Illustration by Zachary Monteiro
Television is reinventing the modern-day witch, according to the Guardian, with a new crop of small-screen productions featuring magical ladies. Alix Hawley observed a similar trend in the the world of books not so long ago, in “The Year of Witch Lit: Weird Women Dominated New Stories of Suspicion and Rupture”:
Witch hunts are detective stories of a kind—as readers parse notions of reality and supposition—which was probably what grabbed me first, but these books are very different. Not the witches of fantasy or of children’s lit, the characters of three 2021 novels are victims of historical persecutions in England, America, and Germany. The stories evoke a deep confusion about what’s happening and whether there’s any way to fix it, echoing so many questions of our current moment. [Read more]
The CBC’s White Coat Black Art recently explored the stories of women who donated life-saving organs to strangers. With so few donors available, some health experts are focused on improving logistics. Karin Olafson investigated EVOSS, a new support system that promises to rescue donated lungs deemed too fragile or ill for transplant:
A black box with a removable tablet on one side, it looks remarkably like an air fryer (though its creators liken it more to a picnic cooler). [Jayan] Nagendran says the EVOSS has the potential to improve both the quantity and quality of donor lungs in Canada. The two-day transplant window eases the time constraints surgeons typically face. Lungs that have been damaged because the donor was ill or injured can be repaired: sick lungs can get antibiotics, and blood clots can be removed with clot-busting medication. [Read more]
The Ottawa Citizen reports that Indigenous and environmental groups are disappointed with the newly approved plan to store nuclear waste at Chalk River, saying it poses “a safety risk for generations to come.” Eva Holland, a new contributing writer for The Walrus, delved into the long-term implications of environmental hazards, in “Arsenic and Gold: My Family’s Role in the Poisonous Legacy of Giant Mine”:
How do we warn future generations—future civilizations, even—about the radioactive waste we have left behind? When history might be erased and languages might be reinvented, how do we tell the people of the future not to dig any deeper? In his book Underland, British nature writer Robert Macfarlane describes some of the suggestions proposed by a US-run panel of experts for a nuclear waste site in New Mexico. They included terrified human faces carved into stone (Edvard Munch’s The Scream was a possible model) and what Macfarlane called “a durable aeolian instrument” for tuning “the far-future desert winds to D Minor, the chord thought best to convey sadness.” [Read more]
“Sex after Sixty,” a somewhat NSFW digital issue of Cosmopolitan, is asking a lot of questions about adult relations, in “But Where’s Our Little Blue Pill?” Sarah Barmak has the answer in her deep dive into female desire:
Mindfulness-based therapies developed at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have had the most clinically significant results, in part because of their ability to ease not just low desire but many of its causes, such as stress. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, a small research company called Emotional Brain says two of its drugs in development could usher in a new “personalized approach” to low libido. The hope is that we are on the cusp of a greater understanding not just that women are entitled to their desire but that pop culture and politics are not enough to secure it—that, to truly support women and their sexualities throughout their lives, we need to learn more, to research more creatively, and to develop a full range of treatments to address desire in all its complexities. [Read more]