Triage, Blue, Gender, Marriage, Justice

Uri Bram -

Saving Lives In Las Vegas

Judith Tintinalli & Kevin Menes | Emergency Physicians Monthly | 3rd November 2017

Las Vegas doctor tells how he mobilised the emergency room at Sunrise Hospital to receive more than 200 victims of the October 1st mass shooting. “My plan was that we were going to take care of all of our major resuscitations (red tags) in Station 1. Station 2 was going to have our orange tags, patients with threatening gunshots in critical areas, but had not crashed yet. This is not in the textbook. In my mind, these orange tags were expected to crump near the end of the Golden Hour” (3,300 words)

Prussian Blue

Katy Kelleher | Awl | 14th November 2017

In praise of the pigment that Audubon used for magpies and blue jays, Van Gogh for Starry Night, and Hokusai for the great wave off Kanagawa. “This is the story of a blue most common, and most beloved. A blue that Thoreau thought needed to be Americanized, like Freedom Fries. It’s the color of waves and stamps and too many paintings to count. It’s an accidental pigment, a happenstance color, and an antidote for heavy metal poisoning. Meet my sweetheart, Prussian blue” (1,600 words)

Your Reckoning And Mine

Rebecca Traister | The Cut | 12th November 2017

On the emerging balance of power between men and women in the wake of the Weinstein scandal. Men in the public eye feel vulnerable, and rightly so. Women are torn between truth and past friendship. “The anger window is open. It’s wild and not entirely fun. In the shock of the house lights having been suddenly brought up, we’ve had scant chance to parse what exactly is inflaming us and who. It’s our tormentors, obviously, but sometimes also our friends, our mentors, ourselves” (5,700 words)

Child Marriage in America

Anjali Tsui | Frontline | 14th September 2017

Heather was pregnant at 14 when she married her 24-year-old boyfriend, hoping to save him from jail for statutory rape. She lost the baby, the marriage failed, and the boyfriend went to jail anyway. A sad story, but not an exceptional one. All US states allow minors to marry with parental consent. At least 200,000 — almost all girls — have done so in the past 15 years. “Children as young as 10, 11 and 12 years old were granted marriage licenses in Alaska, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee” (5,725 words)

Scott Alexander | Less Wrong | 14th November 2017

Systems of justice adapt, often ingeniously, to the means and the morals of the time and the place. As in medieval Iceland, which made legal standing a negotiable good: “A man who did not have sufficient resources to prosecute a case or enforce a verdict could sell it to another who did and who expected to make a profit in both money and reputation by winning the case and collecting the fine. This meant that an attack on even the poorest victim could lead to eventual punishment” (5,200 words)

Video of the day Religion Is Nature’s Antidepressant

What to expect:

Robert Sapolsky on the evolutionary advantage of religious belief: It brings significant health benefits by reducing stress (3’16”)

Thought for the day

We are stories. Ethics is the business of trying to make the stories good ones
Charles Foster

Podcast of the day Getting A Date | Ear Hustle

Podcast from San Quentin Prison. In this episode, inmates talk about the process of applying for parole
(34'44")