Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, don’t miss Natalia Antonova with some advice for an anonymous lovelorn dictator just looking for the one; it really resonated with the Kremlin spies who monitor our server logs!
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‘Inside the Biomedical Revolution to Save Horseshoe Crabs and the Shorebirds That Need Them‘ (Deborah Cramer for Audubon)
Horseshoe crabs are strange, miraculous, wonderful things, and a birder who works for big pharma wants to ensure they stay that way.
This synthetic alternative has been on the U.S. market for almost 15 years, but institutional and regulatory barriers have hindered its acceptance. It’s taken Bolden, a birder, to persevere, and he’s collected enough data to convince his employer that it’s time to make the switch. If rFC is taken up by the rest of big pharma, it will be a groundbreaking change, and both horseshoe crabs and shorebirds will likely feel the difference.
‘The Decline of Snapchat and the Secret Joy of Internet Ghost Towns‘ (Helena Fitzgerald for The Verge)
If you share our deep and abiding affection for internet communities and culture, we think you’ll enjoy this meditation on the little corners of the internet that people call home, and how we got where we are today.
First in the era of America Online, and then in the era of LiveJournal and micro-blogging, the internet was at least partly an escape. It was a place where the boundaries of real life, in which everything was more or less a job interview, could be sloughed off and one could imagine the internet as a quiet, uninhabited space of whispered intimacies. In this era of hyper-usefulness, what seems rarest and most valuable online are spaces that offer, however illusorily, a return to this original uselessness. There are places where, against the constant obligation to be seen and remembered, we might get to be unseen, unrecorded, and forgotten.
‘Tucker Max’s Culture War‘ (Laura Bennett for Slate)
Tucker Max’ bro empire has been the subject of considerable criticism, but it’s also been extremely lucrative. Where is Tucker Max now, though, and where is he headed in a world of changing media tastes and expectations?
Being “Tucker Max” has been very profitable for Tucker Max. When he started writing in the early 2000s, he said, “the entire social justice warrior movement didn’t exist.” He calls it “authoritarian” and “anti-American.” He describes Lena Dunham—“the anti-me”—as if she were its living embodiment. “She got a $6 million advance for her book, and it was a complete bomb,” he said. “I had a massive groundswell of support, massive book sales, and everyone in media hated me.” None of those book sales have diminished his sourness toward the publishing industry, which he believes has treated him as a kind of lowbrow novelty item, underpaying and underestimating him at every turn. “I could’ve so easily wrapped myself in literary pretensions and had those literary douchebags slobbing my knob for decades,” he said.
‘Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy‘ (Nellie Bowles for the New York Times)
Do you ever read a profile and think to yourself: ‘This is destined to be a classic’? If you haven’t had that experience yet, you will after reading this, the piece that took the world from ‘who is Jordan Peterson’ to ‘wow, that Jordan Peterson guy sounds like a nightmare’ in a single morning reading.
Mr. Peterson’s home is a carefully curated house of horror. He has filled it with a sprawl of art that covers the walls from floor to ceiling. Most of it is communist propaganda from the Soviet Union (execution scenes, soldiers looking noble) — a constant reminder, he says, of atrocities and oppression. He wants to feel their imprisonment, though he lives here on a quiet residential street in Toronto and is quite free.
‘Finding the Lost Generation of Sperm Donors‘ (Ashley Fetters for the Atlantic)
The numbers of donor-conceived children are growing by leaps and bounds. So too are the repercussions of using donors for genetic material, and what happens as children grow up and want to learn more about their genetic heritage and who they might be related to. And, of course, everyone has an opinion on outcomes for donor-conceived children…even though it’s rarely backed by science.
There’s now an increased focus, compared to the ’60s and ’70s, on how kids respond to being the product of a donation. In one 2011 study, psychologists found virtually no difference in the psychological wellbeing or mother-child relationship quality of 7-year-olds who were told about their donor-conceived origins and 7-year-olds who were naturally conceived; the researchers found only a slightly less strong mother-child bond among 7-year-olds who were donor-conceived but not aware that was the case.
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Photo: Susanne Nilsson/Creative Commons