Why Teenage Girls Still Love Sylvia Plath

Thirty years after her suicide, Sylvia Plath continues to seduce the adolescent psyche. But her fans are just as likely to romanticize her death as they are her poetry:

Twenty-first-century teens’ belief that they’ve found a kindred outsider in Plath is evident in the thousands of Internet sites and Web logs that now celebrate the poet. Some girls dub their journals “bell jar” or “ladylazarus.” On plathonline.com, girls with e-mail addresses like sylviaaplath, plath2002 and LuvlySylviaPlath feel that the poet speaks the truth and speaks it only to them.

Published: Nov 1, 2003
Length: 7 minutes (1,770 words)

Famous Cases of Journalistic Fraud: A Reading List

This reading list includes stories about Janet Cooke, who made up a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict, Jayson Blair, who fabricated stories at The New York Times, Stephen Glass, and more.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 22, 2014

On Breaking One’s Neck

A senior physician gets a new perspective about what it’s like to be critically ill under the U.S. medical care system after falling and breaking his neck:

What did this experience teach me about the current state of medical care in the US? Quite a lot, as it turns out. I always knew that the treatment of the critically ill in our best teaching hospitals was excellent. That was certainly confirmed by the life-saving treatment I received in the Massachusetts General emergency room. Physicians there simply refused to let me die (try as hard as I might). But what I hadn’t appreciated was the extent to which, when there is no emergency, new technologies and electronic record-keeping affect how doctors do their work. Attention to the masses of data generated by laboratory and imaging studies has shifted their focus away from the patient. Doctors now spend more time with their computers than at the bedside. That seemed true at both the ICU and Spaulding. Reading the physicians’ notes in the MGH and Spaulding records, I found only a few brief descriptions of how I felt or looked, but there were copious reports of the data from tests and monitoring devices. Conversations with my physicians were infrequent, brief, and hardly ever reported.

Published: Jan 20, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,024 words)

After I Came Out As A Transgender Man, I Was Asked If It Felt Like I Had Died

On the oddly spiritual experience of transitioning:

I have made my transition into a ritual. It’s like church to me, every other Sunday. It takes me about half an hour in the little bathroom. I lay everything out like a makeshift altar: bag of syringes, alcohol wipes, pickle Band-Aids, vial of testosterone. I don’t like to be bothered, but sometimes I think about certain people being there. It seems strange to invite anybody. Sometimes my mouth gets dry in the middle and I go for a glass of water. Or I feel lightheaded so I break and chew some multivitamins. Down in Iowa for Christmas, my mother asks me if my shots are “self-administered”; she means am I doing them on my own, but all I can hear is the word “minister” and I remember when, as a toddler on the brink of baptism, I asked my parents if I was going to be “pasteurized.” Like milk, boiled clean. When we say we are moved, it is always some liquid, as Anne Enright writes in “My Milk.”

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Jan 20, 2014
Length: 5 minutes (1,407 words)

Karma Bum

What It’s Like To Be 9 Years Old and Playing Video Games with Allen Ginsberg:

The following night, after Ginsberg’s poetry reading (why would I want to go to that?) a group of students eager for him to impart morsels of omniscience were forced to wait outside my room while we played video games on my Atari 2600—I destroyed Ginsberg at Frogger, but he eviscerated me on Combat. In a lame attempt at armistice he explained something about angles of trajectory and mathematics, but I went supervoid. He said he’d never played Combat before, but nobody is above suspicion.

Published: Jan 4, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,674 words)

The Northridge Earthquake: ‘Like a Punch Delivered from Below’

Revisiting the Northridge earthquake two decades later. Before Hurricane Katrina, it was considered “costliest natural disaster in U.S. history”. As recalled by Richard Andrews, director of California’s Office of Emergency Services at the time:

I took a turboprop plane with Wilson and the head of the California Highway Patrol from Sacramento to Los Angeles. We knew there had been damage to the freeway system, so on the flight down we were poring over maps of Southern California and trying to locate the places where we knew there would be freeway interruptions. We began talking about the strategy that we would eventually employ later that day of fast-tracking contracts to get the debris cleared and the repair work under way on the freeways. That proved to be one of the smartest things we did, because not only did it shorten dramatically the time to get the freeways back up and running, it also sent the public a signal that somebody was in charge and taking action quickly to address some of the major problems.

After we landed in L.A., we boarded an LAPD helicopter and took an aerial tour. We saw the damage to the Nordstrom out in Canoga Park, the freeway collapse at the 14/I-5 interchange and along the I-10 toward Santa Monica.

Published: Jan 14, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,810 words)

The End of the Line: What It’s Like to Ride the Bus in Syria

Matthew McNaught taught English in Syria between 2007 and 2010. He now works in mental health and sometimes writes essays and stories. This piece first appeared in Syria Comment, and our thanks to McNaught for allowing us to republish it here.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 20, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,615 words)

Interview: Bernice King

An interview with Martin Luther King Jr.’s youngest child, Bernice King, on her family’s legacy:

In the popular history of your father, people remember “Dream” and his crusade for civil rights. But his other platforms—fighting poverty, antimilitarism—seem to get lost. Was that part of the reason behind your 50 Days of Nonviolence campaign?

You have to take this part in stages and steps. Baby steps. Whether we want it or not, we live in a violent culture. And I don’t mean only video games or people on the streets. I mean in our discourse. We scream and holler, make disparaging comments. It’s a violent culture. If you are going to shift it, you have to spoon-feed it like a little baby. So 50 Days was really about buzz, to get the notion of nonviolence out in the culture. This has been a tough 365 days in our nation.

Published: Aug 1, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,723 words)

What’s in a Home? A Reading List

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Thought Catalog, The Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed, and The Billfold.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 19, 2014

How Japan Stood Up to Old Age

A quarter of Japanese are over 65. A look at how the country is supporting its aging population:

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.

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jan 17, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,294 words)