intellectual properties

good reads

the november 30th issue of the new yorker is the best one i’ve read in a while, with several articles i read all the way through. for anyone who wants some good reading, here’s 3:

1. Either/Or, by Ariel Levy, is a long but engaging article about Caster Semenya, the African track star who was recently in the news because people were questioning whether she was a woman.  the article is great because it neatly braids several things: 1. the history of sex/gender testing in sports, and relative to testing for other things (drugs, hormones, etc) 2. sex/gender issues in both Western culture and in her native culture 3. basic civil rights regarding what is private information and what is public regarding such issues 4. how much international sports have changed Africa (Mandela credits sports for breaking the racial barriers of apartheid), and 5. what does it actually mean to be a man or a woman? is it hormones? chromosomes? genitalia? some people are born with confusions of all 3.

2. The Politics of Death by Jill Lepore uses the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, who went into a coma in 1975 and her parents had to sue the hospital for rights to “pull the plug”, to discuss the idea that “The more successfully medicine has staved off death, the less well anyone has accepted dying“.  It goes into the history of the case, the complexities of what it means to be alive or not biologically, and, as the title states, the politics around dying.  the whole thing is interesting, but the most interesting point to me was that basically, before the 1950s, there wasn’t really such a thing as “life support”, and when you got really sick, you died.  usually at home.  and no one fought too much about it. but as soon a there became “life support”, people were no longer allowed to just die natural deaths, and in fact, any family asking that their child/mother/father be allowed to do so has been villainized, and now today we even have people talking about “death panels”, as if believing in natural death is somehow now akin to believing genocide is ok.

3.  A beautiful short fiction piece by Don DeLillo entitled “Midnight in Dostoevsky“.  The writing is superb. Maybe i was partial to this because i also like to talk long meandering walks, talk subjectively a lot about nothing, speculate about other people’s lives, and had a philosophy professor who only talked with his eyes closed.