Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few pieces of longform writing that we loved reading. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

The launch

There is so much detail that goes into the most mundane bits of life — we are wandering around like idiots most of the time, biting mindlessly into apples, for example, with no awareness of the batshit cataclysm of biology and finance and competition that lie behind each tart bite.

About an hour outside Wenatchee, a man named Dale Goldy, who was once in charge of scouting new varieties for the apple giant Stemilt, gave me a tour of his nursery: thousands of young trees growing in long, straight lines; stacks of new saplings waiting in the dark, frigid warehouse where he keeps three-quarters of a million mostly custom-ordered young trees of various kinds. Some were labeled with their variety and rootstock, but others were identified only in code. “So when people like you walk through the tree storage, you don’t know what you’re looking at!” laughed Goldy. It was a scary, competitive world out there, he explained: “We can’t relax for a second. If we don’t have something new to offer and create customer excitement, we’ll be run over by the other stuff.”

The promise and price of cellular therapies

Another awesomely geeky story, this time about stem cell transplants, and how the immune response between guest and host went from threat to therapy. And — what happens then, when human cells become a commodity?

Thomas flew to Seattle. On August 12, 1960, Barbara was sedated, and her hips and legs were punctured fifty times with a large-bore needle to extract the crimson sludge of her bone marrow. The marrow, diluted in saline, was then dripped into Nancy’s bloodstream. The doctors waited. The cells homed their way into her bones and gradually started to produce normal blood. By the time she was discharged, her marrow had been almost completely reconstituted. Nancy emerged as a living chimera: her blood, in a sense, belonged to her twin.

Networked dream worlds

Augmented reality! Smart cities! Free wifi for all! 5G is big tech’s miracle drug of the moment. Shannon Mattern has an excellent (and very readable) explainer of the technology behind the buzzword, digital redlining, and the battle between financial titans to control this Next Big Thing.

... while these 5G speculations suggest a world of possibility and profit, they elide lots of potential risks and alternative futures. They also, unsurprisingly, fail to ask about the wisdom of entrusting the telecom industry (which has a long history of unscrupulous, monopolistic business practices) and the tech industry (newly under fire for similar reasons) to build what is purportedly _the_ critical infrastructure for a planned global transformation.