Susan Potter Will Live Forever
When Susan Potter died of pneumonia at the age of 87, she donated her body to the Visible Human Project so it could be sliced and photographed. The images would be digitized and used to create a virtual cadaver that medical students could use to dissect and reassemble with the stroke of a few keys.
The Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Very Litigious Bikini
Prime and Punishment
Lucrative placements within coveted search ranks on Amazon’s Marketplace are incentivizing sellers to do whatever it takes to undercut each other — not by competing on price or quality, but by creatively sabotaging the listing above theirs. Bad actors plant obviously fraudulent five-star reviews on popular listings to trigger penalties, or set rivals’ products on fire to frame them as explosive, or reclassify mundane products into irrelevant categories like “sex toys.” Once sellers find themselves trapped in Amazon’s Byzantine court of appeals after a surprise suspension, guilt is often the only acceptable plea — and sometimes the only person left to contact is the richest man in the world.
How to Thrive as a Sober Queer Through the Holigays
In a piece that’s part personal essay and part service journalism, Molly Priddy shares how challenging it initially was going home for the holidays just after she got sober — and how it’s gotten better over the years. She also offers tips suggesting how others avoiding alcohol might get through the end-of-year forced family fun with their sanity — and sobriety — intact.
How to Grieve Your Friend and Mentor
In this moving personal essay, Amy Jo Burns writes about how the death of her writing mentor, Louise DeSalvo, has affected her, and how reading Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend helped her process her grief.
The Bootleg Video Vans of the Soviet Union
Before the U.S.S.R. disbanded, Soviet-made propaganda led many Russian kids to fetishize the authentic American films that the government censored. Pushed into the underground, resourceful Soviets played overdubbed, bootlegged copies of these films on VCRs inside mini-vans they turned into mobile theaters. This is how many Soviets learned English.
What Do I Want From a Fat Protagonist?
Kelly Faircloth’s review of the year in fat film and TV characters is both a best- and worst-of list, and a personal exploration of the importance and challenges of representation.
The Reservoir
Steven Bedard, a former field biologist, travels around Bangladesh with a team of public health investigators studying Nipah, a bat-borne virus with the potential to become the next pandemic.
When the Body Says No
In this poignant piece, longtime runner Christopher Solomon considers loss and the body’s inevitable decline as he recounts how his father helped him fall in love with running, what running has meant to him over the decades, and the injury that stands between him, daily roadwork, and the peace and joy that it can bring.
Losing the Plot
A personal essay from our Fine Lines series in which Sari Botton finds that not planning for death is, well, killing her.
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