This Week’s Top 5 Long Reads

In this week’s issue:

• Counterfeit drug overdose epidemic
• Rethinking the power of menstrual blood
• Dental cruelty and wit
• Life as a Death Doula
• The science and weirdness of pet cloning

Paul Solotaroff | Rolling Stone | June 16, 2024 | 9,164 words

Snapchat’s secret features, especially messages that disappear after viewing, make it especially attractive to young users, from pre-teens to college students. Unfortunately, this has made it the perfect platform for drug dealers to sell deadly mixtures of OxyContin, Xanax, and other popular drugs to young users. In 2020, over 950 children died from drug overdoses, with another 1,150 deaths in the first half of 2021. The majority of these deaths were due to fentanyl and synthetic substances used in fake pills sold online. Paul Solotaroff spent eight months researching this harrowing feature, presenting two different perspectives. One is the heartbreaking story of a family who lost a child after buying and taking counterfeit pills from a dealer on Snapchat, and the other is the social media giant’s own version of this story, which points to its zero tolerance policy towards drug dealers and claims that the team is doing everything possible to make the platform safe. In addition to excellent reporting on the evolving drug trade (which is booming on social media) and the legal landscape (where companies like Snapchat enjoy impunity for crimes perpetrated by their users), Solotaroff follows one activist mother who took action after losing her son, a bright 14-year-old boy named Alex Neville. She’s since been in touch with dozens of other victims’ families, working with law firms on their cases, and fighting to hold Snapchat and Big Tech accountable. This is an important story to have nightmares about, whether you’re a parent or not. (I’m a parent myself.) Noema Interview with the author Anxious Generation This week is a very different but complementary read that discusses mental health and anxiety among today’s young people, and the reshaping of childhood through apps like Snapchat. —CLR

Maddie Oatman | Mother Jones | June 26, 2024 | 4,254 words

I’m a 38-year-old woman, soon to be 39, who has been menstruating since I was about 12 years old. Reading this feature by Maddie Oatman got me thinking: What gallons of blood have I expelled from my uterus over the last 25 years? And what important information am I never going to know about my body and health because that blood is treated as waste? You might be thinking “TMI!” but I say “NEI.”not enough Information.” Oatman would agree. “Due to centuries of shame, menstruation has been understudied and underrepresented in the medical literature,” she writes. “A PubMed search returns only about 400 papers from the past few decades that mention ‘menstrual blood,’ compared with about 10,000 related to erectile dysfunction.” Now, a handful of researchers are pioneering menstrual blood research. They believe that menstrual blood can help diagnose and even prevent diseases such as HPV, diabetes, and endometriosis. Among other things, menstrual blood is rich in stem cells. They have sometimes struggled to get support for their research because menstrual blood is considered, in the actual words of other scientific experts, “filthy,” “highly toxic,” and “very low quality.” (Picture me banging my head on the desk.) But researchers are forging ahead to unlock a secret that shouldn’t be a secret. “Every day, hundreds of millions of people around the world experience menstruation,” Oatman writes. What would we know about the human body if we hadn’t spent millennia avoiding one of the most basic functions of a huge portion of the Earth’s population? What would we soon know about ourselves? This trait is both infuriating and inspiring, a rare combination. —SD

Gabriel Smith | The Paris Review | June 24, 2024 | 3,621 words

Assuming you’ve forgotten as much of 2020 as possible, NYT Magazine Profile of John and Mike Mew, father and son dentists who were campaigners against traditional orthodontics and advocated a series of treatments they claimed could help strengthen children’s jawlines. Adult When the so-called manosphere exploded online in the 2010s, Mike Mew captivated audiences. But before his success on YouTube and TikTok, he treated a pre-teen boy named Gabriel Smith. Smith was an attractive patient, with a slender build and a long face. He was also observant and very funny. And now, nearly two decades later, he’s written a deadpan essay about his struggles with erectile dysfunction. The Paris ReviewIf he There was none Interestingly, this will be hard to read. Mew and co. deploy techniques so horribly invasive that they make Orrin Scrivello look like Mister Rogers. All the while, Smith thwarts them in small ways. “I had just learned about communism on cassettes of The Clash albums,” he writes. “I thought I was Che Guevara. I was the Che Guevara of dental instruments.” Smith is a writer smart enough to stretch his horizons outside the dentist’s office, leading us from his childhood to his later addictions to his healthier, happier (and ostensibly angular) adulthood. But at its heart is the undeniable violation he suffered at the hands of someone who was quickly becoming an incel idol, and the grace with which he was able to transform suffering into self-actualization. —PR

Meg Bernhardt | n+1 | June 21, 2024 | 5,416 words

Meg Bernhardt asks, “What is a good death?” It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few years. We’re all going to die, but we’re bad, both as individuals and as a society, at supporting the dying and those around them. 1+1In , Bernhardt talks about her experience becoming a certified death doula, a person who supports people approaching death. By her description, a doula is like a “personal assistant” to the dying person, handling the formal and informal tasks surrounding death, from funeral arrangements, logistics, and legal documents to creating the desired atmosphere for the final moments. Doulas care for grieving families, making sure they have rest, food, and water — things that are easy to forget during difficult times. They bring safety, comfort, and compassion to a process that can be disorganized. This piece is beautifully candid. There’s no small talk here. Bernhardt thinks deeply and critically about the process of becoming a death doula. She delves into her feelings about so-called good and bad deaths as she searches for meaning in her training and in her life. “Much of the language surrounding the burgeoning death doula movement, and its vision of what constitutes a ‘good death,’ feels too neat and tidy to me,” she writes. “But after completing my INELDA training, I found myself wondering whether there really is such a thing as a good death, and what we lose by focusing too much on achieving it. Maybe death is always bad, even when we think it’s beautiful. We have to face that. Maybe end-of-life doulas can only make a bad death better.” I, too, have a hard time accepting the concept of a good death. This work is brilliant in that it raises so many important questions, some of which I will spend my whole life trying to answer. And perhaps what I loved most about this story is that there is no neat ending. —KS

Alexandra Horowitz | The New Yorker | June 24, 2024 | 5,529 words

My biggest takeaway from this article is that even nearly 30 years (!!!) after Dolly the Sheep, mammal cloning still feels like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel. Alexandra Horowitz’s excellent report on pet dog cloning includes an ominous trio: creepy twins, a company called ViaGen with a name like Dr. Evil, and a hidden donor dog. She starts with the twins, who are actually clones: a pair of neatly trimmed dogs named Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine, a Shih Tzu/Lhasa Apso crossbreed with eyes in different positions that make them mirror images of each other when they “puff at the same time.” They are clones of an original dog named Princess, rescued by retired police officer John Mendola. When Princess died of cancer, Mendola contacted ViaGen, which has a patented dog-cloning technology, and asked them to recreate Princess. To learn more about the process, Horowitz visited the company’s 100-acre ranch in Texas and met with President Blake Russell. Jurassic ParkJohn Hammond: “One day my farm will be full of baby rhinos riding horses.”[.] “Isn’t that the coolest thing?” The cloning process involves the surgery of two dogs, one to donate the eggs and the other to act as a surrogate mother. ViaGen doesn’t own these dogs, but rents them from so-called “production partners.” (It’s unclear what happens to these “production” dogs afterward.) As a scientist who studies dog behavior and cognition, Horowitz is a respectable guide to this world, and her concern for “invisible animals whose bodies are being used to be cloned” is clear, as is her skepticism about whether owners eagerly awaiting the return of their beloved pets are getting true replicas.[t]The clones that shaped the original world are not here, nor are there any repeats of the sights and smells they encountered. Life leaves its mark.’ This thought-provoking work will have you digging out your old books. A brave new world—C.W.

Audience Award