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In this week’s list:
• Keeping the internet alive via 800,000 miles of undersea cables
• What an auto trade show says about America
• Art framing as a lens into what we hold dear
• The (kinda) doomed voyage of the Snowdrop
• Life as an artist—the maddening, unvarnished version
1. The Cloud Under the Sea
Josh Dzieza | The Verge | April 16, 2024 | 8,856 words
I wouldn’t call myself a hardware geek, but lately I’ve been fascinated by stories that help me understand and appreciate the infrastructure that is essential for modern society to function. Hardware that physically sits somewhere on this Earth, hidden away and inert and seemingly lifeless, like the servers in a data center on the outskirts of Dublin that store Ireland’s memories. Or the expansive networks of underwater cable, traversing 800,000 miles along the ocean floor, that run the internet. This immersive feature by Josh Dzieza, packaged with art by Kristen Radtke and photography by Go Takayama, dives deeper into the latter, weaving a riveting account of a crew aboard the Ocean Link, one of 22 cable maintenance ships stationed around the world, that raced to repair a broken cable after the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in March 2011. The engineers on this aging ship are just a handful of the thousand or so people in this highly specialized industry, doing precise and physically demanding tasks that keep the internet (and every corporate, banking, and government entity) up and running every day. These workers spend most of their time at sea, away from home, and face precarious situations, performing invisible and underappreciated labor; given the current transoceanic cable boom, the demand for their skills will only continue to grow. But it’s the adventure, sense of purpose, and incredible scale of this work that keeps them in the field. Dzieza does a fantastic job showing how indispensable they are—yet you probably didn’t even know they existed. —CLR
2. Auto Show Dispatch
Mark Krotov | n+1 | April 16, 2024 | 4,423 words
Oddly, this is the second consecutive week I’ve recommended an n+1 story that takes place at a professional gathering. I’d usually avoid such egregious repetition, but you’re gonna have to take it up with n+1 for publishing work directly in the center of my personal Venn diagram. Mark Krotov’s dispatch from the New York International Auto Show (a premise you may have already gathered from the headline) is hilariously venomous, deeply knowledgeable, and unexpectedly mournful. In short, it’s the ideal version of this sort of feature. Krotov has been writing about cars for more than 30 years, and he’s seen the trend cycles up close, for better or worse. Now, though, he seems to be at his wits’ end—if not about each individual automobile, then about where the industry seems to be heading. After all, while he’s a driver like most of us, he’s also a human being like all of us: “Whenever a child walking along a four-lane exurban road is killed by a driver who swerves into the shoulder, whenever someone is simply able to drive 98 miles per hour in a 55 zone, whenever a family of seven in an ostensibly safe minivan is killed despite the self-evident technological ability to limit speeds, redesign roads, and enforce existing regulations, it seems reasonable to infer that what car culture is really about aren’t sexy concept cars or futuristic taillights. What car culture is really about is death.” You don’t read many pieces that open with a joke but darken steadily from there; that Krotov’s does without overwhelming you is a marvel in itself. —PR
3. Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife
Wendy Brenner | Oxford American | March 19, 2024 | 4,448 words
I am endlessly curious about and fascinated by others’ jobs. For Oxford American, Wendy Brenner writes about being an art framer, a role that might strike you as monotonous and boring. In reality, it is anything but. To frame something is to preserve it, to hold a small ceremony, if you will. And what do we choose to frame? Art both commercial and personal, our accomplishments, our treasures, our memories—things that offer insight into who we are and what we value as human beings. “Months into my new art-framing job, the stacks awaiting me on the worktable each day still feel like a miracle, a surprise party just for me,” she writes. “The art feels like a tornado whooshing through me. I feel euphoric and empty, cleaned out. Words and thoughts blasted away. My eyes scoured clean.” Brenner juxtaposes her work preserving what’s beautiful and precious for clients against her mother’s aging and decline, a period during which old grudges fade and their relationship softens. I love how Brenner describes her work; it’s tactile, all-consuming, and satisfying. The small injuries she sustains on the job are scars earned, rather than the ones families can inflict on one another. The shop itself is a fully realized character in this piece, complete with a quirky boss, walls festooned with art, and a satisfyingly analog way of doing business that itself has been deliberately preserved. Brenner’s essay is an evocative portrait of art framing as a fulfilling job, as well as a stark reminder that because humans are frail and temporary, our relationships are worth reframing. —KS
4. The Snowdrop: Lost in the Arctic
Paul Brown | Singular Discoveries | April 11, 2024 | 5,012 words
I am always fascinated by daring journeys, and it doesn’t get much more daring than a small whaling boat’s 1908 trip from Scotland to the Arctic. Paul Brown recounts the Snowdrop’s voyage vividly, leaning on the written and verbal records from her crew, most of whom would not return to Scotland for 18 months—after their little ship hits an iceberg and sinks. (The captain bemoans upon his return that he left his spectacles behind.) The main character is 21-year-old Alex Ritchie, brought to life from an oral account transcribed by a family member, who offhandedly relates that upon leaving the quay in Dundee, “The weather was good, but all our crew was drunk—from the captain to the cook.” Presumably sobering up at some point, the Scots went on to capture a rather distressing number of walruses and seals before the sinking of the Snowdrop stranded them, along with several Inuit families they had taken aboard for help, on a frozen peninsula in the Arctic Archipelago. The sailors relied on the Inuit for survival, and although it was Ritchie who went for help, he would not have made it had it not been for his Inuit companions. I appreciated Brown’s efforts to highlight the cohesion between the two groups, along with his tidbits on Inuit survival methods: frostbite treatment was knocking a patient out with a sandbag to the head before attacking “the frost-bitten limb with an ice saw.” (I took a brief moment to reflect on Prince Harry’s frostnip.) So pick up your rum, clutch your extremities, and enjoy this rip-roaring adventure story. —CW
5. It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now
Andrew Norman Wilson | The Baffler | April 4, 2024 | 5,166 words
In this episodic essay, Andrew Norman Wilson, a visual artist who works primarily in video, takes readers on a ride through several years of his career. If you think that sounds niche or dull, I assure you it is not. This is at once one of the funniest and most distressing stories I’ve read in months—I laughed, I cringed, it became a part of me. Year by year, exhibition by exhibition, housesit by housesit, Wilson shows how the art world left him dirt poor despite his ever-growing CV, took a toll on his mental and physical health, and killed his idealism. He anchors this journey in 2016, illustrating how, in the wake of Trump’s election, art-world gatekeepers eager to burnish their social justice bona fides have disingenuously circumscribed the industry definition of what art matters, and why. “It becomes trendy to believe that images within contemporary art contexts can directly achieve the goals of political struggle,” Wilson writes. “The proliferation of bad faith gestures toward political change and the aestheticized consumption of other people’s suffering sickens me, especially when these expressions still play into the financial objectives of oil barons, arms dealers, and other vampires.” That’s a distressing bit. A funny one involves Wilson putting images of Barney (the dinosaur) on the walls of a place where he’s staying when Barney’s (the department store) comes to shoot photos of him for some reason. Another comes during a snorkeling trip, when Wilson is surrounded by sea lions: “I’ve found what I was looking for on this island. Something that feels like the opposite of scrutinizing a nondescript object in a white room and then having to read a citation-heavy press release to find out that the object is the product of prison labor, and prison labor is bad.” This essay could read as the bitter whining of a person with a bone to pick, but it doesn’t. It’s too self-aware for that. Instead, it reads as a searing and darkly entertaining indictment of late-stage capitalism’s poisonous influence on art. —SD
Audience Award
What piece captured our readers’ curiosity this week? The envelope, please:
In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson
Andrea Dworkin | Free Press | 1997 | 3,494 words
O.J. Simpson died this week. In light of this news, here’s radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin’s brilliant essay about Nicole Brown Simpson, the abuse she suffered at the hands of O.J., and how the help she needed never came. Dworkin, herself a survivor of domestic violence, originally published pieces of this essay in the Los Angeles Times; she then compiled and revised that writing for her 1997 book, Life and Death. The essay has since been republished by Evergreen Review. —SD
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