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A glimpse into this week’s list:
- Forcibly displacing the Maasai tribe in the name of “conservation.”
- The death of an Alabama pastor—and the grief of the community he left behind.
- Studying Alaska’s little brown bats.
- A dispatch from a conference on artificial intelligence.
- Remembering Shaun of the Dead, 20 years later.
1. The Great Serengeti Land Grab
Stephanie McCrummen | The Atlantic | April 8, 2024 | 8,385 words
The pastoral, semi-nomadic Maasai have lived on their land in northern Tanzania since the 17th century. But under the guise of conservation and modernization, the Tanzanian government is resettling the tribe, destroying their compounds and seizing their cattle—in other words, erasing their traditional way of life. This makes way for ecotourism, carbon offsets, and supposed conservationist efforts that work toward the goal set by global leaders to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. But is the violent displacement of an Indigenous group, one that has sustained the Serengeti ecosystem and its lush grasslands over time, necessary for such environmental progress? Setting aside this land for “conservation” also means fueling a lucrative safari industry that still sells a romanticized version of Africa, catering to billionaire trophy hunters, and partnering with powerful foreign interests, including the Dubai royal family (for whom land has been annexed as a private hunting playground). This story is eye-opening and upsetting, and Stephanie McCrummen’s reporting is admirable: she balances big players, sweeping actions, and power moves with smaller details and quiet telling moments. But it’s the emotional narrative weaved within—of one Maasai man, Songoyo, who navigates terrain that was once his home—that is most effective here. You’ll likely come to this piece to understand the larger humanitarian crisis that has unfolded, but leave it stunned by McCrummen’s gorgeous writing, which centers the journey of one herder as he feels and watches his community and culture slip away. —CLR
2. Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy
Mark Warren | Esquire | April 3, 2024 | 11,242 words
I won’t mince words: this story hurts. It hurts because it holds a great deal of pain—the pain of Bubba Copeland, a Baptist pastor who took his own life when his personal secrets were exposed to the world, and the pain of the grieving community he left behind. It hurts because it lays bare the infuriating hypocrisy of the self-righteous trolls who made Copeland decide he could no longer go on. And it hurts because it is a searing reminder that right-wing pseudo-media threaten more than democracy: with their commitment to publicly humiliating the perceived enemies of conservative values, they also threaten individual lives. “The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure,” Mark Warren writes. Warren does heroic work in this feature to reclaim Copeland’s story from the jaws of 1819 News, whose coverage of Copeland I won’t deign to link to. He approaches his project with a respect so strong it is almost palpable. You can feel it in the way Warren writes about Copeland, his family, and his friends, especially in the description of the careful, compassionate process of approaching subjects wary of speaking to a journalist for obvious reasons. You can also feel it in the way Warren writes about faith, tolerance, mistakes, and forgiveness. If you let the hurt wash over you, there’s grace on the other side. —SD
3. Bats of the Midnight Sun
Trina Moyles | Hakai Magazine | March 12, 2024 | 3,100 words
One of the things I love about Hakai Magazine is how it uses awe and wonder to make nature and wildlife science accessible to lay readers. As the piece opens, Trina Moyles puts us on a viewing platform over a tumultuous river. Below, salmon catapult themselves upstream to return to their spawning ground as huge bears compete for fresh fish. “A 350-kilogram male submerges in the frothy pool of water beneath the falls, surfacing with a salmon 10 seconds later,” she writes. “He clutches the fish between his two front paws, as if praying, then skins it whole.” The scene is immediate and visceral, but this story is about another brown Alaskan mammal who spends its winter in torpor, albeit a much tinier one: the little brown bat, weighing in at 10 grams. Jesika Reimer is a chiropterologist who wants to better understand the interconnections between Alaskan bat colonies. You might wonder why she’s leading the world’s first gene-flow study to learn where bat colonies hibernate to help manage and protect their populations. Aren’t bats a rabies-carrying scourge? It turns out that they don’t deserve their bloodthirsty reputation. There are 1,400 documented species and counting, ranging from “massive fruits bats—the size of a small human child—to the tiny bumblebee bat, which weighs in at just two grams.” Each species fills “ecological niches, pollinating specific flowers, distributing fruit and tree seeds that help sustain and regenerate forests, and regulating insect populations.” This is just a small sample of their contribution to the planet, and yet we sit back while white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations across North America. If you think, though, that we don’t have much in common with bats, consider our hands and their wings. The human hand has 27 joints; a bat’s wing, 25. Reimer became interested in bats, who are often overlooked by conservationists, as a less-beaten scientific path. “I want to ask the questions that haven’t yet been asked,” she says. As a reader, I’m grateful for her curiosity and awe of these tiny flying bears. In the end I learned that when it comes to bats, it’s not about what they can do for you, but what you can—and should—do for them. —KS
4. An Age of Hyperabundance
Laura Preston | n+1 | April 10, 2024 | 8,200 words
Few subgenres are as dependable as the Writer Visits Industry Conference variant of subculture piece. Similarly, few topics offer more fertile ground for Wrestling With the Moment than artificial intelligence. Put those two things together, season them with insightful, wry writing, and you’ve got Laura Preston’s account of her visit to a conversational AI conference. The key here is that Preston was invited to the conference as the “honorary contrarian speaker,” based on a piece she’d written for n+1 about a real-estate chatbot. She sees the trap, but she also sees the paycheck, so she walks into it willingly. Her decision benefits us all; the conference’s emphasis on avatars provides an important preview on how the AI industry is turning chatbots into simulated humans, and Preston’s impeccable note-taking (and unfailing ear for good quotes) exposes the uncomfortable energy beneath each interaction. As much as the conference’s attendees pay lip service to avoiding ethical and cultural pitfalls, every single use case she encounters here sounds like an express train to dystopia. Medical-advice avatars who wear stethoscopes to coax disclosure but aren’t doctors. Customer-support avatars who convince people to euthanize pets. Senior-home avatars who are designed to palliate dementia patients in their darkest days. Services that promise to diagnose your mental and physical health based on a snippet of your voice. “What really frightened me,” Preston writes, “was the future of mediocrity they suggested: the inescapable screens, the app-facilitated antisocial behavior, the assumptions advanced as knowledge, and above all the collective delusion formulated in high offices and peddled to common people that all this made for an easier life.” With the news this week that Meta and OpenAI are seeking to create AI that can remember and reason, it’s tempting to look at the future and see eradication, just as Preston’s Lyft driver does. Thankfully, Preston suffuses the piece with a gallows humor that proves absolutely crucial. Laughing to keep from crying has never felt quite so necessary. —PR
5. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost Break Down the Making of Shaun of the Dead, 20 Years Later
Jack King | British GQ | April 9, 2024 | 2,522 words
It took a moment for me to forgive Jack King for making me feel very old with this interview. It’s been 20 years since Shaun of the Dead was released. Yes, 20 years since a motley group of Brits chose to ride out the zombie apocalypse at their local pub. (A plan I always admired.) A bastion of understated humor, the film is full of lines I can still quote today, and if I ever receive a zombie bite, I’ll aim to state, “I’m quite all right, Barbara, I ran it under a cold tap.” King honors the passage of two decades by bringing together the stars of the film, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, along with the director, Edgar Wright, to talk about the making of this first-ever zombie romantic comedy (rom-zom-com). There are fascinating insights into how the film got commissioned and went on to spawn two further spoofs, and I particularly enjoyed learning of the debate over which vinyl records to fling at zombie heads, and the real tears that were shed when Shaun’s mum—the aforementioned Barbara—became a zombie and died. Pegg and Frost are as baffled as I am by how much time has passed, remarking how bizarre it is that they are around the same age as actor Bill Nighy was when he made the film. (They describe Nighy as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” of the film shoot; imagine realizing you are now the same age as your Obi-Wan.) But the trio remembers the filming vividly, and warmly, with time not diminishing the dry sense of humor they share. While reading this, I felt like I had wandered into The Winchester for a pint and a chinwag with Shaun and Ed. I didn’t want to leave. —CW
Audience Award
Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever
Gary Shteyngart | The Atlantic | April 4, 2024 | 9,099 words
As Gary Shteyngart is quick to remind you, he’s far from the first writer to chronicle a cruise ship voyage. He may, however, be the first to do so while wearing a daddy’s little meatball T-shirt. And for more than 9,000 words, he adds a worthy entry to the participatory subgenre. It helps that he punches up (and in) more than down, though the result is the same: making you savor terra firma. —PR
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