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Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

The Discovery That Spawned the Synthetic Marijuana Industry

The biological reaction that marijuana triggers in the body had long been a mystery. Scientists could dissect marijuana’s active component — THC — tinker with its structure and conjure synthetic compounds based on that. But they did not know whether THC worked through non-specific interaction with cell membranes or whether it interacted with the brain’s sensory receptors, which read neurochemical messages and tell cells what to do.

Then, in the late 1980s, came the discovery of something called the cannabinoid receptor, which confirmed the latter of the theories. This was the system that THC stimulates. But it was much more than that.

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Its discovery marked a crucial moment in the development of synthetic cannabinoids. Rather than fumbling around in the dark, chemists could aim for a specific target — the cannabinoid receptor. Pioneering researchers started synthesizing fresh compounds to see how the receptor reacted to them.

“It took the black-magic aspect of marijuana’s activity and gave it a biomolecular mechanism in your body,” said Brian F. Thomas, a principal scientist with RTI International, a research institute. “Because you had this cannabinoid receptor, you could then look and find new compounds that can bind to that receptor.”

Terrence McCoy, writing in the Washington Post about John W. Huffman, a Clemson University chemist who unintentionally helped spawn Washington D.C.’s synthetic drug epidemic. Huffman was the first person to synthesize many of the cannabinoids used in synthetic cannabis. 

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Why Women Are Less Likely to Be Exonerated Using DNA Evidence

In a recent piece for Mother Jones, Molly Redden looked at why it can be particularly hard for wrongfully convicted women to be exonerated (Women make up about 11 percent of the people convicted of violent crimes, but just 6 percent of those exonerated of violent crimes). Despite their good intentions, most innocence projects fail to bring justice to wrongly convicted women.  Why? Karen Daniel and Judy Royal—lawyers with Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions —spent three years pursuing that question. Their research brought them a number of insights, including the fact that women are far less likely to be exonerated using DNA evidence:

Daniel and Royal started by digging deep into the exonerations database. Their first insight had to do with DNA evidence—the very breakthrough that launched the innocence movement a quarter century ago. “Women tend not to be convicted of the types of crimes that can be overturned based on the results of DNA testing,” Daniel explained. Men perpetrate the overwhelming majority of rapes and murders of strangers. These crimes are much more likely to leave behind DNA evidence that can rule out an innocent suspect, or point to the real rapist or killer.

But when women kill, they usually kill someone close to them. And in most of those cases, DNA isn’t relevant. When a woman is suspected of killing her husband or her child, investigators are likely to find her DNA all over the crime scene whether she’s guilty or innocent—so DNA testing can do little to exonerate her. Sure enough, 27 percent of the men in the exonerations registry were freed using DNA evidence. The same was true of only 7.6 percent of the women.

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Why Bordeaux Consumption in the U.S. Has Been Declining Since the ’80s

Yet, while the trajectory of Petrus [a major Bordeaux wine estate] has been ever upward (and its price as well), the consumption of Bordeaux in the United States has been declining since hitting its peak in market share in the mid-’80s. Even the boozy precincts of France have become less boozy—about their wine, at least. In 1965 the country drank a liver-pickling 210 bottles a year per capita; today the number is a sober 75. Whatever the cause of that may be, hypotheses abound as to why Americans have cut down on claret. Most obvious, perhaps, is that from Austria to Australia, more places are making quality wine than ever before. There is also the fact that no other wine is as intimidating to talk about—saying the word terroir is a great way to kill the fun at a dinner party—or as confusing to know when to open. Add to this the perception of Bordeaux as being a rich man’s plaything, and the fact that plenty of those tatted-up somms pushing juice from the Jura and garage pinots from the Sonoma coast don’t want it on their precious wine lists, and you can see why Jean, who has more than just Petrus to worry about, is still very much working full-time.

Jay Fielden, writing for Town and Country about Jean Moueix, the charming 29-year-old scion of Bordeaux’s Petrus wine dynasty. Fielden travels from the vineyards of southwestern France to the tasting rooms of New York City in search of answers to a single question: can Moueix make Bordeaux cool again?

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The People Who Get Woken Up at 2am When Bob Ballard Finds Something on the Ocean Floor

73-year-old ocean explorer Bob Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic 30 years ago, and he hasn’t stopped exploring the ocean floor since. In a recent piece for Popular Mechanics, Ryan D’Agostino profiled Ballard and the research aboard his ship Nautilus (a 211-foot former East German research vessel that carries seventeen crew and thirty-one scientists and operations specialists). But what happens when the Nautilus team thinks they might have found something in ” the three-dimensional chess of the oceans deep” and isn’t sure how to proceed? They call in the experts:

Ballard has assembled, over the years, an astonishing roster of experts in many fields, all volunteers. When the Nautilus is at sea, towing its cameras through the depths, and it finds something interesting, the crew needs to know whether to stop and explore further or move on. And they can’t keep fifty experts on board at all times. So the Nautilus has a phone system with a 401 area code. “The ship thinks it’s in Rhode Island at all times, no matter where on the planet it is,” Ballard says. “When we need an expert, we just pick up the phone. It goes like this: ‘Hi, Deb? I know it’s 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, but can you boot up your laptop? We got something. We wanna know what it is. The ship is hovering in twenty thous and feet of water wondering, up or down?’ And we do this literally all the time. All. The. Time. Within twenty minutes we have to deliver the brightest mind in America on whatever subject it is to the spot of the discovery to tell us what to do. If you tell us go, we go into a response strategy,” Ballard says, jutting his chin into the breeze. “It’s an unbelievable feeling. The closest thing to a drug for me is Coke Zero. I don’t drink coffee, I don’t smoke. I do have wine. But you can’t beat the thrill of finding something on the bottom. And I’ll wait and wait and wait for it. We just had one on the last trip!”

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Every Kiss Begins with Kay… And Strategic Placement in Your Suburban Shopping Mall

In “Kay, Zales, and Marketing Diamonds to the Middle-Class Man”—a recent feature for Racked—Chavie Lieber wrote about Signet Jewelers, the parent company that owns such household names as Kay Jewelers, Jared, and Zales. Signet became the largest specialty jewelry company in America by targeting the midmarket jewelry segment, knowing their customer base, and doing some serious marketing. Trust also plays a major role in jewelry purchases, and Signet has honed customer trust via an unlikely strategy: store location.

Location is another incredibly important factor in the company’s success, says Angie Ash, executive vice president of jewelry marketing firm Fruchtman Marketing. Stores for Signet’s three largest brands (Kay, Jared, and Zales, which make up 41, 21, and 14 percent of the brand’s sales, respectively) are strategically placed. Most Kay and Zales storefronts are located in suburban malls populated with shoppers, while Jared storefronts are “normally free-standing sites with high visibility and traffic flow, positioned close to major roads within shopping developments,” as per the company’s 2015 annual report.

This emphasis on location not only correlates to sales, it also helps build brand recognition among shoppers.

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Echoes Ash, “A customer that walks past the same mall jewelry brand every single week is going to eventually feel comfortable enough going when he’s ready to buy something. These mall jewelers also don’t have many barriers. They are an open storefront where people can go right up there and talk to an employee. In most cases, they also have price tags so shoppers can easily look at the items and see what they can afford.”

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On the Difficulty of Separating Van Gogh the Artist from Van Gogh the Brand

It has become harder over the last 130 years or so to see Van Gogh plain. It is practically harder in that our approach to his paintings in museums is often blocked by an urgent, excitable crescent of worldwide fans, iPhones aloft for the necessary selfie with Sunflowers. They are to be welcomed: the international reach of art should be a matter not of snobbish disapproval but rather of crowd management and pious wonder – as I found when a birthday present of a Van Gogh mug hit the mark with my 13-year-old goddaughter in Mumbai. But there is so much noise around Van Gogh besides the noise of his paintings. There is the work, then the several hundred thousand words he himself wrote, then the biographies, then the novel, then the film of the novel, then the gift shop, then even (as at the National Gallery) the Sunflower bags in which you cart your treasures away from the gift shop. The painter has become a world brand. And so there is an inevitable coarsening, at the micro as well as the macro level…

We have a problem of seeing, just as we often have a problem hearing (or hearing clearly), say, a Beethoven symphony. It’s hard to get back to our first enraptured seeings and hearings, when Van Gogh and Beethoven struck our eyes and ears as nothing had before; and yet equally hard to break through to new seeings, new hearings. So we tend, a little lazily, to acknowledge greatness by default, and move elsewhere, away from the crowds discovering him as we first discovered him.

Julian Barnes, writing about Vincent van Gogh in the London Review of Books.

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Industrialization and the History of the Matzo Machine

The Streit's matzo factory on Suffolk and Rivington. Photo by Leo London, Flickr

For centuries matzo was a handmade specialty, carefully rolled into a thin, cratered moon shape and pricked with a fork. Today, many Orthodox communities still make this version — called shmurah — which is supervised by a rabbi from start to finish. But industrialization in the mid–nineteenth century forever changed the matzo industry.

Historians trace the first matzo machine back to a French Jew named Isaac Singer (no relation to the American inventor of the sewing machine), who, in 1838, invented a contraption that automated rolling the dough, rather than kneading it, which cut prep time. The new contraption greatly increased the supply of matzo, which also made it cheaper. Countries around Europe soon began using the machine, a great boon for the growing Jewish population across the world. In 1888, Behr Manischewitz, a Russian rabbi, brought a version of Singer’s machine to America, settling in Cincinnati and establishing the country’s first matzo company. By 1915, when Aron Streit emigrated to New York from Austria and founded his matzo business, Manischewitz had upgraded to three rolling machines and was by far the largest producer of matzo, cranking out 1.25 million crackers a day. So, essentially, other American producers, like Streit’s, have been playing catch-up from the beginning.

Britta Lokting writing in the Village Voice about murky future of Streit’s, America’s last family-owned matzo factory. After 90 years on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Streit’s sold their Rivington Street factory in January without having yet secured a new location. The company is hoping to relocate upstate to a facility in Rockland: they are “frantically working out last-minute logistics” for a September move-in, but the deal has not yet been officially announced.

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Bona-Fide Celebrities: Nikki Finke on the Late ’80s ‘Literary Brat Pack’

Cover image from Bright Lights, Big City via jaymcinerney.com

In 1987, a young Nikki Finke profiled the “Literary Brat Pack” (choice Brat Pack members included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, of Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City fame, respectively) for The Los Angeles Times. Read more…

‘Gidget,’ John Hughes, and the Whitewashing of Jewishness in Pop Culture

Photo by Netflix

This whitewashing of Jewishness out of pop culture is an old, old story, and it isn’t specific to camp movies; it’s true of plenty of other Hollywood representations of American teens, too. The Czech Jew who wrote the novel that was the basis for Gidget (1959) was inspired by his own surfing daughter, Kathy Kohner, who went on to marry a scholar of Yiddish literature—but that didn’t make it into the sequels. One could even argue that a substantial element of John Hughes’ magic was to take places and performers that could be read as specifically Jewish—Skokie, Illinois, in Sixteen Candles, say, or Matthew Broderick, who not long before becoming Ferris Bueller played Eugene Morris Jerome in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs—and render them approachably all-American, neither too WASPy nor Jewish per se.

Josh Lambert writing for Tablet Magazine about Wet Hot American Summer and its recent Netflix revival. According to Lambert, unwhitewashed Jewishness and its humor remain at the heart of both versions of Wet Hot American Summer.

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‘Every Means of Confession Creates a Kind of Person Who Confesses’

Every means of confession creates a kind of person who confesses. You become who you are by saying what you did. The details make a difference. That pronoun, “I,” feels one way when you say it as part of a formula, in the dusk of a confessional, to a priest you cannot see behind the metal grille he blesses you through. Rambling in the well-lit office of a psychiatrist, “I” feels very different.

Moira Weigel, writing for The New Inquiry about FitBit activity trackers and the nature of confession (“Like confession and therapy, activity trackers promise to improve us by confronting us with who we are when we are not paying attention,” writes Weigel).

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