Why Is America Turning To Shit?
A look at the culture and politics of something we all do: poop:
Consider the difficulties of your everyday life if you had to wade through wet fields or even an idyllic garden to get to a leafy area to shit or to an outhouse to take a crap, and if you couldn’t simply flush it away with a quick movement of the hand but had to worry about the sanitary requirements of seeing that the shit didn’t simply turn into a disease-harboring pile or smear your clothes or return with you into the home.
Consider what your day would look like if you had to go in a bucket, constantly rake over your own shit and that of others, being careful to cover it with enough composting material so that it didn’t simply turn into, well, a pile of shit that, again, spread disease amongst everyone in your household.
For many millions of people, shit is not something you hold on to but rapidly want to get away from, as soon as you’re done. For the eager shit activists in cities like Chicago and New York, composting is a way to prove their fealty to the planet or their credibility.
The Bones of Marianna, by David Kushner: Our Latest Longreads Member Pick
This week’s Longreads Member Pick is by David Kushner, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone whose work has been featured on Longreads often in the past. He has just published The Bones of Marianna, a new story from The Atavist, and we’re thrilled to give the ebook to Longreads Members.
Should This Inmate Get a State-Financed Sex Change Operation?
Michelle Kosilek, a transgender woman in prison for the 1990 murder of her wife, is fighting for the right to have the state provide sexual-reassignment surgery. Kosilek’s battle touches on what is covered under the Eighth Amendment:
We enter into a kind of compact with the people we incarcerate. Much as we might like to put them out of mind—behind 20-foot-tall, quarter-mile-long, immaculate walls erected in the middle of nowhere—we are, by the act of imprisoning them, bound more closely to them than ever. They are entirely dependent on us for food, clothing, shelter. Is it right that we brandish that dependence over them like a threat? Is it ethical for us to treat some legitimate medical conditions but not others? What does society owe to the worst among us? “Eighth Amendment protections are not forfeited by one’s prior acts,” wrote future Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1979. Yet there is a point at which even progressive legal scholars hesitate to champion those protections. Dolovich teaches her law students about a bank robber in California who received a heart transplant in 2008 while serving a 14-year sentence. The cost of the operation, including follow-up care, was more than a million dollars. The fact that the bank robber got the heart meant that someone else, someone law-abiding, didn’t.
Rodolfo Walsh and the Struggle for Argentina
Walsh was an artist, activist and investigative journalist whose book Operation Massacre is credited by many as the first “nonfiction novel,” having been published years before Truman Capote defined the term with In Cold Blood. Phelan explores Walsh’s life and impact on Argentina:
Having famously declared, “The typewriter is a weapon,” he had come to doubt that words alone were any real substitute for bullets in effecting change, and particularly the fine words of literary artists. “Beautiful bourgeois art!” he later wrote. “When you have people giving their lives, then literature is no longer your loyal and sweet lover, but a cheap and common whore. There are times when every spectator is a coward, or a traitor.”
The Girl in the Closet
The story of Lauren Kavanaugh, who was locked up, starved and tortured for six years by her birth mother and stepfather when she was barely two years old. Kavanaugh, now 20, is still figuring out how to live on:
“We know that for at least five or six years, she was tied down and locked up,” said Emily Owens, a child-abuse detective for the Dallas County district attorney’s office who worked 18 months on the case.
“This was during those formative years when you’re supposed to be bonding and the years when you’re supposed to be learning love and trust. All she got was pain. How do you ever get past that?”
That is the central question in Lauren’s life.
The Snowden Leaks and the Public
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on what we’ve learned so far about the Edward Snowden leaks, our privacy, and the way our government, press and commercial Internet companies have handled it. In many cases, it can come down to people who aren’t quite sure what’s going on trusting the people who do know:
But I did have an interesting (unattributable, of course) briefing from someone very senior in one West Coast mega-corporation who conceded that neither he nor the CEO of his company had security clearance to know what arrangements his own organization had reached with the US government. “So, it’s like a company within a company?” I asked. He waved his hand dismissively: “I know the guy, I trust him.”
Rude Awakening
Natasha Gardner on girls and early puberty, and what happens after they grow up:
In the United States, menstruation generally arrives when a girl is 12-and-a-half years old; that hasn’t changed significantly in recent decades. What has changed is the onset of early, or “precocious,” puberty, which triggers breast development and pubic hair as early as seven (for boys, the cutoff is nine). Until the late 1990s, researchers thought puberty usually started around age 11. By 1997, the average age bumped down to 9.96 years; today, it may start as early as six-and-a-half years old. Although environmental chemicals, hormone levels in water supplies, and mere evolution have been cited as possible culprits, researchers still don’t know why the shift is happening.
The Prophet
A profile of personal finance guru Dave Ramsey, who has six million listeners tune into his radio program and countless others who rely on him for tips about handling money. But Ramsey’s tips can only help people get so far:
Often it’s even more basic expenses that create the undertow. “The structural stuff swamps them in the end,” says Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a visiting professor of sociology at Arkansas State University who is studying Ramsey’s work. “One person I spoke with said they were doing well ’til their health insurance bill went up by $100 a month, or $1,200 a year. The first year they didn’t go on vacation. But the second year there was no more vacation to not go on.”
Economic volatility is an overwhelming fact for millions of Americans; willpower is finite; and gazelle intensity takes its toll. “Ramsey never talks about the cost of [his strategies],” Barrett-Fox continues. “He does not have good advice for people who have low incomes and are against the wall. If they lose a job, he doesn’t really have anything for those folks.”
How a Law Firm Hid Evidence of Black Lung Disease
Jackson Kelly is the go-to law firm for the coal industry—and a new investigation reveals that it withheld evidence in order to deny claims from miners who suffered from black lung disease:
The judge who denied Fox’s claim in 2001, Edward Terhune Miller, recently retired and, in an interview with the Center, learned what had been shielded from him more than a decade earlier. His eyes widened, and, for a moment, he was speechless. “I’m utterly dumbfounded,” he said. “I just cannot conceive of attorneys doing that. … That’s really misleading the court. It’s misleading the witnesses. It’s tainting the witness testimony.”
How We Filed: The Early Technology of Paperwork
Shannon Mattern was obsessed with office supplies when she was young—here she explores the many ways we once used to file and store paperwork, which once “constituted approximately ninety percent of the activity” in an office:
Filing tools—the spindle file, the pigeonhole file, the bellows file, the flat file, the Shannon file, the vertical file—have been around for centuries. But the First World War gave rise to a new era of business that generated an explosion of paperwork, and that paperwork needed to be filed away. “With the growth of businesses, the departmentalizing of activities, and the necessity of depending upon the written word rather than upon memory,” Johnson and Kallaus write, “[t]he person who is responsible for the orderly arrangement of those papers has one of the most responsible positions in any business office.” Those individuals who held the new and noble position of “Records Manager” had to know “where each piece of paper originates and why, how many copies of it are necessary, how these flow through the different offices and departments, where they are stored temporarily and how, and what their end may be,” whether immediate destruction, destruction after being archived, or temporary or long-term retention.
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