Search Results for: Review

What the Smartphone Is Doing to Fiction

“There’s nothing worse for plots than cellphones. Once your characters have one, there’s no reason for them to get lost or stranded. Or miss each other at the top of the Empire State Building. If you want anything like that to happen, you either have to explain upfront what happened to the phones or you have to make at least one character some sort of manic pixie Luddite who doesn’t carry one.”

Rainbow Rowell and other authors discuss the effect of technology on their work (New York Times). Read more on tech in the Longreads Archive.

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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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“In the jargon of economics, the demand for therapeutic drugs is ‘price inelastic’: increasing the price doesn’t reduce how much the drugs are used. Prices are set and raised according to what the market will bear, and the parties who actually pay the drug companies will meet whatever price is charged for an effective drug to which there is no alternative. And so in determining the price for a drug, companies ask themselves questions that have next to nothing to do with the drugs’ costs. ‘It is not a science,’ the veteran drug maker and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer told me. ‘It is a feel.’”

– An examination of how pharmaceutical companies determine the price of drugs. Read more on medicine in the Longreads Archive.

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“The problem today is that neither individual homebuyers nor even larger commercial builders drive ‘market forces.’ Instead, the market for real estate construction comprises managers of hedge funds and speculators who buy buildings and homes as rental properties. They are waiting for the value of the buildings to rise, as they had before the 2008 collapse. By early 2014, these high-volume buyers will most likely be near their short-term return on investment (ROI) with their investors and therefore looking to sell.”

-A modest proposal for remaking America through construction and real estate, from LA Review of Books. Read more on housing in the Longreads Archive.

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“Who, after all, would want to compile an exhaustive list of mental illnesses? The opening passages of DSM–5 give us a long history of the purported previous editions of the book and the endless revisions and fine-tunings that have gone into the work. This mad project is clearly something that its authors are fixated on to a somewhat unreasonable extent. In a retrospectively predictable ironic twist, this precise tendency is outlined in the book itself. The entry for obsessive-compulsive disorder with poor insight describes this taxonomical obsession in deadpan tones: ‘repetitive behavior, the goal of which is […] to prevent some dreaded event or situation.’ Our narrator seems to believe that by compiling an exhaustive list of everything that might go askew in the human mind, this wrong state might somehow be overcome or averted.”

-Sam Kriss offers a “review” of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, reimagined as a dystopian novel (via The New Inquiry).

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Confessions of a Drone Warrior

Longreads Pick

From a windowless box in Nevada, Airman First Class Brandon Bryant helped pilot drones that killed over a thousand people as part of the U.S. drone warfare program:

Bryant’s laser hovered on the corner of the building. “Missile off the rail.” Nothing moved inside the compound but the eerily glowing cows and goats. Bryant zoned out at the pixels. Then, about six seconds before impact, he saw a hurried movement in the compound. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person.” Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot. “And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 26, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,485 words)

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other. … By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

Paul Krugman, 1998 (via New York Review of Books). Read more on the past, present and future of the Internet.

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Afghanistan Undone

Longreads Pick

CBC reporter Mellissa Fung was kidnapped, stabbed, and thrown down a hole outside Kabul where she spent 28 days in captivity. Five years later, she returned to Afghanistan:

“Back at home after my ordeal, I refused to let my nightmares rise out of the darkness. I took on the cause of wounded soldiers as a personal journalistic mission. I visited almost every Canadian Forces base in the country, reporting on soldiers suffering from traumatic brain injuries or PTSD, or struggling over disputed claims with the Veterans Review and Appeal Board. But I couldn’t shake the guilt that nagged at me. I sought the help of a therapist, who assured me that my anxiety—a sense of something unfinished—was part of my ‘new normal.’ Still, I was haunted by those I had left behind. I had gone to Afghanistan to expose the plight of displaced people, abused women, and orphaned children. Instead, because of my kidnapping, I had become the story.

“All of this left me desperate to go back, even though some of my friends and family thought I was crazy. CBC was reluctant to send me to Afghanistan: what if I was kidnapped again? My inability to return made me feel like a hostage all over again, helpless and powerless. Unable to let it rest, I read articles and books, and set up a Google Alert on anything to do with the country I thought I would never set foot in again. I didn’t realize it then, but I was slowly becoming a stakeholder in the futures of those girls and women.”

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Oct 11, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,272 words)

Reading List: Stories From the Working Class

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

I read a brilliant piece, “Zen and the Art of Cover Letter Writing,” that reminded me that I had not yet featured the stories of those suffering under the yoke of this abusive economy.

These are stories about injustice, about broken promises, about frustration and desperation and of course, debt. This is a list for anyone caught in a gross transition period, in a dead-end job, who is trying to make something, anything work out long-term. This is a list for anyone who has been told to “just find a job” or “you can do anything you set your mind to” or “your generation is so lazy/narcissistic/vapid.” This is a list for anyone who has been late on their rent, or hassled by credit card companies, or received overdue loan warnings. You’re not alone.

1. “Young, Multi-Employed, and Looking for Full-Time Work in San Francisco.” (Lucy Schiller, The Billfold, May 2013)

The Billfold is my go-to site for voyeurism, empathy, financial advice, and great storytelling. Schiller and her friends attempt to “ford the murky river of the hiring process” of self-employment, multiple part-time jobs and internships—anything but traditional full-time work.

2. “Retail Workers Need Rights, Too.” (S.E. Smith, This Ain’t Livin’, Febraury 2013)

Retail workers work long hours for practically minimum wage, with hidden physical and emotional abuses, few benefits, and intolerant leave policies.

3. “How She Lives on Minimum Wage: One McDonald’s Worker’s Budget.” (Laura Shin, Forbes, July 2013)

A single mother of four shares the harrowing experience of living on her part-time job’s minimum wage.

4. “‘We’ve Got Ph.D.s Working as File Clerks.” (Will Owen, The Washington Blade, June 2013)

The recently founded Association of Transgender Professionals (ATP) works to further transgender equality in the workplace in the U.S. and abroad. ATP helps trans* individuals prepare for interviews, apply for jobs, and find employment; it also assists companies in recruiting LGBTQ folks.

5. “The Burdens of Working-Class Youth.” (Jennifer M. Silva, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2013)

Silva spoke to over a hundred working-class citizens in Lowell, Mass. and Richmond, Va. She found that education for working-class teens is no path to success; rather, these students have no one to advocate for them or explain the labyrinthine bureaucracy of higher education and financial planning, which ends in a dead-end of debt and frustration.

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Reading List: Stories From the Working Class

Longreads Pick

This week’s reading list from Emily Perper includes stories from The Kenyon Review, The Billfold, This Ain’t Livin’, Forbes, The Washington Blade, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 6, 2013