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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This piece isn’t for the faint-hearted: a description of the cries of a stranded baby seal pup is accompanied by a video—to wring your emotions to the maximum. But, reporting from both land and sea in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia, Larry Pynn does some excellent investigation work into the problematic practice of storing logs in estuaries.
Seals often seek out log booms for haulouts and to give birth and raise their pups. Because booms float atop the water, they don’t submerge at high tide as offshore rocks often do. They also offer protection from land predators such as wolves, cougars, and bears. In some ways, “you couldn’t ask for a better maternity ward than a log boom,” says Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
The problem is, these platforms can also kill. In places like Cowichan Bay, booms sink onto the seafloor at low tide. Before they do, mother seals escape to deeper water, but newborn pups they leave behind can be crushed by shifting logs. No researcher has officially studied the issue, but a local resident has captured dozens of gruesome photos of pups that died this way in Cowichan Bay over the last decade. On my visit, I see several vultures perched on the boom and atop nearby wood pilings, as if they sense the possibility of this particular pup’s demise.
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For as long as there’s been the study of science, virtually no one has bothered to pay attention to period blood. This is in large part thanks to thousands of years of sexism, namely the belief that menstrual effluent is dirty or dangerous, something to be shunned or ignored. That’s finally changing, however slowly:
“Period blood is the most overlooked opportunity in medical research,” Qvin co-founder Dr. Sara Naseri likes to say. Collecting it is noninvasive. And data hidden in its cells might help scientists crack the code to some of the most cryptic reproductive ailments.
One of those is endometriosis, wherein tissue resembling the type that lines the uterus invades areas outside the womb. Given its complexity, frequent painfulness, mysterious etiology, and lack of a cure, the disease is a research white whale. Dr. Christine Metz, a professor at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health who co-directs a prominent endometriosis study, says she was shocked a decade ago when she realized menstrual effluent—which contains cells shed from the uterine lining—had rarely been considered as a window into a woman’s reproductive organs. It’s like “a biopsy of the endometrium,” she says.
Other researchers are examining period blood’s potential to treat diseases. The uterus is an incredible organ for many reasons, chief among them is that it repairs itself—without scarring—after shedding its tissue every month or so during a person’s reproductive years. It does this with the help of stem cells, some of which are present in menstrual effluent. There have recently been clinical trials testing the use of these stem cells for conditions such as infertility and severe COVID, and studies showed they helped with wound healing and stimulating insulin production in diabetic lab mice.
Even so, scientists studying menstrual blood say they have been met with a reluctance rooted in cultural taboos about menstruation. The queasiness continues to hamper research, obscuring discoveries that—considering every single day, hundreds of millions of people worldwide are menstruating—may be hiding in plain sight.
In 2014, when Naseri began to explore the possibility of using periods to diagnose disease, she approached the lab director at a high-ranking university hospital and asked if she could run some experiments. He refused. Naseri’s research partner, Stanford OB-GYN professor emeritus Dr. Paul Blumenthal, offered to spin the blood down, separating the serum from the red blood cells that give the substance its intense color. But the lab director still wouldn’t budge. “No, no, no, that can’t happen,” Blumenthal recalls him saying. “I’m not letting you put that skanky stuff in my machine.”
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Meg Bernhard attended certification training to become a death doula. In looking at her own experiences with death, she poses some hard questions about what it really means to have a “good death,” ostensibly one without pain, suffering, and surrounded by loved ones, in contrast with a bad death, one in which someone dies alone, in misery, and perhaps suddenly.
Nicole and Omni explained what work we’d be learning to do. A good death doula acts like a personal assistant to the dying. She sorts out funeral, insurance, and legal logistics; she keeps a binder of contacts at hospices, medical facilities, and massage therapists; she serves as a neutral liaison to spouses or children. She helps a dying person carry out their final projects, whether completing a memoir or making a video to show their children how to use power tools. She helps them create advanced directives, legal documents that outline medical decisions, and vigil plans for the moment they die: who they’d like at their bedside, what atmosphere they’d like to create. During the death, she watches over the family to make sure everyone has what they need, because it’s easy to forget to eat, and drink water, and rest. After the death, the doula helps family close social media and bank accounts, transfer car titles, hire people to clean a vacated apartment, tying all the loose ends of the recently living. She guides them through their grief.
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“You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a conman,” says Alejandro Jodorowsky, maker of cult films El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre, and the unmade psychedelic Dune; writer of the legendary graphic novel series The Incal; and practitioner of the tarot.
When the story opens in the dystopian world of The Incal, our hero John Difool, holder of a Class R private detective’s license, has been beaten up by a masked gang in Suicide Alley and is falling headlong into an acid lake. Difool and Deepo, his pet concrete seagull, are versions of The Fool and his dog from the tarot. Characters across the galaxy, several fashioned after other cards, converge around the Incal, an ancient artifact of untold power and beauty. The game “begins here, not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Teaching Jodorowsky the tarot, the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington said: “The tarot is a chameleon.” Salvador Dalí, fellow explorer of surreal realms, designed a deck featuring himself as The Magician. Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats, member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, wrote poetry rife with tarot symbolism. A few years ago, Sylvia Plath’s copy of the Marseilles deck fetched $206,886 at Sotheby’s—the one that Ted Hughes had gifted her, the one that had prompted her to write several poems including The Hanging Man, and from Cambridge, write to her mother that she was “on the road to becoming a seeress.” Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot had Madame Sosostris, “famous clairvoyante” and “the wisest woman in Europe,” lay down a “wicked pack of cards” in The Waste Land. More recently, author Erin Morgenstern hand-painted a black-and-white tarot deck to complement her fantasy novel, The Night Circus.
Calling the tarot a “machine for constructing stories,” Italo Calvino wrote a semiotic fantasy called The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Two groups of travelers cross a forest. One ends up in a castle, and the other in a tavern, both having lost their power of speech in the travails of the crossing. Using tarot cards, they tell tales through the night, but no tale is ever quite the truth, only a version of it. Booker winner Margaret Atwood, often accused of prophetic abilities herself, said: “Oracles in the ancient world were always ambiguous. They didn’t say, this will inevitably happen. They were like warnings—if this, then that. . . . There isn’t one The Future. There are an infinite number of possible futures, and which one you get is going to depend on what you do now.” Two-time Booker winner Hilary Mantel, who thought of writing as “the arena of peril,” kept a deck in a drawer of her writing desk. Her character Alison Hart in Beyond Black says of reading the tarot: “You don’t know what you’re going to say. You don’t even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don’t know anything. Then suddenly you do know. You have to walk blind. And you walk slap into the truth.”
I hold the old New Orleans deck in my hands. It has a perfectly satisfying aspect ratio. The syncretic vodun artwork is stunning. All decks have 78 cards, 22 of which comprise the Major Arcana. This deck has one extra, a wild card called Les Barons. Top-hatted, dark-glassed, cigar-smoking Baron Samedi and Baron Cimetière walk up some stairs with Manman Brigitte (to the French Quarter Police Station, I’m told). All grinning skeletons wearing long coats and carrying the respective accoutrements of their works—a curved walking stick, a headstone, a cross—they make me smile. Eros and Thanatos, awful without a few laughs. I shuffle the cards, a rustling hush. I hear the Sanskrit root śam that says pacifying, extinguishing; the root śi that says sharpening, focusing. If it’s all a game anyway, wouldn’t you like a deck of cards?
Against the context of the rising popularity of the tarot in the literary arts, Spencer curates a freewheeling conversation with Alexander Chee, Alia Curtis, Laurie Filipelli, Meg Hayertz, Cecily Sailer, Rachel Wright, and Maritess Zurbano, where they discuss how the tarot figures in their lives and writing practices. Among the discussions about its assorted applications in various fields is information about the creative uses they put it to.
Sailer: I was drawn to Tarot because it shares with writing a fundamental aspiration—to articulate the complexity of human experience. Writers must journey into the murky realms of the subconscious and return with material the conscious mind can digest. Tarot can enter this process as a collaborator and compliment [sic]: It shares a writer’s desire to interrogate while providing a different language and angle for doing so.
Chee: It develops a formidably dense amount of information about characters, but it also lends you distance from them, lets you see them in ways they won’t, and you need that. Also, it is useful for teaching students. I will give the Celtic Cross exercise in class and sometimes not explain the link to the Tarot until afterwards as not everyone finds the Tarot credible, even as a structural element with no cards. I find it helps them to start seeing the deck apart from the overly mystical way, by teaching them how to use the elements of the deck’s tradition to tap into their imagination—and power—before they meet the deck itself and assign it some authority it just doesn’t have.
Drawing elegant parallels between the girlhood game of folded-paper cootie catchers and the tarot as a literary form in itself, Nethercott suggests in this tender essay that the link between reading—or “reading”—as an act of divination and writing as an act of creation may not be so tenuous, seeing as language is involved. As “an occult power, a supernatural tool that must be wielded delicately,” it can read minds, transcend time, survive life and death, she suggests. Every card has a story to tell and that is a powerful act.
Like so many divinatory games, young women have long been the keepers and practitioners. In our patriarchal society, young men have been emboldened to select their own paths, to determine who and what they wanted to become—leaving boys with no true need for fortune telling or luck. Why bother with divination when you can control the future? Adolescent girls, however, were never afforded this promise. Thus, girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them. If they couldn’t control the future, at least they could get a preview of what’s to come.
If something can tell a story, chances are that it can tell your story. The Fool who steps into the unknown… the Three of Swords bearing heartbreak… the patient, dangling Hanged Man… As any good writing teacher can tell you, the microcosm contains the macrocosm—within the tarot, we view an individual illustration and immediately it expands, jumpstarting associations with similar images in our own lives. And so, through these archetypal narrative images come tales. And tales lead to questions. And questions lead into the future.
A creative tool, a beautiful game, a clarity device for a confounding world? Or perhaps in our era of pervasive despair, where we endlessly medicalize nature and culture and press them into therapeutic service, should the tarot be seen as psychotherapy? Carl Jung did say in a 1930s seminar: “They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” In this thoughtful essay, McConnachie tours the cultural history of the tarot, examining various origin theories and influences—it was a parlor game to begin with—and arriving at ways the tarot and the reading of it appear to operate. A tool of “cold tricksters or wise therapists,” he seems to ask, but is there a difference?
The poet William Empson, no less, wrote to the London Review of Books in September 1980 to protest that ‘nobody in the Renaissance would invent such a random thing without making it symbolical’; that ‘the picture cards of the tarot are rather aggressively mysterious’; and that the tarot pack was unlikely ‘used merely for games’. [The philosopher Michael] Dummett replied that: ‘Intellectuals, scholars and other serious-minded people are prone to consider playing games a trivial occupation,’ yet in the courts of early Renaissance Italy, by contrast, ‘men and women did not despise games as trifling, but cultivated them and took them seriously, by which I do not mean portentously.’
My original question: ‘Why does tarot survive?’ In a sense, tarot does encode wisdom – albeit within an invented tradition rather than a secret one. It is a system for describing aspirations and emotional concerns. It is a closed system rather than one based on evidence but, as such, it is not dissimilar to psychoanalysis, another highly systematised, invented tradition whose clinical efficacy depends ultimately on the relationship between client and practitioner.
The Querent (Alexander Chee, The Morning News, August 2011)
The querent is the person who asks the tarot—“78 windows into the secret life of the world, hidden somewhere beyond the air, under the skin of existence”—a question. In this moving personal essay, Chee starts with fortune telling, buying a deck that the (in)famous occultist Aleister Crowley designed together with Lady Frieda Harris, seeking “one of those mirrors, the ones positioned so you can see around a corner, but for my whole life.” He ends up with something else a lot harder to define, something he must meet with his eyes closed nonetheless.
On reflection, it seems to me much of what I love about literature is also what I love about the Tarot—archetypes at play, hidden forces, secrets brought to light. When I bought the deck, it was for the same reason I bought the car—I wanted to feel powerful in the face of my fate. I felt too much like a character in a novel, buffeted by cruel turns of fate. I wanted to look over the top of my life and see what was coming; I wanted to be its author.
On the subway home, I remembered the story of my own trip to a fortuneteller as an infant in Seoul. All she would say, apparently, was, “This one, he has much to do.”
If she said anything else, no one remembers. I think sometimes of asking, but it seems to me now, after my uncle’s story, that you think you want to know the future until you do. It would be like waiting for a bullet to pace its way to your side across the years.
In this luminous piece categorized as experimental-hybrid essay-memoir, Swift draws for us 22 deeply observed, deeply lived true stories laid out in the pattern of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. Here is everything we have been talking about so far. Here is what the tarot can do for one who wants to see and make. As Yogi Berra famously said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
The Magician/1
One Christmas, when I was a child, my grandmother offered an unusual gift: she would make a donation to the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert, California, on my behalf. What animal did I want to sponsor? I said wolf. She was furious, I was later told, that I would pick a predator over something sweet and cuddly. But, probably after a long talk with my dad, who may have offered her some ecological reasoning, she sent me a card with a photo of the Mexican wolf. I was so proud of that card, not because she had donated a token sum of money in my name for the fund-raiser, but because I had allied myself with wolf.
The Moon/18
Anne Carson stated it confidently: “I do not believe in art as therapy.” Upon reading these words, I sighed with relief. She had said it. I had nodded. Art, the dedicated work of making. Therapy, the tenacious work of healing. Nodding, I realized two things about myself. One, I had matured as a writer, an artist. Two, I had healed some deep fissures in myself. Otherwise, I might have retreated at her comment, belligerently disagreed. There is no way around the curvature of grief; one must lean into it, buck the heavy swell. To write well is to name pain with beauty and strangeness. That’s the art of it. Creativity, which could just as well be a word for God. Learning these things was one of the greatest freedoms of all. Some people think writing is easy. I want to tell them, try to face yourself daily in the salt pan of the empty page. Try to go there and come back unscathed.
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
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