What I'm Reading
reopening for editing work / links
First, some ~personal business news~: after a long pause while I was nose-down with editing my own book, and then seeing that book out into the world, and then catching up on a crush of freelance assignments, I have relaunched and refreshed my editorial services offerings. I really love working with other writers, especially on book proposals and the like. If you’re taking the summer to hash out your next project and are looking for feedback to help you identify larger patterns in your writing and understand both what is working and why, and what’s not working and why, I might be a good fit. You don’t have to just take my word for it—listen to Sam!:
Now, for what I’ve been reading and am eager to share, both in the child welfare world and beyond:
Jessica Lussenhop’s investigation for ProPublica illuminates how child abuse pediatricians are all too often single-minded in their assessments of complex and not readily explicable injuries in babies, with devastating results for families and for the physicians who try to challenge their assessments.
I wish this story at The Imprint were longer and had included voices of former foster youth, but I’m glad to see reporting on why families voluntarily relinquish kids to foster care these days, something I touch on toward the end of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow when speaking with social worker Ilena Robbins about her work at Lawyers for Children
This is more of a “listening” recommendation, but the new Wondery podcast “Liberty Lost” by T.J. Raphael offers a chilling look at the modern-day maternity home—this one run by Liberty University. For a reading accompaniment, I appreciated this Slate interview with Raphael about how “a place like the Liberty Godparent Home is a symptom of a much larger problem.”
Shifting gears, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s latest cancer feature for The New Yorker delves into the complex reality of early cancer screening, which something I’ve been thinking a lot about as someone with a family history riddled with cancer and a deep skepticism of the growing market for full-body MRI scans peddled by the likes of Kim Kardashian.
And for funsies, I loved this NYT Mag Screenland essay by Jake Nevins on And Just Like That, the worst show on television, which I have been slogging through so I can listen to the recaps on my fave podcast, “Every Outfit.”