Imagethief

Month: May 2025

  • The Ticking Spine Bomb

    My lower back counts me down to mortality

    I threw my back out. It happened as I was out for a pre-dawn run. One moment I was a gliding athletic superman, the picture of health. The next, blam!, I was hobbled and shuffling, one hand on my spine and one foot in the grave. After a few minutes I was able to gingerly jog home. For the next couple of weeks my exercise routine was limited to walks and stretching.

    Among the things that my brothers and I inherited from our father is that we’re tall and we all have janky backs. I woke up with my first sore back on my thirtieth birthday. At the time, I thought, so much for my youth. That was 27 years ago.

    My back episodes are often multi-step disasters. There is a priming incident—I think of it as pulling the pin on a grenade—with a random delay of 0 seconds to three weeks until the actual explosion.

    This time, there were two possible priming incidents. The first was a hike on my last trip to Taiwan. The path between Tiger Mountain and Elephant Mountain in Taipei is mostly stone stairs up and down. It was belting rain and the path was slippery and during a descent I slipped on the edge of a step and landed on the next step down. It was just a few centimeters, but my knee was locked and I felt the shockwave go through my hips and into my lower back with a flash of pain. I thought, gonna pay for that later.

    The second possible priming incident was the trip home, later that week.

    If you gathered the world’s greatest scientists and asked them to create a device to destroy the human spine with maximum efficiency, they would create a baggage carousel. Consider: after twelve hours of enforced immobility in a seat with an interstellar void where lumbar support should be, you will have to drag an awkwardly shaped, 23-kilogram bag off a moving belt and over the lip of the carousel. This will require you to bend from the waist in exactly the way you are warned to never do when lifting heavy objects. If you’re unlucky and your bag is on the inside of the belt, god help you.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • The Endless PR Stunt

    America’s superstar pro-natalist couple hacks the media

    Have you heard about Malcolm and Simone Collins? They’re the American couple that have made themselves the poster-family for the “pro-natal” movement, which is an actual thing we have in the U.S. now. If you haven’t heard about them, congratulations! And I am so sorry to break your streak. But they’ve been profiled repeatedly and I know about them, so now you have to know about them, too. They look like this:

    A photograph of Simone and Malcolm Collins, seated, in front of a reflective window. Simone is on the left, dressed in a white bonnet with long drawstrings hanging down to her elbow level. She is wearing a black skirt over a white blouse with a ruffled neckline and puffy sleeves that end in ruffled cuffs, and her signature, chunky, black, round-framed glasses. Her hands are folded in her lap and she is looking down and to the right, in front of Malcolm. A toddler’s head is visible peeking from behind her left shoulder. Her overall presentation reflects her “techno puritan” aesthetic. Malcolm is dressed in a black leather jacket, black collared shirt and jeans, and square-rimmed black glasses, and is gesturing while speaking to camera for an interview.

    They are often pictured with more of their many children. Simone’s rural-trad presentation notwithstanding, this is a couple that famously met on Reddit a decade or so ago and that has been terminally online for years. They have strong “people you would sidle away from at a party” energy.

    Regrettably, the Collinses are fascinating both because of their cause (I have previously written about government pro-natal campaigns) and because of how successful they have been at getting themselves and the cause profiled. The current arc of coverage started in January and picked up speed through April, and I have read it so you don’t have to:1

    There are many more from last year and the year before. They may be decent at having kids (four plus one on the way), but they are undisputed world champions at getting into the press.

    Read the rest on Substack