Search Results for: Depression

The Book of Jobs

Longreads Pick

The parallels between the story of the origin of the Great Depression and that of our Long Slump are strong. Back then we were moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are moving from manufacturing to a service economy. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years ago to less than a tenth of it today. The pace has quickened markedly during the past decade. There are two reasons for the decline. One is greater productivity—the same dynamic that revolutionized agriculture and forced a majority of American farmers to look for work elsewhere. The other is globalization, which has sent millions of jobs overseas, to low-wage countries or those that have been investing more in infrastructure or technology. (As Greenwald has pointed out, most of the job loss in the 1990s was related to productivity increases, not to globalization.) Whatever the specific cause, the inevitable result is precisely the same as it was 80 years ago: a decline in income and jobs. The millions of jobless former factory workers once employed in cities such as Youngstown and Birmingham and Gary and Detroit are the modern-day equivalent of the Depression’s doomed farmers.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 11, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,505 words)

So the Great Depression runs through Little House in the Big Woods like a big three-hearted river.

Perhaps most striking, however, is that the book’s central theme is made most conspicuous not through the events and details described in its pages but by the things that aren’t there.

There’s no Depression in the Big Woods. There’s no sign that the Civil War was less than a decade in the nation’s rearview (aside from one minor character, Uncle George, who ran off to be a drummer boy and came home “wild”). There are no banks. There isn’t even a cash economy: A description of the family’s visit to the store in town depicts a dazzling oasis of consumerism, but Pa pays for the calico and the sugar in trade, with bear and wolf pelts. There’s no government. In fact, a government would seem superfluous. No need for police or courts, because everyone gets along. The Ingallses have everything they need thanks to Pa’s seemingly limitless frontiersman skills and Ma’s “Scottish ingenuity” on the domestic front.

“Little House in the Present.” — Aimee Levitt, Riverfront Times

See more #longreads from the Riverfront Times

Little House in the Present

Longreads Pick

So the Great Depression runs through Little House in the Big Woods like a big three-hearted river.

Perhaps most striking, however, is that the book’s central theme is made most conspicuous not through the events and details described in its pages but by the things that aren’t there.

There’s no Depression in the Big Woods. There’s no sign that the Civil War was less than a decade in the nation’s rearview (aside from one minor character, Uncle George, who ran off to be a drummer boy and came home “wild”). There are no banks. There isn’t even a cash economy: A description of the family’s visit to the store in town depicts a dazzling oasis of consumerism, but Pa pays for the calico and the sugar in trade, with bear and wolf pelts. There’s no government. In fact, a government would seem superfluous. No need for police or courts, because everyone gets along. The Ingallses have everything they need thanks to Pa’s seemingly limitless frontiersman skills and Ma’s “Scottish ingenuity” on the domestic front.

Published: Nov 24, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,835 words)

After Suicides, a Family’s Journey Toward Grace

Longreads Pick

He grew up the middle of three brothers. By his 25th birthday, he was the only one left. Brett, the youngest, killed himself in December 2005, two months before he turned 20. His depression could appear with a stunning swiftness. On that final night, he talked of forgiveness and the future. And then, like the flipping of a switch, something changed. The oldest, Beau, struggled for years with depression. In the final few months of his life, mounting problems pulled him into a downward spiral. His family tried to help, but nothing could keep him from slipping farther into darkness. Four years after his brother’s death, Beau told his stepfather that Brett, who had shot himself in the head, had done it wrong. Days later, he went up to the attic of his family’s home and shot himself in the chest.

Published: Sep 18, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,808 words)

Better, Faster, Stronger

Longreads Pick

Every generation gets the self-help guru that it deserves. In 1937, at the height of the Depression, Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich,” which claimed to distill the principles that had made Andrew Carnegie so wealthy. “The Power of Positive Thinking,” by Norman Vincent Peale, which was published in 1952, advised readers that techniques such as “a mind-emptying at least twice a day” would lead to success. By the seventies, Werner Erhard and est promised material wealth through spiritual enlightenment. The eighties and nineties saw management-consultancy maxims married with New Age thinking, with books such as Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” In the past decade or so, there has been a rise in books such as “Who Moved My Cheese?,” by Spencer Johnson, which promise to help readers maximize their professional potential in an era of unpredictable workplaces. Timothy Ferriss’s books appeal to those for whom cheese, per se, has ceased to have any allure.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 5, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,604 words)

To Heaven by Subway

Longreads Pick

On this Memorial Day weekend, travel back to August 1938 to New York City’s Coney Island on a hot summer Sunday. The article profiles the narrow strip of land where Brooklyn meets the Atlantic and thousands of New Yorkers still pour out of the subway to eat hot dogs, ride roller coasters, visit bathhouses and watch freak shows. This was during the Depression, when Coney Island was struggling to survive as the “empire of the nickel.”

Source: Fortune
Published: Aug 1, 1938
Length: 32 minutes (8,220 words)

How to Spot a Psychopath

Longreads Pick

It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the 19th century, that there was a madness that didn’t involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it “manie sans délire” – insanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on the surface, but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of violence. It wasn’t until 1891, when the German doctor JLA Koch published his book Die Psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten, that it got its name: psychopathy.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: The Guardian
Published: May 21, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,421 words)

Brendan Maher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

I’m the biology features editor for the news team at Nature, the UK-based science journal. Longreads kindly asked me to offer up my five favourite couldn’t-put-down features for the year, and I was happy to comply. The focus on biology wasn’t intentional, but I did purposely keep features from Nature out of the running (it’s like choosing which child you love best!).

***

Autism’s First Child (John Donvan & Caren Zucker, The Atlantic, October 2010)

This profile of the first person technically diagnosed with autism is as touching as it is revealing about the troubles faced by doctors, patients and patient advocates when trying to determine a diagnosis.

Paper Trail: Inside the Stem Cell Wars (sub req’d) (Peter Aldhous, New Scientist, June 9, 2010)

Peter Aldhous went to town with a data-mining quest designed to verify a claim that several scientists had been complaining about: namely, that the publication of papers in a specific area of stem cell research was being manipulated by a cadre of influential scientists. It’s not exactly narrative form, but a stellar data visualization effort.

Depression’s Upside (Jonah Lehrer, New York Times, Feb. 28, 2010)

Jonah Lehrer deftly maneuvered this puzzling, but oddly compelling argument that depression has a purpose and benefit for the brain. It doesn’t soft pedal the real and relevant criticisms of evolutionary psychology, but still presents a nice picture of the “tortured genius” paradox (see also David Dobbs’ “Orchid Children” which missed making this list for a temporal technicality).

The Covenant (Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2010)

Peter J. Boyer’s masterfully nuanced profile of NIH director Francis Collins was exquisitely written and did a nice job of really digging into someone whose faith–it would seem–has lots of potential to come into conflict with his job. It also happened to be timed quite well with the collapse of funding for stem cell research–something that The New Yorker couldn’t plan for, but obviously accommodated quite deftly.

The Brain that Changed Everything (Luke Dittrich, Esquire, Oct. 25, 2010)

This is just a stirring feature on one of the events of the year for neuroanatomy. It recounts the life and death and dissection of Henry Molaison, who lost the ability to form new memories after an operation to remove his hippocampus. The operation was performed by William Scoville and the piece is written by Scoville’s grandson.

Matthew Aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads, 2010

aldridge:

My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic:

The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired
“Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.”

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man Chris Jones, Esquire
“He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now.”

The Hunted Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker
“Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.”

The Mark of a Masterpiece David Grann, The New Yorker
“Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro’s story. As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.”

Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy
Jon Ronson, The Guardian
“I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown make-up who are suffering from depression. Shaggy nods quietly. ‘I get anxiety and shit a lot,’ he says. ‘And reading that stuff people write about us… It hurts.’”

See my (much longer) list of the best long-form journalism of 2009.

Follow @longreads, or search for #longreads on Twitter. Or follow me, @mpaldridge.

Can Preschoolers Be Depressed?

Longreads Pick

Is it really possible to diagnose such a grown-up affliction in such a young child? And is diagnosing clinical depression in a preschooler a good idea, or are children that young too immature, too changeable, too temperamental to be laden with such a momentous label?

Published: Aug 25, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,023 words)