Slate Magazine •

Getting an IUD Inserted Is Tricky. Getting an IUD Out Can Be a Different Story.

When Carli removed her own intrauterine device while sitting in a warm bath, she was elated. IUD in hand, “I threw on a towel and ran to my partner,” she told me. “I was just like, ‘Holy crap, I did it. I did it by myself!’ ” When Madeline removed her IUD, in a deep-squat position she replicated from a home-birth video someone had sent her on Reddit, she found it to be remarkably easy, even compared to having the device removed by a doctor, as she had done previously. “I think the predictability of knowing the exact timing and having it all in my own hands—literally—was a lot better," she told me.
Slate •

Millions of Women Have Them. They’ve Radically Improved. Why Do Many of Us Understand So Shockingly Little About How They Work?

The nurse practitioner who inserted my IUD worked with the precision and speed of someone on a pit crew. Or, really—just someone working in the gynecology department of a student clinic at one of the largest universities in the U.S. “You probably do a lot of these, huh?” I asked. She smiled. For weeks, I had been dreading the appointment. A steady stream of friends who had endured the procedure before me had warned me it hurt. Still, they said, reliable, long-lasting birth control was worth it.
Slate •

For Years, Prison Life Was Isolated From Tech. Now Tech Is Beginning to Define It.

One evening in July 2020, I paced around the house, on the phone with my grandmother. The coronavirus pandemic had suspended visitation at the jail where my uncle was incarcerated, but they had just introduced video calling, and she was trying to figure out how to schedule and pay for a call. We didn’t know it at the time, but my grandmother had only a few months left with my uncle. Those video calls—however imperfect, expensive, and clunky they may have been—facilitated some of the last moments they spent together.
Slate •

He Gouged Out Both His Eyes. Can the Government Still Execute Him?

André Thomas has no eyes. One he gouged out in 2004, in jail, days after he murdered his estranged wife, Laura Boren, their son, and her daughter. The second he pulled out and ate in 2008, while on death row in Texas. There’s no one who hears Thomas’ story and doesn’t respond with a “sharp intake of breath,” Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told me. Thomas’ lawyers have called him one of the “most mentally ill prisoners in Texas history,” a distinction that seems to unite observers too. The details of death penalty cases are always devastating, as capital punishment is, in theory, supposed to be reserved for the most severe of murders. But Thomas’ case feels uniquely raw and excruciating.
Slate •

I Confronted Someone Who Removed Me From Find My Friends. It Was Mortifying—but I Learned Something Important.

I followed Daniel around for four years on Find My Friends before he removed me from his contact list. We didn’t have a single conversation during that time, but I felt like I understood the basic blueprint of his life. About every other day, I would log on to Find My Friends and scroll through my people, checking in on my parents and college roommates. When I clicked on his name and saw that he was at the university where he worked as a research assistant, I wondered what it would be like to work on campus. When I saw he was at what looked like a fun restaurant (I concluded after zooming in on Apple Maps), I wondered what it would be like to live in a lively college town.
Slate Magazine •

The Problem With How Courts Decide Whether Someone Can Be Executed

In 2007, the Supreme Court case Panetti v. Quarterman set the standard for when the government can execute someone with severe mental illness. Fifteen years later, the state of Texas is still trying to execute the petitioner in that case, Scott Panetti. This week, a federal judge is hearing testimony over whether Panetti meets the standard the Supreme Court outlined in his case in 2007: Does he have a rational understanding of the link between his crime (the 1992 murder of his in-laws) and the impending punishment?
Slate Magazine •

SSRIs Are a Tool. They’re Also Fueling a Cultural Movement.

Do antidepressants work? It’s a question that comes up in the news cycle from time to time. This summer, we got it two-fold: First, there was Tucker Carlson ranting about how selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors were somehow responsible for the uptick in shootings (they are not). More recently, there was a review study that “debunked” the idea that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance—a fact that has been known for a long time, which did not stop the study authors from taking jabs at SSRIs.
Slate Magazine •

On WhatsApp, You Can’t Escape Work—or Life

It’s 3 p.m. Saturday, and you check your phone to see if your aunt replied to the message you sent asking how to save your dying plant. The little red circle next to the WhatsApp logo is a promising sign: a new message! You open the app to see, at the top of your active chats, your boss’ name and photo next to a truly horrific status: “typing.” The internal conflict begins: Are you expected to answer? Can it wait until Monday?
The Marshall Project •

My Uncle Died the Day He Was Released From Jail. I’m Still Trying to Understand Why.

It took me four months to open the email my mom sent me with my uncle Bryan’s medical history. By the time I read through the 132 pages, divided into three carefully scanned PDF files, he had been dead almost half a year. I wondered why it had taken me so long. There were the usual excuses — I was busy, working, things came up. I had avoided it because I knew it would be hard, emotional. The bigger truth is I wanted Bryan’s story to be straightforward, and I was worried that what I would find in his medical records would not be.
Narratively •

The Secret Sisterhood of Offshore Oil Workers

María de Jesús Ramos Cárdenas didn’t know what she was doing when she arrived at the helicopter pad in Ciudad del Carmen, an island city along Mexico’s gulf coast, in September 1988. She didn’t know much about the offshore oil industry. But she was tired of using her medical degree only haphazardly — giving consults when and where she could, often door-to-door, while also cooking food, sewing clothes, cutting hair, and painting nails in between to pay the bills. Things had been better during the past few months; she was thrilled to have finally gotten a chance to put her degree to use more regularly, working on the island at a hospital run by Pemex, Mexico’s national oil company.
Slate •

Trump’s Ambassador to Mexico Wants to Be a Star on Mexican Twitter. It’s Complicated.

If you were Donald Trump’s ambassador to Mexico, you might be forgiven for lying low. Instead, in early September 2019, Christopher Landau, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Mexico, posed a challenge to Mexican Twitter users. His counterpart in Greece, he wrote, had almost 150,000 followers in a country with a population of 10 million, whereas the @USAmbMex account only had 40,000 followers in a country of 130 million. “This is an outrage! … Mexico has to be #1!” he tweeted in Spanish.
Transformations •

Words When the World Quakes

When you learn a second language, the words you fumble to make your own come to you in two ways. There are the words you find in the pages of a book, the worksheets of a lesson. And then there are the words you learn because the universe teaches them to you--words that can change the shape of your life. The first Spanish word I can remember the universe teaching me is simulacro, drill. It was September 18, 2017, and I was studying in Mexico City. It was day before the anniversary of the 1985 earthquake, a tragedy estimated to have taken the lives of around 10,000 people.
Slate •

Moving Classes Online Is Hard—Especially in Prisons

The decision to stop sending volunteers to give classes in California prisons was a difficult one for Ernst Fenelon Jr., the senior program coordinator of the Prison Education Project.Fenelon, who was incarcerated in California from 1991 to 2005, understood what stopping classes would mean for the project’s students inside: isolation, uncertainty, and a lack of positive activities to fill their time. Though he was worried about participants’ physical health, Fenelon told me, “I was also concerned for the mental health safety of those incarcerated, in the sense of keeping their hope alive, keeping them connected to positive programming.”
Slate •

Life Has Moved to Zoom. Can Prison Visitation Do the Same?

On Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern, join Future Tense for There’s No Social Distancing in Prison, a Social Distancing Social with Josie Duffy Rice and Lawrence Bartley. For Robert Pezzeca, who is serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania, the introduction of Zoom as a means of video visitation meant he got to see his 22-year-old daughter for the third time in her life. “I sat there for 45 mins watching my daughter eat dinner, laugh, smile, tell me stories, burp & I loved every second of it. Even when
Slate •

How Migrant Shelters in Mexico Are Facing COVID-19

Late last month, a group of migrants in an immigration detention center in the Mexican town of Tenosique lit mattresses on fire to protest conditions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic: overcrowding, the inability to carry out preventive measures like social distancing and sanitation, a lack of medical services and information, and potentially indefinite periods of confinement. One person, a migrant from Guatemala, died as a result of smoke inhalation, and 14 others were injured.
Slate •

Who Gets to Cross Closing Borders With Ease?

Last week, I was at a mall Starbucks in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, Mexico, the place that’s been my home for the past six and a half months as I’ve worked as an English teaching assistant through the Fulbright Program. I was scrolling through my COVID-19-saturated newsfeeds from a place that still felt very far away from the pandemic. But then I received a memo from the U.S. State Department that changed all that. Due to the global spread of COVID-19, the State Department was “strongly advis[
The Marshall Project •

What Gate Money Can (And Cannot) Buy for People Leaving Prison

As Ignacio Pedroza travelled the more than 350 miles from Pelican Bay State Prison to his home near Oakland, he was paying close attention to the roadside signs—particularly the ones that advertised prices for gas or food. Things were more expensive than they had been when he went to prison 12 years earlier. In his pocket, Pedroza had $200 in a debit card the state of California had given him upon release. He was busy making calculations in his head, trying to figure out what that money was actually good for.
Longreads •

In Sickness, In Health — and In Prison

Niccole Wetherell and Paul Gillpatrick were engaged in 2012. The state of Nebraska has prevented their wedding ever since​. Wetherell is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, housed in a prison about 50 miles away from her fiance, Gillpatrick, who is serving a 55-to-90-year sentence for second-degree murder. The pair, who met in 1998, have come to accept they cannot marry in person. Instead, they want to wed via video conference, and they want an end to a prison policy that forbids Nebraska inmates from marrying each other except in “special circumstances.” Wetherell and Gillpatrick argue they have a “fundamental right to marry.” In June, U.S. District Judge Robert Rossiter ​affirmed​ that right. The case is now in appeal. But the legal precedent Rossiter cited has a quirky history that involves an infamous co-ed prison, an impromptu wedding, a soon-to-follow divorce and a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
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