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San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- Health
- San Francisco Chronicle
Joanna Sokol's ‘A Real Emergency' looks under the hood of a broken emergency response system
Growing up in Oakland in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Joanna Sokol felt adrift and uncertain, a school-averse black sheep among her academically inclined family. Eventually, she found her calling as a paramedic, spending a decade serving the communities of Reno, Santa Cruz and San Francisco. She started to make sense of her experience writing essays for Reader's Digest, Epoca and Hazlitt. Her revelatory book 'A Real Emergency: Stories from the Ambulance' details her painful, abusive love affair with driving an ambulance. It's a mordant, sometimes stomach-churning immersion into the world of first responders dealing with ailing bodies, drug-addled minds, bean-counting bureaucracies and eventually a pandemic that pushed the system to the breaking point. Q: During your early days working as a medic at concerts and festivals, did you notice any patterns between styles of music and emergencies? A: There were certain patterns in drug use — you're going to get more alcohol at a metal concert, more psychedelics for a jam band, more MDMA variants at a rave. But you'd be surprised how much overlap we saw. Like — sir, why are you using ecstasy at a hardcore show? You are on the wrong drug, my friend! And I would say even more than the genre, we noticed differences between the overall energy levels at an event. A late morning reggae set at a festival I would expect maybe dehydration or bee sting allergies, whereas a 4 a.m. heavy electronica warehouse rave; well, you can imagine. A: I had some amazing mentors as a new EMT. This sounds trivial, but I would jump on the floor and teach young me some core strength exercises. When you're first getting into the job, everyone says 'take care of your back,' but no one really explains exactly what that means. It's actually less about lifting heavy patients and more about poor working conditions. Most ambulance workers don't get their own stations to rest or stretch in between calls the way that firefighters do. Instead, we are in the ambulance driving around for 12 or 16 hours a day. Q: Along those lines, 'A Real Emergency' shows how poor work conditions make the job so much more difficult than it needs to be. What are the biggest hurdles EMTs face in organizing for better work policies? A: This is really layered, and there is some fascinating history behind it. But the short answer is that ambulance systems are run by a wide variety of entities in the United States. Some public, some private, some by fire departments. There's no real cohesion on a national level. In many places, the ambulance is very much treated as a steppingstone to a fire engine, so most people don't stick around long enough to see paramedicine as a realistic career. Q: Your descriptions of the early months of COVID-19 while you were working in San Francisco are beyond chilling. What did that period reveal about our emergency and hospital system? A: A lot of us knew for years that the emergency system was falling apart: overcrowded ERs, long wait times for ambulances, never enough staffing. And suddenly the rest of the world was looking at us with this sense of fear and shock, asking us if there were enough resources, and we were thinking, 'No, of course there aren't enough resources.' It felt like we'd been inside a burning house screaming our heads off and suddenly everyone else was saying to each other, 'Oh, no, what if that house catches fire?' Q: In researching the history of ambulance/EMT services, what are some of the challenges that remain unchanged over more than a century? A: The ambulance has never turned a profit. It's generally used by those in poverty, and those with chronic medical and social issues. And there have always been arguments about what constitutes a 'real emergency.' I found records of one of the first ambulance agencies in the country arguing with their local police department about overuse of ambulances for drunks. This was back in the 1800s! The ambulance has always tried to focus on immediate life threats, and it has always ended up as a resource for all of the issues that society can't or won't deal with in other ways. A: More EMS staffing. There are some very cool ways that ambulance crews can get trained and be more involved in these issues, but unfortunately every single one of them starts with having enough of us available to respond to calls.
Hindustan Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Home run: Wknd sits down with Jeet Thayil to talk about his deeply personal new book
It's a 'conundrum of a novel', says Jeet Thayil, of his new book, The Elsewhereans. It begins with his father, the journalist TJS George, flying from Bombay to Cochin in the 1950s, to visit Ammu George, a teacher he is set to marry. Against convention, he wants to privately meet her once before the wedding. The book takes off from there, merging fact and fiction, memoir, travelogue and supernatural saga in mind-bending ways. The reader isn't meant to know which is which. 'I want you to wonder… to keep guessing,' Thayil says. Fragments of postcards, letters and photographs add to the sense of confusion. A few years on, he enters the tale, born in the backwaters of Kerala, followed by his sister Sheba Thayil (who would also go on to be a journalist and writer). The family would move from Bombay to Bihar, then Hong Kong and New York; the novel unfolds also in Vietnam, France, Germany and the UK. As it traces his teen years, when he 'lived to defy and dismay my father', and builds itself around his deep love for his mother, what emerges is Thayil's most personal novel since The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017; a pacy, autobiographical work that also married memory and fiction). Incidentally, in 2013, Thayil became the first Indian author to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, for his debut novel, Narcopolis, about opium, Mumbai and one man's struggles with drugs. (The novel was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.) 'This is a story about a family of Indians out in the world,' says Thayil, 65. Excerpts from an interview. * Where did the idea for The Elsewhereans come from? This is material I've been saving, or hoarding, all my life; material that never found its correct form. The novel — discrete stories, some written in the third person, some in the first, set in different eras, on different continents — assumed its true shape only towards the end of the writing. Some of those stories were gratifying to relate. For example, the story about my father starting AsiaWeek in Hong Kong. They sold a majority stake to Reader's Digest, which sold the shares on to Time, and then Time eventually shut AsiaWeek down. This is a story only journalists in Asia, Europe, America and India knew about, that AsiaWeek was a magazine run by Asians for Asians, in the '70s, and that it was killed by Time… Like that story, there are others that illuminate forgotten corners of history. * This is also a book about your difficult relationship with your father…. For most of my teens, I tried to be the opposite of what he wanted me to be. My father (now 97) is gifted in many ways, but not so much when it comes to the minutiae of fatherhood. He comes from a long line of conservative Malayali Syrian Christian men for whom parenting is about distance, punishment and anger. But if you don't have a relationship where you're also a friend to your children, you miss out on a lot. The child may end up self-destructive or recalcitrant. For a long time, I wanted to upend his image of himself by becoming the black sheep, by doing things that would have made any parent upset. I think of it now as a waste of time, but… that's how it was. I don't think I got over that very childish way of dealing with myself, my parents, and the world until my 40s. I was living in New York, working for a newspaper, trying to get by, and I realised it takes so much space in one's head to define oneself in opposition to a single person or idea. I realised it just wasn't worth it. It seems like a basic lesson, but it took me ages to get there. * Your love for your mother forms the sort of nucleus of this book. She was always my biggest champion. And yes, she is the moral centre of this book. Her story begins the narrative and her end ends it. In terms of our financial lives, if it weren't for my mother, I wouldn't be writing novels. I'd be working, earning a living, trying to pay the rent. She was the one who, right from the beginning, invested small amounts of my father's earnings. My father had very little sense of money as a living quantity. She always did. Which is why I can afford to spend the day writing a poem or a song. In that sense, I suppose I owe her everything. I wanted to chronicle her life in The Elsewhereans. A life can be remarkable, but unless you put it down, unless you record it in some way — not necessarily in the form of a novel, but in some way — what's the point? All those extraordinary moments are gone. * Her death (six months ago; aged 90) was an emotional trigger to the ending of the book… Yes… I knew it was finished the moment she passed away. Obviously, I couldn't do anything for a while, but once I got back to work, I finished it very quickly. I rewrote portions, added the last few pages, and it just put a lock on the book for me. * Did the idea of a documentary novel, a blurring of truth and reality, make The Elsewhereans easier to write? At first, I thought it would be a work of non-fiction, but that would have made for a narrow narrative. One can't inhabit other people's heads and other people's lives in an immersive way unless one is writing fiction. At the same time, a number of elements here are factual, taken from life, with actual photographs, letters and documents. Which is why I think of it as a documentary novel. The point is, life isn't easily categorised. Life is open-ended. It doesn't have labels, and it doesn't have happy endings. I like the form of the documentary novel. I might do another in the same vein. * You suggest that we are all on a lifelong journey, never belonging to a place. And yet you capture how the world is turning to hate because of ideas such as nationality and race… As someone who began travelling at the age of eight, I've known for a while that all travellers are not equal. A traveller of colour understands this before they begin to understand cultures other than their own. It's more than the colonial-era hierarchy of the visa process. It's also a question of belonging. As the world becomes increasingly intolerant, it becomes increasingly intolerable. When divisions between nations and races deepen, you realise there are places you are not welcome. For me, the sense of being an outsider has always had an upside. It has sharpened my perception. * Are we all Elsewhereans then? All of us. There's a moment in the book that describes what it's like to feel like a foreigner in one's own house. Even if you've never left your hometown, you might feel as if the world around you has changed so much it doesn't feel like home anymore. * Given that it is set across 70 years and a dozen countries, what did the research for this book involve? I looked up accounts of the various time periods and places in which each chapter is set. I interviewed my parents over the course of about three years. That was a useful thing about moving to the family home in Bengaluru in 2018. I started work on this book in 2020. As soon as I knew I was going to write it, I began talking to my parents about the past. They remembered a lot of it, in striking detail. Then I looked at my dad's notebooks. He kept extensive notes of his years as a journalist. I went through a lot of material and asked both their permissions before I started to write. My mother may not have been very pleased with the idea, but there's no way she was going to say no, which is why the first epigraph in the book is Czeslaw Milosz: 'When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.'
NZ Autocar
18-06-2025
- Automotive
- NZ Autocar
Toyota is NZ's most reputable company again
Toyota New Zealand has claimed the top spot in the annual Kantar Corporate Reputation Index. This cements its place as the most reputable company in the country for a second consecutive year. It also follows Toyota winning the Reader's Digest 'Most Trusted Car Brand' in New Zealand for the 20th consecutive year. The Kantar Corporate Reputation Index, now in its 11th year, measures consumer perceptions of New Zealand's top 50 companies, addressing trust, leadership, fairness, and responsibility. Among the top 10 companies, Toyota led in the Trust and Leadership pillars and ranked among the top performers in Fairness and Responsibility. Tatsuya Ishikawa (front) with other members of the TNZ management team. Toyota New Zealand Chief Executive, Tatsuya Ishikawa, says the recognition reflects both the strength of the Toyota team and the trust customers place in the brand. 'Toyota is a brand for all New Zealanders. Every day, we work hard to earn their trust, in every interaction we have with them. 'Our ambition has always been to be more than just a car company. We want to be a trusted partner in our customers' lives and a responsible contributor to New Zealand's future. 'Toyota Stores don't just invest in their businesses; they also invest in the communities they're part of. We recognise their efforts through our annual Citizenship Awards. We complement this local impact with national initiatives that support safer roads and stronger communities across New Zealand.' Tatsuya Ishikawa continues: 'At our core, we're a mobility company but it's the strength of our relationship with customers that drives our success. That relationship doesn't begin and end with a purchase. We work hard to anticipate needs, resolve issues quickly, and deliver a seamless experience at every stage. How we look after our customers after a purchase is so important to us. While things won't always go to plan, being truly customer-focused means taking responsibility and putting things right quickly, and with care. 'We're focused on helping communities thrive, not just through economic investment but by shaping a more sustainable future. That means continuing to electrify our fleet, reducing emissions, and staying on track to meet our goal of net-zero carbon by 2050,' says Tatsuya Ishikawa. 'At Toyota, we embrace the philosophy of kaizen, a commitment to continuous improvement. It's a simple idea, but a powerful one. We believe reputation is earned one decision, one relationship, one interaction at a time.'
NZ Herald
29-05-2025
- Automotive
- NZ Herald
BMW Museum celebrates Italian design icons
Bridgestone is NZ's most trusted tyre brand for the 9th year running 29 May 04:00 PM The company has taken the top tyre spot in the Reader's Digest Most Trusted Brand survey.
Daily Mail
27-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
The dirtiest area of a cruise revealed - and it's NOT the toilets
Whether it's watching the sun set over the horizon, waking up in a new port every day or tucking into a hearty buffet each evening, cruise holidays are generally an idyllic way to travel. But unfortunately they can also be a hotbed for germs. And cruise holidaymakers might be surprised to learn that one of the most luxurious parts of the cruise ship can also often be the dirtiest. The USA'S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that two outbreaks of Legionnaires' Disease on cruise ships were linked to private balcony hot tubs. The unpleasant disease is a lung infection that people can get if they inhale droplets of water containing the bacteria that causes Legionnaires'. Symptoms include a cough, shortness of breath, chest pain or discomfort, a high temperature and flu-like feelings. Germ expert and microbiologist Jason Tetro told Reader's Digest that hot tubs are 'in essence' a 'three dimensional petri dish'. He explained: 'All bacteria need three things: a nice warm place to grow, plenty of water and organic material they can use for food.' Hot tubs tend to provide all three of these factors, making them much more germ prone than tourists might think. And private hot tubs are generally more likely to put holidaymakers at risk. Jeff explained that these type of tubs may not 'undergo the same level of testing or disinfection as the public ones'. The CDC has advised cruise holidaymakers to ask their cruise crew a couple of questions before taking a dip. CDC questions to ask your cruise operator
