Premature & Boxer

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‘Look, they’re getting skin!’: the moral challenge of saving the world’s tiniest babies

The Guardian • 19 Nov 2024 • ~5850 words

Doctors are pushing the limits of science and human biology to save more extremely premature babies than ever before. But when so few survive, are we putting them through needless suffering?

When babies are born on the edge of viability, between 22 and 24 weeks, their prognosis is often so poor that parents and doctors must decide together what is in the baby’s best interests. Do they deem the chance of survival so low that it is better to offer “comfort-focused care”: to do nothing that might cause the baby pain, and let them die peacefully in their parents’ arms? Or is the right approach to pursue “survival-focused care”: to resuscitate them and admit them to the Nicu, where they will undergo many painful and invasive treatments, in the hope that they will defy the odds and live? Doctors call this period at the limits of viability, when the ethics of whether to resuscitate babies is deemed so uncertain that it is seen as a matter of parental choice, the “grey zone”.

A Boxer on Death Row

The Atlantic • 18 Nov 2024 • ~5900 words • Archive Link

Each day for 50 years, the Japanese boxer Iwao Hakamada woke up unsure whether it would be his last.

Hakamada was sentenced to death, and spent the next five decades in a state of debilitating fear. Prisoners in Japan are not told when they will be executed; they listen every morning for the footsteps that could precede a key turning in their cell door and then a short walk to the hanging chamber. No warning is given to their lawyers or family members. Hakamada spent longer on death row than anyone else in history, earning a spot in Guinness World Records. He wrote eloquently about the daily mental torture he endured, and in the end it drove him mad. His agony changed the lives of many people around him, including one of the original judges, who became convinced of his innocence and spent the rest of his own life racked with guilt.

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The Hidden History of Bermuda Is Reshaping the Way We Think About Colonial America

Smithsonian Magazine • 19 Nov 2024 • ~4500 words • Archive Link

New archaeological finds on the islands have revealed secrets about one of Britain’s first settlements in the Americas—and the surprising ways it changed the New World.

For the past 14 years, Jarvis, a historian and archaeologist at the University of Rochester in New York, has led excavations in Bermuda seeking to uncover the secrets of its neglected colonial history. Nobody has done more to shed light on the islands’ important role in fostering the growth of Britain’s overseas realm and its American spinoff. Now he is confident he has located its first substantial settlement. His findings are exciting those who research Europe’s colonization of the New World, given how rare it is to uncover remnants of such an early English community in the Americas. Mark Horton, a British archaeologist digging for remnants of the failed 1587 Roanoke colony on the North Carolina coast, hails it as “a truly significant discovery” that will “greatly help in understanding early 17th-century settlement—not only in Bermuda, but at Jamestown, in New England and across the Caribbean.”

Why Do We Talk This Way?

The New Yorker • 19 Nov 2024 • ~2000 words • Archive Link

Technology is dramatically changing political speech, rewarding quantity and variety over the neat messages of the past.

The kinds of speech that strike us as authentic, satisfying, and desirable change with time, and depend on our position in the world and on the conversations happening around us. After the play, talking about A.I. and surrounded by amiable chitchat, I wondered whether, someday soon, conversations with human beings would be deemed lacking if they didn’t exhibit chatbot-like speed and responsiveness. Maybe there are some circles, in tech or elsewhere, where the quality of “the median conversation you can have with a person” is already measured unfavorably against the yardstick of A.I. Or perhaps the opposite is true: maybe we’re coming to value the awkwardness, vulnerability, and spontaneity of human conversation even more. In either case, our communications technologies will be shaping our speech—or, more accurately, continuing to shape it, since the mutual incomprehension we’re experiencing today results, in part, from networks that have already influenced our intuitions about how we should talk.

The Longhorn’s Long Journey to Becoming a Texas Icon

Texas Monthly • 18 Nov 2024 • ~3850 words • Archive Link

How did this ungainly creature develop into a Texas symbol? And what is its role in the twenty-first century? Photographer Joel Salcido traveled thousands of miles—including across the Atlantic—to find out.

The Texas Longhorn made more history than any other breed of cattle the civilized world has known,” folklorist J. Frank Dobie famously pronounced in his 1941 book The Longhorns. Rugged, wild, and solitary yet filial, with a rack of horns that today can stretch more than ten feet across, the Longhorn, then and now, has embodied so much of what is mythically Texan—individualistic, indefatigable, improbably big. But this auspicious beast is also a reminder of Texas’s origins in colonial New Spain and, later, the Republic of Mexico. “The Longhorn was, as will be detailed, basically Spanish,” Dobie wrote, somewhat controversially at the time. “Yet, when he entered upon the epoch of his continent-marking history, he was as Texan as his counterpart, the Texas cowboy.

Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute

asterisk • 18 Nov 2024 • ~6150 words

The rise and fall of the influential, embattled Oxford research center that brought us the concept of existential risk.

To its many fans, the closure of FHI was startling. This group of polymaths and eccentrics, led by the visionary philosopher Nick Bostrom, had seeded entire fields of study, alerted the world to grave dangers, and made academia’s boldest attempts to see into the far future. But not everyone agreed with its prognostications. And, among insiders, the institute was regarded as needlessly difficult to deal with — perhaps to its own ruin. In fact, the one thing FHI had not foreseen, its detractors quipped, was its own demise.

The Feminist Who Inspired the Witches of Oz

Smithsonian Magazine • 16 Nov 2024 • ~4900 words

The untold story of suffragist Matilda Gage, the woman behind the curtain whose life story captivated her son-in-law L. Frank Baum as he wrote his classic novel

After male critics branded Gage as satanic and a heretic, she became an expert on the subject of witch hunts. Her 1893 manifesto Woman, Church and State chronicled the five centuries between 1300 and 1800 when tens of thousands of human beings, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft and put to death by fire, hanging, torture, drowning or stoning. In one gruesome scene, she described 400 women burning at once in a French public square “for a crime which never existed save in the imagination of those persecutors and which grew in their imagination from a false belief in woman’s extraordinary wickedness.”

The 900km Amazon highway that's dividing a nation

BBC • 14 Nov 2024 • ~1900 words

The BR-319 is famed as one of South America's most challenging drives, but those who attempt it are rewarded with an unfiltered experience of the Amazon that few get to see.

Nobody seems to remember how Brazil's Road of Ghosts came by its name. Maybe it was due to the long, desolate stretches along its 900km course through the Amazon rainforest without a soul or settlement in sight. Or perhaps its "ghosts" are the burnt-out carcasses of overturned freight trucks found abandoned on the roadside. Though the highway's dire condition makes it impassable in the rainy season, drivers will often gamble on its condition in the summer months, braving crater-sized potholes and bouncing along dry, dusty ruts. Sometimes the odds aren't in their favour.

A Case Against the Placebo Effect

Carcinisation • 13 Nov 2024 • ~16850 words

The picture that emerges is that a placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect, but the exact same pill has an enormous effect larger than all existing treatments when administered by a researcher who really wants the placebo effect to be real. The most parsimonious explanation is that it is the research practices, rather than the placebo.

Studies designed specifically to exploit response bias in measuring a “placebo effect” were often able to produce large differences on self-reported outcomes, but never on objective outcomes like wound healing, pregnancy after IVF treatment, or any outcome measured by a laboratory test. Brain imaging studies seem to have confirmed, rather than refuted, the claim that the “placebo effect” is a phenomenon of response bias. Studies finding similar efficacy for “open-label placebos” lend more support to the conclusion that response bias drives placebo effects.