“Canada’s world-leading Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program” was instituted in 2016 to help the terminally ill avoid intolerable suffering. But as Cassandra Kislenko reports at The Baffler, the Canadian government, in expanding the program, may broaden the number of conditions that could qualify for state-supported suicide, including, possibly, terminally-ill newborns. Given that Canada’s health care system is an underfunded disaster, where people cannot access necessary physical and mental health care, “disabled people and advocates fear that medically assisted suicide will become a weapon for the state to do away with what capitalism considers unproductive bodies.”
Living in poverty, Gwen felt her only choice was to become one of the growing number of disabled people using Canada’s world-leading Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program simply because the state refuses to provide them with quality of life. “My doctor was acting like she couldn’t hear me,” she remembers of her initial attempts to communicate this decision. “She kept encouraging me to try anything else . . . but there was nothing else to try.”
However, as early as April 2019, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities expressed she was “extremely concerned” that Canada was not ensuring disabled people seeking state-assisted suicide had been provided with viable alternatives before making the choice. In a report to the Human Rights Council, she warned that “assisted dying must not be seen as a cost-effective alternative to providing services for persons with disabilities.”
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
A mysterious scammer conning Instagram influencers. A grim account of illegal gold mining in South Africa. A read on time and the science of the perfect second. An examination of one’s birth — and the control that documents have over us. An ode to the soybean and the world of tofu.
Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis | ProPublica | March 26, 2023 | 4,629 words
If you’ve ever lost your Instagram account to a hacker or requested aid from Meta in any way, you understand feeling helpless trying to get a faceless corporation to pay attention. Egregious tech company irresponsibility and complete disregard aside, where Meta failed, ProPublica may have succeeded in tracking down a man known for hijacking accounts by exploiting security loopholes, then hounding their owners for money. A scammer known as OBN claims to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars plaguing people who earn a living on Instagram “because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.” Not only does he shut down lucrative influencer accounts, he antagonizes account owners with taunts and threats. Meta’s response? They intend to offer a program that would charge for customer support from a real person, something that most tech companies consider not just the right thing to do, but table stakes for being in tech: “Meta has acknowledged that it needs to invest more in customer support. In February, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would offer people the ability to pay for account verification and enhanced support, including ‘access to a real person for common account issues.’” —KS
Kimon de Greef | The New Yorker | February 20, 2023 | 7,676 words
A decade ago, I traveled to South Africa as part of a public health research project focused on the country’s mining industry. Countless miners — almost all of them Black — suffered from silicosis and tuberculosis from their time spent toiling underground, looking for gold. They were owed compensation for their suffering, but most of them had never received it. Our research question was simple: Why? The answer was a tangled web of institutional dysfunction, racism, inequality, poverty, and neglect. It was also wholly predictable. South Africa’s mining sector was designed during the colonial era to benefit a few at the expense of many (to say nothing of the toll on the natural environment). Black workers were paid slave wages to work in horrific conditions; for some it was the only means of providing for themselves and their families. When the industry collapsed in the ’90s, leaving behind labyrinths of shafts and tunnels, illegal mining emerged in force because people still needed money to survive. Kimon de Greef masterfully shows how an array of historical forces and failures brought South Africa to the era of zama-zamas, illegal miners who spend months, even years at a time deep in the earth working for criminal syndicates. If there is a lesson to be learned from South Africa’s mines, it is that cruelty begets desperation, which in turn begets more cruelty. —SD
Tom Vanderbilt | Harper’s Magazine | March 20, 2023 | 5,339 words
How do you count seconds? By feel? Mississippily or Mississipilessly? Can you ever trust a New Year’s party countdown? If you’ve ever even considered these questions — or if you just have a lifelong love of calipers and other measuring devices — you’re in for a treat. Tom Vanderbilt (who, like me, had a childhood fascination with the time/temperature line in his hometown) heads off in search of the ground truth of our chronological system. That quest brings him to Colorado’s Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, itself operated by a federal agency that oversees all things measurable in the United States. As it turns out, time is just as slippery as you thought it was while waiting for thunder to follow lightning; it’s the only one of seven international “base units” that has never had a physical constant. Since 1967, a second has been the time it takes for a ball of cesium atoms to reach 9,192,631,770 microwave-induced oscillations, but even that’s only an approximation. But Vanderbilt’s story isn’t simply a tale of numbers and methods; it’s a chronicle of curiosity, of the way we can be captivated by something that sounds so utterly rigid. Tick-tock, you don’t stop. —PR
Diane Mehta | The Kenyon Review | Winter 2023 | 6,018 words
“The FS-240, or Consular Report of Birth Abroad, that my parents filled out on my behalf, three months after my birth, is a way of avoiding the truth: I have no status inside or outside any clear borders unless I consider my mother’s uterus my original country.” In this gorgeous essay, Diane Mehta examines the unknowns surrounding her birth in postwar Germany, and reflects on the life trajectories of her parents — her father, an Indian Jain physician, and her mother, a Jewish American woman. Mehta intimately explores her family history while also placing it within a global context; she writes about what it means for written documents and pieces of paper to dictate our lives and seal our fates, but also how imagination can help someone reshape and control a narrative filled with blanks. —CLR
George Stiffman | Asterisk Magazine | March 9, 2023 | 3,278 words
Having been vegetarian for the last couple of years, I have eaten many a chickpea and a lentil, but not much in the way of tofu. My efforts at cooking with it generally result in a sad, limp affair that has more than a passing resemblance to pond sludge. But this delightful essay has single-handedly turned my tofu thoughts around, with luscious descriptions that pour off the page and make you want to reach in and grab a piece of the joyfully named “exploding-juice tofu.” And if exploding juice is not your thing, fear not, for there are more than 20 other types of tofu in the world, all with “different mouthfeels.” I was as surprised as you. George Stiffman briefly touches on how the perceived value of vegetarian food differs between East and West — but for the most part, this essay is unashamedly just about how good this soybean curd can be, and is no poorer for it. (So good that Stiffman waits for a tofu teacher outside a Chinese brothel at 4 a.m. while “jotting down tofu goals.”) I have a new reverence for my pond sludge. —CW
Suzanne Heywood | The Guardian | March 25, 2023 | 5,574 words
In this excerpt from her book, Wavewalker: Breaking Free, Suzanne Heywood recounts the misery of her unconventional childhood. A three-year sailing adventure ended up being nearly a decade trapped on her parents’ boat — which Heywood remembers here with a brooding resentment. This edited extract gives a full picture of her remarkable story. —CW
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The residential school system is just one of Canada’s dirty secrets. For decades, the Canadian government, in partnership with the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and United churches, took Indigenous children away from their families and imprisoned them in residential schools designed to “take the Indian out of the child.” Children were stripped of everything indicative of their culture. School officials cut their hair, put their clothing in the garbage, and punished them severely for speaking Indigenous languages. Many children suffered physical and sexual abuse; some died under these horrific conditions. At The Walrus, Annie Hylton highlights survivors’ stories from the community in and around Delmas, Saskatchewan, so that they can start the long, difficult process of healing.
Annie has written about Indigenous issues for Longreads. Read “Searching for Mackie,” a story about Immaculate “Mackie” Basil, a young Indigenous woman who went missing in British Columbia in 2013.
Jenny Rose Spyglass was three years old when the men came for her.
As Spyglass recalls, her family lived in poverty—her father had recently been deployed by the Canadian military, leaving her mother to care for six children. That fall day, Spyglass remembers, a black vehicle drove up the gravel road and approached her house. A few men emerged: federally appointed Indian agents—who enforced Ottawa’s policies across First Nations reserves and Indigenous communities in Canada—and two priests. The men pointed at Spyglass as her mother pled. “I hung on to my mom,” she says. The men snatched her from her mother’s grip and tossed her, along with her two elder brothers, Martin and Reggie, into the back of the vehicle. During the drive, Spyglass fell asleep and later awoke to children sobbing and gathered near another vehicle. All of them had been torn from their homes in neighbouring reserves—Moosomin, Poundmaker, Sweetgrass, and Red Pheasant, among others—after their parents were threatened with jail or fines if they resisted their child’s attendance at the Thunderchild school.
One day, when she was about four years old, Spyglass learned that her brother Reggie, a year older, had become ill. She and Reggie were close—best friends. Reggie was isolated in a small room, and nobody was permitted to see him. “They just let him suffer,” Spyglass says. “He never made it home.”
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Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Abdul Sharifu was one of tens of thousands of immigrants who have settled in Buffalo, New York, in the last two decades. Sharifu was a one-man mutual-aid operation — he had access to his cousin’s leased car, which meant he could run errands and give rides to those in need. But the very systemic failures Sharifu was working to patch over claimed him this winter. As journalist Albert Samaha conveys, Sharifu’s story is a window into one of America’s most diverse and unequal cities:
The tragedy underscored inequities that continue to grip the city. Rita Jones, who grew up on Buffalo’s East Side and manages Caudle’s flea market, said the area’s residents have complained for years that the city often neglects to pour snow-melting salt on most of the roads in their neighborhoods, as it does in more affluent and commercial districts. City officials issue blizzard warnings but otherwise leave residents to fend for themselves. Those without fully stocked pantries are more likely to brave the conditions to obtain supplies. Those unable to take time off work have less time to prepare before a storm hits.
Because of the city’s reputation for harsh winters and its lore of producing hard-scrabble steelworkers toughened by mills that filled their lungs with asbestos and carcinogenic fumes, outsiders’ perception of Buffalo is usually framed by an admiration for its peoples’ resilience. But resilience is exhausting when repeatedly called upon — a trait honed out of necessity, foisted upon those with no choice but to navigate scarcity.
People turned to Abdul Sharifu because they had nobody else to turn to, and he provided services that nobody else would provide. His death brought pain to those who loved him, but also left a vacuum for those who needed him.
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Yes, it has one of the best hed/dek combos I’ve seen this year, but Jayson Greene’s look back at the spuming cultural wave known as the pop-R&B gigahit “Blurred Lines” doesn’t stop there. It aims primarily at Robin Thicke, though Greene’s got heat for everyone from Thicke collaborators Pharrell Williams and T.I. to Miley Cyrus. Sometimes the best culture-crit is steeped in a vat of acid. (That said, I regret to inform you that “Shooter” still goes superduperhard.)
Now, 10 years since its March 2013 release, “Blurred Lines” is a poisonous time capsule. In many ways, all of them unfortunate, it could be considered the song of the 2010s. Pick any disheartening pop-cultural trend of the past decade and chances are it applies to “Blurred Lines”: The hollow outrage cycle in news, increasingly reliant on hot takes tossed out with superhuman speed, often without a speck of human logic? The predatory power dynamics of the entertainment industry, and American society’s ongoing dismissal of consent? The increasingly litigious pop landscape, in which lawyers and music publishers fight for scraps, and every pop song feels safely Xeroxed from the last one? Every decade gets the songs it needs and the songs it deserves.
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In South Africa, there are men who have lived underground for months or years at a time. They’ve suffered from malnourishment and tuberculosis. They’ve watched friends die in falls and sudden explosions. They’ve been subject to the whims of criminal syndicates and violence of security forces. These men, known as zama-zamas, are illegal miners, seeking flakes of gold in the carcass of tunnels and shafts left behind when the legal — but still-odious — mining industry collapsed:
The crash came in 1989. The price of gold had fallen by nearly two-thirds from its peak, inflation was rising, and investors were wary of instability during South Africa’s transition to democracy. (Nelson Mandela was freed the following year.) The rise of powerful unions, in the final years of apartheid, meant that it was no longer possible for the industry to pay Black workers “slave wages,” as the former chairman of one large mining company told me. The Free State goldfields eventually laid off more than a hundred and fifty thousand mine workers, or eighty per cent of the workforce. The region was almost wholly reliant on mining, and Welkom’s economy was especially undiversified. The town’s sprawling urban design was also expensive to maintain, leading to a “death spiral,” Lochner Marais, a professor of developmental studies at the University of the Free State, told me.
I first visited Welkom in late 2021. As I drove into the city, Google Maps announced that I had arrived, but around me it was dark. Then my headlights picked out a suburban home, followed by another. The entire neighborhood was without electricity. South Africa is in the midst of an energy crisis and experiences frequent scheduled power outages, but that was not the cause of this blackout. Rather, it was symptomatic of chronic local dysfunction, in a municipality ranked South Africa’s second worst in a 2021 report on financial sustainability.
Welkom is surrounded by enormous flat-topped mine dumps that rise from the plains like mesas. The roads have been devoured by potholes. Several years ago, zama-zamas began breaking open wastewater pipes to process gold ore, which requires large volumes of water. They also attacked sewage plants, extracting gold from the sludge itself. Now untreated sewage flows in the streets. In addition, zama-zamas stripped copper cables from around town and within the mines. Cable theft became so rampant that Welkom experienced power failures several times per week.
As the gold-mining companies scaled back in South Africa, they left behind wasted landscapes and extensive subterranean workings, including railway lines and locomotives, intact winders and cages, and thousands of miles of copper cable. Many companies had devised protocols for withdrawing from depleted mines, but these were seldom followed; likewise, government regulations around mine closures were weakly enforced. “It’s as if they just locked the door — ‘Now we’re done,’ ” a mine security officer said of the companies. Shafts were often sold many times over, the constant changing of hands allowing companies to evade responsibility for rehabilitation. By the early two-thousands, according to authorities, South Africa had a large number of “derelict and ownerless” gold mines across the country, creating opportunities for illegal mining. Mining researchers in South Africa sometimes joke that the story of gold mining runs from AA to ZZ — from multinationals like Anglo American to zama-zamas.
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Despite hearing “Bad Habits” on the radio at least twice a day, I know very little about Ed Sheeran, but I found myself unexpectedly charmed by Brian Hiatt’s interview with him for Rolling Stone. Sheeran comes across as a genuinely nice guy — and one who has had to deal with a tremendous amount of loss.
Sheeran isn’t afraid to say what he means in his songs, at nearly all times. If he’s grown up and is a father now, he sings, “I have grown up/I am a father now” — the opening line of 2021’s =. His use of metaphor is sparing. He loves Van Morrison, but if Sheeran wrote a song called “Listen to the Lion,” it would probably be about a trip to the zoo, and a Top Five worldwide hit to boot.
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This essay does not deviate from its one topic: tofu. And I loved it for that. It is a pure homage to soybean curds — cooked the right way. With a smattering of history and copious mouthwatering descriptions, I came away with a real tofu craving.
Five months after my first taste of melting tofu, summer break arrived, and I was back in Guiyang. It took two weeks of meandering produce markets, buying and tasting different tofus, asking shop owner after shop owner, to find a teacher. Finally, one agreed. The next day, I woke in the dead of night, crawled out of bed, and wandered over. I had apparently undershot my wake-up call. At 4 a.m., the only thing for sale was sex, and my teacher was nowhere to be seen. I sat down on the curb outside his boarded-up shop, across from three women huddling in the shadows. I had nothing to do, so I pulled out my journal and began jotting down tofu goals. Learn best practices for coagulating soy milk. Measure their water’s mineral content. Figure out the specific roles of acid and alkaline…
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“My father was a charming man. Large of belly and thick of neck, with an appetite for lard-heavy meepok, fried Spam, and braised pork belly. He could and did talk to absolutely anyone. He was my cousins’ favorite uncle and my classmates’ favorite Dad,” Rachel Heng says of her father, a lawyer with a gambling problem so severe, he lost millions. Heng writes beautifully about family bonds and what home means as she reflects on what she, her mother, and her brother faced attempting to find a stable housing situation in the years after her father abandoned them.
Our second home, if you could call it that, was the living room in the small flat of an aunt. Thus began my years of sleeping on the floor. I did not feel it as a hardship. At nine, sleeping on the floor seemed fun, like camping, though I had never been camping.
I remember little about my aunt’s flat. When I think back on this time, I think of the slice of apple my mother had told me to eat that I secretly threw out the window. The next day, my aunt found it in the common corridor outside the front door, shriveled and brown, beset by ants. I remember the hot slick of shame as I lied that I had no idea how it got there. I was punished nonetheless, made to stand in a corner in this unfamiliar place, reflecting on my crime.
My grandmother spoke Hokkien, no English, and little Mandarin. I did not speak Hokkien and my Mandarin was poor, so we spoke little. I was scolded by her often. Though I remember little of the substance of her scoldings, I remember their tone well: aggrieved and indignant, which at the time I took for dislike, but now I understand to be love.
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He hijacked the accounts of Instagrammers who earned a living straddling the gray area of what Meta considers acceptable content and made them pay to get their accounts back. Pro Publica took up the case, tracking down a scammer that has exploited Meta’s security loopholes and ambivalent customer support.
OBN exploits weaknesses in Meta’s customer service. By allowing anyone to report an account for violating the company’s standards, Meta gives enormous leverage to people who are able to trick it into banning someone who relies on Instagram for income. Meta uses a mix of automated systems and human review to evaluate reports. Banners like OBN test and trade tips on how to trigger the system to falsely suspend accounts. In some cases OBN hacks into accounts to post offensive content. In others, he creates duplicate accounts in his targets’ names, then reports the original accounts as imposters so they’ll be barred for violating Meta’s ban on account impersonation. In addition, OBN has posed as a Meta employee to persuade at least one target to pay him to restore her account.
“Once you’re put on Brandon’s radar, whether someone’s paying him or not, he has this personal investment in making sure that your life is miserable and that he’ll try and get as much money out of you as he possibly can,” said Kay Jenkins, a Miami real estate agent and model. Her main Instagram account with roughly 100,000 followers has been repeatedly deactivated since 2021.
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“The world would be forever mixed; now Germany had some India and more Ashkenazi Jew in it.” In a stunning, probing essay at The Kenyon Review, Diane Mehta examines the unknowns surrounding her birth, and her parents’ trajectories and family history. Mehta digs into who her parents were — especially her mother, a Jewish American woman living in postwar Germany — while also exploring what it means for pieces of paper to control our lives and seal our fates.
I’m a fill-in-the-blanks sort of person, so I believe that each of the boxes on the FS-240 embodies all the possibilities of circumstance, pleasure, and menace that as an infant I did not know until they happened to me. Perhaps this is my first clue that I have no control over being, and limited control over the rhythm of my days in this world. There is not only Frankfurt, where I lived for six months, but other borders and cities in me. I can keep filling in the blanks with constructed narratives, to explain the accidents that others call fate; I do not believe in it any more than I believe in astrology or magnetism or the Year of the Tiger. I do believe in habit and imagination, and out of that you can burn your way into any narrative you choose.
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Imagine three children, ages 2, 4, and 5 being abandoned in a train station in Barcelona in 1984. They do not know what their surname is. They do not know the names of their parents. Add a mafia boss, a hit man, and a soothsayer, and you have the makings of a mystery that spanned four decades. At The Guardian, Giles Tremlett attempts to do the math.
When I visited Ramón in a small penthouse apartment in Barcelona, he recalled once finding a pistol in a house where they were staying. He and Ricard started playing with it on an outdoor staircase. Ramón pointed the pistol at his brother, then turned away and pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled as he fired a real bullet. He explained with photographic exactitude the shape of the staircase, the white outside wall and a garden below. “My father was furious,” he told me.
He remembers, too, his father driving them to a beachside restaurant and leaving the engine running while he went inside. They waited a few minutes before he reappeared, bleeding from a badly beaten face. “I recall the tension in the car as we drove off,” Ramón said. Ricard’s memories are fewer, but also vivid: his father parking the black Porsche above a vertiginous cliff; a wood-lined Paris apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower; visiting his father in a hospital room. They seemed like scenes from a French noir gangster movie.
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Once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor. Never mind my terrible grades in all things science. Never mind that I decided this in my second year of college, after deciding that the music school that I’d wanted for years wasn’t for me. It was 2006. It was the age of Dr. Gregory House.
I love a good medical drama. My mother, a nurse, raised me on ER and General Hospital, always pointing out all the plot lines that “would never happen in real life” but were really cool to watch on TV. My mother credits ER with pushing her toward her decades-long career in the operating room. So when I, a poor lost college sophomore who had gone to school to play French horn (French horn!) and found it wasn’t what I thought it would be, I did what I knew best to do and turned to TV. And on TV, I found House.
House had it all: a painkiller-addicted doctor with a smart mouth and a slap-worthy face, medical mysteries solved via CSI-style case-of-the-week format, and a beleaguered crew of sidekick physicians whose instincts were never quite as good as House’s. I would spend each episode studying the setup and trying to unravel what the medical culprit could be before the ultimate reveal. Instead of realizing that what I might want to be was a writer with a good plot, I missed the mark and decided I wanted to be a doctor.
Reader, I did not become a doctor. (That fizzled out after one year of biology classes and a stint working in a local nursing home.) But I remain a lifelong medical mystery buff. Here, then, are a few of my recent long-form favorites — enjoy the game of whatdunnit.
Swamp Boy (Kris Newby, Now This News, October 2022)
One day, a 14-year-old boy with no previous physical or mental issues informs his parents that he is the “evil, damned son of the devil” and he needs to kill himself before he destroys them all. Thus begins the onset of a massive medical manhunt to uncover exactly what is causing the boy’s psychosis and physical symptoms, which include OCD, shortness of breath, chronic pain, frequent urination, intense headaches, the belief that he had green vines growing under his skin, the belief that he was a bird, and the belief that the family cat was ordering him to kill everyone around him — including the family fish.
Complete with vivid graphic-novel-styled art illustrating some of the reported hallucinations, this piece has it all, including a father’s fight against the medical establishment and an ending you’ll never see coming. In other words, it’s about as close as one can get to a real-life episode of House.
Meanwhile, back at home, now more than seven months after his son’s first psychotic breakdown, Scott could finally clear his mind, and began to focus his analytical skills on Michael’s case.
To the medical experts, his son had been a ten-inch-tall stack of paper annotated with clinical notes. Each expert had examined one piece of Michael—his brain, his stomach, his heart, his immune system, his gut, his spine, his skin, his eyes. Scott, meanwhile, was determined to analyze Michael as a whole. “I knew I had to figure out what was wrong, or I’d lose my son,” he said.
It was during one of his many conversations with doctors about Michael’s potential treatment that Scott had an epiphany: Maybe no one could help their son because they were treating the wrong illness.
On an ordinary day in Le Roy, New York, a high school cheerleader begins twitching. Another cheerleader develops tics a week later. And another after that; and another after that. It spreads past the cheerleaders and on to the art kids, a boy, kids in neighboring schools. Is there something in the water? Is it those mysterious bins labeled with hazardous waste from a nearby factory? Is it that strange orange ooze coming up from the ground on the football field? Or is it all in their heads?
Featuring media vans, Dr. Drew appearances, familial finger-pointing, women’s least favorite H-word (hysteria), and a cameo from legal crusader Erin Brockovich, Dominus’s reporting takes us into the mystery that consumed a small Northeastern town, while still making the science accessible to lay readers.
How could one person’s illness be reflected in another person’s neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.
No, not that pandemic. Pate McMichael looks back at the teenager who may have died of AIDS more than a decade before HIV gripped the nation. But where did the virus come from? How did a young boy who was not a drug user, had not left the state, and never received a blood transfusion contract a virus that wouldn’t be detected in the United States for another decade? Furthermore, why did the news break in the mainstream media before the scientists who first identified the strain even had a chance to understand what was in their lab?
This piece combines two of my favorite things: a medical mystery and an ethical quandary. It pulls back the curtain on how the scientific establishment studies new diseases and how and when they release that information to the public. Add in that historical lens — doctors seeing a new and potentially terrifying disease in the 1960s, the echoes of Hurricane Katrina in Pate McMichael’s 2007 writing — and you’ve got a winner.
A few years later, in 1973, Elvin-Lewis and Witte presented Robert R.’s case at a lymphology conference and published a journal article on his systemic chlamydia in The Journal of Lymphology. The paper they presented actually raised as many questions as it answered. Why had Chlamydia spread throughout the body, when it normally stayed near the port of entry? And why did this young man have these purplish, malignant lesions called Kaposi’s sarcoma, as the alert pathologist had discovered during the autopsy? Kaposi’s sarcoma was known as an old man’s skin disease, typically affecting Jews and Italians. The pathologist decided that Robert R. had an African variant that affected children and primarily targeted the lymphatic system. That decision suggested an intriguing question: How did a black 15-year-old from St. Louis acquire Kaposi’s sarcoma?
A woman seeking her familial DNA for a clinical trial learns that not only is her father not her biological father, but her bio dad is actually her mother’s fertility doctor. All together, now: Yikes. Worse, she finds out that she is not alone; several other children conceived via fertility clinics have also discovered that their fertility doctors are their real fathers. One doctor, featured in the Netflix documentary Our Father, sired over 90 children.
This piece grapples with ethical questions and hard-to-draw lines: Is it medical rape to inseminate someone with fraudulent sperm? Do these doctor-fathers owe their scores of children anything? Should these children, once the fathers are discovered, seek a relationship with their bio dads? And what if the bio dad wants nothing to do with them? What if these men fail to see their behavior as a violation?
Not a mystery, but still riveting — and a good case study around the meaning of consent.
Not everyone who is watching Our Father has a personal connection at stake, but they are drawn in regardless. Fertility fraud rivets audiences because it channels the mysterious allure of genetic inheritance, crossing it with the perverse power relations between a doctor and their patient. Conception — so often an intimate act — is made impersonal and medicalized in the context of the fertility clinic, and then made intimate again through the abuse of the doctor-patient relationship.
Every child of fertility fraud is a baby who was desperately and deeply wanted by their parents. The exploitation of that desire is devastating; the fact that the body becomes evidence of the transgression is all the worse.
If Rule 34 of the internet is that there exists porn for every possible interest, then Rule 35, according to Jo Piazza of the podcast Under the Influence, is that there exists an influencer for every topic — including diarrhea.
Why yes, Hot Girls do have IBS, and you can hear all about it on TikTok, Instagram, and pretty much anywhere else there is to make money off of “bloating positivity.” (Truly, if there was ever a sign that we really are in late-stage capitalism, this has to be it.) But really, why do so many hot girls (and other mortals) have IBS these days? This essay takes a look at the history of digestive discomforts, all the way back to the 1700s when The Gentleman’s Magazine examined why all the “well-to-do Ladies” complain of stomach “[d]iagnosticks … neither visible or certain” and to our new era of “normalizing bowel function” (finally!).
It has a name, but not much else. IBS is a so-called “functional disorder,” meaning that it is a condition without identifiable cause. Unlike with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, patients diagnosed with IBS have no medically detectable signs of damage or disease in their digestive tracts. Essentially, IBS is diagnosed when tests come back normal; it’s what’s written down on a chart when there’s nothing else left to identify. Many people with IBS struggle with the implication that their symptoms are made up — especially as IBS both relies on self-reporting and presents differently from patient to patient. It is a catch-all term for a variety of gastrointestinal ailments, including cramping, bloating, intestinal gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Statistically, it affects more women than men, and is most common in people under 50. Regular exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, and meditation have all been shown to alleviate symptoms. Even so, “IBS is not a psychiatric illness,” says Dr. Arun Swaminath, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, “though stress and depression can make symptoms worse.” Despite its growing prevalence — IBS is the most frequently diagnosed gastrointestinal disorder — some doctors and digestive specialists question its utility as a medical construct, since the diagnosis does not elucidate anything about patients’ physiology or the causes of their discomfort. It is, however, very profitable: in the United States, the annual medical costs associated with IBS exceed $1 billion.
Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.
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Edward Alperowitsch was only 22 years old when he traveled to Nuremberg in 1948, ready to testify to the Nazi war crimes that had claimed most of his family. Instead, he was disqualified on procedural grounds. Yet, as George Anders writes, transcripts came to light of extensive pre-trial conversations Alperowitsch had had with the prosecution team — allowing father and son to revisit that time together, and perhaps to find some measure of closure.
It’s been nearly 75 years since my father traveled to Nuremberg, and there are times when he still regrets the legal fastidiousness that barred him from the witness stand. He wishes he could have testified, believing that some German generals’ complicity in the Holocaust would have earned much harsher punishment. Yet on a different level, Ed appreciates the Allies’ scrupulous adherence to the highest legal standards. Even today, Nuremberg is upheld as the model of how to run a war crimes trial. And the strength of the U.S. legal system—even when buffeted by the most odious pressures—is one of the things he cherishes as a naturalized American.
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In this excerpt from her book, Wavewalker: Breaking Free, Suzanne Heywood recounts the misery of her unconventional childhood. A three-year sailing adventure ended up being nearly a decade trapped on her parents’ boat — which Heywood remembers here with a brooding resentment. This edited extract gives a full picture of her remarkable story.
My parents always claimed our time on Wavewalker was wonderful and told me I’d had a privileged upbringing. But this oft-repeated mantra conceals a much darker story. What I found, when I mustered enough courage to look back, was that many parts of my childhood were worse than I’d been willing to admit.
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One of the largest homeless encampments in the U.S. continues to grow in downtown Phoenix, and a longtime sandwich shop, Old Station Subs, sits in the middle of it all. Eli Saslow writes a heartbreaking, bleak, and deeply immersive piece for The New York Times about this massive camp; the unsheltered, mentally ill, and drug-addicted people trying to survive; and the shop owners — Joe and Debbie Faillace — trying to find a way out.
He had washed 268 windows in the last month, but he was still nowhere close to saving enough for a security deposit and rent, so instead he had settled into an encampment so immense that it operated as its own separate economy. Blue fentanyl pills sold for $2, and anyone could trade a decent pair of shoes for a week’s supply of methamphetamine. A group of young men in the encampment had begun selling off pieces of the public sidewalk, charging each person $20 a week for what they called “lot rent and security.” That had seemed ridiculous to Kipp until he decided not to pay and then awoke one night to the smell of someone dousing his tent with lighter fuel.
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