The Red Pill of Humility | Is Beekeeping Wrong? | Retailers appear to be facing a self-checkout reckoning | My Last Day as a Surgeon

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The Red Pill of Humility - The Atlantic

The 1999 film The Matrix is famous for coining the metaphor of the “red pill.” In the imaginary world of the movie, people live largely in a state of illusion, experiencing a completely managed simulation of real life that keeps them passive. The protagonist, Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), is offered the choice by the rebel leader Morpheus of staying in the simulation by taking a blue pill or breaking into reality by taking a red pill. This is not an easy decision: choose reality, with its difficult truths, or live in the numb oblivion of the Matrix?

The “red pill” entered the lexicon as a choice we can make in life. Lately, this sometimes refers to political radicalization, but since before that and more benignly, it has meant the choice we make in life to either numb ourselves or face reality. On the one hand, the proposition runs, we can accept the narcotic distractions of modern life, be they drugs or social media or smartphones. On the other hand, we can face the sometimes harsh reality—of our relationships, our work, our prospects—including the truth about ourselves that we might prefer not to confront.

With the blue pill, we are perfect the way we are: We are lovable; our opinions are right; we never sin. The red pill shows us our imperfect selves: flawed, maybe hard to love, blameworthy, ignorant, arrogant.

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Is Beekeeping Wrong? - The New Yorker

On a hot, pollen-dazed morning this summer, I stopped by the house of Gareth John, a retired agricultural ecologist, who lives on a quiet lane above a river in Oxfordshire, to take a look at his bees. In British beekeeping circles, John, who has a white beard and a sprightly, didactic manner, is well known as a “natural beekeeper,” although he acknowledged right off the bat that this was a problematic term. “It’s an oxymoron, right?” he said. John cares for perhaps half a million bees, but he does not think of himself as keeping anything. “I wouldn’t call myself a dog-keeper,” he said. “But I have a dog.” Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture. They believe that mainstream beekeeping—like most human-centered interactions with the natural world—has lost its way. There is another path, but it requires the unlearning and dismantling of almost two centuries of bee husbandry and its related institutions. During my visit, John asked me not to disclose his exact location, because his hives fell off the radar of the National Bee Unit, a government agency that monitors honeybee health, about a decade ago, and he prefers it that way.

John grew up in the English countryside in the sixties and seventies, when beekeeping was—as he remembers it—a gentle, live-and-let-live pastime: men in veils pottering around a few hives under the apple trees, jars of honey for sale at the garden gate. “It was very, very leave-alone,” he said. “Natural.” When John returned to the craft, in the early two-thousands, he was shocked by what it had become. In 1992, an ectoparasitic mite called Varroa destructor, which had jumped from an Asian honeybee to the Western one sometime in the fifties, emerged in Britain and killed untold millions of bees. Thousands of hobbyist beekeepers gave up. (Varroa reached the U.S. in 1987, and wrought similar devastation.) There was an atmosphere of vigilance and doom. Bee researchers talked about the “Four P’s”—parasites, pathogens, poor nutrition, and pesticides—as if they were the horsemen of the Apocalypse. The British Beekeeping Association, which has served as the custodian of the craft since the late nineteenth century, ran courses on pest control. “Fear,” John said. “Disease. Disease. Disease.” He watched fellow-beekeepers treat their bees with miticides, to control varroa; import more prolific queens, and other non-native bees from southern Europe, to boost honey production; and feed their hives syrup to get them through the winter. “It had become this agro-industrial monster, where you were supposed to behave as if you had a high-yielding Holstein dairy cow,” he recalled.

It didn’t feel right. As a species, the Western honeybee (Apis mellifera) is millions of years old. (It was introduced to North America by European settlers in the sixteen-twenties.) Although people have harvested its honey and wax—sweetness and light—for thousands of years, the honeybee has not been tamed. “Wheat is domesticated. Cows are domesticated. Dogs are domesticated,” John said. “Domestication is a mutual process. You could never domesticate a robin. Bees are the same as robins. They will quite happily live in a nest box that you give them. But they’re not dependent on you. They don’t need you.”

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Retailers appear to be facing a self-checkout reckoning -

More than 30 years after the introduction of self-checkout and its promises of labor-cost savings, the tech has become ubiquitous in stores across the US.

Now, retailers including Costco, Walmart, and Kroger are rethinking some of their self-checkout strategies. Some are finding they still need employees to combat theft, assist with purchases, review IDs, and check receipts.

Costco, for example, has started asking staff to check membership cards in the self-checkout lanes, as well as assist with scanning items.

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My Last Day as a Surgeon - The New Yorker

In May of 2013, the Stanford University neurosurgical resident Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic lung cancer. He was thirty-six years old. In his two remaining years—he died in March of 2015—he continued his medical training, became the father to a baby girl, and wrote beautifully about his experience facing mortality as a doctor and a patient. In this excerpt from his posthumously published memoir, “When Breath Becomes Air,” which is out on January 12th, from Random House, Kalanithi writes about his last day practicing medicine.

I hopped out of the CT scanner, seven months since I had returned to surgery. This would be my last scan before finishing residency, before becoming a father, before my future became real.

It was already 6 P.M. I had to go see patients, organize tomorrow’s O.R. schedule, review films, dictate my clinic notes, check on my post-ops, and so on. Around 8 P.M., I sat down in the neurosurgery office, next to a radiology viewing station. I turned it on, looked at my patients’ scans for the next day—two simple spine cases—and, finally, typed in my own name. I zipped through the images as if they were a kid’s flip-book, comparing the new scan to the last. Everything looked the same, the old tumors remained exactly the same ... except, wait.

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