Bari’s Picks of the Week: Life and Death

Hi folks—we’ll get to three must-read stories in a moment, but first, an exciting announcement about next week.

To mark the end of summer, we’re launching Journeys, a new series about the trips (literal and figurative) that change us. It’s our firm belief that everyone, for at least a few days each year, needs to switch off and hit the road. So for the last week of August, you’ll get an essay in your inbox each morning from some of our deepest thinkers—including Paul Kingsnorth and Agnes Callard—who’ll tell stories of life-changing journeys, by rail, by car, and by motorcycle. Then, to cap off the week, Abigail Shrier will share one of the most powerful personal stories I’ve ever read.

We can’t wait to share these essays with you. I hope they help you slow down and reflect before the busiest month of the year begins.

Okay, let’s get to this week’s stories.

The Doctors Redefining Death

Death and taxes, so the saying goes, are the only two certainties in life. “For millennia,” medical ethicist L.S. Dugdale writes, death “was fairly straightforward.” But now, a group of doctors is turning that certainty on its head.

Amid shortages of organ donations, a group of physicians is seeking to redefine the very definition of death to include the “hopelessly comatose” in order to relieve demand for healthy human organs.

Dugdale writes, “If we expand the definition of death to include patients who are alive—unconscious, yes, but definitely showing brain activity—we might end up killing people who could regain consciousness,” such as a Kentucky man who awoke just before the planned retrieval of his organs.

The implications of this are profound, and Dugdale explains the issue better than anyone I’ve read. Read her here:

They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems.

No Free Press story has generated more discussion this week—much of it from people who failed to read it—than this one.

There is real hunger in Gaza, as we have reported on in these pages. There is also a concerted campaign to make that hunger appear like widespread starvation—starvation that is being induced by Israel.

In an investigative report, Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova found that at least a dozen viral images of hunger in Gaza—photos that have appeared across social media, in the reports of leading international aid organizations, and in CNN, The New York Times, and NPR—lack essential context. The subjects of those photos all have significant preexisting health problems, including devastating diseases like cerebral palsy.

“The inference is that Israel is behind this, and if they just agree to a ceasefire, all of this will stop now,” said one military expert. “And that is the farthest thing from the truth.”

A critically important piece of reporting. Don’t miss it:

Living in the Shadow of the American Dream

“I live in Shenandoah County, Virginia,” Andrew Tait writes. “I’m a factory worker, a farmer, and a father of two girls, one still in diapers. I get up before the sun, and most days I don’t sit down until after it’s gone.”

He works very hard. And lives honestly. But he can’t afford groceries. And he can’t marry his partner, who’d lose her Medicaid coverage if they wed.

Tait, standing in the long shadow of the American dream, asks a simple question: Who is this country for?

It’s a short, mighty piece:

America’s Nuclear Revival

What if I told you that the light in your home is brought to you by the Russian state?

Twenty percent of the U.S. grid is powered by nuclear energy—a source of electricity dependent on enriched uranium as fuel. But due to a series of political decisions and decades of government neglect, America has lost its ability to supply its own enriched uranium. Instead, we import much of it from Russia, one of our greatest geopolitical foes.

But General Matter, a nuclear start-up that broke ground in Kentucky earlier this month, hopes to change that.

“Imagine a world where every reactor being built around the world leads to a long tail of dependence on China and Russia,” said co-founder Lee Robinson. “Imagine a world where our grid is unstable because we don’t have our own reactors. Where we have submarines and aircraft carriers that are dry-docked because we can’t fuel them. That’s the world we could be living in, in 2040.”

Not if General Matter can help it. Sean Fischer reports.

Also on my radar are excellent pieces about the quiet gutting of Yosemite, Niall Ferguson on America’s own Gilded Age, and a galvanizing speech delivered at Yale Law School by former U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned from her post rather than succumb to pressure from President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice to drop the prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams.

That’s it from me, folks. Enjoy the dog days of summer, and be sure to read Suzy’s Saturday morning culture dispatch and Things Worth Remembering while you’re at it.