Franklin’s images of X-ray diffraction were critical in confirming the helical structure of DNA made famous by Watson and Crick.

Franklin’s “pic” is known as “Photo 51,” an X-ray diffraction image of DNA taken by a grad student at King’s College in 1952.

This line plays on a popular Jay Z line from Kanye West’s “Diamonds from Sierra Leone”:

I’m not a businessman,
I’m a business, man!

The suggestion is that putting “female” in front of “scientist” diminishes Franklin’s intellectual contribution.

Sheff describes once visiting Minneapolis and the site of Berryman’s suicide and contemplating about “the inescapable velocity of the suicide”:

I was listening to music and thinking about John Berryman and thinking about a lot of different things….There’s a part of A Night of Serious Drinking where he talks about the inescapable velocity of the suicide, or something like that, where you might think halfway down, “Wait a second, I’ve made a bad decision.” That really struck me a lot. (Pitchfork)

In an interview, Sheff describes how this line was inspired by a real-life experience watching a news report of an alleged murderer.

I remember my co-workers looking at him and looking at him for the evil on his face. You wanted to see the evil, but it wasn’t there.

More broadly, these lines powerfully capture the phenomenon that murderers can be everyday people not only monstrous demons.

Kith and kin are essentially synonyms and used in conjunction as a cliche to mean friends and family. Kith is the more inclusive term, as it connotes anyone intimately familiar whether or not a blood relative. From the Old English cȳthth.