It’s a 10 part piece. Here’s a snippet from the first:

…I was peculiarly well-situated to smell a rat in the late Nineties when I began reading about a furor brewing in the United Kingdom over an European Union directive mandating the removal of lead from gasoline (or petrol as the British know it) in the year 2000. Strangely, the same desperate claims to save lead were being resurrected. Makers of the lead additive were placing alarmist full-page ads in newspapers, filled with the same untruths that had terrified me as a boy twenty years earlier. Government ministers and MPs were up in arms, citing these very falsehoods, some going so far as to urge withdrawal from the European community. Even the traditionally staid Rolls Royce Owners Club were moved to march (actually, drive) on the Houses of Parliament in protest.

How could this be? We’d had the same discussion in America two decades previous, as well as the benefit of the intervening years to learn the truth: the removal of lead from gasoline had hurt no one – other than the makers of the additive – and helped everyone, with American blood lead levels falling an average of 90 percent. It was, if anything, one of the great public health triumphs of the modern world and had been almost entirely painless. Was no one paying attention? Had our information society somehow failed to transmit this vital data tidbit across the pond? Was there no one in all of Europe to correct them? 

Didn’t they have a phone? Were there, perhaps, larger forces of disinformation in motion?

What would become an ongoing part of the rest of my life’s work became clear, as I sought find out the real truth about lead in gasoline. The first result of my study, “The Secret History of Lead,” appeared in The Nation magazine in 2000, and made the case that some of America’s biggest corporations – DuPont, its longtime charge General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (today known as ExxonMobil,) – had put lead in gasoline for profit in the 1920s, ignored legitimate health warnings and covered up safer alternatives, which we use today. Translated into 16 languages and a mini-best-seller in France, it remains a piece of history its star players would prefer we forgot.

Jamie Kitman. A Brief History Of Gasoline: A Century And A Half Of Lies. Jalopnik

The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality.

The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal.

But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them.

– John Williams in Augustus

If you’ve ever jumped into cold water, you’ll know that the human body can be transformed by this extreme change of state. Sure, you might end up listening to the sound of teeth chattering inside your head, but in those moments when your skin screams to adjust, lungs bursting for breath and legs kicking out, you might feel properly alive.

Is there anything else, besides oxygen, which we so instinctively crave? A cold drink of water might keep us quenched and vital. But even a few inches of H2O can cause death by drowning. Is it this compelling tension that makes us yearn for a dip in the sea? All the while knowing that with the one swipe of its foamy white paws, water could undo us.

Our bodies are mostly made up of water and in life as in art we must go with the strongest currents and tidal pulls, while also finding ways to catch or follow quieter, perhaps creative, trickles of our own making.

Battersby, M., 2022. Editorial. Popshot Quarterly, (35).