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A suspicious death in London, England. How AI could unlock the secrets on ancient scrolls. The struggle to convey a massive glacier’s beauty. How plants experience time. And the hot mess behind the sriracha shortage.
1. A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld
Patrick Radden Keefe | The New Yorker | February 5, 2024 | 14,311 words
I didn’t read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing when it first came out. Not because I wasn’t interested—rather, I knew that I was going to like it so much, that it was going to be so annoyingly good, that I needed to crack it open when I had time to get lost in its pages. It was one of those leave-me-alone-I’m-reading books. In the case of PRK’s latest feature for The New Yorker, I waited two days to dig in: I finished a long, complicated edit, a bunch of admin work, and household chores, then found myself with a solid stretch of an hour to just read. The story is about Zac Brettler, a young man in London who posed as the son of a Russian oligarch and wound up dead in the Thames after jumping from the balcony of an apartment owned by a gangster; his death appeared to be suicide, but it might have been something else, and we’ll never know for sure because the gangster, who was the last person to see Brettler alive, is now dead too. As I suspected, I had to read the piece in one gulp. Every inch of it is fascinating: the twists and turns of Brettler’s story, the portrait of London as a playground for conmen and fabulists, the revelations that stunned Brettler’s family after he was gone. Needless to say, when you can, clear your own plate and get to reading. —SD
2. Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World?
Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 5, 2024 | 3,688 words
The Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls, were buried by the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. To date, about 800 scrolls have been found from excavations at the site, but historians think there may be thousands more, which could shine more light on the world of classical texts and thought. Attempts to unroll them over the centuries, however, have been unsuccessful—in some cases, these fragile scrolls have literally crumbled into pieces. This entertaining story by Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet has all the elements of a modern-day Indiana Jones adventure, minus the villains: Precious artifacts buried beneath layers of volcanic ash in a villa thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. A Silicon Valley executive-turned-Roman history buff who holds a competition in which promising young programmers around the world race to uncover the secrets on pieces of papyrus that were last unrolled 1,900 years ago. A team’s breakthrough discovery of hidden ink, which opened the door to deciphering Greek letters on the scrolls using AI. It’s a delightful read that blends history, the classics, technology, and machine learning. —CLR
3. Glacial Longings
Elizabeth Rush | Emergence Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 4,468 words
In this excerpt adapted from her book The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush recounts an expedition to the Thwaites Glacier, a massive sheet of ice in Antarctica, one whose “calving edge stretches over a hundred miles.” What I love about this piece is that you get a deep sense of the thinking and struggle that went into writing about familiar geography so many have never experienced in person. I revelled in Rush’s attempts to get it right. And at first, the glacier defies her. “The words I conjure—cirque, serac, cleft, torque, ski slope, rampart—all slide off the surface of the ice, plopping one after the other into the bay right in front of Thwaites,” she writes. “I try out different words for white—plaster of Paris, opalescent, pearl—and blue—cobalt, cadmium, torqued turquoise—but none get at the way these colors come together to form a symphony of sorts, a polyphony of light and play, impossible to translate.” This piece is far more than a litany of discarded descriptors. It’s a fascinating account of coming face-to-face with a glacier and trying to comprehend its vast majesty; about grappling with how to convey that singular experience with precision. And in the end, reader? Rush ices it. —KS
4. A Clock in the Forest
Jonathon Keats | Noēma | Feburary 8, 2024 | 3,226 words
Count me among the people who didn’t know that plants experience time in variable ways. We may age trees by their rings, but their growth—and thus those ever-accreting concentric circles—ebbs and flows in response to the world around them. Trees have helped researchers mark climate change over centuries, even tying it to history-changing droughts. That’s why, as Jonathon Keats explains in this enlightening essay, a 12-foot-tall “arboreal clock” will be among the timekeeping devices included in a project he has been shepherding. There will be others, like a fluvial clock marking time the way a river system might. Taken together, they will underscore a crucial point: time is larger than humans, and by experiencing it as other beings do can help us reconnect to the larger natural world. “Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves,” he writes. “We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way.” I’ve recommended stories about time and measure before. None of them gave me pause the way this one does—a pause that, I now know, ripples well beyond any one organism. —PR
5. What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage?
Indrani Sen | Fortune | January 30, 2024 | 3,994 words
I started reading this essay in a cafe, with a bottle of sriracha sitting on the table across from me. Staring at the iconic bottle—the bold rooster motif, the cheerful bright green cap—I tried to remember when I first heard the rumors of the “Great Sriracha Shortage.” I believe the mutterings started at a dinner party, whispered tales of bottles selling for $80. Getting home, I opened my cupboard to check my stash—relieved to see two full bottles snugly in place. I would make it. Secure in my immediate supply, the sriracha dilemma fell from my mind, until I came upon this essay and realized I had no idea what actually caused the shortage. I was ready for Indrani Sen to dish the dirt. She begins by artfully filling us in on the history of the sauce, its unexpected rise to fame (it’s never even run a marketing campaign), and the deal between two companies that secured its future with a quality supply of chilies. But this deal—between Underwood Ranches (the chili farmer) and Huy Fong Foods (the sauce maker)—ultimately led to the problem. An argument about money caused a fiery end to the 28-year relationship, costing both companies millions. As Sen writes, the two “soft-spoken patriarchs” remain at odds, even though it leaves: “One man with thousands of acres of pepper fields, but nobody to buy his peppers. Another with a massive pepper factory, and not enough peppers to keep it running.” A Shakespearean-level feud. This hot mess makes for a fascinating read, and hold onto your bottles: it’s still a rocky road. —CW
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Why You’ve Never Been in a Plane Crash
Kyra Dempsey | Asterisk | January 22, 2024 | 3,422 words
The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. Kyra Dempsey, aka Admiral Cloudberg, explains the governing norms of post-accident investigations. —SD
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