LINKS - April 17th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Cutting Class: On the Myth of the Middle Class Writer
“It must be said, though, that the advice “do what you love” was and is usually meant kindly, as a way to correct the old ideas about labor as something that is dutiful or mechanical or lifeless. And “doing what you love” was more achievable in previous eras—at least for some slices of the population—when writing was a job and compensated accordingly. Today, however, writers are often encouraged to work for exposure, or to think of low pay and lack of job security as a supposedly fair exchange for not being bored out of our skulls—yet another hat trick of neoliberalism, where the more work provides actual meaning in people’s lives, the more it’s denigrated as hobby or vanity project, which makes it easier to keep labor costs down across the board.”
Slippery Slope: How private equity shapes a ski town
By Nick Bowlin, Harpers
“Blixseth’s net worth reached $1.3 billion by 2007, according to Forbes, but the Yellowstone Club filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy during the Great Recession. Years of litigation followed, and Blixseth went to jail twice for contempt of court. I asked Hart if he ever comes back to Big Sky. ‘No, no,’ she said immediately. ‘He would get shot.’ Hart had some choice descriptors for him—’flamboyantly fake,’ ‘very much a chode’—but she also called him a visionary. Blixseth rejected the traditional ski-town model that attracted middle-class families for single vacations, having realized that the real money was in luxury real estate, where the wealthiest people in the world would pay huge sums for amenities, belonging, and above all, seclusion.”
Walks in Green Parks Mean Stronger Immune Systems and Better Mental Health
By Lydia Denworth, Scientific American
“A second theory suggests that time spent in nature activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which reduces the body’s stress responses. Studies show reductions in cortisol levels—part of those responses—after exposure to greenery. In addition, green space affects health indirectly because time outdoors encourages physical activity and offers chances for social connection, both of which improve mental and physical well-being.”
Savages! Innocents! Sages! What Do We Really Know About Early Humans?
By Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“I already anticipate some grumbling from fans of Harari & Co. that Geroulanos, a professor of European intellectual history at New York University, is advancing an anti-science argument. He is not. He has plenty of praise for geneticists and paleontologists who have enlarged our understanding of various areas of inquiry, including human migration, food intake and the Neanderthal genome. What both fascinates and troubles him is our seemingly irrepressible urge to look to the lives of early humans — to that mysterious time before recorded history — to tell us who, essentially, we are. Not to mention that such interpretations can condition how we relate to others: Prehistoric ‘findings’ have been used to shore up a prejudice, justify an injustice or expand an empire.”
The history-altering medical mystery of an astronaut who fell in the bathroom
“On February 26, 1964, a 40-year-old man slipped in a hotel bathroom and clocked his head on the tub. The painful tumble would end up altering how the entire world approached space exploration. Why? Because that man was John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and that fall triggered a medical mystery that pushed to the forefront research into what spaceflight might do to the human body.”