Through some casual cruelty inflicted by her grandmother, Fiona Sampson learned at an early age that she was adopted—the “cuckoo in the nest.” For Aeon, she excavates the stigma she experienced and carries still, as an adult.
The new adoptive family, forming like a scar, is built on loss and breakage. It has to try and heal each corner of its triad: biological parents who have lost (or chosen to lose) their kids, adoptive parents who are often dealing with infertility and the loss of the dream of ‘kids of their own’, and an adoptee who will grow up without the restful privilege of a family that is ‘their own’.
Over the years, I’ve come to think that my grandmother was also poking me. My childish psyche, tentacled like a sea anemone, would shut if she hurt it enough. It did shut. And she was compelled to make it do so because I was a stranger in the family. The cuckoo in the nest, a phrase I got to know well. Both a stranger: and so anomalously strange that I would eventually pass more and better exams than any of her four biological grandchildren.
I don’t know how much I was priced at, but I do know that my grandmother told my mother they could have paid more and got a younger baby. I know from my case file that it was less than a week before Christmas and that, if I wasn’t placed before the holiday, I was to be put into an institution. My file also tells me I was hard to place because I was a girl. And also because someone has noted on the file that my biological mother is plain and I resemble her.
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Recently, an injured barred owl caused a kerfuffle in my local neighborhood—with everyone trying to help the beautiful bird. While this seemed unusual, Jude Isabella’s careful reporting has enlightened me: these birds are booming in British Columbia, to the detriment of some other owl species. This piece weighs up human villains against owl ones, with unsurprising results.
Healthy, diverse forests in the east also typically have open areas, carved into the canopy by wind or ice storms or through natural stand development over time. Barred owls thrive in such patchiness; they sweep soundlessly through the open spaces to hunt for prey. Before colonists thoroughly logged the Pacific Northwest, barred owls might have struggled to survive in its comparatively dense old-growth forests. But just as settlers altered the Great Plains in a way that may have provided a conduit west, so too did industrial logging of the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests help the region feel more like home for barred owls.
And so the barred owl did what any species would do when limits on its establishment and growth are gone. As Charles Darwin observed in 1859, “Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so slightly, and the number of species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount.” Many species go forth and proliferate when opportunity arises; the barred owl is no exception.
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Mitch Barnett is the first of two Boeing whistleblowers who have died this year. Barnett is thought to have committed suicide after years of trying to get someone—anyone—to listen to his deep concerns about potentially devastating quality problems on Boeing 787 jets. Instead of paying attention, Boeing retaliated. They transferred and demoted Barnett, forcing him to retire years early. For New York Magazine, Sean Flynn tries to figure why it all went so wrong.
Mitch tried to stick to protocol, following the rules and procedures that had evolved over nearly a century of civil-aviation manufacturing. He complained repeatedly to upper management about what he considered safety flaws, like parts being swiped from one aircraft and put on another without any documentation, and to human resources for what he claimed was retaliation for complaining.
In August 2014, he found three-inch-long slivers of titanium scattered among the wiring and electrical components between the cabin floor and the cargo-hold ceiling. Those slivers came from the fasteners that hold the floor in place, which meant they would be scattered in the wiring of other planes, too. Considering the risk of an electrical short, Mitch thought those planes should be cleaned; his bosses, he alleged in his complaint, told him that would cost too much and then reassigned him.
And then there were the squibs. In the summer of 2016, dozens of the overhead units that contain the reading light and the air vent and, inside, the oxygen masks that are supposed to drop down in an emergency ended up in the MRSA. The damage was cosmetic, but they had to be disassembled, which included emptying the oxygen bottles. Normally, those bottles are triggered by a tiny explosive called a squib, which activates when you tug on the mask. But Mitch discovered a lot of those squibs didn’t work: Out of 300 he tested, 75 — one-quarter — failed. Mitch thought those bad squibs should be analyzed to figure out why a quarter of the passengers on a depressurized 787 might suffocate. Instead, he was removed from the squib investigation.
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The mauling death of a jogger in the Italian Alps has sparked a furious debate about the relationship between humans and nature. Environmentalists are squaring off against right-wing politicians, neighbor against neighbor. At the heart of the controversy is Gaia the bear*:
Papi’s death sparked fury in the local area. Maini, the mayor of Caldes, started to receive hand-scrawled notes and Facebook messages, some of them threatening, demanding to know why he hadn’t protected his constituents. A pupil at his six-year-old daughter’s school told her that her father was a murderer.
People put up signs all over the village: “Justice and Dignity for Andrea.” Fugatti, the right-wing politician, turned up the heat, saying that Papi would still be alive if he had been allowed to kill Gaia in 2020.
Outside Trentino animal-rights activists were mobilizing to prevent Gaia from being killed. They launched an appeal in Rome, and a court agreed that the bear’s death sentence should be commuted to confinement. Campaigners proposed she be relocated to a sanctuary in Romania. Legal wranglings over Gaia’s fate are still unfolding slowly between courts in Trento and Rome.
Throughout the process, animal-rights activists have been protesting outside Fugatti’s house (“Fugatti, we are all JJ4!” read one placard). Declaring themselves “anti-speciesism and anti-fascism”, Gaia’s supporters have also protested in Milan and Rome. They wrote to Maini too. (“You wanted the bears, now protect them.”)
“They all live on an ideal mountain,” Maini told me recently. “We have to live on a real one.” His village has been besieged by journalists from around the world, and the furor has caused him a great deal of stress. At one point his resting heart rate went up to around 200 beats per minute.
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There’s a renewed interest to return humans to the moon. But to achieve this vision, one challenge of space travel—and a taboo topic even on Earth—needs to be solved. More than 50 years ago, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he’d stored his bodily waste in poo bags that were left behind—and, to this day, they still sit on the moon. In this entertaining essay, Becky Ferreira discusses the logistics of going to the bathroom in space—and what the entire process of waste management and disposal might look like.
At the dawn of the Space Age, American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module, and astronaut Frank Borman’s decision to simply not poop for more than a week on Gemini 7 to avoid the attendant indignities.
In other words, there’s a very small chance that human poop microbes could interfere with alien moon life. This is an exceedingly improbable outcome, given the inhospitable nature of the moon, but because it is a possibility, Mark Lupisella, an exploration integration manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has proposed a robotic mission to procure samples from the poo bags at one of the Apollo landing sites.
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Educators on the Fort Apache Reservation have repeatedly condemned teenagers for participating in a sacred ritual known as the Sunrise Dance, marking the transition from childhood to maturity for young girls. This follows a pattern of Christian discipline begun more than a century ago, but people on the reservation grappling with the bigotry find themselves in a tough position:
Since 2020, Wels [the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod] has published 180 sermons on its YouTube channel, Native Christians. Thirty-one of the 190 videos—almost a fifth—include disparaging remarks about tribal practices including the Sunrise Dance or medicine men, including two completely dedicated to convincing the congregation of the evil within the Sunrise Dance.
Only two Christian denominations operating on the reservation told me they do not include anti-traditional-Apache rhetoric in their sermons and ideology: the Catholic church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. Families on the reservation commonly have a similar understanding.
The influence of this religious teaching throughout the community affects the tribal government as well. Less than half of the 11-person White Mountain Apache tribal council participates in Apache ceremonies, according to the councilmember Annette Tenijieth. She believes seven council people do not participate in Sunrise Dances or support the work of medicine men.
Apache families who send their children to the East Fork Lutheran school face a complicated choice. Some families do so because students in Christian schools are seen as more successful than those attending the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools down the road. Others simply value a Christian education, and feel that their children might get on the “right path” with that background.
Still, many families have their children participate in Native ceremonies, ignoring the school’s racist policies. They just hope they do not get found out by the teachers.
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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
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
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
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
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
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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