Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, check out Louise Hung’s piece about coming to terms with her eyelids, which turned out to resonate with a lot of readers!
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‘Americans Will Struggle to Grow Old at Home‘ (E. Tammy Kim for Bloomberg)
An aging generation in the United States is demanding increasing levels of care. The availability of caregiving services is not keeping up, and neither is the ability to pay for the services that are within reach. A crisis in aging and eldercare — sweeping across the disability community as well — is looming, at precisely the moment that more people are growing older and the government is cutting funds to programs and services designed to keep elderly and disabled people safe at home.
At 6 a.m. on a winter morning in Ridgewood, N.Y., a woman I’ll call Valia leaned on her kitchen counter, drinking black tea and packing a giant purse. She wore her blond-gray hair in a bun and pulled on an ankle-length brown puffer coat. “OK, I’m taking my medication, I’m taking my telephone, my tablet,” she said, going down her checklist. She whispered goodbye to her cat and her 26-year-old son, who was still asleep, and lit a cigarette to smoke on her way out.
‘The Mutilated and the Disappeared‘ (Alice Driver for Longreads)
What happens to those who are gravely injured while attempting to migrate to a better future, or at least away from a horrific past, in Mexico? This shelter steps in where other services fail to treat and support people dealing with catastrophic physical and emotional trauma, and the scenes there are harrowing.
Matus Sánchez, discussing kidnapping based on the thousands of stories migrants had told her, pointed out that it wasn’t limited to the streets. She argued that gangs paid bribes to Mexican migration officials to gain entry into government migration centers. Of migration officials, she said, “They have already become kidnappers. There is already organized crime within the migratory station.”
‘Have You Ever…‘ (Christina Cauterucci for Slate)
Members of a certain generation remember the Spark Purity Test vividly — and spreading results, talking about the test, and trying to game the outcome were all popular sports in the late 1990s. How has the test held up over time, and is possible, perhaps, to engineer it for a new generation?
Coyne and Bolotin intended their test for college students, but it resonated in high schools and middle schools, too. Coyne believes his quiz hit at the perfect moment in time: “It was the right combination of sexual, goofy, and interactive at a time when people were coming to the internet in hordes.” Without social media infrastructure to help it along and without share-count or page-view markers to prove it, this online quiz went viral in a very analog way: through printouts, rites of passage, and word of mouth. “This purity test was secretly accessed, printed, and disseminated throughout my middle school,” writes playwright Chiara Atik. “This purity test was clandestinely filled out under the bleachers, passed along in binders, talked about, discussed, analyzed at length.”
‘Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle‘ (Taffy Brodesser-Akner for the New York Times)
Jimmy Buffet is the epitome of the casual, chill, fun-loving ‘island lifestyle.’ But Jimmy Buffet the man is very different from Buffet the businessman and performer, and it turns out that he’s a little too busy with his empire for most of that. How does he reconcile such a divide between his performance and real life?
If Jimmy Buffett was a Jimmy Buffett kind of guy, these thoughts would have been incidental, thought up in a hammock then lost to memory the way the best boozy thoughts always are. But he’d taken a business class when he was in college studying journalism, and it stuck with him. The class covered supply and demand and goods and services. From the stage, looking out over the growing number of people wearing parrot headgear, he realized there was demand. He had supply. He could find the goods and services.
‘No one told Babe Ruth he had cancer, but his death changed the way we fight it‘ (Eleanor Cummins for Popular Science)
This is a very intriguing read on the history of early cancer treatment, via a famous baseball player with a stubborn health problem that refused to resolve itself, no matter how hard doctors tried.
The drug that Ruth took was called teropterin. Richard Lewisohn, a researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, extracted the antifolates from brewer’s yeast. The compound seemed to work in a few mice, but it had never been tried in humans. Against Lewisohn’s will, the nascent drug was nonetheless made available for Ruth’s use. “It went from mice to Babe Ruth,” Bikhazi says with a sense of amazement, even after all these years. “There was no intermediary.”
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