Search Results for: health

Naked and Unafraid: A Reading List About Nudity

Here are five stories about the sociopolitics of stripping down.

1. “Babes at the Museum.” (Kyle Chayka, Adult Magazine, December 2014)

Kyle Chayka took his first figure drawing class at age 12. He discusses intention versus interpretation and nakedness versus nudity in this thought-provoking essay about figure drawing.

But as long as you approach it with the right mentality there’s no wrong way to go about figure drawing. Replicating the infinitely complicated human form might get easier over time, but it’s never perfect. What matters are the qualities you bring to the drawing, the artificial work of art that comes from the physical body as it exists in the world. In a way, the artist brings a lie to the fact.

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Violet

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Adele Oliveira | Longreads | January 2016 | 23 minutes (5,727 words)

 

I don’t believe in fate, or that life events, both everyday and profound, unfold the way that they’re supposed to. Yet the first six months of my first pregnancy were at once mundane and ordained. I got pregnant quickly. Morning sickness and a sore back arrived right on schedule. Growing up, my mom acquainted me with the details (like gaining 60 pounds) of her two healthy pregnancies and the unmedicated, uncomplicated births that resulted in me and my sister. I’d wanted to be a mother since I was a toddler pretending to breastfeed my dolls, and so I outlined the birth of a healthy child in an indelible mental framework, so unconscious and routine that it felt like destiny.

My pregnancy ended abruptly when our daughter Violet was born two years ago in late September, at 25 weeks gestation, about three months ahead of schedule. The day of Violet’s birth feels like a bad dream, partly because I was on a variety of strong drugs. I remember almost all of it with nauseating specificity, but it still doesn’t seem quite real; like it happened to somebody else.  Read more…

Stephen Rodrick Returns Home to Flint

The Flint River in the 1970s. Via Wikimedia Commons

The human damage is incalculable. Think of a mother waking in the middle of the night to make formula for her baby girl and unwittingly using liquid death as a mixer. Lead poisoning stunts IQs in children, many of whom in Flint are already traumatized by poverty, arson and rampant gunfire outside their doors. And for what?

In Rolling Stone, Stephen Rodrick returned to Flint, Michigan, to investigate how government neglect led to a massive health crisis. For more on Flint, read Upvoted’s interview with Flint-based journalist Ron Fonger, who covered the disaster as it unfolded.

What Goes into Japan’s Famous Powdered Green Tea

Matcha ─ you’ve read about its health benefits, you’ve seen it in chic cafes sold as bright green lattes and iridescent bubble teas. Consumed in Japan since the 12th century, it’s suddenly trending in America. So what is it and where does it come from? In Serious Eats, food writer Matthew Amster-Burton provides a rare look inside matcha’s complex, multi-step production process. With his usual good humor, Burton takes readers through a factory in southern Japan and details the stages of production, from the tea fields to the leaves’ drying to the creation of tencha, the shaded leaf that eventually gets pulverized between stones. It’s a fascinating look inside one of the world’s most rarified and ancient beverages, and an education for those who just know matcha as that stuff in green ice cream.

I asked if I could taste a leaf. “Go ahead,” said Toshimi Nishi. I pulled one off and stuffed it into my mouth. It was tough and fibrous and tasted like, well, a leaf. How does anyone taste this and decide it’ll make good tea?

Toshimi Nishi can. He’s more like a chef than a corporate suit. He’s the man in charge, but he has an encyclopedic knowledge of tea. And he can learn a lot by tasting a raw leaf: the variety of tea bush, the quality, the time of year. Spring-harvested tea is considered higher quality than late-season tea. It was now July, hot and humid even in the mountains. Specialized tractors with spindly legs and deadly blades on the underside stood by, ready to give the rows of tea a haircut during the next harvest.

We got back in the car and headed for the factory. “Do people at the factory drink tea all day?” I asked Takahashi.

“Nah, they mostly drink coffee.”

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Will One Doctor’s Radical New Vaccine End the AIDS Epidemic?

Longreads Pick

At Portland Monthly, Jennifer Abbasi profiles Louis Picker, a vaccine researcher at Portland’s Oregon Health & Science University who is working toward an AIDS cure within the next two decades.

Published: Dec 21, 2015
Length: 12 minutes (3,092 words)

On the Brink of a Cure: An Innovative Immunologist’s Quest for an AIDS Vaccine

Louis Picker, an immunologist at Portland’s Oregon Health & Science University, believes he’s working toward a vaccine to prevent and cure AIDS: “I think within 15 years we’ll have both.” In 2013, his vaccine research showed the first evidence of monkeys eradicating the AIDS-causing virus from their bodies; he inoculated them with weakened CMV — or cytomegalovirus, an infectious agent in the herpes family — which not only pumped up their immune systems and fought off the virus, but killed it off entirely. At Portland Monthly, Jennifer Abbasi profiles the ambitious researcher, whose project’s first human study is set to begin later this year.

Picker set out to prevent AIDS, not cure it. In 2006, he and his team began vaccinating macaques against SIV, the monkey version of HIV. The researchers placed bits of SIV genes inside weakened CMV, hoping the macaques’ immune systems would then mount their natural immediate, large-scale response to CMV. “The immune system will make a response both to the CMV genes and to the SIV or HIV genes that will be in the same flavor, so to speak,” Picker explains. This approach contrasts sharply with that of most HIV vaccine projects, which typically focus on generating antibodies to block infection. Instead, Picker’s method aims to provoke T cells to prevent an infection from progressing to disease. Two years after he inoculated the first group of monkeys with the CMV-based vaccine, he exposed them to SIV.

In 2013, Nature reported Picker’s surprising findings: not only were most of the macaques able to control SIV, but over time their immune systems completely killed off the virus. It was the first evidence of monkeys eliminating the AIDS-causing virus from their bodies. Says Koff: “Louis straddles the prevention and the cure. The most intriguing thing about his vaccine is that the responding animals appear to clear the infection.”

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Resolving to Read, Write, and Travel More in 2016

Let’s be real: My 2016 resolutions are intentionally vague. I tend toward self-loathing, so settling on achievable goals is important for my mental health. But I’m still excited for a fresh year and a fresh start, even if time is a social construct. My intentionally vague, utterly achievable resolutions are as follows: Read more…

10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2016

Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li (Photo by Don Feria/Getty Images for The MacArthur Foundation Awards, via Wikimedia Commons)

Below is a guest post from Mumbai-based writer-filmmaker—and longtime #longreads contributor—Pravesh Bhardwaj (@AuteurPravesh). Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Investigative Reporting

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

* * *

Lauren Kirchner
Senior Reporting Fellow at ProPublica.

The Price of Nice Nails (Sarah Maslin Nir, The New York Times)

I can’t remember another investigation that had as much widespread and immediate impact as this one. Through a year of persistent and patient reporting, Nir uncovered the ugly truth of New York’s nail salon industry: the labor exploitation, institutionalized racism, and dire health risks faced by its manicurists. It was an explosive story, but Nir told it with restraint. When this came out, everyone I knew was talking about it. Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio both pretty much immediately launched emergency task forces and investigations to address the problems Nir described. Reforms continue to roll out for salon owners who put their workers at risk.

But I noticed a subtler impact, too: some real soul-searching among New Yorkers about the ethics of indulging in cheap luxuries—for many of us, the only luxuries we can afford. A lot of readers were asking themselves, how could we have not have seen it? “We hold hands with this person for a half hour; we look into her eyes,” as Nir later put it. “I think my investigation revealed that we are not seeing them.” Read more…

Recovery Sham

Longreads Pick

An in-depth investigation into an exceedingly shady drug rehab mogul: Christopher Bathum built a veritable empire of more than 20 sober-living houses and outpatient clinics in the Los Angeles area, despite being neither a licensed drug counselor nor a therapist. Amidst allegations of sex abuse, drugs, and fraud, he’s now the target of probes by nearly every large insurance company in California, as well as the FBI, LAPD, L.A. County District Attorney and California Department of Health Care Services.

Source: LA Weekly
Published: Dec 17, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,982 words)