Edward Tenner

American military aid to Ukraine has been remarkably effective, especially in comparison with the long, ill-fated U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. A recent statement by General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helps explain why. “Ukrainians are not asking for anyone to fight for them,” Milley said. “They don’t want American soldiers, or British, or German, or French, or anybody else to fight for them. They will fight for themselves.” The Ukrainians want only the means to defend themselves against Russian invaders, he said, adding that the United States would provide support “for as long as it takes.” By providing advanced weaponry and reliable intelligence, the United States and its allies have allowed Ukraine to inflict large losses on Russian armed forces and roll back earlier Russian territorial gains.

A canker sore—a painful white ulcer inside the mouth—might be brought on by stress. Or the wrong toothpaste. Or certain foods: tomatoes, peanuts, cinnamon. Or an iron deficiency. Or an allergy. Or a new prescription. Or an underlying autoimmune disease.

Even though millions of people suffer from them every year, researchers still don’t know much about what fundamentally causes these sores. This leaves doctors and dentists stuck playing detective with their patients—running down a checklist, trying to figure out which of more than a dozen potential triggers could’ve set off the gnarly little lesions.

That list is long and spans different specialties in medicine. It includes trauma to the mouth, stress, diet, genetics, hormones, allergies, vitamin deficiencies, autoimmune diseases, and gastrointestinal diseases. Diana V. Messadi, a professor at the UCLA School of Dentistry, told me that canker sores are multifactorial, which makes them hard to study. Cold sores, by comparison, offer a much tidier story: They’re viral infections (herpes simplex) and thus are treatable with antivirals. (Cold sores are pimplelike blisters that usually form around the lips, whereas canker sores are white ulcers that occur inside the mouth.)

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Laura Kiesel was only 6 years old when she became a parent to her infant brother. At home, his crib was placed directly next to her bed, so that when he cried at night, she was the one to pick him up and sing him back to sleep. She says she was also in charge of changing his diapers and making sure he was fed every day. For the majority of her early childhood, she remembers, she tended to his needs while her own mother was in the depths of heroin addiction.

From as early as she can remember, Kiesel says she had to take care of herself—preparing her own meals, clothing herself, and keeping herself entertained. At school, she remembers becoming a morose and withdrawn child whose hair was often dirty and unkempt.

In a ritzy Park Avenue apartment, Juliet Tuttle posed in front of a birdcage, staring into the eyes of a parrot. She wore an elegant silk robe and a cloche hat. A photographer snapped a picture, and soon Tuttle appeared in newspapers around the country under the headline “Not Afraid of Parrot Disease.”  

The year was 1930 and a panic had erupted over an illness spread by birds. Though only a few hundred Americans had caught the flu-like “parrot fever,” people were so afraid of being infected that they wrung the necks of their own pets. Tiny carcasses piled up in trash cans, the brilliant blue-and-green wings lying limp among the coal ash.

Tuttle insisted that the fears of contagion were overblown, saying that she often kissed her birds on their little beak. She seemed like the kind of daffy, kind-hearted widow who would one day leave her fortune to her menagerie. And yet seven years later, a tabloid dubbed her the “Eastchester Dog Poisoner” after she was caught in a New York suburb doling out suspicious tablets in doggie treats.     

This article was originally published in Hakai Magazine.

Fishers around the world are desperate for a reliable way to stop dolphins from plundering their catch. Dolphins’ net burgling—known as depredation—costs fishers income and also puts dolphins at risk of injury and entanglement. Proposed solutions, such as using noisemakers, have had mixed results. So researchers in Greece went back to the drawing board in search of the perfect deterrent: something so unpleasant that it would ward off dolphins and keep them away. They came up with fishing nets coated with a resin laced with capsaicin, the chemical compound that gives chili peppers their signature heat.

Giving predators a spicy surprise might seem like a far-out solution, but capsaicin-based deterrents have proved successful on land with other mammals such as deer, squirrels, and rodents.

Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told me that when she hit her mid-40s, she had an “aha moment.”

“I was thinking, It’s so great having gotten to this stage of my career where I’m a little more established. It’s very freeing,” she told me. “And I realized: Oh, I think I just aged out of sexual harassment.” The leering, the inappropriate commentary, the talking over her—much of it had stopped, perhaps because she had become so accomplished, perhaps because she had reached an age where men in her profession did not automatically treat her as a sex object. “There was nothing like having babies to change the male gaze,” she added.

During the quarter century of its formal existence, the Moscow School of Civic Education did not have a campus, a syllabus, or professors. The school instead ran seminars for politicians and journalists, led by other politicians and journalists, from Russia and around the world. It operated out of the Moscow apartment of its founders, Lena Nemirovskaya and Yuri Senokosov. They had met in the 1970s while working on a Soviet philosophy journal, and shared a hatred of the violent, arbitrary politics that had shaped most of their lives. Nemirovskaya’s father was a Gulag prisoner. Senokosov once told me he could not eat Russian black bread, because the taste reminded him of the poverty and tragedy of his Soviet childhood.

Anyone who’s been in a dumb recurring fight knows that the entire problem could be cleared up if everyone could just agree on exactly what was said or done. But you can’t, so you end up stuck in a cycle of relitigation. Housing-policy discussions are like that. They descend into crushing bickering because even the basic facts are up for debate.

The most basic fact about the housing crisis is the supply shortage. Yet many people deny this reality. Before I get to the veritable library of studies, our personal experiences compel us to recognize that housing scarcity is all around us. The most dire signs of a shortage are when even rich people struggle to find homes. Viral clips of hundreds of yuppies lining up to tour a single Manhattan apartment or stories of real-estate agents acting as bouncers at open houses to keep things orderly—these vivid examples demonstrate that demand has far outstripped supply.

In the more than two years since gun violence suddenly began to rise in cities all across the country, researchers have been asked repeatedly to explain what caused the rapid increase and what can be done to reverse it. The urgency behind the question is warranted: Gun homicides rose by 34 percent from 2019 to 2020, and then rose again in 2021. In Chicago alone, over 250 more people were murdered in 2020 than in 2019, and that heightened level of violence continued into 2021. Murders are down slightly this year in Chicago and many other cities, but young lives continue to be lost to gun violence at a much higher rate than just a few years ago.

The immediate crisis is clear. But these short-term trends can sometimes distract us from the question of how American cities got to this point, and how they can move toward a sustained period of low violence. To answer these questions, a long view can be useful.

My brother arrived in my life like the rain always did: after fervent prayer and petitioning. My father was a crop duster in the Texas Panhandle, a land where memories of the Dust Bowl remained painfully fresh even as the farmers remained stubbornly persistent. And so we were always praying for rain, before Friday-night high-school football games, around the dinner table, at church on Sunday morning. When rain canceled the rodeo or a much-anticipated carnival, gratitude held our disappointment in check. When hail flattened crops and tornadoes ripped sheet-metal roofs off barns, we took the bitter with the sweet: At least we got some rain.

Late in the summer of 1985, when I was 3 years old, the drought must have been worse than usual. Adults fretted about withering crops and paltry yields; their anxiety hung in the dry air like static electricity—invisible yet crackling and buzzing. Perhaps I absorbed their worry, or maybe I was simply mimicking what I saw the adults doing, but I joined them in praying for rain. And when the fat drops of moisture fell solidly on the brittle ground a few days later, it was my turn to feel electric. With the matter-of-factness of a child suddenly convinced of her cosmic power, I greeted God with a new request: “Can I have a little brother or sister?”