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Six Stories for Mother’s Day

Photo: Lori

My mom and I won’t be together on Mother’s Day this year. I’m in western New York for a friend’s wedding. She’s home in Maryland—relaxing, I hope, but more likely preparing for another week of teaching. We have a lot in common, especially our love of books and thrift stores. We carry our weight in the same parts of our bodies (sorry for mentioning it, Ma). We both have short hair. We have the same middle name and the same urge to overachieve.

One thing I admire about my mom is her fearlessness when it comes to starting over. A musician for decades, she went to graduate school (again!) in her 40s and became a children’s librarian. She parted ways with the church our family attended for a decade and found a new spiritual home, a church (coincidentally, I’m sure) two blocks from my own apartment. And she’s always down for trying interesting foods, new hobbies, new clothes or exciting hair colors—currently, she’s sporting a platinum pixie cut with lavender tips. She always surprises me. Our relationship isn’t always smooth, but it’s ours.

This week, I’ve collected stories about new moms, missing moms, dead moms and boomer moms, if only to demonstrate that there is no one way to have a mother or not have a mother. Some of us have toxic relationships with our moms and are better off—mentally, physically, spiritually—without them. Some of us have lost our moms to diseases, accidents, or time itself. And still others of us are becoming moms—every day, another Facebook friend announces she’s pregnant. Mother’s Day can be a day of meditation or just another Sunday. But I hope, truly, that it is a day of contentment, no matter how you celebrate.

(Past lists on this holiday include A Collection of Stories About Not Choosing Motherhood and Reading List: Mother’s Day.) Read more…

Millennial Women At Work: A Reading List

Photo: Mike Licht

These stories offer a glimpse into the weird world of “professionalism,” how young women are expected to adapt to rapidly changing, innately biased work environments. (This list isn’t exhaustive. There is no one universal millennial experience, no matter what your crotchety relatives on Facebook would have you believe.) And while millennial women are at the forefront of some of these changing norms—monetize that side hustle!—we are still at the mercy of societal forces beyond our control, including nepotism, sexism, and, in many cases, racism and discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender expression. Millennial women are the hardest working people I know, and I wanted to celebrate their perseverance, fearlessness and creativity.

1. “My Job Search.” (The Point, Emilie Shumway, 2012)

A hundred cover letters + a handful of interviews = months of desperation. My favorite part of Emilie Shumway’s meditation on life after college is her deconstruction of professionalism and the disconnect between her personhood and the self that job-hunts. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

LOREN ELLIOTT | Times Michael Dingman, 28, is seen in a Bradenton residence where he sometimes stays on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2016, while waiting for his next heroin fix. Dingman injects heroin multiple times per day, getting very ill when he goes for long without it, he says. On this night, he was able to inject shortly after this picture, and said he felt immediate relief from the physical symptoms of heroin withdrawal.

 

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Cancer Cons, Phony Accidents and Fake Deaths

Longreads Pick

After Taryn Wright exposed an elaborate fake tragedy on Facebook, she became an unlikely leader of an online hoax-busting squad.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Feb 18, 2016
Length: 20 minutes (5,239 words)

Five Stories About Espionage

The life of a spy is supposed to be glamorous. James Bond, right? Fancy cars, hot women, top-of-the line technology, and a signature drink. I went looking for those stories this week, then remembered James Bond isn’t, you know, real. There are no standoffs on the top of moving trains, and Dame Judi Dench does not run a secret government agency, unfortunately. The reality of espionage is still exciting, but it’s more complicated. The good guys and bad guys are not so easily differentiated. Today’s spying relies on social media, surveillance, coercion and ambition. Read more…

The Freelancers’ Roundtable

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Eva Holland | Longreads |February 2016 | 25 minutes (6,339 words)

 

There’s been more talk than usual lately about the state of freelance writing. There are increasing numbers of tools for freelancers: among them, the various incarnations of “Yelp for Journalists.” There’s advice floating around; there are Facebook support groups.

With the exception of one 10-month staff interlude, I’ve been freelancing full time now for seven and a half years. I’ve learned a few things along the way, but I also still have a ton of questions, and often feel as if I’ve outgrown some of the advice I see going by in the social media stream.

So I gathered a handful of well-established freelance writers and asked them to participate in a group email conversation about their experiences and advice. Josh Dean is a Brooklyn-based writer for the likes of Outside, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science. Jason Fagone lives in the Philadelphia area and has recently published stories in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Matter, and Grantland. May Jeong is based in Kabul, and has written for publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and Al-Jazeera America. (She managed to fit in her contributions to this roundtable while reporting from a remote corner of Afghanistan, so thank you, May.) As for me, I live in Canada’s northern Yukon Territory, and my work has appeared in AFAR, Pacific Standard, Smithsonian, and other places on both sides of the border. Read more…

In Praise of Public Pitching

I’ve always been fascinated by how narrative journalism gets commissioned, reported, and published–but the most perplexing part of the entire system is the continued power imbalance between writers and publishers.

This imbalance persists in spite of the internet “democratizing” publishing. More digital publishers are embracing feature writing, but the process behind the scenes feels stuck in the past–a time-consuming marathon of unanswered emails and rejection. Read more…

Violet

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Adele Oliveira | Longreads | January 2016 | 23 minutes (5,727 words)

 

I don’t believe in fate, or that life events, both everyday and profound, unfold the way that they’re supposed to. Yet the first six months of my first pregnancy were at once mundane and ordained. I got pregnant quickly. Morning sickness and a sore back arrived right on schedule. Growing up, my mom acquainted me with the details (like gaining 60 pounds) of her two healthy pregnancies and the unmedicated, uncomplicated births that resulted in me and my sister. I’d wanted to be a mother since I was a toddler pretending to breastfeed my dolls, and so I outlined the birth of a healthy child in an indelible mental framework, so unconscious and routine that it felt like destiny.

My pregnancy ended abruptly when our daughter Violet was born two years ago in late September, at 25 weeks gestation, about three months ahead of schedule. The day of Violet’s birth feels like a bad dream, partly because I was on a variety of strong drugs. I remember almost all of it with nauseating specificity, but it still doesn’t seem quite real; like it happened to somebody else.  Read more…

Modern Grief: Digital Ephemera and Coping with Loss

Photo by Dewet CCBY

At The Walrus, Nancy Westaway finds comfort in the digital footprints left behind by her husband Jonathan, who died of esophageal cancer at the age of 50.

But I know I am trying to do the impossible: to reanimate the love of my life word-by-word, tweet-by-tweet, text-by-text.

At first I was uncomfortable with the online grieving. When people clicked “like” on Jon’s obit after it was posted to Facebook, it felt remote and impersonal as if someone was taking something that belonged to the kids and me. But digital death notices and online goodbyes are part of modern love. When I saw the names of people I had never met posting their condolences on a friend’s page, I understood it. When I die, I want my friends to be comforted too.

After he died, Jon’s online presence grew and then faded into the ether. Now, when I Google his name late at night, I see he has slipped further and further down in the search results.

Sometimes I forward emails from Jon’s account to mine to keep track of something important. And even though I know I’ve just sent myself an email from his account, my heart still leaps when I see his name appear in my inbox.

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The Murky Importance of Giving: A Reading List

I have a Facebook “friend”—let’s call him Ken—who does something finance-y for the federal government. What I’m saying is, he has money to burn. Every few months, he’ll post a Facebook status along the lines of “For every ‘like’ I will donate $1 to _______ and for every comment I will donate $3 to ________.” Of course, his thousands of Facebook acquaintances are only happy to oblige. Most of my friends don’t make much more than their car insurance payments, student loans, rent and other bills; maybe that’s why Ken’s altruism seems so novel, almost suspect. In reading for this list, I discovered people who give freely, their generosity intertwined with thoughtfulness at best; carelessness, illness or guilt at worst.

1. “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Giving.”

Sam Kean, The Atlantic, May 2015

Giving, it seems, might become compulsive in some people because they crave the rush of dopamine that accompanies it—a rush that might be similar to the spike in dopamine levels that gets some people hooked on drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines. In a real sense, pathological givers might be addicted to philanthropy.

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