Addiction

Monday

Bridget Phetasy

America needs a 12-step program

When I got sober in October of 2013, my sponsor said many things I didn’t want to hear. One of those things was ‘You have no idea who you are.’ Another was ‘Many of the things you thought you wanted, you’ll realize you don’t want and vice versa. If you manage to stay sober long enough, you’ll look around and marvel at who you have become.’ She turned out to be right, but I never could have predicted that in the span of five years I’d go from waiting tables to writing for Playboy to representing Independents on the Ben Shapiro Election Special on a Fox News panel. At a certain point, sometime around 2018, I looked around and said to myself, ‘Wait. I’m a conservative now? How much weed was I smoking!?

sober
social media heroin
Karol Markowicz

Social media is nothing like heroin

On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, speaking to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, compared Facebook to tobacco and opioids while pushing for similar regulations. Haugen, a 'whistleblower' who came forward after Facebook dissolved her team and who admits she never worked on child safety during her time at Facebook, told a terrifying story about an app that harms young girls. Social media is like a drug. We hear this all the time. We’re powerless addicts in the face of its influence. We need to keep the kids safe from it. But is it? And do we? I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night.

Friday

Cockburn

Is there anything ‘new’ or ‘shocking’ about the latest Hunter Biden scandal?

The prodigal son returns without his pants. Hunter Biden, the male heir of the 46th president, was caught hanging brain with a prostitute, again. The creeps over at the Daily Mail obtained the video which was recorded in January 2019. In a chyron, Fox News described the footage of Hunter as ‘new’ and ‘shocking’ — but frankly it’s neither. In the clip, Hunter recounts how he lost a laptop filled with his raunchy sex tapes while passed out in a pool. According to the Daily Mail, the conversation occurred after Biden and the unidentified woman had sex. So romantic. And you thought your pillow talk was awkward. 'They have videos of me doing this. They have videos of me doing like fucking crazy [expletive] sex [expletive],' Biden said in the video.

hunter biden

Thursday

Ian Birrell

The scandal of OxyContin, the painkiller that caused untold pain

From our UK edition

Last week I was staying in a cool hotel in the middle of San Francisco. When I walked out to find coffee in the morning, I came across a man with his trousers lowered as he injected himself in the groin. An older fellow nearby used the street as a toilet, adding to the human excrement on the pavement. A woman lay crashed out, hair matted over her face in the heat. Returning later in the day, passing the clusters of tents and people chasing dragons from foil, I was asked: ‘Do you want anything?’ These disturbing scenes of human despair were beside a smart shopping mall in the city with the most billionaires per capita on the planet.

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Dark knight of cool

‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ Maxwell Scott announces in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Something like this seems to have occurred with the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Other members of the West Coast jazz scene such as the great saxophonist Art Pepper were often in dire straits, but Baker has come to personify the romantic figure of the tragically doomed jazz artist. Once heralded as the ‘prince of cool’, Baker’s self-destruction was lucidly chronicled by Bruce Weber in the 1988 documentary Let’s Get Lost. Even his album covers, where he gazes broodingly at the viewer, underscore his vulnerability. His meditative, halting solos formed the antithesis of the frenetic bebop movement emanating from jazz haunts on the East Coast.

chet baker

Friday

Bridget Phetasy

Giving up Twitter for Lent went well

It’s Lent and the good Catholic schoolgirl in me loves this season of fasting and rending the heart and not my garments and all that jazz, so I dug deep and asked myself the hard question: what would be the most challenging thing in my life to give up? Since I’ve already given up heroin, cocaine, alcohol, weed, cigarettes and toxic men, two primary substance addictions remain: coffee and Twitter. If I’m honest with myself, Twitter is the most hardcore addiction I have and it’s also the one that robs me of the most productivity. So. Into the media desert I go...I rip the Band-Aid off around 5 p.m. PST on Tuesday, logging out from my account and removing the app from my phone. Goodbye, my love. Day 1: Holy Moly. I have a problem. 6 a.m. PST: Ash Wednesday.

fatwa twitter

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

The semiotics of Jackass

Sad times for emotionally stunted millennials – which is to say, all of us – as Bam Margera, star of the cult classic stunt comedy show Jackass, has continued his disastrous middle age with a desperate plea to sentient mustache and self-help guru Dr Phil to help him with his alcoholism. Naturally, I wish Mr Margera the best. Addiction is a terrible burden to bear. Still, it got me thinking about Jackass, which, incredibly, was developed about 20 years ago.Think about what this means. There are thirty-somethings and forty-somethings who, when asked by their innocent children what they watched when they were young, have had to lie or else explain their youthful enthusiasm for watching people set themselves on fire, publicly defecate and eat raw eggs and vomit them into a pan.

jackass

Tuesday

Barbara Boland

Technology is damaging hands – not just heads

Silicon Valley parents are famously strict about their children’s screen time, even as they dish out their ‘crack cocaine’ technology to the rest of the world’s youth. Last week, however, Tucker Carlson upped the ante: he called on Congress to step and ban children from smartphones, as they do with alcohol. Researchers have demonstrated a link between hours spent in front of a screen and depression and anxiety levels in children. But screen usage damage isn’t just in our heads; increasingly, it’s also in our hands.  ‘Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned,’ reports the Guardian.

smartphones technology