Ever lost your way in the wilderness? In 2021, nearly 3,400 people got lost in a US national park. In the 2000s, a researcher named Robert Koester gathered and analyzed data on the behaviors of different types of people, from children to experienced hikers, who’ve wandered and gotten lost in the wild. In what direction do they go? How do geographic features and different terrains influence their movements? In this piece for Undark, Sarah Scoles reports on the growing science of “lost person behavior,” which in turn can inform the strategies of search-and-rescue missions.
His decision to follow the drainage, and then stay near a stream, fits with Koester’s hiker profile. That means the search managers could have had a good idea that they might find him here, and so made plans to search the area: “Hikers are guided by terrain to other linear features,” Koester wrote. Of all find locations, linear features like streams account for the largest percentage of hikers. In this category, people tend to go downhill too, as Read did.
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Moderated by Emily Bazelon | The New York Times Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 9,019 words
I was visiting my parents this week, helping them pack up the home where they’ve lived for almost 39 years, and one evening, our conversation turned to Gaza. While we didn’t see eye to eye on everything, we agreed that one of the most important steps that we as outside witnesses to this tragedy can take is to direct our attention beyond the headlines, statistics, and slogans. We must look at the roots of the conflict, but not as they’ve been sanitized and presented to Western audiences for far too long—we must look at the roots as they actually are, ugly and gnarly. A perfect starting point is this discussion, moderated by Emily Bazelon, which examines the period between 1920, when the British mandate for Palestine was established, and 1948, when Palestinians were forced from their homes to make way for the state of Israel. I read the piece after the conversation with my parents and was particularly moved by Nadim Bawalsa’s description of his family’s experience of the Nakba. “Since December 1947, no one in my family has entered our home in Jerusalem,” Bawalsa writes. “My grandparents were able to briefly return to Palestine with their children to live with my grandmother’s family in Ramallah during the period of Jordanian rule until 1967, but they were not allowed to go to the west side of Jerusalem. Following 1967, we’ve only been able to go back as U.S. citizens—tourists.” Now, as I tape up boxes full of cherished objects, I can’t stop thinking: my parents will miss their home, but at least they are choosing to leave it. —SD
Eva Holland | Outside | February 7, 2024 | 5,325 words
Having read Into the Wild, I was already familiar with the story of Chris McCandless (or Jon Krakauer’s version, at least). The naive explorer left his home in the northern Virginia suburbs and traveled across the continent, eventually ending up in an abandoned bus in Alaska, where he starved to death at age 24. Although gripped by the adventure story, I didn’t fully understand what drove McCandless to leave society and cut contact with his family. Eva Holland felt the same way, and her reporting takes pains to explain the abusive home life he left behind, as told by his sister, Carine McCandless, in her 2014 book The Wild Truth. The missing pieces finally fell into place. But this essay isn’t really about McCandless. It is about the bus. McCandless may have been its most famous resident, but it has been a part of many people’s stories—and that of Alaska itself. Holland weaves the layered history of Bus 142 right up to its new chapter: its removal from the wilderness of the Stampede Trail to its new home at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. By taking the time to piece together the broader picture, Holland nods to the thousands of people to whom the bus means something, herself included. (She recounts her own visit to the bus with beautiful reverence.) The museum exhibit is not yet open, but some 700 photos of the bus graffiti have already been compiled into an album online, and visitors are encouraged to claim their tag and tell the story of their visit to the Stampede Trail. In its new life at the museum, I hope Bus 142 will not only tell these stories, but be a part of many more.—CW
Kevin Pang | Chicago Magazine | February 13, 2024 | 6,458 words
A writing teacher once told me that great profiles make personal obsessions public. Hot on the heels of “A Knife Forged in Fire” by Laurence Gonzales, Chicago Magazine has done it again with Kevin Pang’s nuanced portrait of ramen chef Mike Satinover. Both pieces feature people deeply obsessed with their craft, and as a reader you get to ride the wave of devotion, savoring every detail along the way. In this case, those details include delicious globules of fat floating atop ramen made with precision and care. Pang seasons his writing with the same deep respect that Satinover puts into his ramen—a dish he fell in love with after choosing to study Japanese in high school. He’s been trying to make the perfect bowl of noodles ever since, earning the handle “Ramen Lord” for his careful study and open-source approach, publishing recipes under development with rigorous notes for anyone to attempt at home. In addition to serving a savor-y profile of Satinover’s noodle bona fides, Pang doesn’t shrink from critics who claim cultural appropriation, given that Satinover is a white American making a traditional Japanese dish; he discovers that the criticism comes “largely from white people on social media,” and that “when gaijin come to Japan and attempt their culture’s cooking, the locals view it not as appropriation but as appreciation of their cuisine.” Pang’s piece is so rich and delightfully nerdy, I could not help but slurp it up. —KS
Jessica Traynor | The Dial | February 6, 2024 | 3,423 words
Last night, I finished Person of Interest, the police procedural/sci-fi show that ended in 2016, which feels like ages ago, but the show’s premise—a society surveilled 24/7 by an artificial intelligence—is incredibly timely. There are numerous scenes in the series that require a rogue team of hackers and ex-military operatives to break into a warehouse or secret office floor to alter or destroy servers and computer equipment. I kept thinking about these physical facilities that hum along around the world while reading this essay, in which Jessica Traynor recounts a family trip to a data center just outside of Dublin. Data centers have proliferated in industrial business parks across Ireland: 82 in total, with another 40 planned to be built. These centers store much of Europe’s digital information, but at a cost, increasing Ireland’s energy footprint and straining its power grid. Traynor’s musings on the “fragility of social and national memory,” however, resonate with me the most. Is digital preservation, and the cloud to which we upload important and precious information, really the most effective way to store knowledge? I realize my current entertainment binge depicts extreme scenarios, but it still shows that these data centers are anything but indestructible. Here, Traynor points to an unsustainable energy path, Ireland’s long and “patchy” memory, and the “fantasy of technological stability” to argue that the digitization of its records is not as secure as we think. I love stumbling on pieces like this—a thoughtful read on an unexpected topic. —CLR
David Pierce | The Verge | February 14, 2024 | 2,992 words
I read stories this week that elicited an acute emotional response, and I read stories this week that dazzled with prose. But nothing I read this week felt more urgent or important than David Pierce’s explication of robots.txt, that snippet of code on every webpage that allows (or doesn’t allow) search engines to catalog its content. See, robots.txt has effectively functioned on the honor system: search companies agreed not to send their automated web crawlers into sites that expressly disallowed them, and everyone was more or less happy. Thirty years later, though, there’s a new breed of web crawler in town. These new bots swarm websites not to catalog content but to feed that content to AI, a technology that threatens to replace search as the default means of online discovery (and does so by digesting and regurgitating the content in a monstrous, unciteable form). Even worse, AI crawlers don’t necessarily respect robots.txt—and there’s nothing legally compelling them to do so. Pierce frames the conundrum perfectly: “As the AI companies continue to multiply, and their crawlers grow more unscrupulous, anyone wanting to sit out or wait out the AI takeover has to take on an endless game of whac-a-mole. They have to stop each robot and crawler individually, if that’s even possible, while also reckoning with the side effects. If AI is in fact the future of search, as Google and others have predicted, blocking AI crawlers could be a short-term win but a long-term disaster.” For three decades, websites large and small have depended on search to help build their readership; now they’re caught in a philosophical quagmire. Trust the robots, or sink into oblivion? —PR
Audience Award
Which story was the most-read editor’s pick this week?
Peter Holley | Texas Monthly | February 7, 2024 | 3,620 words
Yes, the headline is undeniable. Yes, the story delivers on its promise. Yes, Peter Holley’s story about Austin Riley’s harrowing ordeal will stay with you. A chilling reminder that animals gonna animal, no matter how tight the bond. —PR
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Just about every website out there includes a page called simply robots.txt; on it you’ll find a list of any search engine crawlers that aren’t allowed on the site. For 30 years, this has been a gentleperson’s agreement, honored by all in hopes of building a civil internet. But over time, what these crawlers do has changed considerably—and now, the rise of artificial intelligence is forcing site owners between a bot and a hard place. For The Verge, David Pierce ably unpacks the dynamics behind a tumultuous, if hidden, sea change.
But the internet doesn’t fit on a hard drive anymore, and the robots are vastly more powerful. Google uses them to crawl and index the entire web for its search engine, which has become the interface to the web and brings the company billions of dollars a year. Bing’s crawlers do the same, and Microsoft licenses its database to other search engines and companies. The Internet Archive uses a crawler to store webpages for posterity. Amazon’s crawlers traipse the web looking for product information, and according to a recent antitrust suit, the company uses that information to punish sellers who offer better deals away from Amazon. AI companies like OpenAI are crawling the web in order to train large language models that could once again fundamentally change the way we access and share information.
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Rebecca Solnit reflects on how the social climate of San Francisco has been permanently altered with the rise of tech giants which have widened the disparity between the haves and have nots and who—perhaps surprisingly—are behind some crime in the city, drug-related and otherwise.
Crime in the San Francisco Bay Area can be described in many ways. But there are no dramatic videos showing Palo Alto native son turned crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried misappropriating $8.6 billion of clients’ money or of the scam run by ex-Stanford student Elizabeth Holmes, who raised $700 million for Theranos, a company whose sole product was a medical technology that didn’t exist. Holmes, who used to live in a $15 million mansion and fly in a private Theranos jet, is doing time in federal prison for defrauding investors. Bankman-Fried awaits sentencing. Those thefts were crimes in the most traditional sense, but the sheer wealth generated by Silicon Valley has given its pack of billionaires the belief that they are above or beyond the law. Most of them made their fortunes in finance or technology; those fortunes and the accompanying hubris and seclusion convinced them they were magnificent at everything and anything, including remaking society according to their lights.
Another tech/venture capital billionaire and opponent of Boudin, Ron Conway, has long used his wealth to push San Francisco to the right. In 2010 he was a driving force behind an ordinance banning sitting on the sidewalk intended to criminalise those with nowhere else to go. In 2016, Conway and Oberndorf funded a ballot proposition to outlaw tent encampments, the homes of last resort for the unhoused. The tech elite tends to regard the homeless not as people with unmet needs, but as an intrusion or even assault on the sensibilities of others (though Mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, has made more benign donations, including $30 million to study the problem). If you equate your wealth with virtue, you tend to equate poverty with vice, and the enemies of the homeless routinely portray them as criminals. The assumption that Bob Lee was murdered by the underclass rather than one of his own speaks to this, as well as to the sense among tech leaders that they are the good guys, the people with solutions, sometimes the victims but never the perpetrators of problems.
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I am standing in the middle of a large, stark classroom. On the walls there are educational posters; sinks line the back. If you glanced through the window or peeked through the door you might think it’s a school science lab. But as you enter, it’s apparent that this is not a space for Bunsen burners or glass beakers.
For starters, it is very cold, like standing inside a fridge, and in place of desks, there are large, thick slabs of wood with steel legs, nailed into the floor and spaced at regular intervals. I’m wearing a white coat—not unlike a lab coat, actually—paired with non-slip safety shoes and a particularly unflattering white mesh, trilby-style hat. I am also sporting a chain-mail vest and a thick, plastic, wipe-down red-and-white-striped apron. More tellingly still, on the block in front of me are half a dozen dead pheasants. This is the butchery department, deep in the bowels of Waltham Forest College in North East London, UK, where I am the only female student.
Butchery is one of the oldest crafts in the world. Opinions vary as to exactly how old, but if we take butchery to simply mean deliberately preparing animals as food using tools, we can date it to 3.4 million years ago—the age of animal remains recovered in Kenya with marks suggesting sharp stones were used to break up the bones and strip the meat. When excavations were made in 2004 for a high-speed rail link to be built in Ebbsfleet in Kent, UK, elephant bones were found, surrounded by sharpened flint tools that have been dated to over 400,000 years old. Contemporaneous red deer bones have been found with signs that suggest the same cutting techniques that are used by butchers today were deployed. And there is evidence in Florida from 12,000 years ago not only of sloths and giant tortoises being butchered for their meat but—according to butcher lore and blogs—of the existence of a formal trade and butchers’ shops.
But in the UK, butchery as an established commercial endeavor came in with the Romans: before they invaded Britain, the slaughter of animals was ceremonial and religious, and meat was a secondary consideration. As the Romans set up towns, bringing disparate groups of people together, there was an increased demand for meat, whole carcass butchery, and secondary processing. Butchery was now more than a religious process; it was a commercial prospect. Archaeological evidence suggests that these trade butchers each had highly specific roles, some dealt solely in bone marrow, others in hooves. Careful, neat knife work was not the order of the day—the cleaver was the preferred tool of Roman butchers and appears to have been a Roman invention, along with the butcher’s block.
By the Middle Ages, butchery was a respected and skilled craft: the Worshipful Company of Butchers, one of the historic livery companies (or trade associations) of London, traces its roots back to 975 AD, while the York Butchers’ Gild appeared in the Freemen’s Rolls in 1272. The Victorian age was a particularly good time to be a butcher: Britain was the first country in the world to have a greater town population than country population—and it was a population that consumed a large proportion of meat. The butcher was in demand. Without refrigeration, the shelf life of fresh meat was limited, and most would shop daily. Butchery thrived—in the Shambles, a particularly narrow street in York, there were 31 butchers’ shops in 1885. None survive today.
Archaeological evidence suggests that these trade butchers each had highly specific roles, some dealt solely in bone marrow, others in hooves.
The beginning of the 20th century saw the start of World War I, which meant rationing. Rationing tokens weren’t simply given to consumers, but also to those supplying the goods, and the small amount of meat given to butchers forced them to be clever and astute when it came to creating value-added products like sausages and pies. By the time the Second World War began, butchery had been made a protected occupation, and butchers over 30 couldn’t be conscripted to serve—the high demand for meat meant that their normal roles were seen as indispensable.
But today, butcher shops are facing a crisis. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board published an article in 2019 stating that over the last 25 years, the number of independent butchers in the UK has reduced by 60 percent. More than 100 butcher shops are closing per year. What has changed? What went wrong?
By the time the pheasants and I became acquainted, I had been learning craft butchery for a couple of terms. While we aren’t quite talking about a meme-worthy record-scratch freeze-frame moment—yep, that’s me, you may be wondering how I got here—it wasn’t an obvious route for me. I’ve always eaten meat, and I’ve always been interested in how we break animals down to become individual cuts, but as a chef and a food writer my work focuses on cookery—often puddings—and I don’t need an expertise in raw meat.
However, I was also tired of being nervous about cooking meat. Before I left my career in law in favor of pâtisserie, I couldn’t cook at all. I lived on supermarket pasta and sauce. So when I started learning to cook, it wasn’t systematic learning, and the prospect of buying expensive cuts of meat—and potentially ruining them with my lack of skill—was too intimidating. As time went on, and I became more proficient in other areas, this started to embarrass me. I looked for a quick fix: my local further education college offered six-week adult courses that would teach me how to joint a chicken and tie up a rack of lamb. But every time I signed up for the course, it would be canceled.
One day, on a whim, I went into the college to ask about it. After another unsuccessful attempt to sign up for the short course, I was taken down to the chilly butchery stores and introduced to Ray Humm, head of butchery. Ray is a surprisingly slight man for someone who has spent over 60 years lifting forequarters and wielding cleavers. But his skill, knowledge, and enthusiasm for the craft are clear from the first meeting. An hour later, I walked out into the bright sunshine, slightly dazed, having signed up to study for a yearlong course—an NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) Level 2—in craft butchery.
For much of my training, I was the only person on the course; and the highest-ever number of students in our large, airy, butcher’s-block-filled classroom was three (we started at different times). This was at odds with the oversubscribed culinary courses, or indeed any of the other trade and apprentice subjects. The trainee hairdressers’ salon was packed, young adults in paper chef toques thronged the halls, and hopeful electricians and carpenters were plentiful. But within three years of completing my qualifications, the entire butchery department at Waltham Forest College had closed for good.
Where had all the butchers gone?
The golden age of butchery was brought to an end by the rise of the supermarket, and butchers’ shops have been clinging on for dear life ever since. There are several reasons for supermarket reliance, but among them is convenience. Suddenly a family could do their weekly shopping in one easy trip; there was no need to visit several different specialist shops.
These one-stop shops also arrived at a time when women, who had traditionally been relied upon for both shopping and cooking for the family, entered the workplace, meaning households became time-poor. So while the cuts at the supermarket were generally more limited than those a butcher could offer—and their provenances less clear—for many, the pros outweighed the cons. The single shopping trip also coincided with the availability of ready meals, and many families simply got out of the practice of buying locally or cooking from scratch. Pre-prepared meals are not only quicker and easier to cook, but they also don’t require culinary knowledge in the way that roasting a joint of meat or making a casserole does. That knowledge of how to handle meat (and other raw ingredients) was, for the first time in hundreds of years, no longer essential to be able to sustain oneself or one’s family. And, naturally, without the necessity for that knowledge, it fell out of common usage.
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Today in the UK, most supermarkets have done away with their butchery counters, at least in any meaningful sense, leaving a place where sausages and mince can be weighed out, but no real cutting or butchery is done. The majority of the meat we buy raw is from one of a handful of big supermarkets, portioned and in taut little gas-flushed tubs. We are less familiar with those cuts that don’t appear robustly packaged on supermarket shelves. But perhaps even more pertinently, we don’t know how to order meat, and the fear of embarrassment is enough to keep us away from the intimidating, old-fashioned high street butcher’s shop.
As a consequence, animal rearing and meat production have become further and further removed from our daily lives, and, as a population, we are now disconnected from handling and cooking meat. This disconnect, along with that lack of culinary knowledge and confidence, means that consumers have become nervous around raw meat. It’s a vicious circle. Nearly six years ago, the UK supermarket giant Sainsbury’s introduced no-touch chicken breasts, with the chicken in pouches so consumers could tip the breast directly into the pan. The supermarket’s decision came after research from Brand Potential found over 37 percent of respondents stated that they would actively choose to buy meat packaged in a way that completely eliminated touching it. It was couched as solving hygiene concerns, but the reality is that it put the customers at an even further—and literal—distance from the meat they were consuming.
In short, we have become scared of meat.
But now independent butchers face a new crisis: the workforce. In the UK, Brexit has had a significant effect on those able (or indeed willing) to work in the meat production industry. Our farming and meat-processing workforce—with its often poorly paid, unstable work—was populated in large part by Europeans. After Brexit, they were no longer entitled to work in the UK.
This lack of manpower brought meat processing to a terrifying halt. In 2021, farmers pleaded with the government to make immigration exceptions for slaughtermen, to prevent the culling of 150,000 pigs that simply couldn’t be processed for market with no one to do it. The prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, was unsympathetic, making jokes about bacon sandwiches coming from dead pigs and refusing to engage with the distinction between pointless, unprocessed killing due to a labor shortage and slaughter for processing.
Abattoirs and meat-processing plants were particularly hit, but, of course, this had a knock-on effect on butchers’ abilities to source and provide meat. Compounding this, butchery as a trade is no longer a terribly attractive profession. It’s hard on the body, and not just in terms of physically hoicking heavy animals about. There’s the cold, the repetitive movement, and the often wet hands, which causes painful skin damage. As with any job that involves, knives, cleavers, and heavy machinery, it’s dangerous too, and horror stories abound of hands lost to grinders and digits to meat slicers. At one point, injuries to the femoral artery were colloquially known as “butcher’s block” because a slipped knife causing exsanguination was an occupational hazard. Butchers typically struggle with damaged knees, backs, and hands; and it is almost impossible to do the job if your physical health is impeded. It requires deeply antisocial hours, too, with much of the work happening before the shop doors open early in the morning, and there’s rarely anyone to pick up the slack in your absence.
As with any job that involves, knives, cleavers, and heavy machinery, it’s dangerous too, and horror stories abound of hands lost to grinders and digits to meat slicers.
There is a distinction between the meat processing done in factories and the craft butchery that takes place in butchers’ shops. Craft butchery tends to use traditional techniques, rather than automation. In practice, this means that the craft or artisan butcher wields a knife rather than mans a machine, works on smaller quantities of animals (and, many would argue, better-sourced animals), and cuts them in a way that adapts to the animal and customer’s needs, as opposed to more uniform slabs of meat. They are also more likely to employ nose-to-tail butchery, using offal or more unusual cuts from the animal.
Butchery, throughout its history, has relied on the passing down of this knowledge and skill through example and supervised practice—apprenticeships, in other words. The lifeblood of craft trades. Butchery training isn’t a quick process; it can take years to become truly proficient, and far longer to become a master butcher. Successful acquisition of butchery knowledge requires a mentor, which means finding someone willing to pass that knowledge on to you.
Even now, with formal apprenticeship programs at UK colleges in place, to progress any further in butchery training than I did, a hopeful butcher needs someone established to both employ and financially sponsor them through the process. For that reason, it’s often a trade that has stayed in the family: sons learning and then taking over from fathers, and the business passing down the family line. This has the effect of making it something of a closed shop, particularly if you do not fall into the conventional—white, working-class, male—mold of a traditional butcher.
But even then, given the slow decline in profitability over the last 50 years, it’s hardly surprising that those who have watched family members struggle with the business don’t feel predisposed to make it their own career. In an age where there are jobs that are less physically demanding, better remunerated, or just warm, it’s harder to attract the fresh meat needed.
And it’s dearly needed. We are facing an aging population of butchers: many, who have been in the industry since their teenage years, are now reaching retirement age. But the problem isn’t as simple as finding someone to take over the management of a shop. If these veteran butchers retire before a sufficient new generation is trained up, the skills will die with them. We need something new.
I was taught butchery by one of the old guards: Ray Humm is 79 years old and has spent over 60 years in the industry. Born and bred in Tottenham, in the North East of London, he was a keen amateur boxer, with no intention of becoming a butcher. At age 15, he was studying engineering, and planning a six-week summer holiday of hanging around with friends, doing very little, before starting an engineering apprenticeship. But his dad, who drove lorries for Smithfield Market, the largest wholesale meat market in the UK, had other ideas: “He said, ‘If you think you’re standing around street corners for six weeks, you have another thing coming!’” On the first day of the holidays, his father dropped him off at a meat processing plant. Ray was squeamish to start with, reluctant to touch the inside of a chicken, but things changed.
By the time I met him, Ray had owned a butcher’s shop, six specialized sausage shops, and a sausage factory. He sold all of them in 2000 and tried to settle into an early retirement. Quickly restless, he was relieved when the local college—where, as a hobbyist, he’d studied for a diploma in cookery—asked him if he’d like to come and teach on the course.
The college had a butchery department and, when the head butcher later injured himself, Ray was asked to stand in and teach the apprentice students for three weeks. The previous butcher didn’t return, and the rest, as they say, is history. For 17 years, Ray headed up the butchery department, often single-handedly, until the department was unceremoniously closed last year.
When Ray began teaching, there were intakes of 50 apprentices at a time, although almost none of them were female. His final intake, by contrast, was only six apprentices, but half of them were women.
Back with the pheasants, and it’s the smell that’s getting to me. Traditionally, game is allowed to hang after it has been killed, unplucked, with entrails still intact. This intensifies the flavor, which most game aficionados prefer—but the powerful, high smell of raw birds can be overwhelming. And I am overwhelmed.
And it’s not just the smell: the feathers that need to be pulled out are sticky, a bit slimy. They glue to my hands as I pluck, which feels disproportionately gross. Birds have tiny stones in their gullet; they swallow items whole when they eat, so it is these stones that grind up their food. Preparing the birds—by removing their heads and necks—the stones fall onto your work surface, along with any undigested grain, making a peculiarly bathetic jangle. I have a visceral reaction to it: revulsion.
But I’m also the only woman in the classroom, and it has become absolutely essential that I do not gag. Although the number of women apprentices had been creeping up over the years, from the get-go, as a woman studying butchery, I am still a novelty. Members of staff from all over this large, wide-ranging vocational college have trooped down to meet the girl who wanted to learn about cutting up animals. Despite my training and work in two traditionally male-dominated environments—the legal bar and the world of chefs—I felt I stood out in a way that I had never felt before, my position as a woman scrutinized.
Preparing the birds—by removing their heads and necks—the stones fall onto your work surface, along with any undigested grain, making a peculiarly bathetic jangle. I have a visceral reaction to it: revulsion.
Throughout my training, I felt this weight, which informed how I behaved. I believed I could not be perceived as weak in any way. So I didn’t complain about the cold. I picked up carcasses wherever it was physically possible to do so. I made sure my bones were so clean that you’d struggle to make stock with them. I avoided the cleaver and favored the saw, which did just as good a job without showing up my lack of upper body strength. And I would not be squeamish.
But I didn’t succeed in my pheasant poker face. The experience made me grimace, and Ray captured it on camera. “It’s my favorite photo of you!” he often says, with genuine warmth. I look silly, which would not normally bother me, but here it makes me feel stupid—like I have betrayed myself—undermined as a woman in butchery by my squeamishness. Why did I feel my gender mattered so much in this arena?
“Oh, you weren’t what I was expecting . . . well, what were you expecting?!” Charlotte Mitchell asks. Mitchell’s question is a fair one, given that her position as a female butcher is strongly suggested by her shop’s name, Charlotte’s Butchery. She has become used to the comments, but even now, her clients’ surprise remains a constant. Mitchell’s path to butchery was swift, if not traditional. After studying theology at university, she took a job with the Church of England as a pastor’s assistant in London. Becoming disillusioned with that career, she looked around for other ideas: “What other job can I do that is totally archaic and ridiculous?” she asked herself. She had spent a brief period while at university working in a butcher’s shop as a sales assistant, which she’d enjoyed, so went with that: “OK, I’ll be a butcher.”
Mitchell spent some time working in shops in London and Newcastle, but she’d only been properly butchering for a year when she bought her shop in Gosforth in the North East of England, where she grew up. Her training wasn’t without hurdles. She was underutilized in one job (“a very well-paid tea girl”), while elsewhere she was tested. Required to bring in beef forequarters that were unequivocally beyond her physical capabilities, she found ways around it: “I just got my saw and cut it in half and took it in in two loads. Have I passed?” As a consequence, perhaps, she thinks that she probably learned most of her butchery while she was in her own shop, simply by having a go.
Jessica Wragg, a trained butcher and author of Girl on the Block, took her first steps into butchery at 16, working on the till at a local farm shop. Even without the complications of being on the cutting side at that stage, she describes the first six months as a baptism of fire: “It really hardened me.” She found the attitudes to women, especially young women, outdated and difficult—at best flirty and misogynistic, at worst harassment.
Some of the bars to greater progression or representation of women in butchery are near-identical to those of other male-dominated or male-coded industries: having to prove worthy of training to the employer; not being taken seriously by the consumer, even when fully trained; being dismissed for presumed physical or mental weakness; and a scarcity of role models. It is difficult, too, for a workplace that doesn’t have true representation to ensure that older attitudes toward those excluded from the trade don’t prevail, which in turn makes those spaces less accepting of and less appealing to women.
Once Wragg decided to pursue butchery as a career, the first hurdle was “fighting to have to learn something and be taken seriously,” but what quickly followed was getting the customer to take her seriously. She tells stories of shop customers ignoring her to ask questions of a junior, male shop worker. She felt a real need to prove herself as equal to her male contemporaries: “I used to go out of my way to lift heavier things just to prove that I could.”
She found the attitudes to women, especially young women, outdated and difficult—at best flirty and misogynistic, at worst harassment.
One would think that women in butchery would be hyper-visible, given their rarity. But this is not the reality. Their scarcity renders them invisible when it comes to expertise; it seems inconceivable to those inside and outside the industry that they could possess the skill and knowledge of their more visible—and therefore expected—male counterparts. Both Wragg and Mitchell relay stories of being patronized or overlooked in favor of less experienced, less knowledgeable male colleagues. “Every single male butcher that I’ve ever met in my life has mansplained something to me,” Mitchell tells me.
Wragg knows that her gender has afforded her particular opportunities within the meat industry that she otherwise may not have realized. But the novelty that brought about those experiences is holistically detrimental, because that othering “makes you stand out,” and many women understandably don’t want to feel that in their jobs. It means that those women are by definition challenging gender norms, rather than simply doing a job; they can never be butchers, always female butchers.
Wragg observes the “weird disconnect” that exists in the industry: on the one hand, an awareness that a skilled workforce is dying out, and on the other, an “interesting relationship between older butchers who feel like they’re entitled to this knowledge and have earned the right to be secretive about this world, and younger people who want to learn.”
It has often been assumed by those within the trade that the dearth of women in the industry is because women do not have an interest in being butchers, due to the physical requirements of the job. Plainly, this is untrue: we have never worried about women’s interest or capability in hugely physically demanding careers like nursing or caregiving. Ironically, we have also not historically had the same problem with women working in slaughterhouses, which is considered less skilled and less respectable than craft butchery, and consequently has inferior pay and job stability. And, for most of civilization, women have been trusted with small home farms and the rearing, slaughtering, and butchery that goes with that. It’s only when it comes to women being professional butchers that we begin to feel uncomfortable.
The “ick” factor of women being in this arena is a particularly difficult one to overcome because it’s entirely irrational. In her 2018 paper, “Women Who Butcher: Gender Bias, Knowledge Politics, and Solidarity in Meat Processing Systems,” Maria Cali finds that when it comes to women in butchery, “their identity as women is in tension with their identity as skilled meat processors, and coworkers and customers alike reveal discomfort with that tension.” This then plays directly into who is and is not “allowed” access to knowledge. The ick is a manifestation of our collective discomfort with women butchering, and the gatekeeping of knowledge from women is the result.
The resistance to women in butchery goes further: we associate butchery with blood and gore, and dealing with blood and gore is not a place for a woman. We refer to destroying or making a mess of things as butchering them and to particularly brutal murderers as butchers. Even eating large quantities of meat, especially red meat, and particularly rare red meat, is seen as a male preserve. From the killing to the consuming, meat is viewed as inherently masculine. Prime cuts are primal.
Wragg believes it’s about a reframing: “Stereotypically, meat is very masculine. There is a school of thought that eating meat is a male thing, cooking meat is a male thing, understanding meat is a male thing—and a lot of men use it as a bit of a personality trait, really. I’m so manly, because I eat lots of steak. But butchery itself is actually a very intimate and very creative thing. If you think about the action of using a knife to separate bones from flesh, it’s not slapdash, it’s not chop here, chop there. It’s very soft, very beautiful.”
When Ray began his career in the 1960s, women were employed as cashiers, but nothing more. “It was a man-dominated trade. And women were not strong enough. They weren’t robust enough. And they weren’t streetwise enough. That was how the butchery trade felt.” (He is at pains to distinguish these generalized views of the industry, from his own.) “And so women, basically, were second-rate people. Men didn’t take no notice of them, and they had no say. They were there, they cleaned up, done washing up, scrubbed floors, washed counters.”
Even eating large quantities of meat, especially red meat, and particularly rare red meat, is seen as a male preserve. From the killing to the consuming, meat is viewed as inherently masculine. Prime cuts are primal.
In London’s Smithfield Market, Ray thinks the environment became self-selecting. Women who had encountered and embraced feminism felt like it hadn’t reached the marketplace: “There was a lot of swearing, a lot of innuendo, a lot of sort of touching; you could smack a girl’s bottom without anyone even taking any notice.” This meant that places like Smithfield remained wall-to-wall men. Women would work in the upstairs offices, but they would never come down to the actual market. Women simply weren’t taken seriously in this world, so chose not to enter it.
And if, despite these hostile working conditions, a woman had wanted to be trained up as a butcher? “No no. As a woman, you’re not strong enough. You’re not enough. It’s a messy, dirty job. Women don’t do messy, dirty jobs. It was that attitude, very much,” says Ray.
Even for those women willing to come up against those hurdles, getting their hands on the knives has not been simple. For a long time, guilds prohibited women from working as butchers at all. Their role was limited to sales; the deli counter, too, was fair game. Or rather, a woman’s game: the making of sandwiches and doling out of sausage rolls was entirely manned by women, often the wife of the butcher proprietor.
“There is a bias around who gets to cut meat and who doesn’t,” says Camas Davis. When she lost her job in magazines during the 2008 recession, she found herself in France, on a pig farm. There she learned how to butcher pork, with women doing as much of the butchering and farming as men—a “beautiful, accepting setting.” But when she returned to the US, the story was different: “My first job in a butcher’s shop was at a meat counter which was run by men who played practical jokes on me, who tried to trick me into making mistakes, just generally were trying to undermine my learning experience. Though they did not outwardly question my place there, it was clear my place was being questioned.”
It feels axiomatic to say that those who come from outside an established or “validated community of knowers” will find it significantly harder to both acquire knowledge and have that knowledge recognized than someone whose path is a well-trodden one. One of the most common ways of excluding non-traditional entrants to an industry is to be dismissive of them. This idea of being “taken seriously”—often those exact words—comes up again and again in the butchers I speak to about women in the trade.
Because the meat business has been heavily dominated by men for so long, one of the biggest challenges for women entering the field used to be finding female role models for employment, training, and support. It’s changing. Davis was brought into the world of butchery by Kate Hill, who set up Grrls Meat Camp (now the Women’s Good Meat Network), an educational space that brings women together. It filled a void for women who wanted to learn about meat but didn’t know where to go—who had sought training or on-the-job experience but couldn’t find it within a male-dominated industry. “Being able to learn and ultimately teach alongside women, it didn’t feel competitive,” says Davis. “It was very open and accepting to all levels.” She quickly graduated to teaching at the camp and became a spokesperson and activist for representation within the industry. It is no coincidence that so many of the women who have resisted the gender bias in the industry and fought for access to and recognition of their knowledge have, in turn, become educators.
Davis is interested in the idea of mastery: “In any male-dominated industry, there is an assumption that men can come in with or without knowledge or mastery, and do the job; they get entrée into that industry. For a lot of women, me included, we must master the skill or trade first to be legitimately allowed in. And so, what I have seen is, by the time a woman becomes a meat cutter, they have really studied and practiced and are precise, and are working really hard to prove that mastery.” Wragg, who also began teaching women-only butchery classes, creating an environment where women felt comfortable enough to learn and ask questions, agrees. “It’s one of the only careers where you have to gain people’s respect in order to gain access to knowledge.”
Of course, some men wholeheartedly support and champion women in the industry, mentoring them, raising them up, working under them as well as alongside them—Ray among them. But again and again, I come across apparent women-positive articles about butchery, lauding the feminine skills that women can bring to the industry, that actually just perpetuate gender-divisive clichés.
Women in Butchery, for example, is an Australian website designed to encourage women into the trade (and the trade to accept women); its tagline is “cutting through gender stereotypes.” When extolling the advantages of hiring a female apprentice, it states:
Women can bring a different approach to butchering than men. Their advantage is their attention to detail. Their feminine touch (more dainty and delicate cuts instead of the macho chunks of beef their male colleagues prefer) look a lot more attractive to customers, who, as the old saying goes, buy with their eyes. The unique female perspective on meat cutting and displaying is an advantage. Women also tend to be better at giving cookery advice to customers.
“Dainty,” “delicate,” “macho,” “attractive.” In many ways these are just as misogynistic as the exclusion of women in the first place: women bring calmness, they bring finesse, they have fine, delicate hands that make the finishing and primping of the cuts—presumably prepared by the men with the real skill—more attractive for sale. It is another example of undermining women’s expertise and knowledge. Unsurprisingly, none of the women butchers I speak to think that women cut differently from men.
But the way we cut meat is changing—and possibly to women’s advantage. For a long time, the traditional British way of butchering was to prepare joints, usually for roasting, and often on the bone. These joints would contain several different muscles, cut and trussed into a neat shape, that looks handsome on the plate, lends well to roasting, and allows thin, cohesive slices of meat to be cut from the cooked product. This method required significant physical strength, the wielding of cleavers, and the manipulation of whole carcasses or forequarters.
But seam butchery—a European method of butchery—is being adopted more widely. It’s now common among craft butchers in the UK and is frequently practiced in the US too. In this particularly economical and low-waste style of butchery, the meat is cut by finding the natural seams between muscles and separating them with the very tip of a butcher’s knife, rather than using a saw or cleaver. The action of doing so feels more like encouraging the meat away from the bone than cutting; a lot is done almost blind, relying on feeling within the carcass the routes that your knife has to take. It is surprisingly delicate. Working with the muscles rather than against them makes cuts that are easier to cook (different muscles can require different types or times of cooking), as well as producing complete cuts that otherwise would only be usable in mince or sausage.
Mitchell believes that good butchers, contrary to stereotypes, need to be “light-handed, gentle, sensitive,” in the way that they cut meat—but that doesn’t mean that they are cutting in a “feminine” way. You would never, Mitchell observes, expect a male pastry chef to be less meticulous, less refined, less delicate than their female counterparts; you wouldn’t refer to his skill as feminine.
Mitchell believes that good butchers, contrary to stereotypes, need to be “light-handed, gentle, sensitive,” in the way that they cut meat—but that doesn’t mean that they are cutting in a “feminine” way.
For Ray, it’s the attitude of women entering the trade that sets them apart: “They’re more precise in what they do. I find they’re more dedicated. Take the younger generation: the boys come in to do a job because it’s a man’s job, and it’s a job we can do. Women come into it really wanting to learn, really wanting to make it a career.” Perhaps it is the exclusion of women from the industry that means that those who enter it are necessarily more intentional, more long-sighted than those who have never been denied entry.
The World Butchers’ Challenge—billed as “The Greatest Butchery Event on Earth” and seen as the equivalent to a World Cup for meat prep—takes place every four years. Last year in Sacramento, California, among 13 countries competing, with six competitors in each team, there were only two teams with two women members (Canada and Brazil) and five teams with one woman. The other six were entirely made up of men, which equals lower than 10 percent female representation.
Elsie Yardley was the one woman on the Great British butchery team. Just speaking to her is spirit-raising: with a background in art and design, she finds huge creativity in butchery, and loves the level of skill required to master it. But there’s a familiar story in terms of her entry into the industry. Having realized her enthusiasm for it while working as a Saturday girl, serving customers and making tea for the proper butchers, she approached her boss and asked to be trained up. His response was unequivocal: “He said if I couldn’t lift it, I couldn’t cut it.” Undeterred she found someone who was willing to teach her. She knows that her physical strength is a limitation, just not an insurmountable one. Aware that there was no way she could have lifted 600-kilogram bodies of Aberdeen Angus, she developed workarounds. She has taught herself to cut large cuts of beef while they’re still hanging from a hook—a more continental way of doing it, but not one for which many butchers in the UK have the skill or knowledge. “I’ve learned the best way to cut it to suit me, and I use the carcass’ weight to my advantage,” she says.
For Yardley, much of the job’s appeal is the interaction between the meat she sells and the cooking process. She considers the value-added products—the chicken Kievs, the marinated chops, the “butcher’s ready meal” that you find on a butcher’s display counter—the way forward. While consumers of meat are time-poor, they still care about quality, provenance, and sustainability, and, in her experience, they’d far rather have a prepared meal from a butcher, which can speak to these considerations, than one from a supermarket or delivery company that is mass-produced and ethically ambiguous.
This is one of the problems with an aging population of butchers: the butchers who started in the industry 50 or 60 years ago were dealing with a clientele who had different considerations and culinary knowledge than many of those who want to buy meat today. Of course, there will always be cooking enthusiasts who want to spend a lot of money on a cut of meat and are confident in their abilities to bring the best out of it. But the reality is that the number of customers in 2024 who know what a Barnsley chop is, let alone what to do with it, is significantly lower than the number in 1963. Younger butchers like Yardley are more sympathetic to this.
In some areas, we are seeing greater recognition for these new figures: the Women in Meat Industry Awards was set up in 2018 by Meat Management Magazine (which also hosts the Meat Management Industry Awards) and specifically celebrates women in management positions across the sector. Meat Business Women is a network set up in 2015 by Laura Ryan and Pamela Brook as a reaction to the scarcity of women in the industry, particularly at the board level. This network established a global mentoring program designed not only to attract but also to retain women in meat. And the last master of the Worshipful Company of Butchers was Margaret Boanas, the third woman to hold the role in the Guild’s 700-year history. (Although it is worth noting that this is a ceremonial role, and one of the previous female masters was the Princess Royal, who, one suspects, has little professional experience of butchery; while Boanas’ experience is in meat buying as opposed to butchery itself.)
But the reality is that the number of customers in 2024 who know what a Barnsley chop is, let alone what to do with it, is significantly lower than the number in 1963.
“Master butcher” (distinct from Boanas’ position) is the highest qualification and recognition of skill that a working butcher can achieve in the UK and is awarded by the Institute of Meat, which is also responsible for apprenticeships and other accredited butchery training. There have been fewer than 60 awards in the last three decades: only two were to women, and no women were recognized in the most recent awards. But the same awards ceremony also celebrates apprentice butchers, and—in contrast—two-thirds of those winning apprentices were women.
So, amid the doom and gloom, there are reasons to be cheerful. And while the supermarkets have long held the monopoly on a plentiful supply of cheap meat, there are areas in which the butcher remains king (or queen). Now that even supermarket butchery counters have gone, their customers are given no choice over the exact amount, preparation, or cut of their meat; as well as no personal service, recommendation, or guidance. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a swell of new consumers to butchers’ shops, and while many have returned to the convenience of the supermarket, there remains an increase in custom to the independent retailer.
There is also increased awareness of the dangers of poor farming standards and the ethical and ecological impacts around sustainability, with more people seeking out meat where the source is traceable, the quality is higher, and the craftsmanship is obvious. A renewed willingness to pay higher prices for smaller amounts of quality meat means we may see a resurgence in the use of the butcher.
If there is an interest in using independent butchery, how do we stop more shops from closing? Well, in one sense, the answer is simple: bodies. As Mitchell puts it, “I think we just need to bring anyone under the age of 40 into the industry.”
To survive, butchery as a craft needs a workforce. It needs to pass on its skills to younger butchers before the older ones, well, pass on. Crafts can only live as long as they are practiced. So new blood in the trade—especially when those who would have traditionally joined it are no longer an automatic addition—is vital. “Allowing” women to enter the trade means an instant and significant increase in the number of potential butchers.
It is clear from the women who have made it in the industry, and from those actively seeking out encouraging and educational spaces for future women, that there is a female appetite for professional butchery. And, among the women butchers I speak to, there is a surprising optimism alongside a genuine and sustained enthusiasm for the craft. Charlotte Mitchell calls butchery “the most rewarding job in the world”; Elsie Yardley tells me, “I’m still massively in love with it, I don’t get bored of it. . . . I can’t see myself doing anything else.”
But the culture of butchery remains off-putting. There needs to be a reckoning. Jessica Wragg can see that there is significant work to be done in terms of accessibility and attitude: “I would love to go into a butcher’s shop and just feel comfortable. I feel that walking into a butcher’s shop, even though I’ve had the life I’ve had, still intimidates me.”
She believes that women are necessary for the progress of the craft: “In 10 years, we’ll have understood how the meat industry can progress in a way that is less damaging to our health and environment, and I think women have to play an integral part in that. I’m hopeful, I don’t think all is lost.”
And there is an inherent virtue in bringing women into the profession. As Davis puts it, “Whenever you have a population of people who have been excluded and then are allowed to become a part of it and define it, that is inherently going to change the nature of that thing. . . . I can see that in the restaurant, meat, and farming industries, those who have been cast out and then brought back in, bring with them an ability to see the need for full systems, reevaluating hierarchical systems. Having a different face and story attached to the meat industry seems hopeful to me.”
While still underrepresented, there are more women in the industry than ever before, more female-friendly spaces, and more female educators. An optimistic reading is that this should gradually bring about its own momentum, reshaping the industry around those who now take up space in it, a younger and more diverse workforce. If that is the case, butchery can be pulled into the 21st century by its apron strings.
Olivia Potts is a food writer and chef. After a career as a criminal barrister, she retrained in patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu. Her latest cookbook, Butter: A Celebration is published by Headline, and is out now. Her first book, A Half Baked Idea: How grief, love, and cake took me from the courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu won the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book Award and is published by Fig Tree, Penguin. She was the Guild of Food Writers’ Food Writer of the Year 2020.
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As climate changes continues to manifest in more frequent and more severe weather events, we need people we can turn to, to help us understand the deeper causes behind the cloudburst and the why behind the windstorm. Enter Daniel Swain, a physical scientist with a huge social media following who is earning a growing profile with the mainstream media for clearheaded weather context lay people can grasp.
No bells, no whistles. No fancy clothes, makeup, or vitriolic speech. Sometimes he doesn’t even shave for the camera. Just a calm, matter-of-fact voice talking about science on the radio, online, on TV. In 2023, he gave nearly 300 media interviews—sometimes at midnight or in his car. The New York Times, CNN, and BBC keep him on speed dial. Social media is Swain’s home base. His Weather West blog reaches millions. His weekly Weather West “office hours” on YouTube are public and interactive, doubling as de facto press conferences. His tweets reach 40 million people per year. “I don’t think that he appreciates fully how influential he is of the public understanding of weather events, certainly in California but increasingly around the world,” says Stanford professor of earth system science Noah Diffenbaugh, ’96, MS ’97, Swain’s doctoral adviser and mentor. “He’s such a recognizable presence in newspapers and radio and television. Daniel’s the only climate scientist I know who’s been able to do that.”
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A group of experts discuss the roots of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. This is a must-read piece, a starting point for understanding for the genocide happening in Gaza today:
Nadim Bawalsa: The mandate period sets a precedent for how Palestine will be handled at the international level, which is to say as an exception to the law. Britain started off as the military occupier of Palestine at the end of World War I and then unilaterally altered its own status to civil administrator, even though it didn’t have the power to do so under international law. The League of Nations then left it to the British authorities to manage Palestine however they saw fit.about:blank
Around the same time, local Muslim-Christian associations were springing up all over historic Palestine, in Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Jerusalem. They would convene regularly to draft grievances and submit them to the British authorities in Jerusalem.
The local associations convened a Palestine Arab Congress, which met between 1919 and 1928.They always made the same demands: self-determination as part of an undivided Arab Syria and opposition to Jewish immigration and land acquisition.about:blank
So the British were very much aware of exactly what it was that the Arabs or the Palestinians wanted. But to serve their own interests, they pitted the Palestinians against one another. Right after the Nebi Musa riots, they sacked the mayor of Jerusalem and appointed Raghib al-Nashashibi in his place. He was of the Palestinian nationalist elite who opposed Zionism, but he was more obedient and agreeable to British interests. The British also created the Supreme Muslim Council to oversee Islamic property, endowments, schools and courts and appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini, from a rival elite family, to head the council as the grand mufti of Jerusalem.
Al-Husseini was chosen for mufti by the British high commissioner of Palestine after he stated his “earnest desire to cooperate with the government and his belief in the good intentions of the British government towards the Arabs,” according to Rashid Khalidi. A mufti can issue rulings based on Islamic law.He was seen as more of a people’s leader, but he also collaborated with the British. The point is that during the 1920s and early ’30s, Palestinian nationalists could oppose Zionism all they wanted so long as they didn’t get in the way of Britain’s goals.
And of course, all of this falls short of actually giving the Palestinians national and territorial rights.
Derek Penslar: Many Zionists wanted to believe that they represented progress—they would come with their technology and electricity, with better farm machinery, and improve everyone’s lives. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose version of Zionism was the precursor to Likud, the party of Benjamin Netanyahu, had a more realistic vision. He said: Don’t condescend to the Arabs. They have every reason to oppose Zionism, and they will do so, until they are met with overwhelming force.
Rabinovich: In 1923, the British offered to have a legislative council in which the Arabs would have had a larger share than the Jews, but they boycotted the elections for it. And this is a theme I think that we need to follow all the way from 1920 to 1948—the theme of missed opportunities, mostly by the Palestinians.
Dallasheh: This council was not supposed to be proportional or truly representative. The Zionist movement was never willing to accept that because until 1948, any such voting body would have meant a decisive Palestinian majority.
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Being a pet food taster at Waltham Petcare Science Institute sounds like a pretty sweet gig. As Vivian Ho writes, each day the dogs and cats there “eat two meals, and from there, teams of behaviourists, statisticians and nutritionists study how they respond to the food.” I had no idea pet food was studied so deeply. Interspersing her piece with tales of her own (toothless) cat, Florence Meowmalade, Ho creates a delightful read.
When I arrived at Waltham one overcast day last summer, I found cats lounging in their outdoor catios, gazing out over swaths of manicured lawn, or shimmying up scratch trees. Labradors of every hue chased balls in play areas and walked on leads with their handlers. The animals live in state-of-the-art facilities. The dogs have heated squares for sleeping and bunk two to a room to prevent loneliness; the cats have specially designed climbing nests that look like spiral staircases. All the animals can access the outdoors from their living quarters.
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You’ll savor Kevin Pang’s nuanced profile of “Ramen Lord” Mike Satinover, a man who became obsessed with creating the perfect bowl of noodles after falling in love with the dish in high school. One part precision, one part love, one part pure devotion, Satinover’s noodles have become renowned in Chicago since Akahoshi Ramen opened in Logan Square just a few short months ago.
If ever a bowl of noodles could kick your ass, Sumire’s miso ramen did it to Satinover with steel-tipped boots. For the first time since arriving in Japan, he was tasting food in the outer bounds: intense savoriness, extreme richness, wobbly fat from the chashu, bean sprouts charred dark. As he sat alone at this second-floor walkup in Sapporo, his life changed, even if he didn’t know it at the time. But the problem with losing his ramen-in-Japan virginity to something so maximally delicious was that it set Satinover up for a high nearly impossible to replicate…
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After Texas Governor Greg Abbott put them on a chartered flight to Chicago, Angi and her family found themselves not in a shelter but stuck in limbo at one of the world’s busiest airports, sleeping on the floor as holiday travelers glided by. Elly Fishman offers a glimpse into the lives of just a few of the vulnerable people—in this case, from Venezuela—who are hoping to put down roots in the United States:
On this December morning, Angi’s children keep themselves entertained on the airport floor. Yenni, her belly flat against the ground and her legs propped up behind her, takes a marker to a stack of construction paper. She sketches a collection of faces: Happy. Laughing. Sad. As she draws, a pair of police officers idly pace the room. They nod at familiar faces and chuckle at their quiet, private jokes. Angi watches Yenni draw. She admires her daughter’s artwork.
“The other day she said to me, ‘Mom, all the effort we put into coming here, and for what? We’re stuck here,’” Angi says. “I told her we were going to take it day by day. It’s a slow process.” The truth is Angi gave up long-term planning many years ago. The notion of a permanent home has been fractured and scattered in the years since she left Venezuela. For Angi, the airport is just another point in a long list of impermanent places.
Sliding back into her chair, Angi watches as a group of holiday travelers—headphones wrapped around their necks, skis tucked snugly inside tailored bags—weave their way through the room. Even their baby’s car seat comes with its own bag. The group soon settles in an otherwise empty row of chairs. The baby gurgles from a stroller while the older children remain fixated on their tablets. The man, likely the children’s father, surveys the room. His face remains stony as his eyes dart from one corner to the other. He holds a water bottle to his mouth and silently directs his family toward the automatic doors. The group rise to their feet and obediently make their way toward the exit.
Angi watches the family as they cut through the crowd. “Sometimes I look at them and think about how they are able to travel and carry bags,” Angi says. “I hope someday that will be me.”
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Steve Fisher’s account of Mennonite farmer Franz Kauenhofen’s rise and fall reads like a real-life Breaking Bad tale. In 2000, Mennonites eventually settled on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula; they bought and cut down large areas of jungle in Campeche to grow crops like soybeans and hoped to live in isolation and peace, free of religious persecution and the distractions of modern life. When Pablo Escobar sought a new shipping route to smuggle cocaine into the US, the fields the Mennonites had created were perfect landing strips for planes that needed to refuel or unload drugs. This setup propelled one of the Mexican cartels, later known as the Sinoloa cartel, to become one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the region—and launched Kauenhofen down an unlikely trajectory.
Kauenhofen also testified that he oversaw an additional 20 cartel members who provided logistics and security for planeloads of cocaine.
He continued to dress like everyone else. But he amassed a fleet of trucks, four-wheelers, motorcycles and an arsenal of weapons — including high-powered machine guns capable of taking down helicopters — to safely escort shipments to Sinaloa, according to the deposition.
In his deposition, Kauenhofen specifically mentioned 15 different planeloads of cocaine during his four years working for the Sinaloa cartel, and he alluded to many more. He said each landing earned him $325,000.
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In this essay—a written version of a speech given on January 27—Nicki Kattoura reflects on the attacks on Gaza over 113 days; the futile process of writing about war and destruction; and the way that our sentences fail to convey the scale of Palestinian suffering.
I’ll give you another example. Typically, when reciting the devastation of genocide we tend to rapid-fire statistics. To date, 26,000 Palestinians have been martyred (comma) over 60,000 have been injured (comma) over ten thousand are trapped underneath the rubble of buildings and presumed dead (comma) 2 million people have been internally displaced (comma) millions are starving (comma) dehydrated (comma) dying of disease… The comma neatly separates a list of things that are completely entangled, and in the process obscures the degree of violence happening to each individual person.
A thousand eulogies are exported to the comma, a tiny line or symbol, that just cannot bear the weight of the lives and aspirations of this many people. People whose lives are as intricate and multi-faceted and contradicting as our own.
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For most of my adult life, I have been, in the words of Beyoncé, a single lady. I met my current partner in 2021. My previous relationship ended in 2009. For the intervening 12 years, I was single.
I loved those years. I devoted a lot of time to building my career as a communications specialist for international NGOs: working internationally, immersing myself in local communities, and seizing every opportunity that came my way. Outside of work, I traveled widely and prioritized my own development. I practiced yoga and learned to cook. I wrote a novel. I bought and made a home. I found and lost friendships. So much of life exists outside of romantic relationships, and I immersed myself in this realm. I embraced solitude, relying on myself for sustenance and happiness. It was an enormous gift to intentionally build a happy, fulfilling life, just for me. And I’m not the only one to think this way. The number of single people in the U.S. has increased significantly in recent decades: In 2004, 33 percent of people aged 18-34 were unpartnered. By 2018, that number had risen to 51%.
During my single years, I had one friend who would always ask if I was dating anyone. No matter what else was happening in my life, my relationship status was the only thing that mattered to her. The rest of my life was only window dressing around that central, critical question: had I been chosen by another person? I tried to be generous with her. I knew she came from a generation of women defined entirely by their relationship status. If I’m honest with myself, her questioning only bothered me because it struck a nerve.
There were times when I longed for a partner. I knew it was better to be alone than in a bad relationship, but I still craved some kind of romantic connection. I dated: immersing myself in dating apps, swiping and liking, and going on first dates, before scampering back to my solitude. Sometimes my dates liked me and wanted more. Sometimes I liked them and wanted more. But those desires rarely overlapped. In 12 years, I had only a few flings, all of which were more trouble than they were worth. I was sometimes lonely, though less than people assumed. I missed having a steady person by my side, someone to drive me home from the hospital after a medical procedure or collect medication from the pharmacy when I was sick. But I certainly didn’t feel lonely on weekend nights, curled up with a novel and a bubbling lasagna.
Interestingly, I struggled to surface articles about heterosexual men choosing to remain single. There are plenty of alarmist pieces about how dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise, but few include the voices of men who’ve found value in remaining single.
But despite rising numbers of single people, the cultural expectation that we will fall in love and get married remains strong. For some, it’s only when we’re happily partnered that our lives are considered complete. Being single is usually positioned as something to overcome, not something to celebrate. Someone like me—who remained single for more than a decade in a world devised for couples—is a puzzle to be solved, not a reality to be accepted.
What follows is a collection of articles offering different perspectives on single life. I hope they will challenge your perceptions of what a single life can look like and push you to make space for the richness that exists independent of romantic partnership.
On Spinsters (Briallen Hopper, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2015)
I first considered my singlehood as an identity while reading Kate Bolick’s book Spinster, which grew from this 2011 article in The Atlantic. I enjoyed the book, but it was Hopper’s blistering review that really resonated with me. Hopper doesn’t criticize the book, as much as she imagines what could have existed in its place. Bolick’s book features five white female writers living in the American Northeast. The review challenges this framing and imagines the diverse group of radical women who built lives full of “friendship, faith, family, community, political purposefulness, significant caregiving responsibilities, dazzling professional success, and, occasionally or eventually, real romance.” This review adds queerness and radicalism to a book I loved, while expanding our understanding of what a satisfying life can look like outside of the same old heteronormative, patriarchal pattern.
Spinsterhood, for Bolick, is not simply being an unmarried woman. Nor is it cat-collecting, celibacy, or the social indignity of life as a human Old Maid card. Instead it is something luxurious, coveted, and glamorous, associated with long days of reading, plenty of room to sprawl in bed, ecstatic self-communion, and, as befits the former executive editor of the decorating magazine Domino, a well-appointed apartment of one’s own.
I also loved another piece from The Cut—Anna Holmes’ thoughtful take on her decision to stay single. “For a certain type of creative, highly sensitive soul,” she writes, “singledom was a feature, not a bug.”
Building from her own experience as a longtime single woman, Traister writes about how a cultural reassessment of female life could spark a significant political shift. I enjoyed how Traister takes what is ostensibly a cultural issue and traces its influence on our collective political priorities, pointing to how issues like pay equity and caregiving are rooted in the changing role of women in society.
Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality. They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves. The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life.
This heart-wrenching essay about being single in a world that expects us to want romantic partnerships was published on Them, one of my favorite sites for queer news. With beauty and simplicity, Brandon Taylor writes about his history of childhood sexual abuse and how it impacted his life. Like Taylor, I experienced sexual trauma during childhood and found snippets of my own experience between his sentences. Taylor writes movingly about how sexual attention makes him squirm, and how he craves the intimacy of close friendship rather than romantic connection. Ultimately, he strives to make peace with himself knowing that, at least for the moment, singlehood is the best fit for him. I related to it deeply.
Perhaps that’s the source of my uneasiness. That every time a person interacts with my body, I’ve got to live with the record of it; that suddenly I have another voice to contend with as I try to make peace with myself. It’s another thing I have to move aside or reconcile as I move slowly, so slowly, with the speed of geology, toward a deeper accordance with myself and what I want or don’t want.
I didn’t expect to relate to a 15th-century Catholic nun, but I was very happy to be proved wrong. Jessa Crispin travels to Ávila, Spain, where the locals are celebrating a philosopher who pioneered women’s independence more than 500 years ago. In the Catholicism of my youth, a woman’s only role was to birth and raise more Catholics. But St. Teresa chose another path, joining the church because it was the only way for a woman to be a philosopher and an author. In doing so, she became an unlikely role model for women choosing to create a life alone. This piece also highlights how unmarried women are often the most socially and politically engaged members of society, which reflects my own experience volunteering during my single years. Without a romantic partnership, I had more energy to devote to my community. For a season, I spent my Friday nights volunteering at a children’s hospital—more meaningful than a night of socializing.
Teresa did not want to be reduced to merely a body, bred and sacrificed for the sake of her husband and children. If she had to choose between being a body and a brain, she would choose to be a brain. So she entered the church — the only way a woman could become a philosopher.
DePaulo has published several books on singlehood and has also given a popular TEDx talk on the topic.
We’ve all heard the studies: married people are, on the whole, happier and less lonely than their single counterparts. But when social scientist and long-term single person Bella DePaulo decided to examine the research, she uncovered serious methodological flaws in how these studies were conducted. This piece examines the research that currently exists on single people and highlights how further studies could benefit society as a whole. Single people have a lot to teach us about the pleasures of solitude, the importance of building a life based on your own values, and why we shouldn’t prioritize one central romantic relationship to the exclusion of everything else.
Ever since social science has been interested in the concept of marriage, it has endorsed the idea that everyone’s goal and likely trajectory is to get married at some point. “The idea has been that everybody wants to get married, and eventually everybody will, so why bother studying single people?” she said. Single people are either people who have failed to get married, in other words, or married-people-in-waiting. They’re not worth studying as a category unto themselves.
Throughout most of my single years, I was fortunate to be able to live alone. I couldn’t always afford it, but would sacrifice other luxuries to ensure my own space. One of the biggest challenges to remaining single in a world structured for two is the financial strain it can cause. In this thoughtful and deeply researched piece, Anne Helen Petersen dives into the ways our society is organized to support the needs of partnered people. The tax code, social security benefits, pensions, health insurance, IRAs, and countless other aspects of our societal infrastructure are set up to support married family units—and disadvantage those who choose to stay single. This particularly impacts women, who can expect to live longer than men, but earn less over their lifetimes. Women of color, especially Black women, are particularly penalized. It’s a sobering article about the need for policy—as well as cultural—change when it comes to the rights of single people.
American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people. Some of this isn’t deliberate, as households cost a baseline amount of money to maintain, and that amount is lessened when the burden is shared by more than one person. There are other forms of antagonism, too, deeply embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life.
Clare Eganis a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes a regularnewsletter about life after trauma and is working on her first book.
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