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 the week’s best reads for you to savour.
1. Is sugar the world’s most popular drug?
Write Gary Taubes is a crusader against sugar – and with the publication of his new book, he’s written a long essay for The Guardian about why he questions whether it’s best to just quit sugar for good. For starters, he argues that it seems to be addictive. This might make you question that biscuit with your afternoon cuppa…
(The Guardian, approx 24 mins reading time)
The critical question, as the journalist and historian Charles C Mann has elegantly put it, “is whether [sugar] is actually an addictive substance, or if people just act like it is”. This question is not easy to answer. Certainly, people and populations have acted as though sugar is addictive, but science provides no definitive evidence. Until recently, nutritionists studying sugar did so from the natural perspective of viewing it as a nutrient – a carbohydrate – and nothing more. They occasionally argued about whether or not it might play a role in diabetes or heart disease, but not about whether it triggered a response in the brain or body that made us want to consume it in excess. That was not their area of interest.
A new trend is seeing people in the US taking small doses of drugs in an effort to make themselves more productive and less anxious. But is all this ‘biohacking’ worth it?
(GQ, approx 15 mins reading time)
How exactly LSD fits into such a regimen for self-betterment was a topic of great curiosity one night not long ago in a San Francisco loft. George Burke, one of the Bay Area’s most fervent biohackers, had convened a presentation on the topic, entitled “Performance Psychedelics.” Up onstage, the legendary psychedelic psychologist Dr. James Fadiman told the crowded room that the key to unleashing the benefits of the drug was all in the dosage. The doctor explained that taking a smaller amount than usual—something on the order of one-tenth of a typical “party dose”—would stimulate the mind in all kinds of positive ways.
Jared Kushner has been appointed to an advisor role to his father-in-law, Donald Trump. This article looks at the similarities between Kushner and The Donald.
(New York Magazine, approx 39 mins reading time)
Kushner acknowledged that Trump was “easy to hate from afar,” but he claimed his father-in-law was different once he got down to business in the privacy of the boardroom. He predicted the administration would take a “rational” position on immigration and would join with Democrats to invest in infrastructure, which he said could mean not only roads and bridges but high-speed internet and driverless cars. He said Trump had asked Elon Musk why the aerospace industry couldn’t make planes that fly faster, like the Concorde used to, and Musk replied that most CEOs preferred incremental improvements to moon-shot risks. “Trump will not be afraid to fail,” he said.
Black Panther Albert Woodfox was one of the Angola 3, jailed in 1969 over a robbery. He was held in solitary confinement for 40 years, the longest length of time a prisoner was ever kept in that situation. This is the story about what happened after his release.
(The New Yorker, approx 57 mins reading time)
Angola was known as the most dangerous prison in the South. According to the editor of the prison’s newspaper, the Angolite, a quarter of the inmates lived in “bondage”: raped, sold, and traded, they generated income for their owners as well as for prison guards, who were paid to look the other way. The Panthers organized an Anti-Rape Squad, which escorted new prisoners to their dorms. “We would let them know who we were and that we were there to protect them,” Ronald Ailsworth, a member of the squad, told me. They armed themselves with bats and knives, which they fashioned out of farm equipment, and used mail-order catalogues and dinner trays as shields.
It’s something that’s not often talked about – the health problems that can come after childbirth. But here, Keira Butler talks to women who have experienced a number of issues after giving birth.
(Mother Jones, approx 25 mins reading time)
Doctors are required by [US] law to warn women about what could happen to their bodies during a cesarean section, from infection to the uterus splitting apart, and pregnant women are routinely informed about genetic conditions like Down’s syndrome and birth defects like spina bifida that could affect the baby. Yet according to more than a dozen physicians and public health experts I interviewed for this story, rare is the obstetrician who has a frank conversation with a pregnant woman about the long-term problems she might face. Even women with the time and money to rigorously prepare for birth seldom hear much about how labor and delivery can damage the pelvic bones and muscles. Childbirth classes gloss over it, as do most popular pregnancy books.
Kathleen Hale tells the story of a killing that took place in Ohio in April 2016, where eight family members were killed in their homes. She travels to Pike County to try and figure out why no arrests have been made – and finds that people are not happy about her arrival.
(Hazlitt, approx 33 mins reading time)
9-1-1 operators received her frantic call at 7:49 a.m. In shock, Bobby cried that it looked “like someone had beaten the hell out of them…blood all over the house!” She couldn’t remember the street number and went to the mailbox, “4077” scrawled in red paint on the side, and relayed Chris Sr.’s address to officials. Bobby bolted from the blood-spattered trailer to her nephew Frankie’s place. The door was locked there too. According to The Enquirer, when no one answered, Bobby fell into a trance as she screamed and banged on the trailer. She heard a lock turn. Frankie’s three-year-old boy, Brentley, stared up at her.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Love wine? Then this 2002 essay in the New Yorker will have you intrigued. You’d think that it would be very easy to tell the difference between white and red wine… or is it? Calvin Trillin investigates the test that was rumoured to be carried out at the University of California at Davis.
(The New Yorker, approx 18 mins reading time)
I was definitely told, though, that the folks at Davis poured wine that was at room temperature into black glasses—thus removing the temperature and color cues that are a large part of what people assume is taste—and that the tasters often couldn’t tell red wine from white. After [my friend] Bruce returned from a short course at Davis in the mid-seventies, he had someone at the Joseph Phelps winery, where he then worked, set up a red-white test with black glasses. Bruce got three out of five.
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