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In this week’s edition:
- A fake-pill overdose epidemic
- Reconsidering the power of period blood
- Dental atrocities with a side of wit
- Life as a death doula
- The science and strangeness of cloning pets
1. Inside Snapchat’s Teen Opioid Crisis
Paul Solotaroff | Rolling Stone | June 16, 2024 | 9,164 words
Snapchat’s clandestine features—notably, messages that vanish after they’re viewed—are especially appealing to its younger users, from tweens to college kids. Unfortunately, this makes it a perfect platform for drug dealers to sell lethal concoctions of Oxycontin, Xanax, and other sought-after pills to these younger users. In 2020, more than 950 kids died from drug overdose; in the first half of 2021, another 1,150 died. The majority of these deaths were from fentanyl and synthetics, both of which are used in fake pills sold online. Paul Solotaroff spent eight months reporting this harrowing feature, and presents two different perspectives: the heartbreaking accounts of families who lost children after they’d bought and ingested counterfeit pills from dealers on Snapchat, and then the version of this story from the social media giant itself, which points to its zero-tolerance policy regarding drug dealers and claims its teams are doing everything possible to make the platform safe. Alongside excellent reporting on the evolving drug trade (which is booming on social media) and the legal landscape (in which companies like Snapchat have immunity from crimes committed by their users), Solotaroff follows one activist mother who mobilized after losing her son, a bright 14-year-old boy named Alex Neville. She’s since connected with dozens of families of other victims, working with law firms on their case and fighting to hold Snapchat—and Big Tech—accountable. This is a nightmarish but important story, whether or not you’re a parent. (I also read a Noema interview with the author of The Anxious Generation this week—a very different yet complementary read that discusses mental health and anxiety in today’s youth and the rewiring of childhood due to apps like Snapchat.) —CLR
2. Rags to Riches
Maddie Oatman | Mother Jones | June 26, 2024 | 4,254 words
I’m a 38-year-old woman—nearly 39—and I started menstruating when I was about 12. Reading this feature by Maddie Oatman, I found myself wondering: how many gallons of blood have I expelled from my uterus over the last quarter century, and what vital information did it hold about my body and my health that I’ll never know about because my blood was treated as nothing more than waste? You might be thinking, “TMI!” To which I would say, “More like NEI—not enough information.” Oatman would agree. “Centuries of shame have ensured that periods have been understudied and underrepresented in medical literature,” she writes. “A PubMed search yields only about 400 papers referencing ‘menstrual blood’ in the last several decades, compared to around 10,000 related to erectile dysfunction.” Today a handful of researchers are pioneering the study of period blood, which they believe can help diagnose diseases like HPV, diabetes, and endometriosis, and possibly even prevent them; among other things, the blood is rich in stem cells. They’ve struggled at times to find support for their work because period blood is considered, in the actual words of other scientific professionals, “skanky,” “extremely toxic,” and “very low quality.” (Picture me banging my head against my desk.) But the researchers are forging ahead, seeking to unlock secrets that shouldn’t be secrets at all. “Every single day, hundreds of millions of people worldwide are menstruating,” Oatman writes. Imagine what we’d know about the human body if we hadn’t spent millennia shunning one of the most basic functions of an enormous chunk of the earth’s population? Imagine what we might soon learn about ourselves? This feature is as galling as it is exciting, a rare combination. —SD
3. Swallowing: I Was Mike Mew’s Patient
Gabriel Smith | The Paris Review | June 24, 2024 | 3,621 words
Assuming you haven’t blocked out as much of 2020 as possible, you may remember a NYT Magazine profile of John and Mike Mew. The father and son, both dentists, were crusaders against traditional orthodontia, and espoused a series of practices they claimed would help children develop a strong jawline; they’d also found a willing adult audience when the so-called manosphere exploded online in the 2010s. Before Mike Mew found success on YouTube and TikTok, though, he treated a preteen boy named Gabriel Smith. Smith was a skinny kid with a longish face, which made him irresistible as a patient. He was also, as it turns out, highly observant and very, very funny—and now, almost 20 years later, he recounts his orthotropic tribulations in a deadpan essay for The Paris Review. If he weren’t funny, this piece would be difficult to read: Mew and his associate run through enough horrific and invasive techniques to make Orin Scrivello look like Mister Rogers. All the while, Smith sabotages them in small ways. “I had just learned about communism from a cassette of a Clash album,” he writes. “I’m Che Guevara, I thought. I am the Che Guevara of Dental Appliances.” Smith’s a clever enough writer to expand the scope beyond the dentist’s office, taking us from his childhood through his later addictions and into a healthier and happier (and ostensibly square-jawed) adulthood. But the centerpiece remains the undeniable violations he suffered at the hands of an incel idol in the making, and the grace with which he’s able to alchemize suffering into self-realization. —PR
4. Grief Guides
Meg Bernhard | n+1 | June 21, 2024 | 5,416 words
Meg Bernhard asks: “What is a good death?” I’ve thought about this question a lot over the past couple of years. We all die, yet often individually and as a society we’re terrible at supporting the dying and those around them. For n+1, Bernhard recounts becoming a certified death doula, someone who supports people as they approach death. As she explains, doulas are like “personal assistants” to the dying; they handle both the official and unofficial tasks surrounding death, from funeral arrangements, logistics, and legal documents to creating the desired atmosphere for the final moments. They mind the grieving family, ensuring they get rest, food, and water—things that are easy to forget in trying times. They bring safety, comfort, and compassion to a process that defies order. This piece is beautiful and direct. There is no small talk here. Bernhard thinks deeply and critically about the process of becoming a death doula. She mines her own feelings about so-called good deaths and bad deaths as she searches for meaning in her training and in her life. “So much of the language around the burgeoning death doula movement, and its vision of what constitutes a ‘good death,’ feels too clean, too neat,” she writes. “But I left INELDA’s training wondering if there’s even such a thing as a good death, and what we stand to lose when we focus so much on trying to achieve it. Maybe death is always bad, even if you also think it’s beautiful, and we have to work with that. Maybe end of life doulas can only make bad deaths better.” I, too, struggle to embrace this notion of a good death. This piece is incredible at raising so many important questions—some that I will spend my life trying to answer. And perhaps what I loved most about this story is that there’s no neat and tidy ending. —KS
5. Would You Clone Your Dog?
Alexandra Horowitz | The New Yorker | June 24, 2024 | 5,529 words
My lasting takeaway from this piece is that nearly 30 years (!!!) after Dolly the sheep, cloning mammals still feels like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. Alexandra Horowitz’s excellent reporting on cloning pet dogs includes a sinister trifecta of creepy twins, a company with the Dr. Evil-sounding name of “ViaGen,” and hidden donor dogs. She starts with the twins, which are really clones: a pair of neatly trimmed dogs named Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine, part Shih Tzu and part Lhasa Apso, each with a different misaligned eye so that they mirror each other as they “pant in tandem.” They are clones of an original dog named Princess, rescued by retired police officer John Mendola. When Princess succumbed to cancer, Mendola contacted ViaGen, which has a patented dog cloning technique, to recreate her. To discover more about the process, Horowitz travels to the company’s hundred-acre ranch in Texas to meet its president, Blake Russell, who says things reminiscent of Jurassic Park’s John Hammond: “One day, my pastures are going to be filled with baby rhinos in draft mares[.] Would that not be the coolest thing ever?” The cloning process involves surgery on two other dogs—one to provide the eggs, one to be a surrogate. ViaGen doesn’t own these dogs; they rent them from what they call “production partners.” (It is not clear what later happens to these “production” dogs.) As a scientist who studies dog behavior and cognition, Horowitz is a worthy guide through this world, and her concern for “the unseen animals whose bodies are used in making a clone” is apparent. So, too, is her skepticism on whether the owners, longing for the return of a beloved pet, are getting a true replica, explaining that “[t]here can be no cloning of the world that shaped the original, no repetition of the scenes and smells they encountered. Life leaves its mark.” This thought-provoking piece will have you digging out your old copy of Brave New World. —CW
Audience Award
The Problem With Erik: Privilege, Blackmail, and Murder for Hire in Austin
Katy Vine and Ana Worrel | Texas Monthly | June 17, 2024 | 7,430 words
A tale of bizarre goings-on in Austin, Texas. If you were blackmailed, would your first choice be to hire a hitman? It was for Erik Maund, which—unsurprisingly—escalated things further. With strong reporting from Katy Vine and Ana Worrel, this story races along to a tragic conclusion that could have easily been avoided. —CW
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