Reading List: Sex Work and Sex Workers

New reading list from Emily Perper featuring picks from Something Magical, The Daily Dot, NPR, and The Rumpus.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 18, 2013

Surgeon Races to Save a Life in L.A.’s Shooting Season

Inside an operating room at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center during L.A.’s “shooting season”:

“The season of shootings has begun on time. Last year, from July through September, this Torrance hospital treated 107 gunshot victims, the highest number in the county.

“This year, four GSWs — medical shorthand for gunshot wounds — arrived on the first day of summer. One was a suicide and three were assaults. Three died and one would probably be discharged in a few days.

“Now, on June 23, two more have come in, both teenagers, both assaults. They walked through the front door at 2:25 a.m., no EMTs, no police. The hospital staff calls it the homeboy ambulance service: patients brought in with injuries often from gang shootings.”

Published: Aug 18, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,119 words)

Body and Soul

The writer recalls an accident that left his friend paralyzed. A memoir about friendship and disability:

“‘You can move your leg!’ I said. When a nurse came in, I pointed. ‘That’s not a muscle spasm, right? He can move his leg.’

“The nurse looked at Dan, then shifted her gaze to the floor. She was silent for a moment.

“‘I’m pretty sure,’ she said softly, ‘that’s a muscle spasm.’

“The blood drained from my face. The nurse left the room, and for the first time since Dan was injured I felt tears in my eyes. He would never walk again, and there was no point in pretending otherwise. I stood at the foot of his bed, watching his leg, which was now twitching uncontrollably. My face began to move in spasms, too, and I wept.”

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Aug 15, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,225 words)

Knight of the Swan

The writer discovers a family secret:

“The first time I heard about my father’s godfather was at a family dinner. We were in my grandmother’s dining room celebrating my father’s birthday. It was the usual ritual of slicing the cake with the silver triangle onto the square, flowered plates, passing each one to my grandmother to slowly scoop ice cream upon, like a queen giving her blessing. Along with that were the usual jokes about my father’s birth and therefore his peculiar place in the family–how he was ten years younger than his siblings, and really, if we are being honest, an accident.

“‘A damn good accident!’ my grandmother would say from the end of the table, the light from the chandelier gauzy on her cheekbones. And we would laugh. When I was eleven, I saw my aunt, my father’s sister, lean over to my mother and mutter, ‘And of course we all know about Bobby Putnam.'”

Source: The Toast
Published: Aug 16, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,307 words)

The Notorious MSG’s Unlikely Formula For Success

In 1968, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine wondered if eating food in American Chinese food restaurants caused feelings of numbness and fatigue. Decades of research has shown little consensus on whether consumption of MSG is bad for us. How the MSG myth was born and propagated:

“‘The Chinese food causes thirst,’ he wrote, ‘which would also be due to the high sodium content. The syndrome may therefore be due merely to the large quantity of salt in the food.’ MSG was almost an afterthought: ‘Others have suggested it may be caused by the monosodium glutamate seasoning used to a great extent for seasoning in Chinese restaurants.’ He closed ruminating on the idea that the presence of MSG might make the sodium-related symptoms ‘more acute.’

“But it was the MSG bit that people focused on. The New York Times quickly followed the NEJM’s lead, publishing a small write-up on the issue a month later (Chinese Restaurant Syndrome Puzzles Doctors,’ May 19, 1968). Also fueling the burgeoning myth was a latent distrust of what happened behind the kitchen door at Chinese restaurants, even as they became increasingly common to American diners in the late 1960s. ‘To be suspicious of the goings on in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant was not uncommon,’ food historian Ian Mosby writes in his paper ‘”That Won-Ton Soup Headache”: The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968–1980.’ For many, suspicions of mysterious meats and other ‘excessive’ practices were still present.”

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Aug 15, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,837 words)

Wreckage

After their teenage daughter is killed in a tragic accident, two grieving parents grapple with the events leading up to her death:

“Inside, Jason realizes he’s been thrown into the backseat. He looks up at Taylor still strapped into the front, hair and shorts splashed with blood. Dustin is still buckled in the backseat.

“The girls are missing.

“Neighbors rush to the wreck as the boys climb out of the Blazer. Dustin starts breaking bottles, mumbling about getting in trouble, before eventually running off. Jason and Taylor find Jamie lying on the ground beneath the U-Haul, groaning.

“One of the witnesses tries to reassure them: ‘The four of you are okay.’

“‘No,’ says Taylor. ‘We had five.'”

Published: Aug 15, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,200 words)

The Summer of Love and Newsweek

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg reflects on his early career working as a correspondent for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering Jefferson Airplane, Ronald Reagan and hippies:

“If the S.F. music scene (I quickly learned that ‘Frisco’ was a no-no) was scarcely known outside the Bay Area, and neither was the larger cultural phenomenon it drew strength from. The word ‘hippie’—derived from ‘hipster,’ the nineteen-forties bebop sobriquet revived sixty years later in Brooklyn, Portland, and food co-ops in between—had been coined only a few months earlier, by Herb Caen, the Chronicle’s inimitable gossip columnist. (At the time, as often as not, people spelled it ‘hippy.’) Ralph J. Gleason, the Chron’s jazz critic, was the scene’s Dr. Johnson. (Pushing fifty, he was too old to be its Boswell.) Gleason’s protégé was the pop-music critic for the U.C. Berkeley’s student paper, the Daily Californian, Jann Wenner. But the national press had not taken much notice, if any. So getting something into Newsweek was a coup.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 15, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,143 words)

The Killing Machines

How do we live with drones during wartime—and then after it’s over? A look at the ethical and legal implications, and the realities of what advantages drones have given the U.S. in the battle against al-Qaeda:

“Once the pursuit of al-Qaeda is defined as ‘law enforcement,’ ground assaults may be the only acceptable tactic under international law. A criminal must be given the opportunity to surrender, and if he refuses, efforts must be made to arrest him. Mary Ellen O’Connell believes the Abbottabad raid was an example of how things should work.

“‘It came as close to what we are permitted to do under international law as you can get,’ she said. ‘John Brennan came out right after the killing and said the seals were under orders to attempt to capture bin Laden, and if he resisted or if their own lives were endangered, then they could use the force that was necessary. They did not use a drone. They did not drop a bomb. They did not fire a missile.'”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 41 minutes (10,324 words)

Longreads Member Pick: ‘Quebrado,’ by Jeff Sharlet

This week, we’re excited to share a Member Pick from Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth and bestselling author of The Family, C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. “Quebrado” is a chapter from Sweet Heaven, first published in Rolling Stone in 2008, about Brad Will, a young American journalist and activist.

Read an excerpt here.

Become a Longreads Member to receive this week’s pick.

Published: Aug 1, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,133 words)

Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?

They once struggled for funding. Now, Carl June and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are drawing attention for a trial that uses gene therapy—engineered T cells—to fight cancer:

“In their natural state, T cells usually aren’t able to kill tumor cells, partly because they can’t latch on strongly enough. But June was fascinated by scientific papers showing it was possible to change this. A few researchers—first an Israeli named Zelig Eshhar in the ’80s, then other investigators around the world—had discovered that you could force a T cell to stick to a tumor cell and kill it. To pull this off, you built an ‘engineered T cell’—a T cell never before seen in nature. You altered the T cell’s genetic blueprint by injecting a new gene into the cell. The new gene would tell it to build a new molecular limb. The limb, called a ‘chimeric antigen receptor,’ would sit partly inside the cell and partly outside, and it could send signals either in or out. One signal it could send was: kill. Another was: replicate.

“June loved this approach. So elegant. Put the immune system on steroids. What if you could train the body to fight cancer on its own? What if, instead of replacing a patient’s immune system (as in a bone-marrow transplant) or pumping him full of poison (chemo), you could just borrow some cells, tweak them, and infuse them back into the patient? In theory, the engineered cells would stay alive in the blood, replenishing themselves, killing any tumors that recurred. It occurred to June that one infusion could last a lifetime.”

Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,145 words)