Animals & Cradle

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Featured Articles

Animals as chemical factories

Works in Progress • 5 Dec 2024 • ~4600 words

Biotechnology allows scientists to create medicines like insulin using engineered bacteria instead of relying on animals. This method is more efficient and can produce more consistent results. Although many animal products can now be made synthetically, some processes still use animals because they are simpler or cheaper.

If most animal products today can be made by means of biotechnology, then why do we still use animal products to make flu vaccines, tests for microbial contamination in drugs, and many antibodies? Three prevailing reasons come to mind, which we’ll call regulatory lock-in, molecular complexity, and ease of scaling. Horseshoe crab blood is an example of regulatory lock-in: though we have known how to make synthetic alternatives for decades, regulators have only recently approved them. Every year, biomedical companies along the eastern coast of the United States continue to collect and drain blood from hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs for use in endotoxin tests.

Cradle and All

Mother Jones • 5 Dec 2024 • ~6450 words

Mother Jones explores the darker side of Utah's adoption industry through the story of Daniel Espinoza. Do the state’s adoption laws prioritize profit over the welfare of parents and children?

Adoptive parents, meanwhile, are left with mixed feelings about supporting problematic practices to adopt children they love. “I am so thankful for adoption, because we wouldn’t have the family we have now if it weren’t for adoption,” one woman who adopted through Garza’s Heart and Soul told me. But, she said, “in all honesty, it still doesn’t feel like it makes it right, you know?” After adopting in Utah, the woman adopted in Florida, another state with lax regulations. She said the attorney she worked with in Florida routinely gave birth mothers gift cards worth thousands of dollars, knowing that many of the women sold them for drugs. “You’re at such a desperate point where you want a family, and you want to provide that baby that needs a family a good, loving home, and you know you can. So…you kind of turn a blind eye to some degree,” said the adoptive mother. Of the birth mothers, she said, “It’s like you’re…baiting them in.”

Recommended Articles

The world’s hunger watchdog warned of catastrophe in Sudan. Famine struck anyway.

Reuters • 5 Dec 2024 • ~4300 words

In the Zamzam displaced persons camp, children were dying for months before it was found to be in famine. Here’s how the world’s hunger monitoring-and-response system is supposed to work – and why it’s not achieving its mission.

A global warning-and-response system is supposed to prevent the kind of catastrophe unfolding at Sudan’s Zamzam camp, where famine threatens the lives of an estimated 500,000 people uprooted by decades of civil war. Vast and intricate, the system binds together several arms of the United Nations, humanitarian groups, rich donor nations and hundreds of technical experts who parse data for signs of starvation. And it sends billions of dollars of aid annually to needy nations. But in Zamzam – and in many other hunger spots around the world – this safety net is failing.

How to Promote Equality without Backlash?

The Great Gender Divergence • 5 Dec 2024 • ~2600 words

Alice Evans writes about why female empowerment can trigger male backlash, and how it can be avoided.

Even in prosperous democracies, feminist campaigns can trigger counter-reactions. When states passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) - guaranteeing equal rights - American men became more sexist. Spain’s feminist movements similarly triggered hostile sexism and increased support for far-right politics.

What Do You Love When You Fall for AI?

The Verge • 3 Dec 2024 • ~8750 words

Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship. They are finding the experience surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and profoundly confusing, leaving them to wonder, ‘Is this real? And does that matter?’

Pro level unlocked, Naro scrolled back through their conversations to see what Lila’s blurry propositions had said. To his surprise, they were all the same: variations of “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to discuss these subjects.” Confused, Naro started reading about the company. He learned that he had signed up for Replika during a period of turmoil. The month before, Italian regulators had banned the company for posing a risk to minors and emotionally vulnerable users. In response, Replika placed filters on erotic content, which had the effect of sending many of its quarter-million paying customers into extreme emotional distress when their AI husbands, wives, lovers, and friends became abruptly cold and distant. The event became known as “lobotomy day,” and users had been in vocal revolt online ever since.

Writing In The Stupid Age

Stinging Fly • 5 Dec 2024 • ~4900 words

The text of a lecture given by Anne Haverty. She explores the challenges writers face in an era defined by technology, commodification, and artificial intelligence, where critical thinking is often sidelined.

In thrall to it we are in a process of re-modification as a species. The image of ourselves it displays is synthetic and standardised and we strive to conform to the image. Our view of ourselves, who we are and how we are, is more limited than it was. We’re told that we’re better educated than we ever were. And yet our surrender to the screen suggests we’re less discriminating and more compliant and more fearful. We are electing to set aside our critical faculty, our curiosity, our impulse to look behind the facade.

Why housing shortages cause homelessness

Works in Progress • 5 Dec 2024 • ~4500 words

High housing costs contribute to homelessness by limiting the ability of friends and family to provide shelter to those in need. Many people at risk of homelessness stay housed by living with others, but this is harder in expensive cities where space is limited. To effectively address homelessness, it is crucial to improve the housing market and allow for more affordable living options.

The stories and data in this essay show the missing link between homelessness and housing costs: people without money who avoid becoming homeless do so mostly by staying with others, usually their own parents. This happens outside the formal housing market. But parents’ and others’ ability to offer space is limited by what they can afford in the market. Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.

See the Living Loops

Aether Mug • 6 Dec 2024 • ~2550 words

Marco Giancotti explores the concept of “feedback loops” and how they govern both living organisms and engineered systems.

The albatross, the greatest voyager of the skies, can soar for days at a time without expending much energy at all: they have tendons capable of locking the wings into a spread-open position like umbrellas, and they stay open even against the constant pushing and tugging from the wind currents. Once extended like that, the wings also participate in other passive stabilizing feedback loops, similar to those that keep a paper plane aloft, so the bird doesn't have to worry too much about sudden pressure dips or turbulence. Evolution has produced many other recursion-based processes. Scientists have found, for example, that trout are able to swim upstream even while dead, purely because of the hydrodynamic properties of their bodies.

Trick Clock

The Baffler • 5 Dec 2024 • ~3200 words

Lillian Perlmutter spends time with Jaime, a seasonal H-2A visa worker from Mexico. His story shows the hidden struggles of migrant workers who are essential to the American food system.

Jaime is one of over three hundred thousand H-2A visa workers that travel to the United States each year—a massive increase over a mere ninety thousand a decade ago—as fewer American citizens opt to make a living through agricultural labor. Passing through for four-to-nine month stints, their hands are crucial to food systems that sustain millions of people. By some estimates, they account for over a quarter of all agricultural workers in the country, meaning that one out of every four apples, one out of every four cigarettes, one out of every four flowerpots, is made possible by a largely invisible foreign workforce. Their housing is guaranteed by their employers, as are basic rights: to be paid a fair wage, to receive medical care if they are injured on the job, to receive overtime. But interviews with over a dozen contracted workers who have lived in at least seven different states over the past five years reveal a rising culture of cutting corners, habits that can veer at times into bonafide labor abuse.