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The Last Day of the Guarantee

A box of prescription drugs sat forgotten in the back closet of a retail pharmacy long enough that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Sealed bottles, original containers, never opened. Diet pills under brand names nobody has spoken aloud in forty years. Barbiturates. A four-ingredient headache compound. Every one of them was at least twenty-eight years past the date stamped on the label, which meant that under every rule governing American pharmacy, they were garbage. Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, looked at the box and saw an experiment nobody could afford to run on purpose. He called Roy Gerona at the University of California, San Francisco, a chemist who had grown up in the Philippines watching people take outdated medicine and get better anyway. Gerona ran the contents through liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The results were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on October 8, 2012, under a title that gives away nothing: “Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications.”

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No One Dies Lying

On the twenty-second of May, 1929, at Fort Riley, Kansas, a woman named Zenana Shepard sent her nurse to a closet for a bottle of bootleg whiskey. She said the liquor had a strange smell and a strange taste, and she asked whether enough remained in the bottle to test it for poison. Then she said the sentence that would outlive her by four years and travel all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States: “Dr. Shepard has poisoned me.” The doctor was her husband, Charles A. Shepard, a major in the Army medical corps, and the government would later argue he had salted that whiskey with bichloride of mercury because he loved a woman named Grace Brandon and his wife declined to divorce him. Zenana Shepard died on the fifteenth of June. Her husband was convicted of her murder, and her sentence, the spoken one, did much of the convicting.

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Six Hundred Million Breaths

The first inhale, the last exhale, and the enormous unexamined middle. A human being spends nine months underwater and then, in a single violent second, becomes an air-breathing animal. We tend to picture that first breath as a natural unfolding, the lungs simply beginning what they were built to do. The reality is closer to a demolition. Before birth the lungs are not empty. They are filled with fluid secreted by the lung tissue itself, and that fluid has to go somewhere before air can enter. Labor begins clearing it. The surge of adrenaline and noradrenaline that accompanies delivery flips the epithelial cells lining the airways from secreting fluid to absorbing it, and sodium channels in those cells begin pulling the liquid back into the tissue and the bloodstream. The mechanical compression of the chest during a vaginal delivery squeezes out more. Even so, at the moment of birth the newborn faces a set of collapsed, wet sacs whose internal surfaces are stuck together by the surface tension of water, and it must pull them open with nothing but the muscles of its own chest and diaphragm.

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The Plume and the Alibi

An answer to Caroline Fraser, whose book Murderland argues that lead and arsenic from the smelters of the Pacific Northwest helped produce the serial killers of the 1970s and 1980s. A reader sent me a fragment of an interview with you. You are asking why the Pacific Northwest produced so many serial killers, and you have arrived at smelters, at lead, and at a pair of graphs that lie on top of each other. You won a Pulitzer for Prairie Fires and you do not deserve a lazy reply, so here is the long one. One half of what you are saying is sound. The other half is rotten, and the rot is spreading into the half that deserves to survive.

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DO HARM: The Book That Began with a Word I Did Not Know

I am not a physician. I have never cultured a specimen, read a chest film, or signed a death certificate. I trained as a dramatist at Columbia, in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center, which qualifies me to tell you how a scene builds and not much else about a hospital. So let me get the obvious objection out of the way early, because it is the first thing a serious reader should ask. What business does a playwright have writing a book about hospital-acquired infection? The answer is the whole book, and it starts in a shut room in Newark in 2002.

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Enthymemes: The Argument You Finish Yourself

“Because you’re worth it.” Four words, running in L’Oréal advertising since 1971, and by the time you reached the period you had already done the heavy lifting. No one told you that personal worth justifies the purchase, that expensive cosmetics are how worth gets expressed, that you in particular qualify for the category. You supplied every one of those claims yourself, silently, in the half second the slogan allowed. The advertiser handed over a conclusion and trusted you to build the staircase leading up to it.

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The Goldfish Never Said That

A fabricated statistic taught a generation to believe their minds had broken. The truth about attention is stranger, and it names a culprit nobody wants to indict. Picture the goldfish. You have met it a thousand times, in conference keynotes and morning television and the opening line of ten thousand blog posts. It swims in its little bowl of received wisdom and carries one damning number on its back: nine seconds of attention, a full second longer than the modern human animal. We hold nuclear codes and write string quartets, and we supposedly lose the thread after eight seconds while the fish swims on, victorious. The crown of creation, outconcentrated by a snack with fins.

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