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In this week’s edition:
- A remorseful juror decides to take a stand—more than 30 years later.
- A Palestinian writer considers what it means to bear witness to unrelenting atrocity.
- A look at the uncertain future of a once-captive beluga whale in Norway.
- A dive into weightlifting culture and the destigmatization of steroids.
- A coming-of-age tour of the early internet, before we were all Extremely Online.
1. The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty
Michael Hall | Texas Monthly | January 16, 2024 | 9,962 words
In this riveting braided feature for Texas Monthly, Michael Hall unravels how it all went wrong for Carlos Jaile. In the ’80s, Jaile had been living the American dream in Texas as a successful Kirby vacuum salesman who embraced the sales motto “persistence over resistance.” Suddenly, one day, the police showed up at his office to take him away, allegedly for raping a young girl. Estella Ybarra sat on Jaile’s jury. She’d voted him guilty, but felt pressured into the decision by two fellow jurors—pushy white men who could not be talked down. Hall gives you all of this up front: we’ve got a miscarriage of justice, a remorseful juror, and a man incarcerated for decades for a crime he did not commit. We think we know what happened, but we don’t know precisely how it happened. Hall’s brilliant pacing spurs your need to understand how egregious detective work, grievous police errors, and two loudmouth jurors put Jaile away for life plus 20 years; his exceptional storytelling rewards you for tracking Estella Ybarra as she confronts her conscience to embrace “persistence over resistance” to free an innocent man. “Everyone involved in Carlos’s case found a reason to look the other way,” writes Hall. “Everyone, that is, except for one woman determined to do the right thing.” A wrongful conviction overturned is always a bittersweet read. And while the most beautiful thing is that Carlos Jaile does go free, it’s Hall’s deep craft that does justice to his story and to an emotional and poignant conclusion you will not forget. —KS
2. The Work of the Witness
Sarah Aziza | Jewish Currents | January 12, 2024 | 2,587 words
It has been three months since Israel began a relentless campaign of violence in Gaza. Israeli forces have killed nearly 25,000 people, some 9,600 of whom were children. They have displaced roughly 85 percent of the remaining population and pushed survivors to the brink of famine. Day after day, the world has watched the devastation. We have seen bodies crushed by rubble, mothers weeping over dead babies, doctors tending to the injured in hospitals plunged into darkness by power cuts. What’s happening is unconscionable, unforgivable, and there is no end in sight. In a tremendous essay, Palestinian writer Sarah Aziza considers what it means to bear witness to a “livestreamed genocide,” to sit with our own horror and helplessness. “I have been pondering not the English, prosecutorial witness, but the Arabic,” Aziza writes. “In this, our, language, the verb to witness comes from the root شهد . This is also the source of the much-maligned word شهيد, shaheed, which means, literally, witnesser, but is often translated as martyr. . . . To be a witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.” In this sense, to witness atrocity is to be wounded by it. “We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut,” Aziza continues. “This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.” —SD
3. The Whale Who Went AWOL
Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | January 14, 2024 | 6,434 words
When Hvaldimir the beluga whale first appeared in northern Norway, he was wearing a harness, apparently a leftover from his time in the Russian Navy. (Satellite photos of Russian naval bases around Murmansk—near the spot Hvaldimir turned up—show sea pens he may have escaped from.) That’s right, whales are captured and trained for use in the military. I knew we had been keeping cetaceans in tanks for entertainment since the 1860s, but I did not know we forced them into military service. A quote from this excellent piece by Ferris Jabr hit me hard: “Whales and dolphins are basically the last animals on Earth that have to perform seven days a week until they die while living in a completely barren box without even a rock to hide behind.” Hvaldimir is just one whale, but his story echoes those of thousands. Can a once-captive whale survive in the wild? Or, as Jabr writes, can a “severely traumatized victim of abduction reintegrate with society?” A tangle of humans are now involved with Hvaldimir’s welfare, a mess of ambition, ignorance, noble intentions, and bickering. Jabr’s writing is understated yet searing: we don’t really know what to do with captive whales. From the first line, this essay gripped me, but by the end, I felt like I did after watching the 2013 documentary Black Fish: deflated. If only we hadn’t taken them in the first place. —CW
4. Steroid to Heaven
Adrian Nathan West | The Baffler | January 12, 2024 | 3,856 words
There’s joy in finding a story that engages with one of your core interests, and even more when that interest is generally ignored or disdained by the “literary” world. So it was almost a shock this week when two different pieces took on the world of physical culture and weightlifting. (The last time I came across one of those was nearly two years ago.) While I enjoyed Jordan Castro’s Harper’s piece, Adrian Nathan West’s Baffler story is a truly rare bird: an argument you don’t agree with, yet thoroughly enjoy. (If you happen to enjoy deadlifts, that’s a bonus, but I promise it’s not a prerequisite.) West, a longtime resident of the weight room and the jiujitsu dojo but also “a discreet man with modest bodily goals,” does his level best to destigmatize steroids, even yearn for them. But he does so smartly, both by picking apart the double standard of their demonization and by being honest about his own desires—all while casting a gimlet eye on the swollen idiocy of roided-out fitness influencers. “As Adorno noted in his writings on astrology,” he writes in one of many stunning passages, “individuals’ awareness of their dependence on knowledge systems that exceed their grasp is closely associated with authoritarian conformity; for the same reason, young steroid users, faced with the complexities of organic chemistry, are likely to turn away from the hundreds of studies on PubMed and seek out some loudmouth with nineteen-inch arms who tells them what they want to hear.” In fact, it’s probably not fair to call this an essay about lifting weights; it’s something else entirely. It’s a piece about danger and hysteria and self-delusion. About what happens when the fantasy of physical transformation becomes a little less fantastic. About making the illicit pedestrian. In other words: weird flex . . . but OK. —PR
5. Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet
Kyle Chayka | The New Yorker | January 13, 2024 | 3,986 words
In this excerpt from his new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Kyle Chayka recalls an early internet that allowed “creative possibility” and “self-definition”—a web that many of us miss. When he tells us his AOL Instant Messenger username, “Silk,” I immediately recall my first AOL screen name, “RsrvoirGrl.” (Yes, in high school I was obsessed with Quentin Tarantino films.) When he describes posting to LiveJournal, where his writing “became a kind of public performance,” I remember my own musings on Diaryland, another early publishing platform. Those diary entries make me cringe when I read them now, but they’re also so unfiltered and passionate; I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t written with such energy since. His later experiences are just as fun to read, and remind me of a few milestones in that evolving space: the way my MySpace profile suddenly fused my online “shadow” self to my physical IRL identity; the first virtual encounter with my future spouse (I’ll never forget the first tweets my husband and I exchanged); the way Instagram initially inspired the photographer in me, and then slowly sucked all of my creativity. As with a number of pieces I’ve read recently about the broken state of the web, this essay doesn’t really say anything about the internet we don’t already know—or already feel in our bodies, minds, and attention spans. But I always enjoy Chayka’s writing, and his thoughts here on what it was like to be online when “being online wasn’t yet a default state of existence” are relatable and served up with just the right amount of nostalgia. —CLR
Audience Award
Our most-read editor’s pick this week:
Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue
KC Hoard | The Walrus | January 16, 2024 | 2,041 words
Joni Mitchell’s sixth album, Court and Spark, just turned 50. For The Walrus, KC Hoard shares their deep affinity for Mitchell’s music and its place in their life. For Hoard, Court and Spark marked Mitchell’s musical reinvention, where she distanced herself from her coffeehouse chanteuse image and the accessible, less complicated arrangements of her earlier work. —KS
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