Search Results for: Space

Malls and the Future of American Retail

Longreads Pick

The mall was supposed to be a reinvention of the town square — and for nearly half a century it was, as a public space committed to shopping, eating, or merely lounging around with friends. But the retail apocalypse has taken the core out of the mall, the flagship retail that held it all together, and the new mall may have more in common with a museum, where shopping is less important than an overall mood of luxury and citizenship.

Source: Curbed
Published: Feb 15, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Speaking Candidly about Opioid Dependence and Legal, Safe Alternatives

AP Photo/Richard Vogel

Every ten minutes, an American dies from opioid abuse. In fact, drug overdose is America’s main cause of accidental death. And yet, as journalist Janet Burns points out at Forbes, “the U. S. assigns more favorable legal status to around 50 different opioids than it does to cannabis or psilocybin mushrooms.” Most of those 50 opioids are prescription drugs.

With disarming candor, Burns describes the way a seemingly routine painkiller script led her to full-blown dependence. Going into debt, having to move, buying drugs on the street to ward off withdrawal ─ her experience with prescription painkillers mirrors the experience of the majority of Americans’ who have opioid addiction disorder; four out of five American heroin users started their dependence with prescription medication. Burns uses her experience to make a case for the benefits of legal, accessible medical marijuana to treat the ailments that lead people to opioids. And she show the flaws in America’s war on drugs, which protects the pharmaceutical industry more than American citizens. In her words, “our laws for protecting people form dangerous drugs seem to have far less to do with safety and efficacy than you would hope.”

In the past few years, I’ve also had particular opportunity as a business writer to explore the costs of such policies, and to bring those numbers to light.

I found that cannabis — which currently costs the country billions per year in arrests and incarceration (not counting the cost of lives lost to opioid addiction or other treatable illness), and remains unavailable to millions of patients who need it, including family and friends of mine — stands to deflate the patent-prone pharmaceutical industry by at least $4 billion per year, according to estimates.

I discovered that comparatively cheap programs like syringe exchanges, low- or no-cost medication-assisted treatment and safer injection sites (a.k.a. supervised consumption spaces) have been shown to reduce public disorder, save lives and bring down the cost burden for police and hospitals.

And that the cost of the decades-old drug Naloxone, which reverses overdose, has risen right alongside opioid abuse.

 
Read the story

Little Führers Everywhere

Matthew Heimbach in front of court in Charlottesville, VA. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Vegas TenoldEverything You Love Will Burn | Nation Books | February 2018 | 20 minutes (5,442 words)

The first time I met Matthew Heimbach was in 2011, shortly after my trip to New Jersey with the National Socialist Moment. Our meeting was completely coincidental, and we would both forget about it for several years until we met again. That summer I found myself in the woods of northern North Carolina at the invitation of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My experience with the NSM had resulted in more questions than answers, and I figured that if I wanted to understand the white supremacist movement in America, I might as well start with the “Original Boys in the Hood,” as one of their more popular t-shirts stated.

It took some driving around to find the location of the Loyal White Knights rally. This was another thing that had changed over the years. There was a time, only a few decades ago, when Klan rallies were, if not announced and attended by the public, certainly tolerated enough to be held in the open. In 2011, even in North Carolina, they had been relegated to the backwoods, as far from people as they were from relevance. At the turn-off to a narrow dirt road stood a decrepit old tractor that someone had taken the time to drape in a Confederate flag. It seemed like a clue, so I took a chance and turned left into the woods. Read more…

An Education in Doubt

Cover art for Roald Dahl's novel 'Matilda' / Illustration by Quentin Blake

Catherine Cusick | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (2,900 words)

We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of homeschooling shows a different road that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into schooling back into family education might cure two ailments with one medicine, repairing families as it repairs children.

— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down

I stood and, still shaking, tried to pry loose the small length of copper tubing. I almost had it when Dad flung a catalytic converter. I leapt aside, cutting my hand on the serrated edge of a punctured tank. I wiped the blood on my jeans and shouted, “Don’t throw them here! I’m here!”

Dad looked up, surprised. He’d forgotten I was there.

— Tara Westover, Educated

When I was 9, my dad brought home a copy of Matilda on VHS. Every time I watched Matilda best her unfit parents and take down the unforgivably violent Trunchbull, something would swell in my heart.

“Daddy,” Mara Wilson pleads up to Danny DeVito, one of the only actors ever to plead at him in that direction. “You’re a crook.”

“What?” DeVito says, turning away from training Matilda’s brother in the junk tricks of his trade at the auto shop. He’s teaching his son how to fudge the mileage on used cars by rewinding an odometer with a hand drill.

“This is illegal,” Wilson says, stomping an indignant little foot.

“You make money?” DeVito asks a 9-year-old. “Do you have a job?”

“No,” Wilson replies. (Of course, Wilson does have a job. We are watching her do it. She’s hard at work headlining a major motion picture that ends up grossing $33 million at the box office.)

I, too, am 9 years old, watching Wilson back in 1996, crossing my gangly legs one over the other on the beige carpet in my family’s den.

“But don’t people need good cars?” Wilson-as-Matilda asks. “Can’t you sell good cars, Dad?”

“Listen, you little wiseacre,” DeVito begins, launching into one of those custom-made lines for movie trailers. “I’m smart, you’re dumb; I’m big, you’re little; I’m right, you’re wrong. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Wilson takes one decisive look around. She sees her father’s signature hat next to some superglue.
Read more…

The Internet Isn’t Forever

Illustration by Shannon Freshwater

Maria Bustillos | Columbia Journalism Review | February 2018 |2900 words (12 minutes)

This story is published in collaboration with the Columbia Journalism Review, whose Winter 2018 issue covers threats to journalism.

The Honolulu Advertiser doesn’t exist anymore, but it used to publish a regular “Health Bureau Statistics” column in its back pages supplied with information from the Hawaii Department of Health detailing births, deaths, and other events. The paper, which began in 1856 as the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, since the end of World War II was merged, bought, sold, and then merged again with its local rival, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, to become in 2010 The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. But the Advertiser archive is still preserved on microfilm in the Honolulu State Library. Who could have guessed, when those reels were made, that the record of a tiny birth announcement would one day become a matter of national consequence? But there, on page B-6 of the August 13, 1961 edition of The Sunday Advertiser, set next to classified listings for carpenters and floor waxers, are two lines of agate type announcing that on August 4, a son had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway.

In the absence of this impossible-to-fudge bit of plastic film, it would have been far easier for the so-called birther movement to persuade more Americans that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But that little roll of microfilm was and is still there, ready to be threaded on a reel and examined in the basement of the Honolulu State Library: An unfalsifiable record of “Births, Marriages, Deaths,” which immeasurably fortified the Hawaii government’s assertions regarding Obama’s original birth certificate. “We don’t destroy vital records,” Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman Janice Okubo says. “That’s our whole job, to maintain and retain vital records.” Read more…

Black Disabled Wonder Women Need Love, Too

Crutches from Shutterstock

Britney Wilson | Longreads | February 2018 | 25 minutes (6,304 words)

 

“You good?” you asked, pulling a gray wool blanket up tighter around your shoulders, yawning, and stretching your legs out on the worn blue couch in the corner of my apartment.

“Yeah,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me and attempting to do my version of tiptoeing back over to my bed, hoping the slight clanking of my crutches wouldn’t wake anyone.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me. I was in law school. I’d spent the hours before your arrival cursing the fact that I had been born in the middle of February, and praying for your safe journey as I watched the snowstorm that was beginning outside my window.

The night before, on the phone, I had been worried. The news had been forecasting that the accumulation might be pretty significant, and as sad as the thought had made me, I’d suggested that maybe you shouldn’t come after all. You’d promised it would be fine and that you would all be there. I was genuinely concerned, but equally relieved by your determination.

A lawyer friend of mine had perfectly summed up what my transition from college to law school had been like. She said undergrad was alma mater (as in “dear mother”) and graduate school was the stepmom. You initially hate her because she’s not your mother, and you resent the way she seems to be encroaching on your life. Eventually, as you each come to appreciate the other’s unique role, you develop your own separate relationship and become friends. I liked the analogy, but I was two years in, and still hadn’t gotten to the friendly part. I desperately needed that reunion.

The only guy in the bunch, you had offered to sleep on the floor and give someone else the couch, but they’d insisted you take it. They had put you through enough on the drive up. You deserved your rest.

Because I’d known it would take me the longest, I’d let everyone else get ready for bed before me. So, I was the last person to get in the bathroom after our personal updates and in-house karaoke sessions wound down in the early hours of the morning, after you all arrived. By the time I came out, everyone was asleep, except you. I could tell you’d been fighting it.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me.

I stepped around Mia and Monique, who were lying across the floor old-school slumber party style on a pile of extra sheets. Bending down when I got to my bed, I gingerly placed my crutches on the floor next to it and moved an extra pillow to the head of my bed where Lisa was lying at its foot.

You leaned forward from the couch, craning your neck slightly to watch me climb onto the bed. When you were sure I was all set, you leaned back against the arm of the couch and yawned again.

“Alright, good night. I love you,” you said.

“Good night. I love you too.”

As I closed my eyes that morning, flanked by my friends on all sides, feeling supported and at ease for the first time in months, with your voice as the last one I heard before I fell asleep, I wondered where it had come from — the love.

Read more…

Cataloguing the Detritus of Relationships Past

While all happy couples might not be alike, each unhappy couple is surely unhappy in its own way. And when their relationships end, each leaves its own trail of uniquely meaningful detritus in its wake.

There’s a monument to this phenomenon — the Museum of Broken Relationships, in Zagreb, Croatia, created in 2003 after founders Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić ended their relationship. For the Virginia Quarterly Review, essayist Leslie Jamison visits the museum and considers what stories are told by the objects once shared between former loved ones. She also lauds the idea of memorializing relationships past, and not running away from the melancholy lingering from them.

I could summon my own lost loves as an infinite catalog: a pint of chocolate ice cream eaten on a futon above a falafel shop; a soggy tray of chili fries from the Tommy’s at Lincoln and Pico; a plastic vial of pink-eye medicine; twenty different T-shirt smells; beard hairs scattered like tea leaves across dingy sinks; the three-wheeled dishwasher tucked into the Iowa pantry I shared with the man I thought I would marry. But perhaps the deeper question is not about the objects themselves—what belongs in the catalog—but about why I enjoy cataloging them so much. What is it about the ache that I enjoy, that etched groove of remembering an old love, that vein of nostalgia?

After breaking up with my first boyfriend, when we were both freshmen in college on opposite sides of the country, I developed a curious attachment to the sadness of our breakup. It was easier to miss the happiness of being together when we were no longer together. It was certainly easier than muddling through what our relationship had turned into: something strained by distance, and the gap between the different people we were becoming. Rather than sitting through stilted phone conversations and the hard work of trying to speak to each other, I could smoke my cigarettes outside at night in the bitter Boston cold, alone, and miss Los Angeles, and what it had been like to fall in love there: warm nights by the ocean, kissing on lifeguard stands. I was more comfortable mourning what the relationship had been than I’d been inhabiting the relationship itself. I loved the way sadness felt pure and ascetic: smoking a lot and eating nothing and listening to sad songs on repeat. That sadness felt like a purified bond, as if I was more connected to that man in missing him than I’d ever been while we were together. But it was more than that, too: The sadness itself became a kind of anchor, something I needed more than I’d ever needed him.

Olinka believes that “melancholy has been unjustly banished from the public space,” and told me she mourns the fact that it has been driven into ghettos, replaced by the eerie optimism of Facebook status updates.

Read the story

America’s Duded-Up Kitchens

Martha Stewart Living/Home Depot via AP

As more American men started to cook at home, companies started redesigning kitchen appliances with tough, clean steal and black-matte, and they quit coding designs for females. For instance, “Crock pots” became “slow cookers.” As Ashley Fetters writes at Curbed, this is big a change, because appliances were designed and advertised exclusively to women during most of the 20th century. Unfortunately, by bro’ing up appliances for customers big on their beards and flannels, Fetters shows how companies simply maintain outmoded stereotypes about manliness and femininity, and maintain gendered spaces.

There’s a pervasive notion that when women cook, it’s a chore, and when men cook, it’s an art. Like child-rearing abilities, cooking skills seem to some people to come standard in anyone hoping to ever be a capable wife or mom, but they are perceived as a special extra feature in men—a notion no doubt reinforced by a celebrity-chef culture dominated on one end by high-strung male food auteurs and on the other by friendly female cooking coaches determined to turn you into the most efficient and people-pleasing cook you can be.

Friedman, professor of American art history at Wellesley, has often asked her students to talk in class about the gendered spaces in their homes. And when they do, she said, “There’s a very big difference between the way in which kids say, “My dad really loves to cook and so we have a big kitchen’ and how they say, ‘Well my mom really loves to cook.’

“I think there’s much more of an honorific quality,” she said. “It’s more of a hobby, a leisure activity. The mom has to cook. The dad does not have to cook, according to traditional roles. ‘She has to cook. I’m glad she loves to cook because she has to do it anyway.’”

Read the story

A Shot at Glory

Illustration by J.O. Applegate.

Sam Riches | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (3,309 words)

Peter Forsberg skates in slow, tense circles and waits for his chance at history. It’s the 1994 Olympics and the men’s gold medal hockey game has come down to a shootout. Dressed in Sweden’s vivid gold Tre Kronor, with the matching blue helmet and gloves, Forsberg is a burst of color atop the cold sheet of ice, an interruption to the routine. He has one shot to keep Sweden’s hockey hopes alive.

At the other end of the rink, as Canada’s Corey Hirsch bends forward at the knees, he momentarily drops his head. Then he reaches back with his right arm and knocks the barrel of his goalie stick against the crossbar, twice. The sound of heavy wood on hollow steel rings out and up and fills the arena.

The whistle blows. Forsberg’s skates dig in. Hirsch taps his stick against the crossbar again, confirms this is really happening, and then pushes out of his crease to meet Forsberg. The space between them shrinks.

Forsberg accelerates. He pushes past his own blue line, then over the center line, now he’s in the attack zone. He comes in wide. Hirsch angles to cut him off. Forsberg is out of position. He has no room to shoot.

But he does. He waits until the last possible second, then he reaches back, one glove on his stick, and slips a backhander past Hirsch, who watches helplessly as his momentum carries him in the opposite direction, out of the crease, out of the picture. The puck slides into the back of the net.

It is Sweden’s first Olympic hockey gold. It is their greatest hockey goal. It is a moment commemorated on a postage stamp. But not yet.

Read more…

The Great Stink

CSA Images/Mod Art Collection

Laurie Penny | Longreads | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4270 words)

My heart goes out to men right now. Actually, my heart goes out to all sorts of unsavory places these days, no matter how much I warn it. My heart goes out to men most nights, wearing precarious outfits, no doubt getting exactly what it deserves. It brings back stories.

In the past weeks and months I’ve spent a lot of time sitting across tables from men who have been accused of sexual assault and rape — men who are angry, and afraid, and have no idea what to do now. Men for whom the fast-changing code of sexual and romantic conduct is not the most immediate problem: theirs is that they have been called out, condemned, and are wondering what the next months and years of their lives are going to look like. And in their bitterness I can hear a backlash coming down the tracks.

Read more…