Search Results for: health

Your Inner Drone: The Politics of the Automated Future

Nicholas Carr | The Glass Cage: Automation and Us | October 2014 | 15 minutes (3,831 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from Nicholas Carr‘s new book, The Glass Cage. Our thanks to Carr for sharing this piece with the Longreads community.  Read more…

How a Blog Post Sparked a Retail Movement

Once in a while, a single post can spark a movement. In the summer of 2011, Gabi Gregg, who writes the blog GabiFresh, went on a quest to find a bikini; at the time, bikinis were hard to find in large sizes. When she found one, she posted a picture of herself in it, calling it a “fatkini.” (Gregg says that she got the word and the idea from a Tumblr user.) The picture, and a follow-up article for the Web site xoJane, the next summer, went viral, prompting a wave of copycat posts. Plus-size women took bikini pictures and tagged them #fatkini. Gregg ended up on the “Today” show, and the retail landscape changed. Gregg told me, “Out of nowhere, all these plus-size brands were suddenly making bikinis.”

The fatkini movement—and plus-size fashion in general—has occasionally sparked a backlash. “Being really visible when you’re a plus-size woman is not for the faint of heart,” Conley told me. Many blogs attract lewd and misogynistic comments, but the more mild-mannered critics cite health concerns. “There’s a fine line between anti-body-shaming and obesity-glorification,” one reader wrote, at the bottom of a Buzzfeed article about the fatkini trend. Another added, “Celebrating obesity seems a bit ridiculous.”

Lizzie Widdicombe, writing for The New Yorker about the rapidly evolving plus-size fashion industry. For Gabi Gregg, being a pioneer in a shifting retail landscape has been lucrative—she now designs her own line of swimwear, and her most popular suit sold out in twenty-four hours.

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Photo: Gabifresh, Instagram

The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty

Photo by mulmatsherm

Kiera Feldman | This Land Press | September 2014 | 34 minutes (8,559 words)

This Land PressWe’re proud to present a new Longreads Exclusive from Kiera Feldman and This Land Press: How Richard Roberts went from heir to his father’s empire to ostracized from the kingdom. Feldman and This Land Press have both been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and her This Land story “Grace in Broken Arrow” was named the Best of Longreads in 2012.
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‘It’s not too much of a stretch to say that this story fundamentally changed me as a person’

All reporters have pieces that stay with them, stories whose characters and components linger long after the last revisions have been rendered and the paper put to bed. For Jennifer Mendelsohn, Sean Bryant was that character.

Mendelsohn first encountered Sean Bryant shortly after his death, nearly two decades ago. Transfixed by his short, vivid life and subsequent suicide, she eventually produced “Everything to Live For,” a gripping, deeply reported  investigation into Bryant’s life and death. The story first appeared in the June 1998 issue of Washingtonian, and our thanks to Mendelsohn for allowing us to reprint it here. Mendelsohn also spoke with Longreads about how she first encountered Bryant, her reporting process, and the effect his life has had on hers. Read more…

Everything to Live For

Jennifer Mendelsohn Washingtonian | June 1998 | 36 minutes (8,995 words)

Jennifer Mendelsohn is the “Modern Family” columnist for Baltimore Style magazine. A former People magazine special correspondent and Slate columnist, her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Tablet, Medium, McSweeney’s and Jezebel. This story first appeared in the June 1998 issue of Washingtonian (subscribe here). Our thanks to Mendelsohn for allowing us to reprint it here. You can also read a short Q & A with the author here.

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Hollywood’s Vaccine Wars

Longreads Pick

Vaccination rates have plummeted at Los Angeles’s most prestigious schools. The numbers are staggering—some schools’ immunization rates are on par with South Sudan—but what does this mean for public health in the city at large?

Author: Gary Baum
Published: Sep 10, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,640 words)

The Effects of Untreated PTSD on Neighborhoods Plagued by Violence

Over the past 20 years, medical researchers have found new ways to quantify the effects of the relentless violence on America’s inner cities. They surveyed residents who had been exposed to violence in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore and noticed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): nightmares, obsessive thoughts, a constant sense of danger. In a series of federally funded studies in Atlanta, researchers interviewed more than 8,000 innercity residents, most of them African-American. Two thirds of respondents said they had been violently attacked at some point in their lives. Half knew someone who had been murdered. Of the women interviewed, a third had been sexually assaulted. Roughly 30 percent of respondents had had symptoms consistent with PTSD—a rate as high or higher than that of veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Experts are only now beginning to trace the effects of untreated PTSD on neighborhoods that are already struggling with unemployment, poverty and the devastating impact of the war on drugs. Women—who are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—are more likely to show signs of anxiety and depression and to avoid places that remind them of the trauma. In children, PTSD symptoms can sometimes be misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kids with PTSD may compulsively repeat some part of the trauma while playing games or drawing, have trouble in their relationships with family members, and struggle in school. “School districts are trying to educate kids whose brains are not working the way they should be working because of trauma,” says Marleen Wong, Ph.D., the former director of mental health services, crisis intervention, and suicide prevention for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Men with PTSD are more likely to have trouble controlling their anger, and to try to repress their trauma symptoms with alcohol or drugs.

— From “Black America’s Invisible Crisis,” a joint collaboration between Essence magazine and Propublica.

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Photo: Michael Le Roi

It’s 1969 And This Is Robert Lanza’s First Time Experimenting with Embryos.

His best friend’s mom laughed when Lanza told her he wanted to become a doctor. “You’d probably make a very good carpenter,” she said. When Lanza announced his plan for the school science fair—he would alter a chicken’s genetics and turn it from white to black—his classmates giggled and his teacher said it was impossible. It’s a word he’ll hear many times.

Down in the basement, wedged between the furnace and clothes dryer, a homemade Styrofoam incubator on the table in front of him, he’s decided the chicken experiment is challenging, but not impossible. He talked his way into syringes and penicillin at local hospitals and borrowed tabletop centrifuges from a guy across town who works for the state health agency. His neighbor drove him to local farms so he could gather eggs from white chickens and black ones. Now he’s been working in the furnace room for months, trying to introduce pigmented genes into white embryos while his mom stands in the kitchen telling her friends that “Robby is downstairs trying to hatch chicken eggs.” Not quite, Mom, he thinks.

Eventually several white chicks will emerge from their eggs with brown spots. Lanza will drop by Harvard Medical School to get help repeating the results, and in a scene straight out of the movies, he’ll mistake the founder of Harvard’s neurobiology department for a janitor. Stephen Kuffler, “the father of modern neuroscience,” won’t mind a bit. He’ll introduce Lanza to a graduate student who will later become director of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science, and who will spend hours chatting with the eager teen about his chicken project.

Molly Petrilla, writing in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the early life of Dr. Robert Lanza. Dr. Lanza has racked up a slew of scientific accolades—and generated an equal amount of controversy—for his pioneering work on cloning and stem cells.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Life of a Full-Time Barbecue Editor

Weird as it is to say, I understand the morbid fascination with my 36-year-old cardiovascular system. My job requires that I travel from one end of the state to the other eating smoked brisket, one of the fattiest cuts on the steer. And I can’t forget to order the pork ribs, sausage, and beef ribs. Of course my diet is going to raise eyebrows. Including those of my doctor. During one of my semiannual visits to see him, when my blood work showed an elevated cholesterol level, he gave me a scrip for statins and a helpful catalog of high-cholesterol foods to avoid. First on the list? Beef brisket. Second? Pork ribs. When I told him about my role as barbecue editor, he just said, “Maybe you could eat a little less brisket.” I promised to focus more on smoked chicken, but the pledge was as empty as the calories in my next order of banana pudding.

My wife, Jen, also has concerns. My editor, Andrea Valdez, once asked her if she was worried about my health based on my profession. Jen replied, “Shouldn’t we all be?” But to her credit, she’s been supportive of my decision to change careers (albeit a bit less enthusiastic than she was when I was made an associate at the Dallas architecture firm I worked with for six years). Only once has Jen placed restrictions on my diet. Back in 2010, when I was regularly writing for my blog, Full Custom Gospel BBQ, and doing research for my book, The Prophets of Smoked Meat, she declared February “Heart Healthy Month” and banned me from eating barbecue. Suffering from withdrawal, I turned to cured meats. She got so sick of seeing salami and speck in the fridge (I think I even staged a bacon tasting at one point), she let me off the hook three days early. That was the last prolonged barbecue hiatus I can remember.

All jokes aside, I do understand the long-term perils of my profession. I’ve taken those statins religiously for several years, and I’m doing my part to keep the antacid market in business. But I’m usually more worried about the acute health concerns I face. I judged the “Anything Goes” category at a cookoff in South Texas and spat out a submission mid-chew that featured some severely undercooked lobster tails. At a barbecue joint in Aubrey, I took a bite of beef rib that I had reasonable suspicion to believe had been tainted with melted plastic wrap. And the most gastrointestinal discomfort I’ve ever had came from the 33 entries of beans I judged in one sitting at an amateur barbecue competition in Dallas.

— Daniel Vaughn, on what it’s like to work as Texas Monthly’s full-time barbecue editor.

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Photo: Heather Cowper

A Family, a Fruit Stand, and Survival on $4.50 a Day

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Douglas Haynes | Orion | Summer 2014 | 22 minutes (5,391 words)

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Morning

“It’s like this here every day,” Dayani Baldelomar Bustos tells me as her dark eyes scan the packed alley for an opening. People carrying baskets of produce on their heads press against our backs. Read more…