A Life Worth Ending
In this reported personal essay, Michael Wolff writes about watching his mother “dwindle” painfully between life and death — not well enough to live on her own in her final years, without tremendous intervention from her family and doctors, but not sick enough to just quickly die. He makes a convincing case against the medical establishment’s practice of keeping the dying alive long past such time as they are able to thrive on their own, leading to excruciating slow deaths that deplete families and tax payers.
The Guardian At the Gate
It broke the WikiLeaks story, then the Snowden scandal, now Alan Rusbridger’s crusading newspaper is trying to break America. But with its US campaign on the brink of disaster, has the deadline passed to beat a dignified retreat?
News outlets want to break big stories but at the same time not be overwhelmed by them – a certain detachment is well advised. It is an artful line. But the Guardian essentially went into the Edward Snowden business – and continues in it. It’s a complex business, too: to ally yourself with larger-than-life, novelistic characters, first Assange, and then Snowden, and stranger-than-strange middle men, like the Guardian’s contract columnist Glenn Greenwald, who brought in the story. The effort to pretend that the story is straight up good and evil, that this is journalism pure and simple, unalloyed public interest, without peculiar nuances and rabbit holes and obvious contradictions, is really quite a trick.
A Life Worth Ending
[Not single-page] A reflection on a mother’s life, and how advancements in medicine have extended our life expectancy, and have made it more difficult for us to die:
“ME: ‘Maybe you could outline the steps you think we might take.’
DOCTOR: ‘Wait and see.’
NEUROLOGIST: ‘Monitor.’
DOCTOR: ‘Change the drugs we’re using.’
MY SISTER: ‘Can we at least try to get a physical therapist, someone who can work her legs, at least. I mean … if she does improve, she’s left without being able to walk.’
NEUROLOGIST: ‘They’ll have to see if she’s a candidate.’
ME: ‘So … okay … where can you reasonably see this ending up?’
NEUROLOGIST: ‘We can help you look at the options.’
ME: ‘The options?’
SOCIAL WORKER (to my sister): ‘Where she might live. We can go over several possibilities.’
ME: ‘Live?'”
How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way Into Silicon Valley
To many, Milner’s success is not just too much and too fast in a land of too much and too fast but … but … and here people start to petulantly phumpher … somehow unfair: Here’s an outsider who has handed out money at outrageously founder-friendly terms—paying huge amounts for relatively small stakes, essentially buying exclusive access to the most desirable companies on the web! It is his outsiderness that seems most irritating and even alarming. How is it that an outsider has spotted opportunities that the Valley’s best investors missed? Does Milner’s success suggest that the rest of the world is starting to horn in on what has been, to date, as American as apple pie—the Internet future and Internet riches?
