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In this week’s edition:
- A starting point for understanding the genocide happening in Gaza today.
- What’s next for the abandoned bus where Chris McCandless spent his final days.
- A nuanced portrait of a ramen chef in Chicago.
- Reflections on memory and Ireland in the age of digitization.
- The past and future of the tiny text file that has kept the internet in order—until now.
1. The Road to 1948
Moderated by Emily Bazelon | The New York Times Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 9,019 words
I was visiting my parents this week, helping them pack up the home where they’ve lived for almost 39 years, and one evening, our conversation turned to Gaza. While we didn’t see eye to eye on everything, we agreed that one of the most important steps that we as outside witnesses to this tragedy can take is to direct our attention beyond the headlines, statistics, and slogans. We must look at the roots of the conflict, but not as they’ve been sanitized and presented to Western audiences for far too long—we must look at the roots as they actually are, ugly and gnarly. A perfect starting point is this discussion, moderated by Emily Bazelon, which examines the period between 1920, when the British mandate for Palestine was established, and 1948, when Palestinians were forced from their homes to make way for the state of Israel. I read the piece after the conversation with my parents and was particularly moved by Nadim Bawalsa’s description of his family’s experience of the Nakba. “Since December 1947, no one in my family has entered our home in Jerusalem,” Bawalsa writes. “My grandparents were able to briefly return to Palestine with their children to live with my grandmother’s family in Ramallah during the period of Jordanian rule until 1967, but they were not allowed to go to the west side of Jerusalem. Following 1967, we’ve only been able to go back as U.S. citizens—tourists.” Now, as I tape up boxes full of cherished objects, I can’t stop thinking: my parents will miss their home, but at least they are choosing to leave it. —SD
2. The ‘Into the Wild’ Bus Was a Pilgrimage Site in the Wilderness. Can It Hold Up in a Museum?
Eva Holland | Outside | February 7, 2024 | 5,325 words
Having read Into the Wild, I was already familiar with the story of Chris McCandless (or Jon Krakauer’s version, at least). The naive explorer left his home in the northern Virginia suburbs and traveled across the continent, eventually ending up in an abandoned bus in Alaska, where he starved to death at age 24. Although gripped by the adventure story, I didn’t fully understand what drove McCandless to leave society and cut contact with his family. Eva Holland felt the same way, and her reporting takes pains to explain the abusive home life he left behind, as told by his sister, Carine McCandless, in her 2014 book The Wild Truth. The missing pieces finally fell into place. But this essay isn’t really about McCandless. It is about the bus. McCandless may have been its most famous resident, but it has been a part of many people’s stories—and that of Alaska itself. Holland weaves the layered history of Bus 142 right up to its new chapter: its removal from the wilderness of the Stampede Trail to its new home at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. By taking the time to piece together the broader picture, Holland nods to the thousands of people to whom the bus means something, herself included. (She recounts her own visit to the bus with beautiful reverence.) The museum exhibit is not yet open, but some 700 photos of the bus graffiti have already been compiled into an album online, and visitors are encouraged to claim their tag and tell the story of their visit to the Stampede Trail. In its new life at the museum, I hope Bus 142 will not only tell these stories, but be a part of many more.—CW
3. The Ramen Lord
Kevin Pang | Chicago Magazine | February 13, 2024 | 6,458 words
A writing teacher once told me that great profiles make personal obsessions public. Hot on the heels of “A Knife Forged in Fire” by Laurence Gonzales, Chicago Magazine has done it again with Kevin Pang’s nuanced portrait of ramen chef Mike Satinover. Both pieces feature people deeply obsessed with their craft, and as a reader you get to ride the wave of devotion, savoring every detail along the way. In this case, those details include delicious globules of fat floating atop ramen made with precision and care. Pang seasons his writing with the same deep respect that Satinover puts into his ramen—a dish he fell in love with after choosing to study Japanese in high school. He’s been trying to make the perfect bowl of noodles ever since, earning the handle “Ramen Lord” for his careful study and open-source approach, publishing recipes under development with rigorous notes for anyone to attempt at home. In addition to serving a savor-y profile of Satinover’s noodle bona fides, Pang doesn’t shrink from critics who claim cultural appropriation, given that Satinover is a white American making a traditional Japanese dish; he discovers that the criticism comes “largely from white people on social media,” and that “when gaijin come to Japan and attempt their culture’s cooking, the locals view it not as appropriation but as appreciation of their cuisine.” Pang’s piece is so rich and delightfully nerdy, I could not help but slurp it up. —KS
4. Memory Machines
Jessica Traynor | The Dial | February 6, 2024 | 3,423 words
Last night, I finished Person of Interest, the police procedural/sci-fi show that ended in 2016, which feels like ages ago, but the show’s premise—a society surveilled 24/7 by an artificial intelligence—is incredibly timely. There are numerous scenes in the series that require a rogue team of hackers and ex-military operatives to break into a warehouse or secret office floor to alter or destroy servers and computer equipment. I kept thinking about these physical facilities that hum along around the world while reading this essay, in which Jessica Traynor recounts a family trip to a data center just outside of Dublin. Data centers have proliferated in industrial business parks across Ireland: 82 in total, with another 40 planned to be built. These centers store much of Europe’s digital information, but at a cost, increasing Ireland’s energy footprint and straining its power grid. Traynor’s musings on the “fragility of social and national memory,” however, resonate with me the most. Is digital preservation, and the cloud to which we upload important and precious information, really the most effective way to store knowledge? I realize my current entertainment binge depicts extreme scenarios, but it still shows that these data centers are anything but indestructible. Here, Traynor points to an unsustainable energy path, Ireland’s long and “patchy” memory, and the “fantasy of technological stability” to argue that the digitization of its records is not as secure as we think. I love stumbling on pieces like this—a thoughtful read on an unexpected topic. —CLR
5. The Text File That Runs the Internet
David Pierce | The Verge | February 14, 2024 | 2,992 words
I read stories this week that elicited an acute emotional response, and I read stories this week that dazzled with prose. But nothing I read this week felt more urgent or important than David Pierce’s explication of robots.txt, that snippet of code on every webpage that allows (or doesn’t allow) search engines to catalog its content. See, robots.txt has effectively functioned on the honor system: search companies agreed not to send their automated web crawlers into sites that expressly disallowed them, and everyone was more or less happy. Thirty years later, though, there’s a new breed of web crawler in town. These new bots swarm websites not to catalog content but to feed that content to AI, a technology that threatens to replace search as the default means of online discovery (and does so by digesting and regurgitating the content in a monstrous, unciteable form). Even worse, AI crawlers don’t necessarily respect robots.txt—and there’s nothing legally compelling them to do so. Pierce frames the conundrum perfectly: “As the AI companies continue to multiply, and their crawlers grow more unscrupulous, anyone wanting to sit out or wait out the AI takeover has to take on an endless game of whac-a-mole. They have to stop each robot and crawler individually, if that’s even possible, while also reckoning with the side effects. If AI is in fact the future of search, as Google and others have predicted, blocking AI crawlers could be a short-term win but a long-term disaster.” For three decades, websites large and small have depended on search to help build their readership; now they’re caught in a philosophical quagmire. Trust the robots, or sink into oblivion? —PR
Audience Award
Which story was the most-read editor’s pick this week?
His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him.
Peter Holley | Texas Monthly | February 7, 2024 | 3,620 words
Yes, the headline is undeniable. Yes, the story delivers on its promise. Yes, Peter Holley’s story about Austin Riley’s harrowing ordeal will stay with you. A chilling reminder that animals gonna animal, no matter how tight the bond. —PR
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