Human Meme

At 10:48 on a weekday evening, a laboratory result appeared in a hospital record. The number was a D-dimer greater than 3,000. It did not explain itself, and no number could assign anyone to act. Richard was fifty-four. He had arrived with chest pain that began while he was lifting weights. An electrocardiogram had shown no abnormality. His chest X-ray and blood tests were still in progress. The advanced care practitioner who had been treating him considered a musculoskeletal explanation likely, but he could not reproduce the pain through movement or touch. Something more serious remained possible. His shift was over. The uncertainty was not.

The bottle came up at four in the morning. It had been buried for 141 years, and the people standing around it knew that this was one of a finite number of chances. They carried it into the light, checked its condition, and found it intact. Inside was a mixture of sand and seeds that had waited through 141 years of changing biological methods. The year was 2021. The pandemic had delayed the planned extraction from 2020, so the appointment itself had become part of the experiment's history. This was the sixteenth bottle of twenty. Four more would remain in the ground after this one was taken away.

The president woke early at his ranch. It was August 11, 1984, a Saturday, and Ronald Reagan had his weekly radio address to tape. Before the taping he did what broadcasters do. He leaned into the microphone and gave the engineers a voice level. What he gave them was a joke. He kept a straight face and announced that he had signed legislation outlawing Russia forever. Then came the punch line. "We begin bombing in five minutes." The technicians laughed. The networks had a line open, and they recorded it all. Within days the tape had circled the planet. American officials scrambled to assure the Kremlin that a joke was not policy. The Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Soviet forces in the Far East went on alert for half an hour. In his diary the president wrote that he had been doing a voice level, with no thought that anyone beyond the few people in the room would ever hear it.

The product was a pain reliever made by one of the most trusted companies in America. Months earlier, at a plant in Puerto Rico, two lots of it had failed a laboratory test: the caplets might not dissolve properly, which means, in the plainest reading, the medicine might not work. Nobody had been hurt. Nothing had been reported. And the company had told the government it would get the product back. It just never used the word recall. It called the program a purchase project. The word recall was the thing being avoided, because a recall is public, and public is expensive. The whole thing came apart because of a piece of paper.

I want to tell you about a winter in 1868. In Concord, Massachusetts, a thirty-five-year-old woman named Louisa May Alcott sat at a desk her father had built and wrote a novel for money, because the family needed the money. She wrote it fast, about ten weeks, and she wrote about four sisters who were her own sisters. She did not expect much from it. The first printing vanished. The presses ran all fall. Then the letters started. Thousands of letters, from girls all over the country, and every letter asked the same question. Who does Jo marry? Alcott put her answer in her journal, and it is the funniest and angriest sentence in American publishing.