IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
We are a nation of dog lovers, and everyone thinks that their own dog is the best in the world.
So if given the opportunity, would we clone our beloved pets? Can their unique selves be replicated?
(The New Yorker, approx 24 mins reading time)
But, if it is dogs’ individuality that we value, what should we make of the idea that their unique and unreproducible selves can, in fact, be reproduced? Cloning is the ultimate expression of genetic determinism—chromosomes as character. ViaGen’s Web site declares that a cloned dog “is simply a genetic twin of your dog, born at a later date.” The assertion is not untrue, as far as it goes, but it’s a sales pitch that dodges a host of complicated ethical and identity issues. There are issues of exploitation—both of the bereaved owners whose desire to somehow cheat death is being monetized and, more viscerally, of the unseen animals whose bodies are used in making a clone. There’s the issue of supply: the production of bespoke dogs in a society when so many good, naturally born ones in shelters are in need of adoption. Finally, there’s an existential issue: who, exactly, is produced when a dog is cloned?
Snapchat is known somewhat for its secretive features, with messages that can disappear when viewed.
But this also makes it a perfect platform for drug dealers and dozens of families of drug overdose victims are now fighting to hold Snapchat—and Big Tech—accountable.
(Rolling Stone, approx 42 mins reading time)
This was manna for kids, who could text (or sext) each other without fear of their parents’ prying eyes. But that disappearing ink was a godsend for dealers too — a chance to sell narcotics and leave no breadcrumbs for the cops and feds to follow. This made all the difference to fake-pill pushers, whose product was as lethal as it was deceptive. Two milligrams of fentanyl — think 10 grains of salt — would asphyxiate a teen in his bed. Why fentanyl? Because it’s so plentiful and potent that you can produce a fake Oxy for less than five cents a pill — and sell that pill to kids for $30. Dealers, as a rule, don’t try to kill their clients, but with fentanyl, it’s the cost of doing business. No home cook can process a batch of “Xanax” without peppering chunks of fentanyl in the mix.
Meet the Doctor that the likes of Tom Brady and Leonardo DiCaprio call when they’re in need.
(The New Yorker, approx 28 mins reading time)
One of his patients, for instance, is Vasiliy Lomachenko, one of the best boxers in the world. After his wins, he likes to credit God. In a bout in 2018, he threw a combination of punches that yanked his right shoulder out of its socket. It hurt so badly that he bit through his mouth guard. “For a long time, I wondered if I could box again at the same level,” Lomachenko told me. He went to ElAttrache. The doctor operated on the shoulder, then undertook the more delicate work of helping Lomachenko rebuild trust in his arm. ElAttrache would take him out for lunch and counsel him on what punches to throw and when. Lomachenko won his second match back by knockout, a right hook to the skull. Afterward, he didn’t thank God. He thanked ElAttrache.
Sophie Vershbow was less than a week old when her cousin Jeffrey died.
He fell into a coma after surgery to treat an AIDS complication.
She has mined diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings, and spoke to many people in her cousin’s circle to tell his story: Jeffrey and his brother Larry contracted HIV and died within six months of each other in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
(Esquire, approx 25 mins reading time)
On Monday, August 14, 1989, two hundred people gathered at a Hackensack, New Jersey, funeral home to say goodbye to AIDS activist Jeffrey Bomser. Local journalist Mike Kelly reported in his column for the next day’s Bergen Record: “There were a rabbi, a Lutheran minister, and a Roman Catholic priest. There were gay people and straight people. There were retired men and career women. There was a mother with her infant.” That infant was me, four days old at the funeral of my mother’s first cousin, dead at 38 from AIDS-related causes just six months after AIDS took the life of his brother, Larry.
In a crucial decade in print media’s transition to the internet, hit HBO series Game of Thrones was a boon in traffic.
But what happened when every publication started chasing the same thing?
(The Verge, approx 12 mins reading time)
By the time she was entering the recap cycle full time, in the show’s sixth season, Game of Thrones coverage was an established machine. Readers who wanted recaps already knew where they wanted to get them. To differentiate herself, Renfro positioned herself as an expert on the texts. She’d pored over George R.R. Martin’s work and was able to pick apart the ways it was reflected in the show or, more crucially, deviated from it. She offered an obsessive’s expertise — of the books, of the mythology, of the subreddits.
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.
However, 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.”
But the researchers are forging ahead, seeking to unlock secrets that shouldn’t be secrets at all.
(Mother Jones, approx 14 mins reading time)
Qvin is part of a small but growing wave of companies and research initiatives doing something that science and medicine have neglected for thousands of years: treating menstrual blood not as a waste product, but as an important trove of information about the bodies it comes from. I’d become especially interested in the new science of periods after a baffling diagnosis left me grasping for more details about my reproductive organs and wishing medicine had more answers to give.
In 2011, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was celebrating its 40th year in print in the US.
It had been published almost a decade previous to middling reviews in the UK, and was released in the US to wild acclaim.
(Poetry Foundation, approx 15 mins reading time)
In March 1970, the poet Ted Hughes found himself in a tricky real estate situation. There was a charming seaside house he wanted to buy, in Devonshire, but the necessary funds weren’t at hand. Of course he could have sold one of his two other homes, but one was the home he had shared with his now deceased ex-wife Sylvia Plath, another was a solid investment, and so on. In the end, he wrote to Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia, asking for her blessing to sell one of his other assets: her daughter’s first and only novel, written a year before her suicide in 1963, for which Hughes suspected there might now be a market in the United States.
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