Search Results for: NPR

Face Mask Scarcity Leaves California Farmworkers Unprotected

Longreads Pick

The demand for face masks could have profound effects on California agriculture, including the application of different fungicides and an increase in Valley Fever. Many farm workers can’t afford to let risks effect their livelihood, but fear of exposure is reducing the number of workers in certain sectors. Without laborers, $4 billion dollars worth of crops are at risk in Monterey County alone.

Source: CalMatters
Published: Mar 26, 2020
Length: 7 minutes (1,953 words)

How to Predict the Unpredictable

Longreads Pick

After the death of her dog, Katie Gutierrez grapples with the ripple effects of her decisions — and how to live with uncertainty as a mother.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 23, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,370 words)

How to Predict the Unpredictable

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Katie Gutierrez | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,370 words)

 
On the side of a busy road, I called her name: Lola! Lola! Flaxen weeds blew at my knees. Traffic a blur of painted metal. She could be anywhere. And then I saw her — a black pug parting the grass, running toward me. I took her into my arms and pressed my forehead against hers, relief stinging sweet.

I told Adrian about the dream with my eyes still closed. We had only been living together for two weeks, since he’d moved to San Antonio from Sydney to be with me. We’d known each other since we met on a cross-continental flight 10 years earlier, though we’d only been together, long-distance, for the last two years.

When he didn’t respond, I opened my eyes. He was grinning at a Craigslist photo: a black pug puppy drooping in slim-fingered hands. She looked like a child’s school project: clumsily glued googly eyes, pink felt tongue.

“We can’t,” I said, laughing, but he was already sending the email.

We drove to a neighborhood in northwest San Antonio. It was March, and the puppies looked like miniature seals, basking, all shiny black fur and skin rolls. They were big for their age, except for the only girl, the runt in the back corner. At first we passed one of the boys back and forth. Then the girl, who instantly crawled up our necks, her sharp puppy claws sticking like burrs in the collars of our shirts. She licked our chins, swiping at our ears and cheeks.

“This is her, isn’t it?” Adrian asked.

I nodded, thrilled and mystified at where we found ourselves, all because of a dream.

“What should we name her?” I asked.

“I think it has to be Lola,” he said.
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The Nonprofit Hospital That Makes Millions, Owns a Collection Agency and Relentlessly Sues the Poor

Longreads Pick

In partnership with MLK50, ProPublica investigates a nonprofit hospital system’s aggressive debt collection practices with poor patients: “Its own employees are no exception. Since 2014, Methodist has sued dozens of its workers for unpaid medical bills, including a hospital housekeeper sued in 2017 for more than $23,000. That year, she told the court, she made $16,000. She’s in a court-ordered payment plan, but in the case of more than 70 other employees, Methodist has garnished the wages it pays them to recoup its medical charges.”

Source: ProPublica
Published: Jun 27, 2019
Length: 26 minutes (6,630 words)

Unprotected

Longreads Pick

Katie Meyler founded the More Than Me Academy in Liberia to educate girls and get them off the street. She also hired the man who would rape dozens of MTM’s 11 and 12 year old students, impregnating some and leaving others HIV positive.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Oct 11, 2018
Length: 54 minutes (13,700 words)

How ProPublica and NPR Changed the Narrative About Maternity Care in America

A new room in the maternity ward of Maine Medical Center. (Photo by Shawn Patrick Ouellette / Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

Seventeen years ago, Nina Martin’s sister almost died in childbirth. “I remember the trauma of that experience really, really, really well,” recalled Martin. “The disorientation of it and then also, the silencing of it afterwards.”

Martin is ProPublica’s sexuality and gender reporter, and Martin and NPR special correspondent Renee Montagne recently co-authored the first of several stories on maternal care in America. The first part of the series aired on NPR last week, and the other was published on ProPublica as “The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth.”

Over the next several months, Martin and Montagne will release more stories about maternal care in America which will focus on a host of issues surrounding maternal mortality, including racial disparity in care and women with near misses. Every mother has her own story of birth, and all too often these stories go unnoticed, or are buried under platitudes that focus on the health of the baby. Together, Martin and Montagne want to move the conversation back to the mother, and ask why America is the only developed nation where maternal death rates are rising.

Longreads spoke to both journalists about the process of reporting the story, their passion behind the project, and the impact they hope it will have.

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NPR’s Mobile Home Series

Longreads Pick

A two-part report on conditions at mobile home parks in the U.S. Read parts one and two here.

Source: NPR
Published: Dec 26, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,500 words)
NPR
Publisher

Unprepared: The Difficulty of Getting a Prescription for a Drug That Effectively Prevents HIV Infection

Longreads Pick

When Spenser Mestel tries to get a prescription for Truvada in Iowa City, he discovers that medical breakthroughs are only one small part of HIV prevention.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 6, 2016
Length: 22 minutes (5,642 words)