The Rabbit Died: The History of the Home Pregnancy Test →

Cari Romm, writing for The Atlantic:

A long, long time before women peed on sticks, they peed on plenty of other things.

One of the oldest descriptions of a pregnancy test comes from ancient Egypt, where women who suspected they were pregnant would urinate on wheat and barley seeds: If the wheat grew, they believed, it meant the woman was having a girl; the barley, a boy; if neither plant sprouted, she wasn’t pregnant at all. Avicenna, a 10th-century Persian philosopher, would pour sulfur over women’s urine, believing that the telltale sign was worms springing from the resulting mixture. In 16th-century Europe, specialists known as “piss prophets” would read urine like tea leaves, claiming to know by its appearance alone whether the woman who supplied it was pregnant.

Piss Prophets—that was the name of my band in high school.

Joshua Cohen’s ‘Book of Numbers’ →

Alexandra Alter, writing for The New York Times:

“The world made this book true while I was writing it, which of course is the paranoid’s greatest fantasy,” he said, smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of grapefruit juice in his small basement apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn, one morning. “The question now is not, ‘Is this true,’ but, ‘How can we live with it?’ ”

The lede of the NYT’s review of ‘Book of Numbers’ is what initially hooked me:

Alive with talk and dense with data, Joshua Cohen’s novel “Book of Numbers” reads as if Philip Roth’s work were fired into David Foster Wallace’s inside the Hadron particle collider.

But reading the first couple of chapters yesterday is what bumped it to the front of my to-read list.

The New Normal

Stephanie Wittels Wachs:

The grief takes up so much space that there’s not much room for anything else. When I’m not thinking about how bleak life’s going to be without you, I’m signing or notarizing or mailing documents on your behalf or explaining to some customer service representative that you’re dead. Most importantly, I’m trying my best to get out of bed every morning, put one foot in front of the other, and smile for my daughter. This is taking all the energy I have. As a result, my ability to think and remember is notably compromised. I constantly say one word but mean another. I hear “I told you that already” constantly.

If you’re someone who has dealt with the unexpected death of someone close to you, you’ll recognize yourself in this piece.

/via Bill Simmons

Colonizing Mars →

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for The New Yorker:

Kelly’s One-Year Mission represents a kind of dress rehearsal for a longer, straighter, and even more punishing voyage. In NASA’s Buzz Lightyear-esque formulation, it’s “a stepping stone” to “Mars and beyond.” At its closest, Mars is thirty-five million miles from Earth, and, under the most plausible scenario, getting there takes nine months. Owing to the relative motion of the planets, any astronauts who make it to Mars will have to cool their heels on the red planet for three more months before rocketing back home. What NASA learns about Kelly—at least, so the theory goes—will help it anticipate and overcome the challenges of interplanetary travel.

Makes sure you read this one all the way to the end.

Th Atlantic Interviews The Rolling Stones—In 1971 →

Sara Davidson, writing for The Atlantic:

Jagger lay on his side on a couch, drinking Château Lafite-Rothschild from the bottle. The hotel in Copenhagen faced the North Sea, and the windows were thrown wide-open. With him were three other members of the Rolling Stones and a few friends, playing poker, clowning, laughing, and smoking. Much lost all the money he had on him, borrowed some, lost that, threw in his socks, and finally his room key. “There,” he said, laughing. “That’s worth a lot. It was the first night of the Stones’ Grand Tour of Europe, 1970—eight countries, nineteen cities, in six weeks—and the kickoff, a press conference at the Marina Hotel, was a letdown or both press and Stones. Reporters had come from all over Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Austria, but they filled barely four rows of seats. The band walked in a half hour late with Jagger at the head, revved up and laughing, wearing a straw hat with flowers and ribbons in the brim, enormous round sunglasses, a blue shirt open in front, and close-fitting blue trousers. He flopped in a char and started banging the table. “Can you hear the drums?” he called to guitarist Mick Taylor, and cackled, flapping his slips. Turning to the reporters, he mugged, “Good afternoon, children. We’re here today to talk about religion.”

I forget how I stumbled across this, but man, is it a good read.

Zen Pencils’ ‘Frida Kahlo: Strange Like Me’ →

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Another perfect cartoon from Gavin Aung Than. I almost hate to use the word ‘cartoon’ to describe what he does. I can’t wait to show this to my girls one day.

Eddie Vedder Performs ‘Better Man’ on David Letterman

In Rock Star School, they devote an entire semester to learning how to deal with a broken guitar string in the middle of a song.

Public Radio Can Capitalize on Its Popularity Without Selling Out Its Mission →

Ira Glass:

Two weeks ago I told a reporter that public radio is ready for capitalism. People have been commenting online about what they think I meant. I’m writing this to clarify.

The hardest part of being a liberal is dealing with other liberals who refuse to be pragmatic. Not surprisingly, I.G. drops a truth bomb here. Sure, he was talking about radio and podcasts, but the general theme—stop shirking from the fiscal responsibility of art—would be useful for many areas of our culture.

South Dakotans May Not Like Obama, But They’d Like to See the President →

Greg Jaffe, writing for The Washington Post:

There’s hardly a state in America that’s more hostile to Obama than South Dakota, where the president’s disapproval rating hovers around 70 percent and the local Republican Party last summer passed a resolution calling for his impeachment.

But even in an era of almost unprecedented political polarization, people still want to see their president. That was especially true in Watertown, which had never hosted a sitting commander in chief.

Just when you thought there was no hope, that all was lost.

America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care →

Atal Gawande, writing for The New Yorker:

Virtually every family in the country, the research indicates, has been subject to overtesting and overtreatment in one form or another. The costs appear to take thousands of dollars out of the paychecks of every household each year. Researchers have come to refer to financial as well as physical “toxicities” of inappropriate care—including reduced spending on food, clothing, education, and shelter. Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm.

Why does this fact barely seem to register publicly?

The closest you can get to mind expansion without taking LSD. Read this, but be prepared to question everything you thought you knew about the healthcare you receive.