 Poor things The natural state of humanity is poverty. For almost all our history people lived as subsistence farmers on the edge of famine. Wild animals exist in a constant Malthusian struggle to survive. “To ask why some societies in the world are still poor is the wrong question,” writes the economics blogger Noah Smith. “Poverty is the default condition.” Poverty — a shortage of resources — is humanity’s greatest and oldest enemy, and the interesting question is how so many of us have escaped it, not why some of us have not. The wonder of the world is that in rich countries, “almost all of us manage to stay a few steps out of reach of that monster for our entire lives.” That is the product, Smith argues on Noahpinion, of industrial modernity, “our single weapon against the elemental foe.” When people denounce economic growth, “they are denouncing the very walls of the fortress that has allowed them to live more than an animal existence” — although that growth must be sustainable. “If we burn the walls of our fortress to throw a party in the moment, there will be nothing left to protect our descendants, and the foe will devour them.” Carefully vetted Animals take drugs too. “I have a bit that I do when people ask me what I do,” writes the pharma scientist Trevor Klee. “I say, ‘I work on drugs for cats!’” And when they ask him what kind, “I say, ‘Oh, you know, methamphetamine, LSD.’” If that doesn’t shut the conversation down, he reveals that he works on therapeutics for serious feline diseases, and people often want to know: What are the regulations for animal drugs? Just like with human medicine, there are rules, says Klee. But all of them are easier to navigate. For one thing, the stakes are lower — “injuring or killing someone’s pet is not as serious as injuring or killing a person.” And, crucially, you can test the drugs on the species they’re intended for: Animal testing is much more reliable when you’re targeting actual animals. On the flip side, the market is much smaller: People are understandably less willing to spend vast sums to keep an animal alive than a human. “My rule of thumb is that drugs developed for animals cost 10x less than their comparable drugs in humans,” says Klee, “but also they make 10x less in revenue.” Original gangsters The Sopranos is 25 years old. Its star, James Gandolfini, died in 2013, six years after the last episode aired. He was, argues Ben Sixsmith on The Zone, “the last victim of Tony Soprano” — when the pilot aired in 1999, Soprano was “a heavyset but active and playful man”; by the finale, both he and the man who played him were “obese and exhausted.” Gandolfini’s off-set issues were part of the reason, but “the weight of Gandolfini’s job must have played a part.” As Tony tells his second-in-command: “You’ve got no fucking idea what it’s like to be number one.” Gandolfini helped make a work of art “as close to agelessness as popular culture can withstand,” argues Sixsmith. It’s a fun, funny show — “without compromising its dramatic qualities,” and underneath Tony and his goons wisecracking “the seething mistrust between them could erupt in bloodshed at any time.” It has a moral depth: Its characters have choices, even if they make the wrong ones. “The Sopranos lives on — entertaining and appalling, as human life has always been and will always be.” Contains spoilers for The Sopranos, unsurprisingly. |
