Media + Culture

As Nicholas Kristof Recruits Students for His Global Poverty Tour, a New Book Exposes His “Racist and Imperialist Logic”

New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof has issued an invitation to university students to apply for his "2019 win-a-trip…

November 28, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Explained Why Marijuana Should Be Legal on Instagram—But the Live Feed Also Had Wider Significance

New York Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, captivated thousands of viewers on Instagram Live on…

November 19, 2018

“Zombies” and Rotting Flesh: The Media Just Loves Halloween-y Depictions of People Who Use Drugs

Zombies are apparently not just for Halloween—they pervade media descriptions of people who use drugs. An October New York Times…

October 31, 2018

Misinformation About So-Called “Terrorist Drug” Dispelled in New Report

If you're in the US, you may not have heard of captagon—an understudied synthetic drug recreationally popular and widely traded…

October 25, 2018

Why Everything About the Trump Administration’s New Opioid Video Campaign Is Wrong

A new campaign—from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the Truth Initiative and the nonprofit Ad…

October 24, 2018

Bopping Toward the Apocalypse: Where Drugs, History and Culture Collide

Obsessions with heroin and writing have dominated large, if not necessarily concurrent, parts of my life. But one need not…

October 16, 2018

The Language of Addiction: New York Times Insists on Perpetuating Stigma

The debate over journalists’ language on drug use was reignited by a recent email from New York Times standards editor Phillip B.…

October 15, 2018

The Tricky Path to Publishing a Harm Reduction-Oriented Addiction Memoir

Women drink and take drugs because it’s fun. We do it to be bulletproof. To be more intimate, or more…

October 12, 2018

Homelessness, Vaping and Fentanyl: Three More Examples of Bad Media Coverage of Drugs

Inaccurate and biased media coverage of drugs, drug use, and harm reduction was in full swing over this past weekend.…

October 9, 2018

In Defense of Juul, After the Latest Media Hit-Piece

The media frenzy against Juul, the US market leader in vaping products, is on steroids—and this feeds directly into actions…

October 2, 2018