Sally Montgomery takes us on a fascinating journey of self-discovery as she learns how to free dive. In pushing the limits of her physical abilities, she discovers a new identity and redefines her relationship with the sea.
I was anthropologically fascinated by why people might want to do something that seemed so counterintuitive: to hold their breath and fight all instincts to breathe in order to reach a new level of immersion.
I AM MOVING DOWN slowly. At times I close my eyes to relax. There is no rush to the bottom.
Compared to scuba divers, who are laden with heavy oxygen tanks and take breaths that reverberate bubbles and noise, I move quietly, freely, gracefully. “It makes you feel like you are from the sea,” Liv says.
At around 10 meters deep, I reach a point where my buoyancy cancels out. I neither sink nor float. Below that, the water starts pulling me down. At these depths, freedivers can enter a free fall.
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If you’ve seen any docuseries set in jails or prisons recently, you may have seen incarcerated people holding tablets. As Philip Vance Smith II writes from inside a medium-security prison, these aren’t just telecom devices to handle phone and payment services. They also deliver movies and television—at costs that vary from facility to facility, but are consistent in their exorbitance.
The high cost of entertainment falls on families of the incarcerated more than us because we can’t earn much money behind bars. Most jobs in North Carolina prisons pay 40¢, 70¢, or $1 per day—so a streaming bundle could cost a prisoner two weeks’ worth of income, or more. We simply can’t afford the price of entertainment. The astronomical fees that prison-tech companies charge are aimed at our families, who want to help us while we are incarcerated.
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Columbia Law Students for Palestine; CUNY Law Student Against Genocide; Maeve Vitello; Rita W. Wang; Mehrdad Dariush, Chisato Kimura, Chloe Miller, and Rachel Vogel; Alaa Hajyahia and Seetha Tan | The Law and Political Economy Project | May 2, 2024 | 4,342 words
If you read one thing this week about the protest movement sweeping US college campuses, make it this. Drowned out by hysterical concerns about campus safety and anti-Semitism—terms that the mainstream media is largely (and irresponsibly) allowing the opposition to the movement to define—are the protesters’ voices and specific demands. Despite what CNN would have you think, these aren’t impetuous children screaming about a conflict halfway across the world they know little about and have no way of influencing. These are young people who, in the tradition of student opposition to South African apartheid and other odious regimes of the past, know full well that they can have an impact by demanding that their institutions divest from weapons manufacturers and other entities that are currently enabling the genocide in Gaza. They represent a generation that, in no small part thanks to the education they’ve received at the schools now inviting police to brutalize them, sees clearly how various systems of violence and extraction—colonialism and capitalism, for instance—are intertwined. In this collection of short pieces, protesters at Columbia, NYU, Yale, and the City College of New York explain in their own words why they are putting themselves on the line. They know the stakes, and they know what they are capable of. “When students link arms with faculty, New Haven residents, encampments nationwide united under the vision of the ‘Popular University for Gaza,’ and in ultimate solidarity with Palestinians, they make possible a different kind of university that leaves the current administration and Trustees behind—to their great fear,” write four Yale law students. —SD
Chloé Cooper Jones | The New York Times Magazine | April 19, 2024 | 4,755 words
I would normally dismiss a story with such a headline, but the combination of dance and disability in the dek made me stop and look. I’m glad I did, because Cooper Jones’ writing is gorgeous, and the perspective she shares of her partner, choreographer Matty Davis, is inspiring. Cooper Jones has sacral agenesis, a congenital condition that affects the lower spine. Before she met Davis, she believed she lived in a body excluded from most types of movement, finding refuge in fear and disgust as forms of self-protection. (When she’s introduced to Davis’ work in a video online, she describes her response as a mix of disgust and fascination.) In her 2023 memoir, Easy Beauty, she discusses her reluctance to acknowledge her disability. In this piece, she doesn’t focus so much on her body’s physical limitations; she uses simple yet telling words like “clenched” and “curled” to describe its default position. She reflects honestly about the grief in her life—her mother’s deterioration from cancer, her stepfather’s death, her husband’s infidelity—but it’s her writing of Davis as she rehearses with him in preparation for a dance performance, and his freeing definition of movement, that’s truly enlightening. “Movement doesn’t need to be some big leg swing or jump,” he tells her. “It’s walking the dog. It’s us making love. It can include thinking and loss and change.” I tend to save favorite lines from essays in a note app, and after reading this piece, I filled a page with so many insights—ones that challenge my own ideas about dance, mobility, and the interplay of bodies within a physical space. —CLR
Nick Bowlin | Harper’s Magazine | April 15, 2024 | 5,450 words
It wasn’t so long ago that the uneven distribution of wealth had distributed itself somewhat evenly across the Mountain West: Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Sun Valley, Idaho; Telluride, Colorado. But as Nick Bowlin sketches out in this Harper’s feature, nothing quite stacks up to Big Sky, Montana. A private resort socked away above the town counts numerous billionaires among its members, and even down below the average home price clocks in at $2.5 million. Boom times for the Gulfstream crowd aren’t the real point, though. Instead, Bowlin chips away the private-equity varnish to reveal the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Big Sky has always run on the labor of ski-resort employees, but now, those employees are pushed into company-owned converted motels or faraway towns where they still need to work multiple jobs to keep a foothold as the cost of living rises precipitously. Meanwhile, the town itself isn’t really a town at all, but a hodgepodge of homeowners’ associations and other organizations that approximate the work of a mayor or city council—neither of which exist in Big Sky. This is what a company town looks like in the 21st century: not just a place where inhabitants live and work for a corporate behemoth, but where they scrape by in service of the Tres Comas Club in exchange for access to the natural resource that drew them there in the first place. —PR
Bathsheba Demuth | Emergence Magazine | September 16, 2021 | 4,011 words
Most stories follow a familiar pattern, with a beginning, middle, and end. Our place in the story of the earth is unclear, as Bathsheba Demuth writes in this keenly observed essay for Emergence Magazine. Demuth is an author I follow and I was happy to stumble on this story I missed in 2021. She has an uncanny ability to find and convey the beauty she encounters outdoors in the North. Her pieces not only educate me; they, for a time, satiate my never-ending hunger for excellent writing. Demuth accompanies Stanley Njootli on a trip to hunt a moose that will feed them and other members of the community in Old Crow, Yukon. Traveling the Ch’izhìn Njik river, they notice significant erosion along the banks, the collapse of which sends plants and trees and loam into the water. “Banks had lost all coherence, like a bag of flour slashed open. . . . The earth is ceasing to cohere: how to make that coherent? The way I know to do this is with the pattern of a story,” she writes. “But what we see on the river has no end. We are telling from a middle or a beginning, with no view of where it will resolve.” As a white environmental historian with a couple of decades under her belt in the North, Demuth recognizes her position as a relative newcomer. She questions whether the Anthropocene—earth’s current epoch, the first irrevocably influenced by human activity—will become the end of its story. “‘Anthropocene’ is a word but also a story. A story where the hero is not an individual but a species. In it, Homo sapiens carry a tectonic if unruly power, singularly able to shape the fate of all life. Able to make the land itself kneel down.” If only we could learn from the female moose, who, even while pregnant, consumes the “feltleaf willows she prefers” in such a way that the plant flourishes from being gently pruned, rather than razed. If only we returned more to the earth than what we take. Perhaps then, the Anthropocene might become the middle of a larger story, rather than the end of this one. —KS
Joshua Rigsby | Thrillist | April 19, 2024 | 1,713 words
Reading this piece, my first reaction was: “What?” Joshua Rigsby’s visit to the Cabbage Patch Kids Babyland General Hospital is truly bizarre. But bizarre is often brilliant, and Rigsby had my rapt attention as he explained how, in a building that looks like a plantation house in Cleveland, Georgia, Cabbage Patch doll “babies” are “born.” For the measly sum of $120, you can have a complete birthing experience (the “Planned Parenthood” option). Rigsby, not ready for full Cabbage Patch parentage, takes the free tour instead—but still gets to witness a birthing ceremony, his description of which left me with fundamental questions about the human race. Upon the birthing announcement over the tannoy, guests gather around a tree on a plaster mound, in which, as Rigsby explains, electronic Cabbage Patch Kids are buried neck-deep, swiveling “their heads in permanent smiles like a scene from Dante’s Animatronic Inferno.” An employee in hospital scrubs declares Mother Cabbage fully dilated (it remains unclear if Mother Cabbage is the tree, the mound entombing the dolls, or some other deity). Everyone has to shout “push” and the “faithful pump their toddler fists and sway, pleading with the plush baby to emerge from the dilated tree vagina, as the Dante robot heads swivel and writhe.” That was a sentence I needed to read twice. Rigsby takes pains to emphasize that this is all done unironically. Kudos to the staff here. Cabbage Patch Kids sells a lot of dolls: their marketing, including this experience, obviously works (I refer again to my questions about humanity). While I am never going to visit the dilated tree vagina, I am glad Rigsby did—he recounts this extraordinary place delightfully. —CW
Audience Award
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Set in the San Joaquin Valley, Jessica Garrison’s LA Times feature is about an irrigation official named Dennis Falaschi who’s been accused of stealing more than $25 million worth of water from the federal government over the past two decades. Garrison details how Falaschi siphoned water out of the Delta-Mendota Canal—one of the main channels delivering water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Fresno and Merced counties—with a secret pipe. Some farmers considered him “the Robin Hood of irrigation”; others were outraged that a water official had been stealing and selling “liquid gold” to farmers and other districts, and using public funds to pay for everything from housing remodels to car repairs to concert tickets for himself and his employees. A very wild, very California tale. —CLR
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Plenty of ski towns run on the labor of year-rounders, the folks who actually live in the places most only visit. But not many ski towns are like Big Sky, Montana, where the average house runs $2.5 million and billionaires flock to private resorts in the mountains. Nick Bowlin reports from the land that time forgot—and private-equity firms bought—to tell the story of a 21st-century company town.
The immigrant workers tend to hold different jobs from the ski-slope employees, but some experiences cross these divides, notably that of having one’s employer for a landlord. Lone Mountain has spent more than $300 million on community housing and plans to build over one thousand more units. One of these projects is the Powder Light, a drab collection of stacked prefabricated boxes costing $1,700 a month per room, often shared, and backed by Lone Mountain; the 448-bed development was finished in 2023. A current Yellowstone Club employee, who had previously worked for the resort, was one of the first tenants, and he told me he experienced water pooling on the carpets and fuses blowing if the stove and oven were used at the same time. “Everything about the housing here is the most half-assed, cheaply built garbage that you can imagine,” he told me.
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Josuha Rigsby recounts his family visit to Cabbage Patch Kids’ Babyland General Hospital with understated humor. Although bemused by the experience, Rigsby still vividly describes the “birthing” of a Cabbage Patch doll. This is a highly entertaining read.
Along the back wall of the hospital, as in an ancient procession, the ground becomes more sacred. Here resides a faux-earthen mound, several feet high, made of painted plaster with geode caves recessed inside—the stuff of ‘60s-era TV sci-fi or Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Sprinkled around the mound are cabbage leaf sprouts from which protrude Cabbage Patch doll heads. If you pluck a baby from this mound, a cashier will ring it up for a mere $60, roughly double the doll’s retail price. It’s like apple picking, where you pay for the pleasure of harvesting your own pretend child.
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We are currently witnessing the largest, most consequential student protest movement in a generation. But mainstream media have given remarkably little space and airtime to the young people putting themselves on the line. Here, in their own words, gathered before the brutal crackdowns administrations and police authorized this week, are some of the protest leaders, articulating their carefully formed ideas and demands:
Nearly every student encampment has set out demands tailored to their campus. Yet common and central to each of these groups’ demands is divestment – that is, demanding their university withdraw its investments in companies that either do business with Israel or materially provide support for the occupation. Universities in the United States are massive financial institutions, who invest billions in assets to provide revenue. How big of a player are Universities in the world of finance? Columbia University’s endowment totaled $13.6 billion last year alone. Where does the money go? It goes into traditional investment portfolios meant to maximize returns; included in these portfolios are weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Some Universities have as much as $52.5 million invested in weapons manufacturing alone.
In targeting universities for divestment, student protests across the country are not about citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, nor are they a mere ideological struggle over a conflict the students themselves are divorced from; student encampments target institutions ostensibly accountable to them, in a way that aims to prevent their material support for the occupation. The ties between a university campus and the violence propagated by capital investment are close and tangible. Not only do universities pour billions of dollars into the companies providing the material means of Israeli occupation, but figures within those companies find themselves looped back into the university’s administration. For example, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, sits as an officer of the Board of Trustees for NYU, a university which violently swept its campuses own encampment demanding divestment from the company he heads. (Maeve Vitello, New York University)
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A few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Len Davis rose to face a jury. A former policeman, Davis was a big man who’d once exuded toughness and sometimes thrown himself in harm’s way on the streets. He became known around New Orleans’s Ninth Ward as Robocop, but that wasn’t his only nickname: People also called him the Desire Terrorist.
In the early 1990s, Davis earned a fearsome reputation in and around a public housing complex called the Desire Development for helping drug dealers move product and cover up violent crimes. Murder is what landed Davis in court, but the victim wasn’t in the drug game. She was a single mother who had filed a brutality complaint against Davis. The next day, he ordered a hit man to kill her.
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The murder is the most notorious of the 424 that were committed in New Orleans in 1994, the city’s deadliest year on record. After Davis was arrested, he became a national symbol of the depths of corruption and depravity the New Orleans Police Department had sunk to, and he was convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to die. The verdict was affirmed on appeal, but the death sentence was tossed out. In 2005, a resentencing trial was scheduled to determine Davis’s fate once more.
Davis represented himself in court, delivering an opening argument and even cross-examining witnesses. Despite damning evidence to the contrary, including recorded phone conversations between him and the hit man immediately before and after the murder, Davis claimed that he was innocent, that the witnesses testifying against him were lying. “When this case is over,” he said, “you will be filled with reasonable doubt.”
The jury was unmoved. On August 9, it recommended the same punishment as the previous panel: death. A judge affirmed the recommendation two months later.
For many people in New Orleans, the resentencing marked the end of the saga of Len Davis, and news of it was all but swept from the headlines by the worst disaster in the city’s history—a disaster that spurred shocking new instances of police brutality. For at least five incarcerated men, however, the story wasn’t over. In their view, that high-profile murder case from 1994 only scratched the surface of Davis’s wrongdoing. Were it not for him, the men claimed, they might not be behind bars. In a sense, they were the Desire Terrorist’s other victims.
No one seemed interested in their side of the story. Their appeals stalled or failed. In time the men came to understand that their only chance of getting out of prison was for someone to recognize the wrong done to them and take the extraordinary steps necessary to make it right. So they waited. For 17 years after Davis’s resentencing they waited.
Part I
Locals like to point out that the most infamous cop in New Orleans history isn’t from Louisiana at all. Born in Chicago in 1964, Len Davis moved to the Crescent City with his mother upon his father’s untimely passing. After he graduated high school, Davis drove a candy truck for several years. He also racked up a criminal record, including battery charges.
At 22, Davis enrolled in the NOPD’s training academy. Amid the crack epidemic and white flight from the city, the department was desperate for recruits. It loosened employment standards, allowing some individuals with criminal histories to attend the academy, and made getting through training easier than ever. “They created a situation where if you could not pass the final exam, you could still graduate,” Felix Loicano, a former acting chief of detectives with the NOPD, said in an interview.
Davis wasn’t at the academy long before he got in trouble for unspecified reasons and was given the heave-ho. But after taking a job guarding academy property, he was allowed to reenroll. He graduated in 1988.
At the time, the NOPD was plagued by misconduct and graft. Deputies vying for the department’s top job had loyal factions committed to protecting their own. “We had the equivalent of four Mafia crime families running the police department,” a city official told The New York Times. Pay was so low—the starting salary for an officer was less than $20,000—that many cops worked security on the side. Enterprising officers known as detail brokers even hired fellow police to work gigs for clients and took a cut of their earnings. Moonlighting, which often paid well, created perverse incentives. “The allegiance becomes to this seedy, after-hours establishment that you are guarding,” historian Leonard Moore has said, “as opposed to your particular shift at the precinct.”
Meanwhile, among city residents the NOPD was known to be ruthless. Between 1985 and 1990, the federal government received 26 civil-rights complaints for every 1,000 officers on the force. That was more than 50 times the rate for the New York Police Department.
Davis landed in the NOPD’s Seventh District after finishing the academy, and in some ways he distinguished himself. Once, after responding to the scene of a mugging, the victim wrote a letter to the department praising his courtesy. In another instance, Davis talked a woman out of shooting herself and into giving him her gun. For his efforts, Davis received commendations but not promotions, a fact that may or may not have been related to the infractions that were beginning to accumulate on his employment record: ignoring orders, failing to complete paperwork.
In May 1989, Davis was transferred to the Fifth District, known as the Bloody Fifth. Violence was rising as gang recruitment and drug use proliferated in the district’s public housing, including the Desire Development. One criminal group did business out of a black pickup emblazoned with the word “Homicide” in gold lettering.
On July 19, 1991, while Davis was chasing three armed suspects, a bullet shattered the windshield of his cruiser, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. He spun into a fence, then burst out of the car with his gun raised and collared one of the suspects. A moment later, a gun fired and Davis crumpled, groaning from a gut shot. The suspect he’d grabbed tried to shake free, but Davis managed to pin him down until backup arrived, all while blood flooded the front of his uniform.
Davis received a medal for sustaining injury in the line of duty, and after three months of recovery he rejoined the force. His return was far from triumphant. He cycled through a succession of partners. He had an alcohol problem. He was accused of brutality, physical intimidation, and stealing from the department. Once, when he was stopped for driving on the shoulder of a road, Davis threatened to beat up the officer who’d pulled him over. In 1992, he was suspended from work for 51 days on battery charges after he assaulted a woman with his flashlight, leaving her with a head wound and two black eyes. According to Davis, she had criticized and hit him as he made a drug arrest outside her house.
Attorney Carol A. Kolinchak, who later represented Davis, would argue that no one could have emerged from her client’s tribulations as a cop unaffected. “It’s well documented. It’s in [the] literature, it’s been published by experts who have studied law enforcement,” Kolinchak said in court. “The symptoms are common and they’re universal: stress, irritability, aggression, depression, alcohol, substance abuse, and increases in citizen complaints.”
At some point, Davis’s behavior became devious. His cousins Little June and Charles Butan dealt drugs in New Orleans, and they began funneling cash to Davis for accompanying them as they transported their product. He came to these jobs armed and in his NOPD uniform. “I’m sure not the police no more,” Davis once told a girlfriend. “They lost me a long fucking time ago. I’m on this bitch strictly to get what I can get, use my job to benefit me.”
Davis wasn’t the only New Orleans cop who crossed the line between enforcing the law and breaking it. The NOPD’s vice squad, for instance, was well on its way to being disbanded for thefts and shakedowns—the deputy in charge would eventually be convicted of snatching cash from the till during raids on strip joints and bars in the French Quarter. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Davis found a co-conspirator, another corrupt cop to be his partner in crime.
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Writer Chloé Cooper Jones has sacral agenesis, a congenital disability that affects the lower spine. In this beautiful essay—in which she describes her participation in a dance work choreographed by her boyfriend, Matty Davis—she writes about fear and disgust as forms of self-protection, opening up to and trusting a partner, and expanding the definition of “movement.”
I asked him how limited he would be if the partner in the rehearsal room had a body like mine. I was shocked to hear my own question, and I felt as though someone else had asked it. “Easy Beauty,” the book I’d spent the last year promoting, was in part about my reluctance to acknowledge my disability, preferring to abandon the notion of a body altogether and lead instead with my ideas, words or accomplishments in conversations with others. I had charted my attempts to do this less, to be more in tune with my identity as a disabled woman. But the lessons of self-acceptance that I had learned and written about felt puny and distant in the face of this hypothetical — me in a room, dancing.
“Do you ever watch the New York City Marathon?” he asked. I did not. “I cry watching the runners,” he told me. It was not the ones who won or broke records that moved him so deeply, but the ones who were, regardless of their position in the pack, simply reaching for and ascending to their own personal physical pinnacle. This was the kind of movement he was interested in. Less compelling to him was a history of dance traditions that, like ballet, imposed a set of movements onto bodies — the movements themselves being the pinnacle to be attained, and attainment possible for a tiny sliver of existing human bodies, and even then, only briefly. That common practice, what I associated with dance, was not interesting to him and could not be further from the center of his approach.
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Stuart Potts lives in a one-bed flat in Middleton, a town in Greater Manchester, and ever since he moved in, he has let homeless people come and stay. This unregulated charity work is clearly a means for Potts to keep his own demons at bay, but his efforts for others still make for a heartwarming story.
Still, when someone from a local charity told them about a man putting homeless people up in his own house, they were suspicious. “I thought he was just going to be some fucking … ” Jade paused, looking for the right word, “teacher or something.” But when they met for a pint to scope him out, Jade was immediately reassured. “He’d been on the streets, and he’d been to prison. He was really normal, we just felt comfortable. He’s not judging.” They stayed at his flat that night.
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In this interview, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie speaks with Erica Wagner about the deeply personal costs of championing free speech, the process of writing his new memoir, Knife, optimism as a disease, and the comedic foreshadowing of the attack that nearly took his life.
The task you undertook is different from therapy, but what did you gain from writing in this way?
Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor says that you shouldn’t treat illness as metaphor: illness is illness and metaphor is metaphor. And I felt something the same about this: writing is writing and therapy is therapy, and I had a very good therapist. But what it did do, I feel, is it gave me back control of the narrative. So, instead of being a man lying on a stage in a pool of blood, I’m a man writing a book about a man lying on a stage in a pool of blood, and that felt like it gave me back the power, you know? My story. My story that I’m telling in my way. And that felt good.
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In this Vanity Fair story, Keziah Weir recounts how the Vatican played a role in the science of in vitro fertilization. A 1957 encounter between two men—Bruno Lunenfeld, an endocrinologist, and Don Giulio Pacelli, an Italian prince and one of Pope Pius XII’s nephews—marked the start of the journey toward the first successful IVF pregnancy. The miracle substance that ultimately made it possible? Thirty-thousand liters of urine from 300 postmenopausal nuns, which was used to develop Pergonal, a fertility drug. Weir intertwines religion, science, and politics in this fascinating piece, and enriches the narrative with details and memories from Lunenfeld’s incredible life.
A year later, Lunenfeld sat with Giulio Pacelli and Piero Donini, musing over the design needs of the special toilets they planned to install in the convent. They settled on a teardrop-shaped container akin to a small trash can, lined with a plastic bag. Throughout 1958, elderly nuns hiked up their habits, crouched over the containers, and voided their bladders. Serono employees collected the bags of urine and transported them to the Rome laboratory at Via Casilina, where technicians emptied them into metal tanks for processing. (During a 1930s Netherlands-based urine collection program, the people tasked with picking up donations were called pissmannekes, or “small piss men.”)
By 1959, Serono had harvested enough hMG to begin trials on infertile women. Lunenfeld, back in Israel, where he was working as a visiting scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, wanted to treat his own hypothalamic amenorrheic patients with the drug, hoping to induce ovulation. The head of the hospital instructed Lunenfeld to inject himself with the substance. If he didn’t sustain any major side effects, they’d go forward with treatment.
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Why visit a library if you’ve got Google at your fingertips? In this thoughtful essay, Charles Digges reflects on the services and experiences that libraries have given us over the decades, and how today’s libraries—and librarians—still offer things that a search bar can’t: Community and connection with people IRL. The space to be curious. The chance to discover the unexpected, free from an all-seeing eye. But Digges does so in a way that doesn’t pit the library against the internet, nor does he dwell on or romanticize our analog past.
But what if it hadn’t been so simple? What if—instead of having my screen cluttered instantly with infinite reproductions of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks—I was forced to live in a period of contemplation? Of not knowing? Might that have generated a spark of curiosity?
If so, I might have found my way to the library. And while there, I might have stumbled on a good deal more about Nighthawks and its enigmatic portrayal of urban loneliness—as, once upon a time, as a Midwestern kid longing for a life in the big city, I did within the stacks at the Iowa City Public Library. There, I followed the streets of Hopper’s metropolis to the stories of John Cheever and Ralph Ellison, their characters often under the spell of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, whose records I checked out. I could step backward, too, following Hopper’s urban themes to Degas and Manet—their gamines encountered with the longing felt in the pages of Proust.
The fact that eBooks can only be read by one patron at a time puts me back in an approximation of a public space. It reminds me that there is another human being somewhere in this city who shares a curiosity with me. We may never meet, but as I place a hold on the material we’re both interested in, I am acknowledging some sort of physical finitude—a democratic compact to share a limited resource. This is not a typical digital experience where the world—and our searches—are available for a price.
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Set in the San Joaquin Valley, Jessica Garrison’s LA Times feature exposes an irrigation official named Dennis Falaschi who’s been accused of stealing more than $25 million worth of water from the federal government over the past two decades. Garrison details how Falaschi siphoned water out of the Delta-Mendota Canal—one of the main channels delivering water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Fresno and Merced counties—with a secret pipe. Some farmers considered him “the Robin Hood of irrigation”; others were outraged that a water official had been stealing and selling “liquid gold” to farmers and other districts, and using public funds to pay for everything from housing remodels to car repairs to concert tickets for himself and his employees. A very wild, very California tale.
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Walsh walked over to where the hat was spinning. He peered down at a standpipe that had once connected the Delta-Mendota Canal to an irrigation ditch that extends through adjacent farmland. The standpipe had been cemented closed and was no longer functional. At least in theory.
Walsh moved closer and heard a rushing noise in the pipe — the sound of water running hard and fast.
There must be a leak, he thought. But if the canal were leaking, there should have been water pooling around him. The field where he was standing was dry.
And he saw something even more peculiar. The abandoned pipe was old and rusted. But it had been fitted with a new gate to control the flow of water from canal to ditch. And that gate had a lock. Walsh’s water authority was responsible for every turnout on that canal. But he had never seen this lock, and he didn’t have a key.
“When I saw that, I thought: Someone is stealing water,” he said, a sentiment later echoed in court filings.
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For years, Richie Henderson helped the children of Avenues The World School cross the street. For years, he cared for them like he cared for his own family. And when tragedy struck, that huge extended family did the same for him and his loved ones. A newspaper feature that embodies the best of the genre: sadness, hope, and a feeling that humans still look out for one another.
In the summer of 2023, the school honored Henderson’s contribution by making him a staff employee, something they had never done for a crossing guard before. He’d no longer work as a subcontractor. He would have a benefits package, including health care, a retirement plan and a life insurance policy.
“They gave him his roses,” Dockery said of Henderson’s status as a staff member.
She said her husband, imposing at more than 6 feet tall and more than 200 pounds, could be stern and demanding of his own children, but never with the kids at Avenues.
“Those kids, that school, they got the best of Richie,” she said with pride and not regret.
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In the face of the climate crisis, few pastimes seem quite as frivolous (or doomed) as skiing and snowboarding. Paying through the nose to slide down mountains, even while the planet burns and the ice melts, is rather absurd. Why, exactly, do we care about this sport?
It’s simple, really. Frivolity is fun. Fun attracts people, and those people snowball into groups until a legitimate industry revolves around said frivolity—for better or worse. I’m one of those people. Despite growing up in an English county where the highest hill stands at a whopping 344 feet, I fell in love with skiing during a school trip to Austria, and ultimately moved to Vancouver, Canada, partly in pursuit of bountiful powder.
And I’m one of around 400 million who visit ski resorts (including indoor centers) annually; that’s nearly 5 percent of the planet’s population. The US ski market alone is worth an estimated $4.6 billion and is still growing, climate change be damned.
Skiing’s elitist reputation may be warranted, but it’s also not the whole story. When I ski back to my patchily converted 2005 GMC Savana, I remember that different versions of skiing exist. Frivolity is worth fighting for—for everyone. More importantly, skiing offers a unique perspective on a question that has shaped our present and will shape our future: how we interact with nature.
Until recently ski culture has generally focused on joy, freedom, and conquest. But attitudes are diverging as the planet heats—and alpine environments warm faster than any other. Twice as fast, in the Swiss Alps. Hundreds of abandoned resorts now haunt Europe, and in the US ski seasons shortened by 34 days between 1982 and 2016. Skiing’s plight presents some of the starkest Western proof that the climate crisis is not our future, but our present.
When normality breaks, calls for change commence. But what does adaptation look like for winter sports? Technological innovation, in the shape of giant snow blankets and thirsty snow machines? Reoriented business models and environmental practices? Elitism and corporate consolidation? Activism and democratic accountability? New ways of sliding?
Skiing is not an escape, but a practice rooted in and reflective of society. How the ski world balances competing interests in its responses to these threats will shape livelihoods, landscapes, health outcomes, cultural attitudes, and political possibilities—beyond just ski towns. Skiing is a bellwether, a dress rehearsal, a microcosm.
The outdoor community is starting to take note. Climate change, mental health, and diversity are now common themes in ski media. This is welcome, but much work remains to connect individual stories and collective passion for adventure with systemic change. As the Northern Hemisphere’s ski season draws to a close and the Southern Hemisphere’s season approaches, I present these pieces with this possibility in mind.
Snowfall is falling, in the worst possible sense. In Europe, snowpack depth has decreased by 8.4 percent per decade since 1971. The industry’s most visible response has been technological. Resorts are furiously making fake snow and painstakingly preserving real snow.
For 1843, Simon Willis tells this story through snow-obsessed Finn Mikko Martikainen—a man who once convinced a doctor to set the bones of his broken wrist “in the form of a loose fist so he could continue to grasp a ski pole.” Now one of the world’s leading snow consultants, advising resorts and the Sochi (2014) and Beijing (2022) Winter Olympics, Martikainen has graduated from sliding on snow to conjuring it out of dry air.
In Beijing, the problem isn’t heat but drought. Yanqing, where the alpine ski races will be held, gets an average of 5cm of snow a year; the chance of a flurry during the games will hover around 1%. The barren hillsides are more likely to be dusted by sand blowing in from the Gobi desert than by snow.
The chosen solution to this self-imposed problem, Willis reports in this piece published before the Beijing games, will be snow machines. To affirm the sense of sanctioned insanity, he explains that “in the hillsides outside Beijing, water is as scarce as it is in South Sudan.” European examples further bolster the case.
Ski resorts have used snow machines for decades. They aren’t always so terrible—when water is drawn from responsible sources and melts back into waterways. Nevertheless, this piece outlines the business-as-usual future of skiing, in which problems are innovated away, to just beyond the resort boundary. A future, as one source puts it, of every ski resort “trying to make itself independent of nature.”
We can discern an alternative future in the recent rise of backcountry skiing: in the US, “skinning,” or walking with sticky ski pads uphill to ski lines without resort access, has more than tripled since 2020. Higher ticket prices, busier resorts, COVID-19, and popular backcountry films have all contributed. The result is more skiers seeking a slower, more attuned mountain experience.
For FT Magazine, Tristan Kennedy travels to the Italian village of Montespluga. Four hotels once served a bustling ski community here, with skiers arriving on horse-drawn sleighs whenever snow closed the road to cars.
By the early 1980s, however, numbers had dwindled. The other hotels shut down, one by one, the draglift was dismantled and Montespluga in winter became something of a ghost town. Until the arrival of Homeland.
Homeland represents an interesting facet of the backcountry trend: the flickering dawn of lift-free ski “resorts.” Hankin-Evelyn, here in British Columbia, has been quietly pioneering a rustic model for years, captured in this short Salomon TV film. Bluebird, the first lift-free resort in the US, opened to positive press in 2020 (though it closed in 2023 due to a struggle to find suitable long-term land). Lift-free resorts will never replace traditional ones. But in contrast to the myopic techno-optimism of snow production, they propose a low-impact response to the climate crisis—one rooted in a logic of sufficiency. It’s a space worth watching.
One consequence of the backcountry boom, in conjunction with climate change making avalanche conditions more volatile and challenging to predict, is the increased risk of fatalities.
The microphone dangled on a cord extending from his backpack. But he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t move his arms. He lay immobile, struggling to breathe for about three minutes. Then everything faded to black.
So relays Joshua Hammer for GQ in this harrowing account of a Swiss avalanche incident. Hammer recounts the rescue attempt as if in real time, punctuated by timestamps marking the minutes—each reducing the survival odds—since the victim’s burial.
The piece captures the spectacular illusion of tranquility on a bluebird powder day. Crucially, it also articulates the silence of an avalanche’s aftermath—when buried under snow—as well as its trigger moment. “You hear that crack and the silence while nature holds its breath, waiting for the mountain to go,” says one alpinist, who has lost multiple friends to avalanches. “Even the birds go quiet. You can feel your breath thundering in your ears.”
Ultimately, the story conveys how proper training, quality kit, excellent decision-making, and good luck will all continue to be vital in the backcountry—even with the world’s most storied rescue operation within radio range.
At age 33, Cathleen Calkins fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a ski patroller. But, in this personal essay for Longreads, she tells the story of how through skiing and helping people every day, her “dreams became nightmares.”
As I experienced both trivial and traumatic moments day after day, an emotional narrative emerged, and I began to confront the falsehood that I too would be okay. My thinning confidence overshadowed my passion to rescue others, and seven years into my career, I became terrified to do my job.
Calkins offers a vulnerable account of the incidents that chiseled away her well-being, the culture of qualified bravado that suppressed the symptoms, and the fear, despair, and breakdown that resulted. Coming from the rescuer’s perspective—the red-jacketed hero, ever poised and in control—it hits all the harder.
Gloria Liu’s profile of a Park City, Utah patroller is a worthwhile, complementary take on the challenges and precarity of ski patrolling.
The future emerges from this history in Calkins’ advocacy for a ski culture more attuned to shadow, pain, and trauma. It also lurks in her depiction of how skiing—that frivolous pastime—can snap futures into pieces. And it runs through her reflections on the way skiing, like other pursuits that give young people “freedom, autonomy, and power,” presents a manner of moving into the future, motivations and misdirections included.
Socialism and skiing seem unlikely bedfellows today, but it hasn’t always been so. This fantastic Current Affairs essay by Richard Michael Solomon opens with an old German man in a chairlift, holding forth on the prospect of skiing under fully automated luxury communism. Inspired, Solomon traces the history of skiing from its egalitarian European roots, through a postwar wave of social-democratic skiing projects, and into late capitalism’s Ski Inc. oligopoly.
Ski Inc. is what many will recognize as skiing today, especially in the US: giant corporates like Vail and Alterra gobbling up hills; bumper multi-resort season passes and stratospheric day-ticket prices ($299 in some places) incentivizing yearlong commitments as a hedge against climate change; and ski towns morphing into “aristocrats’ Potemkin villages” of empty chalets, splashy stores, and olde tyme simulacra. Stuart Winchester, Substack’s leading ski journalist, recently (and provocatively) made the point that not all good ski resorts match this description. True enough, but the slide toward consolidation and luxury continues.
Solomon goes further, searching for more radical models. He recommends existing nonprofit and community-owned ski projects. He proposes taxes, more taxes, revenue sharing, and a Public Lands Fund modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund. He also calls for politicization:
Skiers, river rats, scuba people, dirt-bags, surfer bros, biker girls, cavers, bird fanatics, anglers, hiking vagabonds—we are a powerful voter bloc and possess sizable consumer power. Given that the natural world is under relentless assault by a pollutive and commodifying force, the outdoor community must become thoroughly politicized.
Solomon’s vision is fanciful, by his own admission. But fanciful ideas are often so from a political perspective, not a practical one. Fatalism, he argues, is worse than fancy:
On the chairlift, I recall Hans told me that our modern social order is like concrete. To sledgehammer the thing is brutish and unlikely to do much, but to sandpaper the edges is inadequate. For this reason, such ski dreams of his may seem like an exercise in pointless fantasy—fated “to bleach on the plains of the past under a hallucinated utopian sun,” wrote British Marxist E.P. Thompson. But in the boom-bust rhythms, small cracks in that concrete will form. There, radical projects can sink their roots.
As society undergoes an ecological turn, parts of the ski community are turning the same way. In both cases, Indigenous voices have much to contribute—if we can learn to listen. I love Matthew Tufts’ Freeskier profile of Lakota skier Connor Ryan, a modern shredder spreading ancient wisdom, as a step in this direction.
“Dude, I just want to pop up like the little Microsoft Office paperclip and tell other skiers, ‘Oh hey there! It sounds like you’re having trouble describing your connection to nature,’ [Ryan] said with an exasperated laugh between bites of ahi poke ceviche. Our guide to alpine reverence wore a basketball jersey and backwards cap with long braided hair snaking out from the brim. He pointed at us with a tortilla chip. ‘Bro, what if I told you Native cultures have had words for that for thousands of years?”
The piece hangs around a series of Indigenous phrases, each encouraging a reciprocal, animistic, grateful relationship with nature—for skiers and others. It is a paean to the power of language.
Language is not only a tool for communicating intentions and relaying our actions, but also serves as a pillar in the framework of our interpretation of the world and its people. It’s largely held that a people defines its language; it is less frequently acknowledged that a language reciprocally shapes its people.
One of my favorite ski films in recent years, Spirit of the Peaks, explores Connor Ryan’s perspectives—and showcases his skiing—through a visual medium.
Skiing is not the most diverse world, so representation is important. But when abstracted from different communities’ perspectives and particularities, representation can feel tokenistic—especially within marketing campaigns. Not this profile. In focusing on Ryan’s linguistic insights and ritualistic practices—singing songs, and burning sweetgrass—the piece is artful in its articulation of diverse ways of thinking and being.
Connor isn’t out to alter the experience skiers already have with the mountains; rather, he sees an opportunity, through language, to enhance the depth and perspective of these experiences in a way that cultivates a healthier reciprocal relationship between skiers, the land and the Indigenous peoples upon whose land we so often recreate. He hopes to bring some of these Indigenous terms into the skier’s vernacular, integrating long-standing cultural practices into our daily experiences on the mountain. In doing so, the ski community can adopt a new understanding of, and appreciation for, our relationship with the natural world.
To close, a piece that is less literary long-form and more a realist rallying cry. Scottish snowboarder Calum Macintyre is one of the sport’s most outspoken environmental activists. Matt Barr’s Looking Sideways Substack, for which this is a guest post, is one of the most thoughtful corners of the snowsports world. (Macintyre also just appeared on the Looking Sidewayspodcast, discussing the same themes).
Having been involved in the climate movement for some years, I have often been asked by people who have no interest in snow sports or climbing, ‘Where the hell are all of you?’ I have found it difficult to respond to this question. In this piece, I will present my five reasons why I believe our community is not more engaged and why I think more of us should participate in disruptive protests.
I love the simple, direct provocation of this piece. It asks all of us with an affinity for the outdoors to ask some honest questions: Are we doing what we can to protect the environments we cherish? If not, why not? What are the most effective actions we can take? These questions are increasingly animating both ski communities and wider society. Their consequences will come for skiers first—but will catch us all in the end.
Sam Firman is a freelance writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. He writes a newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and how this might help build better systems.
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Today’s internet is fragile, toxic, and broken, with tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta “consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure.” In this thoughtful essay, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon make their case for “rewilding” and rebuilding the web and look to ecologists for inspiration, vision, and actionable next steps. Rewilding doesn’t mean repairing, but restoring—considering the internet as an entire habitat, making it more resilient via diversity, and allowing more people to make, remake, and innovate.
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.
But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?
Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view.
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Muskrat populations in North America are declining. But why? For Hakai Magazine, Brandon Keim dives into the reasons why the number of these under-appreciated, semiaquatic rodents are dwindling, to help us understand their contribution to the environment and the others species that share it.
The animals are often mistaken for beavers, another semiaquatic rodent, albeit one whose adults weigh as much as a six-to-eight-year-old child; muskrats tip the scales at a couple kilograms. That lack of appreciation extends to the ecological roles performed by muskrats. Though their influences are subtle when compared with the wetland engineering of beavers, muskrats are still important habitat makers and nutrient movers. They help the world come to life, even if we don’t readily notice them doing so; their diminishment would reverberate far beyond them. It is also foreboding. What does it portend, and what does it say about how humans have transformed the world, when in so many places such a common, hardy animal can no longer thrive?
In his review of muskrat ecosystem impacts, Ahlers describes how these disturbances produce dramatic increases in plant species richness. One study suggested that muskrats were primarily responsible for an increase of more than 70 percent in the variety of plants found in the disturbed areas of a cattail marsh; by grazing on abundant plants that would otherwise become dominant, muskrats also create space for rare plants to grow. Meanwhile, their houses—a meter or more from the water and up to two meters wide, lasting for a year or two before gradually degrading—become habitat features themselves. “Birds are probably the most conspicuous beneficiaries of the muskrat’s influence on wetlands,” writes Ahlers, including the ducks, terns, grebes, and other wetland avians who use muskrat houses as nesting sites. Turtles, water snakes, and frogs also dwell in them, and even skunks and shrews—more than 60 vertebrate species altogether, by one count.
These animals also avail themselves of the reed feeding platforms that muskrats construct. So do beetles and other invertebrates, and in turn their predators benefit. As the platforms decompose, they even increase local microbial diversity. And where muskrats dig dens in banks along the water’s edge rather than build houses, their burrowing aerates riparian soils, and those subterranean chambers become habitat for reptiles and amphibians. “When you remove them,” says Smith of muskrats, “the ecology of the wetland changes.”
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