Search Results for: Pacific Standard

‘Garbage Comments Cheapen My Work’: Journalist Eva Holland on Freelancing and Commenters

Eva Holland

Eva Holland is a journalist based in the Yukon who has written for publications including Pacific Standard and SB Nation. Her latest Longreads Original, “‘It’s Yours’,” explores the life (and maybe death) of an internet commenter community, “the Horde,” that Ta-Nehisi Coates helped foster at The Atlantic. I spoke with her via email about her own relationship with internet comments as a freelance journalist, and whether there’s hope for building sustainable communities that are not inevitably dragged down by vitriol and spam. Read more…

The 2015 National Magazine Award Winners: A Reading List

This year’s National Magazine Awards were handed out Monday night in New York, with General Excellence honors going to publications including The New Yorker, Glamour, Garden & Gun, Nautilus and The Hollywood Reporter. Vogue won the award for “Magazine of the Year.”

Here’s a brief rundown of some of the winning stories from the night:

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Multimedia: “Beyond the Border” (Texas Observer)

Texas has become the deadliest state in the US for undocumented immigrants. In 2012, 271 migrants died while crossing through Texas, surpassing Arizona as the nation’s most dangerous entry point. The majority of those deaths didn’t occur at the Texas-Mexico border but in rural Brooks County, 70 miles north of the Rio Grande, where the US Border Patrol has a checkpoint. To circumvent the checkpoint, migrants must leave the highway and hike through the rugged ranchlands. Hundreds die each year on the trek, most from heat stroke. This four-part series looks at the lives impacted by the humanitarian crisis.

Read more…

Slither and Hiss: Four Stories About Snakes

This week, I’m sharing four stories about snakes and the people who love, hate, and tolerate them in equal measure. But first, a haiku:

Scary, beautiful
Important to religion
Slithering and scaled.

1. “The Pentecostal Serpent.” (Asher Elbein, The Bitter Southerner, September 2014)

An Atlanta zoo. A dusty office at the University of Tennessee. The mountains of Appalachia. A small church in Alabama. How has the life of the handled snake touched each of these? Read more…

Committed: Stories About Stays in Psychiatric Facilities

In this week’s list, I wanted to share the experiences of those committed—voluntarily or not—to a psychiatric facility. From One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Nellie Bly’s 19th century expose to American Horror Story: Asylum, the “madhouse” occupies a weird space in America’s psyche, equal parts fascinating and feared. But the experiences of the patients and their caretakers are, obviously, very different than sensationalized cinematic accounts.

1. “Something More Wrong.” (Katherine B. Olson, The Big Roundtable, July 2013)

In this well-wrought essay, Katherine B. Olson profiles Alice Trovato, a woman and patient who mothers her unofficial charges and strives to make the most of her stay at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in the greens of Queens. Read more…

Can ‘Mad Maps’ Offer Patients a Way to Take Charge of Their Psychiatric Care?

Like advanced directives for the dying, DuBrul explained, mad maps allow psychiatric patients to outline what they’d like their care to look like in future mental health crises. The logic is: If a person can define health, while healthy, and differentiate health from crisis, that person can shape his or her own care. The maps are not intended to be rejections of psychiatry, though they could be that. The maps are designed to force patients and family members to plan ahead—to treat a relapse as possible or even likely—in order to avoid, or at least minimize, future mistakes.

When Jonas was 16 months old, Giulia and I put a bottle of anti-psychotics in our medicine cabinet, just in case. This might seem reasonable, but it was silly. We hadn’t yet heard of mad maps, so we’d never discussed what a situation would have to look like for Giulia to take the pills, and that made the medication useless. Was she going to take them if she wasn’t sleeping enough? Or was she going to wait until she was already psychotic? If she waited until she was psychotic, she would also likely be paranoid, meaning that she wouldn’t take the pills willingly. Me convincing her to do so at that point would be almost impossible.

…This is where mad maps offer a shard of hope. Giulia and I, finally, are trying to make one, and now that we’re doing so I have to concede that in some ways, Laing was right: The treatment of psychosis is about power. Who gets to decide what behavior is tolerated? Who chooses how and when to enforce the rules? We started trying to create Giulia’s map by discussing the pills in the medicine cabinet. Under what circumstances would Giulia take them, and how much would she take? I took a hardline approach: No sleep for one night, pills at maximum dosage. Giulia wanted more time before jumping to medication, and favored starting the dose out light. We argued bitterly as we outlined our positions and punched holes in each other’s logic. Ultimately we had to sit down with Giulia’s psychiatrist to figure it out. Now we have a plan—for one bottle of pills. It’s a small victory, but a genuine step in the right direction in a world where such steps are rare.

—From “My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward,” a recent essay by Mark Lukach for Pacific Standard. In the piece Lukach discusses his relationship with his wife Giulia, and how it shifted from husband to caregiver and back again after she suffered a psychotic break.

Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business writing.

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Max Chafkin
Writer focusing on business and technology.

Schooled (Dale Russakoff, New Yorker)

This piece explores the failed attempt by Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker, among others, to fix Newark’s schools—and in doing so makes clear just how hard education reform is. Most shockingly, it exposes the huge sums of money spent by the city and its supporters on education consultants who managed to extract huge fees without, apparently, doing a whole lot. It’s pretty hard to make a dense story about education reform read well, but Russakoff amazingly manages it, while managing to be fair and incisive. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

30,000 Words, 700 Jobs, One Year

A few months ago, a friend considering a freelance writing career asked me how much money I make as a writer. I wanted to say, “You mean, what’s the going rate for a human soul?” But I wasn’t close enough to this friend to be certain she’d realize I was mostly kidding. Instead I said, “This month, I made between $25 and $2,000 for individual stories that were about the same length,” to indicate how unpredictable rates are in an industry that is hemorrhaging money while flooded with qualified candidates.

I’ve produced more than 30,000 words of original and highly job-specific material without pay in an effort to prove myself a capable and good sport to the handful of companies that have reached back out to me from the black hole of resume inboxes to give me a chance.

– Prospective employers demand full-time freelancers to produce inordinate amounts of writing as part of their applications, in addition to the usual cover letter and resumé. From sample tweets to an entire magazine, Alana Massey experienced this firsthand. Read more about her experience and the ethics of freelancing at Pacific Standard. 

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The Bureaucracy of Death: A Reading List

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Although more and more countries are abolishing capital punishment, over half the world’s population lives in four of the countries that continue to use it: India, Indonesia, China — and the United States. U.S. public opinion continues to move against the death penalty, but while some states have overturned capital punishment (or never had it), most still sentence people to die. These four pieces examine the range of flaws in a system whose irreversible outcome can ill afford them.

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The Intersection Between Religion and Mental Health: A Reading List

This week, I’ve compiled four pieces about the intersection of religion, mental illness, safe spaces and alternative caregiving.

“Humanist Caregiving: Do We Need Chaplains or Counselors?” (Walker Bristol, Patheos, October 2014)

Atheist communities at Yale, Harvard and Tufts have chaplains who believe the work they do transcends religion; they provide a safe space for existential exploration. What does it mean to be a humanist chaplain? How does their work differ from social work or therapy?

Read more…