Asbestos, Artificial Blood & White Wellness

Asbestos is still a problem. We still can't produce artifical blood. Also, the rise of white wellness.

Asbestos, Artificial Blood & White Wellness
Photo by Alwan Ibrahim / Unsplash

This is the first newsletter after the changes I announced yesterday, and we have three featured pieces that are all great reads. I especially recommend reading Bailey's piece on Asbestos and how it affected her family.

Don't forget to check out our new website at https://theslowscroll.com/ to browse our recent selection, and if you like it, please spread the word!

Asbestos: a corporate coverup, a public health catastrophe

Prospect • Published on 2025-01-30 • ~5600 words
By Charlotte Bailey

Through the lens of her father's battle with mesothelioma, a disease caused by exposure to asbestos, Charlotte Bailey explores the devastating impact of asbestos. She challenges the perception that asbestos is a relic of the past, but a threat that many still face today, decades after its dangers were acknowledged.

Asbestos remains in most UK schools and hospital trusts, and likely in more than 1.5m houses and flats—though the true number is unknown. Mesothelioma victims in the UK are increasingly likely to be teachers, nurses, musicians and accountants—like my dad—who are contracting the disease after working in crumbling, asbestos-filled buildings. Victims continue to confront illnesses that are impossible to cure, difficult to palliate and entirely preventable.
The documents revealed that, in 1969, Cape’s medical adviser accepted that mesothelioma could be caused by “short and possibly small” exposure and that “no type of asbestos proved innocent”. Yet for years the company continued to insist on their products’ safety.

The Long Quest for Artificial Blood

The New Yorker • Published on 2025-02-02 • ~7300 words
By Nicola Twilley

Nicola Twilley writes about the challenges, historical context, and current research efforts surrounding the development of artificial blood substitutes, both from lab-grown red blood cells and synthetic alternatives. For something so abundantly produced by our bodies, we are still not very close to being able to make blood outside of it, and the lack of it still contributes to a significant number of preventable deaths.

Modern on-demand blood, it turns out, is a logistical miracle: rubber tubing and milk bottles have been replaced by an engineered process that gathers the liquid, tests it, and then stores each of its elements for maximum shelf life, before getting it to the patients who need it. But not to all of them. Despite the high throughput of the N.H.S.B.T. blood factory, and despite the fact that a unit of blood is transfused every two seconds in the United States, there just isn’t enough.
… scientists don’t yet understand everything that blood does, or how it does it. Somehow, the various components of blood—red and white cells, platelets, and plasma—manage to perform an entire spectrum of life-promoting functions. In addition to picking up oxygen in the lungs and releasing it throughout the body, blood delivers nutrients; transports hormones; carts away toxic waste products such as carbon dioxide, urea, and lactic acid; regulates body temperature, pH, and over-all chemical and fluid balance; monitors for and raises the alarm about organ damage; recalls, detects, and defends against immune-system threats; and is even responsible for the hydraulics behind tissue engorgement, as the more prudish textbooks might put it.

Soap to supremacy: The rise of white wellness

Al Jazeera • Published on 2025-02-02 • ~8600 words
By Mark Hay

Wellness products are not something usually associated with white supremacy movements. However, when Mark Hay’s reporting starts pulling at the threads, they uncover a network of brands that not only promote alternative health but also serve as vehicles for extremist views.

Many people feel uncomfortable with social change like racial justice movements that reorient how they see themselves in relation to other groups like marginalised populations, Gerrand and Anderson explain. When someone they learn to trust like an influencer in a mainstream wellness space on social media affirms their misgivings about, say, the Black Lives Matter movement and frames support for "white lives matter" as a matter of self-care, then an individual might slowly warm to this ideology.
White nationalists, Simi learned, know that they are often seen as backwoods hicks who wear white hoods or swastikas. They also know that people don't always recognise hate speech when it's delivered by someone who doesn't fit that mould.

The leading AI models are now very good historians

Res Obscura • Published on 2025-01-22 • ~3200 words
By Urbano Monte

We all have different lines when it comes to how and when AI should be used. Benjamin Breen writes about some of his experiments with it while using it for historical research, and how it can be a valuable tool.

But the architecture of these models, the data that feeds them and the human training the guides them, all converges on the median. The supposedly “boundary-pushing” ideas it generated were all pretty much what a class of grad students would come up with — high level and well-informed, but predictable.
Although this is not exactly a breakthrough finding, it is quite indicative of the sorts of ways that generative AI can help us do research going forward. It is another, wholly alien pair of “eyes” on a given problem or domain, and that altered perspective can be helpful, even (or especially) when it’s wrong.

A universal, absolute, and infinite theory of vibes

Numb at the Lodge • Published on 2025-02-02 • ~7200 words
By Sam Kriss

Sam Kriss connects what we now call “vibes” to Hegel's philosophy of “Geist”, and explores various metaphorical "vibe machines,” that attempt to explain how they shift. Just like vibes, this piece flows between being playful and serious. “We need another universal theory of vibes” he writes, maybe because “because of the vibes is not actually a very impressive explanation.”

It’s a hazy thing, bodiless, ghostly, but at the same time it moves around the heavy stuff of the world—armies, monuments, empires—like they’re nothing. For Hegel, the fall of Rome didn’t have to do with imperial overextension or steppe migrations, it was because Rome had bad vibes.
The vibe shift is also a shift towards vibes.

‘I Am Still Mad to Write’

The Atlantic • Published on 2025-02-03 • ~2600 words
By Hillary Kelly

How a tragic accident helped Hanif Kureishi find his rebellious voice again.

Nobody is equipped for the kind of calamity that struck Kureishi. But the body, with all its spewing, writhing, lusting, hunger, and degradation, had long been his obsession. His fiction had traced his own arc from young renegade to disgruntled middle-aged father to ailing older man. Pain and pleasure were his recurring catharsis points. He wanted to explore whether, and how, the body could really satisfy the curiosities of the mind.

I Was the World’s Worst Cancer Mom

Narratively • Published on 2025-01-27 • ~6600 words
By Elizabeth Austin

Elizabeth Austin shares her tumultuous journey as a mother navigating her daughter's cancer diagnosis. While other parents seem to embody strength and hope, Austin reveals her struggles with alcohol and despair, a stark contrast to the idealized image of a "cancer mom.”

I stared at the bottle and considered the fortitude of faith required to believe that something like lavender oil could combat the persistent stink of industrial disinfectant and our kids’ vomit. I caught a whiff of something sharp and sour, like old milk and iron, and then realized it was me. I’d been wearing the same stained period underwear for three days and my hair and breath smelled like the wine I’d thrown up earlier that morning.
Each time I arrived at the hospital with suitcases of clean laundry and grocery bags filled with Carolyn’s favorite snacks, I flashed my plastic “parent” wristband at the front desk and caught the security guard’s knowing, sympathetic look, which always filled me with rage. I didn’t want sympathy from people who could, a moment after bearing witness to my family’s pain, turn from it and return to their cancerless lives. I was grateful for the mask hiding the unsmiling bottom half of my face, my gray-purple teeth, and my lips which were cracked and raw from being too drunk to feel myself chewing on them in my sleep.

The Battle for Better Air

Asimov Press • Published on 2025-02-02 • ~5800 words
By Larissa Schiavo

Larissa Schiavo explores the evolution of indoor air quality from prehistory to modern times. This brief history reveals how our understanding of indoor air quality has progressed and why it remains a critical health issue today. We might be tempted to think that air quality was not an issue before industrial times, but that does not apply to indoor air because of “the carcinogenic byproduct of burned wood, dung, and other fuel biomasses.”

Odd as it may sound, the loudspeaker, microphone, and amplifier played a crucial role in improving indoor air. Before voice amplification systems, people relied on acoustics to make themselves heard. In huge spaces like theatres, this often involved enclosure and the nixing of windows. At best, this led to stuffy, still air shared by too many people. At worst, such as in the U.K. Houses of Parliament and the U.S. Capitol, it meant hundreds of men in full suits in the heat of summer, trying not to pass out and inadvertently infecting one another with airborne diseases.
For the first time in history, the built environment could withstand the tyranny of climate. People could sit inside a fully enclosed space in the summer with no risk of heatstroke. Heat-related mortality decreased in cities like New York as air conditioning became more prevalent. The air in rooms without direct window access no longer stagnated. The usable square footage in simpler, cheaper-to-build floor plans and taller skyscrapers increased, and hotter regions like the American Southwest and Southeast opened to would-be residents.

The Leaning Tower of New York

The New Yorker • Published on 2025-02-02 • ~4050 words
By Eric Lach

Eric Lach writes about the troubles surrounding the construction of 1 Seaport, a luxury Manhattan skyscraper that began leaning during construction. Something like this happening might come as a surprise in the modern times we live in, but Lach’s reporting reveals the combination of cost-cutting, a lack of due diligence, poor communication, and unsafe work practices behind it.

Rather than pausing to fix what had already been done, an attempt was made to straighten the thing out in midair. To compensate for the lean, higher floors were intentionally poured out of alignment, in the opposite direction. This compounded the problem. “What happened was, as the building went up, the parties tried to pull it back and it kind of counterweighted,” a lawyer representing Pizzarotti later explained to a judge. “Your Honor,” the lawyer said, “it’s shaped like a banana right now.”