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In our Top 5:
- A Bitcoin-fuelled health nightmare in Texas
- The hidden history of oil in Los Angeles
- Buying fentanyl components online
- Preservation over profit in Alberta, Canada
- Wayfinding with hand-drawn maps
1. ‘We’re Living in a Nightmare’: Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town
Andrew R. Chow | TIME | July 8, 2024 | 4,250 words
There are 137 bitcoin mines in the US, many of them located in remote and rural places in Texas, “home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians.” After a massive bitcoin facility started operating in town of Granbury, people of all ages began to experience a range of unexplainable medical issues, including hypertension, chest pain, heart palpitations, migraines, vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss, and panic attacks. Even the community’s nonhuman residents—from dogs to chickens to a family’s backyard oak tree—exhibited strange symptoms. At first, no one knew what was making them sick, but they knew they had one thing in common: the inescapable “dull aural hum” from the mine. The buzz, generated by 30,000 computers and thousands of fans running to cool them, is constant. And the noise, which residents have consistently recorded at over 85 decibels, is over the state’s legal limit. (On top of this, Texas’ noise law is the worst in the nation—one that seems to protect noise polluters, not its citizens.) In this eye-opening story, Andrew R. Chow shares the medical struggles and stories of more than 50 Granbury residents affected by the noise, and reports on how the community is trying to fight back against Marathon, the mine’s owner. As crypto and AI fuel the data center industry’s growth, however, this very scenario is repeating itself in other states, including Arkansas and North Dakota. “Ultimately,” Chow writes, “Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.” —CLR
2. It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil
Jonathan Blake | Noēma | July 30, 2024 | 3,826 words
Sometimes a fact jumps out of a piece of journalism and lodges itself directly into your long-term memory. In Jonathan Blake’s engrossing Noēma piece, that fact is this: unlike most cities that developed along rail and streetcar lines, Los Angeles’ (sub)urban development clustered around those many places where underground oil fields were tapped. Even if you’ve driven past the oil wells near Baldwin Hills, you may not have realized how strongly black gold influenced the city. (Or how it continues to, despite its winnowing footprint.) Blake didn’t either when he was growing up in LA; now, he visits some of the city’s most active, and camouflaged, drilling sites. Like the one in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Pico-Robertson, where, directly across the street from a restaurant opened by Steven Spielberg’s mother, ivy-covered walls conceal 40 active wells. Or the one tucked behind the Beverly Center shopping mall, the one you can only see from the top level of the parking structure or from the hospital across the street. About a third of Angelenos live within a mile of an active drill site, the negative physical and mental consequences of which Blake inventories starkly. Yet, the lingering presence of extractive industry also leads Blake to celebrate the recent launch of a satellite that continuously observes methane gas levels around the planet and makes its data available to researchers. This, he writes, is part of the necessary work to grasp what fossil fuel consumption has wrought: “Even someone living in the places most affected by climate change, like the Arctic, can’t intuit planetwide change from personal experience.” Just because you grow up in a city without realizing what’s thrumming under your feet doesn’t mean you can’t fight to make that city—and the planet it’s part of—a better place to live. —PR
3. We Bought Everything Needed to Make $3 Million Worth of Fentanyl. All It Took Was $3,600 and a Web Browser.
Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, and Stephen Eisenhammer | Reuters | July 25, 2024 | 6,355 words
Each December, Bloomberg Businessweek publishes a Jealousy List, a compilation of “all the stories we wish we wrote this year.” If I had a 2024 list of my own, I would put this Reuters investigation on it—as I was reading the piece, I couldn’t stop thinking, “Damn, this was a great story idea.” The premise is simple: fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has become the number-one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, can be made by combining chemicals that anyone can order online. Most of these precursors, as the chemicals are known, ship from China. To investigate this dangerous pipeline, Reuters became customers. Reporters bought chemicals with names such as 1-boc-4-AP and 1-boc-4-piperidone and had them delivered to apartments in Mexico and the United States. The shipments showed up disguised as adapters or sealed in cat-food bags. All told, the investigating team purchased enough chemicals to make 3 million tablets of fentanyl, a process that cost them only $3,600 and required only clicking buttons on a smartphone or laptop. (Perhaps you, like me, just gasped in dismay at those figures.) All told, this project shows how difficult it is to cut off the fentanyl supply at the roots—it’s basically a game of Whac-a-Mole. “While it was easy to source the goods, it proved far more difficult to identify exactly who sold them,” the story explains. “Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.” One of the companies in question is still peddling its product despite being under US federal indictment. So much, I guess, for the long arm of the law. —SD
4. The Big Life—and Looming Death—of a Rocky Mountain Defender
Drew Anderson | The Narwhal and The Globe and Mail | July 18, 2024 | 4,238 words
Conservationist Karsten Heuer is only 55 years old. He knows he will die this autumn, but it’s not the first time he has faced death. In 2021 he fell nearly 30 feet to the ground from a tree stand while searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley. His lungs collapsed and he broke ribs, his sternum, and his back in several places. Since, he has been diagnosed with “a fast-acting and fatal neurological condition called multiple system atrophy” that may have been a result of the fall. After spending so much of his life traversing vast stretches of wilderness observing animal behavior, he refuses to be fettered or diminished by the symptoms of his disease and has scheduled an assisted death this fall. Drew Anderson’s piece is so much more than a profile of a lifelong nature advocate. Heuer is a tenacious fighter who has had success navigating conflicts between profit and preservation that can feel intractable in Canada’s oil-fuelled, capitalist society. In 2018, Heuer led an effort to reintroduce bison to Banff National Park, a species that had been hunted into extinction, missing from the region for 140 years. His work documenting animal migration patterns prompted the Banff, Alberta, town council to halt certain developments and move others to preserve the wildlife corridor nearby. “He was one of the early advocates of what is now known as large-landscape-scale conservation,” writes Anderson. “This model takes into account the huge scope of some animals’ terrain, a departure from caring for the land in a patchwork of small protected areas.” Even as the end of his life approaches, he’s still fighting development that would double the size of neighboring Canmore, in the name of preservation. After all that he has given to the planet in his time here, if only medical science could find a cure to preserve Karsten Heuer. —KS
5. Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps
Ben Buckland | The New York Times | July 17, 2024 | 2,793 words
Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying only on hand-drawn maps from the people he met along the way, including local cheesemakers, a chef, and a farmer whose family had lived on the land since the 1600s. “I wanted to know what it would teach me about how technology and convenience have changed the way we travel,” he writes. “I wanted to be lost, and to find my way through the artwork of strangers.” At first, I found this goal as annoying as it was inspiring. Going on trips with my 6-year-old daughter has transformed the way I travel, and gone, for now, are my flâneur days, when I’d set off on foot in one direction to see where I ended up. Still, I couldn’t resist Buckland’s words and stunning photographs, his spontaneity, and his willingness to trust the people he encountered. I love his thoughts on making maps, even the simple sketches he received; reading a map is an “act of empathy,” he writes, a way to learn about a person through the details they see. By the end, Buckland walked about 250 miles over 12 days—along lakeshores, up mountains, into villages, and through the heart of Switzerland. A lovely piece on serendipity, being present in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes. —CLR
Audience Award
Here’s the story our audience put their money on this week.
My Mother, the Gambler
Victor Lodato | The New Yorker | July 29, 2024 | 5,627 words
From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart. —KS
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