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In this week’s edition:
- The up-and-coming sport of competitive Excel
- The opioid epidemic at sea
- Running away from a polygamous cult
- The art of worm grunting
- The complexities of using parents as content
1. Spreadsheet Superstars
David Pierce | The Verge | June 12, 2024 | 7,191 words
Even before I read this feature about the Excel World Championship, I had been charmed by its design. The visuals are chef’s-kiss perfect: paragraphs rendered as spreadsheet cells; an old-school palette of green text on a black background; bitmap-style illustrations that chunk together as you scroll them into view. Even the footer and credits tab feel considered, consistent, and—most importantly—not so assertive that they overwhelm the reading experience. (Achieving a balance between spectacle and legibility is all too rare in the post-“Snow Fall” era.) Thankfully, the piece’s creative director, Kristen Radtke, shares byline billing with author David Pierce. But don’t ignore Pierce’s role in a fantastic story. This is a scene piece of sorts, in which he heads to Las Vegas for his completely unrealistic shot at the big prize, but it’s also a surprisingly lyrical meditation on what makes a program like Excel both powerful and poetic. “In a spreadsheet world,” Pierce writes, “everything is comparable, reducible to some base figure that eventually explains everything if only you know how to ask. Spreadsheets promise the world isn’t actually complicated — you just have to know the formulas. I don’t know if that’s beautiful or bleak or both, but it’s certainly big business.” What’s so lovely about the project as a whole is that the story and art work in perfect concert. Neither takes itself too seriously, yet both execute at the highest level of their form. I smiled as soon as I opened the tab, and I didn’t stop until I finished the last word. An easy formula to hope for, but a hard one to accomplish. —PR
2. The Mayday Call: How One Death at Sea Transformed a Fishing Fleet
C.J. Chivers | The New York Times Magazine | June 6, 2024 | 7,449 words
Some of the finest journalism of the last several years has been about the opioid crisis: the people who created it, the ravages it has inflicted, the inequities it has deepened. C.J. Chivers’s masterful feature is a new kind of entry into the canon, one that bridges widely known consequences with increasingly available solutions. Chivers focuses his attention on the fishing industry, populated by contractors who pride themselves on their grit and independence. Substance abuse is rampant in this grueling line of work; virtually everyone in Chivers’s story—whether workers, their families, or their friends—have been touched in some way by addiction. In 2021, one fisherman, just 72 hours into his career, fatally overdosed at sea, and his death prompted a family-owned fleet to consider keeping Narcan on its vessels. Why not make the nasal spray that can reverse an overdose as ubiquitous as, say, fire extinguishers? Chivers chronicles a handful of people’s efforts to save lives and transform an industry, the travails of which he depicts with gorgeous prose. “Hands worked fast, flicking adductors into buckets and guts down chutes that plopped them onto greenish water beside the hull. Large sharks swam lazy circles alongside, turning to flash pale undersides while inhaling easy meals,” Chivers writes of 11-hour shifts worked on a scalloper. “When enough buckets were full of meat and rinsed in saltwater, two deckhands transferred the glistening, ivory-colored catch into roughly 50-pound cloth sacks, handed them down a hatch into the cool fish-hold and buried them beneath ice. Everyone else kept shucking.” (Shameless promotion: read this feature, then, if you have the time, check out The Atavist’s story “Revive,” about the little-known, deeply personal origins of Narcan.) —SD
3. This Is Not an Escape Story
Paige Kaptuch | Runner’s World | June 5, 2024 | 4,568 words
Paige Kaptuch begins her piece with a powerful image: an unidentified woman in a prairie dress with “a collar buttoned up to her chin, sleeves down to her wrists” running up and down a hill in the 90-degree heat of a Utah summer. When Kaptuch spotted this woman a few years ago, she knew she was a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a community living in Short Creek. Kaptuch has a clear fascination with the FLDS, touching on her own family connections to it. But it’s Darlene Barlow Stubbs who is the focus here, a former FLDS member who discovers running after fleeing the group in 2005. Stubbs leaves at a time when Warren Jeffs is the “prophet,” a leader who normalized not only polygamy but underage marriage and child labor. By 2018, things had changed: Jeffs was in prison, the land was in different hands, and the Short Creek population had plummeted. Returning to try and reclaim a family property, Stubbs sees that she can help her old community, and starts the Short Creek Running Club. This club—about health and fun, and nothing to do with religion—would have been impossible 10 years ago. Kaptuch writes how the group finds healing as they run against the backdrop of “jagged red vistas that have been featured in so many documentaries and news stories about the area . . . often accompanied by haunting music meant to evoke the unthinkable crimes that took place here.” They are reclaiming their lives. Kaptuch does some lovely storytelling as she weaves through the years, ending up running with the club herself—everyone in sports gear, not dresses. —CW
4. The Worm Charmers
Michael Adno | Oxford American | June 4, 2024 | 4,991 words
Somewhere in the Apalachicola National Forest in Sopchoppy, Florida, Gary Revell is using a piece of black gum wood, known as a stob, and a heavy metal file to conjure worms right out of the ground. Audrey, his wife, is picking worms as they surface, storing them in a bucket. They call it worm grunting, which is also known as worm fiddling, worm rubbing, worm snoring, and worm charming. The Revells sell worms as fishing bait to local stores and to walk-up customers on the honor system. “The Revells’ intuition was like that of the fishermen they were collecting bait for, a catalog of knowledge assembled from spending time out here and bound together by deep curiosity,” Michael Adno writes. As fourth-generation worm grunters, they’ve earned a seasonal income this way for the past 54 years, one that has survived the advent of small plastic fishing lures and nightcrawler farming. I’m powerless against a story like this—one filthy with history and culture, complete with a mystery that gets solved along the way. Adno writes well about Florida, and this piece is now my favorite of all his work. One pass of the file over the stob is called a roop. Rooping creates vibrations in the soil, urging worms to move to the surface for picking. Through the Revells, Adno reveals the lore and scant history of the practice. Things get even more fascinating when Kenneth Catania, “a neuroscientist with a bent toward ecology and biology,” arrives to test a scientific theory that reveals why grunting works. Does it have to do with moon cycles? Cosmic vibrations? Incantations uttered while rooping? I couldn’t possibly spoil the surprise for you—read this piece and you’ll be glad to find out for yourself. —KS
5. The Delicate Art of Turning Your Parents Into Content
Jessica Winter | The New Yorker | June 5, 2024 | 1,664 words
In this piece, Jessica Winter discusses great examples of adult creators using their parents in films and TV shows over the years. Think back to John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence. Or the amazing scene in Goodfellas when Tommy, Jimmy, and Henry have a meal with Tommy’s mother—played by Martin Scorsese’s real-life mother, Catherine—right after they kill and stuff a dead guy in a trunk. Or, more recently, the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, in which the gay comedian interacts with various people on his quest for love and connection, including his parents, who’ve struggled to accept his sexuality. I initially dismissed Winter’s piece as a Top 5 contender because it’s shorter than most longreads. But I kept returning to it, and to one beautiful line in particular: “[It] can be a twentysomething rite of passage to realize that your parents are more than your parents; that they had a life before you; that they were beautiful and moved beautifully and were desired, and still are.” It’s a profound realization, and one that’s taken me into my 40s to really grasp. (For this reason, I got a kick out of the recent wave of #80sDanceChallenge clips in which TikTokers filmed their dancing parents, moving like they did in the ’80s, to the unmistakable beat of “Smalltown Boy.”) For a while now, I’ve wanted to do something similar—not record my parents letting loose to catch a glimpse of their younger selves, but to sit down with them, and all of my aunts and uncles, to ask them questions about their lives, especially their early years: their childhoods in the Philippines, their many firsts. As Winter explores here, the process of turning our parents and elderly family members into entertainment fodder can be fun, emotional, and rewarding, but it may also become tense and uncomfortable, revealing complex generational and family dynamics. This is a quick yet thoughtful read, with a few must-click links that go to Francesca Scorsese’s delightful TikToks, in which she records herself with her famous filmmaker dad in genuinely warm and funny exchanges, like this one where she asks him to identify feminine products. —CLR
Audience Award
The American Novel Has a Major Problem With Fat People
Emma Copley Eisenberg | The New Republic | June 7, 2024 | 1,923 words
Emma Copley Eisenberg calls out the publishing industry for weight prejudice in this fascinating essay. Reading the piece, you will realize how few times you have experienced an overweight main character while reading fiction. And that will make you think. —CW
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