This is a beautiful essay on family and aging, told through a bike passed down through generations. Ian Treloar explores the history of his family with respect and self-awareness. A reminder to honor your family treasures, and where they came from.
I guess I always had some distant awareness of the fact that the red bike was a part of family history stretching further back than my period of guardianship, but I was too caught up in the everyday to really engage with that story. There was Life Stuff to deal with: big things like relationships, work, family, as well as all the little things we get hung up on, thinking they’re big things. Covid-19 was a kind of a reset, though. More time at home with the kids. A more poignant relationship with my older relatives, particularly my Grandma over in South Australia, who I used to see a couple of times a year but who I now hadn’t seen for two years. And the whole time, growing increasingly dusty and rusty, the red bike and the secrets it held lay waiting under my parents’ floorboards.
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In this gripping essay, Judith Hannah Weiss recounts life before and after the traumatic brain injury she suffered after a drunk driver hit her parked car. Left with aphasia and amnesia—which instantly altered her life as a writer—she documents her long physical and cognitive recovery.
In my first life, I was a freelance writer. We ate my words at every meal and they paid the mortgage, too. Prolifically not myself, I wrote countless pieces of promotion for clients like New York, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, PBS, Disney, and Vogue. More a story seller than a storyteller, I was a tool like a broom or a mop. I wrote about places I didn’t go, and things I didn’t do, for legends I didn’t know.
Then a drunk driver stole a truck, jumped a curb, and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage. It was an accident.
My first mind had furnishings. You know, nice chairs, a sofa, floor to ceiling shelves for beautiful things. It also had a foundation. My new mind tips in and out, devoid of furnishings. I was a mommy, I was a badass, then I was in pieces, invisible. An instantaneous dissolution of an entire culture, formerly between my ears. The brain that blew was mine.
Once I can use my hand, I start scratching any words I can find on any surface I can find – paper plates, paper cups, placemats, Popsicle sticks. Fragments not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me.
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Bridget Read | Curbed | March 12, 2024 | 6,005 words
When I first started reading this piece, I wasn’t sure whether to be appalled or amazed. Last September, realtor John A. Woodward IV listed 1316 Beverly Grove Place for just under $5 million. When the pool guy asked whether the new owners might keep him on, Woodward knew something was up—no one had bought the house. Raucous parties complete with thumping bass were said to take place five nights a week. Jittery, glassy-eyed partygoers spotted in daylight signaled debauchery. Unsatisfied with a “suggested donation” as the price of admission, the cons started to rent out rooms in the mansion they didn’t own. LeBron James—who lives nearby—was among a growing number of concerned neighbors. Who was living at this Beverly Hills property? For Curbed, Bridget Read spins a cinematic story of deception and intrigue worthy of a blockbuster movie. This piece features multiple grifters experienced in a variety of scams, and Read does a terrific job unraveling the twisted tale for gobsmacked readers incredulous at the perpetrators’ audacity. “The latest accused fraudsters to take up residence were louder, more obvious, and more desperate than their predecessors,” she writes, “but the mansion had long been in the possession of people who got it by lying and stealing.” Let’s hope The House of Deception eventually comes to a movie theater near you. Maybe they can get Quentin Tarantino to direct. —KS
Oscar Schwartz | The Drift | March 12, 2024 | 6,077 words
When Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk was released last September, the response was as predictable as it was divided. Musk had bought Twitter more than a year into Isaacson’s reporting and writing process, completing his transformation into an ideological lightning rod—and all but guaranteeing that the book’s reception would simply be a microcosm of the fractured public opinion about Musk. But Oscar Schwartz’s fascinating Drift essay makes clear that that initial spate of discussion overlooked Isaacson’s own intellectual (d)evolution. Schwartz traces the biographer’s life not just through his book projects, but through his employment history, teasing out connections and creating a nuanced portrait. As Isaacson moved from Henry Kissinger to Benjamin Franklin to Albert Einstein, his CV evinced an increasingly blinkered neutrality and credulous techno-optimism; by the time he chronicled the life of Steve Jobs in 2011, he had perfected the art of conflating personal flaws with genius. That embrace of the founder myth suffuses Elon Musk, Schwartz’s analysis of which is both surgical and undeniable. (It also doesn’t happen until more than 4,000 words into the piece, making for some deliciously delayed gratification.) “Like Vasari to the house of Medici,” Schwartz writes, “Isaacson has tied his name to the house of Palo Alto. He is unable to unveil its darker truths without implicating himself.” Schwartz has no such ties and no such compunctions. And readers are better off because of it. —PR
Mosab Abu Toha | The New Yorker | February 24, 2024 | 2,259 words
Ninety-three percent of the population in Gaza, more than two million people, are experiencing “crisis,” “emergency,” or “catastrophe” levels of food security. This dire statistic sounds abstract and unemotional on paper, but in this heartbreaking essay, Mosab Abu Toha—who fled Gaza with his family in December—describes what that looks like for his loved ones who remain there, including his parents and brothers. Toha recounts speaking to his mother, looking weak and pale on his phone’s screen, who tells him she’s scouring the ground for edible plants—while military drones buzz in the background. He listens to his brother’s messages and reads updates about how hard it is to find food: how they’ve mixed bits of grain with rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed; searched for sacks of flour in the rubble of their family’s destroyed home; paid $95 for a small plate of uncooked rice and raw beef; and, after his wife gave birth at a hospital while bombs fell around them, received just one syringe of milk before being asked to leave. Reading Toha’s piece, I’m reminded of a profile we published recently about a Palestinian American chef in Arkansas whose family has run a bakery in Gaza for over a century. While these two stories are very different, both explore the meaning of food in a time of war, and how families connect across borders through their memories around the table. Now in Egypt, Toha writes: “As I eat simple meals of chicken, rice, salad, and olives with my family, I think of the hunger in my homeland, and of all the people with whom I want to share my meals. I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters. I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again.” —CLR
Sierra Bellows | The American Scholar | March 4, 2024 | 7,526 words
I know several New Yorkers, myself included, who have had a dream in which they find a secret door in their apartment leading to a large room they didn’t know they had access to. In the dream, the discovery of extra space in a notoriously cramped metropolis is euphoric, transformative. Sierra Bellows describes what to my mind is the equivalent experience for a nonfiction writer: finding a door that opens to reveal a trove of stories waiting to be told. The door in question was in the attic of the now-shuttered Willard Asylum for the Insane, and the trove was hundreds of suitcases that belonged to the institution’s patients. One held a vanity set; another held books; one contained only a toothpick. When Bellows learned about the suitcases, through photographs shot by Jon Crispin, she was struck by the mysteries and possibilities they contained. “Whereas I had previously imagined life in a psychiatric hospital to be filled with moments of high drama and suffering, I had not considered the quotidian aspects,” Bellow writes. “I wanted to see more. I wanted to know more about the lives of [the patients].” But her essay isn’t strictly an illumination of what she learned about the people institutionalized at Willard. It also wrestles with questions of privacy, agency, and historical memory. And it contains a passage about the human impulse to understand lived experiences other than our own that was so arresting I texted it to my husband before I’d finished reading the piece: “Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life,” Bellows writes. “That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.” —SD
Stuart Heritage | The Guardian | March 11, 2024 | 1,908 words
This year was my first time watching the Oscars live. Partly due to being in the same timezone, and partly—I’ll admit it—because I wanted to see Ryan Gosling sing “I’m Just Ken.” (It did not disappoint.) During the show’s many pans to the audience, I noticed the eye-popping frocks, the clapping dog, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie sweetly holding hands, and, now and then, up above the glitzy auditorium, hints of faces peeking down from the ether of the mezzanines. A glimpse into the shadow world. Although vaguely surprised that the audience above the shiny people was so vast, my concentration whipped back to a naked John Cena. Stuart Heritage returned me to the heights with this delightful piece for The Guardian. Only the A-listers saw Al Pacino up close as he skipped all the nominees to quickly growl Oppenheimer for Best Picture. (He probably had to get back to that new baby.) Up above, it’s a whole different crowd. I am a sucker for a bit of irreverence, and I thoroughly enjoyed Heritage’s take on spending the Oscars with “the normal people.” In the mezzanines, Heritage joins other press members, crews from nominated departments, and friends and family of nominees. Initially, sitting beside a woman mindlessly scrolling through red carpet selfies, he is unimpressed by this version of the Oscars, but as he begins to recognize the groups of people championing particular films, his view shifts. For these people, the stakes are high. Heritage muses, “It might lack the star wattage of the lower levels, but there is something beautiful and human about going through it surrounded by people who are invested in the outcome.” This essay is a lovely reminder of the hugely collaborative effort behind the films, and what they mean to those who don’t make it to the floor of the Dolby Theatre. A reminder that made this my favorite piece of Oscar coverage. And don’t worry—Heritage doesn’t leave without a celebrity encounter (by getting in the wrong lift). I’ll let you read to find out who. —CW
Adam Rogers | Business Insider | March 3, 2024 | 2,922 words
“This is the story of the Theranos of marshmallows” is an undeniable line. Irresistible, even. So what if the parallels are tenuous? Adam Rogers’ tick-tock about the rise and fall of Smashmallow might lack the manipulation and villainy of Silicon Valley’s Potemkin startup, but the lesson at its core is the same: scale at your own risk. —PR
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Where is Kate Middleton and what the heck is really going on? For Nieman Lab, Ellie Hall dissects the oddities in how Kensington Palace PR and press outlets have handled Kate Middleton’s mysterious and ongoing absence from the public eye, complete with a detailed timeline of unfolding events.
Royal press offices rarely go on the record. As former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger noted in this great column that I reference all the time in my work, it’s “unusually difficult” to judge the reliability of royal reporting because “it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.” You almost never see stories with direct attributions to royal spokespersons, which is one of the big reasons why this “Kate Middleton is missing” saga is so interesting. A Palace spokesperson has gone on the record three times — first in response to a Spanish media report that Kate was in a coma, then in response to the widespread social media speculation about her status, and then once again in response to William’s reaction to the social media speculation.
In this case, the lack of speculative tabloid coverage about Kate’s status is one of the things that people have found suspicious about the current situation. The historically nosy news outlets haven’t theorized about what specific type of surgery she had or the circumstances that led to her medical issue being discovered. Until the TMZ photo was published, there hadn’t been any stories about or photographs of the famously close Middleton family. There’s also a distinct dearth of the fluffy, low-stakes stories about the princess that you usually see in the tabloids (like “What Kate’s doing to relax” or “How Kate’s staying a hands-on mother during her recovery”).
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Susana Guerrero and Madilynee Medina explore Americana folklore with the tale of a ghost that supposedly haunts a San Francisco highway. While some fully believe in the spirit, others cite pranks as the source of the continuing story. With personal experiences to fall back on, Guerrero and Medina provide insight into the tall tales.
When an SFGATE reporter recently walked through the historic town of Niles, locals of all ages said they’d at least heard of the ghost story. Several also mentioned a teen who’d stood in the canyon wearing a white sheet. Carol Williamson, who was born in Niles and graduated from Irvington High School in 1964, told SFGATE that she’d heard of the prank as a kid — but that didn’t stop her and her friends from going out looking for the ghost girl.
“When we were in school … you know, everybody would get in their cars and you would just drive through the canyon and somebody would naturally scream and everybody would scream,” Williamson said. “I never saw anything, but you always wanted to.”
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Maya Binyam’s profile is ostensibly pegged to the release of James, Percival Everett’s latest novel, but the stars aligned in a wondrous bonus: at the Academy Awards the night before, Cord Jefferson won Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction, which stems from Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. None of that bears even remotely on the profile itself, which is an exemplar of what can come when a very smart writer comes to the table with an encyclopedic knowledge of her very smart subject’s very smart work. There’s scenework, and there’s dialogue, but the real joy is how Binyam gets inside Everett by getting inside his prodigious output—teasing out his leanings and pressing him on them. She gets him; he gets her. It seems like a friendship in the making, and I sincerely hope that comes to pass.
When asked if an interpretation was his intention, Everett almost always says yes. He knows that his books depend on an audience to achieve significance, and he seems to encourage that dependence. In 2020, he published three versions of his novel “Telephone,” a move that he knew would emphasize the authority of his readers—and piss them off. (The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) “He plays with the reader,” his longtime editor, Fiona McCrae, told me. “Part of his subject is our reaction to his work.”
Because Everett refuses to analyze his fiction, he is popularly regarded as a “difficult” author, a distinction he wears with pride. “I am a famously difficult interview,” he told me more than once. He acknowledges that he can be spacey when his interest isn’t held, and he often splices amusing non sequiturs into conversation. (“If you were going to be an animal, which animal would you be?” “Do you think there’s a Sasquatch?”) He believes that awards are “offensive,” and describes them as “invidious comparisons of works of art.” His books have won many. “I’ve never met somebody who gives less of a shit,” the director Cord Jefferson, who recently adapted “Erasure” into an Oscar-nominated film, “American Fiction,” told me.
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Apparently all you need is a fake piece of paper to start a new lease on life. For Curbed, Bridget Read reports on the serial scams of those connected to 1316 Beverly Grove Place in Beverly Hills, California, a mansion overrun by fraudsters determined to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous—even if they had to steal it.
“When John A. Woodward IV got the listing in September, the mansion was priced at $4.995 million. It was unfurnished, so Woodward had to borrow old photos from the former broker, but other than that, it was in good condition. He hired a pool guy and a landscaper to keep the place looking nice for tours. There were the usual showings, some offers. Then, a few weeks before he heard from the producer, Woodward got a call from the pool guy. Someone had pulled up with a U-Haul, he said. He assumed there was a new owner and was hoping they might consider keeping him on. Woodward raced over to Beverly Grove to see what he was talking about. When he got there, he found his clicker no longer opened the gate. His keys didn’t work in the front door, either. Someone had even ripped up and discarded his FOR SALE sign. When he realized he was locked out, Woodward called the police. Two beat cops showed up and went inside; when they came back out, they said the people in the mansion were claiming they had a lease. It was a civil matter now, and there was nothing they could do.”
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Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk was the latest and most controversial in his series of biographies, but it was also in many ways the apotheosis of Isaacson’s own evolution—or devolution, in Oscar Schwartz’s view. In this deeply satisfying critical essay in The Drift, Schwartz takes stock of Isaacson’s career both on and off the page, creating a compelling argument that mythologizing Musk has long been Isaacson’s inevitable destination.
With Franklin and Einstein, Isaacson was simply rearticulating the achievements of canonical geniuses in the vernacular of his time. Jobs represented a different challenge: because he was still alive, a case had to be made for his inclusion in Isaacson’s coterie of polymaths. Following some two years of reporting, Isaacson wrote a fluent narrative about Jobs that, at least superficially, depicted a man with two sides. Sometimes he is a brilliant, intense, eccentric creative with an uncompromising aesthetic vision. Jobs drops acid and travels to India. He takes a course in calligraphy and later uses what he learned there to help develop the Mac’s font range. He sees a Cuisinart food processor at Macy’s and has the idea to encase his computers in molded plastic. Other times, Isaacson shows Jobs as volatile and cruel. He gets his girlfriend pregnant, then denies it. He betrays old friends (including his Apple cofounder, the true engineering genius Steve Wozniak). He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. But whenever Jobs behaves badly or demands too much of his staff, or loses himself in perfectionistic pursuit of some detail, Isaacson demonstrates how the unwieldy parts of Jobs’s temperament allowed him to create world-changing products. The cruel and authoritarian impulses were established, in other words, as necessary components of his creativity. “His personality and passions and products were all interrelated,” Isaacson writes, “just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.”
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For Esquire, Jason Diamond helps us to understand what it’s like to live with ADHD and to be without Adderall—the medication that allows him to focus and function. The drug has been in short supply since the end of 2022 and Diamond set out to learn why.
My brain moves fast and I’m unable to process thoughts or emotions. Then things get backed up. Sooner or later my heart is pounding, I’m sweating, and I feel like death. That’s not a great way to live. And so, in 2018, after two decades of living without it and with a host of mixed feelings after an overprescribed childhood, I went back on medication for my ADHD. Combined with meditation, exercise, and meds for my anxiety, the Adderall I’ve been prescribed has improved my life. I read hundreds of books a year and write thousands of words every day. I’ve published two books of my own and write for myriad publications. (It is not lost on me that my chosen career is one that requires sitting still for hours and turning my thoughts into words.)
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Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu delivers a characteristically provocative essay that skewers the anti-trans movement, including people she calls trans-agnostic reactionary liberals, or TARLs. She also asserts that trans advocates could, and should, make their cause more expansive:
The TARL will typically acknowledge the existence of a group of fully developed adults whose medically verified gender dysphoria is so persistent and distressing that the argument for compassionate care outweighs the Hippocratic prohibition on harming a perfectly healthy body. The basic strategy here is to create a kind of intake form with exactly two boxes on it. Every trans-identified person is either a participant in a craze or certifiably crazy. (Checking both boxes is permitted.) There is a touch of genius to this approach. It draws a bright line between the kids who say they are trans and the kids who really are while pathologizing all of them as either delusional or dysphoric. This line is as old as gender medicine itself, which for decades was careful to distinguish impersonators and fetishists from the “true transsexual.” So in most cases of gender variance, the TARL informs parents that it is perfectly healthy for boys to wear dresses and for girls to climb trees regardless of their biological sex, which need not be altered after all. He reassures them that the risk of suicide among trans-identified youth has been inflated by cynical activists trying to blackmail the public; what he means by this is that he does not think most kids are suicidal enough to be trans. In those rare instances of true misery, he advises the practice of “watchful waiting,” preferring to see the patient through the often-irreversible changes of puberty to adulthood, when her childhood experience of gender incongruence will finally acquire the weight of medical evidence. If only she had said something sooner!
This is obviously not a vision of justice; it is a response plan for an epidemic. This should not surprise us. The very simple fact is that many people believe transgender is something no one in their right mind would ever want to be. The anti-trans bloc has in general targeted children because Americans tend to imagine children both as a font of pure, unadulterated humanity and as ignorant dependents incapable of rational thought or political agency. This has allowed the movement to infantilize not just kids but all trans people, whom it only wishes to shepherd through the ravages of mental illness and the recklessness of youth. If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed company that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more. It is quite possible, for instance, to believe that cancer patients should have access to aggressive treatments with potentially life-altering effects while also sincerely believing that, in a perfect world, no one would have cancer.
We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. When the TARL insinuates again and again that the sudden increase of trans-identified youth is “unexplained,” he is trying to bait us into thinking trans rights lie just on the other side of a good explanation. But any model of where trans people “come from”—any at all—is a model that by default calls into question the care of anyone who does not meet its etiological profile. This is as true of the old psychiatric hypothesis that transsexuality resulted from in utero exposure to maternal sex hormones as it is of the well-meaning but misguided search for the genes that “cause” gender incongruence. It is most certainly true of the current model of gender identity as “consistent, insistent, and persistent,” as LGBTQ+ advocates like to say. At best, these theories give us a brief respite from the hail of delegitimizing attacks; they will never save us. We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history. This may strike you as a vertiginous task. The good news is that millions of people already believe it.
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When the Andersons fled Iowa City in 2022, they joined a growing group of American families escaping states that have become hostile for transgender communities. How many more will there be, and what about the people who can’t leave the places they feel threatened?
According to a June 2023 polling report by the think tank Data For Progress, 8 percent of transgender adults have moved out of communities or states because of the uptick in anti-trans legislation, and another 43 percent have considered doing so. GoFundMe data provided to ELLE found a 520 percent increase from May 2022 to May 2023 in fundraisers helping transgender residents looking to relocate from the state of Florida, which has enacted six anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law in 2023, including bans on gender-affirming care.
After the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services announced in February 2022 that it would begin investigating any reported instances of transgender children receiving gender-affirming health care, which Governor Greg Abbott deemed “child abuse” in a letter to DFPS, Kimberly Shappley began to fear what would happen to her own 11-year-old transgender daughter, Kai, who went viral for protesting anti-trans legislation in Texas when she was just 10 years old. “I just kept thinking that if they take our kids, no matter how mad people are, nobody is going to be able to come help us,” Shappley says. “And if they [did] come for our kids, do I have the money that it would take to fight this in court?”
In August 2022, the family sold their home in Austin and moved to Connecticut. Kai feels much safer, but the adjustment hasn’t been easy. “We’re homesick,” Shappley says through tears. “We didn’t leave Texas because I had some great job offer. We didn’t leave Texas because we had family we wanted to be closer to. We fled the government of Texas. We are refugees in our own country.”
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In 1995, a curator at the New York State Museum opened a door in an attic of the soon-to-close Willard Asylum for the Insane and found hundreds of suitcases. The cases once belonged to people institutionalized at Willard, and they contained books, photos, letters, and other personal items. They have since inspired a photographer, a poet, and other artists, while also raising questions about the uses and abuses of historical archives, particularly ones pertaining to medicine:
Usually, hearing of other people’s secrets and private lives held a special kind of pleasure. This, after all, is one reason why we read novels or listen to gossip: to experience an interior life other than our own. My fascination with the people who lived at Willard wasn’t without some salacious curiosity and an expectation that their lives, presumably more extreme, more vivid than mine, were worthy of art.
But from an ethical standpoint, was it right to transform into art the lives of those who suffered quietly for so many years? What was the cost to the patient when photographs were taken, poetry written, song cycles composed, magazine essays published? Was I taking narrative pleasure from Freda B.’s suffering? Or was Crispin right in his belief that the primary emotional relationship that most people feel when they look at the suitcases is empathy? And what to do with the fact that Freda B. herself had no choice in the decision to photograph her suitcase, to have her personal effects displayed for everyone to see?
Empathy was an aesthetic term before it was a psychological one. The German word Einfühlung was once used to describe the feeling of emotional resonance with a piece of art, of knowing it from within. In the early 20th century, English-speaking psychiatrists translated the word to empathy, expanding its meaning to include the sense of feeling one’s way into the experience of another. Psychologists long believed that empathy was an inborn, fixed trait. More recent research suggests that it is a competency that can be strengthened or weakened with experience or training. Meditation can increase empathy. So can reading novels.
My whole life, I’ve believed that all of us share a few essential desires, fears, and perceptual experiences of being human. Our differences, I’ve always thought, were the result of differing life circumstances, which shape our preferences, our style, and our narratives. I have persisted in this belief because it has allowed me to imagine the possibility that I could understand other people, that we could be decipherable to one another. Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life. That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.
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As reported in December 2023, 93 percent of Gaza residents—more than two million people—are “experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity, or worse.” In a heartbreaking essay, Mosab Abu Toha describes what that actually looks like each day for the people who remain in Gaza, including his brothers, parents, and other relatives.
Three days later, on social media, Hamza posted a photograph of what he was eating that day: a ragged brown morsel, seared black on one side and flecked with grainy bits. “This is the wondrous thing we call ‘bread’—a mixture of rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed,” Hamza wrote in Arabic. “There is nothing good about it except that it fills our bellies. It is impossible to stuff it with other foods, or even break it except by biting down hard with one’s teeth.”
In the morning, Maram cooked tomatoes and fried some eggs. Dr. Bahaa told us that it was his first normal breakfast in months. We dipped bread and feta into the olive oil. It smelled of the trees that grew the olives, and it tasted like Gaza.
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For some families hustling in the influencer industry, content creation has offered a viable financial path, but also a warped reality. Influencer kids grow up on the internet, their childhoods on display to audiences of millions, while they help churn out content on their parents’ profitable blogs and social accounts. And in many of these cases, these children don’t see a dime. In this story, which is part of Cosmo‘s Sharenting Reckoning series, Fortesa Latifi talks to parents (and a few young adults/ex-influencer kids) to understand how the money flows, and also what these children have lost in the spotlight. At the moment, Illinois is the only state in the US where child influencers are legally entitled to a percentage of the money they help earn, but as Latifi reports, other states may soon follow suit.
When she made a TikTok comparing two of her daughters, the younger felt embarrassed because Merritt called her the “weird kid at school” in contrast to her older sister, who was labeled “popular” and “bubbly.” But Merritt says they decided not to take the video down because it was doing well and making money through TikTok’s monetization program, which pays creators for qualified views. The video is now pinned to the top of her page, with 2.3 million views and counting, netting $1,100 as of late February. As a form of reparation, she decided to split the profit from the video between her two daughters, with the stipulation that they use the money for the bedroom makeovers they’ve been wanting.
Khanbalinov has had zero new offers since he took his kids offline. “When we were showing our kids, brands were rolling in left and right—clothing companies, apps, paper towel companies, food brands. They all wanted us to work with them,” he says. “Once we stopped, we reached out to the brands we had lined up and 99 percent of them dropped out because they wanted kids to showcase their products. And I fought back, like, you guys are a paper towel company—why do you need a kid selling your stuff?”
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It’s 1983. The original Mario Bros. video game is released. Michael Jackson’s Thriller reaches the top of the Billboard album chart. And in the hit film WarGames, a teenage Matthew Broderick breaches the cyberdefenses of a military supercomputer from his bedroom, sparking a global emergency. Back then, outside of the home computing subculture, the term “hacking” would have been unfamiliar to the general public. In fact, the hacking technique Broderick’s character employs onscreen became known as “wardialing” in honor of the movie. We’ve come a long way since then, but I suspect that most of us still have little more than a cursory knowledge of how the internet works, or have any idea as to the nature of hacking beyond that gleaned from WarGames and its countless cinematic descendants.
We are certainly aware, though, that each passing year an ever-growing digital octopus encroaches more and more into every area of our lives, the majority of us networked to one another for most of our waking hours. Despite endless warnings highlighting the dangers of the digital world, there is a growing acceptance that, in return for the speed and convenience of the internet, we must relinquish a little of our privacy. It’s a trade-off, trusting that the institutions we most rely on—banks, insurance companies, government agencies—will keep our personal details safe.
Seldom, however, are we without a major hacking story. In January 2023, the UK’s postal service was hit by a ransomware attack; after Royal Mail refused to pay $80 million to regain access to its computer system, it suffered huge financial losses. That same year, Oakland, California, declared a state of emergency after a similar cyberassault in which a decade’s worth of sensitive data was stolen. Other attacks hit even closer to home. Witness the 2014 iCloud hack that spilled dozens of celebrities’ private photos across the internet, or the 2015 attack on Ashley Madison, a website enabling extramarital affairs, exposing the personal details of thousands of subscribers.
Perhaps more terrifying still is the prospect of international, state-sponsored hacking: countries mobilizing armies of digital soldiers to infiltrate online platforms. Such organized incursions work to promote one nation’s interest in multiple ways, from targeting sites viewed as critical of the country in question to directly attacking a nation’s infrastructure—its banks, hospitals, television stations, or nuclear plants. For a real-world example, we only have to look at the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, where Russian cyberattacks have knocked out vital telecommunications networks.
The features collected below are as illuminating as they are concerning, and as intriguing as they are startling. More than anything, though, they remind us that behind all hacking incidents are human stories. Both hackers and their victims are real people—even if, to those behind the keyboard, 1s and 0s have abstracted that connection beyond any feelings of regret.
The Hacker (Maddy Crowell, Columbia Journalism Review, April 2023)
I grew up in the 1980s, when the specter of nuclear war meant the periodic blare of warning siren tests. On those occasions a dark fear gripped my heart, a sense that dangerous and unseen forces would have the final, fatal say on my life. War, as we know all too clearly, continues apace in the physical world, but increasingly it feels as though the largest battles are being fought in the digital arena. Nowadays, a different ongoing global conflict seems to infect every corner of society: a war for our minds. That may sound a tad histrionic; politicians have always been in the business of swaying opinion, and propaganda has always been part of geopolitics. But deepfakes, chatbots, and cyberattacks on newspapers have changed the game considerably, leading to a digital arms race in deception and the ability to spot it.
For every cause, though, a champion. Runa Sandvik is a child of the internet era. She encountered her first computer in 2002, at the age of 15, and instantly became fascinated by the possibilities of hacking, a passion that later blossomed into genuine concern for users’ privacy online; now, she works to protect high-risk civil groups such as journalists and human rights lawyers. Her cybersecuity bona fides only make apprehension over state-sponsored hacking all the more alarming. Yet, aside from the fascinating technological insights this article provides, Crowell makes Sandvik herself intriguing: an unconventional woman who seems to have, perhaps unwillingly, taken on the mantle of defender of human digital rights, and done so with tireless dedication.
When I asked Sandvik what would be required to make yourself entirely safe from cyber threats, she replied: you wouldn’t be online at all, and you would have to live in the forest. I often found her prudence perplexing. I wondered if there were things she was hiding from me—an awareness of risks that only someone with her expertise could appreciate. Or if, in her affable bluntness, she simply wanted to convey that most of us are blind to the surveillance dystopia in which we live.
It’s easy to understand why teenagers might be drawn to the murky world of hacking; there’s little more seductive than a realm where your power becomes greatly magnified, and romance of an individual challenging big corporations only sweetens the prospect. Hackers are the modern-day dashing highway bandit, albeit without the rearing horse and two smoking muskets—a rogue we can’t help but secretly admire. Greenberg does a fantastic job of bringing all the characters in this lengthy tale to life. It’s that depth that makes the story an ultimately redemptive one.
For two months, he had been waiting for the raid. He was now keeping a nocturnal schedule, working at his computer with Paras and Dalton until 3 or 4 in the morning before sleeping until 8 am and then heading into his father’s computer repair shop. But that night, having finally gone to bed after 4 am, he still lay awake, his mind racing with anxiety.
As the banging started and his older brother hurried upstairs from their shared basement-level bedroom, Josiah went into the storage room and quickly switched off his computers. All three of the Mirai creators had been careful to do their hacking on remote servers and to connect to them only from ephemeral virtual machines that ran on their own PCs. So he figured that switching the computers off would erase any lingering data in memory. Then, before turning off his phone, he sent a message to Paras using the encrypted messaging app Signal: “911.”
Shout out to all the parents out there who worry about what their children might be getting up to online. Teenagers can be enormously secretive, resentful of unwanted intrusion into their personal business. Nowadays, unfortunately, it’s as easy for an adolescent to get into trouble staying at home as being out late. The best we parents can do is instill in our children all the wisdom and advice that we wish we had received at their age, stay connected, and hope for the best.
Fair warning: this is a tale with no happy ending. It’s the story of a young man finding online the confidence and social network he had been unable to discover in real life, and becoming seduced by the power and possibilities of illegal hacking, with a tragic conclusion. Edwin Robb’s not blameless, of course, but you still can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for him.
Edwin was trawling the internet and scanning networks to see who might be using software with a known hole. In this case, it was HP Data Protector. He searched sites manually using Google, entering “Data Protector” as the search term alongside a specific web or IP address. In early December 2011, Edwin struck gold. He found a university in Norway, NTNU, that was using the software and hadn’t yet installed the update containing the patch. Edwin grabbed his exploit, executed it, and he was inside. Looking around the university’s network, he discovered he had six computer servers at his command. On a roll, Edwin next gained control of a “supercomputer” at the University of Tromsø. He nosed around for a while and then installed a “backdoor”. Now he could access the university’s computer server remotely whenever he wanted to.
Edwin pulled off his stunt without a hitch and earned himself hacker cred with his new friends. Dwaan responded to Edwin’s feat with enthused fist pumps and exclamations of “Loooooooolll” and “OMG!”. This only whetted Edwin’s appetite. He went in search of new targets in other countries. His next victim was the University of Twente in the Netherlands, then a website in Iceland, and after that a university in Japan. He was unstoppable. As long as he took care to connect to a VPN server in Russia first, he left no tracks to follow.
The white hat/black hat binary used to distill hacking’s morality evokes fantasy roleplaying and metaphysical lore—fitting counterparts given the overarching nerd/geek subculture from which hacking emerged. A white-hat hacker, for those who aren’t familiar with the term, is one who uses their computer skills for “good.” Such people are often hired by companies to test their security systems, exposing vulnerabilities before a less scrupulous operator discovers them. There are also the altruists, home-based hackers who spend their weekends searching for vulnerabilities in software and hardware used in people’s homes.
It should be reassuring that such people exist, given the amount of smart technology most of us invite into our lives, especially taking into account the observation you’ll find in this excellent piece: it’s often cheaper for companies to pay a fine rather than develop the necessary security for their products. White-hat hacking, it turns out, is bound by its own strict moral code, and the individuals who follow this code make for fascinating subjects.
Most of Dardaman’s contracts run between one and two weeks. Oftentimes, a company won’t tell their security team Dardaman is there, allowing him to move around their networks quietly, observing how things work and finding his way deeper into the system. But the cat-and-mouse game only lasts a few days.
“The goal is by the end of the week that I’m extremely loud,” he added, noting that his final move is typically to gain domain access to the company’s servers to set off alarms on the security team. “If they don’t catch me by the end of the week, they should reassess their security tools.”
Inside the Global Hack-for-Hire Industry (Franz Wild, Ed Siddons, Simon Lock, Jonathan Calvert, and George Arbuthnott, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, November 2022)
I never cease to be impressed by investigative reporting, especially when presented with narrative skill, as is the case here. The amount of time, dedication, and often personal risk necessary to bring such stories to life is admirable; so too is the ability to tell a story with empathy, sympathy, and suspense. This article is a little different from others on this list, and possibly more frightening. Rather than targeting big corporations, the hackers in India’s underground are routinely paid to access personal email accounts, whether by a wife spying on her husband’s financial affairs or a blackmail victim searching for a way out of their predicament.
What is particularly startling, however, is the apparent complete lack of morality in such hackers. They make no judgments. If a client is willing to pay handsomely, someone can be found who will do their bidding. Isn’t that a fear we all have—the thought of all your private online activity, emails, photos, even movements being completely exposed? This article is one of those rabbit-hole pieces, leading you down ever-darkening corridors into a murky world of diamond dealers, dodgy politicians, and unethical private investigators. It will leave you scrambling to reset all of your passwords.
Before approaching his victims, he researches their personal life looking for details about families, relationships, upbringing, children, wealth and holiday destinations. He does this using automated software to scour the internet for scraps of information about the victim and monitors his targets’ WhatsApp account to establish the time of day they are usually online.
“We have surveillance on you for a week, for two weeks, for three weeks or maybe for a month,” he said. This helps him to be more convincing when posing as an acquaintance of the victim.
I spent countless hours of my childhood writing programs on my dear old ZX Spectrum home computer with its whopping 48 KB of memory. I like to think that I could still knock out a line or two of code if need be (assuming Basic and Logo are acceptable), but I admit to feeling totally lost when it comes to the activities you’ll find chronicled here. This is a competition for college-aged kids, and reading about them jumping from screen to screen, excitedly searching for breaches in the system, fills me with a mixture of admiration and bewilderment, like watching trained acrobats backflip across a stage.
These young hackers may have been playing a game, but in doing so they were rehearsing for real-life encounters. Governments are more aware than ever of the threat of cyberattacks on a country’s infrastructure. If the pretend water plant in this article had been real, a successful hack could have brought about serious consequences. Let’s hope that the talented students who are the subjects of this piece continue to develop their skills in the right direction.
For the next two and a half hours, the water-treatment plant remained under siege from several different groups of hackers, who were attacking each other even as they delved deeper and deeper into the plant’s controls, causing absolute mayhem. At 2:45, a pair of revolving sirens threw blue beams around the room: The system that maintained the plant’s water levels had been disabled, and one of its tanks began to fill at an alarming rate.
“The float’s been submerged!” a technician called out from near the tanks. The float was supposed to cut off water flow the moment it became immersed.
“Is it still filling?” asked another, hunched over a laptop perched on his knees.
“Yes!”
“That’s bad.”
The workers powered down the plant again in order to drain the tank to a safe level.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
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For Harper’s Bazaar, Julieanne Smolinski interviews comedy legend Carol Burnett, age 90, about her current acting roles and doing live unscripted audience Q&A to open The Carol Burnett Show in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The bit was so successful that Burnett took it on the road for 20 years after the show ended.
The questions were never vetted, the audience members never preselected. Burnett would choose on the fly, usually just by picking people out and pointing aggressively at them. On one occasion, on The Carol Burnett Show, a woman asked if she could get onstage and sing a song. Burnett let her, lending the audience member her orchestra and even joining in herself, a few bars into “You Made Me Love You.” Rather than dying of gratitude, the woman laughingly complained that Burnett had “screwed it up” by failing to harmonize during the performance’s big finish. When Burnett tells this story, it’s not “What a bitch” but “What a delight.”
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It’s taken a long time for Toronto officials to recognize a crisis: the city is running out of land to bury its dead. For The Local, Inori Roy reports on the monopolization and “McDonald’s-ization” of Ontario’s bereavement industry, and looks into one group in particular, Mount Pleasant, that has amassed $1.2 billion in assets and hundreds of millions in revenue from its cemetery and funeral services. In the past, cemeteries and family-owned funeral homes worked together in a friendly, cooperative way, but the corporatization of death care has since transformed the industry into a for-profit machine focused on money and real estate.
Back then, Hunter says, cemeteries and funeral homes were “completely different animals.” Funeral homes were responsible for collecting and preparing the deceased, hosting services, ordering flowers, and everything up to the moment the casket reached its final resting place—the rest, burial onward, was the responsibility of the cemetery. During working hours, Humphrey and Mount Pleasant Cemetery were often two limbs of a single organism, working together to lay a body to rest. After clocking off, workers would mingle. “We played hockey together, we played baseball together, we curled together, we would get together and do pub nights,” Hunter remembers. They had, he says, “a very close, intimate professional relationship.”
The governments of aging populations in dense urban centres across the world are already having to face this problem. Hong Kong has been actively encouraging its residents to be cremated; Singapore has a fifteen-year limit on burial plots, after which time the remains are disinterred and cremated. In Toronto, Hanson says, there are options. We could backfill cemeteries—interring people in the spaces between existing graves. We could introduce community burial grounds, smaller cemeteries built into local parks and parkettes. And, as much as the idea might be discomfiting to some, we could bury people in the Greenbelt—which would, in theory, only add to the need to protect and preserve it.
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What is it like to go to the Oscars? No, not the celebrity Oscars, the “normal people Oscars.” Stuart Heritage reports from up in the gods—the mezzanine high above the more famous audience, reserved for journalists, film crews, and the family of nominees. In this fun piece, Heritage discovers that the people here can be even more invested than those below.
But perhaps we are missing something by watching it on a screen. Maybe the definitive way to experience the Oscars is to go to Los Angeles and soak up the atmosphere. If you spend time around the winners, the Oscars might start to make some sense. Maybe, I thought, if I experienced the Oscars in the same way as a celebrity, everything would click into place. I might even end up a born-again Academy Awards convert.
At least, that was my intention. Unfortunately, as someone who ranks extremely low on the entertainment industry’s totem pole, I don’t possess the status to experience the Oscars in the same way as a celebrity. They get to sit close to the stage. Jimmy Kimmel makes jokes about them. People are desperate to be around them. None of that happened to me.
In a sense, that didn’t matter, because it meant I got to experience another side of the ceremony that simply isn’t available to TV viewers. That’s right, on Sunday night, I got to participate in the normal people Oscars.
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