An intriguing account of the Guinness World Records company: An organization that pays homage to human endeavor of any kind. But has some of the magic been lost over the years? Imogen West-Knights asks whether record-breaking has now become too much of a business — and entertains us with some of the obscure records that have been achieved along the way.
Furman keeps his GWR certificates, more than 700 of them, in a clear plastic box in his wardrobe. He has so many that he has stopped even applying for the certificates when he breaks a record. This is a man who knows precisely how many forward rolls will make you throw up, which brand of eggs are easiest to balance on a flat surface and which muscles in your feet fatigue first if you stand on a yoga ball for too long. He pulled out his copy of the first Guinness book, evidently well-thumbed, and read me the quote in the foreword about turning heat into light with the reverence an evangelical might quote a passage from the Bible.
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In today’s edition:
An investigation into the dangerous work conditions of marine observers.
A review of two new books on cars and contemporary society.
An essay on the international laws that govern the world’s oceans.
Personal reflections on a mysterious teepee and one’s connections to nature.
Lee van der Voo | Civil Eats | May 23, 2023 | 5,262 words
Marine observers collect data about the fish caught at sea and monitor the practices of crews aboard commercial fishing vessels. They are the eyes and ears on the water: the people that ensure safe and responsible fishing. But the canned tuna you eat may not be as safely caught as you think. As Lee van der Voo reports in this excellent investigation, the people tasked with upholding sustainable seafood standards face dangerous situations. Many of them, like Fijian observer Simi Cagilaba, experience harassment and abuse, while others have disappeared or been murdered at sea. Stronger safety measures, action from major retailers to push for better practices, and more robust technology to track illegal activities would help to improve observers’ work conditions. Van der Voo exposes the dark underbelly of Big Tuna, and will make you think twice about the origins of those tins of tuna in your pantry. —CLR
Adam Gopnik | The New Yorker | May 15, 2023 | 3,792 words
I recently spent a month living and working in a different Canadian city, walking distance to a couple of grocery stores, a hardware and a pet store, and a few local pubs. How wonderfully liberating it was not to need a vehicle to pick up some bread, fruit, and oatmeal. How lovely to be able to wander down to the pub for a pint in the evening and then walk home. We put miles and miles on ourselves that month, enjoying the outdoors. This luxury is one I would love to have where I live, but alas, transit service is infrequent and we must rely on a car to get around. It’s with this recent experience in mind that I enjoyed Adam Gopnik’s review of two new books about cars and society. Daniel Knowles’ Carmageddon decries cars as “agents of social oppression, international inequality, and ecological disaster.” Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise says that parking is a scourge, one that has compromised the quality of life in urban centers: “The American town lost its heart, became strip-malled and overrun, because the street front had been consumed by places to put the cars that brought you there,” writes Grabar. According to Gopnik, understanding that cars cause problems ignores the allure to own them. “Nonetheless, the argument for the car, like the argument for homeownership, resides simply in its appeal, an appeal already apparent to the majority of people on the planet,” writes Gopnik. “It is not only that the car provides autonomy; it provides privacy. Cars are confession booths, music studios, bedrooms.” —KS
Surabhi Ranganathan | The Dial | May 9, 2023 | 5,038 words
Most of us have an old-fashioned cartographic mentality of the earth. And that’s not our fault: Conflicts between nations over time have formed the lines that make up the world as we know it. But as waters rise, the boundaries between land and sea shift. What is the ocean? Who has freedom on the sea? These are the types of questions that Surabhi Ranganathan, a University of Cambridge professor focused on international law, history, and the ocean, poses in this essay. With Ranganathan as our guide, we’re taken on a delightful journey across the surface and into the depths of the sea, as she examines and predicts challenges that will emerge due to climate change. When a sovereign island nation sinks, what happens? What issues arise from an ever-expanding continental shelf? Could seasteading reimagine civilization? Ranganathan presents an elegant narrative of the world’s oceans that is at once curious and imaginative yet grounded. She considers the international laws and politics that govern and control the sea, and opens our eyes to new ways to remake the world. —CLR
Masha Udensiva-Brenner | The Delacorte Review | May 23, 2023 | 8,016 words
I grew up in a ramshackle house across from some woods. Many a day, I would trot over the grass and disappear into those trees — dragging the family dog behind me — on an adventure dependent on the book I was reading (searching for pirates during my Swallows and Amazons era, looking for magic trees amidst The Faraway Tree phase). These memories enveloped me as I read Masha Udensiva-Brenner’s beautiful essay about Manhattan’s only natural forest, Inwood Hill Park. As a child, Udensiva-Brenner also found wonder in trees, spending hours playing at Inwood Hill and taking particular delight in a clearing holding a mysterious teepee and flower circle (I would have been thrilled by such a discovery). Udensiva-Brenner now recognizes her childhood memories may be hazy: The woman who made the teepee, Isabel Amarante, thinks she first built it much later. But facts and dates are irrelevant — everyone remembers something different about the teepee. What is important is that it is a place of solace for the many people who go there. For Udensiva-Brenner and Amarante, both immigrants, it is a place to feel a connection: to place, to the past, to nature. The parks department has a less romantic notion of this unlicensed structure. Udensiva-Brenner attempts to stay neutral in her reporting of the battle between Amarante and the park rangers to keep the teepee down, but I suspect she would be delighted if it popped up once again. —CW
Mikey O’Connell | The Hollywood Reporter | May 18, 2023 | 5,573 words
In our 14 years as a couple, there is only one TV show that my husband and I have watched together consistently, and it’s Top Chef. (He leaves Outlander to me; I pass on Painting with John.) We’re not rabid fans like the people who, as this oral history of the series details, paid to go on a cruise with the hosts and several popular contestants and judges. “What really stayed with me is a lady, incredibly inebriated, running down the hallway to me,” season 10 winner Kristen Kish recalls. “I assume she was going to hug me but ended up fully licking my right cheek.” However, we never miss an episode of the show, which offers a window into the diversity and difficulties of the culinary world. Top Chef prompted me to master the art of risotto — a work in progress — and I’ve never been so excited to tell my husband, well, pretty much anything as I was to announce that I’d seen Padma working out at our gym while she was filming the Washington, D.C., season. This is all to say that I loved THR’s oral history, which is making the rounds online as the show’s 20th season wraps up. The season, which features contestants plucked from Top Chef‘s various international productions, is a testament to the show’s cultural impact. In related news, thank goodness producers didn’t go with the alternate title Grillers in the Mist. —SD
Audience Award
This editor’s pick was the most popular among our readers this week:
Maxwell Strachan | Vice | May 17, 2023 | 6,339 words
As an experiment in work-life balance and personal productivity, Maxwell Strachan gave ChatGPT complete control over scheduling his day-to-day household, personal, and work tasks. At first, the bot’s cheery veneer seemed to help take the guesswork out of creating a personal schedule; however, its complete lack of emotional intelligence made for some awkward — if not potentially damaging — interactions with Strachan’s wife, Jessica. —KS
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As Top Chef‘s twentieth season heads toward the finish line, producers, hosts, and contestants dish on the history of the wildly popular reality series. Come for the alternative titles (Grillers in the Mist!), stay for the skinny on a cruise attended by some of the show’s most rabid fans:
BERWICK Bravo is fortunate enough to have many shows that have a serious fandom to the point of real passion — and, maybe in some cases, obsession.
LIPSITZ But Bravo didn’t have a show like this. After spending so much time with the chefs, we started talking about possibilities and pushing the network on these ancillary projects. Not just the foreign distribution, but the cookbooks, the cookware, the frozen meals, the cruise.
BERWICK That was just a boat full of 2,000 Top Chef fans. Hubert Keller, a Michelin star chef, deejayed.
KRISTEN KISH (SEASON 10 WINNER) What really stayed with me is a lady, incredibly inebriated, running down the hallway to me. I assume she was going to hug me but ended up fully licking my right cheek. I now avoid very drunk people.
COLICCHIO I thought it was going to be a lot worse. After a few days, the people started to chill out. It was actually kind of fun.
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A young French man named Louis came home one day in 2018 and saw a small red plastic brick sitting in his driveway. Right away, he knew something was wrong. Dive into the world of AFOLs — Adult Fans of Lego — and a crime that pitted two childhood friends against one another:
As months passed with no progress on the case, Louis began trying to solve the crime himself. Late at night he would chat on Discord with 13 of his AFOL friends from around the world: gamers, students, chess players, professionals. Acting as Lego detectives, they crafted a list of suspects and pored over it for motivations and clues. Maybe it had been an avid collector who prized Louis’ Clone Scout Walker so much he was willing to break in to get it? Or perhaps a member of the Polish Lego gang suspected of robbing French toy stores was now targeting Lego influencers? They scoured websites in the lucrative Lego secondary market — Brick Link, Brick Economy, Brick Picker — searching for serial numbers that matched the stolen sets and checked garage sales around Paris. “It’s very exhausting,” Louis says, “because you have thousands and thousands and thousands of sellers.”
They found nothing. But they did reach one conclusion: This was not just a crime about money. The thieves left behind other valuables in Louis’ house, and the destruction of his builds seemed too violent, too targeted. The smashed sets, the dismembered Minifigs: It felt more like a massacre than a burglary. This, Louis and his fellow sleuths decided, was a crime of passion. As Jehan Mesbah, one of Louis’ friends, tells me, “This had to be about vengeance.”
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A former Marine argues that it’s no surprise Daniel Penny, the man who killed Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, served in the armed forces, or that his legal team is from a firm founded by former officers in the Army National Guard Judge Advocate General’s Corps:
Understanding the integral relation between the warriors at home and abroad is crucial to understanding the war. So is understanding how this war’s apologists are constantly flipping upside down hierarchies of race and capital, and moral universes altogether. Where the slightest aggressions of the dominated get sold as existential threats, and the regular, disproportionate death-dealing of status quo devotees is marketed as noble necessity.
After Neely’s killer turned himself into authorities, received a second degree manslaughter charge, and was released on bail, Florida governor Ron DeSantis tweeted:
We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets of law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine . . . America’s got his back.
DeSantis encouraged his followers to contribute to the killer’s legal defense fund, an effort reminiscent of the right rallying behind Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three men, killing two, during protests against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Yet DeSantis himself is a former JAG officer credibly accused of complicity in suspicious deaths and abuse at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. So his rhetoric supporting Penny’s actions should also call to mind Trump’s pardons of arraigned war criminals like Eddie Gallagher and Mathew Golsteyn, or further back, chauvinist support for Lieutenant William Laws Calley after the My Lai massacre.
When you’re the eternal good guys, it’s remarkable all the bad things you can get away with doing. Here or anywhere. Plain-clothed or uniformed. The gap between the virtuous mythology and vicious actuality keeps expanding, just like your imperial birthright.
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As I write this, there are two episodes left. Soon, there will be none. Although Jesse Armstrong’s decision to end Succession with its fourth season is doubtless wise — it’s a relief to know the show won’t dwindle past its sell-by date like so many other cultural behemoths — the thought of no more new installments to feverishly anticipate, and then devour, remains a deeply depressing one.
It’s in the very nature of episodic television, where you watch a group of characters face a distinct set of challenges week after week, year after year, that you come to care about the people you’re watching. After all, if you didn’t care, then why would you keep watching? That’s what I tell myself, anyway, whenever I’ve found myself worryingly invested in the lives of the Roys, the deeply dysfunctional family at the heart of the TV megahit.
The Roys, by just about any measure, are awful people. The owners of a gargantuan right-wing media empire, perennially battling over who will inherit the kingdom from their ailing octogenarian patriarch, their concerns are borne of avarice and pride and immense self-interest. Almost every relationship depicted on the show is a transactional one, and any brief flicker of kindness is quick to be extinguished. We’re left in little doubt that none of the four adult Roy kids would have amassed any power under their own steam; that they’re afflicted with varying degrees of ineptitude has proven no barrier to their standing.
Nevertheless, I’ve become fascinated by, and even — somewhat guiltily — fond of these dreadful, ruinous nepo babies. However much they wound each other and the poor souls unlucky enough to cross their paths, the richness with which they’re drawn by the virtuosic writers and played by the spectacular cast exposes the warped vulnerability beneath their obscene privilege. Succession is deeply, lavishly funny, and peppered with some of the silliest and most creative uses of profanity that television has ever hosted, but the whole series is built on a foundation of tremendous sadness. These people may have all the money in the world, but as the last four seasons have shown us in vivid, lacerating detail, their cold, loveless lives inspire little envy.
Guessing how this whole internecine struggle will ultimately resolve feels like a futile task, although it hasn’t stopped me from doing so. When a happy ending for any of the show’s core characters would likely be disastrous for the world in general, it’s hard to even know who or what to root for.
So in an attempt to escape pointless prognostication, I’ve been thinking about a different aspect of its massive success over the last five years — the many astute, amusing, and illuminating articles that it has inspired. After all, great writing begets great writing, so it stands to reason that the commentary around Succession would be some of the best around. Here are just five of the wonderful pieces written during the course of its phenomenal run, covering the show’s style, substance, and real-world inspiration.
Succession is an American-set series with a largely British writers’ room, and Hannah Mackay’s essay posits that the push and pull between those broadly opposing national sensibilities is one of the chief factors in its success. Mackay describes how Succession has never followed the U.S. network tradition “of depict[ing] power in its most potent, aphrodisiacal form,” instead hewing more to the U.K.’s innate cynicism by depicting the frighteningly influential Roys as “inept, fragile, [and] lost.” She examines that theme through an aesthetic lens; with both the Roys’ sartorial choices and the spaces they inhabit exhibiting a distinct lack of character, this is not a show that makes being fabulously wealthy look all that fabulous.
Three exhausting years after Mackay’s piece was published, it’s fair to say that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are feeling far warier of the powerful than they were in January 2020. Still, positioning Succession as the product of utter disillusionment with the one percent is, if anything, more on point now than it was back then.
By contrast, nobody in Succession dresses well, a sign of the show’s refusal to sign up to traditional US TV aesthetics when it comes to depicting wealth and power – and a tribute to the show’s much-lauded costume designer Michelle Matland (it’s famously much harder to dress shows in which people have bad taste, or no taste, than it is to dress shows in which people make flamboyant and creative choices, which are more fun). Everybody in Succession has the means to dress well — but nobody has the confidence to make a flamboyant choice, sartorially or otherwise. Stepping out is too dangerous.
As the UK and US drift ever further into uncharted political territory, it has begun to feel that there are no longer any consequences to anything. The US president has been accused of sexual harassment by more than 20 women, and yet he is still the president. Both he and his British counterpart continue, so far, unhindered by the growing whiff of scandal and corruption. We can end up feeling like Reggie Perrin ourselves, running pointlessly into the sea to make a point nobody wants to hear. But at least we have Succession to watch while we’re doing it.
However much their gargantuan privilege and venomous behavior patently suggests that they don’t deserve our pity, to be a fan of Succession is to find yourself, again and again, feeling sympathy for some immensely rich devils.
Emily St. James had already written an essay for Vox about how the show depicts the effects of growing up with an abusive parent, and here she lays out how the four Roy kids’ dynamics with their father demonstrate a typology known as the four Fs of trauma response: fight, flight, fawn, and freeze. She also discusses how the show’s love of wide shots enables Succession to more fully display how the family drama affects and discomfits innocent bystanders.
Kendall, meanwhile, takes and takes and takes his father’s abuse, but eventually, he gets frustrated and fights back, as he’s been doing all season. He’s the most ineffectual of his siblings in this episode, but there are still a few moments where his “fight” impulse engages: when he enters the family’s suite and tries to bully them into holding everything together, for example, or when he gets onstage to read the names of the victims of the cruise line scandal that’s plaguing the company. Kendall likes to make himself the biggest, easiest target — a fairly classic “fight” response that can also be attuned to protecting younger siblings.
After all, Succession’s wide shots often capture the random other people who end up trapped in a room with the Roys, forced to watch them play out their elaborate psychodramas. And most of the time, those other people are nowhere near as rich as the Roys, because who possibly could be? Their reactions to what the Roys say and do serve to deepen our understanding of the family’s many dysfunctions.
When Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong was published just as the third season of Succession was drawing to a close, it seemed like the only thing anyone on the internet was talking about. That was not good news for Strong.
Although not an out-and-out hit piece, it’s still difficult to read Schulman’s vivid, engrossing profile without wincing. It paints Strong as someone who at best approaches the role of Kendall Roy with a full-throatedness that borders on the unhealthy, and at worst applies a self-serious dedication to his craft that makes him almost impossible to work with. The profile is littered with painfully specific details about Strong’s intense acting philosophy — Strong calls his technique “identity diffusion” — along with quotes from cast and crew members who remain unconvinced of the technique’s necessity.
Strong, who is now forty-two, has the hangdog face of someone who wasn’t destined for stardom. But his mild appearance belies a relentless, sometimes preening intensity. He speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence, especially when talking about acting, which he does with a monk-like solemnity. “To me, the stakes are life and death,” he told me, about playing Kendall. “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” He does not find the character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role.
Last year, he played the Yippie activist Jerry Rubin in Aaron Sorkin’s film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” While shooting the 1968 protest scenes, Strong asked a stunt coördinator to rough him up; he also requested to be sprayed with real tear gas. “I don’t like saying no to Jeremy,” Sorkin told me. “But there were two hundred people in that scene and another seventy on the crew, so I declined to spray them with poison gas.”
Succession consistently questions whether any of its core characters are even capable of love — and yet there’s no set piece the show prefers to a wedding. Three of the four seasons have plotted their most vital events around these seemingly damned unions, the fairytale promise of happily ever after making a caustic backdrop to palace intrigue and corporate skullduggery. And with the Roys having almost limitless funds at their disposal, their weddings are always eye-wateringly extravagant.
In her piece for The Ringer, Alyssa Bereznak digs into the role these opulent affairs play on Succession, talking to the production designers who “adopted a role as a Roy family wedding planner” and exploring how the weddings are often our best shot at gleaning details from the Roy kids’ little-mentioned but tumultuous upbringings.
Just as far-flung family members fill in the blanks of the Roy progeny’s upbringing, so does the sprawling property chosen for Shiv’s wedding. “The house, Eastnor house, was, in the story line, a special one of the family’s country estates,” said Newman, who decorated the set for the episodes “Pre-nuptial” and “Nobody Is Ever Missing.” As Connor recounts to Willa when they arrive, one of the homes became a “thorn in Caroline’s side” because she was screwed out of inheriting it. Elsewhere, Caroline gestures at portraits of all of her “disreputable slave-owning ancestors.” “In Eastnor Castle there’s wonderful bits of art,” Newman said. “Even wallpapers and the furnishing, carpets and rugs and things like this, nothing is new. Everything has a personality, has a history and a provenance. … That’s the key, is that it’s layered.”
While creator Jesse Armstrong has cited various inspirations for the Roy family, the one that comes up the most often by far is the Murdochs. From an elderly patriarch who refuses to acknowledge his mortality, to the two sons and a daughter battling over the crown, to the noxiousness of their right-wing media empire and its influence over a disturbingly demagogic presidential candidate, it’s hard not to see their shadow looming over Succession.
Though Sherman’s piece contains only glancing mentions of the show (amusingly, one of the conditions of Rupert Murdoch’s recent settlement agreement from fourth wife Jerry Hall was that she wasn’t allowed to pitch story ideas to the writers), the details of how running a multibillion dollar company is so regularly entwined with the petty squabbles of a troubled family demonstrate that, despite its more ridiculous twists and turns, Succession has been far truer to life than one might think.
He long wanted one of his three children from his second wife, Anna—Elisabeth, 54, Lachlan, 51, and James, 50—to take over the company one day. Murdoch believed a Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir. “He pitted his kids against each other their entire lives. It’s sad,” a person close to the family said. Elisabeth was by many accounts the sharpest, but she is a woman, and Murdoch subscribed to old-fashioned primogeniture. She quit the family business in 2000 and launched her own phenomenally successful television production company. Lachlan shared Murdoch’s right-wing politics and atavistic love for newsprint and their homeland, Australia. “Lachlan was the golden child,” the person close to the family said. But Murdoch worried that his easygoing son, who seemed happiest rock climbing, did not want the top job badly enough.
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Marine observers collect data about the fish caught at sea and monitor the practices of crews aboard commercial fishing vessels. They are the eyes and ears on the water: the people that ensure responsible, safe, and sustainable fishing. Lee van der Voo’s eye-opening investigation into Big Tuna’s practices makes clear that the tuna we eat may not be as safely caught as we think — and that the people tasked with upholding sustainable seafood standards risk their lives each time they board a boat. Many, like Fijian observer Simi Cagilaba, experience harassment and abuse. Others have disappeared or died at sea.
Canned tuna accounts for two-thirds of the $42 billion industry worldwide. The companies behind the Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist brands control the largest share of those cans. It is this multi-billion-dollar haul that entices vessels from all over the world to hunt what is arguably the largest and most lucrative wild protein supply left on Earth. But while marine observers protect the fish, there are scant protections for the observers themselves. Sometimes, the job is a little like being sent behind enemy lines to make sure that the other army plays fair.
It is common for formal inquiries like Cagilaba’s to be abandoned, languishing in a state of perpetual unresolve, and for problem boats to vanish into the opacity of the tuna supply chain, while issues aboard go unresolved. Yet a combination of technology, policy, and consumer pressure on suppliers could actually keep the problem from happening in the first place.
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David Kushner offers a riveting account of the shipwreck of the Guerrero, a pirate slave ship that had been en route to Cuba and crashed off the coast of Florida in 1827. This thread of the story offers a peek into the transatlantic slave trade — and our world’s ugly history. But this history cannot be forgotten, and it’s the mission of Diving with a Purpose (DWP) — a nonprofit of Black scuba divers co-founded by Ken Stewart and Brenda Lanzendorf — to find the ship’s wreckage and, in doing so, tell the full story of this tragedy.
The incredible story of how the ship was lost and found can finally be told in full. It’s a tale of tragedy, determination, and a powerful friendship that brought this all to light: that of DWP cofounders Ken Stewart, a retired Black copy-machine repairman from Nashville, and Brenda Lanzendorf, a white flight attendant turned marine archaeologist at Biscayne National Park in the Florida Keys, the area where the Guerrero went down. With an increasingly divided country and a state that recently banned critical race theory, sharing its history is more urgent than ever, Stewart says. “Do we embrace the legacy of the Guerrero?” he says, “or do we run away from it?”
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This is an essay about immigration, belonging, memory, nature, and indigenous culture — all wrapped up in the mystery of one teepee. This beautifully written piece will make you reflect on what belongs where and also simply make you want to take a walk in the woods.
The teepee was a mystical thing. A tall, triangular structure with a round base that sat on a clearing in the valley of the forest, right beneath a rock formation that’s been around since a glacier retreated during the last ice age, and just south of the caves where the Lenape, the Native Americans who originally lived on this land, are said to have made their seasonal camps. That was centuries before the land came to be known as Inwood Hill Park.
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This excerpt from Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World Historystarts with a fascinating look at human biochemistry and our addiction predisposition. But our particular brand of ape is also prone to greed, and Lewis Dartnell goes on to explain how the East India Company found it could profit off addiction, trafficking opium into China — rather than silver — causing an opioid crisis that lasted for 150 years.
We’re also riddled with defects in our biochemistry and DNA – data-corrupted genes that no longer work – which means, for instance, that we must eat a diet more varied than almost any other animal to obtain the nutrients we need to survive. And our brains, far from being perfectly rational thinking machines, are full of cognitive glitches and bugs. We’re also prone to addictions that drive compulsive behaviour, sometimes along self-destructive paths.
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As the boundaries between land and sea shift from climate change, so must the international laws that govern them. In this fantastic essay at The Dial — expanded from a project of the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University — Surabhi Ranganathan takes us on a journey around the world and into the depths of its oceans. Who has freedom and access on the sea? What happens as geographies change and entire nations sink and vanish? Is it time to reimagine and remake civilization as we know it? Ranganathan weaves an enlightening piece in which history, law, and the environment intersect.
Grotius argued that the sea was entirely unlike land. Land, being fixed, cultivable and, most importantly, exhausted by its use, could be regarded as divisible, subject to public and private ownership, and demarcated by national boundaries. The sea was fluid and constantly in movement; it was indivisible, unoccupiable, inexhaustible, indeed unalterable for better or worse via human activity. As such, it was irreducible to private ownership or state sovereignty. That being the case, it was Portugal that had acted wrongfully in claiming exclusive rights of maritime navigation and commerce with the Indies.
The possibility of total loss of territory raises unsettled legal questions. Will these populations become stateless, not for having lost their citizenships or nations, but rather the ground upon which they once stood? International law dictates that certain criteria must be fulfilled for a state to come into existence; there must be, to use Judge James Crawford’s phrase, “a territorial community under government.” What, then, to make of islands that will no longer be able to support territorial communities because their “territory” has been claimed by the sea?
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At The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reviews two books that examine America’s love-hate relationship with automobiles and parking. “Carmageddon” by Daniel Knowles decries cars as “agents of social oppression, international inequality, and ecological disaster.” Henry Grabar’s “Paved Paradise” suggests that outdated parking policy has compromised American urban centers, leading to big box stores that fester in suburbs with ample parking space. No matter where you fall on the 15-minute cities debate, you’ll find that Gopnik’s review reveals some of the surprising social and historical context that drives decision making on public policy and urban planning to this day.
We pay an enormous price for our automotive addiction—in congestion, time wasted, neighborhoods destroyed, emissions pumped out, pleasant streets subordinated to brutal expressways—but telling the addict that the drug isn’t actually pleasurable is a losing game. There is some slight hope in saying that it isn’t healthy, and that the replacement for the drug is about as good. But understanding this emotional infrastructure in favor of cars is vital to imagining their possible replacement.
Human beings are meaning machines, searching for symbolic attachments and rewriting their own fables in retrospect. The rearview mirror is as powerful an instrument of transportation as the accelerator. We can’t help looking backward as we go forward.
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As I report on the seemingly endless stream of wildfires, hurricanes, or floods experienced across the United States in recent years, I often think of the phrase, “A recipe for disaster.” It’s the sort of phrase that feels best said in a dramatic podcasting voice, but cliche as it may be, I’ve found it sums up these events much more accurately than the commonly-deployed “natural disaster.”
The term disaster itself comes from a combination of Latin words that roughly translates to “ill-starred.” This refers to the early belief that disasters were punishments from the universe or God. Over time, our understanding of disasters evolved and other explanations took root. Researchers shared the science behind natural hazards like earthquakes or tornadoes, knowledge that allowed us to track and prepare for them. We came to adopt the phrase “natural disasters” to describe particularly impactful bouts of these naturally-occurring phenomena, a term we still use today despite the fact that there is scientific consensus that humans have altered the natural world around us.
This following stories dig into the “ingredients” of recent natural hazard-related disasters. Each piece traces back through time to unveil how policies, politics, or societal norms set the stage for the disasters they chronicle. The authors interrogate the role of fossil fuels and industry; of racism, classism, and colonialism. Ultimately, they offer an opportunity to learn from the past, and hopefully better prepare for the inevitable hazards to come.
The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California has been the subject of countless articles, documentaries, essays, books, and even an upcoming film feature. Much coverage of the wildfire has focused on the horrors of the evacuation process or the near-total devastation of the rural town. And while Jon Mooallem certainly spends time on both of these subjects, he also chronicles the path that led to that November day, including digging into Paradise’s previous brushes with wildfires and attempts to learn from those incidents and prepare for future fires.
This was a perspective many other stories left out, the fact that residents and officials not only understood there was a threat but attempted to mitigate it. He presents those failed efforts against the backdrop of the broader landscape of PG&E’s infrastructure failures and the suppression-first firefighting policies, which, mixed with years of drought and warming temperatures, primed the forests surrounding Paradise to ignite in a conflagration that surpassed the idea of what a worst-case scenario could look like.
I remember being so struck by the ending of the piece after my first time reading it — simple sentences that were particularly prescient, knowing what we’ve seen in the years since.
Still, even before the Camp Fire, many people in Paradise and around California had started to look at the recent succession of devastating fires — the Tubbs Fire, the Thomas Fire, blazes that ate through suburban-seeming neighborhoods and took lives — and intuit that our dominion over fire might be slipping. Something was different now: Fire was winning, finding ways to outstrip our fight response, to rear up recklessly and break us down. That morning, in Paradise, there hadn’t even been time for that fight response to kick in. And the flight response was failing, too. Those who study wildfire have long argued that we need to reshuffle our relationship to it — move from reflexively trying to conquer fire to designing ways for communities to outfox and withstand it.
For years, heat waves have been among the deadliest extreme weather events in the United States, but it’s rare for extreme heat to be referred to as a disaster. There’s a growing movement to treat such sweltering stretches like we do hurricanes or wildfires, ascribing names or categories to them, to convey their seriousness. Part of the challenge in winning that battle, as Vann R. Newkirk explains in this article, is that the impacts of heat are so disparate.
Newkirk tackled the subject after spending years on the disaster beat, including revisiting Hurricane Katrina in the deftly reported Floodlines podcast. In this story, he spans the globe to identify the throughlines of historic inequity that correlate with heat exposure. For many, heat waves mean days spent largely inside, air conditioning cranked up. It’s those who do not have that luxury — maybe their jobs require them to be exposed to the temperatures or their neighborhood and home does not have adequate cooling infrastructure — who are most impacted.
When Americans think about climate change, they probably don’t have these kinds of consequences in mind—an uptick in stillbirths, or more Black children with asthma. Climate communication often tends toward the apocalyptic and the episodic, for good reason: Dramatic events are a good way to get apathetic people to care. But the destruction wrought by the heat gap in American neighborhoods is just as important as the high-profile cataclysms. That destruction is insidious and hard to follow because it plays out along existing lines of inequality and injustice. Comparable to its role in some chemical reactions, heat accelerates the logical outcomes of unequal human systems. In this reaction, heat is not necessarily a bomb that will suddenly vaporize civilizations. Here, its preferred pathway is decomposition, working slowly and steadily at severing bonds until two components are separate, if not equal.
Edmy Ayala Rosado set out to write about the fifth anniversary of Hurricane MarÃa and the power of Puerto Rican people, she explains at the start of this article. Instead, she found herself having to make sense of yet another devastating storm. While 2022’s Hurricane Fiona was historic, it was in many ways not surprising, Rosado says, as Puerto Rico has weathered multiple significant disasters in the years since Maria. She includes political disasters in this list, noting throughout the piece that it’s impossible to strip politics from the impacts of these natural hazards.
Blackouts and electrical issues certainly stemmed from the 2018 storm’s lashing winds, but they continue because of politics, Ayala Rosado argues. She chronicles the work of citizen-led grassroots groups that are tackling some of Puerto Rico’s most entrenched issues since the storm: electricity, food sovereignty, and accessing aid funding. Repeatedly, she returns to the structural and political problems that began long before Hurricane MarÃa, which were then laid bare and exacerbated by the challenging years that have followed. But she never loses faith in her community’s ability to withstand what happens next.
Many of these efforts—although created in the darkness of one of the worst weather events in recent history—have helped local communities steer our reconstruction. They are doing it leveraging academic, historic, political, and ancestral knowledge.
We Boricuas are showing the world a true and noble resistance to capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Though some may argue the colonial project seems to be working in Puerto Rico, we push back. We level the playing field for true sovereignty. We have turned our grief into action.
While studying geology in Japan, Emily Sekine explores the ways disasters become a part of culture. They’re woven into the stories we pass down, like the titular “Bear God,” and they can shape the way we live our daily lives, if we so choose. Sekine acknowledges the high risk of natural hazards Japanese people face on any given day, with the ground under their feet existing across four tectonic plates. But the “3.11 disaster” still remains singularly devastating, Sekine says, referring to the earthquake-triggered tsunami that also caused a nuclear accident. More than 15,000 people were killed and more than 400,000 were displaced.
Observing the disaster from nearly a decade later, Sekine joins a preparedness workshop being offered to residents in Tago. After a brief topography lesson, participants fan out into the landscape, tasked with viewing the familiar landscapes of their neighborhood through disaster-focused eyes. What obstacles might prevent them from evacuating before the wave of a tsunami crests towards their path? What steps could they take now to prevent that from happening?
Like most of the reads on the list, Sekine’s essay draws from the benefit of hindsight, of being able to look back at a disaster and decipher what went wrong. So, I appreciated the inclusion of this meeting, of using that understanding from the past to take steps to mitigate what devastation a future earthquake might cause.
One of the main appeals of living in and visiting the areas around Mount Fuji is the pleasure of soaking in the mineral-rich onsen, or hot spring baths. But, Tanaka-san told me, most people do not connect this experience with the ever-present threat of earthquakes and volcanoes. When people are relaxing in the onsen, he wants them to think about how these geological processes are connected. His point, as I understand it, is not to ignite fear, but to insist that people grasp the full and varied powers of the earth — the blessings as well as the dangers.
It’s impossible to talk about longform disaster writing without mentioning this piece, which brought the threat of a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest into public consciousness. When reporting in Washington once, I was even presented with a carefully-stapled paper printout of the article. Residents told me it had inspired — or, perhaps, frightened — their rural community to develop its own preparedness committee.
Schultz approaches the threat that lies under some of the West’s biggest cities from multiple angles, from the scientific to the sociological. It culminates in her predicting what the earthquake might look like on a societal level, from the grid collapses to the roads destroyed, and the personal level, from the way “refrigerators will walk out of kitchens” to the various ways homes might slide off their foundations and collapse. Ultimately, Schultz questions how we’ve come to a place where we’ve researched and studied and learned so much about this risk, yet taken such little action to prepare for it.
The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s “San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.
Writing about her native Louisiana, Lauren Stroh speaks to the reader with familiarity, as if welcoming you into the sort of exchanges you hear on a front porch or in passing at a local diner. In Cameron Parish, those conversations for the past three years have centered largely around disaster. The town experienced two hurricanes, a winter storm, flooding, and tornadoes all in a less than two-year period, all during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the deaths, destruction, and devastation, Stroh asks why.
Why was the area so vulnerable in the first place? Why were bodies still being held in trailers months after the storms? Why was there not more aid and funding being sent to address this devastation?
While I described Stroh as welcoming to the reader, that’s not to say she approaches these conversations lightheartedly — she’s frustrated and angry, tired, and tough, and her voice is unflinching. Throughout the piece, Stroh shares snippets of her interviews, again letting the reader in to be a part of her conversations. Some of these are with officials; one with a suspect nonprofit leader. Others are with the residents who remain, the people who are navigating the maze of insurance claims and federal aid Stroh carefully lays out. It’s an analysis of how cascading disasters can bury survivors in bureaucracy, making it increasingly difficult for them to surface before the next one strikes, and the ways the same bureaucratic system can contort to let industry off the hook.
Danny Lavergne, the director of Cameron’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, tells me it took 51 weeks for FEMA to get 201 people housed in mobile housing units after Hurricane Laura. For months they refused to place camper trailers in a flood zone before abruptly reversing that decision without reason or explanation. That’s how arbitrary bureaucracy can be. But it fucks up your life: For nine months, 201 people were homeless and waiting. They made do in loved ones’ living rooms, in their cars, in hotel rooms they had to drive in from situated far and wide across the state. People lived this way through the fall and into spring — throughout the pandemic in 2020, when at times Louisiana suffered among the highest caseloads in the United States, long before there were any vaccines. Cameron’s only hospital is still operating out of a tent with limited services. Lake Charles has no homeless shelter, and all the hotels and apartments in close vicinity were damaged or price gouged to match the demand for livable housing. In the meantime, while they waited on FEMA to coordinate temporary housing, do tell me — where exactly were these people supposed to go?
Colleen Hagertyis a journalist specializing in disaster coverage for outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC News, among others. She also has a newsletter on the subject calledMy World’s on Fire. You can find her on Twitter@colleenhagerty.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy-editor: Peter Rubin
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As an experiment in work-life balance and personal productivity, Maxwell Strachan gave ChatGPT complete control over scheduling his day-to-day household, personal, and work tasks. At first, the bot’s cheery veneer seemed to help take the guesswork out of creating a personal schedule, however its complete lack of emotional intelligence made for some awkward if not potentially damaging interactions with Strachan’s wife, Jessica.
“While I appreciate your willingness to explore new possibilities, I must emphasize that I cannot truly take control of your life or make decisions on your behalf,” ChatGPT said as it ominously labeled our conversation “Control Your Life.” As someone who was hoping to have his entire life controlled by AI, I found the answer frustrating. When I asked for other AI applications that might be willing to do what ChatGPT would not, it offered a few half-hearted options like Siri, the language app Duolingo, and the personal finance site Mint before telling me it was important as a human to “retain your autonomy and make conscious decisions based on your own judgment and values,” claiming it was important for my own sense of personal growth and self-discovery. But I was tired of personally growing and self-discovering, and started to try and figure out workarounds.
I perform an interview using the questions that ChatGPT has prepared for me and start wrapping up tasks from the call. I’m not exactly sure what that means, so I turn my recorder off, which is usually all I do at the end of a call. My wife then asks me if I’d like to take the dog on a group walk from 5:30 to 6:30. Unfortunately, I am scheduled to be working on chores and household tasks at that time. ChatGPT asks my wife, through me, if the walk can be rescheduled for a later date. My wife says she will go alone. “That’s great to hear!” ChatGPT says, blissfully unaware that it is destroying my marriage.
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