Robert Sanchez brings us a rich profile of Lee Maxwell, age 94, whose love of washing machines inspired him to create Lee Maxwell’s Washing Machine Museum, home to 1,500 antique washing machines, all housed on his property in Eaton, Colorado.
He was an expert in the esoteric. Not only did he have the most comprehensive collection of washing machines on the planet, but Lee also collected antique mop wringers, irons, and vacuum stomps. He’d built the menagerie, he says, because he was intrigued by the washers’ mechanics and, over time, became interested in their histories as well. The assemblage was also, he thought, just really, really cool. A steady flow of visitors—up to 700 a year—from around the world would pass through the warehouses and marvel at his pieces, which include an 1885 Guffins Steam Washing Machine, something called a Torpedo Washer, and antique Whirlpools. CBS’ Sunday Morning program profiled Lee in 2018. The “spin doctor,” Jane Pauley had called him.
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Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist. He’s also an investigator. He calls himself a “private ear.” To put it succinctly, he listens to crimes—the audio captured in phone recordings and CCTV footage, for instance—in search of the truth:
One of the earliest cases Abu Hamdan worked on involved Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Abu Daher, two Palestinian teen-agers who were shot dead by Israeli border police in the occupied West Bank during a Nakba Day protest. The Israel Defense Forces claimed that the officers had shot the boys with rubber bullets, to quell the demonstration, and that the cause of the deaths could not be determined. Abu Hamdan used sound analysis to differentiate the sonic signatures of various kinds of ammunition. In this case, the sounds were of neither rubber-coated bullets nor live ammunition “but something in between,” he said. “A kind of amalgamation of the two sounds.” Abu Hamdan ultimately found that the officers had fired live ammunition out of a rubber-bullet extension. This finding led to the indictment of Ben Deri, one of the Israeli border officers, on manslaughter charges. (In 2016, Deri accepted a plea deal for the lesser charge of negligent homicide and received a nine-month prison sentence.)
When Ben Deri was arrested, in 2014, it was the first time that a member of the Israeli forces had been charged with killing a Palestinian child. But how could Abu Hamdan feel anything like resolution? The pursuit of legal justice, however limited, had forced him into a cowed posture. “I was immediately asked to do something that, for me, was politically compromising, which was to argue that the Israeli soldiers were not firing rubber bullets but live ammunition,” he said—the implication being that rubber bullets were acceptable. “Rubber bullets, especially in the Israel-Palestine context, are constantly being shot in people’s faces at close range,” Abu Hamdan explained. They maim, as a form of deterrence.
Two years after the bullet analysis, he created an installation called “Earshot,” which reflects on the killings of Nawara and Abu Daher. The centerpiece is a video called “Rubber Coated Steel.” The film was shot in an indoor gun range, where the sounds of gunfire cannot be heard from the outside—a metaphor for violence done in a kind of aural darkness. There is no speech, but text runs along the bottom of the video: a transcript from an imaginary civil trial. And yet, even in this space of speculative justice, Nawara and Abu Daher are not given “a voice”; the boys are not made to ventriloquize a fantasy of justice from beyond the grave. Abu Hamdan challenges a maxim forced onto the marginalized: that their voices are a source of power.
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Andrew R. Chow | TIME | July 8, 2024 | 4,250 words
There are 137 bitcoin mines in the US, many of them located in remote and rural places in Texas, “home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians.” After a massive bitcoin facility started operating in town of Granbury, people of all ages began to experience a range of unexplainable medical issues, including hypertension, chest pain, heart palpitations, migraines, vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss, and panic attacks. Even the community’s nonhuman residents—from dogs to chickens to a family’s backyard oak tree—exhibited strange symptoms. At first, no one knew what was making them sick, but they knew they had one thing in common: the inescapable “dull aural hum” from the mine. The buzz, generated by 30,000 computers and thousands of fans running to cool them, is constant. And the noise, which residents have consistently recorded at over 85 decibels, is over the state’s legal limit. (On top of this, Texas’ noise law is the worst in the nation—one that seems to protect noise polluters, not its citizens.) In this eye-opening story, Andrew R. Chow shares the medical struggles and stories of more than 50 Granbury residents affected by the noise, and reports on how the community is trying to fight back against Marathon, the mine’s owner. As crypto and AI fuel the data center industry’s growth, however, this very scenario is repeating itself in other states, including Arkansas and North Dakota. “Ultimately,” Chow writes, “Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.” —CLR
Jonathan Blake | Noēma | July 30, 2024 | 3,826 words
Sometimes a fact jumps out of a piece of journalism and lodges itself directly into your long-term memory. In Jonathan Blake’s engrossing Noēma piece, that fact is this: unlike most cities that developed along rail and streetcar lines, Los Angeles’ (sub)urban development clustered around those many places where underground oil fields were tapped. Even if you’ve driven past the oil wells near Baldwin Hills, you may not have realized how strongly black gold influenced the city. (Or how it continues to, despite its winnowing footprint.) Blake didn’t either when he was growing up in LA; now, he visits some of the city’s most active, and camouflaged, drilling sites. Like the one in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Pico-Robertson, where, directly across the street from a restaurant opened by Steven Spielberg’s mother, ivy-covered walls conceal 40 active wells. Or the one tucked behind the Beverly Center shopping mall, the one you can only see from the top level of the parking structure or from the hospital across the street. About a third of Angelenos live within a mile of an active drill site, the negative physical and mental consequences of which Blake inventories starkly. Yet, the lingering presence of extractive industry also leads Blake to celebrate the recent launch of a satellite that continuously observes methane gas levels around the planet and makes its data available to researchers. This, he writes, is part of the necessary work to grasp what fossil fuel consumption has wrought: “Even someone living in the places most affected by climate change, like the Arctic, can’t intuit planetwide change from personal experience.” Just because you grow up in a city without realizing what’s thrumming under your feet doesn’t mean you can’t fight to make that city—and the planet it’s part of—a better place to live. —PR
Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, and Stephen Eisenhammer | Reuters | July 25, 2024 | 6,355 words
Each December, Bloomberg Businessweek publishes a Jealousy List, a compilation of “all the stories we wish we wrote this year.” If I had a 2024 list of my own, I would put this Reuters investigation on it—as I was reading the piece, I couldn’t stop thinking, “Damn, this was a great story idea.” The premise is simple: fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has become the number-one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, can be made by combining chemicals that anyone can order online. Most of these precursors, as the chemicals are known, ship from China. To investigate this dangerous pipeline, Reuters became customers. Reporters bought chemicals with names such as 1-boc-4-AP and 1-boc-4-piperidone and had them delivered to apartments in Mexico and the United States. The shipments showed up disguised as adapters or sealed in cat-food bags. All told, the investigating team purchased enough chemicals to make 3 million tablets of fentanyl, a process that cost them only $3,600 and required only clicking buttons on a smartphone or laptop. (Perhaps you, like me, just gasped in dismay at those figures.) All told, this project shows how difficult it is to cut off the fentanyl supply at the roots—it’s basically a game of Whac-a-Mole. “While it was easy to source the goods, it proved far more difficult to identify exactly who sold them,” the story explains. “Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.” One of the companies in question is still peddling its product despite being under US federal indictment. So much, I guess, for the long arm of the law. —SD
Drew Anderson | The Narwhal and The Globe and Mail | July 18, 2024 | 4,238 words
Conservationist Karsten Heuer is only 55 years old. He knows he will die this autumn, but it’s not the first time he has faced death. In 2021 he fell nearly 30 feet to the ground from a tree stand while searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley. His lungs collapsed and he broke ribs, his sternum, and his back in several places. Since, he has been diagnosed with “a fast-acting and fatal neurological condition called multiple system atrophy” that may have been a result of the fall. After spending so much of his life traversing vast stretches of wilderness observing animal behavior, he refuses to be fettered or diminished by the symptoms of his disease and has scheduled an assisted death this fall. Drew Anderson’s piece is so much more than a profile of a lifelong nature advocate. Heuer is a tenacious fighter who has had success navigating conflicts between profit and preservation that can feel intractable in Canada’s oil-fuelled, capitalist society. In 2018, Heuer led an effort to reintroduce bison to Banff National Park, a species that had been hunted into extinction, missing from the region for 140 years. His work documenting animal migration patterns prompted the Banff, Alberta, town council to halt certain developments and move others to preserve the wildlife corridor nearby. “He was one of the early advocates of what is now known as large-landscape-scale conservation,” writes Anderson. “This model takes into account the huge scope of some animals’ terrain, a departure from caring for the land in a patchwork of small protected areas.” Even as the end of his life approaches, he’s still fighting development that would double the size of neighboring Canmore, in the name of preservation. After all that he has given to the planet in his time here, if only medical science could find a cure to preserve Karsten Heuer. —KS
Ben Buckland | The New York Times | July 17, 2024 | 2,793 words
Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying only on hand-drawn maps from the people he met along the way, including local cheesemakers, a chef, and a farmer whose family had lived on the land since the 1600s. “I wanted to know what it would teach me about how technology and convenience have changed the way we travel,” he writes. “I wanted to be lost, and to find my way through the artwork of strangers.” At first, I found this goal as annoying as it was inspiring. Going on trips with my 6-year-old daughter has transformed the way I travel, and gone, for now, are my flâneur days, when I’d set off on foot in one direction to see where I ended up. Still, I couldn’t resist Buckland’s words and stunning photographs, his spontaneity, and his willingness to trust the people he encountered. I love his thoughts on making maps, even the simple sketches he received; reading a map is an “act of empathy,” he writes, a way to learn about a person through the details they see. By the end, Buckland walked about 250 miles over 12 days—along lakeshores, up mountains, into villages, and through the heart of Switzerland. A lovely piece on serendipity, being present in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes. —CLR
Audience Award
Here’s the story our audience put their money on this week.
Victor Lodato | The New Yorker | July 29, 2024 | 5,627 words
From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart. —KS
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The past few years have been tough for tech billionaires: after more than a decade of being hailed as visionaries, they’re no longer getting a free pass from an uncritical media, and it seems to have broken their brains. As Zoë Bernard details for Business Insider, many of them have responded to the loss of Unassailable Demigod status by going in house—launching a slew of podcasts and other owned media channels that let them tell their story, their way. Fascinating that “telling their story” so often involves the same hobby horses of the galaxy brains who rail against “wokeism.”
The pro-tech media’s other adversaries are a constellation of government, corporate, and entertainment figures dubbed too reflexively anti-tech, too anti-growth, or too politically correct. On Pirate Wires, jeremiads have been written against Anthony Fauci, who “oversaw one of the greatest erosions of institutional trust in American history”; Ellen Pao, “the architect of tech’s #metoo movement”; DEI activists at Google; DEI at large; Disney, for its penchant for “girlboss protagonists”; and NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, for her “near perfect record of ideological opposition to Silicon Valley.” Though Solana has since moved to Miami, his fiercest ire on Pirate Wires remains fixed on San Francisco’s liberal politicians. A sampling of recent headlines: “How San Francisco Attracts and Traps Homeless Transplants,” “How San Francisco’s DEI Industrial Complex Works,” and “Inside SF Public Schools’ Shocking Health Curriculum.” “All-In” has similarly taken aim at figures including Fauci, George Soros, Joe Biden, and a host of California politicians.
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Many houses of worship began streaming religious services in 2020; Christian televangelists have sermonized to a distributed “congregation” for decades. But as Vincent Owino reports, livestreaming preachers like Jeffter Wekesa have flourished in Kenya, where plentiful internet access gives them a pulpit—or at least multiple phones and webcams—from which to serve a hungry global audience.
This is how Wekesa spends most nights, preaching in front of a congregation of people spread around the country, and as far as Saudi Arabia and the United States. He prays that they’ll find jobs, spouses, business success. He tells small prophecies: This one will soon buy a car, that one will travel abroad to find greener pastures. He heals the sick by asking them to touch the ailing body part as he prays. This is the work of many modern evangelical preachers — and like TV and radio before it, social media has become a tool to expand a ministry’s reach.
The difference with Wekesa’s church is that it exists only in the virtual realm. Its physical presence sits entirely within his apartment. He rarely meets a congregant in person. On this April night in Nairobi, after three hours of preaching, Wekesa culminates his session with a request for offerings. Audience members can send him funds through the mobile money platform M-Pesa, PayPal, or TikTok’s digital gifting option. In a given month, Wekesa makes between 100,000–300,000 Kenyan shillings ($786–$2,358) from donations, well above the average income in Kenya. “As I’ve spoken, so shall it be,” he concludes. “God bless you. I will see you again tomorrow, and your life will never be the same.” Then he clicks off the livestreams and the LED lights.
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I see a piece about attending a cryptozoology conference, I read it. Them’s the rules. Thankfully, this isn’t your average “skeptic heads to a convention center to yuck other people’s yum” takedown. Jason Katz believes in Sasquatch down to his bones, and his faith makes this pilgrimage work even beyond the character sketches.
This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance. She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”
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Drew Anderson profiles Karsten Heuer, a conservationist who has dedicated his life to putting preservation before profit in Alberta, Canada.
In October 2021, Karsten Heuer found himself sprawled on the ground, helpless, at the bottom of an aspen tree.
He had been searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley, perched in a hunting stand nearly eight metres off the ground. Then he fell. He doesn’t know how. He was unconscious, lying on the ground for more than an hour before rescuers arrived.
His back was broken in several places, ribs too; his sternum was cracked and he was struggling to breathe with collapsed lungs.
He was alone in the mountains he loves.
“I wasn’t in pain,” he remembers, sitting in his backyard in Canmore on a June afternoon, sun streaking one side of his still-youthful face. “I was actually okay with it. It was October, the sun was on my back, I could hear trumpeter swans on the lake calling, and other bird songs, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually a pretty nice place to die.’ ”
An immensity looms. The bulk of the mountain, the heaviness of what’s to come for Heuer, Allison, their son and their close friends and colleagues.
Bow Valley Engage continues to fight against the massive Three Sisters development. Heuer and his collaborators are awaiting a judicial ruling on an Alberta government decision to skip an updated environmental impact assessment (the original was conducted 32 years ago, long before the current iteration of the proposal). Heuer says the valley and the proposal have changed significantly over those decades.
It is just one of the foundations Heuer has laid for those he will leave behind. He says he has struggled throughout his life to pass tasks on to others, but he’s learning to let that go and make peace with the fact he won’t know how things end.
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