Demonstrating in the Cloud: Our College Pick
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
Experiences of Black Americans: A Reading List
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from TIME, Salon, The Toast, ThinkProgress, and Autostraddle.
An Interview With a Therapist Who Was Once Insane
Joe Guppy is a writer, actor and psychotherapist living in Seattle. Thirty-five years ago, he was 23 years old and a mental patient. He spent 10 weeks in a mental hospital and another 10 weeks in a halfway house after Atabrine, an old-school malaria medication, gave him visions that he was living in hell and that his family was trying to kill him.
Thirty years after he was released, Guppy decided to investigate his own case of mental illness. Through physicians’ notes, journals and interviews, he took stock of how he got sick, how he got better and what his story says about how therapy helps people heal. He is working on a memoir about the experience, and was kind enough to send me a draft and let me interview him about what he found.
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.
The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
Remembering the Life and Work of Journalist Matthew Power (1974-2014)
From a Facebook post by writer Tom Bissell, on his friend Matthew Power. Power died Monday in Uganda while on assignment for Men’s Journal. He was 39.
All Aboard: Four Stories About Trains
This week’s reading list by Emily includes stories from The New York TImes, n+1, and Der Spiegel.
Genome Surgery
Our ability to edit the genome using DNA-cutting proteins may have a profound effect on the way we treat diseases in the future:
It is likely to be at least several years before such efforts can be developed into human therapeutics, but a growing number of academic researchers have seen some preliminary success with experiments involving sickle-cell anemia, HIV, and cystic fibrosis (see table below). One is Gang Bao, a bioengineering researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has already used CRISPR to correct the sickle-cell mutation in human cells grown in a dish. Bao and his team started the work in 2008 using zinc finger nucleases. When TALENs came out, his group switched quickly, says Bao, and then it began using CRISPR when that tool became available. While he has ambitions to eventually work on a variety of diseases, Bao says it makes sense to start with sickle-cell anemia. “If we pick a disease to treat using genome editing, we should start with something relatively simple,” he says. “A disease caused by a single mutation, in a single gene, that involves only a single cell type.”
The Higher Ed Experience in 2014: Our College Pick
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
Showtime, Synergy: Exclusive Early Access to a New Story from The Awl and Matt Siegel
This week, we are excited to give Longreads Members exclusive early access to a new story from Matt Siegel, to be published next week on The Awl. Here’s more from The Awl co-founder and editor Choire Sicha:
“Matt Siegel’s very funny nonfiction story of love, deceit and betrayal (oh my God, I know!!!) comes on all unassuming and conversational. Unlike many citizens of the MFA world (Matt’s a recent graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program), he keeps his techniques hidden. We’re really looking forward to publishing this at The Awl, but we’re more thrilled to share it with Longreads Members—like ourselves!—first.”
Siegel (@unabashedqueer) has previously written for The Huffington Post, The Hairpin, Flaunt Magazine, and The Advocate.