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In this week’s edition:
• A front-row seat to the US immigration crisis
• A thoughtful, warts-and-all profile of a civil rights icon
• A rare look inside a nuclear submarine
• A new way to cope with frightening change
• A conservative fever dream dressed up as summer school
1. A Family Ranch, Swallowed Up in the Madness of the Border
Eli Saslow | The New York Times | February 18, 2024 | 4,159 words
In December, Tucson’s Border Patrol saw nearly 20,000 migrants each week, marking a 300 percent surge from the previous year. Just south, near the US-Mexico border, lies Chilton Ranch: a sprawling expanse of 50,000 cattle-grazing acres in the Arizona desert owned by the same family for four generations and currently managed by Jim and Sue, a couple in their 80s. Five-and-a-half miles of their ranch run along the border wall. Here, footprints in the dirt reveal tales of survival and desperation. Accompanied by Erin Schaff’s emotive photography, Eli Maslow’s dispatch from this family ranch is masterfully reported, showing what its owners and cowboys encounter each day and night: Young children screaming for help, or arriving at their doorstep, their parents dead. Guides paid by the Sinaloa cartel, leading people through one of numerous gaps in the wall. Women who’ve been assaulted, mistaking their home for a Border Patrol station. A pregnant Sudanese woman, possibly in labor, exposed to the cold on a 36-degree night. Migrants, from all over the world, caught on camera footage traversing some of the 150 smuggling trails on the property. As many as 250 people a day wander onto their ranch from remote entry points—a microcosm of a nation facing an immigration crisis and humanitarian disaster—and the Chiltons are in the midst of it all. While Maslow paints a dismal bigger picture, the ordinary individuals in this story show compassion, even in the threat of their own safety and security. Many pieces on immigration feel abstract, impersonal; this is quite the opposite. —CLR
2. The Redemption of Al Sharpton
Mitchell S. Jackson | Esquire | February 21, 2024 | 9,471 words
Evolution never happens in a vacuum. At its grandest scale, it’s a response to a complex web of environmental and internal stimuli. At the humbler scale of a single human being over the course of their life, it’s . . . well, it’s pretty much the same. Take Al Sharpton. The child preacher turned activist that many of us first met in the ’80s—he of the tracksuits and the press conferences—seems far different than the Al Sharpton of today, an eminence grise of the civil rights movement. But how much of that is a change in the man himself, and how much is the context that has accumulated around him? Mitchell S. Jackson never comes out and asks that question directly, but his long, fascinating profile of Sharpton teases out an answer nonetheless. Over the course of a summer, Jackson spends untold hours with Sharpton, and unspools those hours in a recursive series of vignettes, each one taking the measure of the man in a new and surprising way. One of Jackson’s many writerly gifts is that he’s always present in a piece, but never overwhelms it; here that makes him crucial to the profile’s warts-and-all approach. Yes, he contends, the Tawana Brawley debacle remains a blemish. Yes, the Sharpton of long ago maybe had a kiss of hucksterism. Also, though: yes, Sharpton changed irrevocably at a certain point. And yes, the affectations that might have arched your eyebrow have stories behind them, and those stories might just change your mind the way they changed Jackson’s. Al Sharpton has given no shortage of time to reporters over the years, and this profile doubtless serves him the way they all have. But in taking stock of the man’s evolution, and how that has ultimately determined his larger impact, it might also be the truest, fullest profile of them all. —PR
3. Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine as the US Responds to Threats Around the Globe
Adam Ciralsky | Vanity Fair | February 15, 2024 | 6,598 words
I can’t even imagine the amount of paperwork necessary for Adam Ciralsky and photographer Philip Montgomery to spend time on the USS Wyoming, one of the nation’s 14 submarines carrying nuclear weapons. As Ciralsky writes, “The number of civilians who had been given this level of access was roughly the same as that who have walked on the moon.” Our intrinsic voyeurism means weapons of mass destruction hold a morbid fascination, and Ciralsky builds on this with descriptions that imply dark deeds and espionage—boarding the submarine on a stormy night amid high Atlantic seas. It all feels very Cold War. However, the people he then meets break character, coming across as pleasant, even humorous (and in some cases, very young). But a steely resolve is also apparent. Chilling lines in this piece emphasize the dark times we are in. Off the submarine, Ciralsky meets experts such as navy captain Dan Packer, who reminds him, “2027 is the year Xi Jinping said they need to be ready to go to war,” and General Anthony Cotton, the head of US Strategic Command, who alludes to other threats from Russia, North Korea, Iran, and armed groups like the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. These submarines are powerful chess pieces on this tense global stage. In position, ready to move. They are designed as a deterrent, but the chess masters are still poised to play: “If you ever wonder if people would be ready to employ these weapons, the answer is yes,” Ciralsky is told. Perhaps the reason a Vanity Fair reporter was allowed access to the Wyoming—and to literally sleep next to Trident missiles—is just another move in the game. —CW
4. What Happens When We Stop Remembering?
Heidi Lasher | Orion Magazine | February 13, 2024 | 3,346 words
My favorite uncle was diagnosed with dementia three years ago. His decline has been rapid: he went from someone who joked nonstop to being nearly incapable of speech. When I see him, I witness his ever-narrowing new normal. I remember the man who lived with us at various points in my life, the swimming outings, the movies we watched together, how he made me soup after his overnight shift when I left school sick. In this thoughtful essay at Orion, Heidi Lasher considers the concept of shifting baselines in relation to her father’s dementia. “Shifting baselines is the idea that each successive generation will accept as ‘normal’ an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a healthy ecology looks and feels like,” she writes. In mulling our mutable climate, raising kids, and her parents’ declining health, she urges us to be present and to remember in the face of chaotic and frightening transition: “Social researcher Phoebe Hamilton Jones says the antidote to shifting baselines is found in our ability to pay attention and to call forth what once was.” We are not powerless in the face of change, Lasher reminds us. You can mourn what you had or cherish it—the choice is yours. —KS
5. An American Education: Notes from UATX
Noah Rawlings | The New Inquiry | February 19, 2024 | 6,839 words
If you’re not addicted to media discourse, I envy you. I also realize you might need some background before diving into this pick, so here goes: a couple of years ago, a collection of reactionary academics and journalists, hysterical about the purported “wokeness” of US higher education, decided to start their own university. It’s called the University of Austin, but it’s actually in Dallas, in an office complex owned by Harlan Crow, billionaire BFF and patron of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. UATX’s figurehead is ex-New York Times staffer Bari Weiss, who also runs The Free Press (“For Free People”), an online outlet that spends an inordinate amount of time clutching pearls about gender-affirming care for trans children. Many of UATX’s faculty and fellows have expressed support for Israel’s continuing bombardment of Gaza; at least one has couched the genocide as a matter of good versus evil. So. In this essay, which is as hilarious as it is rage-inducing, Noah Rawlings describes attending UATX’s “Forbidden Courses” summer program, which it launched in advance of actually enrolling students. Better Rawlings than I, because I would have lost my damn mind. Not when founding faculty member Peter Boghossian, who once accused his former employer, Portland State University, of being a “Social Justice factory” (quelle horreur) said he’s so good at jiu-jitsu that he could murder everyone on a bus carrying participants to the program’s commencement dinner. Not when Joe Lonsdale, who helped found Palantir, told students that the rise of AI would let humans do “more natural things” with their lives. Not when Weiss, when asked by a student why there aren’t any left-of-center faculty at a school that supposedly prides itself on illuminating truth through dialogue, suggested the left is just less interested in debate. No, I think I would have lost it when someone (Rawlings doesn’t say who) uttered the following: “If Simone de Beauvoir were alive right now, she would be very popular, like Jordan Peterson.” —SD
Audience Award
What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?
The Burgeoning Science of Search and Rescue
Sarah Scoles | Undark | January 22, 2024 | 3,875 words
Ever lost your way in the wilderness? In 2021, nearly 3,400 people got lost in a US national park. In the 2000s, a researcher named Robert Koester gathered and analyzed data on the behaviors of different types of people, from children to experienced hikers, who’ve wandered and gotten lost in the wild. In what direction do they go? How do geographic features and different terrains influence their movements? In this piece for Undark, Sarah Scoles reports on the growing science of “lost person behavior,” which in turn can inform the strategies of search-and-rescue missions. —CLR
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