Laura Kiesel

Trolls, death threats, and constant harassment — the risky business of being a woman journalist in the social media era
“Feminist cunts should die.”
This was the subject of an email I received a year and a half ago. Wary but curious, I opened the message and confirmed that the feminist cunt in question was me.
I didn’t delete the message. Instead, I printed it out and brought it to my local police station, where they added it to a growing file that had started some months earlier, after I pub...

While women have made strides in media and publishing, it seems we’re still often subject to the whims of men
year and a half ago, in the wake of the tragic Las Vegas shootings, I was struck by a single idea: If mental illness is such a prominent culprit in the phenomenon of mass shootings — as so many politicians and media pundits claim it to be — where are all the female mass shooters? After all, we have mental illness too, in arguably much greater numbers than men (at least according to th...

Arlington’s attempt to mitigate a police department controversy causes more distress for some concerned residents
“It’s time we forget about ‘restraint,’ ‘measured responses,’ ‘procedural justice,’ ‘de-escalation,’ ‘stigma-reduction,’ and other feel-good BS … Let’s meet violence with violence and get the job done.”
These words weren’t tweeted by a random Twitter troll. Rather, they were published by a lieutenant at the Arlington Police Department last October as part of a series of columns pu...

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Two years ago, I was chewing a tortilla chip when I heard a loud crackle of bone and a distinct pop, followed by a shrill ringing in my ear. By the time I pushed my jaw back into position, the swelling had already started.
I had seriously sprained my jaw, a problem that my doctor attributed to Ehler-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disease that means I am defic...

The year is 1986, and I am around eight years old. I am sitting in my living room in Brooklyn watching Revenge of the Nerds with rapt attention. My mother is not around; perhaps she is passed out or out of the apartment altogether as she often was due to her retreat into the depths of her heroin addiction. I am alone watching this movie on a mainstream (non-cable) station during prime-time hours on a weeknight. Yet even among those who have the privilege of being raised with more present pare...

The doctor I’d emailed earlier that day agreed to a 20-minute phone call with me. He was known for performing a rare procedure I hoped might potentially restore some of the nerve function to my right leg, which had been compromised ever since I suffered severe herniation and cyst formation in several discs in my lumbar spine nearly three years prior. He quickly shot down that hope when I shared my other diagnoses, though, because I had too many other things going on in my body that would make...

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How we see the world shapes who we choose to be — and sharing compelling experiences can frame the way we treat each other, for the better. This is a powerful perspective.
While some daughters may have memories of accompanying their mothers to their work, my childhood memories are full of mornings assisting my mother at the methadone clinic.
Her brother — my uncle and godfather — helped raise me. He died of a drug overdose in our apartment when I was 15. Though my mother ev...

On a damp and chilly Saturday in mid-October, I rolled out of bed several hours earlier than I usually would have in order to attend the biannual Disability Intersectionality Summit in nearby Cambridge, Mass on the MIT campus.
Groggy but enthusiastic, I stumbled down the stairs of my affordable housing complex and eagerly awaited The Ride–a discounted taxi service for disabled folks in the Boston metro area. After the pickup time came and went (as well as many minutes more), I called the disp...

At the end of last month, I woke up to the swooshing sound of an envelope being stealthily slipped under my door. When I got out of bed to inspect it, the greeting did not even include my name, but was instead addressed to “Resident of unit X.” It informed me of an impending monthly rent increase of $50 beginning in April. In some ways, this was a surprise–since I had been in the building manager’s office not even two weeks before and she did not alert me to any such increase. I had been comp...

Poisons meant for pests are killing animals and impacting humans in Mass
The body was found on a chilly morning in early April 2014, lying under a tree, the legs and feathers stiff with rigor mortis. For four years, Ruby the Red-Tailed hawk was a beloved presence in the Fresh Pond section of Cambridge, where she had shared a nest on the seventh-floor ledge of an office building in the middle of the mall with her long-time mate Buzz. A live camera was even set up to record and broadcast their ...

Ever since the election of Donald Trump and the Republican takeover of both chambers of Congress, the Affordable Care Act–which expanded healthcare coverage to more than 20 million people in the nation–has been their number one target. Yet, repeated attempts by Congress to pass a bill that would directly repeal the ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare, have to date all failed. These attacks on the ACA have also had an unintended result: they have helped revitalize the movement pushing for a sing...

For Medicaid patients who’ve spent years building a team of specialists they trust, changes in insurance can be life-altering.
Major changes to MassHealth, Massachusetts’ Medicaid program, went into effect on March 1.
As a MassHealth user, I was informed in December that they would no longer be partnering with the private insurer Neighborhood Health Plan, which covered the bulk of my health insurance claims.
Instead, I was being automatically enrolled in an Accountable Care Organization (ACO)...

Law And Order

If you want to cut down on gun violence, first target toxic masculinity.

The year 2017 brought the deadliest mass shooting in modern history to the United States, which has become home to more gun massacres than any other country in the world. The response offered by many of our political leaders, both Democrat and Republican, has been to focus on the role of mental illness in such shootings. The day after Stephen Paddock took to a hotel room in Las Vegas with 23 firearms and mu...

How to Manage Thanksgiving with Chronic Illness
For many of us, Thanksgiving is a highly anticipated holiday filled with food, fun times and family togetherness. But for people struggling with cancer, rare disease, or chronic pain and illness, Thanksgiving can be quite stressful. If you’re a “spoonie” it means you have an illness that limits the energy you have each day. Whether yourself or a family member suffers from a disease, there are some crucial things that can be done to ensure you ca...

It’s no secret that national healthcare costs have skyrocketed in recent years. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that in 2016, health care spending had reached an average of $10,345 for each American resident.
For chronic illness patients left in a lurch, charitable assistance organizations provide a safety net that allows individuals to focus on their medical treatments without the threat of bankruptcy looming overhead. Here’s a closer look at why access to charitable...