* “The Silence Doctors Are Keeping About Millennials’ Death.” Germane to me for obvious reasons; our culture denies both death and grief and seems not able to incorporate either, particularly when death is premature. My own end feels so close, particularly because my days, such as they are, are filled with pain and exhaustion.
* “How can we get the world to talk about factory farming?” We probably can’t, until we can replace conventional meat with lab-grown meat. Then we’ll spend a lot of time about how bad people were to animals in the old days. Also, “A Hundred Years of Mocking Vegetarians: For a rare lifestyle choice, vegetarianism tends to drive people pretty bonkers.” Vegetarians are basically morally correct, and that makes the rest of us uncomfortable, so we lash out.
* “Immunotherapy Is Transforming Cancer Treatment and Oncology.”
* “Human history in the very long run.” I’m sad that I only get to see half the slice of human history I ought to see.
* Neal Stephenson’s writing process.
* “What working in a New York City restaurant was like circa 2000” (NY’er, $). Early Bourdain, before TV made him into something different.
* “Vibecamp & Porcfest: An Ethnography of The Internet’s Edge.” Offensive at times.
* Russia is losing a lot, hard, in Ukraine. Plus, “Leaks reveal how Russia’s foreign intelligence agency runs disinformation campaigns in the West.”
* How to Build High-Speed Rail in America.
* London needs 20 million+ people.
* “Immutep Reports Positive Results in First Line Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma Patients with Negative PD-L1 Expression.” These results are amazing: PD-L1 expression of greater than 1 is advised and perhaps necessary for Keytruda to have some chance of working. Mine was 5 in one test and 20 in another, and I failed Keytruda (or rather it failed me). These are really the kinds of results that, for a fatal diagnosis like head and neck cancer. “Efti” is the name of the drug.
* Tesla continues to become a partisan brand, which is likely to hurt it in the both the short and long term.
* More on why Rome missed an Industrial Revolution.
* “Writing the first draft of financial history with Byrne Hobart.” Hobart and patio11 together!
* Restricting housing supply is a bad idea.
* “Puzzles about oncology and clinical trials.” Me from 2023, still sadly relevant.
The Story's Story 
I’ve come to think that how you ought to talk about death is really subjective, but our default is to avoid talking about it or sugarcoat it, because like that article suggests, it’s a protection for the parties that are only discussing it rather than expecting it. It prevents it from being a real thing that will happen, and by maybe not discussing it you’re preventing it’s onset.
At the same time, I think its okay to cope wherever we can. Some things just fuckin suck, and there’s no silver lining to a raw deal.
In dealing with premature grief, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around making death not so frightening. I was in an IRC channel a number of years ago where someone said “death isn’t the opposite of life, it’s just the opposite of being born.” At first I thought this statement wasn’t profound at all, it was a façade that contained some powerful keywords, like a human search engine optimization hack.
I came to think later that it was a little profound, and I even wrapped it in a rose-tinted justification in my mind. My rose-tinted-take is that humans don’t stop being (influential? impactful? affective?), when they are not in the span of time between their birth and death.
An infant already changes the world before they are born, from conception to birth. The biggest changes are instrumented most immediately with the mother, but their influence can be seen in how a home changes, a crib built, some branches of family move into the foreground and others to the background. In degrees of proximity, that unborn human is making all kinds of shit happen.
When someone dies, their passing doesn’t mean they’re just null. Grief isn’t the only proof of that. Everyone around them that was in the closest degree of proximity now carries their influence forward, in some way. Nobody becomes the person who died, instead they champion the parts of them that they most cherished (which can be totally unique from one person to another), and those character changes domino into other changes. Changes that seem totally unrelated, but they are, and we may never even know it.
You’re influencing a lot of people, Jake. Hope reading this was amusing.
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It is and thank you.
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