In this Vanity Fair story, Keziah Weir recounts how the Vatican played a role in the science of in vitro fertilization. A 1957 encounter between two men—Bruno Lunenfeld, an endocrinologist, and Don Giulio Pacelli, an Italian prince and one of Pope Pius XII’s nephews—marked the start of the journey toward the first successful IVF pregnancy. The miracle substance that ultimately made it possible? Thirty-thousand liters of urine from 300 postmenopausal nuns, which was used to develop Pergonal, a fertility drug. Weir intertwines religion, science, and politics in this fascinating piece, and enriches the narrative with details and memories from Lunenfeld’s incredible life.
A year later, Lunenfeld sat with Giulio Pacelli and Piero Donini, musing over the design needs of the special toilets they planned to install in the convent. They settled on a teardrop-shaped container akin to a small trash can, lined with a plastic bag. Throughout 1958, elderly nuns hiked up their habits, crouched over the containers, and voided their bladders. Serono employees collected the bags of urine and transported them to the Rome laboratory at Via Casilina, where technicians emptied them into metal tanks for processing. (During a 1930s Netherlands-based urine collection program, the people tasked with picking up donations were called pissmannekes, or “small piss men.”)
By 1959, Serono had harvested enough hMG to begin trials on infertile women. Lunenfeld, back in Israel, where he was working as a visiting scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, wanted to treat his own hypothalamic amenorrheic patients with the drug, hoping to induce ovulation. The head of the hospital instructed Lunenfeld to inject himself with the substance. If he didn’t sustain any major side effects, they’d go forward with treatment.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/f3n2lIm
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ZqI2Wkw
Why visit a library if you’ve got Google at your fingertips? In this thoughtful essay, Charles Digges reflects on the services and experiences that libraries have given us over the decades, and how today’s libraries—and librarians—still offer things that a search bar can’t: Community and connection with people IRL. The space to be curious. The chance to discover the unexpected, free from an all-seeing eye. But Digges does so in a way that doesn’t pit the library against the internet, nor does he dwell on or romanticize our analog past.
But what if it hadn’t been so simple? What if—instead of having my screen cluttered instantly with infinite reproductions of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks—I was forced to live in a period of contemplation? Of not knowing? Might that have generated a spark of curiosity?
If so, I might have found my way to the library. And while there, I might have stumbled on a good deal more about Nighthawks and its enigmatic portrayal of urban loneliness—as, once upon a time, as a Midwestern kid longing for a life in the big city, I did within the stacks at the Iowa City Public Library. There, I followed the streets of Hopper’s metropolis to the stories of John Cheever and Ralph Ellison, their characters often under the spell of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, whose records I checked out. I could step backward, too, following Hopper’s urban themes to Degas and Manet—their gamines encountered with the longing felt in the pages of Proust.
The fact that eBooks can only be read by one patron at a time puts me back in an approximation of a public space. It reminds me that there is another human being somewhere in this city who shares a curiosity with me. We may never meet, but as I place a hold on the material we’re both interested in, I am acknowledging some sort of physical finitude—a democratic compact to share a limited resource. This is not a typical digital experience where the world—and our searches—are available for a price.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/Ia7U6Fd
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ZqI2Wkw
Set in the San Joaquin Valley, Jessica Garrison’s LA Times feature exposes an irrigation official named Dennis Falaschi who’s been accused of stealing more than $25 million worth of water from the federal government over the past two decades. Garrison details how Falaschi siphoned water out of the Delta-Mendota Canal—one of the main channels delivering water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Fresno and Merced counties—with a secret pipe. Some farmers considered him “the Robin Hood of irrigation”; others were outraged that a water official had been stealing and selling “liquid gold” to farmers and other districts, and using public funds to pay for everything from housing remodels to car repairs to concert tickets for himself and his employees. A very wild, very California tale.
Subscription required.
Walsh walked over to where the hat was spinning. He peered down at a standpipe that had once connected the Delta-Mendota Canal to an irrigation ditch that extends through adjacent farmland. The standpipe had been cemented closed and was no longer functional. At least in theory.
Walsh moved closer and heard a rushing noise in the pipe — the sound of water running hard and fast.
There must be a leak, he thought. But if the canal were leaking, there should have been water pooling around him. The field where he was standing was dry.
And he saw something even more peculiar. The abandoned pipe was old and rusted. But it had been fitted with a new gate to control the flow of water from canal to ditch. And that gate had a lock. Walsh’s water authority was responsible for every turnout on that canal. But he had never seen this lock, and he didn’t have a key.
“When I saw that, I thought: Someone is stealing water,” he said, a sentiment later echoed in court filings.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/NaQne0m
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ZqI2Wkw
For years, Richie Henderson helped the children of Avenues The World School cross the street. For years, he cared for them like he cared for his own family. And when tragedy struck, that huge extended family did the same for him and his loved ones. A newspaper feature that embodies the best of the genre: sadness, hope, and a feeling that humans still look out for one another.
In the summer of 2023, the school honored Henderson’s contribution by making him a staff employee, something they had never done for a crossing guard before. He’d no longer work as a subcontractor. He would have a benefits package, including health care, a retirement plan and a life insurance policy.
“They gave him his roses,” Dockery said of Henderson’s status as a staff member.
She said her husband, imposing at more than 6 feet tall and more than 200 pounds, could be stern and demanding of his own children, but never with the kids at Avenues.
“Those kids, that school, they got the best of Richie,” she said with pride and not regret.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/2Pzvop9
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ukvdwx5
In the face of the climate crisis, few pastimes seem quite as frivolous (or doomed) as skiing and snowboarding. Paying through the nose to slide down mountains, even while the planet burns and the ice melts, is rather absurd. Why, exactly, do we care about this sport?
It’s simple, really. Frivolity is fun. Fun attracts people, and those people snowball into groups until a legitimate industry revolves around said frivolity—for better or worse. I’m one of those people. Despite growing up in an English county where the highest hill stands at a whopping 344 feet, I fell in love with skiing during a school trip to Austria, and ultimately moved to Vancouver, Canada, partly in pursuit of bountiful powder.
And I’m one of around 400 million who visit ski resorts (including indoor centers) annually; that’s nearly 5 percent of the planet’s population. The US ski market alone is worth an estimated $4.6 billion and is still growing, climate change be damned.
Skiing’s elitist reputation may be warranted, but it’s also not the whole story. When I ski back to my patchily converted 2005 GMC Savana, I remember that different versions of skiing exist. Frivolity is worth fighting for—for everyone. More importantly, skiing offers a unique perspective on a question that has shaped our present and will shape our future: how we interact with nature.
Until recently ski culture has generally focused on joy, freedom, and conquest. But attitudes are diverging as the planet heats—and alpine environments warm faster than any other. Twice as fast, in the Swiss Alps. Hundreds of abandoned resorts now haunt Europe, and in the US ski seasons shortened by 34 days between 1982 and 2016. Skiing’s plight presents some of the starkest Western proof that the climate crisis is not our future, but our present.
When normality breaks, calls for change commence. But what does adaptation look like for winter sports? Technological innovation, in the shape of giant snow blankets and thirsty snow machines? Reoriented business models and environmental practices? Elitism and corporate consolidation? Activism and democratic accountability? New ways of sliding?
Skiing is not an escape, but a practice rooted in and reflective of society. How the ski world balances competing interests in its responses to these threats will shape livelihoods, landscapes, health outcomes, cultural attitudes, and political possibilities—beyond just ski towns. Skiing is a bellwether, a dress rehearsal, a microcosm.
The outdoor community is starting to take note. Climate change, mental health, and diversity are now common themes in ski media. This is welcome, but much work remains to connect individual stories and collective passion for adventure with systemic change. As the Northern Hemisphere’s ski season draws to a close and the Southern Hemisphere’s season approaches, I present these pieces with this possibility in mind.
Snowfall is falling, in the worst possible sense. In Europe, snowpack depth has decreased by 8.4 percent per decade since 1971. The industry’s most visible response has been technological. Resorts are furiously making fake snow and painstakingly preserving real snow.
For 1843, Simon Willis tells this story through snow-obsessed Finn Mikko Martikainen—a man who once convinced a doctor to set the bones of his broken wrist “in the form of a loose fist so he could continue to grasp a ski pole.” Now one of the world’s leading snow consultants, advising resorts and the Sochi (2014) and Beijing (2022) Winter Olympics, Martikainen has graduated from sliding on snow to conjuring it out of dry air.
In Beijing, the problem isn’t heat but drought. Yanqing, where the alpine ski races will be held, gets an average of 5cm of snow a year; the chance of a flurry during the games will hover around 1%. The barren hillsides are more likely to be dusted by sand blowing in from the Gobi desert than by snow.
The chosen solution to this self-imposed problem, Willis reports in this piece published before the Beijing games, will be snow machines. To affirm the sense of sanctioned insanity, he explains that “in the hillsides outside Beijing, water is as scarce as it is in South Sudan.” European examples further bolster the case.
Ski resorts have used snow machines for decades. They aren’t always so terrible—when water is drawn from responsible sources and melts back into waterways. Nevertheless, this piece outlines the business-as-usual future of skiing, in which problems are innovated away, to just beyond the resort boundary. A future, as one source puts it, of every ski resort “trying to make itself independent of nature.”
We can discern an alternative future in the recent rise of backcountry skiing: in the US, “skinning,” or walking with sticky ski pads uphill to ski lines without resort access, has more than tripled since 2020. Higher ticket prices, busier resorts, COVID-19, and popular backcountry films have all contributed. The result is more skiers seeking a slower, more attuned mountain experience.
For FT Magazine, Tristan Kennedy travels to the Italian village of Montespluga. Four hotels once served a bustling ski community here, with skiers arriving on horse-drawn sleighs whenever snow closed the road to cars.
By the early 1980s, however, numbers had dwindled. The other hotels shut down, one by one, the draglift was dismantled and Montespluga in winter became something of a ghost town. Until the arrival of Homeland.
Homeland represents an interesting facet of the backcountry trend: the flickering dawn of lift-free ski “resorts.” Hankin-Evelyn, here in British Columbia, has been quietly pioneering a rustic model for years, captured in this short Salomon TV film. Bluebird, the first lift-free resort in the US, opened to positive press in 2020 (though it closed in 2023 due to a struggle to find suitable long-term land). Lift-free resorts will never replace traditional ones. But in contrast to the myopic techno-optimism of snow production, they propose a low-impact response to the climate crisis—one rooted in a logic of sufficiency. It’s a space worth watching.
One consequence of the backcountry boom, in conjunction with climate change making avalanche conditions more volatile and challenging to predict, is the increased risk of fatalities.
The microphone dangled on a cord extending from his backpack. But he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t move his arms. He lay immobile, struggling to breathe for about three minutes. Then everything faded to black.
So relays Joshua Hammer for GQ in this harrowing account of a Swiss avalanche incident. Hammer recounts the rescue attempt as if in real time, punctuated by timestamps marking the minutes—each reducing the survival odds—since the victim’s burial.
The piece captures the spectacular illusion of tranquility on a bluebird powder day. Crucially, it also articulates the silence of an avalanche’s aftermath—when buried under snow—as well as its trigger moment. “You hear that crack and the silence while nature holds its breath, waiting for the mountain to go,” says one alpinist, who has lost multiple friends to avalanches. “Even the birds go quiet. You can feel your breath thundering in your ears.”
Ultimately, the story conveys how proper training, quality kit, excellent decision-making, and good luck will all continue to be vital in the backcountry—even with the world’s most storied rescue operation within radio range.
At age 33, Cathleen Calkins fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a ski patroller. But, in this personal essay for Longreads, she tells the story of how through skiing and helping people every day, her “dreams became nightmares.”
As I experienced both trivial and traumatic moments day after day, an emotional narrative emerged, and I began to confront the falsehood that I too would be okay. My thinning confidence overshadowed my passion to rescue others, and seven years into my career, I became terrified to do my job.
Calkins offers a vulnerable account of the incidents that chiseled away her well-being, the culture of qualified bravado that suppressed the symptoms, and the fear, despair, and breakdown that resulted. Coming from the rescuer’s perspective—the red-jacketed hero, ever poised and in control—it hits all the harder.
Gloria Liu’s profile of a Park City, Utah patroller is a worthwhile, complementary take on the challenges and precarity of ski patrolling.
The future emerges from this history in Calkins’ advocacy for a ski culture more attuned to shadow, pain, and trauma. It also lurks in her depiction of how skiing—that frivolous pastime—can snap futures into pieces. And it runs through her reflections on the way skiing, like other pursuits that give young people “freedom, autonomy, and power,” presents a manner of moving into the future, motivations and misdirections included.
Socialism and skiing seem unlikely bedfellows today, but it hasn’t always been so. This fantastic Current Affairs essay by Richard Michael Solomon opens with an old German man in a chairlift, holding forth on the prospect of skiing under fully automated luxury communism. Inspired, Solomon traces the history of skiing from its egalitarian European roots, through a postwar wave of social-democratic skiing projects, and into late capitalism’s Ski Inc. oligopoly.
Ski Inc. is what many will recognize as skiing today, especially in the US: giant corporates like Vail and Alterra gobbling up hills; bumper multi-resort season passes and stratospheric day-ticket prices ($299 in some places) incentivizing yearlong commitments as a hedge against climate change; and ski towns morphing into “aristocrats’ Potemkin villages” of empty chalets, splashy stores, and olde tyme simulacra. Stuart Winchester, Substack’s leading ski journalist, recently (and provocatively) made the point that not all good ski resorts match this description. True enough, but the slide toward consolidation and luxury continues.
Solomon goes further, searching for more radical models. He recommends existing nonprofit and community-owned ski projects. He proposes taxes, more taxes, revenue sharing, and a Public Lands Fund modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund. He also calls for politicization:
Skiers, river rats, scuba people, dirt-bags, surfer bros, biker girls, cavers, bird fanatics, anglers, hiking vagabonds—we are a powerful voter bloc and possess sizable consumer power. Given that the natural world is under relentless assault by a pollutive and commodifying force, the outdoor community must become thoroughly politicized.
Solomon’s vision is fanciful, by his own admission. But fanciful ideas are often so from a political perspective, not a practical one. Fatalism, he argues, is worse than fancy:
On the chairlift, I recall Hans told me that our modern social order is like concrete. To sledgehammer the thing is brutish and unlikely to do much, but to sandpaper the edges is inadequate. For this reason, such ski dreams of his may seem like an exercise in pointless fantasy—fated “to bleach on the plains of the past under a hallucinated utopian sun,” wrote British Marxist E.P. Thompson. But in the boom-bust rhythms, small cracks in that concrete will form. There, radical projects can sink their roots.
As society undergoes an ecological turn, parts of the ski community are turning the same way. In both cases, Indigenous voices have much to contribute—if we can learn to listen. I love Matthew Tufts’ Freeskier profile of Lakota skier Connor Ryan, a modern shredder spreading ancient wisdom, as a step in this direction.
“Dude, I just want to pop up like the little Microsoft Office paperclip and tell other skiers, ‘Oh hey there! It sounds like you’re having trouble describing your connection to nature,’ [Ryan] said with an exasperated laugh between bites of ahi poke ceviche. Our guide to alpine reverence wore a basketball jersey and backwards cap with long braided hair snaking out from the brim. He pointed at us with a tortilla chip. ‘Bro, what if I told you Native cultures have had words for that for thousands of years?”
The piece hangs around a series of Indigenous phrases, each encouraging a reciprocal, animistic, grateful relationship with nature—for skiers and others. It is a paean to the power of language.
Language is not only a tool for communicating intentions and relaying our actions, but also serves as a pillar in the framework of our interpretation of the world and its people. It’s largely held that a people defines its language; it is less frequently acknowledged that a language reciprocally shapes its people.
One of my favorite ski films in recent years, Spirit of the Peaks, explores Connor Ryan’s perspectives—and showcases his skiing—through a visual medium.
Skiing is not the most diverse world, so representation is important. But when abstracted from different communities’ perspectives and particularities, representation can feel tokenistic—especially within marketing campaigns. Not this profile. In focusing on Ryan’s linguistic insights and ritualistic practices—singing songs, and burning sweetgrass—the piece is artful in its articulation of diverse ways of thinking and being.
Connor isn’t out to alter the experience skiers already have with the mountains; rather, he sees an opportunity, through language, to enhance the depth and perspective of these experiences in a way that cultivates a healthier reciprocal relationship between skiers, the land and the Indigenous peoples upon whose land we so often recreate. He hopes to bring some of these Indigenous terms into the skier’s vernacular, integrating long-standing cultural practices into our daily experiences on the mountain. In doing so, the ski community can adopt a new understanding of, and appreciation for, our relationship with the natural world.
To close, a piece that is less literary long-form and more a realist rallying cry. Scottish snowboarder Calum Macintyre is one of the sport’s most outspoken environmental activists. Matt Barr’s Looking Sideways Substack, for which this is a guest post, is one of the most thoughtful corners of the snowsports world. (Macintyre also just appeared on the Looking Sidewayspodcast, discussing the same themes).
Having been involved in the climate movement for some years, I have often been asked by people who have no interest in snow sports or climbing, ‘Where the hell are all of you?’ I have found it difficult to respond to this question. In this piece, I will present my five reasons why I believe our community is not more engaged and why I think more of us should participate in disruptive protests.
I love the simple, direct provocation of this piece. It asks all of us with an affinity for the outdoors to ask some honest questions: Are we doing what we can to protect the environments we cherish? If not, why not? What are the most effective actions we can take? These questions are increasingly animating both ski communities and wider society. Their consequences will come for skiers first—but will catch us all in the end.
Sam Firman is a freelance writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. He writes a newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and how this might help build better systems.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/vXEiKos
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ukvdwx5
Today’s internet is fragile, toxic, and broken, with tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta “consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure.” In this thoughtful essay, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon make their case for “rewilding” and rebuilding the web and look to ecologists for inspiration, vision, and actionable next steps. Rewilding doesn’t mean repairing, but restoring—considering the internet as an entire habitat, making it more resilient via diversity, and allowing more people to make, remake, and innovate.
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.
But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?
Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/DjxcSdG
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ukvdwx5
Muskrat populations in North America are declining. But why? For Hakai Magazine, Brandon Keim dives into the reasons why the number of these under-appreciated, semiaquatic rodents are dwindling, to help us understand their contribution to the environment and the others species that share it.
The animals are often mistaken for beavers, another semiaquatic rodent, albeit one whose adults weigh as much as a six-to-eight-year-old child; muskrats tip the scales at a couple kilograms. That lack of appreciation extends to the ecological roles performed by muskrats. Though their influences are subtle when compared with the wetland engineering of beavers, muskrats are still important habitat makers and nutrient movers. They help the world come to life, even if we don’t readily notice them doing so; their diminishment would reverberate far beyond them. It is also foreboding. What does it portend, and what does it say about how humans have transformed the world, when in so many places such a common, hardy animal can no longer thrive?
In his review of muskrat ecosystem impacts, Ahlers describes how these disturbances produce dramatic increases in plant species richness. One study suggested that muskrats were primarily responsible for an increase of more than 70 percent in the variety of plants found in the disturbed areas of a cattail marsh; by grazing on abundant plants that would otherwise become dominant, muskrats also create space for rare plants to grow. Meanwhile, their houses—a meter or more from the water and up to two meters wide, lasting for a year or two before gradually degrading—become habitat features themselves. “Birds are probably the most conspicuous beneficiaries of the muskrat’s influence on wetlands,” writes Ahlers, including the ducks, terns, grebes, and other wetland avians who use muskrat houses as nesting sites. Turtles, water snakes, and frogs also dwell in them, and even skunks and shrews—more than 60 vertebrate species altogether, by one count.
These animals also avail themselves of the reed feeding platforms that muskrats construct. So do beetles and other invertebrates, and in turn their predators benefit. As the platforms decompose, they even increase local microbial diversity. And where muskrats dig dens in banks along the water’s edge rather than build houses, their burrowing aerates riparian soils, and those subterranean chambers become habitat for reptiles and amphibians. “When you remove them,” says Smith of muskrats, “the ecology of the wetland changes.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/ikF0MYS
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/ukvdwx5
