Why Lawyers Kill Themselves

The Article: Why lawyers are prone to suicide by Patrick Krill in CNN.

The Text: If you accept that all human life has value, and that suicide is a cruel and devastating end, you might conclude that a segment of society whose members are three to six times more likely to kill themselves might deserve some extra attention and resources. Makes sense, right? Of course.

Now, does your answer change at all if I tell you that the group I’m referring to is lawyers? Be honest. And no, this isn’t the setup for a punch line.

Sometimes revered and sometimes reviled, lawyers are both the guardians of your most precious liberties and the butts of your harshest jokes. Inhabiting the unique role of both hero and villain in our cultural imagination, lawyers play a key part in the proper functioning of society while also repelling any tendencies for people to feel sympathy or compassion toward us as human beings.

Continue Reading

Why Stories, Not Science, Explain The World

The Article: ‘Life Keeps Changing’: Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World by Joe Fassler in The Atlantic.

The Text: The natural world is a source of wonder and even horror for Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp, but science can only explain so much. After Percy read Lawrence Sargent Hall’s “The Ledge” for the first time in college, she dropped her physics major—and started asking questions about story, memory, and narrative. Stories, she now says—invented, reported—better capture the full, complex reality of human beings and our surrounding universe.

In Demon Camp, a work of immersion journalism, Percy tells the story of a rural faith community where people “receive deliverance” through Christian exorcisms. The Covenant Bible Institute is funded, in part, by the efforts of Army Sgt. Caleb Daniels, who came home from Afghanistan suffering from suicidal ideation and frightening hallucinations Percy grounds the story—in which she plays a central role—in the history and science of trauma-induced hysteria. But scholarship is never used to dispute or dispel the visceral “realness” of the demons her haunted subjects live with. Percy’s willingness to entertain her characters’ logic reaches its height in the book’s climax—when she agrees to undergo an exorcism herself. Last week, the New York Times Book Review compared Demon Camp to James Agee’s classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Continue Reading

On Google, Parents Ask About Sons’ Intelligence–And Daughters’ Weight

The Article: Parents Ask Google If Their Sons Are Geniuses And If Their Daughters Are Fat by Amanda Marcotte in Slate.

The Text: One of the unintended consequences of the digital era is that it leaves a historically unprecedented pile of evidence of our innermost thoughts and concerns. Google’s simple search bar has turned into a dumping ground for the questions that we may be afraid to ask out loud, which is why it’s a perfect place to look and see if modern parents, who are often careful to claim publicly that they treat male and female children equally, are privately exerting different expectations and pressures based on gender.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes for the New York Times on his research looking at the different concerns that parents bring to Google when it comes to sons and daughters. He finds, unsurprisingly, that despite a decade-plus of “girl power” cheerleading, parents still believe that what matters about sons is their intelligence and what matters about girls is their looks.

Continue Reading

Is It Wrong To Tell Others To “Do What They Love”?

The Article: In the Name of Love by Miya Tokumitsu in Jacobin.

The Text: “Do what you love. Love what you do.”

The commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times by now.

Lovingly lit and photographed, this room is styled to inspire Sehnsucht, roughly translatable from German as a pleasurable yearning for some utopian thing or place. Despite the fact that it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living room?— where artful tchotchkes abound and work is not drudgery but love?— is precisely the place all those pinners and likers long to be. The diptych arrangement suggests a secular version of a medieval house altar.

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate?— and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

Continue Reading

Obama On Pot Legalization

The Article: Obama on Pot Legalization: ‘It’s Important for It to Go Forward’ by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

The Text: In the course of being profiled for an article in The New Yorker, President Obama told the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, the following things about smoking marijuana:

“I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person.”

“I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.” In fact, it is less dangerous than alcohol “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.”

“Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do. And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.”

Continue Reading