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.”