🧬A Cure For Cancer? 🧬
➕ Taylor Swift or Tailored Script? 🎥 And I want to hear your celeb encounters!! 🤩
So somehow it’s the 12th of December, we’re on the home stretch til we all head home to our friends, pets, and families (or we’ve built a home in our own traditions, which is sometimes cuter) and it seems to be all feeling quite overwhelming and emo. This weekend we went out to a lil beach house (picture a time capsule from the 70s) to celebrate our bestie Evie’s birthday, and something about a three-hour car ride there and back just lends itself to some incredibly confronting chats (if you’re us). Where will we be in ten years? Where will we be next year? Is it okay to comment on our friend’s relationships? When do we just leave each other to live our own lives? Will we ever? How lucky are we to care this much? I wish we didn’t care so much! By the end of the weekend we were emotionally exhausted (and physically - there was quite a bit of boogie boarding) but as it always goes when you spend time with your nearest and dearest - we arrived home with fuller hearts than when we left. Here are some pics for you all to enjoy (you were all with me in my heart, dw):
Here’s to the week ahead, being on the home straight, and spilling our guts on long car rides with our besties 💘💘💘💘
Tell me your celebrity encounters!!
Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer
Taylor Swift or Tailored Script? Taylor Swift Making Feature Directing Debut for Searchlight Pictures
Every “chronically online” conversation is the same
Did you know that the 7th wave is always the biggest?
Tell me your celebrity encounters!!
After getting the gorg Isabella to tell us her story of going on stage and kissing Matty Healy, one of u lovely newsy readers suggested that we make that somewhat of a regular occasion because sometimes it’s fun to read fanfiction in amongst the news. AND if there are two things about me they’re:
Imma listen to you
Imma crowdsource content
SO I’ve made this lil Google form for you to please drop your celebrity stories!! They can be mundane but also the juicier the better!!!
TELL ME YOUR STORIES HERE!
Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer
I figure it’s Monday (well… Sunday for a bunch of you) and it would be nice to start (well… end) our weeks with a hopeful story - and boy do I have one for you!
“A teenage girl's incurable cancer has been cleared from her body in the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine.”
Alyssa, a 13-year-old from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year, and up until now all the treatments she’s tried had failed. So, doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital used something called "base editing" to build her a living new drug. Now, six months later the cancer is “undetectable,” but Alyssa is still being monitored in case it comes back.
T-cells are supposed to be the body's guardians - seeking out and destroying threats - but for Alyssa they had become the danger and were growing out of control.
Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body. Without the experimental medicine, the only option left would have been merely to make Alyssa as comfortable as possible.
"Eventually I would have passed away," said Alyssa.
“Base editing” was only invented six years ago
And Alyssa was the first patient to be treated with this technology!! For those of us who are un-science-minded (me) I loved this description from the BBC about what base editing actually entails:
Bases are the language of life. The four types of base - adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) - are the building blocks of our genetic code. Just as letters in the alphabet spell out words that carry meaning, the billions of bases in our DNA spell out the instruction manual for our body.
Base editing allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions.
I fucking love science and the potential that new technology like this brings.
There’s WAY more information on it here if you’re interested in this stuff!
Taylor Swift or Tailored Script? Taylor Swift Making Feature Directing Debut for Searchlight Pictures
Another classic Luce headline that I’m not sure if I should be proud of or icked out by… anyway… Taylor Swift is about to make her feature directorial debut with Searchlight pictures! She’s written an original script which is gonna be produced by the studio behind “Nomadland” and “The Shape of Water.”
“Taylor is a once in a generation artist and storyteller. It is a genuine joy and privilege to collaborate with her as she embarks on this exciting and new creative journey,” said Searchlight presidents David Greenbaum and Matthew Greenfield.
That’s all we know at the mo - I’ll keep you in the loop!
Every “chronically online” conversation is the same
I love reading about internet culture (seems obvious coz I’m so embedded in it) so it’s really not surprising that I loved this Vox piece about how basically every single interaction online can be taken ✨some type of way ✨ (usually the wrong way) by chronically online people who don’t actually care for the cause, they just want to troll/ show they’re better than you. Here’s how it goes: someone posts something (often harmless) on a site like Twitter, then someone else quote tweets it or replies to it, stripping all of its context and almost purposefully taking it in the worst way possible (often just for likes - they know what the author actually meant), online discourse begins, and then more people see the dunks and the replies to the harmless tweet than the actual tweet, and just like that, we’ve wasted our time (that we should be spending on ✨actual problems✨ and made someone feel like shit.
It’s become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other people’s lives.
Here are the examples Rebecca Jennings crowdsourced from Twitter about this exact thing:
When I posed the question to Twitter — “What was the most chronically online discourse you saw this year?” — the replies were telling: There was “garden coffee lady.” There was someone likening playing fetch with a dog to abuse. There was, somehow, Anne Frank discourse again. There was a spreadsheet of famous authors next to the reasons they were “problematic” (sample: “John Green: ‘harmful depictions of manic episodes,’ William Shakespeare: ‘misogynistic principles enforced in books’”). There was the accusation that the teen actor in a Netflix series was “queerbaiting” because he … acted in the show (he was eventually forced to come out as bisexual in real life). When indie rocker Mitski tweeted that she’d prefer it if her fans didn’t film her the entire time she’s onstage, some fans claimed that her request was insensitive to people with memory-related disabilities.
You all know I could talk about this for hours, but to save your time (and mine) I think you should just go and read this piece!!!
Today’s mundane poll (inspired by a fun fact that came out as we were boogie boarding):
This Episode Was Written By AI (The Shit Show Podcast)
A Ye Update, and Bel Chimes In (Culture Vulture Podcast)
Taylor Swift’s Live Nation Debacle Is Just the Beginning (The New York Times)
22 internet people on 2022’s defining posts (Embedded)
Why Gen Z loves ugly selfies (Mashable)
Instagram is telling creators when and why their posts are ‘shadowbanned’ (Endgadget)
Your celeb encounters
I’m not sure about the 7th Wave thing. I’ve been surfing for a few years now and have not noticed that. Maybe it only happens in perfect swell? (and I’m certainly not doing most of my surfing in perfect swell).
Jamie's World walked so everyone in that Mashable article could run