A Botched Operation: How a Substandard Abortion Provider Stays In Business
Steven Brigham’s abortion clinics keep being sanctioned for offering substandard care. Why is he still in business?
Brigham began placing ads for abortion services in the Yellow Pages. The ads drew a steady stream of pregnant women to his office—and a steady stream of protesters, armed with placards and bullhorns. The commotion escalated, eventually prompting the owners of the building to petition a judge for a temporary injunction against the protesters; after the request was denied, they successfully obtained an injunction against Brigham, who, they claimed, had misrepresented the nature of his medical practice. The controversy attracted extended scrutiny in the local press. One morning, Brigham later recalled, he glanced at the front page of the Reading Eagle and spotted a story, below the fold, about a minor international development: the implosion of the Soviet Union. Above it was yet another story about the turmoil outside his clinic.
How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love
A mathematician uses data mining and algorithms to find the perfect match on a dating site:
When the last question was answered and ranked, he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Angeles sorted by match percentage. At the top: a page of women matched at 99 percent. He scrolled down … and down … and down. Ten thousand women scrolled by, from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in the 90s.
He needed one more step to get noticed. OkCupid members are notified when someone views their pages, so he wrote a new program to visit the pages of his top-rated matches, cycling by age: a thousand 41-year-old women on Monday, another thousand 40-year-old women on Tuesday, looping back through when he reached 27-year-olds two weeks later. Women reciprocated by visiting his profiles, some 400 a day. And messages began to roll in.
Looking Back on ‘The X-Files’: A Reading List
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from The A.V. Club, The Awl, The Hairpin, and Grantland.
Fresh Air Interview: Joaquin Phoenix
Awkward, wonderful interview with an actor who hates to be interviewed:
PHOENIX: If I was driving and I heard this, I’d be – I’d change the channel.
GROSS: I wouldn’t.
PHOENIX: I’d be like, why – can you shut up?
GROSS: Really? Does it bother you like that?
PHOENIX: No. I mean, I don’t know, sometimes I just, you know, I just think, who cares?
GROSS: We, who love movies, care. Does that help answer the question?
PHOENIX: OK.
What It’s Like To Be Four Months Pregnant and Embedded in Afghanistan
Four months pregnant, a journalist joined US forces in Afghanistan as an embedded correspondent. This is her story:
On a muggy August afternoon, I dragged myself and my flu to an infectious-disease doctor. I asked him if he could give me some antibiotics for Afghanistan that were safe to take when you’re pregnant. His eyes leapt up from his notes.
“How far along are you?”
“Three months and a bit.”
I stared at a James Nachtwey photograph on his wall as he regaled me with stories about his war-photographer patients, all of whom were men. Clearly, I posed a different equation.
“Are you sure you will be able to run?” he said. “Because you’re going to need to run, and I have to advise you not to go in your condition.”
The Secret That Became My Life
On the secrets we keep from and for others, and how it warps our identities:
I was so lonely it hurt. I hadn’t told friends the secret of our marriage. The keeper worries about being found out. The keeper also tries to create an internal story that keeps self-judgment at bay. So we rationalize, and we explain, and we cover over the bright shiny truth. We tell ourselves stories about how much better off everybody is if they are ignorant. The keeper is afraid of change, of retribution, and of being judged.
Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta: Our Longreads Member Pick
For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share “On the Far Side of the Fire,” an essay by Jessica Wilbanks, which first appeared in Ninth Letter and was awarded the journal’s annual creative nonfiction award. This is the first time it has been published online.
This Is Danny Pearl’s Final Story
Asra Nomani, a close friend and colleague of Daniel Pearl — who was murdered in 2002 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an architect of the 9/11 attacks — discusses how she grappled with Pearl’s death years later while investigating his murder:
One of the first people I come across while waiting for the courtroom doors to open is James Connell, a defense attorney.
“I’m sorry for the death of your friend,” he tells me. “This must be hard for you.”
I don’t know how to respond. Condolences aren’t what I expected to hear, especially from the defense. I’ve come defiant, wearing a gauzy pink tunic to reject the dark black shroud that a radical like KSM would expect on a Muslim woman. “Thank you,” I finally say.
By 9:25 am, we’re seated and a Guantánamo bailiff bellows, “All rise!” As Army colonel James Pohl, the judge, enters, the five defendants remain sitting.
Suspended Justice: The Story of a Wrongful Conviction, Our College Pick
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
The EST In Me
On a mother’s embrace of the teachings of 1970s self-help guru Warner Erhard.
Perhaps because Jill, a little older, was less susceptible, it was I whom my mother saw as the subject on which to apply her own alchemies. Erhard’s techniques involved trust games, and she taught me several. We enacted the stare-down, in which we peered into each others’ faces until we learned to think about seeing and not being seen. We lay on the ground and visualized feelings of anger and feelings of love and then exhaled them in screams and shouts. There was a “truth process,” a “danger process,” a “headache cure.” For this one, we lay on the ground and imagined the ache as a floating object, drifting away from us. We also fixed our concentration at a point on the wall and led each other into trance-like journeys on which we met wise beings in caves. Who is the wise being? What is the wise being telling you? we asked.
I was my mother’s pupil, but we participated in these exercises as equals. Often, our mystical probings revealed me as my mother’s mentor. One time the cave-bound oracle told my mother to follow any guidance she might receive from me; I’d been her teacher in a past life, the oracle told her.
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