Playing Possum & The Forgotten Pandemic
Do animals share our concept of mortality? Also, why is diagnosing tuberculosis still a challenge?
Featured Articles
What Do Animals Understand About Death?
The New Yorker • 28 Oct 2024 • ~4400 words • Archive Link
The question isn’t whether other creatures share our concept of mortality; it’s whether any living being truly grasps what it means to die.
Idiomatically, “playing possum” means “pretending to be dead,” but what exactly playing possum means to a possum is considerably harder to say. Does the possum have any idea what it means to be dead (to say nothing of what it means to pretend)? When it is moved to begin its Oscar-worthy performance, does it know that it is in mortal danger? Does the implacable fact of death have any purchase whatsoever on its possum-y heart? And if it does not—which seems likely, given its unusually small brain—what of all the other creatures that feign death: frogs, snakes, spiders, sharks, swifts? And what of all the other creatures in general? The octopus, the elephant, the great horned owl, the house cat, the giant tortoise, the chimpanzee: who, in all the vast animal kingdom, joins us in having intimations of mortality?
The Forgotten Pandemic
Asimov Press • 27 Oct 2024 • ~5300 words
Humans have suffered from tuberculosis for thousands of years and, even today, the disease kills more than 1 million people each year. Yet diagnosing cases remains a challenge. Why?
Nowadays, TB is relatively uncommon in the West, where it is mostly shrugged off as a disease of the past. But perhaps surprisingly, TB remains the deadliest infectious disease on the planet. Globally, it kills 1.2 million people a year, with the majority of fatalities occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Malaria, in contrast, killed about 608,000 people in 2022. TB remains so rampant because it is difficult to diagnose. Yet accurate diagnoses are the first step toward understanding the scale of the problem and treating TB early to halt its spread. So why haven’t we made more progress toward developing cheaper and more efficient ways to identify cases?
Recommended Articles
‘If I had the power I’d destroy the whole thing’: what went wrong with the ghost town of Disney-style castles?
The Guardian • 26 Oct 2024 • ~3850 words
It was meant to be a dream development but, 13 years on, it remains unfinished – a microcosm of Turkey’s scandal-hit construction sector under Erdoğan.
The deserted castles have come to symbolise the financial problems and mismanagement that have dominated Turkey’s construction sector during president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s two decades in power. Companies with links to the government have cut corners with impunity – a state of affairs illustrated most dramatically by 2023’s twin earthquakes, in which cities were damaged across an area the size of Germany. The castles have also led to a major rift among the villagers in Mudurnu, between those who see the whole development as an eyesore and those who still hold out hope that the project might be good for local businesses. The only thing the hundreds of angry castle owners, local residents and the Sarot Group can agree on is that the castles aren’t going anywhere – but whether they will ever be completed remains unknown.