What We’re Reading: August 20, 2015
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Pics or It Didn’t Happen (Medium)
by John de Jong
“Is Photography Even a Healthy Pastime? Considering Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’”
The Movement Against Solitary Confinement (New York Magazine)
by Benjamin Wallace Wells
“Why this focus now? For most of the past half-century, the single moral cause of the prison-reform movement, to the degree that such a movement has even existed, was death-penalty abolition.”
I Live in Iran. Here’s How Sanctions Have Shaped My Life (Vox)
by Pedestrian
“It is 2007, and I am an undergraduate at the University of Tehran. I’m very particular. I take notes with Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens, in purple and green, and on this particular day I’ve run through the stash I keep in my desk at home. There is a small office supply store next to the university cafeteria, I’ve bought my pens there before. Before lunch I go to pick up some more Fineliners.”
The Ethics of Bloodless Medicine (New Yorker)
by Amanda Schaffer
“Jehovah’s Witnesses object to transfusion because they believe that scriptural passages forbid it. But the attendant reasoning—that an individual’s singular qualities, life and soul, are carried in blood—does not fall so far outside of the mainstream imagination.”
As Voluntourism Explodes in Popularity, Who’s It Helping Most? (NPR)
Carrie Kahn
“It’s called volunteer tourism, or “voluntourism,” and it’s one of the fastest growing trends in travel today. More than 1.6 million volunteer tourists are spending about $2 billion each year. But some people who work in the industry are skeptical of voluntourism’s rising popularity. They question whether some trips help young adults pad their resumes or college applications more than they help those in need.”
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (New York Times)
by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld
“The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.”
Check out these links related to our latest writing on The Prindle Post:
Conner Gordon: Dissecting the Deathstagram
—When Death is a Fascination (Atlantic)
by Leah Sottile
