8.18.14: The Truth About Organ Transplants & The Secret Shame Of Back Hair

As long as transplants have been medically possible, there have been horror stories about the black market organ trade.  Today, an anthropologist sheds the trappings of academia to take on, and even indict, illegal organ brokers.  Plus, a less frightening example removing body parts – we’ll investigate the growing controversy behind men who shave, wax, or Nair their backs. And now, some hairy men are fighting back against a standard of beauty few of us even knew existed. Plus, the future is now – we investigate an algae powered building that actually works.

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The Organ Detective

• Ethan Watters is a journalist who has contributed to the New York Times magazine, Mother Jones and Esquire. He wrote about Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist who has spent her career investigating the worldwide rumors about a global market for human organs and tissues, for Pacific Standard’s medical issue. His article is titled the “The Organ Detective.”

Transplant Tourism

• Like other kinds of specialized tourism, transplant tourism is growing. If it’s new to you, transplant tourism is when sick individuals in need of new organs travel, or sometimes relocate their entire families to places where they’re more likely receive one. Producer Meg Heckman brought us the story.
• For the story, she spoke with Dr. Fredric Gordon from the Lahey Clinic about the challenges of organ donation.

The Secret Shame of Back Hair

• New York magazine’s Kat Stoeffel recently wrote about the world of men’s back hair removal – and discovered it’s more controversial than all the many other types of hair removal. She wrote about it in the article “Back Hair Surpasses Pubic Hair as Most Political Hair.”

Backtracking

• Backtracking: it’s a little-analyzed phenomenon that’s become standard in the live-music industry – and one that occasionally grates on producer Alex Kapelman, who along with Whitney Jones examined backtracking in an episode of their music podcast, Pitch.

Are Algae Powered Buildings Possible...or Practical?

• Most of us can grasp the concept of wind and solar power but what about supplying the power for an entire building using algae? Ben Schiller is a staff writer for Fast Company’s “Co-Exist” where we found his article “This Algae Powered Building Actually Works.”