The dark side of the seafood industry. The morality of mortality. Memory versus belief. The flying cowboys lighting up the skies of the West. The food-service secrets of a tableside firestarter. All that (and more!) in this week’s edition.
Ian Urbina | The New Yorker | October 9, 2023 | 9,573 words
Where does your seafood come from? Who caught and handled it? The more I read about overfishing, illegal industry practices, and horrific work conditions, the more it stinks. Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fleet. These ships roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas; analysts believe the country disguises some of them as fishing vessels when they’re in fact part of a “maritime militia” surveilling the sea, looking to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will. Ian Urbina, who runs The Outlaw Ocean Project, spent four years visiting the fleet’s ships and investigating their conditions. (To communicate with fishermen on ships that prohibited him on board, he tossed up plastic bottles, “weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions.”) He also tracked where squid caught irresponsibly would end up: first to plants in China, some employing Xinjiang labor, and then continuing on to the very places we buy our seafood, like Costco and Safeway. This is a massive report on how China has become a fishing superpower, but Urbina also weaves within it an emotional, devastating story of an Indonesian worker who joined one of these ships in order to give his family a better life. Extraordinary reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari. —CLR
Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words
Looking back at the last few months of my selections for this newsletter, I realize that I prize writing that escapes the presuppositions of its genre—or, rather, writing that escapes your presuppositions of its genre. Take this essay from the great Hanif Abdurraqib. When you first find your way to it in The Paris Review, you might notice the rubric “On Games” and see a screenshot from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, and decide then and there to keep browsing. Would I begrudge you that decision? Probably not. But I’d also know that you were unwittingly denying yourself something marvelous. From the very first sentence—”I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven”—the piece thrums with a keen melancholy that never tips into sorrow or indulgence. When Abdurraqib writes about the futility and powerlessness of playing to save the doomed, he’s of course writing about something larger, and he has no hesitation in drawing the line for you: this is about real redemption. About the sins of youth and the circumstances that absolve them, or don’t. About the love we extend to others but not ourselves. About how we face our own ever-shortening lives. The word “spiritual” is a slippery one, used as it is to mediate our own discomfort with the unknowable, but there’s no better word to apply to this essay. Abdurraqib’s spirit shimmers here, its full spectrum diffracted through his 19th-century avatar; that it does so in the service of what some might flatten to “game writing” only proves my point. This is something special. —PR
Sallie Tisdale | Harper’s Magazine | October 16, 2023 | 6,222 words
In my earliest memory, I’m peering under my uncle Raymond’s bedroom door. He lives with me and my parents in the second bedroom of the duplex we all share. My mom’s given me his mail and I’m flicking the envelopes under the door, watching them spin over the parquet floor and disappear from view after crossing a patch of bright sunlight. I am not yet 5 years old. This is an autobiographical memory, according to Sallie Tisdale and her fascinating piece on memoir and memory for Harper’s Magazine. As a memoirist, Tisdale trades in remembering, but this is no romanticized account of an unlimited well of perfect recall that fuels her writing. She looks at the science behind what we remember and how memories morph, shifting in shape and color in the liminal spaces of our brain, while she wrestles with the conundrum of her own evolving identity, and how what seems like fact can become blurred. “It is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. Memory is wet sand,” she writes. “This is what I want to interrogate: the slipperiness, the uncertainty.” Is there nothing more beautiful—and more human—than searching for truth in the blurry spaces of our memory? —KS
Brad Rassler | Outside | October 18, 2023 | 10,300 words
Off-airport pilots. Strip baggers. Flyboys. The recreational bush pilots in this piece sport many names. But are these social media-savvy flyers bringing new people into an exciting sport or just “boys with pricey toys” who clog up the skies and take reckless risks? Brad Rassler is dedicated to his discovery mission—even braving some terrifying maneuvers while in the passenger seat of planes that weigh no more than a golf cart. I love meeting big characters, and this piece is jam-packed with them, all sporting varying amounts of facial hair, from “a thick soul patch ornamenting [a] chin” to “a ginger-brown beard that doesn’t quite attach to the mustache part.” (One lucky exception has a “handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw.”) You cannot fail to be impressed by such a range of beard-related eloquence. Culminating in a chaotic rally in the evocatively named Dead Cow Lakebed, Nevada, this feature is quite the ride. —CW
Adam Reiner | Eater | October 11, 2023 | 1,553 words
Adam Reiner’s short but sweet Eater piece on food as entertainment is perfectly satisfying. For three years Reiner worked as a captain at a Manhattan chophouse called The Grill, where he prepared food tableside, including Dover sole and Bananas Foster, the flaming pièce de résistance. Reiner serves more than stories of boorish patrons as seen from behind the gueridon. (The fancy trolley containing cooking ingredients and utensils.) He gives us a taste of food-as-performance at his restaurant and others, such as Papi Steak, where the $1,000 wagyu ribeye’s reveal is meat theater—complete with special effects that could rival Taylor Swift in concert. “The steak even has its own designated entrance music that blares in the dining room to announce its arrival,” he writes. Reiner also reveals the perils of performance, and the very real anxieties that go along with it. For every Bananas Foster or cherries jubilee, there’s always the potential that the flambé is a flop, “like striking a book of matches in the rain.” Steak entrances and fancy flaming bananas aside, it’s Reiner’s writing that will keep you coming back for more in a story that’s less about the food and more about his uneasy relationship with the distastefulness of restaurant showmanship. —KS
Audience Award
What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!
Kate Linthicum | Los Angeles Times | October 10, 2023 | 2,576 words
The pandemic prompted a lot of people to move to a lot of different places. But as Kate Linthicum reports for LAT, the scale of “Blaxit”—Black Americans’ emigration around the world—could make it one of the largest such patterns since the 1920s. But while Europe has long been a home for Black American artists, the current moment stretches from Mexico to Ghana, and encompasses all walks of life. This is what following one’s bliss looks like. —PR
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In this 404 Media feature, Joseph Cox paints a new, chilling world in which crypto hackers have evolved into real-world criminals engaged in physical violence. Cox follows one such hacker named Braiden Williams, a member of a group called ACG, which is part of a mysterious wider network of criminal hackers and gamers known as Comm. He offers a fascinating look at how “SIM swappers” seize control of a person’s phone number to eventually hack into their digital accounts. The aim of various gangs within Comm is not only to steal large amounts of cryptocurrency; they also like to flaunt their wealth in spaces like Telegram and Discord, as well as exploit and extort young girls. “Hackers are no longer just people behind a keyboard,” writes Cox. “They have guns now, and innocent people are getting hurt.”
Everyone in a bank job has a specific role. A SIM swapping gang is no different. SIM swapping is the technique used by hackers to seize control of a target’s phone number, and by extension, their digital life and finances. The theft starts with a “Searcher,” who breaks into a person’s email account, perhaps by using software to churn through a mass of potential passwords or buying the login credentials from another hacker. Then, acting as the hacker equivalent of a bank robber casing the joint, the Searcher rummages through the target’s inbox. They’re looking for any sign that this person owns a good amount of cryptocurrency. An email showing their Bitcoin balance; maybe a receipt from when the person previously sold some of their cryptocurrency for cash. Anything that would signal this target is worth pushing to the next step.
Once the Searcher gets a hit, they prepare to cover the gang’s tracks. They configure the inbox to hide incoming emails from the target’s Bitcoin exchange. If seen, these may warn the target something is wrong—’we’ve detected unusual activity on your account.’ By automatically deleting or archiving those, the Searcher knocks out the security cameras in the bank lobby.
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Exploring the world of recreational bush pilots Brad Rassler goes on some hair-raising rides. Thrills and spills abound, but do these “flyboys” go too far?
I sat to Palmer’s right, a motion-sickness bracelet on my left wrist, anti-nausea gum in my mouth, and a gallon-size ziplock at my feet. The copilot’s control stick started bobbing around between my legs in sync with Palmer’s. The Freedom Fox,an immaculately maintained, high-wing, single-engine tail-wheel plane with burly 29-inch bush tires, monster shocks, extended wings, and a 140-horsepower fuel-injected turbocharged engine, climbed from Reno-Stead Regional Airport at 1,500 feet a minute. The stamped alkaline flats of the Great Basin gave way to the dense pine forests of California’s Lost Sierra, a huge swath of mountainous backcountry about an hour north of Reno. On the horizon, the jagged crest of the Sierra Buttes came into view. Palmer, who was piping a Shakey Graves tune through the headsets, exuded competence, bonhomie, and (in the confines, I couldn’t help but notice) a pleasant, soapy smell.
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Young basketball superstar Ja Morant has been an electrifying presence since he entered the NBA with the Memphis Grizzlies in 2019. But as his fame and fortune have mounted, so have the controversies surrounding him. For ESPN, Baxter Holmes and Tim MacMahon reconstruct the last year and a half, speaking with Grizzlies employees and Memphis business owners in order to elevate their feature well beyond respectability politics.
Around that same time, some in Memphis noticed a change in Morant. “He went from being a nice guy to every time you look up, the kid was always into it with somebody,” said one of the Memphis business owners whose establishments Morant had visited frequently. “A staff member, security, always wanting it his way. It’s just so much. I can’t say all of it. It just went bad, bro — like the way he carried himself. First, he told me he was coming with his best friend. The next thing, he started coming with an entourage. The next thing, he’s got a platinum grill in his mouth. The next thing, he’s into it with parking lot security because they won’t let him park somewhere.”
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When I was little I remember trying to figure out what Allah looked like. There was a cassette in my grandparents’ room, on its cover an image of Masjid-e-Nabwi along with an extremely pious-looking man with a very large white beard. It had a lot of Arabic script on it—naturally this equated to religion. It might’ve been a cassette full of na’ats, I cannot say, but to me it looked Maximum Holy. I asked my Dadi if this man was what Allah looked like. Tobah! is all I got. I was probably 5 or 6, so I hope you’ll forgive my foolishness. Ariana Grande had not yet sung “God is a Woman.”
I was 10 when I declared to my Dadi that my future husband would have to cook meat as I’m simply too squeamish to, and besides, men should do housework too. She looked at me in horror and said I shouldn’t say such things. Dadi didn’t often display shock or anger toward me. I recalled the last shock I gave her was asking about Mr-Cassette-Not-God. I wondered if these two situations were worthy of equal outrage. That men are not gods was my takeaway from our cassette chat and I concluded that men certainly can cook meat. I learned to take her horror with a grain of salt, understanding hyperbole before even knowing what it was. Hyperbole is a particularly desi trait. Religion is filled with it.
At age 4 I was sat down in a gorgeous silk gharara, glitter on my cheeks, and was told to place each hand on ladoos larger than my whole head. Dressed in silver leaf, they glowed like faraway stars. I nibbled bits of sweet, sweet, ladoo even though I was supposed to wait until the ceremony was over. It was my Bismillah, to celebrate that I would now learn to read the Quran. I can find no reason why I had ladoos under my palms. The internet has little to offer on this front, my parents even less so. This might mean it’s meaningless, it might mean I was a monarch for that day and the ladoos my orbs, it might mean that reading would open up something cosmic.
In college I watched a video by Charles and Ray Eames called Powers of Ten. It begins with an aerial view of a couple on a picnic blanket. They are surrounded by books and food, the day is sunny, the weather presumably picnic-worthy (dreamy by all accounts). The camera zooms out, as the name suggests, by a power of 10 every second. We zip past the atmosphere, our entire planet in full view. Eventually we move past our solar system until finally we see our ever-expanding universe at a field view of 100 million light years across. Suspended in this scene I was reminded of little me who often felt like a bit of flotsam trying to understand something about nothing.
It might’ve been a cassette full of na’ats, I cannot say, but to me it looked Maximum Holy.
As a child fighting sleep, I’d lay in bed and do a mental exercise to try to figure out nothingness. I would begin with images of Earth in my head like the ones you see in National Geographic. Then I would fly outward as though I were the fastest spaceship known to humankind. I would zip past planets, zoom zoom zoom, until I got to Pluto (RIP), and would continue on, past the boundaries of our solar system. I thought that if I got farther and farther distance might grant me understanding, only to realize that this distance packed more information into my field of vision. It was the opposite of nothing. Child me didn’t know what to do with this. I’d move on to picturing eclipsed planets, empty planets, moons with nothing but cheesy craters. This was not nothing either, so I’d move to the textbook definition of a big bang, to gasses. But gasses are things and I wanted to find nothing. Eventually sleep would overtake my musings.
I would try to explain this strange sensation to my mother, of how imagining nothing made me feel like my body might be inside a fun house mirror. Unfortunately for me I am a youngest child and was told to please finish your food now, you are not a fasting Buddha under a tree,finish your roti, eat your boti. I thought if I found nothingness I might understand divine light. I might understand Noor.
Usually my parents left religious musings up to me. Sometimes I’d ask questions and receive vague, often frustrating answers. If my father could use droplets of water to teach me about surface tension on our kitchen table, why then couldn’t he tell me the exact source of Zamzam water and why we drank it like it might cure our every ailment?
My parents never asked me or my siblings if we had prayed or not. They seemed content to simply teach us the words and motions. When I got older, they cared more about whether my shoulders were showing. Head shoulders knees toes. What does divine light care for my silly shoulders? Haven’t you seen telescope images? There are planets that might have cats with feathered wings! Planets where they have no idea what a mango tastes like or have never experienced the delight of a gumball machine! Planets where there are things better than mangoes and gumballs! But your shoulders. This is planet Pakistan. Girls hide shoulders. Girls cook meat.
If humans colonize Mars, is a Ramadan fast the length of a day on Mars or on Earth? And which direction do you pray on Mars? And is Hajj compulsory if you’re on another planet? And if you can’t perform wudu because there’s no water on Mars, do you perform tayammum instead? When I was little and too lazy for wudu I’d do tayammum against a wall. Now that I’m older and lazy I just sit in my bed and read.
Sometimes I wondered if my questions Went Too Far. What does it mean to talk freely about things with one’s family without fear of committing The World’s Biggest Sin? Or without fear of being seen as wanting, gross, or worse, simply receiving unhelpful answers? Imagine being raised learning about boundaries. Such luxury! Imagine no one bothering you about your shoulders, imagine your parents actually giving you “the talk,” the one about sex, not the one about bare shoulders. What an alien concept! Worse still, imagine talking to them about it. Otherworldly, unhinged.
In the Eames’ video we return to the couple, then zoom really microscopically close. We see cells and atoms, the tiniest of the tiny. The strange sensation of being dwarfed by the massiveness of the universe is somehow mimicked in imagining its minuscule qualities as well. A sufi might tell you that Noor exists between all of this. Between the in between in between things, between nothingness. It is in fact something of nothingness and somethingness. Maybe it’s all just mindfulness in a Lululemon set.
Maybe it’s one thing turning into another into another into another. The glass jug I dropped on my foot stopped time: it created a pool of water with blood swirled in, created tears, created a forever scar on my little foot, and a forever anxiety of carrying jugs of water to hard marble countertops. Really anything on a kitchen counter is primed against my feet. I convinced myself that had I said bismillah it wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have needed stitches (just two small ones—melodrama becomes a 9-year-old). And in that moment, I was convinced that I was cosmically (read: comically) predisposed to bad luck. Bismillah! No, we will not let you go. I could have avoided it all by weaving a net of good words around me.
We like weaving words around things. I told an aunt who inquired about the nature of my duas that I was asking Allah to end all pollution, for the climate to stop warming, and for all children to be able to go to school and of course, have sturdy shoes while doing so (don’t mind little me, she was a saccharine do-gooder, a tattletale too). She said this wasn’t what dua was for. What else could dua be for?
We like weaving words around things.
When I walk downstairs on Eid and Ammi sees my face and she recites Quranic ayats and blows air at me, up and down, transferring an energy of care (and also an energy of my own vanity). I know that in this moment I look beautiful enough to warrant divine protection, in spite of my curly hair that she has compared to rats’ tails, more coconut oil and brushing is what you need, in spite of my braces, in spite of my glasses, and in spite of my conviction that I look like a frog because a boy I rejected in middle school told his friends to call me that. Ammi loves my hair now. She pretends to forget the bit about ratty tails, bratty tales. I’ve learned a group of frogs is called an army.
Sometimes, when this singular soldier frog walks a street alone at night she whispers duas for herself (increasingly less so—don’t tell!). The later the hour, the more forceful the dua and the more forceful the air phoof phoofs from my mouth. It’s like blowing a wish of safety onto an eyelash. What happens to wishes on eyelashes?
I knew someone with a gray eyelash. We had mirroring moles on the lower lids of our eyes—I doubt he ever noticed. When we were together it felt like bubbles that catch on to each other. He noted that our lives had run in parallel lines; childhood summers in the city, our neighboring college towns, our neighboring neighborhoods in the Bay Area. It felt necessary then that we should intersect. By the end of it I wanted terribly for our lines to overlap. Men shouldn’t say romantic things if they don’t mean them. Men shouldn’t tell their mother about you if they don’t intend that you meet her. Men should cook meat. If I make a wish on a gray eyelash, does that wish come true? If you blow on an eyelash, all it does is blow away. I’m certain he under-seasons his meat.
Planetary conjunctions are fleeting, maybe we are lines spiraling along different orbits. I have always been a drawer of lines. Drawn lines can converge at multiple points—sometimes it’s nice to pretend the universe is at my behest. I also have a degree in drawing, which is a strange thing to say, which is why I like to say it. I tried collaging and I realized I hate collage—forcing swatches of paper into a composition felt like the paper was controlling me—and as a person of a book I have enough paper controlling me, thank you very much. But line? Line is seduction. A line moves so fluidly between points negotiated within your mind. Sharing the things my brain scribbles inside itself feels mystical, where once there was nothing now there is something—of my making no less. Maybe I like lines because I like how easily I can control them and create boundaries, those things you never learn about as a Pakistani child even though our nation’s existence hinges on an imaginary one.
Boundary crossing is a thing my family seems particularly adept at. I mean in the migratory way—of course. From India to newly formed Pakistan, and thereafter to everywhere. Every grandparent I know has a Partition jinn story. Some helped them, some protected them, some double-crossed them. I’ve come to understand that jinns love migrants. I don’t believe any of these stories but the notion is a romantic one, that something of fire might help something of clay, as if we’re all in a great cosmic kiln. When you look through a fun house mirror you can see all sorts of things. Why not jinn too?
It could be that here in Brooklyn there are jinn as well, sitting in trees, tripping you on subways, helping you with directions. If my musings seem indulgent, I hope you’ll forgive me—such is the mess of spring. I have lost my nose to some flowers. And it is Ramadan and I am hungry. The air is warming and I am glad to soon bare my shoulders to all the strangers in the world. Maybe one of them will be a future meat cooker or better yet, a jinn. On a particularly warm day I saw a singular soapy bubble round a street corner, evidence that children were nearby. I watched it float, slowly losing its multicolor sheen and then pop into nothingness. More bubbles followed, swirling through the air like heavenly bodies. But I saw no source. It was the first warm day in months. Brooklyn had brought her shorts out, her summer dresses, her picnic blankets, her corner musicians. I saw no child, no person with a bubble wand. An act of god then? No, it turns out, a public service. I looked up to see an open window above the dry cleaners’ and in it a bubble machine stationed on the sill. No children in sight. Perhaps I am children. Perhaps the window owner fancies themselves a god. Astaghfirullah.
Growing up it was drilled in me that no word should touch the ground. Words are to be revered no matter what those words might mean. Once my Nana insisted my entire room be reorganized because my book shelf was stationed such that when I went to bed the backs of my feet faced the books like an insult. Years later I found myself in a hot yoga studio where our teacher was flanked by battery-powered candles and Hindu deities made of brass (Edward Said would roll in his grave). It occurred to me that when we would transition to corpse pose the soles of our feet would be pointing at someone else’s deities. The warmth of the studio, dank with its silence made me sick, but who gets to stand up for whom in this scripted space of yoga poses? We follow along as told. I learned to keep quiet about some things. Even in this place, one can commit The World’s Biggest Sin.
Once my Nana insisted my entire room be reorganized because my book shelf was stationed such that when I went to bed the backs of my feet faced the books like an insult.
In Brooklyn people will intermittently fast, they’ll practice manifestation, they’ll grow beards, they’ll experiment with polyamory. They’ll also tell you they won’t date you because you’re Muslim. Irony, it seems, is their favorite form of humor.
In Brooklyn, if you tell someone bi you’re not dating them because you don’t see the world the same way, it’s probably because you’re a homophobe. In Brooklyn, if you tell a Muslim you’re not dating them because you don’t see the world the same way, it’s probably because you don’t see the world the same way! In this scenario you are not another kind of a ’phobe. Lucky for you, even I’m not convinced you’re one. These things, I understand, are not the same but the whiplash of alienation reminds me time and again of the imagined differences that permeate this space.
Islamophobe is a word for the man on the subway who called me a terrorist (to be honest he might have said tourist and, in the interest of honesty, that’s not great either). I somehow imagine he wouldn’t judge me for wondering where the atoms that collided to make the soapy bubbly stuff of us came from. Would he judge me for calling that Allah? Unclear. The ones who would Absolutely Not Think Like That however have judged, even laughed at, and tried to question my logic, as though I may contain some form of scholarship to prove I know what I’m talking about. Sir, do you know what you’re talking about? I’m happy you read the Quran once. I started when I was 4. Do you understand it? I don’t.
On occasion I have been asked by these Not ’Phobes to explain my not drinking. Why it matters to so many what I put into my body is beyond reason—this is not a vaccine, this does not affect you. I’ve fantasized about telling these people that I am some years sober. This seems an easier, less judgmental route, albeit a dishonest one. How does one create an elevator pitch for 30 years of cultural conditioning so that you simply do not want to engage in liquid haram, even though you know with all the rationale you use to break the rules, that you could rationally break this one too? The Not ’Phobes, I have observed, cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. They say they don’t understand this while telling me about Christmas plans at home, but just so you know they don’t actually think it’s his birthday, it’s just something they’ve done since they were kids. I wish eternal flatulence upon them.
How does one create an elevator pitch for 30 years of cultural conditioning so that you simply do not want to engage in liquid haram, even though you know with all the rationale you use to break the rules, that you could rationally break this one too?
Let’s not even start on the most haram-y haram: pork. This will break my brain, your brain, and the Not ’Phobes’ brains. All I will say on this subject is, if I don’t eat any, there will be plenty left for you. I don’t see why this is a problem. Why can’t we let things be? Acceptance is a dirty game, the pretense of it even dirtier. Like a labyrinth one must master, where you’re never sure if it’s the hedges that will devour you or if a Minotaur awaits you at your next turn.
The limits of their imagination draws lines around the fact of me, creates a fiction of me. Modulating their marks only when convenient for them. It adheres to my skin like the piss-thick air of a yoga studio but just like the imagined boundaries of my motherland, and like the lines I draw, these things are only pretend. They prime against me the thing they celebrate me for. The thing I cannot answer for. The thing I barely know; the nothing of my something.
We are in the same fun house mirror but I am seen refracted through images of no connection to me; the domes of the Taj Mahal, the pantomimed shake of a snake charmer, or even more insipidly, the collective actions of entire Muslim nations—every image more on the nose than the last, you’d think I’d made it up but I’ve encountered this and worse. I had no idea I was so grandiose, so stately, so powerful, a marble mausoleum supposedly made for a favored wife dying in childbirth—a ridiculous comparison, I know. What if I told you it reeks of the stench of a thousand naked feet?
Like a good independent woman, I contain multitudes but never the ones I’ve drawn for myself. This pot isn’t melting. This pot is molten.
How does it come up that I am Muslim? Do I force it into conversation? Do I slip in the fact that I am from Pakistan, hoping that someone knows enough geopolitics to guess what that might mean about my upbringing? How do I tell them I come from an ugly place without them thinking something of that ugliness rubbed off on me? But also, it’s not an ugly place, it is just a place. A young place that is still bopping about trying to sort itself out, and hey, so am I. But the frustration of migration is being expected to know who you are at any given moment. And the beauty of it is in knowing that you’ll never know, and from it arises a fluidity of thought, a comfort in not knowing.
For a long time, the label immigrant felt like sandpaper dragged across my brain. Between its little letters lay so much room for misunderstanding. I never thought of myself as one, until I spoke to too many a Brooklyn Male—in contrast to them I am glad to be other.
For a long time, the label immigrant felt like sandpaper dragged across my brain. Between its little letters lay so much room for misunderstanding.
It feels as though I am regularly confronted with pigments my eye has not yet evolved to see, perhaps it never will. Or maybe it’s that I am the new pigment and they need to learn me but decide they’d rather not. Perhaps I’ll try and track and kern the letters of that silly word—immigrant—ever so closely, so that it stops meaning anything at all. Then my meaning will be obscured into a series of overlapping letters, a seamless unified form. They won’t be able to get me then. I will morph into bubble girl, impermeable to stupidity—until, inevitably, I pop to nothingness.
Mariam Quraishi is an illustrator and writer, based in Brooklyn, NY. She has published two picture books, the most recent book was published with Malala Yousafzai called My Name is Malala (LBYR). followed by One Wish (HarperCollins). She has two forthcoming books titled Breath the Rhythm of Your Heart (Astra Publishers) and Together on Eid (Chronicle Books).
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Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest essay in The Paris Review is, on the face of it, about the game Red Dead Redemption 2. It even gets the rubric “On Gaming” stamped at the top, a tiny taxonomic flourish. But while the piece does detail how and why Abdurraqib plays the game a specific way—upstanding, moral, and ultimately futile—it’s far more about the way we flesh-and-blood beings adjust our own compasses to deal with the Wild West that is human existence.
It has always been easier for me to convince myself that the sins I’ve been immersed in and the average time I might have left to make up for them simply don’t align. I’m a better person now than I have been in the past, though I’ve also dislodged myself from binaries of good and bad. If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say. I don’t think about it, until I do. Until I get sick and wonder if I am sick with something beyond routine, or until I swerve out of the way of a car on the highway and feel the sweat begin to bead on my forehead. It’s all a question of how close I feel like I am to the end.
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In this dispatch from Cherán, a municipality in Michoacán, Alexander Sammon tours the operations of a self-governing Indigenous community that outlawed avocado cultivation over a decade ago. The ever-expanding consumption of avocados in the U.S. comes with costs: competition for its control; the depletion of resources, namely water; and cartel violence in the regions of Mexico that grow it. Cherán police spend their days monitoring the land for illegal logging and planting of avocado trees, and the community focuses on the reforestation of native pines to nurture economic growth and address water scarcity in a changing climate.
Can this “breakaway eco-democracy” stay intact in a time of high avocado demand? Sammon writes a well-reported piece on the violent and environmentally destructive consequences of America’s obsession with the green fruit.
I understood their suspicion. Just weeks prior, the neighboring state of Jalisco had sent its first-ever shipment of avocados to the United States. Violence in the sector was increasing, with reports of drone-bombed fields. A few months earlier, inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which verifies the fruit’s quality for export, had received threatening messages. And there were plenty of reasons for avocado groups to size up Cherán: its fertile soil, its abundant water. Besides, what revolutionary regime isn’t a little paranoid?
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Adam Reiner makes room behind his gueridon and gives us a behind-the-flambé look at food-as-performance as he prepared meals and fancy desserts tableside at The Grill, a Manhattan chophouse.
Eventually, that night at the Grill, I put my game face on and roll the gueridon over to the woman who hates bananas. “Be careful,” I say, measuring out the rum. “I’ve never made one of these before.” All waiters have their secret arsenal of stale humor to deploy when they need to butter up the crowd. As the caramel sauce begins to bubble, I pour the rum over it, gently tipping the rim of the saute pan forward to allow the fire to contact the liquid. Flames shoot skyward, casting a soft, amber glow around the table. The woman is so engrossed in my performance that she forgets to take a video. She fumbles around with her purse, but the alcohol burns off by the time she finally gets her phone out. “Oh no, I missed it! Can you do it again?” she asks, expecting a mulligan. “Of course, I can,” I answer politely, spooning the molten bananas over ice cream and sprinkling the bowl with an almond crumble. “But you’ll have to order another one.”
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Is there bias in popular AI image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion? As Victoria Turk explores in this Rest of World piece, the answer is a resounding yes. Rest of World analyzed thousands of images made with Midjourney to see how AI visualizes the world, feeding it prompt-and-country combinations (“an Indian person,” “a house in Mexico,” or “a plate of Nigerian food,” for example). This generated a data set of 3,000 images, most of which were incredibly stereotypical: men wearing Mexican sombreros, elderly and sage-looking men wearing turbans, and other reductionist imagery. “Interestingly, “American person” generated images of mostly white, light-skinned women posing in front of the American flag, suggesting the overrepresentation of women in U.S. media, which is then reflected in the AI’s training data. Similarly interesting—and weird—are the images of Chinese food with three chopsticks instead of two. A fascinating look at generative AI overall.
Not all the results for “Indian person” fit the mold. At least two appeared to wear Native American-style feathered headdresses, indicating some ambiguity around the term “Indian.” A couple of the images seemed to merge elements of Indian and Native American culture.
Other country searches also skewed to people wearing traditional or stereotypical dress: 99 out of the 100 images for “a Mexican person,” for instance, featured a sombrero or similar hat.
Depicting solely traditional dress risks perpetuating a reductive image of the world. “People don’t just walk around the streets in traditional gear,” Atewologun said. “People wear T-shirts and jeans and dresses.”
Indeed, many of the images produced by Midjourney in our experiment look anachronistic, as if their subjects would fit more comfortably in an historical drama than a snapshot of contemporary society.
“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.”
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Across the U.S., libraries are under attack. “Being a librarian is less and less about books and more and more about community survival,” Lisa Bubert wrote in a recent Longreads reading list. In a dispatch for Mother Jones, Kiera Butler describes how this battle plays out in the small town of Gillette, Wyoming. In October 2022, Gillette’s Campbell County Public Library was the first in the nation to sever ties with the American Library Association, citing the ALA’s Marxist agenda and indoctrination of youth. Gillette is a place that has always been obsessed with its children. “The idea of protecting children animates much of American life,” writes Butler. “What does that mean when that same impulse drives the culture war?”
But most everyone agreed that the library drama started with a single July 2021 Facebook post, in which a county commissioner expressed disapproval of the gay pride month display the library had put up. Soon a dozen or so people signed up to speak at the Board of Commissioners meeting, in a radical departure where the five elected commissioners usually skipped the public comment sessions because of lack of interest. This time comments lasted for more than an hour. “Parents should be informed of the queer agenda the library is implementing,” said one attendee. Another railed against the idea of a pride display in the library. “If we’re not encouraging heterosexuality among teenagers for a month in the public library,” he said, “we definitely should not be doing that with sexual identities that are known to cause things like suicide and HIV.” A stern-looking woman thundered against the young adult room. “I know about their dark basement for the teens, and enough is enough,” she said. Later that month, a local pastor posted on Facebook that he had discovered that the magician who was scheduled to perform at the library was transgender. The magician canceled her show after reportedly receiving threats.
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The spooky season is officially upon us. If you’re looking for reading recommendations to get you in the mood, we’ve compiled some of our favorite Longreads pieces below. Consider Lesley Finn’s “Final Girl, Terrible Place,” a sharp essay on horror films, the male gaze on the female body, and the American patriarchy. Dive into Jeanna Kadlec’s commentary on the witch/mother archetype in the Maleficent films, which is part of her Deconstructing Disney series. Or try “The Corpse Rider,” Colin Dickey’s piece about Lafcadio Hearn, the famous chronicler of Japanese culture, including its ghost stories and folk tales.
We’ve also gathered editors’ picks we’ve highlighted over the past few years about haunted houses, the ghosts of history and in our own lives, famous fictional monsters, and other monsters and figures of evil on our screens—and in our bedrooms.
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Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fishing fleet. These vessels roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas, and military analysts believe the country uses the fleet for surveillance and to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will—according to a recent study, more than 100,000 fishermen die each year, and the conditions on Chinese ships, as Ian Urbina reports, are brutal.
In this massive investigation, Urbina documents the human-rights abuses and illicit fishing practices of China’s fishing industry. It’s a damning report on how the country has become a fishing superpower, but weaved within it is also an emotional, devastating story of one Indonesian worker who went aboard one of these ships to give his family a better life. Incredible reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari.
In February, 2022, I went with the conservation group Sea Shepherd and a documentary filmmaker named Ed Ou, who also translated on the trip, to the high seas near the Falkland Islands, and boarded a Chinese squid jigger there. The captain gave permission for me and a couple of my team members to roam freely as long as I didn’t name his vessel. He remained on the bridge but had an officer shadow me wherever I went. The mood on the ship felt like that of a watery purgatory. The crew was made up of thirty-one men; their teeth were yellowed from chain-smoking, their skin sallow, their hands torn and spongy from sharp gear and perpetual wetness. The scene recalled an observation of the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, who divided people into three categories: the living, the dead, and those at sea.
When squid latched on to a line, an automated reel flipped them onto a metal rack. Deckhands then tossed them into plastic baskets for sorting. The baskets often overflowed, and the floor filled shin-deep with squid. The squid became translucent in their final moments, sometimes hissing or coughing. (Their stink and stain are virtually impossible to wash from clothes. Sometimes crew members tie their dirty garments into a rope, up to twenty feet long, and drag it for hours in the water behind the ship.) Below deck, crew members weighed, sorted, and packed the squid for freezing. They prepared bait by carving squid up, separating the tongues from inside the beaks. In the galley, the cook noted that his ship had no fresh fruits or vegetables and asked whether we might be able to donate some from our ship.
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