Masturbation, Amalgamation, Doctors in Moral Crisis, a Snake and a Frog - Dinner Table Digest № 54
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
This edition of the Digest features an eclectic collection of stories that span everything from the history of masturbation in the human species, possible governance changes in the Waterloo Region, the moral crisis brought on by a health care system that privileges profit over people, and the joys of owning an unconventional pet.
Sections:
Masturbation in Humanoids / Amalgamation in the Waterloo Region / The Moral Crisis Among Physicians / Frog
Scientists Ponder When Our Ancestors First Started Cranking the Hog - Frank Landymore - Futurism
It turns out that masturbation has been a part of the animal experience for millions of years, and but was especially prolific among the ancestors of early humans. Today, primate non-humans, along with human beings are well-known for engaging in masturbation.
Yet the old way of thinking brushed off this "autosexual" behavior as aberrant, arising mostly as a stress response in monkeys and apes held in captivity. This hypothesis, though, failed to explain why primatologists would go on to frequently observe this behavior in the wild.
So to blow the lid on this mystery, Brindle and her team drew from nearly 400 papers and records documenting the masturbation habits of these creatures, both wild and captive. The raw data showed that 73 percent of wild male primates masturbated, but females lagged behind at 35 percent.
From there, the researchers used mathematical modeling to construct an evolutionary history of the behavior across primate species, which is how they discovered that, not only have primates been cranking it for tens of millions of years, but that the behavior has remained ubiquitous throughout the ages.
Envisioning governance in Waterloo Region between amalgamation or divorce - Jorg Broschek - Waterloo Region Record
Every few years the discussion of amalgamation rears its head in the Waterloo Region. It usually has to do with the amalgamation of two specific lower-tier municipalities, Kitchener and Waterloo. This time around, motivated in part by Conservative Premier Doug Ford’s crusade to reform municipal governance in Ontario, the focus is on the Region itself, which consists of three cities (Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge) and four townships (Wilmot, Woolwich, Wellesley, and North Dumfries). I am, for the most part, opposed to amalgamation generally speaking, because in nearly all cases citizens lose democratic representation through the consolidation and redistricting processes that inevitably result. As Jorg Broschek, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Federalism and Multilevel Governance at Wilfrid Laurier University says,
Finally, there is no reason to expect that amalgamation will enhance our local democracy. On the contrary: It will increase the distance between residents and their representatives. The voter turnout in Toronto’s municipal election in 2022, for example, was below 30 per cent, a historic low. The roots of disengagement and nonparticipation are much deeper. Social inequality and corresponding representation gaps are, as we know from decades of research, the main obstacle to political participation.
He concludes,
And let’s not forget: The performance of any governance structure still depends on the skills of those who work within it, and who bring its potential to life. Political leadership matters profoundly, in times of crisis more than ever.
It is also in this respect that our established two-tier system has an important advantage: The multiplication of political arenas puts on full display those leaders who seem to understand the key challenges of our times, and our responsibility to act accordingly, and those who don’t.
The Moral Crisis of America's Doctors - Eyal Press - New York Times
This piece reads like a Cautionary Tale about the soul-sucking corporate horror that is private health care. Recently Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced innocuous sounding private 'clinics' to pick up some slack in a public system that he and his conservative friends have purposefully and consistently underfunded. This comes even as American doctors speak up about the moral damage that comes with making medical decisions - or having medical decisions made for them - in the name of corporate profits.
During her training, a patient with a terminal condition somberly informed her that his daughter couldn’t make it to the hospital to be with him in his final hours. A. promised the patient that he wouldn’t die alone and then held his hand until he passed away. Interactions like that one would not be possible today, she told me, because of the new emphasis on speed, efficiency and relative value units (R.V.U.), a metric used to measure physician reimbursement that some feel rewards doctors for doing tests and procedures and discourages them from spending too much time on less remunerative functions, like listening and talking to patients. “It’s all about R.V.U.s and going faster,” she said of the ethos that permeated the practice where she’d been working. “Your door-to-doctor time, your room-to-doctor time, your time from initial evaluation to discharge.”
Some young doctors have responded by forming unions:
Last May, the medical residents at Stanford voted to form a union by a tally of 835 to 214, a campaign Sossenheimer enthusiastically supported. “We’ve seen a boom in unionization in many other industries,” he told me, “and we realize it can level the power dynamics, not just for other workers but within medicine.” One thing that drove this home to him was seeing the nurses at Stanford, who belong to a union, go on strike to advocate for safer staffing and better working conditions. Their outspokenness stood in striking contrast to the silence of residents, who risked being singled out and disciplined if they dared to say anything that might attract the notice of the administration or their superiors. “That’s a big reason that unionization is so important,” he says.
The Stanford example has inspired medical residents elsewhere. Not long ago, I spoke with a group of residents in New York City who were thinking about unionizing, on the condition that I not disclose their identities or institutional affiliations. Although the medical profession has been slow to diversify, the residents came from strikingly varied backgrounds. Few grew up in wealthy families, judging by the number of hands that went up when I asked if they’d taken on debt to finish medical school. “Anyone here not take on debt?” said a woman sitting on the carpet in the living room where we gathered, prompting several people to laugh.
Having a union, one resident explained, would enable the group to demand better working conditions without having to worry about getting in trouble with their superiors or losing fellowship opportunities. They would be able to advocate for patients rather than apologizing to them for practices they considered shameful, another added. When I asked what they meant by shameful, I learned that a number of the residents had trained at a hospital that served an extremely poor community with a limited number of I.C.U. beds — beds that during the pandemic were sometimes given to wealthy “V.I.P.” patients from other states while sicker patients from the surrounding neighborhood languished on the general floor.
It is a mistake to think that private health care will solve the problems in our current system; private health care ultimately shifts medical decisions from physicians and health care professionals working in your best interest, to hedge fund managers looking for increased shareholder profits.
Frog - Anne Fadiman - Harper’s Magazine
Anne Fadiman tells the story of Bunky, an African Clawed Frog that came into the home as a mail-order tadpole. African Clawed Frogs, it turns out, are aquatic frogs covered with a thick mucus that makes them slippery and difficult to catch, let alone hold. Bunky the Grow-a-Frog lived for a surprising 15 years. Fadiman’s piece is a really well-written reflection on the joys of having a relationship with a pet that doesn’t necessarily interact with humans in the way that dogs and cats do.
Bunky was an aquatic frog who surfaced only occasionally (he had lungs and breathed air, but not very often), at which time his googly eyes would protrude above the waterline, lending him a faint resemblance to a two-ounce hippopotamus. He had five diaphanously webbed toes on his hind feet, three of them clawed, and four long, thin, sensitive-looking fingers on his forefeet. He looked nothing like Frog in Frog and Toad, or indeed like any of the barrel-chested bright green mesomorphs in our children’s picture books. He was pale. Planar. Ghostly. More than a little Gollum-like.
Because he wasn’t built for life on land, Bunky lacked the sine qua non of frogdom: the ability to jump. He was like a bird that couldn’t fly, a snake that couldn’t slither. However, he compensated for his terrestrial shortcomings with his grace in the water. Sometimes he lay splayed on the bottom, like a rug; sometimes he floated, unmoving, at a forty-five-degree angle. But when he took off, he was so efficient as to seem positively urtextual. He could swim up, down, forward, backward, and sideways. The in-and-out whoosh of his hind limbs—akimbo, straight, akimbo, straight—could have been the pattern on which all frog kicks were based, his powerful webbed feet the model for all swim fins.
You may be wondering: What kind of frog was he?
I didn’t.
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