Search Results for: Internet

The Power of Reddit as a Public Health Advocacy Tool

Writing for Backchannel, Andrew McMillen recently profiled a woman named Tracey Helton. Helton—a former heroin addict who now works as a public health advocate—has taken to Reddit to advocate harm reduction strategies among addicts and to distribute the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Dubbed the “mother of r/opiates,” Helton’s program “illustrates the unexpected good that can emerge from darker corners of the internet.” But what makes the online forum so well-suited for outreach to addicts?

“There’s an anonymity involved with Reddit that I appreciate, because I know it’s really hard for people to come out if they’re involved with drugs,” she says. She has been open about her own past and identity because she wants her online companions to see her as living proof that recovery is possible. “I used my name so people could Google me and see I’m the same person,” she says. “I thought that, by being a semi-public figure willing to share my own experience, it would help people open up in a different way around their using.”

As her profile grew in this community of social outsiders and outcasts — many of whom feel stigmatized by the poor public perception of intravenous drug use — Tracey realized that her experience in running public health programs in San Francisco could offer another avenue of assistance on Reddit.“People were contacting me saying they had no access to naloxone, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s something I guess I could do.’” She mailed her first care package in August 2013. “I assumed a long time ago that somebody else would take over. I didn’t expect to be doing it for this long.”

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The Heroin Heroine of Reddit

Longreads Pick

How a former heroin addict turned public health advocate uses the internet to save lives.

Source: Backchannel
Published: Jul 21, 2015
Length: 10 minutes (2,623 words)

Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,137 words)

Published to great acclaim earlier this year, The Argonauts blends memoir and critical theory to explore the meaning and limitations of language, love, and gender. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. 

A note: In the print edition of The Argonauts, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. We’ve tried to recreate those marginal citations here. However, due to the limitations of digital formatting, if you are viewing this excerpt on a mobile device the citations may appear directly above the quotations, as opposed to alongside them.

***

October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark of the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.

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Adam Sternbergh on the Wordlessly Expressive Language of Emoji

Photo via Sari Botton's iPhone

Happy World Emoji Day, everyone. The occasion seems an appropriate time to re-read Adam Sternbergh‘s layered history of this “wordless tongue” in the November 2014 issue of New York Magazine. Sternbergh considers not only how those funny little icons came to be, but also how our relationship to them has evolved–and how they make the hard, cold digital world just a little nicer:

When I first encountered emoji, I assumed they were used only ironically—perhaps because, as a member of Generation X, I am accustomed to irony as a default communicative mode. And it’s certainly true that emoji have proved popular, unsurprisingly, with early adopters and techno-fetishists and people with trend-sensitive antennae—the kinds of people who might, for example, download a Japanese app to “force” their iPhone to reveal a hidden emoji keyboard. But emoji have also proved to be popular with the least ­techno-literate and ironic among us, i.e., our parents. Many people I spoke to relayed that their moms were the most enthusiastic adopters of emoji they knew. One woman said that her near-daily text-message-based interaction with her mother consists almost entirely of strings of emoji hearts. Another woman, with a septuagenarian mother, revealed to me that her mom had recently sent a text relaying regret, followed by a crying-face emoji—and that this was possibly the most straightforwardly emotional sentiment her mother had ever expressed to her.

And now we’re getting to the heart of what emoji do well—what perhaps they do better even than language itself, at least in the rough-and-tumble world online. Aside from the widespread difficulty of expressing yourself in real time with your clumsy thumbs, while hunched over a lit screen, and probably distracted by 50 other things, there’s the fact that the internet is mean. The widespread anonymity of the web has marked its nascent years with a kind of insidious incivility that we all now accept with resignation. Comment sections are a write-off. “Troll” is a new and unwelcome ­subspecies of person. Twitter’s a hashtag-strewn battlefield.

But emoji are not, it turns out, well designed to convey meanness. They are cartoons, first of all. And the emoji that ­exist—while very useful for conveying excitement, happiness, bemusement, befuddlement, and even love—are not very good at conveying anger, derision, or hate. If we can take as a given that millennials, as a generation, were raised in a digital environment—navigating, for the first time, digital relationships as an equally legitimate and in some ways dominant form of interpersonal ­interaction—it stands to reason they might be drawn to a communicative tool that serves as an antidote to ambient incivility. They might be especially receptive to, and even excited about, a tool that counteracts the harshness of life in the online world. They might be taken with emoji.

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The Latest Human Rights Crackdown in Uncle Xi’s China

Chinese authorities have recently detained or questioned more than 150 human rights lawyers and activists in an unprecedented nationwide crackdown. Some detainees are missing, and a petition is calling on the U.S. to cancel the Chinese president’s upcoming state visit. In his April New Yorker story “Born Red,” Evan Osnos profiled Big Uncle Xi (the state news agency’s nickname for the president), “China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao”:

Before Xi took power, he was described, in China and abroad, as an unremarkable provincial administrator, a fan of American pop culture (“The Godfather,” “Saving Private Ryan”) who cared more about business than about politics, and was selected mainly because he had alienated fewer peers than his competitors. It was an incomplete portrait. He had spent more than three decades in public life, but Chinese politics had exposed him to limited scrutiny. At a press conference, a local reporter once asked Xi to rate his performance: “Would you give yourself a score of a hundred—or a score of ninety?” (Neither, Xi said; a high number would look “boastful,” and a low number would reflect “low self-esteem.”)

But, a quarter of the way through his ten-year term, he has emerged as the most authoritarian leader since Chairman Mao. In the name of protection and purity, he has investigated tens of thousands of his countrymen, on charges ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets and inciting the overthrow of the state. He has acquired or created ten titles for himself, including not only head of state and head of the military but also leader of the Party’s most powerful committees—on foreign policy, Taiwan, and the economy. He has installed himself as the head of new bodies overseeing the Internet, government restructuring, national security, and military reform, and he has effectively taken over the courts, the police, and the secret police. “He’s at the center of everything,” Gary Locke, the former American Ambassador to Beijing, told me.

***

In Xi’s early months, supporters in the West speculated that he wanted to silence hard-line critics, and would open up later, perhaps in his second term, which begins in 2017. That view has largely disappeared. Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, whose upcoming book, “Dealing with China,” describes a decade of contact with Xi, told me, “He has been very forthright and candid—privately and publicly—about the fact that the Chinese are rejecting Western values and multiparty democracy.” He added, “To Westerners, it seems very incongruous to be, on the one hand, so committed to fostering more competition and market-driven flexibility in the economy and, on the other hand, to be seeking more control in the political sphere, the media, and the Internet. But that’s the key: he sees a strong Party as essential to stability, and the only institution that’s strong enough to help him accomplish his other goals.”

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A Chloe Caldwell Reading List

Photo courtesy of Erika Kleinman

On Tuesday, author Chloe Caldwell announced her second collection of essays, I’ll Tell You in Person: Essays on Intimacy & Identity, is forthcoming from indie publishers Emily Books/Coffee House Press in 2016. Caldwell is one of those writers who, once you encounter her work, inspires you to read everything she’s written, akin to Leslie Jamison or Cheryl Strayed (who happens to be her friend and mentor). My best friend introduced me to Chloe’s first collection of essays, Legs Get Led Astray, and it’s a book I carry with me when I’m in need of comfort. Caldwell’s second book, a novella called Women, garnered critical acclaim (and an Instagram shoutout from Lena Dunham). She’ll show you her demons if you’ll show her yours–her style is deeply personal, almost confessional, but Chloe never seems to write from a place of exhibitionism. She’s simply honest, and in an age of Internet posturing, that feels important. Chloe writes about people who are important to her. She’s important to me, so I thought I’d share some of the things she’s taught me.

#1. Find a community of people who a) are great friends, and b) help you hone your craft: “Who Am I? Two Writers Talk About Life and Nonfiction.”

Chloe took to her personal blog and published four installments of a conversation between her and her good friend, the writer Frances Badalamenti. Rather than an interview, I thought the informal nature of this conversation would be a good introduction to her style. Read more…

Science, Chance, and Emotion with Real Cosima

Clone dance party. Photo via BBC America

Maud Newton | Longreads | June 2015 | 24 minutes (5,889 words)

 

BBC America’s Orphan Black seems so immediate, so plausible, so unfuturistic, that Cosima Herter, the show’s science consultant, is used to being asked whether human reproductive cloning could be happening in a lab somewhere right now. If so, we wouldn’t know, she says. It’s illegal in so many countries, no one would want to talk about it. But one thing is clear, she told me, when we met to talk about her work on the show: in our era of synthetic biology — of Craig Venter’s biological printer and George Church’s standardized biological parts, of three-parent babies and of treatment for cancer that involves reengineered viruses— genetics as we have conceived of it is already dead. We don’t have the language for what is emerging. Read more…

Alone

Longreads Pick

Sam Parker travels to a remote bothy in Scotland — quitting the Internet cold turkey — in a bid to find true solitude.

Author: Sam Parker
Source: Esquire
Published: Jun 10, 2015
Length: 14 minutes (3,599 words)

The Box and the Basement

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Nathan Rabin | Longreads | June 2015 | 8 minutes (1,900 words)

 

“Working in the media in 2015 is like being part of an epic game of Musical chairs. Every day the music starts and you race madly to hold onto your fragile place in the world.”

I published that in a Facebook post after being let go from my latest employer, comparing working in pop culture media in 2015 to participating in an insane daily game of musical chairs. You try your best to keep up, to maintain the heat, the buzz, and the pageviews to stay in a game that has a disconcerting obsession with putting aging writers out to pasture to make way for younger, cheaper, more malleable replacements.

Every time you see that one of your film critic colleagues has been let go or taking a buyout (see: Lisa Schwarzbaum, who was at Entertainment Weekly for 22 years before taking a buyout, or Claudia Puig who took a USA Today buyout after reviewing films there for 15 years), you breathe a nervous sigh of relief. For that day, at least, you are safe. Read more…

Wow. Clickhole.

Longreads Pick

A behind-the-scenes look at Clickhole, a spinoff site from the Onion that was designed to mock the internet and has succeeded in creating satirical stories that have gone viral.

Author: Dan Kois
Source: Slate
Published: Jun 8, 2015
Length: 15 minutes (3,925 words)