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:
Brigid, Magdalene, my mother and me (Carmel McMahon, Longreads)
“I do not know the particulars of Grace’s mother’s situation, but I think about her, and my mother, and their mothers before them. The general climate of Ireland was hostile to women. Divorce, abortion and contraception were illegal. Married women were sometimes not permitted to work, and they had no rights to property in a marriage. There was no such thing as marital rape, and the choice, in cases of abuse, was either to remain with their abuser or become homeless. This is the world we were born into. This is the world that shaped us in ways that are continually being revealed.”
The Power of Boundaries (Sara Eckel, Psychology Today)
“Each of us tries to erect a boundary around the parts of ourself we want to keep private, or at least shielded from those with whom we’re not intimate. Some people are more vigilant about raising those firewalls than others, however, which can lead to discomfort, if not open conflict, because it’s harder to keep others’ revelations out than it is to keep our own within. “We think about boundaries as a self-oriented concept: This is my boundary. But it’s not just a matter of what you’re willing or not willing to say, it’s also what you’re willing to let in,” says Mariana Bockarova, a psychology researcher at the University of Toronto.”
28-Day Rehab Doesn’t Work For Everyone (Erica C. Barnett, HuffPost)
“Davis says the biggest problem with 28-day treatment, or any short-term program, is that it treats chronic disorder like an acute problem. This model gets people well enough to walk out of treatment, but doesn’t help people stay sober long-term.
““We even hold ‘graduations’ at the end of treatment, as if it’s possible to graduate from a chronic, lifelong brain disease,” she said. “It’s like giving somebody back surgery and then not funding physical therapy and blaming the patient for not getting better.””
Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up (Amy Chozick, New York Times)
“Mr. Neumann would talk eloquently about creating the first “physical social network,” a place where members could talk about jobs, family, love. “It was like, wait, you mean life. What you’re talking about is just regular life,” Mr. Weber said. But as Mr. Neumann framed things, it sounded revolutionary. As more people bought into his vision, WeWork’s value kept soaring. It may have never reached the stratosphere, though, if Mr. Neumann had not found the perfect benefactor: SoftBank’s chief executive, Masayoshi Son.”
Lessons in Survival (Emily Raboteau, The New York Review of Books)
“This is what the climate emergency looks like now. But how do we ensure that a strategy like managed retreat doesn’t result in unjust displacement? There is a pernicious history in this country of the forced movement of people of color, from chattel slavery and Native American Removal to Japanese internment camps, segregation, redlining, urban renewal, slum clearance, and real estate exploitation. Given our track record, it wasn’t surprising to learn from a recent report in the journal Science Advances that the selection of properties for federal buyouts among the 43,000 homes in flood-prone areas bought and demolished by FEMA in the last twenty years had as much to do with income as danger.”
Image credit: Michael