 Charitable donations Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year in the U.S. because of a lack of available kidneys for transplanting. That’s not because people are unwilling to give them: In polls, between a quarter and half of Americans say they would donate one to a stranger in need, in order to save his or her life. And yet only about 200 do so per year, despite people being able to live quite happily on one kidney. Are the others lying? Scott Alexander donated his own kidney to a stranger recently. He was inspired by the example of a journalist, Dylan Matthews, and thinks the reason more people don’t is that they lack social permission — that it’s too weird and out-there as an idea. He looked into the risks and the benefits, and found that it was effective and pretty safe. Someone somewhere is alive because he gave that kidney, and he wrote a blog post hoping that his example could inspire others: The takeaway from his post, he says, is that “you should feel permission to (if you want) donate a kidney” too. When the rain starts to pour Matthew Perry — best known for playing Chandler, the sarcastic Friend in Friends — is dead. The journalist Helen Lewis offers a eulogy. Friends, in the mostly pre-internet 1990s, was a cultural behemoth, “partly because it was so good and partly because there was, frankly, little else to do in my small city in England if you were 14 on a Friday night in 1997.” So “when I reach back into my adolescence, Perry is there,” she writes: Chandler was “everything I wanted in a boyfriend — smart, funny, emotionally unavailable.” Perry was, she thinks, “an early, high profile example of America’s painkiller epidemic”: He struggled with opioid addiction as well as alcohol. He was also, thanks to Friends, almost impossibly famous, and forever frozen in place as a late-20-something who used humor as a defense mechanism and overemphasized the word be. “Matthew Perry was a transcendentally gifted comic performer who helped me grow up,” Lewis writes. “I wish he had more years. I wish he could have grown old, surrounded by people who loved him.” Electric progress As the world shifts to a low-carbon economy, a frequent complaint is that we shouldn’t just be replacing fossil-fuel energy — we should be reducing the energy we use in the first place. But a low-carbon economy is a lower-energy one, writes the environmental scientist Hannah Ritchie. In a gas-powered car, only about 20% of the energy stored in the fuel is used to push the car forwards. In an electric vehicle, that figure is 80%. You can run four times as many vehicles on the same energy input if you electrify them. Other areas of the economy are harder to electrify than transport. Some industries, for instance, need higher temperatures than electricity can easily provide. But electric-arc furnaces and hydrogen can help, and electric heat pumps can provide heat. Overall, Ritchie estimates, a world run on decarbonized technology can provide the lifestyle we have now for about 40% less energy. “When we electrify our energy systems, a magical thing happens,” she writes: “Large inefficiencies vanish.” |
