A significant report on the impact of sexual crime in adult entertainment.
An exposé on the popular pornography site, awash in a myriad of sexual abuse and child trafficking allegations.
Mickelwait, a leading anti–sex trafficking activist and founder of the Justice Defense Fund, explores the rise in exploitative abuse by the adult entertainment industry. Her impassioned report focuses on her discovery that the 10th-most-visited website in the world, Pornhub, was monetizing homemade, pay-to-download, advertisement-supported sexually abusive content—and manipulatively cloaking that material even after its “dirty secret” was exposed to the media. The author delivers the bulk of her chronologically structured investigation via dramatically lucid language and verbatim commentary from content moderators, survivors, and former employees of MindGeek, the company that owned Pornhub until 2023. Throughout the book, Mickelwait provides damning evidence of Pornhub’s incentivization of sexual crime. “I realize Pornhub’s servers are potentially the largest collection of child pornography and sexual crime in North America, if not the world,” she writes. The author chronicles how she wrote an accusatory series of social media posts and media articles urging the executives of MindGeek, specifically CEO Feras Antoon, to be held accountable, which sparked vicious retaliation efforts. “They have no choice but to attack with lies, and assaults on character and credibility to slow the truth about them from spreading,” she writes. “One thing is clear: MindGeek plays dirty, and this is going to be a messy fight.” As Mickelwait delved further into the darker realms of the internet, more shady characters emerged, and she provides disturbingly vivid portraits of the wrongdoers. Thankfully, her initiative has made significant progress in court, but she is clear that the fight against sexual crime will continue. The author is a dedicated journalist, and she effectively sounds the alarm for tighter controls over “crime scene” porn sites.
A significant report on the impact of sexual crime in adult entertainment.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593542019
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Thesis/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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