Every Monday on Global Comment, we share the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need but that it’s easy to miss in our busy world. We distil the best of the web and recommend just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
The Insulin Empire: How profiteers pushed a lifesaving drug out of reach (Edward Ongweso Jr., Athena Sofides / The Baffler)
Some of the commonly used forms of insulin have long been exponentially more expensive in the United States than in the rest of the OECD; for years, caravans have taken Americans across the border to Canada, where they can buy insulin for a tenth of its U.S. price. Stateside, insulin prices have consistently seen hikes that are eye-watering for patients and mouth-watering for executives and investors. A vial of Eli Lilly’s rapid-acting Humalog (insulin lispro) cost $21 in 1996 but increased to $332 by 2018. A 2016 JAMA study found that the price of insulin tripled from 2002 to 2013; since 2013, per-person spending on insulin alone has grown larger than that on all other diabetes drugs combined. The result: a hundred years after insulin’s discovery saved insulin-dependent diabetics from almost certain death, some 1.3 million Americans have been forced to embrace permanent and severe insulin-restrictions—limiting their doses, skipping them entirely, or going so far as to take expired insulin.
Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother: A decade after her son committed a massacre, Chin Rodger is on a quest to help prevent the next tragedy. (Mark Follman / Mother Jones)
An hour before, her son had sent out a 137-page document to nearly three dozen people with a terse message: “Attached is Elliot Rodger’s life story, which explains how I came to be the way I am.” Titled “My Twisted World,” much of it was an extended tirade about his feelings of extreme social isolation and lack of sexual experience, for which he categorically blamed women. He vowed “a day of retribution” and at the end described a plan to commit mass murder. Linderman had also found a seven-minute video that Elliot had just posted on YouTube in which he declared the same intent.
Read more.
Love, community, grief and institutional complicity (Brown Divest Coalition)
If you have any suggestions for future words to feature, contact us on our socials or at editor@globalcomment.com
Image: Pixabay