Search Results for: New York Review of Books

Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

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In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…

Why Good Health Care Depends on Nurses

What personal care hospitalized patients now get is mostly from nurses. In the MGH ICU the nursing care was superb; at Spaulding it was inconsistent. I had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to patients’ safety and comfort, especially when they are very sick or disabled. This is a lesson all physicians and hospital administrators should learn. When nursing is not optimal, patient care is never good.

Even in the best of hospitals, with the best of medical and nursing care, the ICU can be a devastating psychological experience for patients—as it was for me. Totally helpless, deprived of cohttp://blog.longreads.com/2014/02/04/why-good-health-care-depends-on-nurses/ntrol over one’s body, ICU patients desperately need the comforting presence of family and loved ones. I was fortunate to have that support, but some others in the MGH ICU were not. I can only hope they received extra attention from their nurses.

Arnold Relman, a physician with more than six decades of experience, broke his neck and discovered what it’s like to be critically ill and cared for under today’s health care system. He wrote about the experience for The New York Review of Books.

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Story About Storytelling

In Conversation: Robert Silvers

Mark Danner | New York magazine | April 2013 | 28 minutes (7,063 words)

 

Nicholas Jackson is the digital director at Pacific Standard, and a former digital editor at Outside and The Atlantic.

These year-end lists tend to be like the Academy Awards in that only work released during the last couple of months of the year are remembered well enough to make the cut. That’s a good thing. Sure, I’d like to recall every great quotation I read in 2013, every delightful turn of phrase. But it’s better that I can’t. It means, like movies, that there’s more work I would consider worthy of my time being produced than I could possibly make time for, and plenty that I did make the time for that’s already been displaced in my mind by just the latest of the hundreds of stories I read this year. So, I cheated. I went back through some archives to jog my memory and pulled up this comprehensive interview with Bob Silvers to mark the 50th anniversary of The New York Review of Books. Silvers has had his hands on several big pieces this past year (must-read stories by Zadie Smith and Nathaniel Rich; something about the favelas of Brazil; I vaguely recall an Oliver Sacks essay on, of course, memory), but ask any editor and I bet most would tell you that he’s influenced every piece on these round-ups … and any others you’ve read over the past five decades. This is a story about stories: How we make them, and why.

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Lust in the Golden Years

“Still, I decided, age alone was no basis for rejection. That’s exactly the basis on which I have been rejected many times. The bank, given my age, refused my request for a loan when, in my first year of renting, I found a small house I wanted to buy. The loan I could get—based on my future earning power—would have been a very small one and the down payment would have had to be enormous. On the street, the eyes of the young and not so young slid by me. I look my age. Nobody but someone even older than I wants to look my age. Nobody wants to be my age. I am too close to death for younger people to want to pay attention to me. People think it a great compliment to say to me, ‘You certainly don’t look your age.’ Well, what should my age look like? And if I did look my age, would I be unbearably ugly? Should I stay inside the rest of my life? Because I wasn’t going to look better, not ever. So, really, was I going to do the same with the men who answered my ad? No. It would take more than the age of the writer for a letter to hit the no pile. So it wasn’t Herb’s ‘Have Viagara, Will Travel’ that consigned him to the no pile; it was its brevity.”

-From A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska, a memoir based on a simple ad taken out in The New York Review of Books: “BEFORE I TURN 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Read more on romance.

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Longreads Best of 2013: Best Listicle By Another Name

A Pianist’s A-V

Alfred Brendel | New York Review of Books | July 2013 | 17 minutes (4,233 words)

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Robert Cottrell is editor of The Browser.

The best writers about classical music are professional musicians: think of Jeremy Denk, Stephen Hough, Nico Muhly. (The exception that disproves the rule is Alex Ross.) Charles Rosen, whose contributions were one of the many reasons for reading the New York Review of Books, died this year; Alfred Brendel, another Review contributor from the very highest end of the keyboard, thrives still, though he has given up playing piano publicly. His absence from the stage makes his presence on the page all the more precious: and his “Pianist’s A-V” is evidence of the sensibility, intellect and capacity for delight needed to underpin great interpretative art. His note on Liszt is worth a hundred pages from a lesser hand; he brings Beethoven’s piano concertos to life in a single sentence.

 

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week

animals-thrOur story picks of the week, featuring the Hollywood Reporter, New York magazine, Wired, Oxford American and the New York Review of Books, with a guest pick by Teddy Worcester.

'The Power of a Name': Maya Lin on Making the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

“I made a conscious decision not to do any specific research on the Vietnam War and the political turmoil surrounding it. I felt that the politics had eclipsed the veterans, their service, and their lives. I wanted to create a memorial that everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of whether one thought our country should or should not have participated in the war. The power of a name was very much with me at the time, partly because of the Memorial Rotunda at Yale. In Woolsey Hall, the walls are inscribed with the names of all the Yale alumni who have been killed in wars. I had never been able to resist touching the names cut into these marble walls, and no matter how busy or crowded the place is, a sense of quiet, a reverence, always surrounds those names. Throughout my freshman and sophomore years, the stonecutters were carving in by hand the names of those killed in the Vietnam War, and I think it left a lasting impression on me…the sense of the power of a name.”

Maya Lin on the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in the New York Review of Books. Read more on veterans.

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What One Woman Discovered About Health Care in the Early 20th Century

“Until then, the Health Department had sought to track down sick children and refer them to physicians, a mostly futile endeavor in the days before antibiotics and modern medicine. Baker decided that the new bureau’s mission would instead be prevention. The city had an established and efficient system of birth registration. As soon as a child was born, her name and address were reported to the Health Department. Baker reasoned that if every new mother were properly taught how to feed and care for a baby and recognize the signs of illness, the mother would have a much better chance of keeping the child alive.

“In her first year at the Bureau of Child Hygiene, Baker sent nurses to the most deadly ward on the Lower East Side. They were to visit every new mother within a day of delivery, encouraging exclusive breast-feeding, fresh air, and regular bathing, and discouraging hazardous practices such as feeding the baby beer or allowing him to play in the gutter. This advice was entirely conventional, but the results were extraordinary: that summer, 1,200 fewer children died in that district compared to the previous year; elsewhere in the city the death rate remained high.”

How Sara Josephine Baker revolutionized medical care through her work in the New York City Health Department in the early 20th Century. She chronicled her experiences in a memoir, Fighting for Life. Read more from the New York Review of Books.

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“I did have an interesting (unattributable, of course) briefing from someone very senior in one West Coast mega-corporation who conceded that neither he nor the CEO of his company had security clearance to know what arrangements his own organization had reached with the US government. ‘So, it’s like a company within a company?’ I asked. He waved his hand dismissively: ‘I know the guy, I trust him.’”

“Do MPs and congressmen have any more sophisticated idea of what technology is now capable of? Could they, as supposed regulators, also decipher such documents? A couple of weeks ago I asked the question of another very senior member of the British cabinet who had followed the Snowden stories only hazily and whose main experience of intelligence seemed to date back to the 1970s. ‘The trouble with MPs,’ he admitted, ‘is most of us don’t really understand the Internet.’”

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, in New York Review of Books, on who we trust and what we know when it comes to technology and spying. Read more on spying.

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