In the late 1980s, a new psychotherapy modality emerged that claimed that people could process and mitigate symptoms of PTSD by looking quickly in various directions. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), as it became known, found an enthusiastic reception—and an equally full-throated resistance from skeptics, many of them therapists themselves. Thirty-five years later, having ended her own inconclusive journey with EMDR, Meg Bernhard looks in on the controversy. A fascinating look at an esoteric, and inexplicable, treatment.
When EMDR began to trickle into the mainstream, much initial news coverage was glowing. Lynn Sherr, a correspondent for the ABC program 20/20, described EMDR in 1994 as “a process that mysteriously unlocks the trauma of times past.” Around a decade later, CBS2 News, a local station in therapy-conscious Los Angeles, did a feature on EMDR focusing on a man who survived a car plowing into the Santa Monica farmer’s market, for whom the crash had triggered earlier traumas. After EMDR, he reported feeling physical and emotional relief. “I realize there’s a lot of things that I’ve carried along with me from the past that now I was able to let go of,” he said.
Backlash came just as swiftly as the praise. In a 1994 Los Angeles Times article, “The Amazingly Simple, Inexplicable Therapy That Just Might Work: Is EMDR Psychology’s Magic Wand or Just Some Hocus Pocus?” Nancy Wartik wrote that critics accused Shapiro of “adopting the role of guru ministering to a devoted flock.” One charged that Shapiro had a “cultish” following.
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Nicholas Hune-Brown points out that libraries are the last truly public space. As such, their role has become so much more than just books: They are a social service. Libraries offer their community a vital and essential sanctuary, but Hune-Brown questions the toll this is taking on their staff. A fascinating look at a place we often forget is on the frontline.
Today, you’ll find a semester’s load of classes, events, and seminars at your local library: on digital photography, estate planning, quilting, audio recording, taxes for seniors, gaming for teens, and countless “circle times” in which introverts who probably chose the profession because of their passion for Victorian literature are forced to perform “The Bear Went over the Mountain” to rooms full of rioting toddlers.
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Amelia Tate finds looking back at her teenage diaries a painful experience. Who wouldn’t? But Tate finds more than cringe in these books—she finds an understanding of who she was as a teenager. It’s not someone she is proud of.
Flowers, butterflies, Eeyore and a “sexy” red boot adorn the covers of the books that chronicle everything from my first kiss to losing my virginity. These nine notebooks chart the development of my eating disorder all the way up to the “prom!!” night, when my period returned after years of starvation.
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“When you learn to pick locks, the first and most important thing you steal is your own sense of security,” writes Erica X. Eisen in this fun and insightful piece on competitive locksmithing for Hazlitt.
When LPL first started his channel, he focused his time and energy on niche, challenging pieces, the kinds that real locksports devotees might labour on for months before they hit upon the right line of attack. Solving the puzzles these locks presented was a real feat of ingenuity and skill—but one that few outside of the covert entry community could really appreciate. Eventually, however, LPL discovered a new avenue for his efforts, one with potential for broader appeal: leveraging YouTube to get the word out about flimsy consumer locks with the goal of shaming their producers into making something better. It was a romantic notion, one that positioned his channel as the catalyst for change in a global industry. As he told his listeners in Utah, “People tend to notice when you say, ‘I can open your front door in thirty seconds.’”
Millions of people did indeed take notice, as LPL’s soaring viewership numbers attest. And so did the makers of these locks—but not necessarily in the way LPL had originally hoped. When he exposed a major design issue with one of Key Kop’s products, the company responded not by fixing the issue but by demanding he take the video down. It was a disheartening blow, one that struck at the fundamental assumption underpinning his strategy: that these brands simply hadn’t known how bad their products are. “How do you fix a mistake,” LockPickingLawyer asked the crowd of security experts at SAINTCON, “when they know about it and just keep making the same mistakes over and over?”
If you watch enough of LPL’s videos—if you see the same mistakes by the same big-name manufacturers year after year, product after product, and if you then start to notice these locks in your real life on door after door, building after building—it’s hard not to come away with a vision of the world that’s a little wobblier and worse for wear.
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As an editor of a Berlin English-language monthly, Alexander Wells beautifully observes how, due to increasing globalism, language and usage are in a perpetual state of metamorphosis.
My favourite kind of anglicism is the Scheinanglizismus. Many languages across the world have these « pseudo-anglicisms », which consist of English phrases that are used in that language but don’t actually make sense in English. An overhead projector is called a Beamer here; a photo shoot is, rather alarmingly, a Shooting. During lockdown, the practice of working from home got dubbed das Homeoffice, much to the bafflement of Berlin’s UK contingent. A male model used to be called a Dressman, in a doublepseudo- anglicism: it’s the English verb « dress » tacked onto the elegant rump of « gentleman ». Best of all were short-lived attempts to market the messenger satchel to Germans as Bodybag.
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
An investigation into a heinous (and lurid) crime. A look at the spirited world of competitive cheer. A visit to the world’s creepiest motel. An empathic eye on assisted dying. And the true planetary cost of your beloved cat. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of our editors’ picks.
Andy Mannix | The Star Tribune | June 2, 2023 | 10,330 words
This investigative feature comes with a warning at the top to “read at your own discretion,” and I feel obliged to say the same thing here. What follows is a deeply upsetting story about the suspicious death of a woman who was part of the BDSM community in the Minneapolis area. Heather Mayer was found naked, hanging by a chain that had been locked around her neck; she was covered in bruises and scars, with the words “Daddy Knows Best” carved into her arm. Police ruled her death a suicide, but that never sat right with the death investigator on the case or with Mayer’s mother, who was immediately suspicious that her daughter had been killed by Ehsan Karam, a “dominant” with whom she was in a relationship. Reporter Andy Mannix does a brilliant, sensitive job interrogating the lines between sex and violence, pleasure and pain, consent and coercion. There’s no judgment here, except of the dangerous assumptions many people (including members of law enforcement) make about BDSM practitioners—and of men like Karam, who crossed lines willfully and often, at the physical and emotional expense of their partners. —SD
Jana G. Pruden | The Globe and Mail | June 7, 2023, | 3,231 words
Jana G. Pruden’s Globe and Mail piece is a masterclass in longform journalism. Pruden goes behind the glitter of the Canadian Cheer National Championships in Niagara Falls, Ontario, to introduce us to the hardcore, competitive subculture called cheer. Pruden’s laser focus on original detail puts you in a front-row seat at this raucous, high-energy competition, and before you know it, you’re rooting for these tough-as-nails, besequined athletes as they run their routines before the keen-eyed judges. “Then, as a flyer spun a pirouette atop her teammates’ uplifted hands, a momentary loss of balance,” she writes. “It was the final moment of the final stunt, the last seconds of the routine.” Reading this, don’t be surprised if your spirit lifts like a cheer flyer in motion. —KS
Andrew Chamings | New Lines Magazine | May 19, 2023 | 2,786 words
A clown motel—built to honor the clown collection of a man who died in a mine fire in 1911—would not be top of my must-see list. While Andrew Chamings seems equally bemused, he bravely makes it through a lobby filled with clown memorabilia to stay in a room themed around clown Elvis (Clownvis). Tonopah, the small American town where the clowns reside, has a devasting past. In the early 1900s, a mysterious illness known as the Death Harvest decimated its population, and the motel sits across from the cemetery where many of its victims lie. The graves draw more tourists than the clowns. As Chamings explains, “America … strangely and uniquely fetishizes its brutal past.” The American West has long held a particular fascination: The more gruesome the tale, the more the appeal. Chamings, a Brit, ponders on the cultural difference to England, where “every inch of soil has been warred over, killed for, harvested, bought and sold a hundred times, from the Druids to the Romans to the Gauls to the modern day[;]” concluding that this vastness is why the British lack the same interest in historical tragedies. I concur. When I lived in London, I no doubt had picnics over Black Plague pits—they lie under several green spaces, unmarked. As long as you have a decent sandwich, what does it matter the skeletons that lie beneath? As Chamings eloquently puts it, the “carnage of America’s manifest destiny is fresher, a bloodstain still drying in the sand.” Some fascinating reporting. —CW
Jason Warick | CBC News | June 4, 2023 | 4,312 words
In Canada, while the government has been criticized for proposed expansions to the Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD) program that could include people with mental illness and disabilities, the program’s intent was originally to allow Canadians with terminal illness the right to die with dignity on their own terms. Saskatoon artist Jeanette Lodoen, 87, wanted Canadians “to understand the realities of medically-assisted dying.” She and her family granted CBC News reporter Jason Warick and videographer Don Somers unrestricted access in the weeks before, during, and after her death, allowing them to share an intimate portrait of a vibrant woman who—in relinquishing her life—reminds us how to live. “I thought, thank you. Thank you,” says Lodoen. “I’ve had enough. I’ve had a long life. I’m 87 years old. I’ve had a wonderful family who support me and I love dearly forever. It was such a release to know that I didn’t have to suffer anymore, and that it was OK to go.” —KS
Carrie Arnold | Noēma | June 6, 2023 | 3,186 words
Let me preface this by saying I am both a cat person and a dog person. That said, cats are assholes. That’s okay! It’s part of their charm. They’re loving, yes, but they’re also haughty and destructive and give approximately half a damn about your feelings or possessions. Carrie Arnold allows as much when she sets out her own felinophilic bonafides in her Noēma piece. Yet, even she, a woman who calls cats “the only phenomenon on Earth that could lure me out of bed before sunrise,” was surprised to learn of the havoc they wreak on the natural world. In the U.S. alone, as many as 80 million unowned cats (and another 20ish million pet cats with outdoor privileges) present a legitimate existential threat to birds, plants, and other wildlife. The story, for all its essayistic tendencies, focuses on the rift between conservationists and cat defenders—and also on the hypocrisy lurking in the way we think about outdoor cats. We shun the peaceful “free dogs” of India, yet we don’t give a second thought to the cat with a bird in its mouth (nor do we realize that for every mouth-bird we see, many others have been ravaged out of sight). Then again, as Arnold points out, “the problem with cats has nothing to do with cats at all. The issue is a fundamentally human problem.” We’re so busy marking our own territory, it seems, we don’t think about the responsibility of pet stewardship. Bob Barker was right all along. —PR
Audience Award
What piece did our readers love most this week? The envelope, please!
Richard Sima | The Washington Post | June 1, 2023 | 4,122 words
Could autoimmune diseases be at the root of some mental illnesses? Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, thinks so. “By all accounts, she was thriving, in overall good health and showing no signs of mental distress beyond the normal teenage growing pains,” they said of April Burrell. This was before she suffered a traumatic experience, became incoherent, and was hospitalized. Twenty years after she became catatonic, Markx discovered that April’s bloodwork showed antibodies were attacking her brain. Miraculously, after several courses of steroids and immunosuppressive drugs, April improved to the point where in 2020, she was deemed mentally competent enough to check herself out of treatment, but not before a joyful reunion with her family. —KS
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In this gorgeous essay, Jessica Wilkerson recalls growing up in Tennessee in the ’90s, a place where feminism was widely considered dangerous, ridiculous, and a joke. In trying to find her way in the world, Wilkerson revered two important women: her grandmother and Pat Summitt, the former head coach of the University of Tennessee’s Lady Volunteers basketball team. For Oxford American, Wilkerson recounts Summitt pushing boundaries with her personal brand of feminism and her grandmother’s poignant reminder that Wilkerson’s body was hers alone. “Unlike her, I could live another way. I left with the imprint of her hand in mine, her words in my ears, saying out loud what I did not know I needed to hear. My grandmother, perhaps more than any other person, wished for me to set out to do what I wished with my own life, body, and mind.”
Only at the end of her life, it seems, did she get to make a decision about her body, one granted too few people. After numerous harrowing visits to the ER and several long hospital stays, she had finally gotten her wish: to stay home during the next medical crisis, and to begin the process of dying on her own terms.
When she asked me the question about children, I stumbled over my words. This was not a prompt that people asked in the part of the country where I’m from. Children are assumed, especially of people young and married. Women get pregnant; women raise children.
I told my grandmother in halting words that I didn’t know if that—children, motherhood, sacrifice—was what I wanted. She squeezed my hand and whispered hoarsely, “You know you don’t have to.” In that moment, my grandmother broke an enforced silence around women’s bodies and the choices we can or cannot make and the implications of those choices for our lives.
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