Ghosts and empties

This week I had intended to write up what I've discovered since starting this club—some of the patterns I've seen, feedback I've heard, and lessons I've learned—but frankly, it's been a little hard to concentrate.

I don't expect that everyone on this list has the same political opinions as I do, but I hope you'll understand why somebody like me (an immigrant non-citizen journalist with many friends and family who are in various groups explicitly targeted by the incoming Trump administration) is feeling at sea right now.

Still, if this week has you feeling any kind of things about the future of democracy, then maybe you can turn to September's pick of the month, On Tyranny Graphic Edition, for a little solace and instruction. If you don't have a copy, or you'd like to share one with a friend, I have a few leftover copies from our monthly run: I've put the extras on sale for $20.

So instead of this week's planned email, I thought I'd give you a little roundup of the activities from some of our previous authors. They've been an active bunch.

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Lauren Markham (CUR001) has had a couple of great stories out recently, including this well-observed piece in Alta about the eerie specter of California's ghost towns. I'm fascinated by these shabby little footprints that have been left behind across the state by the changes that history, politics, and economy can bring.

Growing up in Britain, I always took a sort of comfort from the feeling that I am treading where others have been—you are forever standing in the ruins or trails or nooks that carry what came before. California, of course, has a different kind of history. But it also does it with a little bit of Hollywood verve: there's an almost cinematic quality to its falling-down buildings and rickety wooden structures left behind as human life is abandoned to nature.

Nature and place also feature heavily in Lauren’s detailed review of Laura Marriss's The Age of Loneliness—a collection of essays about ecology and grief—in the LA Review of Books. I'm not sure I'll read the book, but I did enjoy reading about it.

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Meanwhile bioethicist Carl Elliott (CUR002) took time to write about a different kind of ghosts by discussing Sydney Halpern's Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis in the New York Review of Books.

You may remember the terrible story of Willowbrook—a state school in New York that housed children with intellectual disabilities in horrifying conditions and used them for live hepatitis experiments for 16 years—from April's book of the month, The Occasional Human Sacrifice. Halpern tells that story and a lot more, connecting the shameful crimes at that institution with a much wider, even more sinister network of scientific abuse.

From Carl's essay:

"For thirty years American researchers conducted hepatitis 'challenge studies', deliberately infecting a variety of vulnerable subjects with hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and even (unknowingly) hepatitis C. Mentally disabled children were not the only victims. The researchers also infected psychiatric patients, prison inmates, and draft objectors. More than 3,700 subjects, all of them living in institutional settings, were enrolled in the hepatitis experiments. More than eight hundred of them were children. As many as 25 percent were African American.

“'I know of no series of problematic infectious disease studies that involved a wider array of devalued and stigmatized groups,' Halpern writes. She estimates that the researchers transmitted blood-borne hepatitis to more than one thousand people."

These stories should haunt us more than the ghost towns, even if they’re less visible.

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And lastly, one to spook us about the future, perhaps? Nicola Twilley (CUR005) has been doing promotion for our September pick, Frostbite—including at one of my former haunts, MIT Technology Review.

Her Q&A there with Allison Arieff makes a great companion to our own conversation about the book.

“People treat their fridge like a bank vault—you put something in it, and it will be safe. Before domestic refrigerators, you weren’t stockpiling perishable food in the same way. Now that we can, we waste much more food at the consumer level.

“We’ve been fooled by the endless abundance of the supermarket. Refrigerators have expanded in size, and many households now have more than one. People drive to the store, then fill their refrigerators and freezers so full they can’t find anything in them. That behavior changes the shape of the city: Houses get bigger, roads expand, stores need bigger parking lots. It’s all connected in a way that has really negative impacts on our environment.”

Read the whole thing.

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That's all for this week. November books should be arriving with club members very soon if they haven't already.

I’m off to find a way to feel a little less empty.

Onward

Bobbie