• • • an aural noise • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Seeking the Truth Behind Books Bound in Human Skin
And the “gentleman” doctors who made them.
An anatomical engraving from 1872. Embiggenable.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1868, A 28-year-old Irish widow named Mary Lynch was admitted to Ward 27 of Philadelphia General Hospital. Nicknamed Old Blockley, this huge facility for the poor in West Philadelphia contained a hospital, an orphanage, a poorhouse, and an insane asylum. Just four summers prior, some walls in its Female Lunatic Asylum—“being undermined by workmen”—collapsed, killing 18 women and injuring 20 more. Patient care at Blockley was a far cry from physician house calls for the wealthy; it was a place for the desperately ill poor, and Lynch’s tuberculosis (then called phthisis) put her in a dire situation.
Lynch’s family did what they could to make her comfortable while she suffered, visiting her with ham and bologna sandwiches in tow. No one seemed to notice the white specks on the lunchmeat—a telltale sign of roundworm infection. The trichinosis she contracted from those sandwiches compromised her already weakened state.
Nurses attended to Mary Lynch over six months as her body withered away to a mere 60 pounds. Eventually she succumbed to the two diseases wreaking havoc on her frail frame. When the young doctor John Stockton Hough first encountered Lynch, it was on his autopsy table in January 1869. In an article in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, “Two Cases of Trichiniasis at the Philadelphia Hospital, Blockley,” Hough reported that when he opened her chest cavity to observe her tuberculosis-ravaged lungs, he noticed that the pectoral muscles that he had sliced along the way had some unusual lemon-shaped cysts. Looking into his microscope, he realized that the cysts were teeming with Trichinae spiralis (worms) in various stages of development.
An engraving of a dissected shoulder and chest by J.C. Whishaw, 1852/1854. Embiggenable.
“Counting the number in one grain of muscle, the whole number of cysts were estimated to be about 8,000,000,” Hough reported, making Lynch’s the first case of trichinosis discovered in his hospital and—as far as he could find—in Philadelphia as well. It was during that autopsy that Hough removed the skin from Lynch’s thighs. He preserved her skin in a chamber pot and stored it for safekeeping while the rest of Mary Lynch’s body was dumped into a pauper’s grave at Old Blockley.
Decades later, Hough—by then a rich, well-respected bibliophile—used Lynch’s skin to bind three of his favorite medical books on women’s health and reproduction, including Louis Barles’s Les nouvelles découvertes sur toutes les parties principals de l’homme, et de la femme (1680), Recueil des secrets de Louyse Bourgeois (1650), and Robert Couper’s Speculations on the Mode and Appearances of Impregnation in the Human Female (1789). Hough had cultivated a specialty in women’s health beginning in his residency at Old Blockley, where he developed a speculum adaptable for vaginal, uterine, and anal use. …
RELATED: Introducing ‘Food Grammar,’ the Unspoken Rules of Every Cuisine
Technically, spaghetti and meatballs is bad grammar.
Normal to Americans; perplexing to Italians. Embiggenable.
SERVE SPAGHETTI AND MEATBALLS TO an Italian, and they may question why pasta and meat are being served together. Order a samosa as an appetizer, and an Indian friend might point out, as writer Sejal Sukhadwala has, that this is similar to a British restaurant offering sandwiches as a first course. Offer an American a hamburger patty coated in thick demi-glace, and they’ll likely raise an eyebrow at this common Japanese staple dubbed hambagoo.
Each of these meals or dishes feels somehow odd or out of place, at least to one party, as though an unspoken rule has been broken. Except these rules have indeed been discussed, written about extensively, and given a name: food grammar.
Yes, much like language, cuisine obeys grammatical rules that vary from country to country, and academics have documented and studied them. They dictate whether food is eaten sitting or standing; on the floor or at a table; with a fork or chopsticks or with fingers. Like sentence structure, explains Ken Albala, Professor of History at the University of the Pacific, a cuisine’s grammar can be reflected in the order in which it is served, and a grammar can dictate which foods can (or cannot) be paired, like cheese on fish, or barbecue sauce on ice cream.
Japan’s fruit sando takes sandwiches in a sweet, new direction.
A culinary grammar can also provide insight into how an assortment of ingredients becomes a meal, much like how a jumble of words becomes a sentence. Many American diners imagine dinner as a plate with a protein, a vegetable, and a starch, followed by a sweet dessert. But for Cantonese diners, writes linguist Dan Jurafsky, author of The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, a meal is a combination of a starch, such as rice or noodles, and another element, usually meat, vegetables, or a combo. …
Hambagoo. I get it.
Ed. Cheese on Fish? Doesn’t McDonald’s do that? No, wait, nevermind. I think they’re talking about actual cheese and actual fish.
An uprising against Wall Street? Hardly. GameStop was about the absurdity of the stock market
The financial titans silenced the ‘retail investors’ who sought to boost an unloved video store chain.
‘Having the right connections means that when you whine, others listen.’
For hose of us who are as intimate with the inner workings of the stock market as we are with the circuitry of the Large Hadron Collider, the brouhaha over GameStop has been illuminating. While the story may seem esoteric, it is highly revealing of the way economic and political power operates today, laying bare both the irrationality of the market and the reach of corporate privilege.
For those who don’t know, GameStop is a US video game retailer that has lost much of its market share to online trade and whose stock plummeted from $56 (£40) a share in 2013 to about $5 in 2019. It is set to close 450 shops this year. Some big hedge funds decided that they would cash in on GameStop’s misery by shorting its shares. A short is a bet that an asset, such as a share, will decline in price. It’s a manoeuvre that can generate huge profits. But if the asset price doesn’t fall, investors can also lose a lot of money.
And that’s what happened with GameStop. A bunch of Reddit geeks on the online forum r/wallstreetbets, an investment discussion group that boasts more than 6 million users, decided to buy GameStop shares en masse. Perhaps they saw it as an investment, perhaps they were bored, perhaps they wanted to inflict pain on Wall Street. Whatever the reason, the consequence was to push GameStop’s share price up. And up. Once it became a global story, others piled in too, boosting the share price from about $40 to almost $400 in a matter of days. As a result, big investors lost big, one hedge fund, Melvin Capital Management, even being forced to seek a rescue package. The story, however, is not just about traders getting their comeuppance, but also about the absurdity of the stock market.
One might naively imagine that it exists to allow people to invest in companies. But share trading often has little to do with productive investment. According to the writer Doug Henwood, IPOs – initial public offerings through which people can buy shares in private companies – have, over the past 20 years, raised a total of $657bn (£479bn). Over that same period, the companies in S&P’s 500 stock index have spent $8.3tn (£6trn) buying their own stock to boost its price. …
RELATED: They Called for Help. They’d Always Regret It.
Two families called 911 to get help for their sons. They didn’t know that they’d be thrusting them into a complex and often brutal system.
Diana Zuñiga holds up a family photo taken at Terminal Island federal prison the day Carlos’s dad was released after nearly 10 years in custody, and shortly before he was arrested and taken to Twin Towers Jail.
WHEN ANTONIETTA NUÑIGA woke up to smoke pouring through her bedroom window, everything she had learned about how to care for her grandson completely left her mind. It was November 2019, in the Los Angeles County city of Pico Rivera. Antonietta’s grandson, Carlos Zuñiga Jr., is schizophrenic; she had the number for ACCESS, L.A. County’s mental-health hotline, taped to her fridge for moments precisely like these. But she knew they were vastly underfunded, and it might take days for them to respond.
Frightened and half-asleep, Antonietta picked up her cell phone and dialed 911. About 10 police cars showed up, she says. When they arrived, she recalls, she told the police that Carlos had been off his medication for weeks and refusing to come inside. He’d been collecting trash in the backyard and had set some on fire to warm himself. “He doesn’t do anything because he wants to do it,” she remembers telling them. “He’s doing that because he’s sick.” Even so, Carlos was taken to jail.
Five months earlier and about 400 miles northwest, a similar scene had played out in the Bay Area city of Fremont. Police officers arrived at the door of Jose Jaime and Gabby Covarrubias, responding to a 911 call for help with their 20-year-old son, Christian Madrigal. “He needs to go back to the clinic,” Jose, Christian’s stepfather, says he told the police. “Something bad has happened in his mind.” Two weeks earlier, Christian had tried hallucinogenic mushrooms for the first time, and he hadn’t been normal since. “When you looked him in the eyes, he was not our boy,” Jose told me. “His eyes were different. His face was different. Everything was different.”
Jose said when the Fremont police arrived, they called for backup and ordered that Christian be brought outside. There, they arrested him for being under the influence of a controlled substance, although his parents maintain that he hadn’t used any drugs since he ingested the mushrooms. When they led him outside the house, Christian began crying out to his mother for help. She and Jose stood by in shock, not knowing what to do.
Carlos and Christian weren’t just unlucky. They’re representative of a decades-long pattern of filling up jails with mentally ill people. When policy makers began closing state-run psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s, they promised to replace them with localized mental-health care—but in most places the funding and political will required to make this happen never materialized, leaving large swaths of the U.S. without any options for those seeking treatment. A conservative estimate says 900,000 people with mental illness end up in our jails every year. “These are people who are not necessarily intending to perform criminal acts,” Christine Montross, a psychiatrist and author of Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, told me. …
Doctor Wondering Why There ‘Reverse’ Switch On Ventilator https://t.co/AK9juaEt5L pic.twitter.com/mR3w9DBOht
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 30, 2021
5-Level Descent Into Madness Of Competitive Dog Dancing
We love to make animals do stupid shit that they probably hate doing. It’s kind of our thing as humans. We get enjoyment out of it. We post it on social media. We spend time and money perfecting ways to make them look and behave more like us. At its core, it’s cute and probably sometimes rewarding for the pets in terms of treats and some stomach rubs.
Beneath the core, like, down in the center of the earth where the dinosaurs are fighting aliens and all the cool shit science doesn’t tell you about is happening, is where you find dog dancing. Otherwise known as heelwork to music. If you take a right at the bubbling volcano that’s shooting out semi-sized spiders and just beyond the elevator that comes straight down from the White House, you’ll find these routines from the prestigious Crufts dog show. And you’ll wonder why the hell we get the urge to do this to these poor animals in the first place …
5. A Dog Whistle that Summons Evanescence?
We, and the competition itself, start with a banger. Going into this, I had no idea what to expect. The second I saw this duo walkout, I was certain that a dog was about to be publically tormented to an Evanescence song.
The first thing you’ll notice about these shows is that every competitor gets an entrance like they’re a WWE tag team. What they’re wearing tells you everything you need to know about what you’re about to see. What you maybe aren’t ready for is the song choice here. These two come out with their big dog balls swinging to Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life.” You know the one. It’s the song that instantly started playing when anyone signed a gym membership from ’02-to-’08. Legend has it, if you put your ear to the ground in one of the country’s many now-abandoned malls, you can faintly hear that track pulsing around you. These two crank it up and get to business.
This routine begins with the dog appearing to be trying to get its owner’s attention in a Lassie-like attempt to inform her that Evanescence is playing and that they are in grave danger. But she doesn’t listen.
Finally, the poor dog runs off and looks like it’s about to break free when the Nu-Metal Witch pulls it right back in. Take special note of the dog’s eyes at the end here. This is the look that you’ll see most of these dogs carry throughout this contest. Crazed and anxious. They know that there is a treat for them at the end of this if they don’t screw up, but they also have absolutely no idea what’s going on. It’s the dog version of acing the group presentation you did zero prep for. Where you hit that unconscious zone where, despite the fact that you haven’t read a single page of The Pearl, you black out and emerge having detailed every last metaphor, impressed the teacher, and passed the assignment. Here, you just get a goddamn Milkbone or whatever. …
Singapore Approves First Lab-Grilled Chicken https://t.co/sK2UpJ9pm2 pic.twitter.com/lw3hfCfxPj
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 30, 2021
RELATED: Why Old People Love Using Ellipses
It’s an unspoken rule of text-based communication that nobody likes people who talk … like … this. It makes you look like an idiot, an asshole, or both, you Tiffany-from-Daria-sounding dipshit. It doesn’t help that it’s usually old people who default to unnecessary ellipses, making them a hallmark of “okay, boomer” memes and mockery. But why? Why is Grandma always trailing off passive-aggressively?
According to one expert — Gretchen McCulloch, who wrote a whole book about modern linguistic evolution called Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language — it’s because they learned to write under an entirely different set of circumstances back in the day.
Basically, the only way to communicate non-vocally was via letter — or, god forbid, postcard — you didn’t have a lot of space to say your piece. To move from one thought to the next, ellipses were a good substitution for a new paragraph without running the risk of spilling over into the address field, and then Doris might never even know you were in Fort Lauderdale. She’d probably think you were dead. There was no other way to know. …
Google AI Zones Out While Being Trained on Mandatory Racial Sensitivity Data Set https://t.co/djc1g3S3lq pic.twitter.com/9jG9v9wKcY
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 30, 2021
RELATED: Gamestop Is Getting Wilder By The Second
Suppose a month ago someone were to tap you on the shoulder and tell you that stock in Gamestop might change how America’s financial institutions operate forever while minting brand new millionaires from a random subreddit and bringing major hedge fund investment firms to their knees. In that case, you’d probably tell that person to get the fuck away from you because “don’t you know we’re still in a pandemic, dammit!” But, one month later, while you still might shout the same thing and run screaming out of ShopRite, that nosy stranger would be absolutely right.
It’s a story as emblematic of our current surreality as any other. Gamestop was/is a struggling business with seemingly few to no avenues for future success. It’s a retail chain that sells used games in an era in which hard-copies of games are being phased out of existence. So, naturally, hedgefund investors looked to capitalize on this and “shorted” Gamestop’s stock (essentially betting that it would fail) and did so to such a degree that they had small fortunes riding on this outcome.
But then, hilariously, users on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets noticed how aggressively GameStop stocks were being shorted and banned together (though not officially) to buy the stock in an effort to send its price shooting through the moon. “Can’t stop, won’t stop, Gamestop!” the denizens of r/wallstreetbets cried, and pretty soon, GME’s (Gamestop) price per share grew by the hundreds. It looked like in the battle between Reddit and the Wallstreet fat cats, Reddit was daddy.
lol who made this pic.twitter.com/j1nW81zEkl
— Bridget Phetasy (@BridgetPhetasy) January 27, 2021
But now the situation has shifted. Many trading platforms, such as Robinhood, have banned the buying of GME, effectively jamming a big ole middle finger in the cogs of r/wallstreetbets. The stock has dropped to under $200 per share as of this writing, and there’s no telling if it can get back to its former height of $350+ and beyond. Still, it’s all pretty impressive when you consider that it’s still way more than the stock of Apple.
It’s only Thursday as I write this story. By Saturday, GME could have shot off to Mars. By Sunday, it could be resting somewhere in the center of the Earth. We don’t know, and neither do the financial institutions that are scrambling to stop this. But we do know this has forever scared the heeby-jeebies out of some very rich people who own some very many boats. …
Raging Coronavirus Leaving Thick Viral Haze All Across California https://t.co/LimsuQfn6a pic.twitter.com/bl3QsMySVk
— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 30, 2021
My grandma’s survival in America defied all odds. Then Covid stole her from us.
Abandoned by her parents at age three, she was raised by nuns and built a life from nothing. The mismanaged pandemic claimed her life too soon.
Composite: Collage by Francisco Navas
A few days before Christmas, I dropped groceries at my grandma Debbie’s door and stood in the middle of her lawn. It was our pandemic ritual that we had perfected after nine months of lockdown.
Each time, I’d insist we avoid physical contact while she would insist on giving me a gift. So we agreed to a compromise: she could throw her presents at me – a bag of fresh tomatoes, spare face masks or a $20 bill for “gas money” – if she kept a safe distance. On that day, she tossed a “holiday check”. I smiled behind two layers of masks and wrapped my arms around myself, pantomiming a hug.
It was the last time I saw her alive.
I did everything I could to keep my grandma safe, but in the middle of one of the worst Covid hotspots in America, during the worst phase of the pandemic yet, it wasn’t enough. On 10 January, she was one of 166 Covid deaths reported in Los Angeles county. She was 80 years old, part of the age bracket whose deaths are considered least newsworthy, but whose lives were nonetheless stolen well before their time.
The loss felt cruel and unfair, not least because she died days before she would have been eligible for the vaccine. I’m convinced she would have lived two decades more.
We’ve grown numb to the death counts in America, pausing only to mark the grim milestones: 100,000 deaths in May; 300,000 by December; 400,000 this month. Senior citizens are the most readily dismissed victims in the daily updates, even though their deaths were premature, preventable and often follow months of traumatizing separation from loved ones.
Every loss stings, but my grandma’s passing was particularly painful given how much she had already overcome in her life. …
RELATED: ‘We were so scared’: Four people who faced the horror of AIDS in the 80s
TV drama It’s a Sin looked back at a dark era for the gay community. Here, some of those who remember it tell of the real-life agony – and the hope.
Olly Alexander as Ritchie and Lydia West as Jill in Russell T Davies’s drama series It’s A Sin.
It can take a long time for society to see the past clearly. In the case of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s, it has taken almost 40 years. But now, thanks to Russell T Davies’s moving five-part Channel 4 drama series, It’s a Sin, we are all able to look at a vivid, troubling and yet ultimately uplifting picture of those dark and deadly days.
To younger audiences, it may be shocking to learn just how excluded and hidden the gay community was from mainstream life. Homosexuality had only been legal since 1967, the age of consent was still 21 and same-sex civil marriage was a quarter of a century away. It was routine, as It’s a Sin reminds us, for gay men and lesbians to conceal their sexual identities from their families and employers.
That was the furtive environment in which AIDS surfaced. The first mysterious cases were reported in the US, where otherwise healthy people began suffering a catastrophic collapse of their immune systems. Early on, it was referred to as the “4H disease” because it appeared to affect “homosexuals, heroin users, haemophiliacs and Haitians”. Then it became known as “Grid” – gay-related immune deficiency – before acquired immunodeficiency syndrome was finally coined (AIDS).
As it spread to the UK, a community that was just beginning to find its public voice and confidence was ushered back into the shadows by a homophobic press campaign. Terms like the “gay plague” were widely used and the belief was fostered that the disease could be transmitted by any kind of proximity.
The gay community was held in suspicion by all sectors of society, including the health service where, again as Davies shows, AIDS patients were often placed in harsh conditions of isolation. It was largely social ignorance rather than community protection that drove such practice. As with the current pandemic, many people died lonely deaths, only in the case of HIV there was no medical reason for their confinement.
Yet as bleak as the period was, it also gave birth to an upsurge in gay activism and support groups that helped transform the position of the gay community in this country.
Here, four people who were at the forefront of the struggles brought so powerfully to life in It’s a Sin, tell their stories in their own words. …
Ed. It will be broadcast in the United States on HBO Max beginning on 18 February 2021.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Subject and star Rita Moreno and director and producer Mariem Pérez Riera sat down with Atlantic Culture writer Shirley Li. Their conversation touched on diversity and representation, instructive shared experiences from an exceptional life, why you are never as helpless as you think, and more.
While America struggles with vaccine distribution, how’s the rest of the world doing?
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
小さな子ねこのうちに小さなカップケーキを作りたい！ と思ったのですが…。While Kitten Miri is small, I want to make a small cupcake.
Let’s let Google Translate take a stab: I want to make a small cupcake among my little kittens! I thought …
FINALLY . . .
Can planting trees make a city more equitable?
As the U.S. grapples with natural disasters and racial injustice, one coalition of U.S. cities, companies and nonprofits sees a way to make an impact on both fronts: trees.
Specifically, they committed to planting and restoring 855 million of them by 2030 as part of the Trillion Trees Initiative, a global push to encourage reforestation to capture carbon and slow the effects of global heating. Announced on Aug. 27, it’s the first nationwide pledge to the program, and additionally noteworthy because the U.S. group — which includes Microsoft Corp. and Mastercard Inc. — will focus on urban plantings as means of improving air quality in communities that have been disproportionately affected by pollution and climate change.
“We’re passionate about urban forestry and the goal of tree equity,” says Jad Daley, president and chief executive officer of American Forests, the longtime conservation group that’s helped organize the pledge. “It’s not just about more trees in cities. If you show me a map of tree cover in any city, you’re showing me a map of race and income levels. We see this as nothing less than a moral imperative.”
While the urban commitments to trees make up a small fraction of the 855 million trees pledged thus far, they do represent a significant investment in greening urban America. Tucson, Arizona, will plant 1 million trees, with Mayor Regina Romero specifically calling out a commitment to “front-line and low-income communities.” Dallas is pledging more than 18 million trees, Detroit will plant 50,000 citywide, and Chicago promised to boost its tree canopy by 4%. Boise, Idaho’s, City of Trees challenge promises to add 335,000 new trees to the city’s landscape. The Arbor Day Foundation also pledged to plant 25 million trees in urban areas nationwide. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
I'm short selling humanity.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) January 31, 2021
