Media + Culture

January 2, 2019 Media Roundup: A Woman’s Rights, a Distorted Drug Ranking and Qatar “Sin Tax”

Here's what we're talking about today:   A Woman's Rights [New York Times] "If the country’s war on drugs functions…

January 2, 2019

Public Health Experts Call for Retraction of Brookings Institution Opioid “Research Roundup”

[This article was updated December 12 to reflect a response from the author of the paper.]   An article published…

December 11, 2018

Is Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” Disrespectful to Mac Miller?

Watching the video for Ariana Grande's record-breaking song "Thank U, Next"—which premiered on Youtube on November 30 and became the…

December 3, 2018

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