The Top 5: IVF regulations, time in medicine, voice clones, "Mid TV"
Welcome to the latest edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Take Five” (Comment Magazine)
Because Brewer Eberly explores how the concept of time affects healthcare workers and their delivery of care, especially in an age of increasing technology use and telemedicine.
Healers claim to practice not just a good work but an art. There is something of an aura around the so-named “art of medicine.” But for the art of medicine to be both an “art” and a “good work” requires recognition of the limits of purpose and attention specific to the kind of art medicine is. One of these limits is time. The more medicine resists time as a limit-in-ambush, the more clinicians report a dissonant sense that “I didn’t have time to do what I needed to do,” and the more patients report, as a patient put it to me after a rushed encounter with another doctor, “nothing happened.”
“The Man Who Turned His Home into a Homeless Shelter” (The Guardian)
Because Samira Shackle tells the story of Stuart Potts, a man living in a one-bedroom apartment in Manchester, UK, who opens up his home to homeless people.
The drastic increase in homelessness and rough sleeping over the past decade and a half is visible on the streets of every major city in the UK. But even those who are distressed by this are unlikely to host strangers in their own home. Potts, though, sees his actions as logical and obvious: people need help, and if you can provide it, then you should. “I don’t need this space – I can sit in my bedroom and watch TV,” he said, motioning at his modestly sized front room. “If more people helped others, the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it?”
“Eleven Labs is Building an Army of Voice Clones” (The Atlantic)
Because Charlie Warzel looked into a new AI startup, and we may be on the precipice of unleashing the next level of disinformation.
It’s easy, when you play around with the ElevenLabs software, to envision a world in which you can listen to all the text on the internet in voices as rich as those in any audiobook. But it’s just as easy to imagine the potential carnage: scammers targeting parents by using their children’s voice to ask for money, a nefarious October surprise from a dirty political trickster. I tested the tool to see how convincingly it could replicate my voice saying outrageous things. Soon, I had high-quality audio of my voice clone urging people not to vote, blaming “the globalists” for COVID, and confessing to all kinds of journalistic malpractice. It was enough to make me check with my bank to make sure any potential voice-authentication features were disabled.
“Taming IVF’s Wild West” (The New Atlantis)
Because Emma Waters supports more IVF regulation by the government - but in her argument, more ethical regulation.
In a sense, then, the left’s picture of a binary between pro-IVF and anti-IVF is encouraged by the fact that there are so few ethical boundaries surrounding the technology. The share of the American public that is concerned about the destruction of embryos in IVF and yet is also in favor of IVF as a procedure for infertility is in the awkward position of effectively supporting an industry that also violates their conviction about the inherent value of human life at all stages of development.
“The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV” (NYT)
Because James Poniewozik observes, “What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones. We have entered the golden age of Mid TV.”
ICYMI on the podcast:
Episode 106: Is Biden’s campaign in trouble? An update on Episode 89
The Morning Five: April 29, 2024