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In this week’s edition (our 500th!):
• The cartels making millions off sand
• How change actually happens
• Considering the history and handwringing behind the hooded sweatshirt
• A woman who spent more than a year alone in a lightless cave
• Reclaiming a fruit that’s both a summer staple and a fraught symbol
1. Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand
David A. Taylor | Scientific American | February 1, 2024 | 3,485 words
My favorite subplot of Barry? The romantic relationship between Chechen mafioso NoHo Hank and Bolivian crime boss Cristobal. In season four, ostensibly in an attempt to move away from criminal life, they decide to import sand. When I watched the episode in which they hatch a plan, I’d thought it was an inspired comic bit; only once I read David A. Taylor’s story did I realize that sand mafias are very real. Sand is one of the main ingredients in concrete, and given that construction worldwide has been booming for decades, we could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. In this piece, Taylor writes about the devastating impact of sand mining and looting on ecosystems that are already fragile, and on vulnerable communities in places like Mozambique and Kenya (and how one woman in Kenya’s Makueni County successfully fought the sand cartel in Nairobi and introduced a regulated, sustainable approach). Stories of organized crime aside, it’s really the simple yet eye-opening details that make this piece, like the fact that China used more cement in just three years than the United States used in the entire 20th century. Or that half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined. Or that sand from rivers and lakebeds, not coastal areas, is ideal for building, and builders who skimp on better sand end up constructing buildings that are flat-out dangerous (just look at the destruction in Turkey and Syria from the February 2023 earthquake, one expert tells Taylor). A fascinating story on a global issue that more people should be talking about. —CLR
2. Slow Change Can Be Radical Change
Rebecca Solnit | Literary Hub | January 11, 2024 | 1,745 words
Whenever I plant seeds, I want immediate payoff. Notoriously impatient, I’ll check on them mere hours after planting to see if they’ve sprouted. Now? (No.) Now? (No.) How about now? With all things, I need evidence that my actions will take root and bear fruit. Rebecca Solnit’s recent piece at Lit Hub gave me some much-needed perspective on the slow pace of change, be it personal or political. Popular culture suggests that all-important turning points come after the impassioned speech or the meet cute, but in reality, true change is imperceptible and incremental, and progress is hard to pinpoint. In this piece, Solnit focuses on the years of advocacy and baby steps that, taken one after another, can lead to a shift in government policy that benefits the environment. What I appreciated most about this piece is Solnit’s gentle reminder that, for the most part, change happens when you’re not looking. For me, that not-looking is both a solution and a problem to be solved. At its best, not looking means keeping the faith that action will beget change; at its worst, it means avoiding the personal reflection necessary to achieve those tiny, cumulative changes that add up to real progress. “A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient,” she writes. According to Solnit, if you take it slow, over time you’ll find perspective. It just depends on how you look at it. —KS
3. Behind the Hood
Nicholas Russell | The Point | January 23, 2024 | 3,053 words
“At a glance,” Nicholas Russell writes, “there is no coherent history of the hood as a symbol for anything.” As we know all too well, that changed in our lifetimes—first with the arrival of hip-hop, and then irrevocably with Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012. But as Russell deftly unpacks in The Point, the hood’s unique position as a cultural signifier exposes far more than this country’s cancerous paranoia about young Black men. Even if this isn’t a piece he wanted to write, having cars swerve at you on two separate occasions while you’re running in a hoodie has a way of changing things. So Russell considers the garment from every angle imaginable. As a guarantor of boy-genius tech-world wizardry. A flashpoint of respectability politics. An easy shorthand for crime-show producers. And of course, in its pointed variant, as an icon of American hatred and bigotry. None of them, though, seem likely to eclipse its current mournful status. Russell is as resigned to that fact as he is resentful: “The hoodie is redolent with meaning no matter what I do, no matter what anyone does. Its legacy is a divorced one, operatic and ugly.” —PR
4. The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave
D.T. Max | The New Yorker | January 21, 2024 | 7,430 words
Spelunking (a delightful word—go on, say it out loud) means cave exploration, but Beatriz Falmini took it to a whole new level. After realizing she’d “never had a bad time in a cave,” as D.T. Max writes, Falmini decides to spend 500 days in one, neither seeing nor speaking to another human being. If you struggled during COVID-19 lockdowns, imagine nearly a year and a half alone . . . in the dark. In some intense reporting, Max pushes Flamini to dive deep into her experience. Even the logistics of organizing 500 days in a cave is more gripping than most thrillers; I have never found facts about food delivery and hygiene more fascinating. Moving on to Flamini outside the cave, Max realizes “she spoke about her happiness underground so adamantly, and repeatedly, that it was a little hard to believe.” The more time he spends with her, the more reality he uncovers: This experience was anything but a breeze. The darkness sapped life. The cave nearly broke her. It’s hard to fathom the psychology of spending so long underground, but Max does an excellent job of getting beneath Falmini’s bravado to do so. —CW
5. Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows
Jori Lewis | Switchyard | November 25, 2023 | 4,744 words
Watermelon has been in the zeitgeist lately. The humble fruit is an important emblem of Palestinian resistance, which means that, over the last three months, images of it have appeared at everything from street protests to Paris fashion week. In the context of US cultural history, however, watermelon carries different connotations—racist ones. Jori Lewis examines these crude and cruel associations in her essay for Switchyard, an exciting new magazine based at the University of Tulsa. She draws on her family’s experiences to show the complicated relationship many Black Americans have with watermelon, but her piece is about much more than the harm stereotypes can do. Lewis is interested in reclaiming meaning, and as is so often the case, that requires looking beyond US borders and deep into the past. This essay is beautifully rendered, taking readers from the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt, to a roadside fruit stand in Senegal, to the agricultural fields of China, in search of watermelon as both sustenance and symbol. “The watermelon is a generous fruit: the flesh of one can feed a dozen people and can parent hundreds of melons with its seeds,” Lewis writes. Cultures have associated it with fertility, solidarity, and luck. Watermelon can both cure hunger and quench thirst, and Lewis bookends her essay with scenes where she lets a juicy slice do the latter. By the time she gets to the second instance, watermelon feels to the reader like a thing transformed. “I felt an ever so slight twinge about me in this Black body in a white man’s field and all that has ever meant. But it was hot, and I was thirsty,” Lewis writes. “I took it with my fingers, and I ate.” —SD
Audience Award
What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?
A Death at Walmart
Jasper Craven | The New Republic | January 16, 2024 | 5,484 words
At age 38, Janikka Perry died of a heart attack at work, on her bakery shift at Walmart in North Little Rock, Arkansas, but you will not find her death recorded by OSHA as workplace-related. The New Republic‘s investigation has revealed that while Walmart touts an enlightened approach to time off, it expects associates to work while sick, or in Perry’s case, deathly ill. “The store was short-staffed, and her manager allegedly told her to ‘pull herself together.’” —KS
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