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Now, the links you’re here for:
I’m 72. So what? (Catherine Texier, Longreads)
“In my early 70s, I am aging naturally, except I still dye my hair. But I am obsessed with women who let their hair go grey and I follow them on Instagram. i. Thick locks cascading down their backs. Gorgeous odalisks sunning themselves on a Malibu beach or hiking the Himalayas. Silver-haired models are the hottest trend. When I had my menopause around age 52 — a non-event that glided past me largely unnoticed — I read in a book that now was the time to embrace my crone status. I didn’t know what the word meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it. I had to look it up. It means a cruel and ugly old woman. I had zero intentions of ever becoming a crone, which to me meant giving up my sexuality and withering on the vine.”
The selfie that revealed I was a stolen baby (Sarah McDermott, BBC)
“I had so much belief in the mother who raised me – she would never lie to me, especially about who I am and where I come from,” Miché says. “So my mind was made up that the DNA test was going to be negative.”
“But things did not go as she hoped. The test results came back the following day and proved indisputably that Miché Solomon and Zephany Nurse, the baby snatched from the Groote Schuur Hospital in 1997, were the same person.”
How to mourn a glacier (Lacy M. Johnson, The New Yorker)
“Having “memory” is just one of the many ways scientists refer to glaciers in terms that make them seem alive. They also “crawl” and have “toes”; when they break off at the ablation edge, they are said to have “calved.” They are born and die—the latter at increasing rates, especially during “the great thaw” of the past twenty years. When Sigurðsson conducted a glacier inventory in the early two-thousands, he found more than three hundred glaciers in Iceland; a repeat inventory, in 2017, revealed that fifty-six had disappeared. Many of them were small glaciers in the highlands, which had spent their lives almost entirely unseen. “Most of them didn’t even have names,” he told me. “But we have been working with local people to name every glacier so that they will not go unbaptized.” Now, he intends to complete their death certificates and bring a stack of them to meetings. The next to go, he thinks, will be Hofsjökull, to the east.”
After the storm (Mary Heglar, Guernica)
“The other thing often forgotten, but which I can never forget, was that Katrina descended the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till. If you are black, and especially if you grew up in the South, the name “Emmett Till” brought immediate, arresting, gruesome images to mind. The name sank to the bottom of your stomach like a bag of rocks—or like the cotton gin fan that weighed down his barely pubescent body to make it surrender to the Tallahatchie River.”
You talk real good (Alison Stine, Longreads)
“I was born with less than 50% hearing due to a congenital issue. “A fluke,” my mother told me her doctor said. I suspect, like most people as they age, I am losing more hearing, but have not been tested in years. I’m afraid to be. The last time I saw an Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialist, he wanted to “play a trick” on his medical student, to see how long it would take her to discover my hearing loss and what her reaction would be. He thought it was great fun, and was surprised when I didn’t laugh. Pro tip: You can’t be in on the joke if the joke is about your own body.”
Image credit: S.D Photo