NICOLE IS BACK, but I’m still pulling Link Roundup duty on Tuesdays for a while, so you’re stuck with me today.
“Punitive depilation of men, especially burning off pubic hair, was intended as a mark of shame in ancient Mediterranean cultures where male body hair was valued.” If you want to read a long academic article about BADGES OF SHAME, click here. If you want to read the summed-up Wikipedia page that’s intellectually friendly and willing to hold your hand (THAT’S WHAT I DID), click here.
NO NO NO NO NO NO
“Belyaev wanted to unlock the secrets of domestication, the links between behavior and breeding and physical traits, but plenty of non-scientists are aware of the project for a different reason: foxes are adorable, and we want to hug them, and we want them to like it.”
It is about time we got around to domesticating new species. We’ve been coasting on “cats and dogs and sort-of cattle” for millennia, and I’m sick of it.
“Domestication is not like taming. You can tame many wild animals so they won’t try to kill you, by raising them from birth, but that’s just learned behavior; that animal is unlikely to exhibit what we know as affection toward you, and the behavior it does have is not passed down to the tamed animal’s offspring. Domestication is actually change at the genetic level: an animal repeatedly breeds, either through intentional human effort or not (or a combination of the two), to emphasize certain behavioral traits. In the case of animals that would, in the wild, be aggressive towards humans, those traits are easy to decide on: we want the most docile, least aggressive, and least skittish animal.”
Obviously this calls for a link to the classic FOX GOES FLOOF.
I give you my word that if you click on this link, you will see a picture of a koala attempting to drive a car.
I can’t not read pieces by doctors who have been themselves diagnosed with terminal illnesses, as if they somehow have a secret to dying better than the rest of us.
Verb conjugation became muddled. Which was correct? “I am a neurosurgeon,” “I was a neurosurgeon,” “I had been a neurosurgeon before and will be again”? Graham Greene felt life was lived in the first 20 years and the remainder was just reflection. What tense was I living in? Had I proceeded, like a burned-out Greene character, beyond the present tense and into the past perfect? The future tense seemed vacant and, on others’ lips, jarring. I recently celebrated my 15th college reunion; it seemed rude to respond to parting promises from old friends, “We’ll see you at the 25th!” with “Probably not!”
Yet there is dynamism in our house. Our daughter was born days after I was released from the hospital. Week to week, she blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks of her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room.
Time for me is double-edged: Every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence — and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time, it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day. It is a tired hare who now races.
IT SEEMS LIKE IF YOU WRITE AN ESSAY THIS THOUGHTFUL YOU SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO LIVE AT LEAST TO NINETY
very metal: “A monk’s 1,000-year-old mummified body was discovered inside a Chinese Buddha statue after it was taken to hospital for a CT scan in the Netherlands.”
….huh
