Five decades after DJ Kool Herc’s genre-birthingBronx party, hip-hop has aged into a new form of tragedy: legendary practitioners dying of natural causes. As Jelani Cobb points out, however, “natural causes” does not mean “old age.” Beloved De La Soul member Dave “Trugoy” Jolicoeur succumbed to congestive heart failure; A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife, to diabetes. Name after name, the irony remains. You can outlive the immediate dangers, only to fall to the long shadow they cast.
De La Soul’s work is defined by its subversive wit and creativity; Jolicoeur chose the name Trugoy the Dove in an attempt to set himself apart from the superficial aggression that had defined so much of the genre even by the time De La Soul emerged, in 1989. But the music that so profoundly articulated the tragedy of premature death at twenty is far less vocal on the subject of premature death at fifty. It was easy to draw the parallels between the artists gunned down in the streets and the indexes of violence affecting Black and brown communities. Tupac’s death resonated precisely because the circumstances under which it occurred, in 1996, were so familiar. It’s less common, though, to sketch the connections between Sean Price, the Brooklyn-bred rapper who died in his sleep at age forty-three, and the disparities of health, health care, and longevity that impact those same communities.
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An unjust police killing. Nature reclamation in the fossil fuel era. Surviving a bear attack. The underbelly of the antiquities trade. And for a well-earned dessert, the legacy of the world’s first breakout video game.
Meg O’Connor | The Appeal & Phoenix New Times | March 14, 2023 | 7,576 words
It’s been nine years since Laquan McDonald was killed by police in Chicago, shot in the back while walking away. It’s been seven years since Philando Castile was killed by police in the Minneapolis suburbs, shot while his empty hands were raised during a questionable traffic stop. And it’s been four years since Jacob Harris was killed by police in Phoenix, seconds after he emerged from a car, his back turned. You’ve likely heard less about Harris’ death than you have McDonald’s and Castile’s, but Meg O’Connor’s thorough investigation makes clear that you won’t forget it. The gross miscarriages of justice are plentiful: the circumstances of Harris’ killing and the shifting police statements around it; the money and valuables police took from Harris’ father’s home before informing him his son was dead; the fact that Harris’ friends are currently serving decades-long prison sentences for his death, while the officers who pulled the trigger (and unleashed an attack dog on his prone body) walk free. We’ve heard far, far too many names like McDonald’s and Castile’s and Harris’ over the past decade, and nothing makes me think we won’t continue to hear many more. That’s what makes this sort of journalism so necessary — not because it can bring these young men back to life, but because it makes brutally clear how unjust their deaths are, and how broken policing is. —PR
Lacy M. Johnson | Emergence Magazine | March 9, 2023 | 3,724 words
We’re starting to see the massive environmental repercussions that the fossil fuel industry’s surge has wrought on coastal areas of the United States. At EmergenceMagazine, Lacy M. Johnson reflects on the Baytown Nature Center, a portion of land restored after oil drilling and water extraction caused the land to sink, making the executive Brownwood subdivision vulnerable to storm surge flooding with more frequent and violent storms caused by global warming. As Johnson catalogues the decades of destruction in disappearing land and animal habitat — all in a bid to fuel vehicles and serve an ongoing war effort with the petroleum-based building blocks of explosives and rubber — you have to wonder, is it really worth it? If you ask Johnson, the answer is no: “It’s normal to want to repair what’s broken, folly to repair what breaks us and keeps on breaking.” P.S. For a Louisiana perspective on fossil fuel, havoc, and the human cost of repeat devastation, read “Great American Wasteland” by Lauren Stroh. —KS
Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | March 10, 2023 | 5,900 words
I have never seen a grizzly bear, but I have seen its tracks: Impossibly huge imprints squelched deep into the mud, tips of long claws cutting in even further, an echo of the power that passed before. Ryan Hockensmith’s piece made me all too aware of what it would be like to encounter that paw firsthand with his chilling, graphic description of a grizzly bear attack on junior college wrestlers Brady Lowry and Kendell Cummings. Although Hockensmith does not shy away from the horror, he leaves plenty of room for the other aspects of this story, whether the friendship behind Cummings’ act of bravery or an understanding of the bear’s actions. (As he sets out, she was likely just protecting her cubs, with the young men fairly blaming themselves for being “in its house.”) The piece details the months following the attack as well, becoming a testament to the boys’ resilience, Hockensmith tracing their road to recovery without overindulging in sentiment. I came out of this gripping feature with great respect for Cummings and Lowry. —CW
Greg Donahue | New York | February 13, 2023 | 5,508 words
The uber-wealthy never cease to amaze with their shamelessness. Case in point: Michael Steinhardt, billionaire investor, noted philanthropist, and, ‘twould appear, someone who for much of his life had exactly no problem buying stolen art. A lot of it. Steinhardt amassed one of the biggest private antiquities collections in the world, including an array of “fresh” objects, straight from the earth and unlikely to pass through above-board trade on their way to Steinhardt’s Upper East Side penthouse. “Steinhardt bought an object so fresh it had to be cleaned by the dealer in a hotel bathtub before being delivered to his apartment,” journalist Greg Donahue writes. The guy once kept a stone skull dating back to 7,000 B.C. on a side table in his living room — we know this because the object appears in real-estate listing photos saved by the Manhattan district attorney’s office that investigated Steinhardt. Wild. “As an investor, mastering risk had brought him wealth and prestige,” Donahue points out, placing Steinhardt’s shady dealings in the context of his wider existence. “Why should antiquities be different?” The piece also subtly raises the question of whether the antiquities market is beyond repair. Steinhardt might be among the worst offenders, but he’s also a symptom of the market’s problematic status quo, shaped as it is by privilege, greed, and colonialism. —SLD
Charles Russo | SFGATE | March 9, 2023 | 2,809 words
Charles Russo tracks the beginnings of the modern video game industry, which has its roots in a “scrappy Silicon Valley startup” now known as Atari. Its founders, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, had previously created the world’s first coin-operated video game, a futuristic yellow machine called Computer Space. Under Atari, they developed Pong, a simple yet engrossing arcade game that became an instant hit with the American public when it was released in March 1973 — and is now a beloved classic. This is a delightful dive into the video game industry’s “big-bang moment,” accompanied by fun images from the ’70s. My favorite is a photograph of a massive retro Atari arcade game at the Powell Street BART station in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by people with bell-bottoms. —CLR
David Browne | Rolling Stone | March 10, 2023 | 8,295 words
In this piece, David Browne gives a respectful account of the frantic life of Lisa Marie Presley. Although there is some attempt to analyze how growing up in the spotlight affected her, this is more of a faithful narrative of her world and tragic death. —CW
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All roads lead to Michael Steinhardt: That’s what Matthew Bogdanos of the Manhattan district attorney’s office learned when he started investigating the penetration of the black market for antiquities into the New York art scene. Steinhardt was a prominent New Yorker, a billionaire with his name on buildings and schools, one of the founders of the Birthright Israel program. He also had a massive collection of antiquities and didn’t care about the provenance of the ancient objects that filled his penthouse apartment:
Determined to be more than another dilettante, Steinhardt built up a library of reference books on antiquities and subscribed to archaeology magazines. He scoured catalogues from Christie’s and Sotheby’s and developed fast relationships with prominent dealers. “He struck me as someone who has a fine eye,” said Aboutaam, that is, an innate sense for which objects held particular significance. Before long, he was spending millions of dollars a year on bronze figurines and Roman mosaics, terracotta idols and stone skulls.
At the time, the antiquities trade was almost entirely unregulated. Fake artifacts were common, as were unscrupulous dealers who had developed numerous methods, including straw purchases and forged paperwork, to skirt patrimony laws designed to keep cultural property from being smuggled out of its country of origin. In 1973, John D. Cooney, a renowned curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, told the New York Times that “95 percent of the ancient art material in this country has been smuggled in.” Anybody who thought otherwise, he added, would have to be “naïve or not very bright.”
Steinhardt was unconcerned. “My overwhelming motivation in buying ancient art was their aesthetics,” he once said in a deposition. “And aesthetics had almost nothing to do with provenance.” He boldly admitted that he would buy pieces that were “fresh,” i.e., taken straight out of the ground, and said he was willing to accept the risk that those purchases might have broken the law. As an investor, mastering risk had brought him wealth and prestige. Why should antiquities be different?
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In 2016, TheNew York Times released a stunning short documentary called The Forger. Featuring shadow puppets, it told the story of a teenager who, during Germany’s occupation of France, manufactured fake identity papers en masse to save thousands of Jews. Later, he would use his unique skills to aid resistance fighters in Algeria, opponents of dictatorships in Greece and Spain, and anti-colonialist forces in Africa and Latin America. For decades he worked publicly as a photographer and kept the story of his forgeries secret from almost everyone he knew.
The man’s name was Adolfo Kaminsky, and he died earlier this year at the age of 97. Adam Schatz has written a remembrance of his remarkable, complicated life that is well worth your time:
As word of the Paris forger’s abilities spread in Resistance networks, the laboratory on the rue des Saints-Pères began to receive as many as five hundred orders a week, from Paris, the Southern Zone and London. On one occasion, Penguin told Kaminsky that a raid on Jewish homes in the Paris region was imminent, and they needed papers for three hundred Jewish children in three days. This meant nine hundred documents, and seemed impossible. But Kaminsky calculated that he could make thirty fake documents an hour and refused even to take a nap until they were done: if he slept for just an hour, he reckoned, thirty people would die. One of his colleagues had to remind him that ‘we need a forger, Adolfo, not another corpse.’ After the Liberation of Paris, he joined the French intelligence services, making papers for the Resistance members who were parachuting into Germany to track down concentration camps before the Nazis destroyed evidence of the extermination. ‘Everything a man keeps on himself, in cases of capture, can save his life,’ he said. ‘I had a week in which to invent for everyone a credible past and to create the proofs of it.’
Simply to offer to make papers for someone – Kaminsky paid house calls to many Jewish families, urging them to accept his help – was to put his life in a stranger’s hands. His warnings to Jews about the extermination camps were sometimes met with disbelief, even anger. In his memoir he remembers visiting Madame Drawda, a mother of four, who insisted she had no need of false documents since her family had been French for several generations and, in any case, all the talk of death camps was ‘Anglo-American propaganda’. Then she threatened to call the police. Over the course of the war, several of Kaminsky’s colleagues were murdered by the Gestapo, including Penguin, who was caught driving thirty children to safety in Switzerland. To avoid detection, Kaminsky learned to ‘transform myself into a shadow’.
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In 2012, Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner stepped from a tiny platform into empty air, 24 miles above the ground, an audience of 10 million people watching live via social media. Video of his ensuing jump, during which he became the first human to break the sound barrier before parachuting safely to earth, has been viewed hundreds of millions of times. It’s little wonder: The record-setting feat epitomizes the allure of that ever-growing category known as extreme sports. Athletic talent is one thing; exercising it at the very fringes of human capacity is quite another.
Every kid who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s remembers Evel Knievel in his star-spangled jumpsuit, thrilling us all with death-defying (and bone-crushing) stunts — but hundreds of years before Knievel revved up his motorbike, Hawaiian divers were leaping feet-first from massive crags in lele kawa, or cliff diving. Further back still, the medieval sport of jousting frequently resulted in injury or death despite its many safety-minded rules; in ancient Greece, athletes fought in the deadly mixed-martial-arts of pankration, a combat in which biting and gouging were the only two methods you couldn’t use to disable your opponent. From Minoan bull-leaping to the Algonquin ball game of pasuckuakohowog, in which hundreds of competitors risked life and limb on the same field, humans have long engaged in (and watched) the riskiest contests imaginable.
In modern times, the appeal of extreme sports can be attributed to twin factors: social media allowing for easy transmission of eye-catching escapades to a global audience, and new technology making even the most challenging of pursuits considerably safer. Bungee jumping, for example, has its origins in the 1980s, when New Zealander Henry van Asch and a fellow Kiwi friend came up with the novel idea of hurling yourself off a bridge attached to an elastic rope. Back then, such an endeavor appealed to a small group of adrenaline-chasers willing to risk their lives for the thrill. Nowadays, bungee jumping is statistically as safe as skydiving and is widely viewed as a relatively low-risk activity for any pleasure seeker.
Not everything is purely a matter of proper safety measures. Ultra-endurance races, combat sports, and other activities earn their “extreme” moniker through the sheer danger that can befall an untrained attempt. Yet, the popularity of extreme sports continues to rise. Whether that’s a reaction to COVID-induced inactivity, a rebellion against the mundanity of desk jobs, or something else entirely can’t be answered, but these articles go some way toward exploring what leads us as a species to seek out our own physical and mental limits.
Hurling yourself from tall places is a high-risk, high-reward pursuit — physically, if not financially. BASE jumping differs from parachuting in that it involves launching not from an airplane, but from a static object. (BASE stands for the four officially sanctioned objects: Buildings, Antennae, Spans, and Earth itself.) Unlike the other activities on this list, it’s a sport with a decidedly illicit frisson. While there are official competitions held around the world and numerous places you can go to learn from the experts, BASE jumping still often hinges on illegal entry into skyscrapers or building sites. In 2009, Hervé le Gallou, the subject of this piece, employed subterfuge to enter the Burj Khalifa, then under construction, and threw himself from the 155th floor.
Dreams of flying date back to Greek mythology’s story of Icarus, and surely much further. Many BASE jumpers, particularly those who employ wingsuits designed to enable the wearer to glide for long distances, seem blind to that particular cautionary tale, with one in every 500 flights ending in death. We’ll never know exactly what went wrong with le Gallou’s flight that made him a numerator in that grim statistic. It’s a poignant tale, particularly when taking account of le Gallou’s former girlfriend’s desperate search for answers. Once more, we find ourselves cycling back to the question of why reasonable people do this.
Raoul jumped first, and then Woerth. Having completed their flights, they waited in the valley for the others. Le Gallou jumped third. His flight started well, according to Brennan and Frat. He banked high over the rocky outcrop and then dropped out of sight. The two Americans jumped fourth and fifth. When they landed in the valley, after flights of more than a minute, they asked about Le Gallou. Neither Raoul nor Woerth had seen him.
Of all the extreme sports, it’s caving, or spelunking (derived from the Greek word “spelaion,” or “cave”), that I find hardest to understand. To turn your back on the sun and worm your way into ever colder and darker places seems like a deliberate act of self-destruction. Squeezing through narrow rock fissures, wriggling on their bellies like a snake along passages less than a foot high: With every inch, cave divers propel themselves farther from safety. Part of the thrill surely comes from the danger. Many a caver has died from flash floods, or worse, wedged into an unseen drop or kink, their bodies never to be recovered. In such cases, the cave in question is transformed into a somber memorial — at least until the boards erected to prevent more tragedy are torn down by the next wave of fearless explorers.
This piece offers a gripping account of Polish caver Marcin Gala’s epic journey into the previously unmapped Chevé cave system, in which the author asserts that such places represent the last unknown earthbound areas left to humankind. Clearly, however, something else is at play. For tens of thousands of years, humans have been drawn to the depths. They came in search of refuge from predators and the elements, but clearly recognized these as sacred places, leaving behind markings of fierce beauty. Reading this article stirs something primal in the soul.
The truth is they had nowhere better to go. All the pleasant places had already been found. The sunlit glades and secluded coves, phosphorescent lagoons and susurrating groves had been mapped and surveyed, extolled in guidebooks and posted with Latin names. To find something truly new on the planet, something no human had ever seen, you had to go deep underground or underwater. They were doing both.
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To some, it’s a bizarre carnival show, a theater of the absurd, the appeal of which is hard to fathom. For millions of fans worldwide, though, WWE is the epitome of popular entertainment — a never-ending, real-life soap opera full of bombastic bravado and comic-book violence. WWE is fast, loud, brutal, and fake. The outcomes of fights are predetermined, but the fights themselves are semi-improvised, and require a level of strength, technical ability, and agility that you can’t help but appreciate. Accidents and injuries are far from uncommon, and the fitness and resilience needed are high. If the male side of pantomime wrestling is contentious, the world of women’s WWE is even more so. It’s an arena in which Irish superstar Becky Lynch, known by her moniker, “The Man,” has battled her way to the top.
Women’s WWE has a less-than-glorious past, with female fighters often relegated to a titillating sideshow, pressured to wear skimpy outfits and even perform simulated sex acts in pursuit of a pink butterfly belt. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising when you consider that the sport has historically been overseen by men, for men, with the majority of fans falling into the working-class, white male, category. Fighters like Lynch have fought hard to overcome this, and the landscape is changing, even if male viewers still make up two-thirds of the audience. These days, the WWE takes women’s wrestling much more seriously and appreciates its growing female fan base. This exciting peek into the world of female WWE makes for an illuminating read.
It was 3:30 a.m. by the time she made it back to the Brooklyn Marriott. Rollins had a bottle of her favorite tequila, Don Julio 1942, at the ready, and she had a drink. Some people thought the match’s ending hadn’t been sufficiently cathartic, but Lynch had done what she came to do. Twenty-one minutes into a fight that left Flair crumpled on the ground and Rousey’s legs covered in bruises, Lynch brought Rousey into a quick roll-up and the bell rang. A moment later, she hoisted the belts she’d won overhead, teary-eyed.
My first exposure to the world of freediving came, as I suspect is true for many others, through The Big Blue, French director Luc Besson’s 1988 film. It’s a beautiful, if eccentric, tale of fierce rivals whose chosen sport is deceptively simple: to see who can dive the deepest on a single breath, then return to the surface without, as the author of this piece memorably puts it, “passing out or dying.” Besson’s movie took inspiration from two legendary figures of the sport, Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca, both of whom retired from competition in good health. In fact, surprisingly, modern freediving is far less dangerous than cycling or running. Diving unaided down to depths of over 100 meters, however, is anything but safe and easy.
The thrilling piece presented here centers on 34-year-old Russian freediver Alexey Molchanov, a superman of the sport, whose holistic approach to diving makes for fascinating reading. Present here, too, is a tragedy more heartbreaking and incredible than any found in the movies. In 2015, Alexey’s mother, Natalia, herself a freediving pioneer and record holder, disappeared on her final dive — a demonstration to students — off the coast of Ibiza. Her body has never been recovered. Alexey, who was trained by his mother, continues to freedive competitively. For him, as was the case with Natalia, the act is far more than a simple sport; it is an exercise in meditation and a powerful tool for self-examination.
Once Alexey emerges, he has 15 seconds to meet the surface protocol. He must show the judges that he is okay (by flashing an okay sign). He must keep his airways above the water. He must flash the tag he grabbed at depth. And he must not pass out. He can cough up blood from a torn lung. He can produce pink foam or his lips can turn blue. But if he meets protocol, the dive is good.
For most of us, and even for elite athletes, running a marathon seems like a daunting prospect. Not for Courtney Dauwalter. Wearing baggy basketball shorts, Dauwalter regularly tackles ultramarathons — courses four or even eight times the standard 26.2-mile distance. She seems happy and bubbly, but inaction makes her antsy, even if just for a day or two. Maybe this hints at the obsessive side of extreme sports, an adrenaline addiction that demands feeding. Inarguably, for Dauwalter, extreme running is an activity inseparable from her sense of self.
Her achievements are incredible. At 37, she’s won nearly everything there is to win, setting records in the process, and has competed all over the world. Most impressive, though, is the mental strength Dauwalter displays. This is a woman who doesn’t just crave challenges — she requires them. Reading this article provides a tantalizing glimpse into her psyche, and it’s not hard to understand the satisfaction, even tranquillity, that arises for her during and after a race. For Dauwalter, the “pain cave” is a hypnotic, familiar, and even reassuring world. It may be a place few of us would desire to visit, but it bears out the new spin on an old adage: There’s value in taking yourself out of your comfort zone.
Sometimes, to ensure that her brain is still working, she recites mantras or tells herself jokes or thinks of song lyrics, or dreams of the brownie toppings she’ll have on her ice cream — after she finishes her nachos — once the race is over. If she has been racing for more than a day, she occasionally forces herself to take a one-minute power nap off to the side of a trail. Sometimes, though, she is so amped she can’t power down, so she powers forward, even if that means, as unfathomable as it seems, nodding off while jogging.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
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Four years ago, Phoenix police officers shot 19-year-old Jacob Harris repeatedly, killing him. Yet, that horrific tragedy was just the first in a series that has unfolded since January 2019: Harris’ friends sit in prison, forced into a plea bargain for a death that another man caused. In a searing piece of investigative reporting, Meg O’Connor lays out the many infuriating aspects to Harris’ murder. Make no mistake: This is crucial, urgent journalism.
Law enforcement officials in Phoenix—including Kristopher Bertz, the officer who killed Jacob Harris—have justified the shooting by saying they feared Harris intended to shoot them. But records obtained by The Appeal show that multiple officials have made inconsistent or false statements about the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Even Bertz’s own accounts of that night have differed slightly. Aerial surveillance footage of the incident shows Harris running away. And a judge in the criminal case against Harris’s friends has stated unequivocally that Harris did not turn toward Bertz.
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This STAT investigation at the intersection of artificial intelligence and medical care is frightening and infuriating. Casey Ross and Bob Herman have found that health insurance companies are relying on AI to make crucial decisions about patient care and coverage. One such company, NaviHealth, uses technology called nH Predict to generate algorithmic reports that assess a patient’s mobility and cognitive capacity, and predicts their need for care, their length of stay, and their discharge date. It’s a slick and shiny product, but as Ross and Herman report, it’s an unregulated algorithm “under the guise of scientific rigor” — its “suggestions” leading to the delay or denial of care for patients and ultimately favoring health insurance companies.
Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient’s treatment. The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations.
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Here is a lyrical feature about Mike Cole, a guy in Connecticut who turned out to have a one-of-a-kind item: the only ticket — not a stub, the whole ticket — known to survive from Michael Jordan’s debut with the Chicago Bulls. Jordan’s showing was inauspicious: He fell on his back on his first-ever dunk attempt in the NBA. But then he became one of the greatest, best-known athletes on earth, making the ticket Cole had tucked in a box of sports memorabilia worth a whole lot of money:
That it ever had any real value before last year was a different kind of conversation altogether, one about his father, old games and the reasons people hold on to anything at all. His dad was a D.C. lawyer; pretty much the only time they hung out was when they attended events together. Cole left home to attend Northwestern, and as a surprise, his dad had called a friend in the Bullets’ front office and had him leave Mike two tickets at will call to Jordan’s first game. All these years later, Cole hated the idea of letting any of his tickets go, of giving them to someone else who couldn’t understand and hadn’t actually been there.
“Every ticket can tell you a story,” Cole says. “I’m someone who’s about relationships and experiences. And that’s what tickets are to me.”
But then, that winter night in 2021, he saw the news story on TV: Ticket stub from Michael Jordan’s NBA debut sells for $264K. Cole’s ticket in the basement wasn’t a mere stub; it was unused, untorn, a complete ticket in good condition. A few weeks later, an armored truck came around the stop sign at the end of the street outside of his house, his neighbors and friends watching in stupefaction, his wife, Kristen, bundled against the cold so she could take a commemorative picture of Mike letting the ticket go to auction. Still, even as appraisers and investors hyperventilated at his discovery, the first ticket of any kind likely worth a million bucks; even as Cole was promised the moon from auction houses seeking his business and hyping its value; even as he stretched his arm to give the ticket to a man wearing a bulletproof vest and a Glock on his waistband bound for Heritage Auctions in Dallas, he wasn’t totally convinced parting with it was the right thing to do.
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John Cotter writes about navigating life with unpredictable hearing loss, a condition not totally controlled by hearing aids. He relates how his needs and habits have had to change over the years to accommodate his sometimes wildly varying auditory abilities. Most importantly, he writes, his loss is not just related to snippets of lost conversation, but of the intimacy that can be intrinsic in sound.
When I could hear well, one of the sounds I most loved was a cat drinking water. A simple need was being satisfied for the cat, and the sound affirming that was satisfying for me. Similarly, there’s a sound Elisa makes when she tastes something especially toothsome, a kind of satisfied smack of her lips. I missed hearing that when my ears went bad, but — before it happened — I didn’t know it was a sound I’d miss.
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There are roughly 600,000 workers hired in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, which allows people in certain professions to stay and work in the country. But what happens if you lose your job? As the tech industry makes mass layoffs, Varsha Bansal reports on the people desperately scrambling to find new employment and stay in the country.
For many tech workers, the current downturn has exposed the precarious nature of life on an H-1B visa. Harini, the laid-off analytics engineer, has been exploring alternative paths to the H-1B alongside job-hunting. “I’m just trying to find people to talk to on that, especially because [with] our visas, everything is so restrictive — and the other thing is that there are so many other options for visas that are very, very under-explored,” she said. “I do not want to wait for a green card for 25 years; that just seems ridiculous.”
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First, they sucked the oil out of the earth on the Brown peninsula in Texas. Then they sucked the water out of the aquifers to help process the oil. With less to underpin the earth, the Brownwood subdivision, home to oil executives and their families, started to sink. Natural habitat for birds and animals went under too. What’s more, man and beast alike became more vulnerable to flooding from storm surges with the more frequent and powerful storms brought on in part by the fossil fuel industry’s emissions. All this, just to fill our cars with gas and make TNT and rubber for war. Given this litany of destruction, you have to wonder: can’t we stop sucking?
Day after day, year after year, the refineries drew on the oil fields and on the groundwater in the aquifers beneath them. Over decades the whole region subsided—an area over 3,200 square miles—sinking everywhere at least a foot and in some places as much as ten feet.
The most drastic changes were right near here, where the Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River meet, where subsidence sunk entire ecosystems: woodlands turned to wetlands, wetlands to marshes, and thousands of acres entirely disappeared, leaving only open water in its place.
What strikes me here today, more than it did before, is that sometimes we try to protect the places we love and end up losing them anyway: a neighborhood, a peninsula, a marsh upriver, a riverine woodland. We need space and time and ritual to grieve these losses, but we also have to love whatever emerges in their place. This place—where herons pick through marsh grass looking for crawfish and mounds of bramble swallow swimming pools and fire hydrants—is just as precious and vulnerable to destruction as the places that were here before. We live in what Gramsci called “a time of monsters,” when the “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.”
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Kira Homsher | Longreads | March 14, 2023 | 3,308 words (12 minutes)
My childhood best friend broke, and still holds, the Guinness World Record for fastest text written on a QWERTY mobile phone. Though I never came close to matching her speed, it was only natural that I should absorb her enthusiasm for messaging. She was also one of the most private people I knew, with an uncanny ability to create and compartmentalize disparate personas to charm all sorts of people, and much of her social life took place on strange websites I’d never heard of. Even after she moved to a new school district, I found myself emulating her volatile affect: vibrant, expressive, flirtatious, and reserved all at once. I learned that it was possible to try on new versions of myself through conversations with strangers, and that the internet was the best imaginable venue for these slippery charades.
I was 12 years old when she moved, too old to play pretend, not yet old enough to resist the impulse. The internet provided a fertile new stage for my proclivity for make-believe. Online, I could be whatever age I wanted. I could be an avatar, a playlist, a chain of speech bubbles. I was pure invention.
My first-ever email address was emilygr83@gmail.com. In assembling a family tree for a sixth-grade project, I’d discovered that I had a great-great-great-grandmother named Emily. Back then, we were advised not to use our real names on the internet, so I borrowed hers. It was so easy to assume a new name and still feel like myself.
A boy from my class emailed “Emily” to ask if she’d be his girlfriend. I wrote back, telling him that if he came up with a good list of reasons why he liked me, I’d date him for one week and no longer. In his list, he cited the fact that, even though I was a girl, I played cool games like Minecraft and RuneScape, a massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing game set in medieval times. He also mentioned the two freckles above my top lip, something I’d never noticed about myself. I let him come over after school for pizza but didn’t let him kiss me. We broke up at the end of the week, but continued meeting on RuneScape to exchange armor, roam the wilderness, and slay giant rats. I preferred interacting with him online, where we could stay up all night flirting without any material expectations or consequences. When I saw him in school, I largely ignored him.
Toward the end of my middle school years, I discovered Meebo, an instant messaging application that supported multiple services such as AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and Facebook Chat. Users could also join Meebo Rooms, public chatrooms searchable by topic and content. You could search almost anything and find a corresponding chatroom full of like-minded people. In 2008, I used Meebo to message IRL friends, but mostly to collect strangers. My AIM username was sexisince1901 — I was a rabid fan of the Twilight series and aligned myself with “Team Edward,” a faction of the fandom that preferred Edward Cullen, a vampire born in 1901, to Jacob Black, a teenage werewolf with 8-pack abs.
The Twilight series comprises five fantasy films based on four novels by Stephenie Meyer, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which, according to Wikipedia, Meyer has named as her greatest influence. Her novels center around a romance between Bella Swan, a brooding high school misanthrope, and Edward Cullen (aforementioned vampire, 87 years her senior). Like many girls my age, most of my preposterous romantic expectations and desires had their roots in this series.
I could be an avatar, a playlist, a chain of speech bubbles. I was pure invention.
On Meebo, I discovered a chatroom dedicated to Twilight roleplaying. By the time I joined, all the most popular characters had already been claimed, so I modestly chose a secondary character I knew no one else would have taken (Tanya from the Denali coven). Within a week, I had a small community of online friends, who I knew only by their role-play names, and an online boyfriend named Jared. An online boyfriend is someone who may or may not be a boy and may or may not be the age he says he is. An online boyfriend doesn’t have to know your real name. An online boyfriend is a viable and dispensable source of attention.
Jared and I started meeting in a private chatroom instead of the old public one. He PM’ed me photos he claimed were of himself, but which I quickly traced back to the second page of results for “emo boys” on Google Images. He sent me messages with actions encased in asterisks, like *slits my wrists n licks ze blood* and *kisses u on ur forehead* and I answered with kk or *kisses u back* or mew ^_^. He threatened to kill himself more than once and, each time this happened, I would rush into the kitchen or the living room to tell my mom that “my online boyfriend is cutting himself again!” She thought it was sweet how earnestly I involved myself with adult matters that had nothing to do with me.
I quickly found other boyfriends — and girlfriends — on sites like DeviantArt, IMVU, and VampireFreaks.com, which was sort of like Myspace for goths. I spent hours dressing and designing my avatars and almost always made them look a bit like myself, which was, in retrospect, a sign of relatively high self-esteem. A friend taught me that if I put things like XxX in my usernames, more people would want to add me, gift me free items, and/or be my boyfriend. I especially liked to create usernames using words like elf, fairy, tiny, and dark. The language of fantasy made sense on the internet, which was itself a make-believe place I could visit by passing through a glass screen. I became accustomed to receiving virtual gifts and favors from my e-suitors. Online, people are more generous with their time and less precious about their romantic and emotional entanglements. Just refresh: There will always be someone new.
It wasn’t long before I ended up on Omegle, a website that randomly and anonymously pairs users in one-on-one chat sessions or video calls. Conversations were between you in blue text and stranger in red and, more often than not, began with the acronym asl, meaning age, sex, location. It was a question without a mark. Other times, people simply opened by stating their age and gender (f for female, m for male). There were more self-proclaimed 18-year-old females than could possibly have been looking to chat with strangers. Most of the strangers I was paired with just wanted to talk about sex or redirect our chat to another platform where we could send pix. Others were naked, lonely souls seeking an audience, and I was more than happy to accommodate them. I wanted to soak it all in.
Chatrooms taught me everything I needed to know about what real people were like before I had to grow up and become one of them. I never stopped collecting strangers; I couldn’t kick the habit. By the time I went to college, all the former mystique of the internet had been subsumed into the tedious landscape of social media. Anonymity was no longer the selling point — it was all about developing an online brand, a persona other people would find desirable, entertaining, original, or infectious. A hook. On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with my name and face publicly displayed, I felt more like an avatar than ever, role-playing some prettier, wittier version of myself.
I was never the sort of person to scroll through an app believing everyone to be as beautiful, happy, and fortunate as they appeared. I’d grown up online and knew all the tricks. I have several vices, but envy is not one of them. If social media mangled my character in some way, it had little impact on my self-confidence.
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If anything, the rise of social media made me quicker to judge and discard other people, as if they were advertisements meant to be scrolled past and scoffed at. My early internet encounters made apps like Tinder, with its efficient model of swiping on first impressions, a veritable playground. I was used to being paired with strangers, but Tinder took it several steps further; I got to attach my conversations to real names and faces, and the attraction was no longer just simulated. Or rather, it felt less simulated.
My taste in strangers did not change much. I always sought out people who seemed alienated, people I suspected were looking for things other than sex — or at least were using sex to look for other things than sex. And no, I don’t mean love. I wasn’t lonely, but I was only interested in talking to people who were.
The first boy I met on Tinder was Gavin, a redhead whose bio read: sjshshsgdjskid djdjdjjdjdjdjd djdjdjjdjd. That was it exactly. I still have the screenshot of his profile in my photos from 2016. We texted for a day and a half before I drunkenly caught a 2 a.m. train to Center City and followed Google Maps to his dingy art gallery loft, where I remained for almost an entire week, wearing his clothes, sharing burnt toast on the floor, and gamely wiping with paper towels after he ran out of toilet paper.
Gavin was skittish and contagiously charming. He hinted at relationships that didn’t work out due to his difficulties with intimacy and told me that, a year prior, he had cut himself off from all his old friends. He texted me things like, Gonna hug u hard it’ll feel like sex and sorry i was so drunk last night but seeing U was so cool n good and waking up with U was unreal. He disliked music and claimed that he’d never once gotten a melody stuck in his head. If I played a song on my phone, he’d practically beg me to turn it off. I watched him flit in and out of his apartment like a neurotic poltergeist and let myself believe I could be the exception to his rules about closeness.
As soon as Gavin and I did our first load of laundry together, it was over. We washed our brief history out of his sheets and something in him turned away from me, back toward the seclusion that had initially drawn me to him. I returned to my apartment and we never saw each other again. I felt an odd mixture of heartbreak and relief: Gavin had logged out, which meant I was free to refresh.
Hungry for more stories, I kept on swiping and adding to my collection: Zooey from Brooklyn, Ali from LA, Darian from Belgium, Mateo from Copenhagen, Ryo from Tokyo. Cara, Izzy, Chris, Yui, Sam, Laura, Goretti, Jun. Sometimes I slept with them, sometimes I didn’t. I preferred to date people who, like me, were just passing through. I admired Omegle’s model of allowing users to disconnect from an interaction — from another living soul — at a whim, and unabashedly applied it to real life. It got so that I almost couldn’t remember what it was like to feel candid attraction to another person without first examining them through the mediating layers of a profile, with its carefully curated photos, idiosyncratic bio, and abridged display of “favorite songs” powered by Spotify.
I found Ali two weeks before I left to study abroad in Japan my junior year of college. My thumb froze over his picture and my brain snapped back into focus. His pictures were so beautiful I thought he was a catfish. He had cherry black hair and big white glow-in-the-dark teeth. Also, incredibly, his bio wasn’t stupid. My heart skipped a beat when we matched. We exchanged numbers and went on texting for another six months without meeting or even FaceTiming. He was attending an art school in Baltimore, and I was studying film on a scholarship in Tokyo, where I binge-drank nightly and blacked out weekly. We treated each other like therapists, messaging at our worst to ask for no-strings love and affirmation from someone who cared, someone beautiful and unreal. Shortly after I flew back home to Philly, Ali took a bus down to spend the weekend with me. Before he arrived, we confessed to being in love with each other over text. We agreed that we would make really cute, really smart babies.
It wasn’t the same in person. Of course it wasn’t. We’d broken the spell. He was just as pretty, but his beauty didn’t translate the same without the separation of the screen. We weren’t sure what to do with each other. He had a nervous laugh and carried his anxious energy in his shoulders. He was vulnerable and alive to the world, and I didn’t know how to be around that. By then, I’d become far more comfortable dating cynical, unreadable people. Earnest displays of emotion seemed ill-suited to 21st-century romance; I wanted only to spend time with people I could not hurt and who could not hurt me. People who were like pictures, folded in a mental scrapbook of short-lived enchantments.
After we had sex, Ali told me that he couldn’t get the email address of his father’s friend out of his head; it was like an intrusive thought. Curled up naked against my body, he chanted: “Greggreen315@yahoo, greggreen315@yahoo, greggreen315. Greg-green-three-fif-teen.”
He was perfect, really, a glowingly good lunatic and everything I could have wanted if only I still knew how to want. We did love each other, but not in the way we’d hoped.
Earnest displays of emotion seemed ill-suited to 21st-century romance; I wanted only to spend time with people I could not hurt and who could not hurt me.
Eventually, you collect so many strangers that the fascination dissipates. The stories start to melt together into an unending tapestry of quirks and anecdotes too close-knit to parse. You forget who had the heart-shaped mole, who had the cute butt, who had joy from the cookbook The Joy of Cooking tattooed above his left knee. Your strangers become one amorphous lover, one long story you grow bored of telling yourself. A low hum, unstrange.
I’d convinced myself that, in my frantic cycling through new people, I was wielding my youth to its fullest potential, perpetually carving myself anew. In opening myself up to so many people — and in exercising the self-restraint to close myself off again — I would become larger than myself, someone who could weather the capriciousness of the world and reflect it back unscathed. Instead, I became callous and compulsive, a thrill-seeker with no real agenda. My days took on a filmic quality, something watched rather than lived.
I had grown tired of watching. I wanted to feel something small, and feel it wholly. I wanted to be like a child on a swing.
I went on Omegle tonight for the first time in years, both to remind myself of what it was like and because I missed the fantasy of anonymity. After swiping through an endless procession of horny robots, I ended up chatting with a gloomy 19-year-old undergrad named Elijah, who only revealed his name and age at the very end of our conversation. Elijah used a lot of ellipses and was extremely anxious — in a sweet, facile way — about a wide array of subjects: his friends, the government, the amount of time he spent playing games on his PC, the pacing of his messages, and whether I was getting bored with the conversation. He told me he was hanging out with a group of friends, but that everyone was stoned and on their phones. He said, Theirs just a lot of insecurities I have right now and it might be making me feel like I don’t fit in with anyone or nobody gets me.. Anxiety probably.
I could tell he enjoyed being asked questions about himself, so I kept thinking of things I wanted to know. He told me he wanted to pursue his talent for chess but lacked the motivation. He apologized for the one-sided nature of the conversation, and I said I didn’t mind. He said, Oh really? and continued not asking me questions. I truly didn’t mind. I had no secrets to share, no disaffection to unpack. He kept saying sorry, thank you, and if that makes sense and if I stopped asking questions, his tone would grow hesitant and insecure. It was obvious Elijah thought, and wanted me to think, that his depression was an interesting quality, something worth dwelling upon. I thought this, too, when I was 19. Like Elijah, whenever I spoke to a new stranger I was quick to offer up my own shiny instability as a conversation piece, a token of faceless vulnerability. I told him I admired his authenticity, though really I was beginning to find it grating. He wanted to be reassured about everything he said. Talking to him, I felt my language becoming trite and consolatory.
I told Elijah I was interested in how people’s early online habits had shaped their communication styles, which was why I was on Omegle. He asked if I was writing an essay for school. Sort of, I said. Am I helping you at all? he asked. I ignored the question, then asked if his classes were online or in-person, and he said in-person. I asked what that was like, and he said, We all wear masks now. I said, I know.
I ended the conversation around 3 a.m. and he asked, very politely, if I’d feel comfortable exchanging social media. I told him I was a very private person, which was a lie. I told him to have a nice life, which I meant sincerely. We disconnected.
A few years ago, I would have agreed without hesitation, regardless of my disinterest in speaking again. Every single person I connected with was a treasure to me, a lesson, something to tuck away inside a chest for safekeeping. Not anymore. The chest is full, and it rarely begs opening these days. I’ve been cured of my curiosity through sheer saturation. There is so little I want to know about other people.
Click to find strangers with common interests. Click to turn on video. You are now chatting with a random stranger. Click esc to stop. You have disconnected.
I’ve largely forgotten how to curate the allure that once came naturally to me on social media. I still post, but my posts no longer contain hidden messages or existential appeals to the unknown, nothing that invites speculation. My photos are mostly of my dog and my partner of five years, the final stranger in my collection. And yes, I found him on Tinder.
I look at my online self and think, this is me. At least it feels like me, naked as it is of the artifice that once came second nature. Still, I sometimes wonder if I’m mediating without even knowing it. I wonder if true candor can exist without the fantasy of anonymity, without the arbitrary landscape where things like age, sex, and location can be effaced and improvised. Many of my closest friends are real people who first came to me as blurry photos and blocks of text. Half of my life was lived on the internet. Is that half unreal?
We all wear masks now. As if this wasn’t already the case. A mask conceals, but it can also expose a great deal about what is hidden beneath it. An avatar is a choice. The way you decide to disguise yourself online reveals something in its negative space. You can fall in love with a text message, a blinking ellipsis, a persistent buzz in your pocket. You can fall in love with your own reflection, poreless and perfected. You can give and give and give and take and take and take. And then log out and vanish altogether.
Kira K. Homsher is a writer from Philadelphia, currently living in Los Angeles. She is the winner of phoebe’s 2020 nonfiction contest and a Pushcart nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, Passages North, The Offing, and others. You can find her at kirahomsher.com.
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In this piece, David Browne gives a respectful account of the frantic life of Lisa Marie Presley. Although there is some attempt to analyze how growing up in the spotlight affected her, this is more of a faithful narrative of her world and tragic death.
After silently sitting at Ben’s grave for a bit, they moved over to her father’s burial spot, directly across from Ben’s. Kessler took the conversation as an encouraging sign. The past few years had been brutal, and perhaps Presley was finally emerging from a period that, even for her family, seemed especially dark.
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Ryan Hockensmith’s prose zips along in this gripping tale of a grizzly bear attack. Careful to give a full account, Hockensmith is graphic in his details, but it’s a well-told story that also celebrates friendship, bravery, and respect for nature.
The violence was so gruesome that it defies logic that anybody could survive. She clubbed Kendell to the ground and pounced on top of him. Her mouth drove down toward his head, and he could smell the rancid breath of a creature that spends its life killing and eating raw meat. Her slobber flew all over him as he desperately tried to put his hands and arms into her mouth in place of his face.
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After you die, would you like to roam space for eternity? For just under $3,000, this far-out option may just be within reach. For The Baffler, Dolly Church explores afterlife possibilities and cutting-edge disposition options at the intersection of the funeral and aerospace industries. Through companies like Beyond Burials, Celestis, and Elysium Space, customers can send one gram of their cremains into space, while their loved ones can opt into a selection of customized packages and memorial events to celebrate the departed. (One company, Celestis, has also expanded into the business of launching DNA into space for “storage and preservation.”) Church asks: “Why be landfill when you can be stardust (or rather, orbiting space debris) instead?
Space, presumed to be a void, becomes a convenient landscape upon which desires for eternal life can be projected and feelings of loss can be negated. This impulse to prolong our existence in the cosmos—whether alive or through a space burial—speaks to the anxieties of living on a dying planet. Looking above for answers, however, might be more analogous to burying one’s head in the sand; to romanticize the deathlessness of space is to ignore its lifelessness too.
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Elizabeth Kolbert clearly enjoys her time with David Wagner, an entomologist who teaches at the University of Connecticut. Wagner’s joy in exploring the insect world is infectious, and Kolbert exudes delight in describing their caterpillar-finding expedition. This is a lovely fun piece — but underlaid with some stark warnings about the future of the insect world.
The implicit argument of Wagner’s work is that every larva matters, no matter how small, squishy, and unassuming. Each new species that he collects is a different answer to life’s great conundrum: how to survive on planet Earth. Each has a unique and often startling story to tell.
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