Why don’t they ever say things like ‘You’re a good person. You’re a great, smart, wonderful guy, your life matters, and you deserve to be happy’? I mean, instead of saying, ‘You’re no good, your life is worthless, everyone hates you, you should hurt yourself, you deserve to be hurt, you deserve to die.’
“Even worse,” the woman went on, “why do the voices always say things like ‘Go shove some innocent stranger in front of an oncoming train’? Instead of, like, ‘How about helping that little old lady with her bags?’ ”
He wanted to laugh, but the woman was being earnest. She was young—early thirties, he guessed—with an unremarkable face except for her eyes, so dark you could barely distinguish iris from pupil. She stared at him from under thick bangs, the only part of her black hair that had been streaked blond. Kiss Me Deadly red lipstick, and a long-sleeved forest-green dress of some suède-like fabric that looked vintage. His gaze kept being drawn to her gleaming manicure, each copper-colored nail like a Japanese beetle.
He could have told her that what she was saying wasn’t true. The voices didn’t always bully or suggest evil acts. Sometimes their words were impersonal, and might even be kind. Sometimes they didn’t speak at all but only breathed heavily—which could, he supposed, be as sinister as threats or curses. Some hummed, or chanted, or sang. “I hear lullabies,” one patient had told him.
If he’d wanted to get into a conversation with Lady Greensleeves, he might have said all this. He might have added the obvious: non-negative voices were not necessarily a positive thing. The problem with the lullabies was that they drove a woman of fifty to rock back and forth and suck her thumb. And, of course, there was a certain kind of person, one of the worst kinds of person, who seemed to live with a voice continually telling them how great they were, and who felt victimized because their perfection was not universally acknowledged.
This story is from the September 09, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the September 09, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Drug of Choice - The natural world contains many billions of potential medications. The question is how to find the ones that work.
AI. is transforming the way medicines are made. Bacteria produce numerous molecules that could become medicines, but most of them aren’t easily identified or synthesized with the technology that exists today. A small percentage of them, however, can be constructed by following instructions in the bacteria’s DNA. Burian helped me search the sequence for genes that looked familiar enough to be understandable but unfamiliar enough to produce novel compounds. We settled on a string of DNA that coded for seven linked amino acids, the same number found in vancomycin. Then Burian introduced me to Robert Boer, a synthetic chemist who would help me conjure our drug candidate.
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