The Man Who Moves Markets | Don’t Pay for Cord-Blood Banking | Where Was the Actual Ice During the Ice Age? | The Commons: The Canadian Way of Death

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� � � � � � The Man Who Moves Markets - The Atlantic    Carson Block uses covert techniques to uncover fraud for profit. Now he’s under investigation himself. Is he the hero of Wall Street, or the villain? For more than a year, the mystery man, who spoke with a French accent, had presented himself in emails as a Paris-based reporter at The Wall Street Journal named William Horobin. But Block had already made an approach to the real Horobin, who has an English accent, and learned that he hadn’t sent those emails. Based on the impostor’s inquiries, Block had a strong suspicion about why he was there. Beginning in 2015, Block’s hedge fund had published a series of highly critical research reports about Groupe Casino, an international retailer based in France. Block believed that Groupe Casino had sent this man on a spying mission to suss out his next moves. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Don't Pay for Cord-Blood Banking - The Atlantic    Umbilical blood can be a valuable treatment for rare diseases. But that doesn’t mean you need to pay thousands of dollars to bank your baby’s. In the fall of 1988, Matthew Farrow, a 5-year-old boy with a rare blood disorder, received the world’s first transplant of umbilical-cord blood from a newborn sibling. It worked: Farrow was cured. This miraculous outcome broke open a whole new field in medicine—and, not long after, a whole new industry aimed at getting expecting parents to bank their baby’s umbilical-cord blood, just in case. These days, in fact, being pregnant means being bombarded at the doctor’s office and on Instagram with ads touting cord blood as too precious to waste. For several hundred dollars upfront, plus a storage fee of $100 to $200 every year, the banks’ ads proclaim, you could save your child’s life. Cord-blood banking has been likened to a “biological insurance policy.” Continued here � � � � � � Where Was the Actual Ice During the Ice Age? - The Atlantic    On November 14, 2016, a huge earthquake rocked Kaikōura, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, killing two people, triggering a tsunami, and thrusting stretches of coastline 18 feet up out of the sea. The biologists Ceridwen Fraser and Jon Waters were watching the aftermath on television. “We were seeing images of kelp and [abalone] lifted out of the water and dying,” Waters says. For these two scientists who had spent much of the previous decade looking for evidence of ecological upheaval on the coast, Fraser says, there was only one thing to do: “We got on a plane.” A decade or so earlier, in the mid-2000s, Fraser was a student in Waters’s lab at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. The pair were studying how the genetics of New Zealand bull kelp vary across the Southern Hemisphere, and they noticed something very strange. Continued here � � � � � � The Commons: The Canadian Way of Death - The Atlantic    The nation legalized assisted suicide—and exposed the limits of liberalism, David Brooks wrote in the June 2023 issue. “The Canadian Way of Death” is a must-read for anyone dealing with prolonged suffering or observing it in loved ones. Rarely has incisive research been combined with a humane perspective so convincingly and compellingly. Thank you, David Brooks, for expressing so well the underpinnings of our deep doubts about assisted suicide. My husband chose to have medical assistance in dying years after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. Reading David Brooks’s article, I feel he romanticizes the value of life and dismisses the extreme suffering and stoicism of those who are dying, and in doing so, he vilifies MAID administrators and physicians, who provide the option of a dignified and carefully chosen form of death. My husband was a life-affirming person; his motto was “Life is good.” For seven of the 10 years that followed his cancer diagnosis, he received extraordinary care from a team of amazing cancer specialists and lived a rich, active, and meaningful life. He selected MAID because despite his extraordinary life force, he needed to be released from extreme suffering, immobility, and pain. His decision permitted a month of meaningful visits with his family members and allowed them to be gathered around him at the moment of his death, neither of which could have happened without MAID. I wish Brooks had considered both the strict procedures in place to protect vulnerable applicants and the stories of people like my husband. Brooks’s analysis, which paints MAID administrators as unfeeling, unethical bureaucrats who “erase” human dignity, does an immense disservice to these courageous and caring professionals, and to those humans who love life but in their suffering deliberately choose a dignified path for leaving this Earth. Continued here

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