Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay

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A 2026 study found that nafta had a directly measurable impact on American lifespans. Communities exposed to Mexican import competition experienced, on average, a 0.68 percent increase in annual age-adjusted mortality over the fifteen years following the agreement, an effect the authors concluded was large enough to erase prior estimates of nafta’s aggregate welfare gains.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs

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It’s jarring to think that our age—unlike our height or weight—can’t be precisely measured. One can count the rings on a tree to calculate how many years it was alive, but there’s no equivalent marker in humans. Every so often, in the hospital where I work, I notice that a patient has a listed age of more than a hundred and twenty. This is disorienting until I realize that the patient may have come into the hospital with no I.D. and no known contacts, and that they might be suffering from a condition—dementia, schizophrenia—that makes it hard for them to remember who they are, let alone how old. In such cases, the hospital’s computer system defaults to a birth year of 1900.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker

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Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.
~ Tyler Durden

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