Ever question why your rent is so high? Lane Brown did, but instead of just wondering, he went on a mission to find out why. Carrying out meticulous research, he discovers that landlords may not be playing fair. An essay that teaches you not to just accept the status quo.
At Lux, Natalie Adler discusses two new books about disability: Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, and The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Both books, Adler explains, “share the underlying assumption that capitalism makes us sick.” Adler surfaces a number of interesting points that the authors lay out in Health Communism, like how we’re conditioned to view health as an end goal — something we could one day have, namely by paying for it — and disease as something temporary, or repairable with money. “I’ve come to realize that the bifurcation between the sick and the well, the disabled and the able-bodied, is capitalism’s intervention,” writes Adler. “In reality, there are just bodies, just us.”
Likewise, in The Future is Disabled, Piepzna-Samarasinha urges us to look beyond the binary between sickness and health, but is also focused on the mutual aid, community, and connection between disabled people and disability activists. “Disabled people are already weathering the end of the world and are keeping each other alive,” writes Adler, “and so disabled knowledge and skills are exactly what we need to survive the future.” Adler goes on to say that both of these books challenge us to view everyone’s lives as vulnerable. Only then can we overhaul, and adapt to, an unjust system.
We now live in a time where we could deal with or even cure many of our ailments, but we are priced out of care or don’t have the time to access it — or we choose not to seek it, because interacting with the medical establishment can be a degrading experience, marred by medical racism and sexism and ageism and homophobia and transphobia and fatphobia and more. So perhaps it’s more accurate to say that capitalism keeps us sick.
What is awe? And can experiencing awe lead to a happier, healthier life? Henry Wismayer spends time with Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychology professor at the forefront of a scientific movement examining our least-understood emotional state. I’ve appreciated Wismayer’s contemplative essays on other subjects, especially travel and tourism, and this profile-reported essay hybrid is yet another thought-provoking read. It’s informative but not dense, and I came away from it fresh, open-minded, and ready to experience the day’s small wonders.
Out of this trove of 2,600 personal narratives, the team at Berkeley distilled a definitive catalogue of awe’s elicitors. Keltner dubbed them “the eight wonders of life.” The most common source of awe was the moral beauty of other people, such as witnessing instances of compassion or courage. Also prevalent was “collective effervescence,” the sense of transcendent unity we might feel at a sporting event or when dancing in unison with others. Then came two predictable ones: nature and music, to which was added a third aesthetic stimulus, visual design. The last three could be lumped together by those of a romantic disposition as matters of the soul: spiritual awe, life and death, and epiphanies, like Archimedes’ Eureka moment, or the Damascene conversion of St. Paul.
When flyers began appearing around the University of Colorado Boulder, announcing that an enrolled student with ties to the white nationalist group Patriot Front, the campus’s independent student newspaper took notice. It secured an interview with the student, Patryck Durham, who admitted to being affiliated with Patriot Front and to publishing social media posts encouraging the killing of immigrants and Black people, but said UC officials were aware of all this before he enrolled and that it was “in the past.” Within hours, the story had taken a turn:
Durham did not definitively say whether he still held the violent beliefs that appeared in his social media posts, which were published in 2021.
“I can’t put an exact date on it because a lot of this stuff is messy. But it’s been, I think, a year or more by now,” since he was last affiliated with Patriot Front, Durham said.
Early Thursday morning, Jan. 26, several hours after Durham spoke with reporters for this story, the University of Colorado Police Department (CUPD) responded to reports of suspicious activity in Durham’s residence hall.
According to police records, officers found Durham with two people that police described as “older friends from Longmont,” just before 2 a.m. Durham failed to clarify to law enforcement how he knew the two individuals in his room, and witnesses told police they felt uncomfortable with the presence of Durham and the other adults.
One of the witnesses told police the pair of older adults were part of the white nationalist group Durham has been affiliated with. The two individuals were “told to leave the building” and did, according to police records.
According to the police report, witnesses also saw Patriot Front messages and propaganda on Durham’s laptop. Witnesses told police Durham was communicating with members of the hate group through the messaging app Telegram.
Sources who described the encounter to the CU Independent and The Bold did so on the condition of anonymity, as they were worried they would be harmed for coming forward. People familiar with the incident said Durham returned to the dorms the next day, Jan. 27, to move out.
In 1976, Nanda Devi Unsoeld, the daughter of legendary mountaineer Willi Unsoeld, died on the mountain for which she was named. This is the story of Devi’s life and of the historic climb that killed her. A riveting adventure read, it doesn’t shy away from highlighting the history of misogyny, cultural appropriation, and selfishness in mountaineering culture:
In late September of 1975, at the Unsoeld home in Olympia, Willi met with 26-year-old John Roskelley, another very accomplished American alpinist, putting plans in motion. They were of different minds about leadership and climbing, and women, too—namely, whether they belonged on major expeditions with men. Roskelley tried to convince Willi not to invite a female climber named Marty Hoey to join the group. He believed that the presence of women could complicate things; he worried that emotions could get out of hand when the two sexes were put together in high-stakes, high-altitude situations.
It didn’t help that Hoey had been dating Peter Lev, another veteran of the Dhaulagiri expedition who they wanted on the team; Roskelley hated the idea of a couple’s quarrels bleeding into the team’s daily demands. He also assumed the climb would be a traditional, equipment-heavy effort, relying on multiple camps and fixed ropes, while Willi and Lev seemed intent on an alpine-style ascent, lighter on ropes and happening fast.
As they wrangled over the climb’s fundamentals, Devi herself burst in, glowing with sweat. She’d just biked seven miles home from a soccer game. Roskelley would later recall his first impression in his 1987 book, Nanda Devi: The Tragic Expedition, saying that Devi “swept in like a small tornado after an obviously brutal game of soccer.”
In public speaking engagements for the next few years, Willi would sometimes describe this moment, too, including an extra detail about some of the first words out of Devi’s mouth that evening: “You’re Roskelley,” she said. “I understand you have trouble with women.”
At Astra Magazine, Elif Batuman looks at what Charles Schultz’s had to say about American values and society with a deep dive on the Peanuts character, Pig-Pen.
Pig-Pen first appears in 1954. Violet’s judgmental friend, Patty, sees him playing in the sand and asks his name. Pig-Pen replies that he doesn’t have one; people just call him “insulting things.” Patty asks for specifics. “I’ll tell you if you won’t laugh,” Pig-Pen says. His name is a punch line. For a long time, Pig-Pen’s name consistently appears in quotation marks, reminding us that it isn’t really a name — that he has, presumably, another one that he doesn’t know. From 1980 to 1997, the quotation marks disappear, blurring the line between Pig-Pen’s “true self” and a reductive description directed at him by other people, which is in effect what a name comes down to.
We think of being in the hospital as enduring isolation in a clinical setting, cut off from normal life. But what if being hospitalized meant something different? What if you could be receive hospital-quality care in your own home? Helen Ouyang profiles a movement of health care providers who, propelled by a range of factors, not least among them the COVID-19 pandemic, are working to redefine what hospitalization in America might look like:
Other countries, including Australia, Canada and several in Europe, had already been experimenting with this practice, some of them extensively. In Australia, which has been running home-hospitals for decades, these services provided in Victoria alone are the equivalent of what a 500-bed facility could offer in one year. Overall, the patients treated in this way do just as well, if not better, in their homes.
The obstacles impeding Leff and other hospital-at-home advocates in the United States were bound up with America’s labyrinthine health care system and particular medical culture. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (C.M.S.), which is the largest payer of hospitalizations, has required that nurses must be on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, effectively keeping patients within the hospital walls. This matches how American society has come to regard hospitalization, too — nurses at the bedside, doctors making their rounds, in elaborate facilities pulsating with machines.
But Americans didn’t always convalesce in hospitals. Before the 20th century, treatment at home was the norm. “Only the most crowded and filthy dwellings were inferior to the hospital’s impersonal ward,” the historian Charles E. Rosenberg writes in his 1987 book “The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System.” “Ordinarily, home atmosphere and the nursing of family members provided the ideal conditions for restoring health.” As Rosenberg puts it, “Much of household medicine was, in fact, identical with hospital treatment.” As health care became more specialized and high-tech, however, diagnosis and treatment gradually moved into hospitals, and they evolved into institutions of science and technology.