Happy Labor Day weekend, all!
All week, I've been accumulating things I wanted to tell you about. Almost every day I read, heard or saw something that made me think, "Newsletter material!"
But then, over dinner the other night, I paged through this week's New Yorker magazine. The Sept. 4 issue is themed "Animals: An Archival Issue."
And E.B. White's January 31, 1953 Talk of the Town piece, about the New York Zoological Society's turtle blood bank, is what I wanted to share with you more than anything.
Medicine, White explains, was (is?) interested in turtle blood because it was surmised that a special property in it prevented them from getting arteriosclerosis, and therefore might be useful for humans. But White has a different theory as to why turtles don't get heart disease.
"There is a possibility that turtles stay in nice shape because of the way they conduct their lives," he wrote. "Turtles rarely pass up a chance to relax in the sun on a partly submerged log. No two turtles ever lunched together with the idea of promoting anything. No turtle ever went around complaining that there is no profit in book publishing except from subsidiary rights. Turtles do not work day and night to perfect explosive devices that wipe out Pacific islands and eventually render turtles sterile. Turtles never use the word "implementation" or the phrases "hard core" and "in the last analysis." No turtle ever rang another turtle back on the phone. In the last analysis, a turtle, although lacking know-how, knows how to live. A turtle, by its admirable habits, gets to the hard core of life. That may be why its arteries are so soft."
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