“We found that cutting the genome with CRISPR-Cas9 induced the activation of … p53,” said Emma Haapaniemi, the lead author of the Karolinska study. That “makes editing much more difficult.”

The flip side of p53 repairing CRISPR edits, or killing cells that accept the edits, is that cells that survive with the edits do so precisely because they have a dysfunctional p53 and therefore lack this fix-it-or-kill-it mechanism.

The reason why that could be a problem is that p53 dysfunction can cause cancer. And not just occasionally. P53 mutations are responsible for nearly half of ovarian cancers; 43 percent of colorectal cancers; 38 percent of lung cancers; nearly one-third of pancreatic, stomach, and liver cancers; and one-quarter of breast cancers, among others.

I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

I am convinced that the camps—all of them—are a negative school; you can’t even spend an hour in one without being depraved. The camps never gave, and never could give, anyone anything positive. The camps act by depraving everyone, prisoners and free-contract workers alike.

I realized that the thieves were not human.

Word had gotten around about the questions I was asking, and an omerta was in effect.

In 2016, Variety reported that more than half of the traffic Vice claimed as its own on Comscore came from “the digital equivalent of mortgage-backed securities”: The company had struck deals with a number of spam-y websites like OMGFacts and Distractify — along with The Awl and Modern Farmer — that allowed Vice to count their traffic as its own in exchange for selling ads on their behalf.