the Jarvik-heart article: the heartless fate
a Brigham and Women’s City of Boston Hospital medical student reportedly so moved by her terse toe tag’s account of the victim’s heartless fate that he confessed to Moment a temporary inability to physically wield the power saw of his assigned task.
Context
The one place genuine feeling breaks through — and it arrives welded to a pun ("heartless fate") and packaged in Moment's same overwrought sob-prose, so that authentic emotion becomes indistinguishable from the article's fabricated version of it. A medical student really is moved, really can't work the saw; the magazine can only report it in the register that has already cheapened every feeling it touches. Sincerity here doesn't get canceled by the irony, it gets laminated by it — the true thing and the corny frame fused past separating.