Keeping you in the know, “
Jeffrey Stockbridge’s photo series documents the inhabitants of Kensington Avenue in North Philadelphia over the course of five years. The city has one of the highest overdose rates in the US, and the street is in one of its poorest neighborhoods, awash with drugs and homelessness. Stockbridge’s lens has compassion for his subjects, but is unsparing in showing the depths of deprivation endured.
Read: “Empire of Pain” (2021)
What began as a 2017 article in The New Yorker became a bestselling book by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (who also features in “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”). Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, Radden Keefe walks readers through a history of the Sackler families, Purdue Pharma, and the company’s manufacturing and marketing of opioid OxyContin.
Read: “Cherry” (2018)
Nico Walker’s searing debut novel was adapted with mixed results into a film starring Tom Holland. Choose the book. Walker writes the gripping tale of a US Army veteran who returned from Iraq, developed an addiction — and became a bank robber to fund it. A work of warts-and-all autofiction, Walker wrote “Cherry” while in prison for robbing banks.
Watch: “Mare of Easttown” (2021)
This limited series by Brad Ingelsby aired on HBO (which is owned by CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery) and starred Kate Winslet as a detective pursuing a murder investigation in a close-knit town. Opioid addiction isn’t the series’ chief concern, serving rather as a disquieting backdrop and fine example of how the crisis has permeated communities across the US.
Top image: “Nan in the bathroom with roommate,” Boston, 1970s (Photo courtesy of Nan Goldin)
