Dear readers,
We’re gradually migrating this curation feature to our Weekly Newsletter. If you enjoy these summaries, we think you’ll find our Substack equally worthwhile.
On Substack, we take a closer look at the themes from these curated articles, examine how language shapes reality and explore societal trends. Aside from the curated content, we continue to explore many of the topics we cover at TIG in an expanded format—from shopping and travel tips to music, fashion, and lifestyle.
If you’ve been following TIG, this is a chance to support our work, which we greatly appreciate.
Thank you,
the TIG Team
By the time Martha Stewart rose to fame, family life in the United States looked very different than it had during her childhood. American mothers had entered the workforce en masse, and when Stewart’s first book was published, in 1982, many women were no longer instructing their daughters on the finer points of homemaking fundamentals like cooking meals from scratch or hosting holiday gatherings. Stewart’s meticulous guides to domestic life ended up filling a maternal vacuum for many of her fans, and she inspired both devotion and envy. Oprah Winfrey, no stranger to hard work herself, once summed up the ire that many people felt about Stewart: “Who has the time for all of this? For every woman who makes a complicated gingerbread house, a million don’t even have the time to bake a cookie.”
At a moment when American women were already feeling the exhaustion of the second shift, Stewart seemed to suggest that they toil overtime to beautify their second work environment too. But despite being most famous as a homemaker, an occupation usually associated with mothers, Stewart would later appear ambivalent about motherhood itself. Before her daughter was born, when Stewart was 24, “I thought it was a natural thing,” she says in Martha, a new Netflix documentary about her life and career. “It turns out it’s not at all natural to be a mother.”
Early in the documentary, an off-camera speaker—Stewart is the only on-camera interviewee—refers to her as “the original influencer.” The labelemphasizes how she shaped domestic life and purchasing trends decades before the advent of Instagram or TikTok; as one friend says, Stewart “was the first woman that saw the marketability of her personal life.” Archival images of a young Stewart exude the charming, homespun domesticity that many social-media creators now emulate. We see Stewart stooped low in her gardens, then feeding chickens in her “palais du poulet”—the French name she gave her coop (“palace of the chicken”). That visual would be right at home on the vision boards of moderninfluencers who broadcast their nostalgic visions of Americana to millions of followers.
But Stewart’s words, whether spoken directly to the camera or read from private letters, tell a story that diverges from tidy fantasies. Part of why Martha raises such interesting questions about motherhood, family life, and domestic labor is Stewart’s apparent doubts about the value of all three. Throughout the documentary, she seems to be confronting her own conflicting beliefs, but clearly, business—not the art of homemaking—has been the essential pursuit of Stewart’s life. And her single-minded focus on expanding her empire is what ultimately attracted the most criticism as she transformed into a gargantuan brand.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.
Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”
Hope dialed his mother, a former physician, who was unequivocal. “You need a D&C,” she told them, referring to dilation and curettage, a common procedure for first-trimester miscarriages and abortions. If a doctor could remove the remaining tissue from her uterus, the bleeding would end.
But when Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, the obstetrician on duty, finally arrived, he said it was the hospital’s “routine” to give a drug called misoprostol to help the body pass the tissue, Hope recalled. Hope trusted the doctor. Porsha took the pills, according to records, and the bleeding continued.
Three hours later, her heart stopped.
The 35-year-old’s death was preventable, according to more than a dozen doctors who reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica. Some said it raises serious questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to diverge from the standard of care and reach for less-effective options that could expose their patients to more risks. Doctors and patients described similar decisions they’ve witnessed across the state.
It was clear Porsha needed an emergency D&C, the medical experts said. She was hemorrhaging and the doctors knew she had a blood-clotting disorder, which put her at greater danger of excessive and prolonged bleeding. “Misoprostol at 11 weeks is not going to work fast enough,” said Dr. Amber Truehart, an OB-GYN at the University of New Mexico Center for Reproductive Health. “The patient will continue to bleed and have a higher risk of going into hemorrhagic shock.” The medical examiner found the cause of death to be hemorrhage.
D&Cs — a staple of maternal health care — can be lifesaving. Doctors insert a straw-like tube into the uterus and gently suction out any remaining pregnancy tissue. Once the uterus is emptied, it can close, usually stopping the bleeding.
But because D&Cs are also used to end pregnancies, the procedure has become tangled up in state legislation that restricts abortions. In Texas, any doctor who violates the strict law risks up to 99 years in prison. Porsha’s is the fifth case ProPublica has reported in which women diedafter they did not receive a D&C or its second-trimester equivalent, a dilation and evacuation; three of those deaths were in Texas.
ProPublica condensed 200 pages of medical records into a summary of the case in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists and then reviewed it with more than a dozen experts around the country, including researchers at prestigious universities, OB-GYNs who regularly handle miscarriages, and experts in maternal health.
Read the rest of this article at: ProPublica
I keep religious icons in my house, the Orthodox ones where Christ has dark, pensive eyes. When my friends come over, they sometimes ask why. It doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of my personality. ‘My parents are religious,’ I say. This makes no sense, because I put the icons up myself. My friend Daniel keeps icons up as well. ‘I’m not sure if I’m a believer, but if there was one true faith, it would be ours,’ he says.
Daniel and I both came to Canada as children, fleeing the Yugoslav war as Serbian refugees. The grief I carry about this – about our displacement, about the war, about an older history of turmoil and conflict and capture through empire – is unwieldy, inarticulate. It’s lodged within me like some half-completed archaeological dig. My icons are a marker of it, while family stories serve as its entryways. My aunt, struck by a stray piece of shrapnel in the neck as she made coffee in the kitchen. My grandmother, peering out from behind her white curtains, the pressure of constant vigilance eventually causing multiple strokes. My father, refusing to be separated from my mother and me, when soldiers ordered all the men off the bus as we made our way out of Bosnia.
Read the rest of this article at: Aeon
If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.
You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down at random in San Francisco’s foggy, mellow Richmond district. Once you pass the entrance’s white Corinthian columns, Kahle will show you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display in the foyer. He’ll lead you into the great room, filled with rows of wooden pews sloping toward a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a grand stained glass dome. Before it was the Archive’s headquarters, the building housed a Christian Science church.
I made this pilgrimage on a breezy afternoon last May. Along with around a dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, clad in a rumpled orange button-down and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life’s work. When the afternoon light hits the great hall’s dome, it gives everyone a halo. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun and who preaches his gospel with an amiable evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. “I think people are feeling run over by technology these days,” Kahle says. “We need to rehumanize it.”
I refer to this as the layer-cake model of the Universe, which dates back to the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes. Not long after Descartes embraced the idea of a deterministic universe, Isaac Newton presented a mathematical law for gravitation, which gave the concept a powerful quantitative update. The gravitational force on one body at one time is determined by the location of all the bodies in the Universe at that time; the state of the Universe plus the law of gravitation tells you how all bodies will move: a layer-cake model, indeed.
The influence of Descartes and Newton on how we think about laws of nature is immense – and not without justification. It has helped to unify whole fields of physics, including mechanics, gravitation and electromagnetism. It is still so widespread in the scientific community, and it has such a distinguished pedigree, that scientists may not even realise that they subscribe to the layer-cake model at all.
Read the rest of this article at: Aeon
Using “the Internet” sometimes seems disconcertingly synonymous with using Google. Google Search, the most popular search engine on the planet, indexes the open Internet, driving traffic to Web sites, and Google Ads provides the revenue that publishers survive on. Gmail is how some two billion people receive their e-mail; many Gmail in-boxes have been accumulating messages for a decade or more. Last, but certainly not least, the company’s browser, Google Chrome, is what a staggering three billion people use to navigate the Internet. According to some estimates, Google holds nearly ninety per cent market share in search engines in the U.S. Chrome, in turn, provides the audience data that Google’s ads leverage to target users, and links the company’s other services together. When you’re using Chrome, it is smoothest and easiest to also use Google’s search, mail, and even new generative-A.I. programs such as Gemini. Google Chrome is the top of a slippery funnel that users slide down, deeper into the Google ecosystem—which is precisely why, following a landmark antitrust ruling, the United States Department of Justice is trying to wrest Chrome away from the company.
In August, a D.C. district court concluded that, when it comes to search services and online advertising, “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Last week, the D.O.J. released its proposals for how the problems should be remedied. It noted that Google has “deprived rivals” of “critical distribution channels” and “distribution partners” for competing search engines. To remedy that, the D.O.J. argued that Google should be forced to sell or spin off Chrome into an independent business that would, according to a Bloomberg analyst, be worth fifteen to twenty billion dollars. The D.O.J. also recommended that Google cease existing arrangements whereby the company pays competitors, including Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars to guarantee that Google Search is the default search engine on their devices, and that Google be forced to license its search results to its direct competitors at “marginal cost” as well as share data about its users and ads for free.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
