Here’s our latest monthly collection of original, weird, lovely, useful, and awe-inspiring stories that are too good to miss.
(And if you want more, check out September’s must-reads, too.)
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“A Journey That Has No Ending”
Chad Blair | Honolulu Civil Beat
It was the beginning of what would become decades of out-migration for the Marshallese.
Within months, the 167 residents of Bikini were displaced to a smaller, uninhabited atoll, and on July 1, 1946, the fourth nuclear bomb in history was dropped on Bikini as part of the Able test of Operation Crossroads. Able was 50 percent more powerful than Little Boy, the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945. News of the test spread quickly around the world, which was part of the point... America wanted the world to know what it was capable of, and the propaganda worked.
French designer Louis Réard was so impressed with the shock and awe that the test elicited, he named his new, scandalous two-piece swimsuit after the tropical atoll. Comedian Bob Hope quipped that, “As soon as the war ended, we located the one spot on earth that hadn’t been touched by war and blew it to hell.”
And we didn’t stop there.
From 1946 to 1958, 67 separate nuclear weapons were exploded in the Marshall Islands. The largest test, code named Bravo and part of Operation Castle, was a surface detonation of a hydrogen bomb that was over 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Bikinians, by and large, haven’t returned to their homeland since.
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“The Narrative Frays for Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes”
James B. Steward | The New York Times
Indeed, Ms. Holmes seems to have perfectly executed the current Silicon Valley playbook: Drop out of a prestigious college to pursue an entrepreneurial vision; adopt an iconic uniform; embrace an extreme diet; and champion a humanitarian mission, preferably one that can be summed up in one catchy phrase.
Like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, Ms. Holmes dropped out of college. Like Steve Jobs, she wears a uniform of black turtlenecks, suggesting she has loftier things to think about than what to wear. “I probably have 150 of these,” she told Glamour. Like Mr. Jobs, she’s picky about her diet. (She’s a vegan who shuns coffee and drinks green vegetable juices.)
And like Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (“Don’t Be Evil”), and Mark Zuckerberg (“Connect the World”), her mission is lofty. As she has repeatedly said, Ms. Holmes envisions “a world in which no one ever has to say goodbye too soon,” brought about through improved health care. Theranos also has a slogan: “One tiny drop changes everything.”
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“Ermahgerddon: The Untold Story of the Ermahgerd Girl”
Darryn King | Vanity Fair
None of this would matter, however, if the original picture hadn’t been such a compelling “found” slice of life. It captured the real, paroxysmal excitement of a little girl at precisely the right millisecond—the moment most unfortunate for her and most entertaining for us—to be rendered in Polaroid dye, scanned, and preserved in pixels forever like a gargoyle of the Internet.
Except, as it turns out, not quite.
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“Ask Polly: Why Do You Always Tell People to Go to Therapy?”
Heather Havrilesky | New York
We are a culture that believes in solving puzzles. Act I: The hero hears the call! Act II: The hero struggles with a Rubik's Cube for four decades straight! Act III: A sudden rush of regret and then, DEATH. Good therapy is like throwing the Rubik's Cube out the window and taking a deep breath and asking yourself, “What do I feel like doing right now?”
It's amazing how infrequently most of us ask ourselves that question. We don't deserve to follow our feelings anywhere, or we confuse feeling alive with indulging too much in booze or food or escaping into a make-believe narrative where our real feelings will be channeled through the feelings of some gorgeous protagonist (and therefore rendered safe and NOT WEAK).
Almost every single person who writes to me is trapped in his or her head and wants to break free. You really can't be reminded to step back, away from the little trivial puzzles of life, enough. You need some kind of a process that connects you to yourself, to your feelings, to a brilliant, full-color world that you deeply deserve but can't touch or taste yet.
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“Why Are Placebos Getting More Effective in the United States?”
William Kremer | BBC World Service
Tests reveal that some well-known drugs for depression and anxiety would struggle to pass their clinical trials if they were re-tested in 2015.
This trend has become a huge concern for the pharmaceutical industry. A slew of drugs have flopped at these final clinical trials, by which time drugs companies have typically spent more than $1 billion in research and development.
No-one knows why the placebo response is rising but a fascinating new study in the journal Pain might help experts pin it down... Why? What could it be about Americans that might make them particularly susceptible to the placebo effect?
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