Search Results for: cancer

William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:

Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. ‘The Collapse of American Criminal Justice‘ was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.

“Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong.” — Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe

See also: “The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, Jan. 23, 2012

Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong

Longreads Pick

William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:

“Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Feb 26, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,264 words)

Time's Radhika Jones: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Radhika Jones is executive editor of Time.

I got to work on a number of great longreads at Time this year, among them Lev Grossman on fan fiction, Kate Pickert on the perils of cancer screening, and Kurt Andersen on the Year of the Protester. But these are a few of the pieces from other venues that have stuck with me.

•••

“And I Should Know,” by Roseanne Barr, New York

I didn’t follow the great Charlie Sheen meltdown of spring 2011. But I read every word of Roseanne Barr’s Sheen-inspired treatise on sitcom fame, in which she opens a window onto the warped and warping world of celebrity. It was a brilliant assignment, sharply executed and highly entertaining.

“It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!” by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

This is about the most exhilarating piece of business writing I have ever read, mostly thanks to Lewis’s summary of the trope of shit in German culture and its relation to the European financial crisis, which I found both hilarious and totally plausible. It was like stumbling into a graduate seminar on formalist readings of macroeconomics textbooks. I mean that in a really good way.

“Changing Times,” by Ken Auletta, The New Yorker

There’s nothing flashy or attention-seeking about Ken Auletta’s profile of Jill Abramson; it makes my top five because I found it fascinating to watch a picture of her emerge from the figure she cuts in the workplace. It emerges slowly—you have to wade through a lot of meetings—but Auletta was smart to go for inspirational at the outset: as a woman in publishing, I felt invested in Abramson’s rise and in the way she’s cultivated authority, intelligence and ambition.

“A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs,” by Mona Simpson, The New York Times

We all read a ton about Steve Jobs in the days after his death. Then Mona Simpson’s eulogy came along, reinvented the Jobs memoriam and blew the competition away. It was elegant, personal and lovingly attentive to detail—a tribute perfectly fitted to the man it honored. He was very lucky to have a writer for a sister.

“Cincinnati,” by James Pogue, n+1

I grew up in Cincinnati, back when WKRP was on the air and Jerry Springer was the mayor. It’s a city of in-betweens, and James Pogue’s rambling, evocative essay in n+1 captures its contradictions perfectly. I love the idea of a piece whose main goal is to take you somewhere else—in geography, in history and in memory.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

The late Marjorie Williams on her cancer battle:

We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live … What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like the next person. So when it actually happened, I felt weirdly like an actor in a melodrama. I had—and still sometimes have—the feeling that I was doing, or had done, something faintly self-dramatizing, something a bit too attention-getting. (I was raised by people who had a horror of melodrama, but that’s another part of the story.) In two months I will mark the finish of year 3 B.T.—my third year of Borrowed Time. (Or, as I think of it on my best days, Bonus Time.) When I was diagnosed with Stage IV(b) liver cancer in early July of 2001, every doctor was at great pains to make clear to me that this was a death sentence.

“A Matter of Life and Death.” — Marjorie Williams. Vanity Fair, Oct. 2005

See more #longreads about cancer

A Matter of Life and Death

Longreads Pick

We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live … What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like the next person. So when it actually happened, I felt weirdly like an actor in a melodrama. I had—and still sometimes have—the feeling that I was doing, or had done, something faintly self-dramatizing, something a bit too attention-getting. (I was raised by people who had a horror of melodrama, but that’s another part of the story.) In two months I will mark the finish of year 3 B.T.—my third year of Borrowed Time. (Or, as I think of it on my best days, Bonus Time.) When I was diagnosed with Stage IV(b) liver cancer in early July of 2001, every doctor was at great pains to make clear to me that this was a death sentence.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 1, 2005
Length: 46 minutes (11,667 words)

[Fiction]

“It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I mean, my sisters get pregnant looking at a cologne ad. They get pregnant in pollen season.”

For six months they had been trying to conceive, and still her period was as regular as the tide. She decided to see a doctor. He told her it would be a waste of money, that the fertility counselor would probably recommend treatments linked to uterine cancer. He went into obscure specifics about the effect of fertility drugs on “weak hydrogen bonds” in the DNA molecule. She listened because he was a very intelligent person who knew more than she did about most things, but in the end she arranged an appointment anyway. To her surprise, the fertility counselor told her that drugs were not necessary. Her hormone levels were fine, and her ovarian reserve was well above the baseline for her age.

“Post-Darwinian Experiments in Consciousness and Other Stories.” — Wells Tower, paintings by John Currin, The New York Review of Books

See more #longreads from The New York Review of Books

Post-Darwinian Experiments in Consciousness and Other Stories

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I mean, my sisters get pregnant looking at a cologne ad. They get pregnant in pollen season.” For six months they had been trying to conceive, and still her period was as regular as the tide. She decided to see a doctor. He told her it would be a waste of money, that the fertility counselor would probably recommend treatments linked to uterine cancer. He went into obscure specifics about the effect of fertility drugs on “weak hydrogen bonds” in the DNA molecule. She listened because he was a very intelligent person who knew more than she did about most things, but in the end she arranged an appointment anyway. To her surprise, the fertility counselor told her that drugs were not necessary. Her hormone levels were fine, and her ovarian reserve was well above the baseline for her age.

Published: Sep 28, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,602 words)

The Man Who Invented Free Love

Longreads Pick

Soon after he arrived in the United States—by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity—Wilhelm Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about sex came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ “orgastic potency” and, by extension, their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere and which he christened “orgone energy”; in concentrated form, these mysterious currents could not only help dissolve repressions but treat cancer, radiation sickness and a host of minor ailments.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 7, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,914 words)

On My Mother, and Dr. Kevorkian

Longreads Pick

My mother died twenty years ago this month—on June 19, 1991. At least, that’s the date I observe. It was on the 19th that she gathered the family together and took a lethal dose of Seconal to end her life after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. To allow her to die as she wished, we had to lie, and cheat, and break the law, and that behavior was antithetical to the way we had and have lived. It was bizarre that being a party to my mother’s getting the Seconal would be like helping a junkie get heroin, when all she wanted was to die at home, with us beside her, under what she held to be optimal conditions.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 4, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,854 words)

Won’t Get Fooled Again

Longreads Pick

Rock music in 2011 is not quite what it was in the mid-1960s. For one thing, it is full of challenging coincidences, such as the one reported by Pete Townshend in a recent e-mail. “I was supposed to be sailing in the St Barth’s Bucket Race on March 24th,” he wrote. That’s right: the writer of “My Generation”, “Substitute” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” now spends part of his time as a yachtsman in the Caribbean. “This was arranged last August,” he added. “In a challenging coincidence Roger Daltrey will be performing ‘Tommy’ on that very day for Teenage Cancer [Trust] at the Royal Albert Hall.”

Published: May 29, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,230 words)