In France, a Swimming Pool With a Story

Aislyn Greene recounts living abroad in France and navigating her new, foreign yet exciting life, one suddenly full of possibility. It was where she discovered—along with the joys of swimming at the beautiful and historic Piscine Saint-Georges—her sexuality.

I think the foreignness of my new life also paved the way for this awakening: Because everything was unfamiliar, my perspective on the world and my place within it shifted. I was different in France, which meant that—just maybe—I could be different at home. Could I have found this part of myself if I’d moved to, say, New York, instead of France? Perhaps. But I think it often takes a total shake-up of our life to shake truths out of ourselves—and travel can often be a vehicle for that transformation.

I didn’t act on this awakening in France. I didn’t go to gay clubs or go on dates with French women. That was much too scary back then. It felt enough to just hold on to the truth. Like I needed time to build myself up, physically and mentally, and the pool was my chrysalis, preparing me to return home, metamorphosis complete.

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The Mysterious Tyranny of Trendy Baby Names

Do you think you have chosen a unique baby name? You probably haven’t. In this fascinating essay, Daniel Wolfe explains how the baby names people choose follow trends—even when we don’t realize it.

Nowadays, she said, people not only have access to unlimited cable channels and the internet, but those innovations have helped usher in a “username creation” mentality — meaning that if someone else has the same name, it’s viewed as taken. So parents tend to tweak their baby’s name just a bit — keeping the “-son,” for example, while swapping the “Ja-” for “Car-.”

Wattenberg finds “an incredible irony” in this. People think they’re choosing something totally unique, but they do it in a way that winds up moving with the zeitgeist. As a result, names have actually gotten less distinctive over time, with nearly half of all baby names now following identifiable suffix trends — a phenomenon Wattenberg calls “lockstep individualism.”

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The Adoption Paradox

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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The Owls Who Came From Away

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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The Life and Untimely Death of a Boeing Whistleblower

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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It Began as a Rewilding Experiment. Now a Bear Is on Trial for Murder

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.

*This story is behind a paywall.

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Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business

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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