Diana Kwon in The Scientist:
Allison Rosen was 32 years old when she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. At the time, she was single, but she knew that one day, she’d want to have children. However, her treatment, which would involve pelvic radiation, would very likely affect her fertility.
Following a detailed discussion with her oncologist and care team, Rosen decided to delay her cancer treatment for a few weeks to harvest and freeze her eggs. But the day before the extraction, Rosen started bleeding profusely and was taken to the emergency room. There, she and her doctor decided that her cancer treatment couldn’t wait. They’d start the next day, meaning she’d have to abandon the plans to cryopreserve her eggs. “I thought, if I’m not alive, what is the purpose of having these eggs?” said Rosen, today a colorectal cancer survivor and patient advocate. “It was one of the most difficult decisions I had to make.”
More here.
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Last year,
It was an anxious summer. The American elections loomed, the sitting president had just been unmasked as an egomaniacal member of the walking undead, and here on the continent, across the Atlantic, Europe was about to elect the most right-wing parliament in the history of the European Union. The streets were plastered with campaign posters. In Germany, high over the boulevards, a well-known comedian gripped an enormous toothbrush and flashed her pearly whites. “Wählen ist wie Zähneputzen. Machst du’s nicht, wird’s braun!” read the accompanying text, or, “Voting is like brushing your teeth: don’t do it, and things’ll go brown.” The joke is that the Nazis wore brownshirts. To “go brown” is to go Nazi. In essence, the suggested defense against such a future was “Brush your teeth for democracy.” Or worse: “We are the guardians of oral and political hygiene—be more like us.” You slobs. It wasn’t a message endorsed by the Democratic Party or its handpicked candidate, Kamala Harris, who spent the final weeks of her abbreviated but competent campaign warning against the dangers of fascism. But it could have been.
“Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.”
Consider this straightforward calculation: (10100) + 1 – (10100)
In a city well-known for political theater, the show at Stone Nest, a performance venue in the heart of London’s West End, took the concept to a new level. For the last month, audiences have been reenacting the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in one of the most violent and divisive days of modern American democracy. But instead of sitting in stately silence, legs crammed into velvet chairs, attendees at “Fight for America” were active participants — singing, chanting, rolling dice, and maneuvering tiny figurines around a model of the Capitol.
Friday is the 30th anniversary of the deadliest massacre in Europe since World War II, when Bosnian Serb forces under Gen. Ratko Mladic overran an area meant to be protected by the United Nations. Soon after, they proceeded to 
In a 1989 interview with the Detroit Free Press, director Charlotte Zwerin worried that her documentary Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser, then newly out in general release after premiering the year before, would be labeled a “jazz film.” Zwerin had grown up, in the 1930s and ’40s, in Detroit, where she had heard a lot of jazz and become a lifelong fan of the music, yet she wanted audiences to see simply that Monk was “an American composer of tremendous stature” who “wrote beautiful songs.” Watching Straight, No Chaser today, you see just what she meant—calling this music jazz (or even American) somehow dilutes the once-in-a-millennium originality of songs that can be heard with the same jolt of immediacy and surprise in all times, places, and genres.
1910: Lahore
Last night, a friend called to give me the sad news of Naim sahib’s passing. He had not been too well since suffering a stroke a couple of years ago but after returning from rehab his spirit was as indomitable as ever. He relished writing and wrote with zest; sparkling essays, columns and a weekly, later monthly, newsletter that he dispatched electronically to a large following. Naim sahib did not shy away from technology. He had a website on which he posted stuff that he liked. But the newsletter was his commentary on various subjects related to literature, including world politics that impacted literature. He wrote what was on his mind without mincing the truth. It was a privilege to be on his mailing list.