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A Birth Plan for Dying (Hanna Neuschwander for Longreads)
What happens when a wanted pregnancy goes off the rails?
The room was empty of sound. There were no monitors on, none of the maniacal beeping that usually accompanies a hospital birth. It took me a while to realize why. Fetal monitors allow the hospital staff to search for signals of something gone awry. They search so they can rescue, so they can intervene if anything goes wrong. We were there for River’s birth and her death. It was her life that was wrong. There wasn’t any point in monitoring us. That night, I remember gliding up through my oblivion to the surface and hearing only my ragged breath, John rustling under a blanket on the bench beside me, someone padding quietly down the hall outside the door. I felt I could hear River, swimming quiet laps inside me.
What Does a Political Story Look Like in 2018? (Roxane Gay for Lithub)
On writing as a political act.
Writers are divided on whether or not it is their responsibility to address the contretemps in their work. Some writers stubbornly cling to the idea that writing should not be sullied by politics. They labor under the impression that they can write fiction that isn’t political, or influenced in some way by politics, which is, whether they realize it or not, a political stance in and of itself. Other writers believe it is an inherent part of their craft to engage with the political. And then there are those writers, such as myself, who believe that the very act of writing from their subject position is political, regardless of what they write.
Banished (Beth Schwartzapeel and Emily Kassie for the Marshall Project)
Extremely broad sex offender registries and zoning laws driven by moral panic make ie functionally impossible for some people on the registry to find a place to live. Miami-Dade County has become an iconic spot for this vexing problem.
A combination of federal, state and local laws has rendered almost all of Miami-Dade County off-limits to sex offenders with young victims. The feds say they’re not allowed in public housing. The state says they can’t live within 1,000 feet of a day care center, park, playground or school. The county says they can’t live within 2,500 feet of a school. In a place so densely populated, forbidden zones are everywhere. And in the narrow slivers of permitted space, affordable apartments with open-minded landlords are nearly impossible to come by.
Godmother of intelligences (Eileen Hunt Botting for Aeon)
Is artificial intelligence analogous to Frankenstein’s monster?
With the advent of ML and some forms of DL, are we, like Frankenstein, setting into motion maniacally smart devices of our own demise? Shelley imagined such a scenario, and so do some contemporary computer scientists.
On Washington’s McNeil Island, the only residents are 214 dangerous sex offenders (Emily Gillespie for the Guardian)
After they’ve served their sentences, some sex offenders find themselves caught in limbo; they’ve done their time, but communities convinced that they will strike again don’t want them released, either. That tension has given rise to civil commitment centers, a strange betweenspace that isn’t freedom or prison.
Civil commitment centers, which exist in fewer than half of US states, are meant as a community safeguard and a means of providing treatment for the offenders. But they’re riddled with controversies. Criminal justice reform advocates fear the implications of predicting future risk and basing confinement on what someone might do.
Photo credit: Mike’s Birds