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 16, 2014

One Country Saved Its Jews. Were They Just Better People?

The surprising truth about Denmark in the Holocaust:

Why did the Danes behave so differently from most other societies and populations in occupied Europe? For a start, they were the only nation where escape to a safe neutral country lay across a narrow strait of water. Moreover, they were not subject to exterminatory pressure themselves. They were not directly occupied, and their leadership structures from the monarch down to the local mayors were not ripped apart. The newspapers in Copenhagen were free enough to report the deportations and thus to assist any Jews still not in the know to flee. The relatively free circulation of information also made it impossible for non-Jewish Danes to claim, as so many Germans did, that “of this we had no knowledge.”

Published: Dec 14, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,622 words)

How We Survived Two Years of Hell As Hostages in Tehran

Three Americans recount their experience of being held captive in Iran’s Evin Prison after unknowingly crossing the Iraq-Iran border while out on a hike. An excerpt from A Sliver of Light, a co-written book about their ordeal:

SHANE (October 2009)

Solitary confinement is the slow erasure of who you thought you were. You think you are still you, but you have no real way of knowing. How can you know if you have no one to reflect you back to yourself? Would I know if I was going crazy? The longer I am alone, the more my mind slows. All I want to do is to forget about everything.

But I can’t do it. I am unable to keep my mind from being sharply focused on one task: forcing myself not to look at the wall behind me. I know that eventually, a tiny sliver of sunlight will spill in through the grated window and place a quarter-size dot on the wall. It’s ridiculous that I’m thinking about it this early. I’ve been awake only 10 minutes and I should know it will be hours before it appears.

They take everything from us—breezes, eye contact, human touch, the feeling of warm wet hands from washing a sink-load of dishes, the miracle of transforming thoughts into words on paper. They leave only the pause—those moments of waiting at bus stops, of cigarette breaks. They make time the object of our hatred.

I try not to look for the light.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Mar 12, 2014
Length: 43 minutes (10,825 words)

Life of a Police Officer: Medically and Psychologically Ruinous

The intensely challenging job of law enforcement is linked to many health issues. Erika Hayasaki met a former officer who tried to protect her high school friend and learned the effect her death had on him:

Police officer Brian Post recognized the 16-year-old girl lying face down in the grass at the Whispering Pines apartment complex in Lynnwood, Washington. He had gotten to know her in recent weeks, helping her obtain a restraining order against her abusive ex-boyfriend. Now, here was Sangeeta Lal, unconscious, with two bullets in her chest.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 14, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,679 words)

Over The Volcano

An experienced hiker returns to the biggest volcano on Earth, and finds himself stranded and hallucinating in a Hawaiian snowstorm:

Broward arrived at the Visitor Emergency Operations Center, a long brown building near Mauna Loa’s southern base, at about 8 a.m. He strolled down a hallway, past his office and up into the dispatch center, perched above the first-floor roof like an air-traffic-control room. He picked up a fax with a 3:17 a.m. timestamp.
It was an advisory from the National Weather Service. A storm was on the way that would hit the summit with a foot of snow, temperatures in the 20s, and wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour. Broward had worked at the park for 13 years and he saw two or three of these storms every winter. He plugged the forecast data into a threat-level chart, which confirmed what he already knew: Conditions were in the Red Zone. The park would be closed for the day. He told the dispatcher to spread the word, then checked the backcountry permit records. There was someone on the mountain: Alex Sverdlov, age 36, had left on Sunday and was scheduled to return on Wednesday. Broward knew the hiker would be at or near the summit when the storm hit.

Source: Village Voice
Published: Mar 11, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,102 words)