‘You Want A Description Of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-hour Problem

Intense, tragic, and deep special report by Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion, and Scott Glover in the LA Times, about OxyContin and Perdue Pharma, and how marketing the drug as a 12-hour remedy lead to abuse and bad prescription practices.

But OxyContin’s stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and when it doesn’t last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug.

California Notes

When Joan Didion publishes a new essay, we link it. I think that's a good standing rule. Here she starts with the Patti Hearst trial, and meanders around that state she wrote about most:

At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.

The House Is a Home

Sarah Galvin on her memories of Hugo House, now that the old building is slated to be demolished.

Though it bills itself simply as “a place for writers,” the Hugo House is actually a gateway to another dimension. The non-profit was founded in 1996 by Linda Breneman, Frances McCue and Andrea Lewis with the hope of creating a hub for Seattle’s diverse, burgeoning community of writers and readers. Named after working-class, Seattle-born poet Richard Hugo, it has consistently honored the spirit it was named in, providing resources and community to writers of every stripe.

How The Rhetoric of Imposter Syndrome Is Used to Gaslight Women in Tech

Alexis Hancock, looking at her experience in tech as a black woman, and how not only was her work not appreciated, how the idea of imposter syndrome was used to keep her marginalized.

I believed in the rhetoric. I thought the process of self-acceptance would mean professional acceptance by my peers. I thought I would stop experiencing negative actions in tech once I could just believe in my worth, and show it to others. I thought that if I worked hard enough and completed enough projects, I would eventually reach a point where I didn’t feel like a fraud. And to cope with the racist and sexist comments along the way, I just focused on reaching that point of power, when my accomplishments would shine brightly. But I’d fallen into a trap.