Search Results for: health

Why Our Ignorance Makes Us Overestimate How Much We Know

Impostor syndrome has been covered extensively in recent years. Its inverse, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, is at least as pervasive: our innate tendency to confidently claim expertise in topics we know very little about, sometimes to embarrassing (if not tragic) results. Writing for Pacific Standard, David Dunning, who led the first studies of this phenomenon, explores the ways in which our inflated sense of knowledge is a defining attribute of human nature.

The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as an absence of knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence. Here’s a particularly frightful example: Driver’s education courses, particularly those aimed at handling emergency maneuvers, tend to increase, rather than decrease, accident rates. They do so because training people to handle, say, snow and ice leaves them with the lasting impression that they’re permanent experts on the subject. In fact, their skills usually erode rapidly after they leave the course. And so, months or even decades later, they have confidence but little leftover competence when their wheels begin to spin.

In cases like this, the most enlightened approach, as proposed by Swedish researcher Nils Petter Gregersen, may be to avoid teaching such skills at all. Instead of training drivers how to negotiate icy conditions, Gregersen suggests, perhaps classes should just convey their inherent danger—they should scare inexperienced students away from driving in winter conditions in the first place, and leave it at that.

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Desperate Characters

Photo via Roger W/Flickr

Paula Fox | Desperate Characters | W.W. Norton & Company | 1970 | 16 minutes (4,046 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Desperate Characters, the novel by Paula Fox first published in 1970 and re-(re-)released this year on the 45th anniversary of its publication. Read Sari Botton’s Longreads interview with Fox about her book.  Read more…

The Amy Winehouse Documentary Doesn’t Pander

Like Senna’s, Winehouse’s family co-operated with Kapadia, but unlike them, they are displeased with the film, and it’s not hard to see why. As well as a welcome portrait of the frequently caricatured Winehouse as an (exceptional) artist and as a person, Amy is an indictment of those around her, especially her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, with whom she developed a set of addictions that derailed her life, her manager, Raye Cosbert, and her father, Mitch, all of whom are portrayed as prioritising her career (and thus theirs) over her health. It is rare to see a non-fiction film in which the goodies seem so good and the baddies so bad, and the effect can be confusing, especially for those of us whose existing assumptions about what happened to Winehouse align with what is shown here. Are we being pandered to? Footage of Fielder-Civil, both from before and during his disastrous relationship with Winehouse, is difficult to watch, and I wondered several times whether the expression of smug, bratty cunning on his face was at least in part a projection of mine, or the director’s. (Having said that, if there’s a more appealing side to Fielder-Civil, it’s not obvious. ‘I can’t sing, so therefore Amy’s life is the only one that is ever valid,’ he recently complained to an interviewer. ‘I almost feel like I’m being punished.’)

Lidija Haas writing in the London Review of Books about Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy, about the singer Amy Winehouse.

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The Mysteries and Truths of Illness: A Reading List

Photo: NVinacco

In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work.” What happens when that long work is disrupted, when an irregularity appears? What if the irregularity is chronic, terminal, fatal? Here, I’ve collected 10 stories about authors reckoning with illnesses—some without cause or cure. Read more…

It’s Not Just About the Minimum Wage: Barbara Ehrenreich Revisits Her Book

So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list — a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.

Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.

Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can’t afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty — though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down.

—From Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2011 TomDispatch essay, which was adapted from the afterword of the 10th anniversary edition of her bestselling 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. When she worked on the book, Ehrenreich took jobs as a waitress, nursing-home aide, hotel housekeeper, Wal-Mart associate, and maid with a house-cleaning service. “I did not choose these jobs because they were low-paying. I chose them because these are the entry-level jobs most readily available to women,” she explained in an article last year for The Atlantic. Concern about income inequality has encouraged cities and states to raise the minimum wage, and the push has been gaining prominence in the presidential campaign.

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The Heroin Heroine of Reddit

Longreads Pick

How a former heroin addict turned public health advocate uses the internet to save lives.

Source: Backchannel
Published: Jul 21, 2015
Length: 10 minutes (2,623 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Matt

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Missing History of Ravensbrück, The Nazi Concentration Camp for Women

Sarah Helm | Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women | Nan A. Talese | March 2015 | 48 minutes (13,071 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from Ravensbrück, by Sarah Helm, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

Fishing Lower on the Food Chain

From the perspective of small fish, the potential collapse of predatory species such as cod, tuna, and swordfish, which are popular with diners, would seem to be good news. However, as the larger, high-value fish became increasingly scarce, the fishing industry turned to farming, and those penned fish needed something to eat. Commercial fishermen have thus begun fishing down the food chain, and smaller fish behave in ways that make them very vulnerable, swimming in large, dense schools that are easy to spot from the air and require little fuel to pursue. “Fishing for these animals may be likened to shooting fish in a barrel,” a National Coalition for Marine Conservation report noted in 2006. Three years ago, a far-reaching analysis of forage fish, put out by the Lenfest Foundation and financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, reported that thirty-seven per cent of global seafood landings recorded annually consist of forage fish, up from less than ten per cent fifty years ago. Of that thirty-seven percent, only a small fraction goes to the consumer market—mostly in the form of fish oils and supplements—while the bulk is processed into pellets and fishmeal, then fed to animals like salmon, pigs, and chicken.

John Donahue writing in The New Yorker about the health, environmental and economic benefits of eating the ocean’s smaller fish.

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#NoShame in Mental Illness: A Reading List

Photo: Kelsey

Even though I’ve lived with mental illness for years, I’m still learning about self-care, support systems and valuable resources. One of these resources is No Shame Day, initiated by poet and mental health advocate Bassey Ikpi. Ikpi founded The Siwe Project, which provides special mental health support for the Black community and other minority groups. On the first Monday in July, people take to social media and use the hashtag #NoShame to talk about living with mental illness and overcoming stigma and silence. Here, I’ve collected several stories about mental illness, many written by writers of color.

1. “Disrupting Domesticity: Mental Illness and Love as a Fact.” (Ashley C. Ford, The Toast, July 2015)

Ashley C. Ford interviews her partner, Kelly, about living with a person with mental illness–how to love her better, comfort her during panic attacks and hold her accountable. Kelly’s love for Ashley is so strong: “I love you for who you are. Anxiety is part of you. That part of you also shaped the person I love.” Read more…