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Now, the links you’re here for:
Whatever happened to _______? (Anonymous, Longreads)
These are points on a line: the rise of potential, then the particularly feminized fall embedded in gentle, hetero domesticity. It’s a wistful blend of longing, regret and admiration. For the story to work the way it always works, the woman has to be better than average. She has to shine. Then she conforms. Then she disappears, fading into the ambient noise of a dishwasher and the washing machine, the TV, lawnmower, barking dog, and family phones. She comes to mark a spot in memory, on a real writer’s path. It’s one of those story structures that’s so pervasive, people harbor and project it onto the arc of a faint career well in advance. There might even be a sort of satisfaction taken in the comfort of assuming this path is inevitable for other people, those women writers who once foolishly set out to have it all.
The medications that change who we are (Zaria Gorvett, BBC)
We’re all familiar with the mind-bending properties of psychedelic drugs – but it turns out ordinary medications can be just as potent. From paracetamol (known as acetaminophen in the US) to antihistamines, statins, asthma medications and antidepressants, there’s emerging evidence that they can make us impulsive, angry, or restless, diminish our empathy for strangers, and even manipulate fundamental aspects of our personalities, such as how neurotic we are.
In most people, these changes are extremely subtle. But in some they can also be dramatic.
When a whisper network fails (Jessie Lochrie, The Outline)
I said no, and looked to leave, but the old building had a massive, heavy wooden door between the hall and the foyer. As his cajoling intensified, I did some calculations: I was trapped in a tiny hallway with a very tall man who’d harmed me before looming over me. My friends had all gone home; I’d been caught up in a conversation and stayed later than them. I began to sense I was moments from being raped, but I wasn’t sure I could get to the end of the hall, through the heavy door, and then out of the building quickly enough to avoid him if he tried to grab me.
A moment later I panicked and bolted, and he didn’t follow me. The next day, I texted him to say he had terrified me, his behavior was unacceptable, and that he was never to speak to me again. I added that if I ever heard that he’d pulled a similar stunt with another woman I would tell everyone we knew what he had done. His apology was rapid and shallow. I wondered if he made it often.
Smoke from underground (Emily Harnett, The Baffler)
Only once did anyone come close to dying. That was twelve-year-old Todd Domboski, who in February of 1981 was nearly eaten alive by his own backyard. He stepped out onto the lawn where a former mining shaft had collapsed and the lawn swallowed him whole, opening a scalding-hot cavern full of carbon monoxide. When his cousin hauled him out forty-five seconds later, the mud on his clothes had hardened, baked as though in a kiln. But the Domboski cave-in was one of few traumatic episodes in Centralia’s half-century of seething anxiety. With the fire underground, the most immediate danger—carbon monoxide seeping up into people’s homes—was liable to put you to sleep; the disaster, for the most part, was drowsy and undramatic. Women tracked the arc of the story by pasting articles about the fire into special scrapbooks. There were tense town hall meetings and tense visits from elected officials: the endless tedium of bureaucratic incompetence and government neglect. Lured by the promise of small-town conflict, People came to town in 1981 and took a famous photograph of a man frying an egg on the smoldering asphalt. A picture implies an instant, but in truth it took more than a half hour for the yolks to set.
The Baron of Botox Is Gone, But His Face Lives On (Justine Harman, Gen)
A visit with the Baron of Botox was a cross between therapy and theater. He listened when a patient had a personal problem and was always empathetic. To distract from the discomfort of needle sticks, he sang show tunes and made jokes, often smothering the punchline with his warm, honking laugh. He would examine each face before he began his work, perhaps injecting the vertical lines between the eyebrows with Botox before switching to a filler like Restylane or Voluma, which he would place just so below the brow to lift and open the face. Unlike the “rootless exoticism” of today’s Instagram Face—a flattened, poreless look inspired by celebrities like Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner—Brandt favored refined features that enhanced an individual’s face without any overt suggestion of intervention. Aviva Drescher, who has platinum-blonde hair and round, high cheeks, already resembled Grace Kelly. After a few well-placed injections from Brandt, even her husband thought she looked like a prettier version of herself. “Fred really looked at me as though I was a work of art,” she said. “And he was going to improve me.”
Image credit: Forest Wander