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How Do We Read in a Digital World?

AP Photo/Suzanne Tobias

In 1994, essayist and book critic Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Even during the early phase of the internet, the reader and bookseller in Birkerts could see how digitization offered a never-ending candy store of sweet distractions, and those distractions posed a danger to not only reading, but what reading does for the solitary reader. Birkerts rightfully feared how the screen would undermine a reader’s ability to sustain deep concentration, to make the connections needed to discern meaning in narratives, to do what he calls “vertical reading”; and that our distractedness would inhibit our ability to deeply examine ourselves. At the Paris Review, Mairead Small Staid reexamines this telling book to see which of Birkerts’ concerns have come true.

Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”

I no longer have a Facebook account, and I find myself spending less and less time online. As adulthood settles on me—no passing fad, it turns out, but a chronic condition—I’m increasingly drawn back to the deeply engaged reading of my childhood. The books have changed, and my absorption is not always as total as it once was, but I can still find, slipped like a note between the pages, what Birkerts calls the “time of the self… deep time, duration time, time that is essentially characterized by our obliviousness to it.” The gift of reading, the gift of any encounter with art, is that this time spent doesn’t leave me when I lift my eyes from the book in my lap: it lingers, for a minute or a day. “[S]omething more than definitional slackness allows me to tell a friend that I’m reading The Good Soldier as we walk down the street together,” Birkerts writes. “In some ways I am reading the novel as I walk, or nap, or drive to the store for milk.”

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Health Care Sponcon: Where Big Pharma Meets Instagram Influencer

Photo via Pexels

I’ve been reading about Instagram influencers of all flavors recently, from kid stars to travel bloggers. Enter the latest type of influencer marketing: health care sponcon. That’s right: pharmaceutical companies and Silicon Valley health startups are teaming up with social influencers to sell new drugs and medical devices.

“There is no doubt that this type of health care advertising-cum-storytelling is effective, and is frequently compliant with federal regulations,” writes Suzanne Zuppello. But is it ethical? For Vox‘s The Goods, Zuppello digs into influencer pharma marketing and investigates how the FDA and FTC are attempting to regulate this type of sponsored content.

Lesley Murphy, a former contestant on The Bachelor and current travel blogger, uses her platform to disseminate information that benefits people like her who are affected by a BRCA genetic mutation, which increases a person’s risk of breast, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers. Murphy, who did not respond to requests for comment, documented her experience of undergoing a preventive double mastectomy on Instagram. Now she advertises ReSensation, a surgical technique launched in October 2018 that may help women undergoing breast reconstruction to retain some or all sensation in their breasts, to her 422K followers. Although ads for most surgical procedures are under the FTC’s purview, ReSensation’s use of human nerves also gives the FDA jurisdiction over Murphy’s Instagram and blog posts.

When asked how the influencer program was developed, Annette Ruzicka, a spokesperson for AxoGen, the company that developed ReSensation, said, “The only request of contributors was to write openly about their breast reconstruction process, and to also share factual information with their followers about the ReSensation technique. We shared publicly available information about the ReSensation technique to ensure that all content shared with the public was accurate. We provided no other content requirements for contributors.”

Murphy, who is not the only ReSensation influencer, has not undergone the procedure herself. But her followers may not realize this detail until they reach the end of her Instagram caption, where she directs readers to a blog post where, at the very end, she discloses her personal inexperience with the technique. Though this does not violate federal guidelines, nor those put forth by AxoGen, it does speak to the ethical obligation an influencer has to their followers.

The reality star’s Instagram post about the technique received almost 11,500 likes, giving ReSensation considerable exposure, yet Murphy omits disclosures required by both the FTC and FDA. She uses the term #partner to disclose that she is a compensated influencer, but the term is considered too vague, even for the FTC, for a user to clearly understand the relationship. She also fails to offer any information about the technique, disregarding federal guidelines to disclose risks and benefits that may impact patient decision-making. Instead, she directs followers to her blog where she discusses “a new technique designed to restore sensation in breasts after surgery,” lamenting the numbness in her breasts since her mastectomy and reconstruction.

Her blog post is where we finally learn the technique was not used on Murphy and cannot be used in conjunction with implant reconstruction, the most common and least complicated form of breast reconstruction, and the type of reconstruction Murphy underwent. Neither Murphy’s posts nor the ReSensation website discloses the success rate of the technique, instead focusing on an insecurity that has plagued mastectomy patients for decades: numb breasts.

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Maybe What We Need Is … More Politics?

Alfred Gescheidt / Getty Images

Aaron Timms | Longreads | February 2019 | 20 minutes (5,514 words)

Alpacas are native to South America, but to find the global center of alpaca spinning you’ll need to travel to Bradford, England. The man most responsible for this quirk of history is Titus Salt. Until the 1830s alpaca yarn was considered an unworkable material throughout Europe. Salt, a jobbing young entrepreneur from the north of England, commercialized a form of alpaca warp that made the animal’s fleece suitable for mass production. Within a decade alpaca, finer and softer than wool, had become the rage of England’s fashionable classes.

Already by the mid-19th century industrialization had begun to disfigure the English countryside with “machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled,” as Dickens put it in Bleak House. The immiseration of the working classes was under way. Troubled by the emerging horrors of the new industrial age, Salt built a model village to house the workers he employed in his textile mill. Saltaire, with its neat, spacious houses, running water, efficient sewerage, parks, schools and recreational facilities, became a symbol of what enlightened capitalism could look like. It was also a model in the truest sense, serving as the inspiration for workers’ villages built later in the 19th century by companies such as Cadbury’s and Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturer that eventually became Unilever.

According to economist Paul Collier, these Victorian capitalists instituted a tradition that survives, however precariously, today: the tradition of “business with purpose, business with a sense of obligation to a workforce and a community.” Among the modern successors of this model of compassionate capitalism, Collier has argued, are U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and John Lewis & Partners, the British department store. In the 1940s Johnson & Johnson set out a credo stating that the company’s first responsibility was to its customers. Thanks to this credo, Johnson & Johnson’s management led a mass recall of Tylenol off supermarket and pharmacy shelves following a contamination scare in the early 1980s. Now standard practice, this type of product recall was uncommon for its time — and allowed the company to maintain goodwill with its customers. John Lewis, for its part, has prospered through difficult decades for brick-and-mortar retail largely thanks to its unusual power structure: the company is owned by a trust run in the interests of its workforce.

The thread uniting this strain of capitalism, Collier contends in his new book The Future of Capitalism: Facing The New Anxieties, is ethics. An ethics of reciprocal responsibility and care — between owners, workers, and customers — has allowed different businesses to prosper in different eras without destroying the communities and environments around them. But very few businesses are run according to these principles today. According to Collier, it is to this model of reciprocal ethics that capitalism, having lost its way over the past four decades, now must return — and reciprocity must become the principle that guides human interaction at all levels of society, not just in the firm. “Our sense of mutual regard has to be rebuilt,” he says. “Public policy needs to be complemented by a sense of purpose among firms.” “We need to meet each other.” “A new generation needs to reset social narratives.” “Norms need to change.” Prescriptivism today, the future of capitalism tomorrow. Read more…

Class Dismissed

Illustration by Cornelia Li

Alison Stine | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,250 words)

 

This essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit organization.

I had never seen so many tennis courts in my life. I had never heard of rugby or lacrosse. I mispronounced genre in class because I had only ever read the word. I didn’t know girls my age owned pearls. I felt equally stunned by black dresses and those pearls at the dining hall on display Sunday nights, something many in sororities wore. I didn’t own pearls, or a nice black dress. I was born in Indiana, where our neighbors grew popcorn. I was raised in rural Ohio. My public high school was small, flanked by fields. The last day of senior year, a student drove up in his family’s tractor. It had taken him hours to get there, puttering along back roads. I was the first person in my family to attend an elite private college, partially on multiple scholarships, and partially, I think, on my parents’ sheer will to get me out.

I wasn’t the first person in my family to go to college — I was the second generation, after my parents — and on teachers’ and guidance counselors’ advice, I had applied to several schools, including state universities. But the private colleges were the ones that seemed to really want someone like me. They courted me. They offered me money, and I couldn’t say no to that. I couldn’t afford to.

I would soon learn that private colleges in this country have a social class problem. Each year, as spring break approaches, I think back on my time in school with particular sharpness, remembering other students going to warm islands or ski resorts. Unlike me, my classmates definitely knew how to ski. They parked their Land Rovers and BMWs on campus, and they landed coveted unpaid internships in the summer — something only rich kids can afford to do.

All of these trappings of wealth were new to me in 1996. But it appeared I was going to get an education in class privilege as well as liberal arts.

I was hardly alone in my experience of class bewilderment. Now, as then, there is no special orientation for students who identify as poor or rural, no workshops on the culture clash we might experience in college. Based on the price of required books, most professors had no idea of our financial reality. Students are reprimanded for not buying books on time, or not having money on a copy card, or for personal printers running out of pricy inks — but these are real and valid issues for those not raised in wealth. While our intellects can keep pace with our wealthy classmates, our wallets can’t.

I sometimes think it is difficult for our former professors to reconcile the academic and intellectual successes that I and my fellow scholarship kids had in college with our difficulties after graduation. A friend who works as a stay-at-home mom, raising multiple children, admitted to me she couldn’t face going to back to campus and seeing beloved teachers. Another friend, struggling to find work at the time, had a visceral, violent reaction to an annual fund request, sent on expensive, engraved paper only weeks after the Wall Street bailout in 2009. A few years after graduation, I returned to campus for a memorial service for a community member. One of my favorite professors asked me what I was doing. When I answered, “Teaching high school,” he said, “That’s a waste.”

I know he meant I was spending all my time working a very difficult job — and not the one for which I had studied — rather than writing. But for most of us, difficult, non-dream jobs are all we have, all we can hope for.
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Three Decades of Cross-Cultural Utopianism in British Music Writing

Mick Jagger and Brian Jones reading a copy of Mersey Beat magazine in 1965. Mark and Colleen Hayward / Redferns / Getty

Mark Sinker | A Hidden Landscape Once a Week Strange Attractor Press | February 2019 | 32 minutes (6,436 words)

 

It was late 1986, and I was frustrated. I’d given up my day-job to dedicate myself full-time to writing, but I wasn’t getting much work, and what I did get was paying almost nothing. Only one title was giving me the freedom to find my voice — Richard Cook’s still-small monthly The Wire, where he was building a team of new young writers — and it paid worst of all. No surprise I wasn’t getting enough paid work: Mostly I wrote about free improvised music and the more intransigent offshoots of post-punk, but I’d also seen King Sunny Ade play at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1983, and fallen in love with West African pop, its dancing brightness and the strangeness of its vocal lines. Others were writing about it, no one very well. Or so I felt. I was young, and young often means arrogant. Two things had drawn me to the music-writing of that era, the weeklies in particular: its opinionated mischief-making humor, and the sense of young people travelling by touch, learning as they went — finding out about the wider world by throwing themselves out into that world. Master both, and there’s your recipe for professional success, I thought. I had a head full of ideas about what music should and shouldn’t be, and was intensely willing to argue about them.

The LP in front of me was Coming Home, debut release of a group of South African exiles under the collective name Kintone. Its quietly melodic afrojazz — with hints of Weather Report, but far less flashy — went right over my head that aggrieved autumn. I had come to hate jazz writing which damned musicians with bland praise, leaving readers swimming unconvinced in routinized tact. But re-listening now, 30 years on, I have to say I no longer hear what apparently so riled me then, when I scorned instrumental prowess and sneered at a cartoon idea of the meaning of fusion.

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This Month in Podcasts: Innocent Until Proven Grifty

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* * *

Let’s start right off the bat with a correction:

When our team introduced the Longreads Podcast last month, I opened the series by saying that on April 17, 2009, Mark Armstrong tweeted the tweet that launched a decade of #longreads, noting (for the comedy!) that this auspicious announcement had only been retweeted twice.

But now that I’ve listened to our first roundtable episode on fact-checking — and Mark has since helpfully reminded me that, in the spring of 2009, Twitter hadn’t formally rolled out native retweets yet — I would like to redress my cavalier lack of rigor by issuing a belated correction. Because lo and behold, he was right: retweets weren’t formally introduced as a native feature on Twitter until November 2009.

So more than two people retweeted that first tweet! It was more like four.

More importantly, the first attempted retweet appears to have graced Twitter on April 17, 2007. So not only does this first monthly podcast newsletter give me a chance to set the record straight, the checking process has given me the additional gift of discovering that retweets and @Longreads have the same birthday! (Is running an account according to its zodiac sign the next frontier in social? Should I be reading @Longreads‘ horoscope? Are you an Aries? Talk to me at catherine@longreads.com.)

So to celebrate Longreads’ tenth birthday in two months, we’ve decided to follow up Bundyville — just nominated for a National Magazine Award in Podcasting! — with a twice-weekly podcast in 2019. Every Tuesday, we run a narrative feature or recent interview as an audio companion to Longreads’ original reporting, essays, and criticism. Every Friday, we host an editors’ roundtable, where Longreads editors discuss what we’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Top 5 Longreads of the Week.

In this first month of roundtables, we’ve covered antidotes to hot takes, rethinking what you “know,” revisiting overlooked and underreported stories, investigating even the more innocent-seeming grifters, and processing discomfort in the face of climate denial. Here are links to all five of our first feature episodes:

Living With Dolly Parton

In Conversation with Doree Shafrir: Dress You Up in My Love

Checking Facts in 2019: Fact-Checker Roundtable

Every Day I Write the Book

Poached Eggs: An American Caviar Crime Caper

I’d recommend starting with our most recent true crime feature on counterfeit caviar from David Gauvey Herbert, the aforementioned fact-checking episode, and our editors’ roundtable on the latest in long cons.

If you’d like to receive new episodes as they air, you can subscribe here on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Tune in tomorrow morning to hear Lily Burana read from her recent Longreads original essay, “Elegy in Times Square,” and Friday morning to hear what Longreads editors have been reading in the run-up to this week’s Top 5.

Just 59 days until Longreads turns 10! Count down with us at longreads.com/podcast.

Thanks for listening!

Audience Editor
Catherine Cusick (@CusickCatherine)

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‘What Would Social Media Be Like As the World Is Ending?’

Hulton Archive / Getty, Greywolf Press

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | February 2019 | 22 minutes (6,069 words)

 

Mark Doten is a deranged seer, a mad scribe mapping the end of the world. In The Infernal, his wonderfully strange first novel, he tackled a host of twenty-first century horrors: Osama Bin Laden and his followers, the moral disaster of the War on Terror, the gravitational pull of the networked world on our minds, and a seemingly inevitable post-human future in which one of the few survivors is Mark Zuckerberg. Now, in Trump Sky Alpha, Doten’s produced a fierce, unexpectedly moving, and surprisingly quickly conceived book about the Trump presidency. The new novel begins with a nuclear conflagration that wipes out 90 percent of the global population. The protagonist, Rachel, a journalist steeped in the folkways of the internet, is one of the few survivors. In an effort to reboot American journalism, the New York Times Magazine, risen from the ashes, assigns her to write an article about internet humor at the end of the world. What were people tweeting as the bombs fell?

It may sound like a deliberately obscure assignment, but it soon takes Rachel into some of the darkest corners of the post-apocalyptic American landscape. Mourning her dead wife and child, Rachel is also searching for their final resting place; along the way she finds a new lover, encounters an American security state that seems just as malevolent as its pre-apocalyptic forebears, tangles with a frightful hacktivist-turned-cyber-villain, and meets a novelist dying of radiation exposure who may be the key to it all. Trump Sky Alpha begins as an elaborate farce and ends as something much more grim and compelling, covering issues of politics, resistance, identity, and what, after all these years of mindless info-consumption, the internet actually means to our society. Read more…

‘I Saw My Countrymen Marched Out of Tacoma’

Illustration by Mark Wang

Joy Lanzendorfer| Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,300 words)

On February 6, 1885, David Kendall, a city councilman in Eureka, California, was shot. Two Chinese men, possibly from rival gangs, were firing at each other from across the street when a bullet hit Kendall and killed him. Within 20 minutes of his death, a mob of 600 white men marched into Chinatown, intending to burn it to the ground.

Disturbingly, this wasn’t unusual. Violence against Chinese people and Chinese-Americans was a regular occurrence on the West Coast. However, this event was different because of what happened next. Instead of destroying Chinatown, the city decided to order the Chinese to leave. Within 48 hours, most of the Chinese residents were forced onto boats bound for San Francisco. This “peaceful” method of expelling them from their homes was quickly imitated. Towns up and down America’s West Coast, but also as far north as Vancouver, Canada, and as far east as Augusta, Georgia, began forcing out their Chinese populations. Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans, considers it ethnic cleansing.

“The intention … was to round up all the Chinese people in over 200 towns across the Pacific Northwest and drive them out so they would never come back,” she says. Read more…

Who You Were Is Who You Are Is Who You Will Be

Photo by Albert Bridge via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

People talk about having a weight “set point” that their bodies naturally gravitate to. Can your whole life have a set point? In an essay published at Medium, Megan Daum looks at her life, age 47, and finds it’s remarkably similar to her life, age 27 — and that’s not a bad thing.

And that brings me back to my apartment window, looking down at the river while listening to the same music I listened to in 1997. The big picture for me these days might be a mélange of sadness and puzzlement and oddly exhilarating resignation, but in this fleeting moment, it feels nearly perfect. I have work that feeds my brain at the same time that it pays for that supermarket sushi. I have nearly a half-century’s worth of friends, which is something that is mathematically impossible to have in your twenties. These friends are in practically every time zone on the globe, and even when I haven’t seen them in years, I can count on them to lift me up or crack me up or at the very least impart some kind of gossip that makes me think about human nature in a whole new way. I’m paying more rent than I can afford, but somehow I’m affording it anyway. The surface of my desk is as littered with paper napkins and hair accessories as it was 20 years ago, but I’ve met my deadlines anyway. Except for the ones I’ve missed.

My 1997 self would be satisfied with how things turned out, at least until I told her this was us at 47 and not 37.

“Is this as far as we got?” she might ask.

“Ask me in 10 years,” I might answer.

Except I already know the answer. It’s as far as we got. It’s as far as we were ever supposed to get.

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The Navy Declines to Respond

The USS Fitzgerald, damaged by the collision with a Philippine cargo ship, is anchored at Yokosuka Naval Base on June 18, 2017. (The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images )

An under-trained, over-worked skeleton crew. Failed certifications, failed electrical systems. Primary navigation running on Windows 2000. Radar tool that fails at the most basic function of radar and can’t automatically track other ships: “[t]o keep the screen updated, a sailor had to punch a button a thousand times an hour.” ProPublica‘s comprehensive investigation into USS Fitzgerald’s collision with a cargo ship in the South China Sea, by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi, reveals the long chain of poor decisions and pressures that led to seven deaths and forced sailors to make truly horrifying decisions:

Vaughan and Tapia waited until they were alone at the bottom of the ladder. When the water reached their necks, they, too, climbed out the 29-inch-wide escape hatch. Safe, they peered back down the hole. In the 90 seconds since the crash, the water had almost reached the top of Berthing 2.

Now they faced a choice. Naval training demanded that they seal the escape hatch to prevent water from flooding the rest of the ship. But they knew that bolting it down would consign any sailors still alive to death.

Vaughan and Tapia hesitated. They agreed to wait a few seconds more for survivors. Tapia leaned down into the vanishing inches of air left in Berthing 2.

“Come to the sound of my voice,” he shouted.

The Fitzgerald had been steaming on a secret mission to the South China Sea when it was smashed by a cargo ship more than three times its size.

The 30,000-ton MV ACX Crystal gouged an opening bigger than a semitruck in the starboard side of the destroyer. The force of the collision was so great that it sent the 8,261-ton warship spinning on a 360-degree rotation through the Pacific.

On the ship’s bridge, a crewman activated two emergency lights high on the ship’s mast, one on top of the other: The Fitzgerald, it signaled, was red over red — no longer under command.

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