A Good Death, Ctd

More stories fill the thread:

In the 1980s, I taught conversational English in Japan. One of my favorite classes had just three students – three middle-aged women who weren’t afraid to say what they felt. Once, one of the ladies missed two weeks. When she returned, she apologized for missing class – her father had died. I hurriedly said how sad I was to hear it, but before I could go on, she stopped me. She told me that I shouldn’t be sad – his death was beautiful. That’s certainly an adjective I had never heard applied to death before.

She explained that her father had caught a cold while he was riding his bike. He was in his late 70s. After a few hours in bed, as the cold turned into pneumonia, he told everyone that he was dying. His children and their families came from where they lived and congregated at his bedside. He was alert and not in pain. He spent a day saying goodbye to everyone. Once he had a chance to talk to his children and grandchildren, he went into a coma. He died an hour later.

By the time the student finished the story, we were all crying and smiling.

Another joins this reader in some gallows humor:

The thread has reminded me of the old joke: I want to die like me grandfather did – peacefully in his sleep – and NOT like the screaming, terrified passengers in that bus he was driving.

In truth, I actually would like to die as my grandmother did. At age 90 she was in marvelous health, needed no medications, and was quite active in her community and church.  On the eve of one of her many trips to Norway to visit relatives, she visited her doctor for a checkup. After the nurse had checked her vitals my grandmother remained seated on the exam table.  The nurse exited saying the doctor would be in to see her momentarily. My grandmother joked that if it took too long she might just take a nap.

When the nurse and the doctor came back in my grandmother was down on the table, a smile on her face.  She had passed, simply, and one assumes painlessly. Would that we all slipped this mortal coil with such ease.

Another reader:

My mom was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer in November 2009.

She refused any radiation or chemotherapy (she was 84), but in the five months of her final illness, she claimed never to have a minute of pain. (Personally, I think this was due to a benign tumor she had for years above her ear – I think it must have blocked pain receptors in some way.)

At any rate, Easter was April 4 in 2010. Our family celebrated on Saturday so various college students could get back to school on Sunday, and my sisters and all our kids (and their multiple significant others) were there. We had a splendid time, although by then Mom was very frail and occasionally on oxygen. She wasn’t strong enough to sit at the dinner table, but she did spend that time in a chair in the living room, close enough to hear and enjoy the fun. Later that evening we helped her up the stairs to her bedroom. This was the first time she needed help – she was pretty indomitable. We helped her into bed and told her we loved her, and she died in her sleep sometime during the night.

When we went up to see her in the morning, she looked so peaceful. If she had scripted her last 24 hours, I don’t think it would have been any different.

Another:

We lost my brother last year. He was 25, perfectly healthy, almost done with the Navy’s cryptology network technician training, when he started having trouble breathing. After a month or two of struggling with what the base doctor thought might be asthma, he almost blacked out walking to his truck, and checked himself into a hospital. He had rhabdomyosarcoma, a heart tumor. He passed away less than eight months after his original diagnosis.

What was good about that? Nothing – but so many things. He was tired of fighting about three months in, and I worried for him then; so many cancers take years and years to reach a conclusion. The speed of it all was hard – but also merciful, in a way.

His greatest hope was that he wouldn’t lose mental and physical faculties, and for the most part, he didn’t. The stroke and subsequent brain tumor impeded his language faculties, but he could still speak and interact with us, and take care of himself – albeit slowly – almost to the very end.

His treatments were conducted about two hours away from our hometown, which allowed him a strong support system of family and friends. Our mom was able to stay with him at the cancer care center, so from the diagnosis to the end, he was never on his own. In the end, he died in his childhood room, with my mom singing to him and his siblings around him holding his hands and sufficient meds to keep the pain and anxiety at bay, and enough counseling from hospice and the funeral home staff that we knew kind of what to expect.

We all knew this was a traumatic thing, but it didn’t feel traumatic – more like a clock winding down and then just not ticking anymore. There wasn’t a visible wrenching from life to death, just smaller and smaller steps until you pass some invisible line and then … then he looked just like before, only motionless. Whether as the person leaving or as the person being left – I really don’t know what I would change about that. I can’t come up with a much better way to go.

Ukraine Reignites, Ctd

In a desperate effort to appease opposition protesters, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and his government resigned today, while parliament repealed a draconian anti-demonstration law passed two weeks ago. But it may be too little, too late:

“It’s more like a smoke break,” said Sergei Kononenko, who was helping to man the makeshift barricades a short walk from the Presidential residence. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Neither, it seems, is President Viktor Yanukovych. In the past two weeks, as riot police have tried and failed repeatedly to clear the streets, he has shown that he will grant practically any of the protestors’ demands – except his own resignation. “That is non-negotiable,” says Nestor Shufrich, a senior lawmaker from the President’s political party. … As for the party’s options now, he would not say whether force was the only one. “That is up to the President,” he says. But if the protesters still refuse to leave the center of Kiev, and if the President still refuses to leave his post, the stalemate will continue until someone flinches. “That’s when things could get bloody,” says Kononenko, the protester.

Half-measures are unlikely to succeed:

[E]xperts warn that historically, once a government starts making concessions, it is more likely to inflame revolution than placate its opposition. “I do not see any signs that the situation can be improved or that compromise can be reached,” says Sergei Gaiday, a political scientist who runs the Kiev-based “social engineering” agency Gaiday.com. “What is happening in parliament no longer has any influence on what is going on out in the streets. The protesters have too many demands, and these are not being met.”

Writing before the latest news broke, Gavin Weise noted how the opposition’s goals had escalated since the protests first broke out in November:

Talk of lesser aims, such as an amnesty for prisoners or opposition representation in Yanukovych’s cabinet, sounds hollow and has probably come too late. After this week’s spreading violence and last week’s Russian-style legislation limiting freedom of assembly and speech, growing numbers of Ukrainians just want to see Yanukovych and his cronies punished and exiled from the political world.

Recent Dish on the Ukraine crisis here and here.

The Pig Production Line

Slaughterhouse

Alastair Philip Wiper visited Denmark’s Danish Crown Slaughterhouse:

Danish Crown is the world’s largest exporter of pork, supplying pork to customers all over the world – 90% of the pork slaughtered in Denmark is exported, with the UK being the biggest market. Completed in 2004, the slaughterhouse at Horsens kills approximately 100,000 pigs per week, making it one of the largest in the world. 1,420 people are employed there, and the slaughterhouse receives around 150 visitors per day. The slaughterhouse has been designed with openness in mind – a viewing gallery follows every step of the production, from the pigs arriving, to the slaughter itself, to the butchering and packaging.

Other photos from the series here. Shepard at Metafilter is put off by the images:

From the very first word on through to the author enjoying delicious sausages in the plant cafeteria, this is 10,000% a puff piece. It has nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with PR.

Another Metafilter commenter pushes back:

So here’s a slaughterhouse that TRIES to do the right thing by being clean and open about what they do, and it’s still no good to some people? I understand that some people feel very strongly about (not) eating meat, but it’s a fact that to most people, eating meat is just as much a staple as eating veggies. That’s not going to go away. To me, a slaughterhouse like this, that tries to be open and ethical about the process, is to be commended, not vilified — in fact, I wish we had abattoirs like that here in the US.

More of the Wiper’s work, which focuses on industrial and architectural spaces, can be viewed at his website and on his Facebook page.

The Rumbled Grift Of “Sponsored Content”?

Here’s an “ad/post/article/sponsored content/whatever, it pays the rent” that leaps out:

Newcastle Ale ‘bought’ me — an in-house copywriter — because actual Gawker writers can’t accept money from advertisers (not that I’m personally cashing Newcastle’s checks but you know, whatever). As someone being paid to write this, I have to say that it’s the greatest ad ever, mostly because Newcastle asked me to use those exact words. Is it the greatest ad I’ve ever been paid to call the greatest ad ever? Yes.

It’s by Stephanie Georgopulos, Senior Content Producer at Gawker Media, or more technically, a “sponsored collaboration” between Newcastle and Studio@Gawker. Yes, the newspeak deepens every time you check in.

It’s an interesting twist on sponsored content, and perhaps – or am I over-reaching? – a harbinger of its eventual collapse.

The “article” is titled: “We’ve Disguised This Newcastle Ad as an Article to Get You to Click It.” Clever, meta – meta-meta even. Even the ad/article/post is meta: “Welcome to the mega huge website we could afford for the mega huge football game ad we couldn’t afford.” But all of this pirouetting suggests to me that Gawker’s “content producers” are beginning to realize that their audience is catching on to the fact that, along with so many other sites, they routinely “disguise an ad as an article to get you to click it.” Now, it seems, to retain any sense of hipness with their increasingly clued-in readership, they have to own the lie, take off their disguise and reveal the fact that large swathes of online content is deliberately deceptive and written by people who know they’ve been “bought” by corporate interests to create propaganda.

At some point, doesn’t the whole house of cards start to tumble? When a grift is rumbled, doesn’t another grift need to be created to fill the gap?

Update here.

Ask Reza Aslan Anything

[Updated with questions submitted by readers]

Reza is an Iranian-American writer and a scholar of religions. He is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and, most recently, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, which offers an interpretation of the life and mission of the historical Jesus. Previous Dish on Zealot here, here and here, as well as Fox News’ treatment of Reza here and here.

Let us know what you think we should ask Reza (if you are reading on a mobile device, click here):

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A Silver Age? Ctd

Pierre Omidyar’s and Glenn Greenwald’s vision:

Salmon is struck by Omidyar’s ambition:

[H]e wants to build a global news organization with multiple brands, deep pockets, fearless journalists, top-notch support services, and even its own technology company. You can see how he could get to $250 million pretty quickly, at that rate. That’s a lot of cash — but it’s still less than a single year’s journalism budget for Bloomberg, Reuters, or the BBC. Omidyar needs to make his money go a long way: he’s building not only an international virtual newsroom (with real physical newsrooms in more than one city) but also an elaborate technology, sales, and even legal infrastructure.

Meanwhile, George Packer is confused by Ezra’s new project:

What does it mean to explain the world on the Web? One thing Internet journalists are never short of is commentary—many of them, such as Klein and Matthew Yglesias, who will leave Slate to join the new project, have been specializing in it since they were fledgling bloggers. (Klein has also written for The New Yorker.) What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say. Klein says that the new site is going to be in the “informing-our-audience business,” which describes everything from the Times to Fox Sports to blogging (which is what Klein and his colleagues have made their names doing). Perhaps Klein isn’t ready to say clearly; perhaps he doesn’t yet know exactly what he and his colleagues will be doing at Vox.

Vox CEO Jim Bankoff provides some details. On the eight-figure investment request:

[Q] Ezra reportedly sought $10 million plus from The Post for a new venture; is Vox committing that amount to this?

[A] We are not disclosing our investment, but suffice it to say these rumored amounts are way off and way high. Moreover, Vox already has many of the core pieces in place, including a leading proprietary modern media platform, Chorus, as well as a full set of creative brand advertising products, killer sales, technology, design, business teams, etc. So Ezra and team will be already starting with a very strong infrastructure.

[Q] Is the built-in infrastructure, etc the main reason why the “eight figure investment” figure is way high?

[A] Well, as I said, I never heard of an eight figure investment being contemplated to begin with (beyond unsourced rumors that are way off), but our existing infrastructure does contribute to making this initiative stronger and more cost efficient …

Mercifully, Vox’s “creative brand advertising” doesn’t include sponsored content:

Bankoff told Ad Age that he has no intention of “tricking anyone” with alternative forms of advertising such as sponsored content or “native” ads — which other new-media growth stories such as BuzzFeed have said they believe are a key part of the future of content. Instead, the Vox CEO said he is counting on Vox’s ability to produce better-quality display ads that will bring in more revenue than the standard banner or site takeover. As he described it:

“We really are in the process of reinventing what brand advertising can be on the web… we believe it can be engaging and beautiful and well integrated [and] fully transparent — we’re not trying to trick anyone like some native ads do… we can create high quality media products at large scale, and we can create high value brand advertising at scale as well.”

Last but not least, Nate Silver updates us on his progress and describes the website he’s building:

In contrast to the previous version of the site, which mainly focused on electoral politics, the new FiveThirtyEight will provide coverage of five major subjects: politics, economics, sports, science, and lifestyle. By design, almost any topic in the news can potentially fit into one or more of these categories. Our idea is that the site’s mission will be defined by how we cover the news rather than what we cover.

How will we cover the news? The new version of FiveThirtyEight will seek to apply the concept of data journalism on a wider scale.

What is data journalism? In one sense, data journalism can refer to the application of statistics and other quantitative methods toward issues in the news. Plenty of us are “stat geeks” at FiveThirtyEight. However, our methods will also include data visualization; the development of interactive graphics and features; and investigative and explanatory reporting, especially as applied to publicly-available data sets.

We’re aware that our strengths as a journalistic organization provide more value in some fields than others. For instance, statistical analysis is more likely to be useful when applied to a gubernatorial election in South Carolina than to a civil war in Syria. We have immense respect for news-gathering journalists and for original reporting.

Earlier Dish on the rise of the blogazines here and here.

Why Do Men Have Weaker Immune Systems?

T:

This month, a team of scientists at Stanford University has reported some of the best evidence yet that testosterone directly influences immune system function in men. … This finding that testosterone may dial down the immune system in humans is consistent with the results of studies of other animals, ranging from fish to chimps. But why would an essential male hormone deliberately handicap the immune system?

The answer might be that this is one of those odd outcomes that follow from the perverse incentives of evolutionary logic. In 1992, a pair of biologists at the University of Tromsø in Norway proposed the “immunocompetence handicap hypothesis,” which essentially says that males will perform dumb, dangerous stunts to impress females. The idea behind the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis is that, in order to prove their genetic fitness to potential mates, males make a trade-off between a robust immune system and a set of elaborate, testosterone-driven secondary sex characteristics, like brightly colored plumage in tropical birds.