Ian Hogarth is an investor in AI startups in Europe and the U.S. and the co-author of the annual State of AI Report. In an essay for Financial Times, he makes a case for colleagues and companies in the AI space to slow down the global race toward AGI, or artificial general intelligence. “God-like AI could be a force beyond our control or understanding, and one that could usher in the obsolescence or destruction of the human race,” he writes early on in the piece. Hogarth urges companies to invest more in AI alignment research (the area focused on mitigating existential risk), to collaborate rather than compete, to focus on safety, and to be open to some kind of governmental oversight. Here, Hogarth combines expertise and knowledge with a frank and unexpectedly personal perspective. There are a lot of pieces floating about on AI, but don’t miss this one. It’s insightful — but also terrifying.
Those of us who are concerned see two paths to disaster. One harms specific groups of people and is already doing so. The other could rapidly affect all life on Earth.
The latter scenario was explored at length by Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. In a 2021 Reith lecture, he gave the example of the UN asking an AGI to help deacidify the oceans. The UN would know the risk of poorly specified objectives, so it would require by-products to be non-toxic and not harm fish. In response, the AI system comes up with a self-multiplying catalyst that achieves all stated aims. But the ensuing chemical reaction uses a quarter of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. “We all die slowly and painfully,” Russell concluded. “If we put the wrong objective into a superintelligent machine, we create a conflict that we are bound to lose.”
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
In today’s edition, our editors recommend:
A glimpse into a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama, where volunteers with different ideologies come together.
A takedown of a phony celebrity criminal profiler and co-founder of an elite crime-solving club.
A story about a Croatian gambler who exploits the flaws in roulette wheels and whose methods have changed the game.
A read on the feral horses roaming around decommissioned mines in Appalachia, and the people who are caring for them.
A profile of the man behind the @dril Twitter account — “the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting” — on emerging from anonymity, Twitter, art and comedy, and creating things on the internet.
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein | Lux | March 3, 2023 | 3,498 words
I hate the South, and I love it. This internal conflict is my inheritance. My roots in the region run deep and strong, but I have no illusions about who and what fed them. “We bury the people we do not care about in the South,” Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote for The New York Times. “It is where we have put migrants and poor people and sick people.” As Cottom rightly notes, however, “Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope.” Needless to say, I’m forever grappling with the South and its sins, which lately include two high-profile mass shootings, threats to reproductive rights, two Black men’s ejection from the Tennessee legislature, and Florida circling the policy drain even more than usual. What a joy, then, to read a story with a different vision of the South. Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein introduces readers to Zac Henson and his band of leftist rednecks who run a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama. “The organizers,” Kaiser-Schatzlein writes, “believe that people in the South, conservatives especially, just need to be given the chance to operate in institutions that harness their most altruistic, communal, and caring tendencies — or, as Henson describes it, ‘positive reinforcement to not be fascist.’” I too want to believe this. Here’s to hope. —SD
David Gauvey Herbert | New York Magazine | April 11, 2023 | 7,018 words
David Garvey Herbert tells the wild story of Richard Walter, a low-paid staff psychologist at a Michigan prison who, in the ’80s, invented a more glamorous persona: genius criminal profiler. Walter faked his qualifications and positioned himself for decades as an eccentric, sought-after expert on the criminal mind, testifying in murder trials and enjoying the true-crime TV spotlight. “He so fully inhabited the role of celebrated criminal profiler he appeared to forget he was pulling a con at all,” writes Herbert. But how did this Sherlock Holmes wannabe fool people for so long? How can such a narcissistic impostor embed themself in America’s criminal justice system? I read this from start to finish, then went back to the beginning to dive in again. The first read was engrossing. The second? Infuriating. —CLR
Kit Chellel | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 6, 2023 | 6,516 words
You can beat roulette: A game designed to be pure random chaos has a flaw. That is fascinating, but throw in London’s Ritz Club, Scotland Yard, and a skilled Croatian, and you’ve got a plot worthy of any heist film. But did Tosa — the Croatian who won tens of thousands from the Ritz and other casinos — even commit a crime? That is what Kit Chellel sets out to answer in this brilliant piece. He spends six months investigating the world of professional roulette players, and this careful research is evident. We learn about the tiny computers that can beat roulette tables, though no devices were ever found on Tosa. We learn that, over time, wheels develop flaws that can turn into predictable patterns: Was that how he did it? Casinos changed their wheels just in case. Miraculously, Chellel tracks down the elusive Tosa to ask him in person, and Tosa is adamant he trained his mind to beat roulette. Nothing dodgy to see here! But would he say if he had cheated? Sometimes not reaching a clear conclusion can leave a bad taste, but not in this instance. I was delighted that Tosa remains an enigma — and is still planning secret international gambling trips. I bet he wins. —CW
Ashley Stimpson | The Sunday Long Read | April 9, 2023 | 5,236 words
It’s Ashley Stimpson’s keen eye that pulls you into her stories, original detail by original detail. In this feature that examines feral horse management in the U.S., you’ll meet Tinia Creamer, who runs Heart of Phoenix equine rescue: “At 40 years old, Creamer has a mane of dark hair, glassy blue eyes, and a full-throated Appalachian accent that stretches her vowels like taffy,” writes Stimpson. “She knows it sounds made up but swears it’s true: her first word was horsey.” You need not have an affinity for feral horses to go wild for this piece. Stimpson’s writing has that magical ability to pique your interest and make you care about a subject you may know nothing about: “Renegade was the first horse I met,” she writes. “The color of black coffee, his mane was so choked with burrs that it was twisted into green dreadlocks. I arrived unarmed with snacks, but he frisked me anyway – my fingers, my phone, my notebook, my hair – with a nose soft like flower petals.” If you’d like to read more by Stimpson, check out “Shades of Grey,” her Longreads feature about Florida greyhound racing. —KS
Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words
Despite being on Twitter for almost 15 years — a number that’s shameful for multiple reasons — I’ve never actually followed the shitposter extraordinaire known as Dril. I didn’t need to. His absurdism was retweeted into my feed nearly every day. Sometimes I’d laugh, sometimes I’d shake my head, but over time two things became clear. The first was that whoever was behind the blurry Jack Nicholson photo had created a wholly unique persona. The second was that this persona somehow distilled Twitter’s worst impulses into a single parodic voice: bombastic, utterly un-self-aware, and so in thrall to the Dunning-Kruger effect that you couldn’t help but marvel. Dril, in one anonymous form or another, has been written about before, but he’s never been truly profiled; that first falls to Nate Rogers, who managed both to score some face time with him and to use that as the foundation for a long, well-reported piece about the man and his legacy. Even if you’ve never heard of Dril (in which case I commend you, again for multiple reasons), Rogers’ piece functions as an incisive assessment of how we think about art and creativity, and perhaps even why so many of us have yet to fully divorce that godforsaken bird site. When a character as good as Dril exists, you don’t need the other 279. —PR
Grazie Sophia Christie | Tablet | February 15, 2023 | 3,359 words
You see it everywhere. On the Kardashian sisters, supermodels Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, influencers, and celebrities. It’s the “perfect” face of an ethnically ambiguous woman, composed of a chiseled nose, filled lips, a Botoxed forehead, and other cosmetic work. For Tablet, Grazie Sophia Christie examines our culture’s obsession with Instagram Face; the path toward “doomed, globalized sameness” in which women are just copies of one another; and how wealthy women can easily reverse what they’ve done to their face, discarding enhancements like just another fashion trend. —CLR
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Lacey Rose’s piece on the rapper Dave Burd (Lil Dicky) manages to exude the same tone as Burd’s comedy series, Dave. It’s funny and fast. Burd’s blinding confidence is made evident from the first sentence, and although at times Rose at times seems bemused by this larger-than-life character, she still creates a very entertaining profile.
Jeff Schaffer, who’d written on Seinfeld, already had his hands full showrunning Curb Your Enthusiasm when a friend asked that he take a meeting with Lil Dicky. He didn’t really have the bandwidth for a second TV show, but he was intrigued enough to say yes. Even in early 2017, Schaffer knew exactly who Lil Dicky was. “Back then, the internet was, like, 70 percent porn, 10 percent clickbait and 20 percent Lil Dicky videos,” he jokes, recounting how, at that first meeting, Burd told him he was going to be the biggest entertainer in the history of entertainment. “And I’m looking at this guy, and he looks like a piece of broccoli had a bar mitzvah, and I’m like, ‘This is hilarious, it’s like cartoon-level delusion.’ And then I start thinking, like, ‘What a great engine for a TV show, because what if he’s right?’ ”
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Kathryn Schulz profiles Jeanne Manford, who founded Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) fifty years ago this spring. For many, openly supporting LGBTQ2S+ folks was considered a radical act in the 1970s, so much so, that only a handful of people attended PFLAG’s first meeting. Fast forward to today, and PFLAG boasts 400 chapters worldwide with more than a quarter million members, all because a mother did what mothers do: She simply loved her son.
That growth reflects a cultural change of extraordinary speed and magnitude—a transformation, incomplete but nonetheless astonishing, in the legal, political, and social status of L.G.B.T.Q. people in America. Paradoxically, one consequence of that transformation is that the moral courage of Jeanne Manford, so evident to everyone lining Sixth Avenue that day, has become hard to fully appreciate. Parents in general, and mothers in particular, have long been a potent political force, from the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina to Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Moms Demand Action. In such cases, the power of parents derives from loving their children and trying to protect them, among the most fundamental and respected of human instincts. What made Jeanne Manford different—and what made her actions so consequential—is that, until she started insisting otherwise, the kind of child she had was widely regarded as the kind that not even a mother could love.
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SIG Sauer denies there’s a problem, yet strangely their P320 pistols have fired unexpectedly — without pulling the trigger — injuring 80 people to date. In this deeply reported feature, The Trace and The Washington Post have learned that the guns have gone off with routine movements such as holstering the weapon. Unintentional discharge is horrific, but what’s even scarier is that no U.S. government agency has the power to investigate gun defects or impose a mandatory recall, leaving gun manufacturers to police themselves.
Navy veteran and former gunner’s mate Dionicio Delgado said his P320 fired a bullet through his thigh and into his calf after he holstered it during a training session at a gun range in Ruther Glen, Virginia. Michael Parker, a welder, said his holstered P320 fired a bullet into his thigh as he removed the holster from his pocket while in his car in St. Petersburg, Florida. Police officer Brittany Hilton said her holstered P320 fired while inside her purse as she walked to her car in Bridge City, Texas. The bullet entered her groin and exited her back just inches from the base of her spine.
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For Nieman Reports, Kendra Pierre-Louis reports on the failures of the media to accurately report on COVID-19 — and the dangerous narratives pushed over the past three years that have downplayed its risks to the public. Pierre-Louis suggests ways that colleagues in journalism can and should improve coverage, including conveying nuance, being mindful of unconscious bias, and including perspectives of people in disabled, elderly, low-income, marginalized, and other at-risk communities.
In the process, we’ve failed at our field’s core tenets — to hold power to account and to follow the evidence. Our failures here could last a generation. As reporters, it’s our responsibility to accurately represent the needs of diverse perspectives and avoid an ableist bias that diminishes the real and lasting health concerns not only of those who are keenly at risk but those who are cautious about repeatedly catching a virus that scientists are still grappling to understand.
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Describing the impact that Dril has made on Twitter — and by extension, on digital culture at large — is difficult to do without simply reading off a selection of his utterly unhinged mini-missives. Thankfully, Nate Rogers resists the trap (at least to a degree), and instead turns in a compelling, well-reported profile of the man behind the blurry Jack Nicholson avatar. With a last name and everything!
To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.
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Untold businesses shuttered during the pandemic. A very few managed to thrive — generally those who satisfied stay-at-home demands. But while you may know about Peloton and Zoom, you can add to that list one Bookshop.org, which launched in January 2020 with the aim of helping indie booksellers become ecommerce contenders. Helping stir-crazy readers and offering a local alternative to certain omniretail monoliths? This profile of the company and its founder manages to feel like that elusive species known as a “feel-good business story.”
Every six months, Bookshop dumped 10 percent of its sales, in equal shares, into the accounts of bookstores that had opted into its earnings pool. Some store owners were caught by surprise when they checked their accounts. VaLinda Miller, who runs Turning Page Bookshop in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina, was facing a crisis when a broken air conditioner caused a gnarly mold outbreak in her shop. She realized she would have to move but couldn’t afford to give a new landlord several months’ rent, replace damaged merchandise, and pay movers all at once. When she finally remembered to check her Bookshop account, she was astonished to see that Turning Page had more than $19,000—enough to cover the move. “It hit during the perfect time,” she says. “It’s been a blessing.”
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From the late Ricky Jay to the not-so-great Gob Bluth, it’s impossible not to love the characters who populate the world of magic — though this dispatch from the triennial World Championship of Magic might test your limits. The only place on Earth where the answer to “trick or treat?” is always “both.”
Winning FISM requires more than merely fooling other magicians: It demands a new technique, a compelling story, a hilarious twist. And so some performers wove narratives at times surreal and poetic. One Japanese magician romanced an empty shirt that somehow wrapped her in its arms. A 15-year-old German student who goes by the name Magic Maxl dueled with a soft-boiled egg that seemed to come alive while he pretended to get ready for school. Others opted for simple, self-deprecating humor. “I spent two thousand dollars to be here,” one French competitor deadpanned, munching fistfuls of potato chips while pulling the four queens from a messy pile of facedown cards with inexplicable ease.
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In a tale that races along like a James Bond novel, Kit Chellel introduces us to Niko Tosa, the man who had casinos scrambling to change roulette. Was his winning streak down to luck, skill, or a supercomputer? We never find out, but trying to figure it out is still a really fun ride.
That night, March 15, 2004, the thin Croatian seemed to be looking for something. After a few minutes, he settled at a roulette table in the Carmen Room, set apart from the main playing area. He was flanked on either side by his companions: a Serbian businessman with deep bags under his eyes and a bottle-blond Hungarian woman. At the end of the table, the wheel spun silently, spotlighted by a golden chandelier. The trio bought chips and began to play.
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In the late 1970s, Richard Walter took a job as a low-paid staff psychologist at a prison on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But somehow, away from the prison, he successfully invented for himself a more attractive persona: genius criminal profiler. Walter co-founded a club of elite investigators called the Vidocq Society, and for years has touted bogus work credentials and claimed to have reviewed thousands of murder cases he actually knows little about. There’s so much more in this wild, unbelievable story of an impostor, excellently reported by David Gauvey Herbert.
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“Wanna go get drunk? Watch some wolves killing elk in a park?” This line from the Paramount series Yellowstone sprang to mind reading Katie Jackson’s essay about wolf-watching in Yellowstone National Park. Jackon makes no such reference: Growing up on the Lazy JK ranch in Montana, she has lived the real thing, with no elaborate drama, just the stark reality of the state’s two conflicting industries — agriculture and eco-tourism. This personal take deftly highlights the nuances of these industries and their different viewpoints.
As I watch my parents, I can’t tell who is more excited: my diabetic dad, who is so fixated on the wolves he forgets to check his blood sugar, or my mom, who is monopolizing the best scope. Both are animated as they rapid-fire questions at Varley. “What are they doing? Can you tell how old they are? Why are there so many?” None of their queries have to do with hunting. Here in the Lamar Valley, 200 miles away from their ranch, wolves aren’t a nuisance, they’re a novelty.
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Economic hardship across the United States appears in many ways. Ashley Stimpson’s Sunday Long Read feature covers the plight of feral horses, some of which have been turned out by their owners and left to fend for themselves. As domesticated animals, horses are getting sick and injured trying to find the sustenance their humans once provided. Their increasing numbers are causing problems for surrounding communities: “But as the herds grew, grim stories appeared in local papers,” Stimpson writes. “Hungry horses chewing the siding off of houses, ripping up landscaping, and causing car accidents. In 2016, three stallions were found shot to death on a decommissioned strip mine in Johnson County, Kentucky.”
HOP was still a fledgling nonprofit in 2012 when Creamer learned about horses roaming old strip mines. Someone sent her an email with a picture of a horse “that looked like it had been set on fire.” The horse was located in Mingo County, the email said, could she help? When she wrote back asking for the owner’s name and the address, the person explained that the horse lived on the strip mine. Lots of them did, actually.
Even 12 years later, her eyes still get wide recalling this moment. She decided to go see for herself.
They were out there all right. Herds teeming with emaciated horses, some with hides marred by open wounds and lacerations, nosing for something to eat amid rocks and brush, breeding and in-breeding indiscriminately. Swarming local roadways to lick salt off the pavement. She knew even the healthy-looking horses were likely vitamin-deficient and full of worms. “They’re domestic animals. They are in no way designed to live out there,” she says.
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Surfing shouldn’t be done alone. Like diving, spelunking, rock climbing, or cutting a watermelon, too much can go sideways. Conditions are unpredictable, equipment or experience can fail — and injury is always the biggest worry. Come off a surfboard the wrong way in three feet of water, and you can hurt yourself, sometimes badly. Come off the wrong way, at the wrong moment, in the wrong place on a large wave and go tumbling into its powerful impact zone, and you might end up floating to the surface (or not) unconscious, or be unable to move some crucial part of your body you’d been counting on to steer you back to light, air, life, and joy.
And that’s the thing about surfing: risks and all, it’s an incredibly joyful activity. It is, in fact, the single most joyful thing I have ever done in my five decades on this beautiful, wave-driven, water-circled planet. And it’s an incredibly joyful life. Surfers plan their days around when they can plunge into the gorgeousness of an ocean, and then spend hours trying to attune their bodies to something as old as time, to the very water that our bodies are made of, and that feels, when you finally manage all that weight, like standing up on the lip of a laughing, moving heaven . . . while at the same time it hurtles you, almost ferocious, across a strangely solid-seeming surface, on the ride of your hey-look-at-me-I’m-flying life.
There is nothing quite like it. Surfing is, for many who hit the waves, more than “fun,” “cool,” or “good exercise.” It is a way of being connected to a deeper deep, an older old. Perhaps even to feel, to learn something that is eluding you on land.
And that’s the thing about surfing: risks and all, it’s an incredibly joyful activity.
But there are those sticky risks, and all surfers know them, or should. Nonsurfers always ask me first: What about sharks? (Actually shark attacks are quite rare, although they do happen, and then not being alone on the water might save you — it’s how famous, now one-armed short-boarder Bethany Hamilton survived and still surfs.) What about protection from what can hurt you? Some surfers wear life vests, even helmets. Most surfers’ best protection is self-knowledge; they only go out when the size of the wave matches their skill level, and no higher. And all surfers know the admonition about going out with a buddy, or at least when there are others in the water. Just in case. It is common sense. It is wisdom.
And yet, some days, I go out alone.
Most surfers, when pressed, will tell you that surfing alone isn’t really an issue — because these days, and especially at the best surf spots on the planet, surfing solo is becoming damn near impossible. This is because there has been, in the last decade or so, an absolute explosion in the sport (what elite surfers do) and the addictive hobby (what everybody else does). Fueled at first by the development of safer, beginner-friendly boards (large, puffy, and buoyant, these “foamies” are easier to stand up on and less likely to slice you with a hard rail or razor-like fin), and then by an accompanying rise in the number of surf camps, clubs, instructors, and videos, the explosion turned even hotter and brighter in the dark season of the pandemic. Hungry and desperate for “safe,” liberating, virus-thwarting outdoor activity, thousands of novices (or “kooks”) headed to surf shops for boards, leashes, rash guards and wetsuits, and beaches filled with new, giddy converts. Many of these were women, who, after a half-century of being active and yet still barely visible in the water, now account for perhaps 20 percent of surfers worldwide.
I was one of them. I had tried surfing for the first time about 10 years earlier, on the beaches at Wilmington, North Carolina, and then for a second time at surf hot spot Nosara, Costa Rica. Both times I fell in love with the feel of the waves and the deeper deep, and was in awe of the beautiful, expert surfers (both women and men) all around me, riding with such grace and focus. Still, it was hard to imagine myself, really, as one of them. I adored and could manage the surging, pushing “whitewash” — the “inside” of a surf break that is close to shore and consists of smaller, already broken waves, ideal for beginners — but it was hard to see myself ever surfing “outside,” where the full-throated, heavier swells were. And after I turned in my rented board and flew home again, distance did the work of doubt. If you don’t live close to the water, surfing requires even more gas, a greater effort of will and imagination. Ah, well, I thought. Who was I to pretend I could move in the way that Bethany Hamilton did?
Then the pandemic hit. As it happened, months before the virus shut down everything in between two oceans, I had already decided to relocate to Oregon to be closer to my elderly parents. They had moved to a tiny town, an unofficial but de facto retirement community perched high on a cliff above a beautiful Pacific cove. Strangely, we had had the sense that something, some surge was coming, something that would be better endured if we were all together (I’d thought, vaguely, it might have to do with climate change). We didn’t know what it was, but whatever it was, it would be better not to be alone.
The little town where we settled was low-key, serene, somewhat remote. (I am not going to name it, in the time-honored and somewhat selfish tradition of a surfer trying to protect a special, quiet spot). It seemed like a good hideout. And there were, intriguingly, what looked, down below, like rideable waves.
In those early weeks when I studied the cove, there would indeed be a surfer, sometimes alone, and now and then buddied up, a pair of bodies floating tarred and thickened in heavy black wetsuits. Usually, though, the water was completely empty of humans. There were more whales and seals than any flipperless mammals. Even the small beach had few people combing it, and when I walked there I found almost all of them were older, some walking with balancing sticks.
I kept looking at the waves. Clearly they could be surfed. And the water was right here. But could I, barely a “kook,” handle it?
To find out, I drove 45 minutes and two towns away to the nearest surf shop. There an affable young man with dreadlocks told me that better breaks for beginners were farther north, and that the small cove’s waves weren’t really all that attractive, “mushy,” closing out fast, often criss-crossing as the tide went in or out. But people did surf there, sure. Not often. Not many. A few.
On his advice I bought a hooded black wetsuit recommended for 50-degree water, and a pair of black wet boots. I bought my first board: a blue and white beginner board, a foamie, eight-and-a-half feet long. I was so excited I had to call my friend back in North Carolina, the woman who had first encouraged me to go into the water. I was really going to do this, I told her. I was going to try to be a surfer.
The very first day that the gray, choppy waves below looked less cross-stitched and hairy, I lugged my board down. There was no one in the water, but there were a few people wandering around on the beach, and I decided that that would have to be safe enough, that at least I could be seen from shore. (The looks I got as I passed with my big, fat board were surprised, wrinkled, smiling.) Besides, I decided, if I was waiting for a buddy in a place where no one really surfed, I might be waiting for a long time.
I waded into the water, alert — but not afraid, I noticed, or at least no more so than I had been the few times I had surfed before. When the water was waist deep I hopped onto the deck of my new prize. The board was reassuring. A boat, of sorts. I floated for a moment. And then it happened. The lessons I had taken before all at once came back to me. Within a few minutes, I was surfing “inside,” standing up briefly and falling joyfully. Even in this cold, out-of-the-way, fairly inhospitable little bay, all the feelings I remembered from my earlier “sessions” came back to me. Of riding on the tongue of something magical, long, wild, wide and laughing. Of sinking into something huge and real and roiling that made it impossible to think or worry or wonder about anything else. Of being connected to something that was bigger than me, but included me, of being part of some unspoken history. (I am mixed race, part Pacific Islander. Had some current in me, I wondered, traveled this ocean before?)
What I hadn’t expected was how magical it was to be alone in the water. Always, when I had surfed before, there had been a crowd with me in the waves. Here, instead, flocks of gulls circled overhead, and an occasional pelican. I saw a seal’s head and neck at a bobbing distance, checking out my own black-hooded costume. The people on the beach were mere specks. Everything else that was human seemed to have melted away. In all that beautiful solitude I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. I hadn’t known how much I needed this aloneness, after years of crowded work at a university, after months of eldercare, the phobias of the pandemic, and the stresses of a crowded, socially mediated, 21st-century life. And too, after five decades of being told, as a woman, I should try to avoid being alone in a risky place, whether it was a parking garage or at the base of a cresting swell.
What I hadn’t expected was how magical it was to be alone in the water.
My friend, Maia, the one I’d called from the surf shop, the first person to encourage me to try surfing, likes to say that water is the universal solvent. It breaks things down. Put anything in it for long enough, and it will dissolve it. It can erase distinctions. It can blur the rigid. Water, the ocean, scrubs, refines, releases. It defies expectation.
Under my wet boots I could feel the cove’s shifting sandbars rising and falling. When I came back a few days later, they were in another place. No place where you put your foot, in a sea, is ever the same. No wave, curling from the intensity of finding fresh bottom, is ever the same. Each moment in a surf session is unique. And in that endless originality, I quickly discovered, is a kind of salvation. A freedom. Because you can’t force an ocean to bend to your will. You can’t meet an ocean rigidly or with any idea of ultimate control. You are not in charge, and you can’t learn to surf if you think you are or ever will be. But neither are you nothing, disengaged. You are water meeting water.
Week after week, month after month, session after session, I tried and failed and sometimes succeeded in riding, for longer periods, the smaller waves, while sowing all my stresses into the gray, punchy, churning Pacific. On the days that were too big for me to surf, I still stared at the waves and tried to read them, understand them. And understand myself beside them. It seemed to me I was learning to let go of many things, with their help: rabid control, the idea of being the perfect daughter, the perfect caretaker of aging parents, perfectionism in general, even (at least as it pertained to surfing), ambition. I was never going to be great at all of this, I decided. It didn’t matter. I would do my best. Each time I went alone into the waves, I couldn’t stop smiling. With no one to see the smile, and no one the smile was for. When I came out of the water, my cheeks actually hurt from so much joy. The water had been balm, the wetsuit had warmed it, and the ocean had circled me, and me alone.
For about a year I surfed solo in the cove. Now and then, on a big day, unsafe for me to do anything but watch from the sand, an experienced surfer might arrive and — ignoring my gaze — paddle to the outside, usually all by himself, and ride the fat waves there. Then come out, perhaps nod, and drive away. And then the cove was empty again.
Sometimes, when the cove looked sketchy and internet surf forecasts suggested better waves to the north, I ventured to the more crowded, “beginner” beaches. But I never noticed that I did any better there, and was always glad to come back to the imperfect and familiar. By now I and my blue and white board had become such a fixture on the beach I was called by the locals the “Surf Lady.” I admit, I reveled in this status. (They didn’t know I was at best a mediocre surfer, and it didn’t matter to me that I was.) I was a surf lady. My whole world, my life, had been transformed by my relationship with the water. My days were guided by 1) whatever it was my family might need that day, and 2) the rhythm of the waves and the tides. I learned to read the surf forecasts as though they were runes. I studied swell direction, wave energy, wave height. I watched for offshore winds (better for surfing), but went out in crosswinds or when they were onshore, too. Finally, I felt I had outgrown my beginner board and bought my second board: shorter, sleeker, thinner, pale cream with a brown stripe. It was amazing. Like switching from riding a mattress to riding a motorcycle.
One day, as I was coming out of the water with this new board and walking toward the cliffs and past the small, scattered line of elderly beachcombers, a man approached me and introduced himself. He had just moved to town, he said, he lived right there (he pointed close to the water), he had taken a surf lesson and loved it, and he wanted to surf more. His wife, however, wouldn’t let him surf alone; she held firmly to the buddy rule. So he was wondering: Could he surf with me?
I stared at him. He was lean, with a shaved head, and looked like a spry elf that had materialized from nowhere. I hesitated. I like to surf alone.
Then I remembered, when I had first started surfing, how kind Maia, and others, how welcoming they had all been to me. And no one owns the ocean.
We talked a bit, maintaining our pandemic-dictated distance. We were surprised to learn we were born in the same year, that we were both defectors from university life. And that we both wanted to surf, here, in this unlikely place, this tiny town, in this little cove. What were the odds? But then everyone wants to surf now, we agreed.
His name was Charlie, and he explained his wife had seen him in too many accidents — skiing, biking, kayaking. She basically didn’t trust him alone anymore. He didn’t look accident-prone to me. He looked lithe and athletic, especially with that shaved, sleek head. But I understood his wife’s concern. And even though it was never said, the implication, of course, was that going out with a buddy would be safer for me, too. And so it would be.
So I said, yes, why not, we could make surf dates.
At home, peeling my wetsuit off, getting in the shower, toweling dry, I suddenly felt, like a bruise, my error. I saw it in the mirror. Along with the red welt on my forehead from my suit’s tight black hood.
The water. The beautiful solitude. The water. It was never mine. It was better to have a buddy. It was wisdom.
But that didn’t mean I had just been wise.
When there isn’t solitude there is company. And unfortunately, for women surfers all over the world, at well-known breaks or on obscure little beaches, that company can sometimes be less than companionable.
The ocean is the opposite of a parking garage; the more people on it, the more risk there is, for some. Ask any woman waverider, go on any women’s surf group on social media, and you’ll find startling (or worse) stories of harassment (or worse): of women’s boards as they sail past a man’s being dangerously pushed down at the tail by a disapproving or mocking hand; of men “dropping in on” (ostentatiously and sometimes dangerously cutting in front of) the woman already riding a wave; of demeaning talk or its condescendingly “helpful” cousin, unsolicited advice (to impress upon the woman she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and perhaps has no business being out so far). Eighty percent of surfers worldwide are men; yet on any given day, in the experience of many women surfers, and depending on where you are, the actual differential can be much starker, a woman’s body more exposed. (Water dissolves, but it doesn’t necessarily dissolve gender, or at least it hasn’t just yet. Or culture. Or race, for that matter. Surfing is still an overwhelmingly white enterprise.)
Yet much of the surfing world is also generous, kind, capacious, always trying to do better. Water has a way of reminding: You all breathe the same stuff, correct? And Charlie seemed nice enough. The kind of guy who listened to his wife, anyway. And it seemed unlikely he would want to alienate the person his wife was going to allow him to surf with.
So that, I thought, isn’t really why you are anxious about a session with him.
I looked into the mirror, and knew.
You don’t want him to be better than you.
Water can dissolve. It can also, it seems, disguise.
In the water all alone, I had imagined I wasn’t competitive. That along with undercutting my perfectionism and some of my more unhelpful ambitions, it had melted my tendency toward measurement against another. But. But.
I am the Surfer Lady!
In the cove alone, I was the best surfer there.
Oh my god, surely, I thought, in all this expansive ocean I wasn’t so small as that?
To be certain, I texted Charlie as soon as I could. As soon as the sun was shining, the wind calm, the waves reasonable. Looks good, I say we go.
He waved as we met on the sand, his sleek, bright yellow, professional-looking board making my own look suddenly chunky and a little wan.
“Here we go!” he shouted, obviously excited. We quickly agreed we would not hover too close, but would keep an eye on each other, and signal if we got into any trouble. Since he was what surfers term “regular footed” (left foot forward on the board) and I was “goofy footed” (right foot forward), we would tend, usefully, to go different directions on a wave anyway, right versus left.
Water can dissolve. It can also, it seems, disguise.
We paddled out on our boards. I was the first to take a small wave, smoothly, and ride toward shore. I was startled to hear a cheer and whoop go up behind me. When I turned, Charlie was grinning and fist-pumping at me.
I had never had anyone cheer me on a wave. It was like not knowing you needed a kite, and then finding one.
I watched him take his first wave, and saw he was a true beginner, not as far along as I was, using his knee to get to his feet, wiping out quickly, but then popping out of the water and grinning from ear to ear. So nothing to worry about. I whooped and cheered, too.
It was the first of our many sessions together, that summer and winter. We grew more comfortable with each other over time. I met Shelly, his wife, who had no interest in surfing and was happy to stay at home. Charlie and I surfed alone. Sometimes, on the water, we wouldn’t surf at all, simply marveling at the pelicans swooping low, diving for fish, or we’d stare at a shimmering sundog overhead, a rainbow with an eye.
Sometimes, on certain days, I still went out alone, either neglecting to tell Charlie I was going, or because he and his wife had gone out of town. On those days the full solitude was again delicious, relaxing, with no responsibility, in the water or elsewhere, for anyone’s safety but my own; smiling again with no one, and for no one. It always seemed to me I was a better surfer solo, too, connecting with the water more cleanly, more intimately. Yet it was also strange without Charlie. Like missing an optional but useful accessory, an extra arm out on the current.
One day Charlie and I both went out but I finished the session first, tired from ferrying my parents to distant doctors’ appointments earlier in the day. I sat on the beach, and Charlie came out and asked if he could try my board. He was having such trouble catching bigger, “green” waves. We both were, in fact. The timing needed for a larger wave is tricky, and Charlie and I both tended to be too late, not catching it until it was already broken and whitewater. He thought my more buoyant, shorter board might help. It didn’t seem likely to me. Longer boards are easier to surf than shorter boards, and taller people need longer boards. Charlie was taller than me.
“Sure, go ahead,” I said.
I was there. I saw it happen. The moment Charlie went from beginner to better. From “kook” to “intermediate” surfer. I watched him catch a nice overhead wave and ride it perfectly. He was so shocked afterward he turned to look at me from the foam, speechless. Then he hooted and fist-pumped and paddled out and did it again. And again and again and again.
I was cheering him on. Yet there was such a pain in my chest. There he was: Passing me up. On my own board. Right in front of me. As somehow I knew he was always bound to do. Leaving me behind. He was a skier, a kayaker, a road cyclist. (He was even, it turned out and as if that weren’t enough, a golfer.) He was an all-around athlete. I was a writer who happened to live by the sea.
I was there. I saw it happen. The moment Charlie went from beginner to better. From “kook” to “intermediate” surfer. I watched him catch a nice overhead wave and ride it perfectly.
Charlie was so high, so joyful when he came out of the water, he was trembling. I hoped he was oblivious to the slight hiccups, the tiniest of silences between my sentences of praise. He thanked me for the use of my board — wow, it had really helped! Yes. How happy, I thought, my board must have been, so responsive to, so relieved to find all that jumpy testosterone on its deck, and Charlie’s greater muscle mass.
We said goodbye — he and Shelly were going out of town again for a while — but assured each other we would surf together again when he got back.
In the weeks that followed, I went out nearly every day. But no matter what I tried, I could not do what he had done on my own board. I pushed myself. Hard. For hours. I cursed, I swore on the water (something I’d never done before). I tried changing my timing, my feet, the position of my arms. The waves went on passing underneath me, leaving me behind. Maybe I’ve reached my limit, I thought. Maybe I ought to be okay with that. But clearly I wasn’t. My surfing deteriorated. I kept falling off the board, impatient, unhappy, where before whenever I’d fallen I laughed with joy — because what is more wonderful than falling into white, frothy water, what could be more like play, more like an acrobat tumbling, when standing was merely what you did all day every day?
As with many things, there is no predictable arc of growth, of progress, of discovery, in surfing. Surfers describe “hitting walls,” or losing their “stoke” — the magical drive, the essence of their connection to the water and the wave that keeps them coming, entranced, back to the swells. Taking or being forced to take a season off, surfers will describe losing their takeoff or their timing. Middle-aged surfers will describe, with shock, how they can no longer leap to their feet or “carve” or “cut” their boards sharply back toward the top of a wave, as they used to do. Surfers will change boards, buy new ones, looking for fresh or lost magic.
The longer the board, the easier it is to ride. Watch children learning to surf on a longboard. It’s astonishing how easily they manage it, the way they take to it, the same way they take, perhaps, to new languages. I once asked an instructor why this was. Was it some innate, childish balance? Was it fearlessness? Intuition? A lack of acculturation? Not knowing any better? Not knowing that they couldn’t?
As with many things, there is no predictable arc of growth, of progress, of discovery, in surfing.
“Nope,” the instructor said. “They’re just so light, the board doesn’t even know they’re there.”
For days I felt nothing but my own weight. And deep frustration. With myself, my board, and the unaccommodating, slashing Oregon waves. I left town for a while, too, with my parents. The pandemic was beginning to lift its fog. I was tired, we were all tired. We needed a vacation. We decided to go inland. The ocean is beautiful but if you see it all day, every day, and what you see in it is a constant measurement of your own insufficiency, your own smallness, you’ll want to run from it and its wrinkled mirror.
Charlie texted he was back and hoping to surf; I texted we were just leaving and his best bet would be to go to one of the busier beaches. I wondered if he could read the subtext. Don’t depend on me. Stop depending on me. I was that small.
A set is a group of waves in a swell, created either by wind or current. There are generally between three and 10 waves in a set, followed by a period of relatively waveless quiet, a lull. Surfers will use the lull between sets to get “out the back,” behind the breaking waves. A lull isn’t always necessary to get past the break, but it can be helpful; it’s less of a beating, less of a fight, to get to where you’re trying to go.
Away from the water, my heart, I found, still yearned, still turned toward the waves. I found myself lying on the floor of a distant, white-carpeted room, practicing my paddling, my leap to my feet, my stance, my balance, thinking about what I knew was required for a bigger wave yet couldn’t bring myself to do. One of the many fascinating things about surfing is that it is both simple and complex problem-solving. The simple part is understanding the obvious mechanics of what it is you are trying to accomplish: Position yourself as you paddle on a moving floatation device so that it will neither nose-dive or stall back from the arc you are trying to catch, and then stand up on it at the precise moment when you can harness the energy of that arc and be launched down and forward by the force of gravity. The complex part is everything else, put together. You. Your brain. Your body. Unique to you. The wave. Unique. The surroundings. Sand or rock. Beach or reef. The shape of the land. Peninsula. Oceanfront. Bay. Cove. Island. Pier. The culture you are swimming in. History. Habits. Bad or good. Weather. Wind. Board. Tide.
The longer I stayed away, the more I missed surfing. But I was afraid to return to it, too. What if I returned, and I discovered that I had taken something so pleasurable, no, more than that, positively ecstatic, and lost it, because I had carried into it too much that was hard and brittle and me?
When we came back, Charlie and his wife had gone away again; he had decided to teach another class at his university. I stared out, uncertain, at the water. There was no one there. I told myself: Go out with no expectations. Try to let go. It’s hard. But try. Try not to think. Just go with the water. Just that.
I took my board in hand. Entering at low tide, I repeated the words of a little ritual I had initiated when I’d first started surfing in earnest. Hello Maia, to honor the woman who had gotten me into the waves. Hello Ocean, thank you, to honor the water, and maybe in a bid for it not to kill me.
I was all alone again. Here came a small wave. I turned and paddled for it. I didn’t think. I didn’t try to do anything new, ask myself to be better than I was. I leapt up.
And there it was. To surf is to ask a wave to let you join it, and get no response but the wave itself. It is not your partner, your friend, your compatriot, your competitor, your doppelganger, a mirror, or your enemy. It is physics touched by human imagination.
One day, not long after this, following a solo session that was quite wonderful but I can’t remember why (an odd thing about surfing, as many surfers will tell you, is that after you have ridden a particularly beautiful wave or had a particularly beautiful session, you sometimes can’t recall a thing about it, it all happens so fast, is so unthinking, so unlike any other part of recorded life), a woman approached me as I was crossing the cove. She introduced herself. Her name was Lori. We were about the same age, she a bit older. Small world; we found we both, through friends, knew Maia. We seemed to have so much in common.
And then we didn’t. Lori told me she had survived three separate bouts of cancer. Each had nearly killed her. That she had first tried surfing 10 years ago, in Mexico, but had to stop. That she was about to have more tests. That she desperately wanted to get back in the water, but was afraid to, alone.
She didn’t ask. I spoke. “I have a foamie. You get a wetsuit. I’ll take you out.”
A week later, Lori plunged in. I saw the fear in her eyes, at first. Everything is such a risk. Then the slow settling. The familiarity. Here is the water. I have been here before. We have been here before. This is where we come from. There is where we are going, dissolving.
She slipped and fell, slipped and fell, stood for a moment. She was overjoyed. “It’s coming back!” she said. “It’s coming back!”
The tide will do that.
Charlie returned. Introductions all around. Nowadays, we are often three on the water. Other surfers, more experienced, occasionally come and go from the cove. They prefer better waves. We stay. We have become a sight, a trio, on the beach. The other day a woman, a mother with a teenage daughter, just moved into town, said her girl wants to join us. Likewise a teenage son from another, new family. The cove is getting younger. If this keeps up, Charlie and Lori and I joke, things are going to get crowded. And the youngsters can’t go out alone. It’s not safe.
I still go out alone, from time to time. Not to be foolhardy. I study the forecasts to be safe. Not to “escape,” or at least not entirely to escape other surfers, or my responsibilities on land, my family, my work, or the fragile, half-inoculated world around me, or pretend I am free of things I am not free of. I go for a certain kind of peace, an assertion of body, and of choice; I go because there is surprise in solitude, as there is wonder in togetherness, in unity; I go because I can, and because, waving back to the older, caned beachcombers who smile and shake their heads at me, I don’t know for how long I can will be true.
I go to melt what I am able to, in cold, cold water, and make friends with how a wave passes.
Mylène Dressler is a novelist and essayist whose recent books include The Last To See Me and Our Eyes at Night. You can learn more about her work at mdressler.com.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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Bay Area MCs have long been a fixture of the national stage — think Too Short, MC Hammer, Hieroglyphics, renowned slanguist E-40 — but they were just the prominent tip of an iceberg that reached impossibly deep. In this long and winding history, Mosi Reeves traces the region’s evolution, recruiting tour guides and archival clips to take you back to the old school in style.
Yet the third moment that catalyzed Bay Area hip-hop wasn’t a singular record like Timex Social Club’s “Rumors,” or an artist like Hammer and Short. It was the sound of walloping, all-enveloping bass.
Made for surgically enhanced car and jeep stereos, the bass colossus is as much a feature of hip-hop in the mid-’80s as the pounding Roland TR-808 machine, from Rick Rubin’s production on LL Cool J’s “Rock the Bells” and T La Rock’s “It’s Yours” to Rodney O and DJ Joe Cooley’s “Everlasting Bass” and Dr. Dre’s work on Eazy-E’s “The Boyz-N-The Hood.” It also mirrors the crack-cocaine epidemic that began to blight and distort communities across the country. As street life turned treacherous, the specter of the hustler, and whether to become one, cast a growing shadow.
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Zac Henson, an avowed communist, runs a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama. If that’s a sentence you thought you’d never read, you’re not alone. Henson’s project, staffed by volunteers like one writer Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein refers to as Hollis, is one of reclamation — the participants want to debunk people’s assumptions about rednecks, car culture, masculinity, and the South:
“It’s my way to care for the community,” Hollis said. Echoing something Henson had told me, Hollis said that as a man in the South, he felt he was often prevented from caring for other people. Hollis — tall, clean-cut, martial — grew up poor in Montgomery, raised by a single mother who, he says, taught him to be sensitive. But going to chaotic public schools amid a crack epidemic and then an opioid epidemic buried his sensitive side under a pile of toughness. Violence became second nature. At 16, he dropped out of school and moved into a house with 14 other people. They sold drugs and robbed to provide for everyone in the house. It was, he realized later, his first experience with communism.
Addicted to dope and charged with theft, he was in and out of prison for nearly a decade, but eventually he got out for good and got clean. The therapy he received at his half-way house taught him how to confront his rage and violence and reconnect with his inner child. As with Henson, the AFC is now the place where Hollis continues to confront the structures that push working-class white men to develop and perpetuate toxic traits, and where he practices diminishing his own authority and re-embedding himself in the community. And while it is hard to gauge the success of this aspect of the project, a site where people are even having conversations about toxic masculinity is, in a place like Alabama, quite novel.
The AFC is also Hollis’s best segue into conversations about politics with other rednecks, people he knows from prison and rehab, and other men. When anyone asks him why he works on cars for free, he can explain changing the community through direct action. While he doesn’t call the work communism or mutual aid, he often gets others to donate their time to better their community and realize that a different way of organizing society is possible. Some volunteers at the shop are even conservatives; they’re not necessarily aware of the politics of the place. But they, and others, continue to show up. I started to see the approach like a wholesome prank: to do left-wing organizing in Alabama is to conveniently forget to mention you are doing left-wing organizing. Gotcha!
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Apple CEO Tim Cook was compelled to work for Steve Jobs after realizing the man was a creative genius who wanted to change the world. At GQ, Zach Baron profiles Cook, helping us get to know the reserved man from Mobile, Alabama, who rose to acclaim overseeing Apple’s supply chain and took over as CEO in 2011, following Jobs’s death. Today, Apple is the most successful company on the planet, valued at $3 trillion, a figure roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom. And with Apple devices in so many hands around the world, Cook is intensely aware of technology’s ability to not just solve problems, but create them.
In his tenure as CEO, Cook has rarely missed an opportunity to decry, usually with a fair amount of heat in his voice, what he describes as the “data-industrial complex”—a complex built of companies (and Apple competitors) who profit from the use and sale of their consumer’s personal information and data. This practice, Cook said in another public moment, “degrades our fundamental right to privacy first, and our social fabric by consequence,” and helps build an ecosystem full of “rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms.”
If you ask Cook, a notoriously private person himself, why this subject is so important to him, he will pivot the conversation back to Apple. “It’s personal for Apple in that we’ve been focused on it from the start of the company,” he told me the first time we met, for an interview in 2021. In Cook’s tenure, Apple has adopted a set of public values and practices that are particularly rigorous around privacy. “We feel privacy is a basic human right,” Cook says. “And so we try to design our products to where we collect the minimum kind of data, and as important, that we put the user in the control chair, where it’s the user’s data and they’re deciding what they want to do with it.” Think of, for instance, the recently rolled-out prompt, the tool Apple calls App Tracking Transparency, that allows you to ask not to be tracked while you’re using any given app. Companies like Meta and Google—fellow tech giants and Apple rivals—had been gathering data on their users, and monetizing that data through advertising, for years. Apple has its own unique advertising business, too, and a partnership with Google that makes their search engine the default on Safari, Apple’s web browser. But Cook nevertheless led Apple to give the company’s customers this tool to prevent their data from being harvested and sold. (And in the process, just so happened to deal a blow to the business of its competitors.)
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