Welcome back to our weekly round-up of the long reads on the web that are worth the investment. If you want to make sure you don’t miss future Global Comment content, don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter right at the bottom of this post.
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Now, the links you’re here for:
Why Everything Is Getting Louder (Bianca Bosker, The Atlantic)
Experts say your body does not adapt to noise. Large-scale studies show that if the din keeps up—over days, months, years—noise exposure increases your risk of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and heart attacks, as well as strokes, diabetes, dementia, and depression. Children suffer not only physically—18 months after a new airport opened in Munich, the blood pressure and stress-hormone levels of neighboring children soared—but also behaviorally and cognitively. A landmark study published in 1975 found that the reading scores of sixth graders whose classroom faced a clattering subway track lagged nearly a year behind those of students in quieter classrooms—a difference that disappeared once soundproofing materials were installed. Noise might also make us mean: A 1969 study suggested that test subjects exposed to noise, even the gentle fuzz of white noise, become more aggressive and more eager to zap fellow subjects with electric shocks.
Why we need a working class media (Carla Murphy, Dissent)
I could go on. The evidence of media’s disinterest in actual working-class realities comes as a steady drip. It adds up to a narrative of a disenfranchised, neutered working class, trotted out for affluent readers interested in poverty or angry populist stories. For too long, we’ve settled for being written about but not for.
It’s not you, it’s me (Helena de Bres, The Point)
People love hearing these sorts of stories because people love twins. We’re recurring subjects in myth, literature and visual art in probably every culture on the planet. We work well as aesthetic devices because we’re unusual and eye-catching and, given the tendency to get us mixed up, ripe for comic use. But our imaginative hold on the species doesn’t bottom out there: in most twin tales, even the B-grade ones, there’s something deeper going on.
Stark lessons from Wall Street’s #MeToo movement (Susan Antilla, The Intercept)
What we learned is that most of the accused men we were able to identify stayed in their careers. In one instance, a senior executive remained at his bank for 16 years after the firm lost an arbitration over his sexual harassment of a female colleague. We also found that, thanks to a broken system that allows brokers to exclude harassment and discrimination cases from their regulatory records, some became serial offenders who hopped from job to job in finance while continuing to harm female colleagues.
In sharp contrast, the careers of most of the women who brought harassment and discrimination claims were disrupted.
Meeting my third family (Margot Livesey, Catapult)
But I was a resourceful orphan. Soon after Eva’s death, I began the process of adopting a nearby family. Roger and my father taught at the same boys’ private school, in the country about sixty miles north of Edinburgh, and he and Merril had four children. They lived in a house a few hundred yards from the one where I lived with my father and stepmother, and I ran back and forth between the two. Over the years, Roger and Merril and their children became my second family, and gradually my second family grew; as of this autumn, I have nineteen “relatives.” These relationships are ones of deep affection and many satisfactions.
Image credit: a.dombrowski