Search Results for: health

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

Life and Death at SeaWorld

In a recent piece for Outside, Tim Zimmermann spoke at length with three former animal care workers about their experiences at SeaWorld. Animal care workers, who are responsible for the health of mammals at marine parks, are privy to the best and worse that goes on, with unique access and responsibilities. In the excerpt below, Zimmermann quotes from the journal of Krissy Dodge, a former employee at SeaWorld San Antonio, as she recounts the birth of a baby beluga:

Sept 17, 2006. Sunday a week ago I had whale watch from 12am–7:30am. Siku the beluga was due at any moment. An hour into it I thought I saw a small amount of blood. I didn’t see any crunching [flexing by the mother] though, and kept watching. I saw more blood and half of the tail flukes come out. I was so excited I started shaking. I immediately called my supervisor and he arrived in 10 min. After everyone was called I got into my wetsuit in case I was needed to get into the water.

When the calf was half way out, the supervisor told us to surround the pool so if the calf went around, it wouldn’t bump into walls or flop out of the pool. The calf was born and I watched it take its first breath. It seemed to be doing OK. It was very exciting for me. I almost wanted to cry. Of course I didn’t since no one shows any emotion in our dept.

I stayed watching until I was off at 7:30am. The next day I found out that the calf was not nursing and had to be tube fed. He didn’t take it well. To do it, someone had to jump in and catch it, swim it over, then a tube was shoved down its throat. A few times milk and blood was being expelled from the blowhole. It was decided on Friday to make an emergency move of Siku and calf to a back pool. Apparently when they got into the water to move the calf, it died in a trainer’s arms. I found out it died as they were bringing it back to 72 [the necropsy room] on the back of a cart.



I had to help in the necropsy. It was my first one and was indeed traumatic. To be the one to see it being born and also the one to cut it up was really difficult. When it was finished I walked to the zoological building to get a shower. I was still taking it all in and trying not to cry. A coworker was there and asked how it went. I said it was ok, but difficult being my first one. She said, “Oh don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. Soon it won’t even phase you.” To have this job, the only way to do it is to become hard and desensitized to everything. This job is so difficult. Not just physically, but emotionally. It’s made me question who I am and what I believe in. I’m ready to move on. This chapter needs to be closed.

Read the story

More stories about SeaWorld

Image: Wikimedia Commons

SeaWorld’s Most Rewarding and Traumatic Job

Longreads Pick

Animal care workers, who tend to the health of mammals at SeaWorld and other marine parks, have unrivaled access to the animals—and the challenges of captivity. They are on the front lines of the debate over marine mammals in captivity, and their stories are fascinating and deeply troubling. Here, three former employees go on the record about their experiences.

Source: Outside
Published: Aug 19, 2014
Length: 34 minutes (8,603 words)

If Only They Had Treated Him Before

Longreads Pick

When Will Bruce killed his mother in 2006, he believed she was an al Qaeda agent. Bruce suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and after seven years in a psychiatric hospital he is slowly reintegrating back into society with the help of his father. Together, they question why the American mental health system is unable or unwilling to help potentially violent patients before tragedy occurs, and advocate for change.

Source: CNN
Published: Aug 15, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,300 words)

The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List

“When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor.” So begins the dark tale of what it means to be an adjunct professor in the United States today, further explored in these essays and articles.

1. “The Teaching Class.” (Rachel Riederer, Guernica, June 2014)

In this excellent essay, Riederer, an adjunct professor herself, discusses the lack of support her peers face in the classroom, a lack of healthcare benefits, substandard pay, administrative hostility and more. With teachers this stressed, students should be concerned about the quality of their education. Riederer gives the dictionary definition for adjunct, but I would like to point out its synonyms: Subordinate. Auxiliary. Assistant. These terms and their connotations demean the work adjuncts do.

Read more…

Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List

When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to map a cartography of loneliness. Published in 2012, Laing writes, “What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal.” Four years into my New York experiment, the pang of loneliness has dulled and has been exchanged for a desire to retreat from an overstimulating city with my close friends and a bag of salted caramel.

This brief list takes a dive into the discussion about loneliness and solitude in our contemporary lives—what it is, how we cope, and how it affects our bodies. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, if you have them.

 

1. “American Loneliness” (Emma Healey, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2014)

I’ve been watching MTV’s reality show, Catfish in awe for the past two seasons. I vacillate between heavy feelings of eager empathy and awkward amusement. Healy explores what Catfish reveals about our common loneliness, longing and vulnerabilities as well as how easily we suspend logic in the pursuit of companionship.

Read more…

The Believer Interview: Ice Cube

Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words)

 

The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community.

* * *

‘Music Is a Mirror of What We’re Going Through, Not the Cause of What We’re Going Through. It’s a Reaction, It’s Our Only Weapon, It’s Our Only Way to Protect Ourselves, It’s Our Only Way to Fit, It’s Our Only Way to Get There.’

Before rap music, New York might as well have been:

Paris


Africa


Australia


A thousand miles away from a thirteen-year-old Ice Cube

* * *

Once upon a time, the name Ice Cube was analogous to explicit lyrics, guns, women as “bitches,” South Central, and attitude. Bad attitude. Not to mention mind-blowing rap music wrapped in raw emotions. But those were Ice Cube’s teen years, before he married Kimberly Jackson, became father to four kids, and turned into a true Hollywood player. A legend long before he turned thirty, Ice Cube, together with his fellow N.W.A. members, revolutionized not only the rap/ hiphop genre, but all music, by making it OK for musicians to speak their minds and then some.

Read more…

The New Science of Evolutionary Forecasting

Longreads Pick

Scientists may not be able to predict what the world may look like 100 million years from now, but they may be able to look at how diseases like the flu will evolve in a few months, which has the potential to save lives: “Lässig hopes to be able to make predictions about future flu seasons that the World Health Organization could consult as they decide which strains should be included in flu vaccines. ‘It’s just a question of a few years,’ he said.”

Source: Quanta Magazine
Published: Jul 17, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,407 words)

The 'Serial Abuse' of Our Armed Forces

The intensification of the War for the Greater Middle East after 9/11 revealed unsuspected defects in America’s basic approach to raising its military forces. Notwithstanding the considerable virtues of our professional military, notably durability and tactical prowess, the existing system rates as a failure.

The All-Volunteer Force is like a burger from a fast-food joint: it’s cheap, filling and tastes good going down. What’s not to like? Take a closer look, however, and problems with the existing U.S. military system become apparent. It encourages political irresponsibility. It underwrites an insipid conception of citizenship. It’s undemocratic. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. And it doesn’t win.

Dishonesty pervades the relationship between the U.S. military and society. Rhetorically, we “support the troops.” But the support is seldom more than skin-deep.

In practice, we subject the troops we profess to care about to serial abuse. As authorities in Washington commit U.S. forces to wars that are unnecessary or ill-managed or unwinnable — or, in the martial equivalent of a trifecta, all of the above — Americans manifest something close to indifference. The bungled rollout of a health care reform program might generate public attention and even outrage. By comparison, a bungled military campaign elicits shrugs.

-Andrew J. Bacevich, in Notre Dame magazine, on the history of U.S. war in the Middle East over the past 30 years, and why there’s no end (or strategy) in sight.

Read more

More military in the Longreads Archive

Photo: usafe, Flickr

The New Baby Boom

Longreads Pick

A generation of new babies is painting a picture of what the future of the British Empire will look like: “Today, the increase in British birth rates has ushered in another baby-centric age, one defined by three distinct aspects. More babies of different ethnicities are being born, challenging the very notion of an ethnic ‘minority’. They are also part of a simultaneous parenting boom: people from an ever wider array of backgrounds can become parents of healthy babies. Finally, there is an intellectual boom: as scientists and policy makers – like their political forebears – seek to use our growing knowledge about how babies and their brains develop to improve education and curb inequality.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jul 11, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,171 words)