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The Rise and Fall of Babe.net (Allison P. Davis for The Cut)
The company scaled up and churned out more copy: Tab Media was already operating on 80 campuses across the U.K. and the U.S., but it expanded its network of contributors and grew babe.net’s editorial team. Babe became its own millennial-pink website, with an independent staff and its own URL, in May 2017. It would have been “babe.com” — so named because that’s what the founding editors liked to call their friends — but the URL already belonged to a camgirl site.
The bitter Pill (Eliza Brooke for The Goods)
A lot of people struggle to find birth control that works for their body and life. Over dinner dates with friends, in conversations with coworkers, on Facebook groups and Reddit forums, in web comics, and in formal interviews, I’ve heard and read all manner of stories about pills, implants, and IUDs that caused the kind of physical and mental side effects that force a change or make a person ask, over and over, “Is this worth it?” While anecdotal, these experiences aren’t hard to come by. Send up a flare and people will come running.
The Road Not Taken (Sarah Jaffe for The Nation)
The jobs never came back. When GM announced, last November, that the Lordstown plant would be closed as part of a restructuring plan, the community held out hope that the company would decide to retool the plant, and rehire some of the laid-off workers. But the last Chevrolet Cruze rolled off the Lordstown assembly line on March 6—a no-frills white model that workers draped in an American flag and posed behind for a last photo.
Can Lacrosse Work As a Professional Sport? (Katie Baker for The Ringer)
“Bring it!” Rabil yells. “We need that!” In college lacrosse, he says, players are conditioned to be too respectful, to swallow their competitive bile. But he would rather “reengineer the mind of the athlete” back toward having no filter and no fear, both to showcase the rough, rugged glories of lacrosse, and because mercenaries make for good memes. “That’s how you build modern rivalry,” says Rabil, who in his ambitious new role at the center of lacrosse’s biggest schism stands to become an expert in the field.
For America’s Uniformed Public Health Service, Existential Questions Abound (Keren Landman for Undark)
If you ignore for a moment the uniquely American link between military service and the guarantee of good health insurance, affordable education, and a retirement plan, expecting a military model to add value to a public health force just doesn’t make sense, Holland told me. Emergency response is in the DNA of public health culture; people in public health run toward emergencies the way soldiers run into opposing fire, regardless of whether they’re uniformed or not. The CDC, Doctors Without Borders, and countless volunteer organizations have not needed military structure to respond selflessly, efficiently, effectively, and frequently to emergencies.
Photo: PSJeremy