Search Results for: Medicine

A Design Aesthetic That Lets You Succeed In a World That Doesn’t Care If You Fail

Christoph Hardt/Geisler-Fotopres/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

If I remember correctly, the term “fern and brass” has been used to describe the hideously bland interior design of lookalike chain restaurants from the 1980s. It didn’t matter what city you were in, be it Spokane or Topeka, they all looked the same. I’m glad I was too young to have fully experienced that, but each generation has their aesthetic and its burdens. For The Cut, Molly Fischer writes a richly detailed analysis and history of a modern design style she calls the “millennial aesthetic,” in a story that has more personality, color, and life in it than any of the interiors she describes. One photo caption in Fischer’s story names the aesthetic’s hallmarks as “Motivational ad copy, soft colors, and photogenic domesticity.” Originality isn’t the point. Sameness has certain virtues, even if they’re clichés. So where did this aesthetic come from? How does it work, and will it and its pinkness ever go away? Our era has eaten the pink pill that sells us design as palliative medicine, something that, as Fischer put it, “functions like a CBD seltzer.” Also, advertising, aspirational lifestyle branding, and consumption are all intertwined in this aesthetic.

If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing, risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it clear that you tried. For a cohort reared to achieve and then released into an economy where achievement held no guarantees, the millennial aesthetic provides something that looks a little like bourgeois stability, at least. This is a style that makes basic success cheap and easy; it requires little in the way of special access, skills, or goods. It is style that can be borrowed, inhabited temporarily or virtually. At the very least, you can stay a few hours in a photogenic co-working venue. At the very least, Squarespace gives you the tools you need to build your own presentable online home.

Fischer explains the central role that the color pink plays, and its surprising popularity.

No account of the millennial aesthetic could fail to address pink: For the better part of a decade, millennial pink bedeviled anyone a color could bedevil. When Facebook rolled out a corporate rebrand last fall, the lead image in the press release showed the new logo — breezily spaced sans serif — in a muted shade somewhere on the ham-to-salmon spectrum. Samuel keeps wondering when people will get sick of the color, but they don’t; almost every client asks for pink. She thinks this is because it’s soothing. They want houses that remind them of vacations, suggest Mediterranean idylls.

“It kind of feels like a binky,” Deborah Needleman, the former editor of T, WSJ., and Domino, says of millennial interiors. (Boob-print pillows and bath mats are perhaps the most literal expression of a general tendency toward the comforts of babyhood.) Needleman sees not a trip to Greece but something more like childproofing. “It’s like it has no edge or sense of humor or sense of mystery,” she says. “There’s no weirdness. There’s nothing that clashes. It is very controlled.”

It’s amusing to note that the PRADA ad in this article’s sidebar turns the brand name into an acronym for “Play Responsibly And Dress Authentically” — one of the motivational ad slogans that Fischer mentions. The ad’s background is 80% pink, and its design elements lack the authenticity its motto tries to sell.

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8 Longreads by Will Storr on the Science of Storytelling

Author Will Storr (Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Getty Images)

“People change, don’t they?” journalist and author Will Storr asks at the beginning of an Aeon essay called “Plot Twist.” That question has been at the heart of Storr’s writing for years now, a question he carries with him throughout so many of his investigations into science, belief, and the human impulse to tell stories.

Storr has a knack for starting with a simple statement that anyone can intuitively understand, then revealing how deceptive both simplicity and intuition can be. Storr’s willingness to challenge even his most basic assumptions appears most often in his stories as curiosity, which he brings anew to all of his conversations with sometimes desperate story subjects who find themselves facing some of life’s most serious consequences.

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A Survey of My Right Arm

Greenspe Huang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

Ge Gao The Threepenny Review | Fall 2019 | 15 minutes (3,057 words)

 

Last summer, I woke up one morning to find my right hand couldn’t grab the doorknob to turn it open. The next thing I knew was that no matter how many times I shook it, it remained numb. Soon, on a hot June night, a furtive pain traveled from my right elbow to my palm, back and forth, through and through, like a fractious child jumping between hopscotch courts with his full body gravity, determined and ferocious.

I am a Chinese woman. Two things I am good at are self-diagnosing and self-preservation. I went to a Chinese massage place the next morning. The lady there told me it was “tennis elbow.” Which seemed funny and unfair to me: I had never played tennis in my life. When I was eighteen and dreamed about my future self wearing a short white tennis skirt, running in a blue court, I signed up for a tennis class—and quit after the first session. My skinny right arm was not capable of holding a 9.4-ounce tennis racquet against a spinning ball. The lady at the massage place first used her arm, then her feet to dissolve the knots on my forearm. A day later, small black and blue bruises on my right arm left a message—there was pain; there was suffering. I consciously wore long sleeves to cover it up, afraid of being misunderstood as a domestic violence victim. But I would roll my sleeve up when I met my friends for coffee. It was show and tell: my pain needed to be noticeable to others as well.

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25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

* * *

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

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Sight and Insight

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Liane Kupferberg Carter | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (4,092 words)

I was born with strabismus, an imbalance in the muscles that position the eyes. Strabismus: from the Greek strabismós, meaning “to squint.” People sometimes call it cross-eyed, wall-eyed, or lazy-eyed.

I was still a toddler when my mother started taking me to doctors. They prescribed drops, eye exercises, and, eventually, glasses when I was 4. Mom chose blue and white striped cat eye frames for me. “These are adorable,” she said. If she said they were pretty, I assumed they must be. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wear them. But my mother wore glasses too, and I wanted to please her.

When the glasses didn’t help enough, the doctor instructed her to put a patch over one lens to force my weaker right eye to work better. That afternoon I went down the street to play with the neighborhood kids. There was a new girl with them. She asked, “Why are you wearing that patch?”

“I’m a pirate,” I said.

“That’s stupid,” she replied. “Girls can’t be pirates. You look ugly.”

I pushed her. She tumbled back onto the lawn and started to wail. A door flew open, and an enormous dog bounded at me, nipping and snapping. Frantic, I tried to get away, but a woman who must have been the girl’s mother grabbed me, her nails digging into my shoulder. She wrenched my arm behind my back and hissed in my ear, “Who’s your mother? You’re a very bad little girl.”

Sobbing and ashamed, I stumbled down the sidewalk, desperate for my mom. By the time I burst through the back door I was panting. Mom looked angry. The scary lady must have telephoned. “You know better than that,” Mom scolded. “I’m disappointed in your behavior.”

I was awash in incoherent misery. Why wasn’t she taking my side?

But I knew. It was because I was bad. An ugly, bad girl.
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At Mrs. Balbir’s

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jillian Dunham | Longreads | January 2020 | 12 minutes (3,036 words)

I sat on the edge of the bed in my hotel room in Bangkok and dialed. Below me, longboats and water taxis bounced across the Chao Phraya like motorized toys. As much as I wanted for someone to answer the phone, for something to happen, I also hoped that it would go on ringing forever. I was nervous about contact.

The voice that answered startled me with its warmth. “This is Mrs. Balbir,” she answered. I explained that my aunt and I were interested in the Thai cooking classes she taught, listed in my Lonely Planet. “I teach out of my home,” she explained, and proceeded to give me directions. “Tell the taxi to go towards the end of Sukhumvit Soi 15,” she explained. She described the courtyard in which she lived and the tiny sign outside that identified her building. “Come a little early, we’ll have tea and talk,” she said, her voice sweet but a little unnerving, like a blurry bird’s. It was as if we were already acquainted. I didn’t wait for her to hang up first.
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What Was Going Wrong With My Pregnancy?

Longreads Pick
Published: Jan 24, 2020
Length: 8 minutes (2,053 words)

Through a Glass, Tearfully

Illustration by Hannah Li

Maureen Stanton | Longreads | January 2020 | 26 minutes (6,448 words)

In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan, the room quiet but for our muffled sniffling. I hadn’t expected the quilt — a patchwork of many quilts — to affect me so powerfully, the clothes and artifacts and mementos stitched into tapestries, with dates of births and premature deaths, soft beautiful tombstones.

Humans are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. Animals do not shed tears of emotion; apes have tear ducts but only to “bathe and heal” the eyes. Crying makes us human. In the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people who’d been replaced by aliens could no longer cry, a telltale sign that they were not human. In one scene, a man carries a pod containing the alien replica of a small child. “There’ll be no more tears,” he tells the child’s mother.

***

Some people are super tasters or super smellers, or even super see-ers, with an uncanny ability to remember faces. I am a super crier, or maybe a super empathizer. An astrologer once said that my soul bears the karmic burden of feeling others’ pain as if it were my own. This is apparently because of the placement on my birth chart of the comet Chiron, “the wounded healer,” named after a Greek centaur who could heal everyone but himself.

Once, in Columbus, Ohio, I choked up at Taco John’s, a brand new mom and pop joint, all spiffy with shiny stainless steel, but empty of customers. I could see the work and sacrifice the family had made to realize their dream — opening a taco shop. I could feel their hope when I walked in the door, but I could calculate the meager profit from my order against the cost of utilities, salaries, supplies. I could see their dream failing.

I nearly lost it again at Karyn’s Kitchen, a food truck in someone’s yard along the road to my house in Maine. Karyn probably figured she’d snag summer traffic on the way to the beach, but who wants to eat in someone’s yard? I ate there once out of pity — her husband’s “famous” meatloaf, which she served with mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, and two slices of white bread with a pat of margarine. When I asked her to heat up the cold gravy, she microwaved it until the plastic container melted and handed it to me like that. When I drive by Karyn’s yard now, I can’t stand to look at the empty space where her dream failed.

A woman in a laundromat once yelled at her small son, “No one wants to hear you,” and I got a lump in my throat.
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The 25 Most Popular Longreads Exclusives of 2019

Our most popular exclusive stories of 2019. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

1. The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People

Laura Lippman | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,147 words)

Laura Lippman, admittedly a rotten friend, is bummed by the ways in which friendships end as one gets older.

2. Atlantic City Is Really Going Down This Time

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

There’s no doubt that Atlantic City is going under. The only question left is: Can an entire city donate its body to science? Read more…

An Addict, a Nurse, and a Christmas Resurrection

Iknuitsin Studio / Getty, and Homestead Studio

Suzanne Ohlmann | Longreads | December 2019 | 16 minutes (4,121 words)

I once cared for a patient who looked like Jesus and, after 40 days in a coma, rose from the dead on my shift. I worked nights as an intensive care nurse on an abdominal transplant unit, and Leonard was the spitting image of the white sacred heart Son of God.

It was the week of Christmas when he became my patient, though Leonard had been hospitalized since before Thanksgiving. He was 50 years old and smelled of dried sweat, sour breath, and incontinent bowels. Before I’d been assigned to Leonard’s care, every major organ system had failed, down to his skin, his entire body covered in large, fluid-filled welts called bullae. He was dependent on the mechanical ventilator due to respiratory failure, and connected to the machine by a tracheostomy tube surgically inserted into his throat. His blood pressure and heart were sustained by three different intravenous medications, and his failed kidneys replaced with hemodialysis, the blood from his body washed by an intricate filtering mechanism the size of a Pepsi machine. He had tubes in every orifice, nostrils to anus. Alone, his family three states away, Leonard’s comatose state left him completely vulnerable to the whims of his medical team. He was incapable of closing his eyes, his stare casting an eerie spell over the room until we decided to start taping his eyelids shut for two-hour intervals. Nurses clucked their tongues upon hearing his story, shaking their heads at his plight with a combination of disbelief and indignation, whispering reactions like, “He should have known better,” or, my favorite, “People like that are the reason I’m not an organ donor.”

Leonard was an alcoholic and had Hepatitis C, most likely from IV drug use, though it’s possible he wasn’t aware of his diagnosis. When he went out with his fellow migrant construction workers to a seafood joint north of San Antonio, he should have ordered the fish and chips. But Leonard ordered a plate of raw oysters, fresh from the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe one of Leonard’s physicians had warned him about raw oysters and Hepatitis C. Maybe Leonard knew that because he had Hep C, he shouldn’t drink alcohol; that his immune system was weakened by his ailing liver; that raw or undercooked seafood from the warm waters of the Gulf can carry a monster bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus; that a person with Hep C who contracts Vibrio vulnificus faces a 50 – 85% mortality rate from infection and septic shock. Maybe Leonard knew, but I doubt it. I can’t say that he should have known better.

***

My biological father died of liver failure at age 50 from alcohol and Hepatitis C. His name was Mike, and I had just discovered him in the year leading up to my care of Leonard. My first full year as an intensive care nurse coincided with my first year of contact with Mike’s family. If Mike had known better and skipped the needles and beer, he might have lived long enough to meet me, but he didn’t, and died not knowing of my existence. A year before I met Leonard, I sent identical letters and a photograph to my father’s two siblings, Aunt Christine and Uncle Greg. I’d found their names in his obituary, and located their address on the Internet. They shocked me with emails of sudden welcome just days after I’d sent the letter. I had to lie down when I read phrases like, “You’re part of our family,” and, “Your dad would have been so proud.”

Before I’d been assigned to Leonard’s care, every major organ system had failed, down to his skin, his entire body covered in large, fluid-filled welts called bullae.

After the initial exchange of letters, Uncle Greg asked to talk on the phone. When I called, he skipped the chitchat and dove into Mike stories: that he was his big brother and best friend; that he never missed a birthday; that he loved to work with his hands and had a bit of a mail-order problem.

“He sure did love his knick-knacks from the Franklin Mint,” he said.

“How did Mike die?” I asked.

“Well, Mike liked to drink Old Milwaukee,” he said.

“Old Mill? Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “I never liked that stuff — got a real twang to the taste — but Mike drank it for breakfast.”

I laughed. “Breakfast?” I asked.

“Yeah, let’s see: there was the beer, and Mike partied pretty hard in the 70’s. You know how it was: live hard, die young,” he said.

“Yeah,” I lied, thinking of my parents, who spent their 70’s (and 80’s, and 90’s, amen) singing in Lutheran church choir, eating at potlucks in the church basement, or practicing recorder for their failed recorder group. We have photos documenting Dad playing a polished, wooden, tenor recorder, a bowl of black hair on his head, with my mom laughing in a hand-sewn denim suit, blonde highlights in her hair, cocktail glasses of soda within reach of each of them.

“We’re pretty sure Mike had hepatitis from all that partying, so that didn’t help with the beer,” he said.

“Hepatitis? Which hepatitis?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “we’re thinking it was probably Hep C that got Mike in the end. Hep C and beer.”
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