You’ve read countless essays about why the internet loves animals. But chances are you haven’t read one as smart, surprising, and memorable as this one. A fascinating exploration of what lurks within the emotional bonds we foist on our pets.
The invention of photography helped establish the pet as a kind of ready-made anthropomorphism. But pets are still animals. A large part of the appeal of adopting a pet is the thrill of interspecies contact, the everyday encounters with what Berger calls the “abyss of non-comprehension”: the joy of making contact across this abyss and approaching a nonverbal intimacy that feels ancient and transformative. A pet is a little walking tornado of mysteries. What does she dream about? What is she trying to tell me? What does the world look like through her eyes? Who am I to her? These are not trivial questions.
No one else who has come along in the past 15 years can touch Kendrick Lamar’s imprint on hip-hop. Other people have sold more records, had more hits, but from the standpoint of pure creativity, Lamar stands alone among his generation. Now he stands at the brink of something new: a self-founded label, an auteurial mind-meld with his creative partner, and what looks like an endless runway. In other words, it’s the perfect time for a writer like Mitchell S. Jackson to try to get inside his (and his partner’s) head. Sure, at some point that’s a fruitless endeavor — to paraphrase Jackson, if Kung Fu Kenny speaks it’s in his music — but that doesn’t mean the results aren’t breathtaking.
Later, we sit at a corner table in the dim dining room of Novikov, an Asian and Italian restaurant. The restaurant is packed and at a decibel level that requires us to lean in. This close, I notice Kendrick’s eyes. How they seem to be both present and distant; both focused on the moment at hand and processing it. Ain’t none of this eyes-are-windows-into-the-soul business with Kendrick. In fact, they might be paragons of the opposite: eyes wide open with revelations few to nil. They strike me as a kind of shield, as well as a way to foster the mystique that keeps people wanting more of him than he will ever share.
This week, we recommend pieces about homelessness, mountaineering, geological memory and amnesia, critical health care in a post-COVID world, and fathers and stepfathers.
Ethan Ward | Capital & Main | December 27-28, 2022 | 7,714 words
Last month, Karen Bass, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, declared a state of emergency with regard to homelessness in the city. In a matter of days, teams began moving unhoused people from outdoor encampments into hotel and motel rooms as part of a new government program called “Inside Safe.” But as this poignant three-part series shows, street homelessness accounts for only a fraction of LA’s housing crisis. People like Sarah Fay, the 28-year-old subject of the series, live on the precipice of homelessness, a position that requires a daily hustle to find a safe place to sleep. The reasons for this kind of housing insecurity are complex, going well beyond low incomes and soaring rents. Fay’s story, told so well by reporter Ethan Ward, is shaped by generational trauma, the burden of debt, maddening bureaucracy, and cultural stereotypes about what it means to be a person in need. Read this story, and send it to your elected officials, in Los Angeles and elsewhere. —SD
Xenia Minder | Financial Times | December 21, 2022 | 4,475 words
At the end of this essay, there is a note stating that Xenia Minder told this story to her brother, Raphael Minder, the Financial Times’ central Europe correspondent. I imagine the support from her sibling enabled Minder to tell her extraordinary story with such honesty and thoughtfulness. Formerly a Swiss judge, a series of catastrophic falls in the mountains leads her to reevaluate her life and realize that while we may think we are choosing our direction, “the key events in our lives are unknown to us.” In the three falls detailed in this essay, she loses — for a time — her ability to move from her neck to her waist and two partners who she loved very much. It is an incredible amount of loss. Yet, Minder does not look for sympathy in this piece, instead telling her story with acceptance rather than complaint, displaying an inspiring resilience and ability to look within herself. It is a beautifully written personal essay that gripped me with every word. —CW
Summer Praetorius | Nautilus | December 19, 2022 | 3,975 words
“It takes time to build memory, but it can be erased in a geological instant.” I didn’t read much the past few weeks, but paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius on geological and human memory at Nautilus cut through the holiday noise and held my attention. Praetorius writes about what Earth knows and records over time by way of tree rings, ocean sediments, and other physical markers of time. (“Ice sheets themselves are some of the best memory banks,” she writes, and “mile-high mountains” are the “great brains of our planet.”) She also writes about geological amnesia, “resilience debt” and the planet’s inability to recover when its ecosystems have been pushed over the edge, and what’s been lost. Praetorius weaves this research with poignant personal insights about her late brother, whose health and memory deteriorated after a snowboarding accident, and by doing so, creates a beautiful piece on loss and resilience. —CLR
Adam Gaffney | The Baffler | December 13, 2022 | 5,282 words
Having a loved one in the ICU is both hopeful and excruciating. You hold out hope that the most highly trained people and the most advanced technology must somehow tip the balance in their favor, buying crucial time their body needs to heal. But what happens when the most tragic outcome is almost certain? How do families and hospitals cope when hopes are slim and the costs of keeping a patient alive mount, perhaps even prolonging certain death? At The Baffler, Boston physician Adam Gaffney suggests that having all the training and technology at your disposal doesn’t mean that it’s always the most ethical and compassionate choice to use it. At what point does care become a horrific ordeal for the patient and their nurses? To what end? “I have seen family members overwhelmed by the magnitude of the decision: letting go might make sense (and they may realize it and even say so), but making the decision feels impossible because it threatens a lifetime of guilt over having been the one to say: ‘Stop the machines.’” —KS
Davon Loeb | The Sun | January 2, 2023 | 2,678 words
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been mired in home repairs that rank somewhere south of Serious DIY but somewhere north of I Can Do This Without YouTube. Every time I cut a machine screw so that a new switchplate would fit, or replaced a toilet’s fill valve, I thought about my dad. Specifically, I thought about being 8 or 9 years old and standing with my dad while he embarked on those same types of repairs — me holding a handful of screws or tools, just trying to be helpful while he worked on whatever it was he was working on. I lost him a decade ago this year, but those memories have retained the same poignancy they had when my grief was fresh, and they came roaring back all over again when I read Davon Loeb’s essay in the latest issue of The Sun. Fathers aren’t easy, and neither are sons; when the two are constitutionally different, it only compounds the difficulty. “Give Dad a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler, and he could design a house,” Loeb writes. “Give me a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler, and I could draw our family.” This misalignment sets the stage for an episode that embodies nearly every competing facet of the father-son dynamic: pride and shame, validation and disappointment, love and fear. Yet, Loeb doesn’t write this to twang some hidden heartstring in the reader. Instead, he sinks back into that moment from his own childhood in order to square the circle of fraught kinship: No matter how much we may clash, it’s the moments of peace that stay with us. —PR
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Age, race, personality; “opposites attract” can refer to any number of traits. But as Desiree Browne’s sly and self-aware essay illustrates all too well, sometimes it’s a different kind of disconnect that drives people apart.
He told me he was a bus driver for the city; I told him I was between jobs but was mostly a writer. As we talked, away from the roar of the party, I watched his desire over the top of my champagne glass, and I started drinking that in, too. He matched the pace of my quips and my laughter was real. I gave him my number because it was another night when it seemed like anything could happen.
Sarah Fay is 28 years old. She has a job at a non-profit, a dog, a car, and family close by. Too close, in fact, on the nights when Fay has nowhere to sleep but her grandmother’s garage, where her own mother has been living for the last 13 years. This three-part series examines the complexities of housing insecurity in Los Angeles, defying stereotypes about what it means to be vulnerable to the pressures of meager wages and rising rents:
Ideally, Sarah would not be looking for a place for the night; she wants a place to call home. She just can’t seem to convince landlords to give her a chance.
Her latest full-time job, as an executive assistant for a nonprofit focused on homelessness in West Los Angeles, pays her $24 per hour. She grosses around $4,000 per month. To people unaware of the surge in rental prices, that might seem like enough. But the median rent for a studio in Los Angeles on December 10 was $1,825 — a $275 increase over a year earlier. After taxes, the market-rate rent would consume most of what she earns.
But in Los Angeles and other housing-squeezed cities, having the resources to pay the local median rent is a far cry from actually getting an apartment. There are, however, supports in place to help people like Sarah.
In 2019, when she earned about $2 per hour less, she qualified for a Rapid Rehousing subsidy from the L.A. Homeless Services Agency, but that did not guarantee that she would receive it. The process struck her as complex. It involves working with a Rapid Rehousing case manager to find an apartment in the right price range, then connecting the case manager to the landlord and hoping that they could work it out. In theory, they agree to allow the subsidized tenant to rent the place based on various criteria, and then the tenant starts out paying a percentage of their rent that will grow in subsequent months and years. The exact amount of the subsidy depends on a variety of factors, including the tenant’s income and the rent, and the process involves the input of the case manager.
The problem for Sarah has been that she has needed to convince a landlord to choose a low-income tenant with mandatory bureaucratic processes over plenty of people in simpler circumstances with larger incomes and better credit applying. Nothing requires landlords to take on tenants like her, and the shortage of affordable lodging means that market forces have been blowing the other way.
This is a powerful and upsetting read on the NHS — the free healthcare service provided by the United Kingdom. Increasingly underfunded, the staff is facing incredible pressure. Reading this essay from a healthcare assistant, you realize what heroic personal efforts are now being called upon to provide patient care.
The family have been called in to say goodbye, but there’s no telling if they will arrive in time. The student nurse and I give him a wash and reposition him to make him more comfortable. I decide to give him a wet shave as well, which he seems to enjoy. Things appear to be under control for now, so I tell the student nurse I’m going to catch up on paperwork. She nods and tells me she will stay with the man who is passing away. She removes her gloves and holds his hand.
The bowerbird, which lives on the east coast of Australia, has an abiding eye for anything blue. Solitary males travel great distances to bring back all manner of blue objects to decorate their nests. Shells, flowers, plastic bottles, and feathers are all fair game, and bowerbirds have even been known to grind up blue pigments with their beaks and paint their homes accordingly. This chromatic fealty is less a matter of design sense than of courtship; the behavior is just one of the bowerbird’s mating tactics. And he has a spiritual brother in ostentatious accumulation: humans.
Collecting as a human practice dates back to at least the third millennium BCE, when the upper circles of Sumerian society gathered extensive hoards of luxury items. Later, the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt (350 – 30 BCE) sought out books from across the known world and housed them in the ill-fated Library of Alexandria. This is all a long way from beer cans, dolls, and genitalia — just some of the obsessions featured below — but the link isn’t too hard to discern. For Tom Hanks it’s typewriters; for Rod Stewart, it’s model trains.
Although little research has been undertaken when it comes to humans, anecdotal evidence suggests that collectors of the homo sapiens variety also tend to be male. As a broad psychological explanation, a large collection indicates wealth, knowledge, and industry — all traits appealing to a potential partner. But while that explains amassing watches or antique furniture, it doesn’t do the same for those who seek out toenail clippings or soap bars. The collector’s drive, it seems, can suggest as many questions as answers.
Indeed, reading through these illuminating pieces reveals the many deeper purposes to collecting. Bonding, fellowship, greed, and even education can play a role. There may even be something more mysterious, more primordial, at play: Unearthing a new “treasure” can release serotonin directly into our brains. This mood-boosting reward could well hearken back to our distant past. Some psychologists highlight a link between collecting and our in-built drive to create a safe, orderly environment. As Randy Frost muses in his book on the subject, Stuff, some scholars “suggest that collecting is a way of managing fears about death by creating a form of immortality.” There may be no simple answer, but the art of collecting can certainly provide a simple joy — and reading about it can provide that joy in some small measure as well.
In France, it’s wine; in Russia, vodka. China has baijiu, while in Madagascar, rum is the national tipple. But in Belgium, Germany, and the U.S. (the last of which provides the backdrop for this piece), beer stands at the top of the pile. Here, beer is a cultural marker and a personal identifier, an integral part of any meaningful event. With this fantastic article, we move away from the decorative and historical into what I feel is true collector territory: beer cans.
When I look around at my piles of records and books, I justify these acquisitions as things that provide something definable beyond their physical selves. Beer cans, though, belong in a different category. While they serve a valid role as socioeconomic and aesthetic artifacts — as do all man-made objects — it’s hard to consider used beer cans worth anything in terms of material value. The Brewery Collectibles Club of America, though, does not agree. This piece introduces you to them and other collectors across several continents, all of whom hold an abiding passion for items that most of us would throw in the recycling bin without a moment’s thought. This is the beating heart of the genuine collector exposed — a heart that quickens over a thing only their fellow brethren would understand.
Dave Larrazolo, an ex-Army drill sergeant, is wearing a bumblebee costume and adjusting his antennae when I speak with him at the canvention. He explains that he doesn’t bother with “rust,” which refers to rusty beer cans. Another collector tells me Larrazolo’s collection is known to be “squeaky clean.”
Despite the group’s communal nature, friendly divisions exist: rusty cans versus clean, new crowns versus old, plastic-lined versus vinyl-lined crowns. Other collectors specialize by geography, brand, or type — West Virginia or California, Ballantine’s Beer or Hamm’s, quarts or 12-ounce size. There are accessories, too, like can openers referred to as “I-7s.”
England’s beautiful Cotswolds is not a place readily associated with international crime, but the picturesque region nonetheless serves as backdrop to this absorbing tale of the murky side of collecting. The practice of lepidoptery (collecting butterflies) has its roots in the 17th century, when explorers and scientists, largely from the West, journeyed thousands of miles under harsh conditions in order to discover new species of flora and fauna. These groups were almost exclusively composed of educated, wealthy white men who possessed the means and opportunity to travel — and who often took with them a sense of superiority and entitlement, together with a distinct lack of respect for the native populations in the lands where they quested. Yet, while lepidoptery’s colonial and ethical legacy remains questionable, its practitioners’ study and documentation advanced our collective understanding by leaps and bounds.
In its time, lepidoptery was a highly fashionable pursuit. You can count at least two 20th-century British prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, among their number, along with highly respected author Vladimir Nabokov. These days, with much more attention focused on humanity’s interactions with nature, butterfly collecting is far from mainstream. Yet, in the U.S. and U.K., lepidoptery is still perfectly legal. There are important caveats — some species and certain designated areas are protected — but where there is prohibition, as this story makes clear, there is always money to be made.
A butterfly’s wings, their colours and patterns, are made up of tiny, overlapping scales. These are at their brightest for the first day or two, but over time, the scales fall out or rub off. No discerning collector would be interested in a faded specimen like this one, but there is still something pulse-quickening about seeing it. The large blue might be persnickety and ornery, but that is what has given this tiny insect its power over humans for centuries. As David Simcox says that day to a middle-aged couple who had driven more than 150 miles on a futile search for a large blue: “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.”
When David Pilgrim began acquiring racist memorabilia in his early teens at the beginning of the 1970s, he could not have known that he would become a sociologist, or that his collection would eventually lead to the founding of the Jim Crow Museum, an institution that may discomfit but whose educational importance cannot be understated. If it feels obvious that he writes “Racist imagery is propaganda,” consider that such imagery is the most powerful social tool in the world. As much as we might like to pretend otherwise, we are deeply susceptible to visual cues, most of which are intentionally designed for just that purpose — whether racist caricatures on 1950s product packaging or modern-day memes. This is what makes Pilgrim’s work so vital.
Perhaps the most telling (and most moving) moment in the piece comes when the author describes how many of the young people he talks to, both black and white, are at first skeptical about the atrocity of the Jim Crow era; when they see the items he has collected, though, the illusion falls away. When in the presence of a large number of such objects, Pilgrim writes, the overwhelming feeling is one of heavy sadness. It is one thing to read about history, and quite another to hold a living piece of it in your hands.
I suppose every sane black person must be angry, at least for a while. I was in the Sociology Department, a politically liberal department, and talk about improving race relations was common. There were five or six black students, and we clung together like frightened outsiders. I will not speak for my black colleagues, but I was sincerely doubtful of my white professors’ understanding of everyday racism. Their lectures were often brilliant, but never complete.
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This thought-provoking piece acknowledges another driving factor behind collecting: comfort. It’s telling that the author’s collection began at a difficult period in her adult life, and Power’s particular passion, dolls, links back to childhood — a time when, hopefully, we experienced the least stress, worry, and hurt. That said, there is surely an element of solace to all collecting, be it sneakers, records, or beer cans. Childhood memorabilia covers a wide area, and the practice of adults continuing to pursue their youthful obsessions has become, if not quite fashionable, then at least acceptable. As EmGo, a Transformer-collecting vlogger popular with my own son, reminds us: “You don’t stop playing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop playing.” It’s a sentiment eruditely echoed by the author here.
Powers’ dolls intersect with her other great loves of fashion, art, and design, but she finds herself faced with an ethical dilemma. Dolls mean plastic and packaging. Buying brand-new items is inarguably bad for the environment. The solution, as she reasons, lies in concentrating on the second-hand market — seeking out and even restoring items that already exist. There’s much to be said for this approach, but the real fascination in this piece comes from Powers’ meditations on what it means to be “adult,” and the stigma that often surrounds holding on to our childhood loves.
Although there is no time in my life where I haven’t loved dolls, there was a time in my life when I felt like I wasn’t supposed to love dolls. I can trace this shift into shame to another rough transitional moment in life — age 12. As I’m sure it was for many, for me, being 12 was awful. It was a time when I felt like I was trapped between leaving childhood behind and facing the unknown world of being a teenager and all the social pressures that came along with it.
The protagonist of this piece, Icelandic history teacher Sigurður Hjartarson, considers himself a collector just like any other. His chosen subject, however, stands out (pardon the pun) as one of the more unusual on this list, or any other. There is nothing salacious about Hjartarson’s hobby; his interest is scientific and, in a liberal country such as Iceland, largely accepted as such. Reading this absorbing piece, however, it’s hard not to sense that Hjartarson revels, even if just a bit, in the quirkiness of his particular field; the Folklore Section of his museum includes an empty glass jar labeled “Homo sapiens invisibilis.”
Again, though, the real interest lies in the genesis and pursuit of Hjartarson’s hobby. As I suspect is the case with many collections, the teacher received his first specimen as a gift — an entirely unexpected and serendipitous spark that started the Icelander on his unique journey. Think of your own obsessions and interests. Where did they come from, and how would you be different without them? In Hjartarson’s case, you can’t help but admire the extraordinary lengths (again, forgive me) taken to complete his museum, and the disarming charm its curator displays.
He has three more donation letters hanging on the wall—from a German, an American and a Brit who visited the museum and were moved to sign away their penises after death—but every year that passes makes them less valuable. “You’re still young,” he said, poking me in the shoulder forcefully, “but when you get older, your penis is going to start shrinking.”
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
Some things we pick up from our fathers — other things we yearn to absorb, but simply can’t. A lovely meditation from Davon Loeb, who finds the perfect symbolic childhood episode to plumb the gaps between a father’s love and a son’s need.
I wanted to be that kid. I wanted to like cars and the smell of gasoline. I wanted to like making trips to Home Depot to search the aisles as if looking for ourselves: our eyes in the shades of paint, our skin tones in the wood, and our hearts in the steel frames of rolling red tool chests. I wanted to look like Dad, to think like Dad, to be like Dad. I wanted to have the same last name as him. But none of those things were possible.
Why does America love serial killers? That’s the question Sarah Marshall considers in this essay. She dives into pop culture, homicide statistics, stereotypes about criminals, and her own life to make the case that serial killers, as a frightful concept, reinforce what many Americans wish to believe about themselves and their country:
In the time of COVID, the right to invite death into your home and to spread it around to others became, somehow, the context of a presidential election. As far as I can tell, Americans love killing one another, and always have, but serial killers make us look a little better. The United States was built on the bones and blood of endless murder, of slavery, and of genocide; crucially, the FBI’s current classification of a serial killer stipulates “unlawful” killings, because otherwise, a lot of cops and federal agents would be serial killers too.
Before it hunted serial killers, the FBI busied itself with projects like trying to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into suicide, and to call that anything other than attempted murder seems pretty academic; to look at the FBI’s collaboration with the Chicago Police Department in the killing of Fred Hampton and call it anything other than murder would just be a lie. That I grew up thinking of the FBI as the good guys who caught serial killers, rather than as the organization that tried to stamp out the civil rights movement, is the result of many things, the limits of my own education chief among them. But serial killers — both the ones who were caught and the theoretical ones we could imagine were still out there — had a lot to offer the FBI, and the American legal system as a whole. David Schmid writes in Natural Born Celebrities that the serial killer is “the figure that, in a sense, [was] the FBI’s greatest ally.” A champion needs a monster to fight.
These are real crimes, and so are the people who commit them; what I wonder is why we focus so relentlessly on just one corner of the picture, as awful as it may be. In America, the most common cause of death for pregnant women is homicide. Isn’t this just as horrifying? Isn’t it worse? But to develop a cultural fixation on men who kill their pregnant partners is to acknowledge a problem bigger than a few inhuman specimens, born beyond redemption. It is to acknowledge that serial killers terrify us not because they are so different from normal people, but because they are so similar to normal men. They exonerate “normal” American violence because they will always be worse. They drive women back in from the open road and into the arms of a more probable killer.
Maybe you’ve seen the photo before: a Serb soldier with sunglasses balanced on his head, a grenade launcher strapped to his back, and his right foot cocked, seemingly on the verge of kicking a woman who lies face down on a sidewalk in a pool of blood. The picture, taken by Ron Haviv on April 2, 1992, is one of the most iconic of the war in Bosnia. But who is the soldier, and what happened to him after Haviv captured his brutality on film? As this forensic investigation shows, the soldier was a member of a paramilitary group known as Arkan’s Tigers who went on to become a popular DJ — and these days, he’s still spinning:
Former members of Arkan’s Tigers are on Facebook, Instagram, and the Russian social media site V Kontakte, where some of them share photos of themselves in uniform, connect with other former members of Arkan’s Tigers, and boast about their past.
On Facebook, Golubović does not present that version of himself. He’s a motorcyclist. He’s a racer, an automobilist, and a musician. A DJ, a producer, and an owner of a music studio. There’s no mention of war — let alone alleged crimes — only his description of himself as a “commando scout high officer.”
In 2018, Golubović updated his Facebook to say he got married. In the comments, people congratulate him with heart emojis. One commenter, however, shares Haviv’s famous photo. “You bum,” he writes in Serbian. “Your time will come.” He adds a curse, one that roughly means: May all the dishonorable things you’ve done come back to hurt you and your family.
In Golubović’s Facebook photo, a bottle of Taittinger champagne balances on a motorcycle.
He’s Facebook friends with at least 10 men who appear to be former members of Arkan’s Tigers. Some of the men listed on the Serbian State Security payment list that Rolling Stone obtained currently work within the Serbian government, and others allegedly have links to organized crime. One former Tiger appears to have recently served as a bodyguard for Ceca, Arkan’s widow and one of Serbia’s most famous singers, who now has her own Kardashian-style reality television show. And at least one former Tiger is on the run from Interpol, having allegedly fled to Russian-occupied Ukraine in 2014 after refusing to stand trial for alleged war crimes he committed. One man on the list is serving 40 years in prison for killing Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003.
While there are countless auto salvage yards in Texas there is only one like Bob’s, where hundreds of old vehicles sit on 65 acres of scrub bush. This is the compelling story of a lifetime spent indulging in a passion.
Bob may have missed the heyday, back when people really did get their kicks on Route 66, but the vestiges of that bygone era remain. With its single-screen movie theaters, roadside cafés, and art-deco gas stations, the rolling plains appear as a dust-covered snapshot, capturing a time when things seemed simpler, at least according to Bob. From as early as he can remember, he’d felt destined to reclaim, restore, and retell the story of what had been lost.
The world’s most vulnerable glacier is also one of the hardest to reach. Our knowledge of it has been hard-won through challenging journeys, but this science from the bottom of the world has a lot to tell us.
Science is a fallible, communal human process; it moves by slow self-correction, threading its way through uncertainties like a ship among icebergs. In Pine Island Bay, where the ocean charts themselves are still being updated, precision is vital. But precision takes time, and Thwaites’s time seems to dwindle with each new study.
In these lovely musings about parenting, Kaitlyn Teer considers Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and ecologist Suzanne Simard’s research on “mother trees” and the interconnectedness and communication of old-growth forests. What does it mean to give, to be useful — as a mother, but also a neighbor, or a natural resource? How do we help mothers, forests, and but also whole ecosystems not just survive, but thrive?
Whether you’re a mother juggling work with raising a child, a person wondering what “community” or “sustainability” really look like, or someone questioning what it means to be happy, Teer beautifully weaves insights that might resonate with you.
Hearing this, I thought of the forest ecosystems under threat as climate-exacerbated droughts and heat waves make for longer, more intense wildfire seasons. I thought of the boy who grew up to be a man who took and took from the tree he loved. And I thought of our society’s focus on the isolated nuclear family, how mothers in particular are pushed to the brink of collapse by extractive structures, how difficult it is for mothers—especially single parents, women of color, and immigrants—to flourish.
Will McCarthy| Longreads | January 2023 | 12 minutes (3,313 words)
Somewhere near the center of Nevada, on the western slope of the Toiyabe Range, there’s a little meadow beside a creek running down from the mountains. In 2019, long before I had ever been there, a man named James Fredette drove his mobile home down the gravel road from the highway and went fishing. It was a lucky day: He caught three big rainbow trout. Then, as the light turned golden and began to fade from the canyon while Fredette packed up his gear, he thought, why not, and walked back down to the creek to try his luck panning for gold. He turned up a few nuggets, right there. Yes, it was a very lucky day.
Fredette had been living in his run-down motorhome for months, trying to fix what he could of the slowly failing vehicle, while saving up to buy parts with his Social Security check. Maybe these nuggets of gold got him thinking. What if there really was a long-lost main vein somewhere around here? A motherlode that the gold rush decades had missed? He could live a lot larger than now, that’s for sure, and finally have the money to fix his motorhome’s engine. Maybe he could even ditch it, buy a house, and get off the road altogether.
If I could just find that vein, he thought, as the last ray of light disappeared behind the mountains.
Instead, the next morning Fredette would drive west. He’d stop at Subway and Taco Bell. He’d do some laundry at a nice laundromat in Winnemucca with a friendly attendant. And then he’d hop back into his motorhome and keep driving.
Stay away from my gold, Fredette thought as he set off to his next destination. “I’m going back to get rich this time,” he wrote.
At least, according to Fredette’s Google reviews of a creekside campground and other stops on his journey, that’s what I imagine had happened.
For a while now, whenever I go somewhere new, the first thing I do is check Google Reviews. If you’ve searched for locations and businesses on the internet, it’s likely that you’ve read a Google review — or perhaps written your own. Most reviews are straightforward. Want to find excellent banh mi in Shreveport, Louisiana? Wondering whether a bed and breakfast in Boise, Idaho, has bed bugs, or if the temperature of the pool is just right? Look to the countless people who have expressed thousands of opinions embedded in Google Maps’ trusted interface. Google Reviews taps you into a nearly infinite community of people who have, out of the goodness of their hearts, shared their experiences so that others might learn from them. It’s like having millions of friends around the world who can give you a reliable recommendation on literally anything.
But in reality, it’s not always like that. Most of the time, reviews alternate between angry, comically banal, and downright bizarre. One star for Laurie’s Gentle Pet Grooming in Terrebonne, Oregon: “She butchered my pomeranian I would not recommend.” One star for a Walmart in Columbia, Kentucky: “I don’t go in Walmart stores, my husband went in. I hate Walmart.” Two stars for the New Hope Baptist Church in Five Points, Alabama: “Can’t really say …. car broke down and had to replace a radiator hose in the parking lot.”
Reasonably good bridge. A little loud for sleeping.
will mccarthy on Puente Las BramonAS, MEXICO
Describing the world on a five-star scale creates a binary where the vast majority of reviews are either overwhelmingly positive or negative. (A lot of bad reviews are really just stories of people having a bad day.) Google’s vetting process is intended to automatically flag fake reviews or inappropriate comments, sorting through hate speech, misinformation, and threats. But it doesn’t always play out that cleanly, and businesses can’t remove every negative review. On the flip side, positive reviews can either help a small business find new clients without advertising, or create an environment where every disgruntled customer holds the threat of a bad review as blackmail. Too many glowing reviews can make a place sound too good to be true, or ultimately ruin a hidden gem.
Sometimes, the whole thing feels like a mess. One of the many internet experiments for-the-good gone wrong. But I love Google Reviews. The good and the bad. Which is not surprising: I like maps, so that’s how it started — just scrolling on Google Maps and seeing what was out there. It wasn’t until later that I realized I spent more time reading the reviews of places — wondering about the people who’d come before me, reconstructing a story from their lives across a two-dimensional landscape — than looking at the map itself. It’s like glancing into apartment windows as you drive down the highway, and feeling that strange and fleeting connection to other people on earth.
It’s been said that “news is the first rough draft of history.” But maybe it’s actually Google Reviews.
Born out of early product reviews of the ’90s and early 2000s like RateItAll and eBay, Google Reviews is a digital marketing tool that allows businesses to collect testimonials about their services. The idea behind Google Reviews was to digitize a service that previously existed through the Yellow Pages, word of mouth, or specialized product guides (like the Michelin Guide). The concept was simple: People wanted to know which products were good, and the easiest way to achieve that was to crowdsource reviews.
In 2001, Google purchased the intellectual property rights of Deja, one of the leading review sites. Yelp popped up on the scene several years later. By the mid-2000s, there were at least half a dozen websites that offered reviews and recommendations for nearly everything. So began the slow march toward today’s era of ubiquitous online reviews, and an internet that influences all the decisions we make, the places we go, and the experiences we have. Eventually, Google Reviews began to dominate the industry.
Even our most cherished memories — that shaved ice we enjoyed with a friend in Lubbock, Texas, or that Spanish-language school we attended on the Gulf of Mexico — have their roots in Google Reviews. No longer just a tool to rate products and businesses, it’s evolved into something bigger.
With a typically rosy view of the World Wide Web at the time, in 2003, the co-founder of RateItAll said that his vision for online reviews was to give “anyone with access to the Internet a chance to tell the world what they think.”
That is, ultimately, what happened — with some unexpected results.
For a long time, I lurked in Google Reviews. I had never reviewed anything before — until last year. I was riding my bike through Baja California, and one night I planned poorly and got stuck in the dark somewhere between Ciudad Insurgentes and La Paz, next to a small concrete overpass spanning a dry creek. Looking on Google Maps, I noticed the overpass had a name — Puente Las Bramonas — and had nine Google reviews. Three of these reviews included comments, which Google translated from Spanish.
I slept under the overpass that night, and in the morning, I wrote a review: “Reasonably good bridge. A little loud for sleeping.” I gave it four stars. After I set off on my bike, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because of Google Reviews — because multiple people took the time to review this squat bridge in the middle of nowhere — I felt like I was part of some shared human experience, the newest member of an obscure club. Maybe the other reviewers would disagree, but this moment felt powerful, like seeing other people’s names etched into a park bench or finding yourself deeply moved by the graffiti inside a public bathroom stall. But it was also weird: This tool for consumer reviews had become a digital guestbook for anything and everything in the world.
After that experience at Puente Las Bramonas, I started looking for reviews everywhere. Three stars for an 18th-century governor’s mansion in New Jersey (“very clean old and haunted,” Brianna Baker wrote). Two stars for a shop selling natural handcrafted products in Prince Edward Island (apparently they sell too much tea tree oil, which is toxic to dogs). Four stars for the Environmental Protection Agency office in Chicago (“great time,” writes Ryan Shippen). Hospitals and government agencies are frequent targets, with Google Reviews serving as a form of protest against frustrating systems far bigger than ourselves. On the outskirts of Chicago, unhappy truckers have dragged the rating for a railyard dock down to 2.7 stars, giving insight into an unhappy drama of delayed and misplaced shipping containers and exasperated big rig operators.
The overwhelming crush of reviews — everything rated, every opinion commodified and digitized, every small subplot in life available for critique — borders on farcical.
I have lived, these reviews say, I have fought and struggled and cried in the face of beauty. I have felt pain, and I have been to Taco Bell and it was only average.
Some reviews read like poetry: “The bell has rung but not late for school. Am i in the right class,” David Prescott wrote of a Taco Bell in New Jersey. Some lines read like odes to Hemingway’s famous six-word story: “Unknowingly purchased sick Nigerian dwarf goats,” Joseph Hardwick wrote of the Hilltop Acres Goat & Sheep Auction in Romance, Arkansas. Sometimes it feels like the reviews are reaching toward some great metaphor. In remote Bowman, North Dakota, Ron Kramer stared at a scarecrow cowboy riding a red, white, and blue USA missile. “The missile warhead fell off,” he wrote.
It might take some imagination, but I think Google Reviews reveals the pure breadth of people out there, and the many ways we can interact with a place and come away with completely different experiences. Take the reviews for Sego Canyon rock art in east Utah — a truly beautiful, undeniably spiritual place with ancient Indigenous petroglyphs dotting the canyon walls. To some, it’s an awe-inspiring display of perspective and timescale. To others, it’s junk.
“This whole area is amazing. It’s a gift to be able to see.”
“A couple glyphs and a small road to a abandoned mining settlement. Ok.”
“The art isn’t even art, just a bunch of stick figure sheep and crappy looking aliens.”
Sifting through reviews sometimes feels like the world is up for debate. But it’s also a way to find common ground.
Timothy Pfeiffer of Four Corners, Florida, rambled around North America in an RV with his wife for almost four years. He initially used Google Reviews the way it was intended: to find recommendations for eating and sleeping, and to help fellow travelers. As a Local Guide, one of Google’s most prolific reviewers, he’s written thousands of reviews.
“Google actually said I was in the top 1% of all reviewers,” Pfeiffer said. “I got a little flag for that.”
When Pfeiffer first started exploring, he just read the reviews, but it wasn’t long before he began to write his own. Over time, Pfeiffer viewed the undertaking as a way to document his travels.
In the process, Pfeiffer began contributing to a vast, chaotic, beautiful, and mildly deranged collection of human experiences. It’s tempting to call Google Reviews an archive, but archivists wouldn’t agree.
Google Reviews is constantly changing. There’s no effort to preserve it — content is sometimes deleted or edited without warning. Google policies governing the reviews shift intermittently. And unlike an archive, none of the reviews have been disembedded from their original context, nor are they easily accessible or searchable. Just the opposite, the reviews are a jumble of unorganized experiences in product-guide form.
If the idea of an archive is to treat the evidence of human existence as somehow sacred, Google Reviews does not. Instead, it’s a throng of memories that could disappear at any moment, like life itself. It’s ultimately this notion of impermanence that makes the experience of reading Google Reviews feel so lonely to me.
When I spoke to Pfeiffer, he was happy to show me how his reviews reflect the trip he took up from Florida, across to the West Coast, into Canada, and down through Mexico. They’re like entries in a ship’s logbook. When I asked him if he would be upset if all his reviews were deleted tomorrow, he paused for a while.
“I would be,” he said. “I really would be.”
For someone like Pfeiffer, I can’t help but think that Google Reviews is more than just a diary or a scrapbook. It’s a story of your existence.
In December 2021, at a Plato’s Closet in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Bradley Hawthorne had a hard time trying to sell his sister’s clothes.
She had passed away about a year earlier, and Hawthorne’s mom had been holding onto her clothes, unwilling to let them go. But after 12 months, the family decided to try and sell them.
Hawthorne had a bad experience at the store: It wasn’t open when it was supposed to be, and it only accepted items at certain hours of the day. The staff didn’t seem to care about the clothes one way or another. Hawthorne gave Plato’s Closet one star.
Great time.
ryan shippen on the environmental protection agency office, chicago
But Hawthorne doesn’t take writing reviews lightly. He approached his response like a five-paragraph essay, with a thesis and supporting arguments. If you’re going to rate something, Hawthorne said, you should state the facts to back it up. The reviews shouldn’t just be opinions.
But even the hundreds of words that Hawthorne wrote couldn’t convey how hard it was for him to take his sister’s clothes to a secondhand store.
“Growing up, never once did I think I was going to outlive her. She never had any medical issues,” Hawthorne said of his older sister. “But then she started getting these headaches.”
He didn’t worry much at first. But her headaches got worse. Eventually, his sister drove to a hospital for a brain scan. They learned she had stage three cancer.
His sister lived another year. During that time, she had been going through a divorce. The family struggled. So when Hawthorne walked into that store with his sister’s clothes, he just wanted someone to see their worth.
“It wasn’t just me trying to hawk some clothes,” Hawthorne said.
It feels impossible to fully connect and empathize with all the people we interact with each day, to see the full existence of every person we pass on the street. It’s easier to keep your head down. But all these stories, these small nuggets of humanity buried in Google Reviews, feel like opportunities for us to practice that empathy.
Customers having bad days at an Autozone in Norman, Oklahoma. A daughter treating her terminally ill father to lunch at a diner in rural Kentucky. A veteran at Arlington National Cemetery, reckoning with the friends he met in basic training who never came home from Vietnam. Hidden beneath all the absurd, bizarre, and hilarious reviews is real and honest vulnerability.
It’s like glancing into apartment windows as you drive down the highway, and feeling that strange and fleeting connection to other people on earth.
For Amanda Vasquez, Google Reviews is an outlet through which to process a series of tragedies in her life, including the deaths of two family members to COVID-19. For S.M. Newlin, it’s a way to reflect on how a remote lake in California has come to represent the passage of time. With wistfulness and joy, he writes about watching his daughter catch her first fish in the exact spot he did so many years before, the same place where his mother’s ashes are scattered.
“Recognize that this place is very much alive,” Newlin wrote. “Know that for some of us who’ve seen and been through the worst of mankind, the peace found in this place is second to none.”
For Mary Ellen Kepner, Google Reviews is a space to express gratitude for one of the scariest moments in her life: being rushed by helicopter to an emergency room right before Christmas. There, at Piedmont Columbus Regional medical center in Georgia, she was treated with dignity and care.
On the surface, these personal stories read like strangers shouting into the void, demanding for their lives to be heard and recognized. I have lived, these reviews say, I have fought and struggled and cried in the face of beauty. I have felt pain, and I have been to Taco Bell and it was only average. To review is to mark your actuality. To not review is to be lost to time in this strange, crowdsourced record of existence.
* During the writing of this story, Kepner changed her original review and 4.5 rating of the facility. Her updated review now gives Piedmont 5 stars.
In the end, though, it’s still Google Reviews. Kepner, for her life-saving holiday experience, gave the hospital a 4.5 rating.
“I have yet to see anything deserve 5 stars,” she wrote.*
In September, I visited the west coast of Alaska to work on a story. A historic storm had flooded the small community of Hooper Bay, tearing homes from their foundations, turning parts of the village into islands, and tossing fishing boats out onto the tundra. At the end of a day of reporting, I walked a few miles down from the village to the Bering Sea, imagining the destructive power of the ocean and sky.
It was a rare sunny day, and the water was glassy and smooth, lapping against the shore. This ancient, frigid body of water separates Asia from North America, plunging 13,442 feet down at its deepest point. The sky reflected off the ocean; the ocean reflected off the sky.
It was so beautiful that I wanted to cry.
More than 600 people have rated the Bering Sea on Google Reviews.
“Didn’t enjoy, too much water.” One star.
“its ok i guess.” Three stars.
“at the time we were out, i had Tmobile and hubby had Verizon. i had service and he didn’t.” Five stars.
As I stood on the edge of the continent, reading absurdist reviews on my cracked iPhone screen about an ocean that’s many millions of years old, I wondered: Why do I do this?
Didn’t enjoy, too much water.
Marie-Roy Isidor Lawrence on the Bering sea
There’s a guy I’ve been following on Google Reviews for a while. He travels around the western U.S., writing reviews that are entertaining and unusually intimate. He’s gone to many of the same places I’ve been, and I think we would get along. He’s reviewed Cactus Pete’s Casino on the border of Idaho, a wildlife refuge in southern Nevada, a Walmart near Lake Tahoe.
And, with each review, he builds a narrative of his life as he goes. In some versions, he travels with a girlfriend or a wife. Sometimes his romantic partner is replaced with kids and they’re out on the road together, having picnics. Other times, it’s just him and his dog.
Maybe it’s all real, but I can’t help but think he’s using Google Reviews to leave a digital breadcrumb of a life that he’s not yet living. Maybe it’s aspirational, like manifesting your own reality. Maybe it’s a little sad. But his approach to Google Reviews feels, in some ways, like the most honest of them all.
I’m pretty sure that some of these hundreds of reviewers have actually been to the Bering Sea. It’s possible they stood in the exact same spot I did, also overcome with emotion. Maybe they quietly gave it a five-star rating, without elaborating, because they knew words would never do it justice.
Even if it’s wishful thinking, I really want to believe that buried beneath the mundanity, the weirdness, and the loneliness, there’s something powerful and ineffable about this record of shared experiences. Even after all this time mining through the reviews, I still don’t know exactly what it is. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll find gold.
Will McCarthy is a reporter and audio producer. He’s written for the New York Times, National Geographic, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. You can find his work at www.willmccarthy.net.
In this gorgeous essay from The White Review‘s archives, Natalie Linh Bolderston writes about her Vietnamese mother, food, the stories of ancient spirits passed down in their family, and the ghosts that live inside those we love. You’ll be drawn to Bolderston’s beautiful observations on wanting, caring, and eating, and delicate descriptions of her mother.
Mum fled Vietnam and came to the UK as a refugee a few years after the end of the war, along with her parents and siblings. They left almost everything behind except for the ghosts, and the language they spoke to them in. These were both the ghosts they had carried from birth — ancestors, old gods, the cursed spirits from stories — and the ghosts that rose from the war. The new ghosts were shapeshifters, most visible at night. Sometimes, they wore the faces of the soldiers who raided family homes for hidden gold and other valuables. Sometimes, they appeared as the old men who were taken away to re-education camps, or young girls after weeks of eating too little.
I wonder how Mum learned to carry such hunger, whether it felt like she too was turning into a ghost. I’ve never known how to fill the spaces that still exist inside her. All I can do is let her watch me eat.
In this thought-provoking and beautifully written essay about geological and human memory, a paleoclimatologist writes about what the Earth knows, records, and forgets. She also contemplates her brother’s tragic trajectory and mental deterioration after a snowboarding accident, weaving in a personal narrative that makes the piece all the more powerful.
Earth records provide us with this information: Ice cores, tree rings, ocean sediments, stalactites and stalagmites in caves, growth rings in corals, tusks, and mollusks. These archives accrete memories on time periods varying from months to millions of years, allowing us to see a spectrum of Earth changes on various temporal and spatial scales—how biology, ocean, and ice respond to climate change in signature patterns, and the points at which those systems are pushed past thresholds.
As I watch the unfolding of extreme events across our planet, I find myself continuously relocated to that moment in the car with my brother. The sense of fracturing that ripples from a single shock event, even if the full extent of damage is yet to reveal itself.
