Link Banana

As ever shouldering his responsibility to tackle moral gray areas, William Saletan offers an enlightening (if unsettling) look into the battle over our organs.

How can we get more organs? By redefining death. First we coined “brain death,” which let us take organs from people on ventilators. Then we proposed to allow organ retrieval even if nonconscious brain functions persisted. That goal has now been realized through “donation after cardiac death,” the rule applied in Denver, which permits harvesting based on heart, rather than brain, stoppage.

Stoppage is complicated. There’s no “moment” of death. Some transplant surgeons wait five minutes after the last heartbeat. Others wait two. The Denver team waited 75 seconds, reasoning that no heart is known to have self-restarted after 60 seconds.

(via MeFi, where the early comments are uniformly bitter)

I’m ready to name this the craziest thing I’ve heard all day:

The remains of a woman have been found sitting in front of her TV - 42 years after she was reported missing.

(via Gizmodo)

It’s often said that a near-death experience is the surest way to understand what’s important in life. If Edward Wong’s story about Wang Zhijun and Li Wanzhi is to be believed, that’s exactly what’s happened for the couple.

“The only thing we had was each other,” Mr. Wang said. “We encouraged each other to live on, and we said once we got out, we’d live a good life and care for each other. Now we have a new start.”

Pretty interesting review of two books about the Civil War over at The New Republic. Of all the interesting bits though, this still seemed the most important:

The American government has learned, sometimes in fits and starts, to “manage” the problem of its troop casualties much as early nineteenth-century reformers learned to “manage” the punishment of social deviants: remove them from public view and institutionalize their recognition. As early as World War II, a major effort was made to keep photographs of dead and wounded American soldiers out of the media, and after televised newsreporting brought the Vietnam War “home” each night and helped to turn the American public against it, a dramatically different protocol was put in place for the first Gulf war and now for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No battle footage, bleeding soldiers, or flag-draped coffins are to be seen. Remembrances are consigned instead to the dry print and official wordings of interior newspaper pages, and assimilated to the formal occasions marking collective sacrifice: Armistice Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. It was remarkable, and telling, that well- placed commentators could regard the attacks of September 11 as heralding an end of American “innocence.”

(via brijit)

I’ll leave the explanation to Boing Boing:

German photographers Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta have a show of their extraordinary before-and-after-death photos opening on April 9 at the Wellcome Trust in London. The photos are marvellous and wrenching, the difference between flesh animated and the empty vessel gigantic and unmistakable, even when the before-death shot is of someone terribly ill. Life’s marvellous and inexplicable.

I’d heard and forgot about the news that 4000 Americans have died in Iraq until I saw this. It made me sit up and pay attention.

In Part 2 of David Brooks’s 2007 Sidneys, I found an excellent story from the too-often drunk and strident Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens had supported the American invasion of Iraq, and his writings saying so were part of what convinced Mark Daily to enlist. When Hitchens learned of Daily’s death “in theater” he felt the expected doubt and regret.

This Vanity Fair story is about Hitchens’s efforts to work through his feelings, and will probably make you cry. Well, at least it made me cry.