Robert Sanchez brings us a rich profile of Lee Maxwell, age 94, whose love of washing machines inspired him to create Lee Maxwell’s Washing Machine Museum, home to 1,500 antique washing machines, all housed on his property in Eaton, Colorado.
He was an expert in the esoteric. Not only did he have the most comprehensive collection of washing machines on the planet, but Lee also collected antique mop wringers, irons, and vacuum stomps. He’d built the menagerie, he says, because he was intrigued by the washers’ mechanics and, over time, became interested in their histories as well. The assemblage was also, he thought, just really, really cool. A steady flow of visitors—up to 700 a year—from around the world would pass through the warehouses and marvel at his pieces, which include an 1885 Guffins Steam Washing Machine, something called a Torpedo Washer, and antique Whirlpools. CBS’ Sunday Morning program profiled Lee in 2018. The “spin doctor,” Jane Pauley had called him.
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Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist. He’s also an investigator. He calls himself a “private ear.” To put it succinctly, he listens to crimes—the audio captured in phone recordings and CCTV footage, for instance—in search of the truth:
One of the earliest cases Abu Hamdan worked on involved Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Abu Daher, two Palestinian teen-agers who were shot dead by Israeli border police in the occupied West Bank during a Nakba Day protest. The Israel Defense Forces claimed that the officers had shot the boys with rubber bullets, to quell the demonstration, and that the cause of the deaths could not be determined. Abu Hamdan used sound analysis to differentiate the sonic signatures of various kinds of ammunition. In this case, the sounds were of neither rubber-coated bullets nor live ammunition “but something in between,” he said. “A kind of amalgamation of the two sounds.” Abu Hamdan ultimately found that the officers had fired live ammunition out of a rubber-bullet extension. This finding led to the indictment of Ben Deri, one of the Israeli border officers, on manslaughter charges. (In 2016, Deri accepted a plea deal for the lesser charge of negligent homicide and received a nine-month prison sentence.)
When Ben Deri was arrested, in 2014, it was the first time that a member of the Israeli forces had been charged with killing a Palestinian child. But how could Abu Hamdan feel anything like resolution? The pursuit of legal justice, however limited, had forced him into a cowed posture. “I was immediately asked to do something that, for me, was politically compromising, which was to argue that the Israeli soldiers were not firing rubber bullets but live ammunition,” he said—the implication being that rubber bullets were acceptable. “Rubber bullets, especially in the Israel-Palestine context, are constantly being shot in people’s faces at close range,” Abu Hamdan explained. They maim, as a form of deterrence.
Two years after the bullet analysis, he created an installation called “Earshot,” which reflects on the killings of Nawara and Abu Daher. The centerpiece is a video called “Rubber Coated Steel.” The film was shot in an indoor gun range, where the sounds of gunfire cannot be heard from the outside—a metaphor for violence done in a kind of aural darkness. There is no speech, but text runs along the bottom of the video: a transcript from an imaginary civil trial. And yet, even in this space of speculative justice, Nawara and Abu Daher are not given “a voice”; the boys are not made to ventriloquize a fantasy of justice from beyond the grave. Abu Hamdan challenges a maxim forced onto the marginalized: that their voices are a source of power.
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Andrew R. Chow | TIME | July 8, 2024 | 4,250 words
There are 137 bitcoin mines in the US, many of them located in remote and rural places in Texas, “home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians.” After a massive bitcoin facility started operating in town of Granbury, people of all ages began to experience a range of unexplainable medical issues, including hypertension, chest pain, heart palpitations, migraines, vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss, and panic attacks. Even the community’s nonhuman residents—from dogs to chickens to a family’s backyard oak tree—exhibited strange symptoms. At first, no one knew what was making them sick, but they knew they had one thing in common: the inescapable “dull aural hum” from the mine. The buzz, generated by 30,000 computers and thousands of fans running to cool them, is constant. And the noise, which residents have consistently recorded at over 85 decibels, is over the state’s legal limit. (On top of this, Texas’ noise law is the worst in the nation—one that seems to protect noise polluters, not its citizens.) In this eye-opening story, Andrew R. Chow shares the medical struggles and stories of more than 50 Granbury residents affected by the noise, and reports on how the community is trying to fight back against Marathon, the mine’s owner. As crypto and AI fuel the data center industry’s growth, however, this very scenario is repeating itself in other states, including Arkansas and North Dakota. “Ultimately,” Chow writes, “Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.” —CLR
Jonathan Blake | Noēma | July 30, 2024 | 3,826 words
Sometimes a fact jumps out of a piece of journalism and lodges itself directly into your long-term memory. In Jonathan Blake’s engrossing Noēma piece, that fact is this: unlike most cities that developed along rail and streetcar lines, Los Angeles’ (sub)urban development clustered around those many places where underground oil fields were tapped. Even if you’ve driven past the oil wells near Baldwin Hills, you may not have realized how strongly black gold influenced the city. (Or how it continues to, despite its winnowing footprint.) Blake didn’t either when he was growing up in LA; now, he visits some of the city’s most active, and camouflaged, drilling sites. Like the one in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Pico-Robertson, where, directly across the street from a restaurant opened by Steven Spielberg’s mother, ivy-covered walls conceal 40 active wells. Or the one tucked behind the Beverly Center shopping mall, the one you can only see from the top level of the parking structure or from the hospital across the street. About a third of Angelenos live within a mile of an active drill site, the negative physical and mental consequences of which Blake inventories starkly. Yet, the lingering presence of extractive industry also leads Blake to celebrate the recent launch of a satellite that continuously observes methane gas levels around the planet and makes its data available to researchers. This, he writes, is part of the necessary work to grasp what fossil fuel consumption has wrought: “Even someone living in the places most affected by climate change, like the Arctic, can’t intuit planetwide change from personal experience.” Just because you grow up in a city without realizing what’s thrumming under your feet doesn’t mean you can’t fight to make that city—and the planet it’s part of—a better place to live. —PR
Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, and Stephen Eisenhammer | Reuters | July 25, 2024 | 6,355 words
Each December, Bloomberg Businessweek publishes a Jealousy List, a compilation of “all the stories we wish we wrote this year.” If I had a 2024 list of my own, I would put this Reuters investigation on it—as I was reading the piece, I couldn’t stop thinking, “Damn, this was a great story idea.” The premise is simple: fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has become the number-one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, can be made by combining chemicals that anyone can order online. Most of these precursors, as the chemicals are known, ship from China. To investigate this dangerous pipeline, Reuters became customers. Reporters bought chemicals with names such as 1-boc-4-AP and 1-boc-4-piperidone and had them delivered to apartments in Mexico and the United States. The shipments showed up disguised as adapters or sealed in cat-food bags. All told, the investigating team purchased enough chemicals to make 3 million tablets of fentanyl, a process that cost them only $3,600 and required only clicking buttons on a smartphone or laptop. (Perhaps you, like me, just gasped in dismay at those figures.) All told, this project shows how difficult it is to cut off the fentanyl supply at the roots—it’s basically a game of Whac-a-Mole. “While it was easy to source the goods, it proved far more difficult to identify exactly who sold them,” the story explains. “Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.” One of the companies in question is still peddling its product despite being under US federal indictment. So much, I guess, for the long arm of the law. —SD
Drew Anderson | The Narwhal and The Globe and Mail | July 18, 2024 | 4,238 words
Conservationist Karsten Heuer is only 55 years old. He knows he will die this autumn, but it’s not the first time he has faced death. In 2021 he fell nearly 30 feet to the ground from a tree stand while searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley. His lungs collapsed and he broke ribs, his sternum, and his back in several places. Since, he has been diagnosed with “a fast-acting and fatal neurological condition called multiple system atrophy” that may have been a result of the fall. After spending so much of his life traversing vast stretches of wilderness observing animal behavior, he refuses to be fettered or diminished by the symptoms of his disease and has scheduled an assisted death this fall. Drew Anderson’s piece is so much more than a profile of a lifelong nature advocate. Heuer is a tenacious fighter who has had success navigating conflicts between profit and preservation that can feel intractable in Canada’s oil-fuelled, capitalist society. In 2018, Heuer led an effort to reintroduce bison to Banff National Park, a species that had been hunted into extinction, missing from the region for 140 years. His work documenting animal migration patterns prompted the Banff, Alberta, town council to halt certain developments and move others to preserve the wildlife corridor nearby. “He was one of the early advocates of what is now known as large-landscape-scale conservation,” writes Anderson. “This model takes into account the huge scope of some animals’ terrain, a departure from caring for the land in a patchwork of small protected areas.” Even as the end of his life approaches, he’s still fighting development that would double the size of neighboring Canmore, in the name of preservation. After all that he has given to the planet in his time here, if only medical science could find a cure to preserve Karsten Heuer. —KS
Ben Buckland | The New York Times | July 17, 2024 | 2,793 words
Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying only on hand-drawn maps from the people he met along the way, including local cheesemakers, a chef, and a farmer whose family had lived on the land since the 1600s. “I wanted to know what it would teach me about how technology and convenience have changed the way we travel,” he writes. “I wanted to be lost, and to find my way through the artwork of strangers.” At first, I found this goal as annoying as it was inspiring. Going on trips with my 6-year-old daughter has transformed the way I travel, and gone, for now, are my flâneur days, when I’d set off on foot in one direction to see where I ended up. Still, I couldn’t resist Buckland’s words and stunning photographs, his spontaneity, and his willingness to trust the people he encountered. I love his thoughts on making maps, even the simple sketches he received; reading a map is an “act of empathy,” he writes, a way to learn about a person through the details they see. By the end, Buckland walked about 250 miles over 12 days—along lakeshores, up mountains, into villages, and through the heart of Switzerland. A lovely piece on serendipity, being present in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes. —CLR
Audience Award
Here’s the story our audience put their money on this week.
Victor Lodato | The New Yorker | July 29, 2024 | 5,627 words
From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart. —KS
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The past few years have been tough for tech billionaires: after more than a decade of being hailed as visionaries, they’re no longer getting a free pass from an uncritical media, and it seems to have broken their brains. As Zoë Bernard details for Business Insider, many of them have responded to the loss of Unassailable Demigod status by going in house—launching a slew of podcasts and other owned media channels that let them tell their story, their way. Fascinating that “telling their story” so often involves the same hobby horses of the galaxy brains who rail against “wokeism.”
The pro-tech media’s other adversaries are a constellation of government, corporate, and entertainment figures dubbed too reflexively anti-tech, too anti-growth, or too politically correct. On Pirate Wires, jeremiads have been written against Anthony Fauci, who “oversaw one of the greatest erosions of institutional trust in American history”; Ellen Pao, “the architect of tech’s #metoo movement”; DEI activists at Google; DEI at large; Disney, for its penchant for “girlboss protagonists”; and NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, for her “near perfect record of ideological opposition to Silicon Valley.” Though Solana has since moved to Miami, his fiercest ire on Pirate Wires remains fixed on San Francisco’s liberal politicians. A sampling of recent headlines: “How San Francisco Attracts and Traps Homeless Transplants,” “How San Francisco’s DEI Industrial Complex Works,” and “Inside SF Public Schools’ Shocking Health Curriculum.” “All-In” has similarly taken aim at figures including Fauci, George Soros, Joe Biden, and a host of California politicians.
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Many houses of worship began streaming religious services in 2020; Christian televangelists have sermonized to a distributed “congregation” for decades. But as Vincent Owino reports, livestreaming preachers like Jeffter Wekesa have flourished in Kenya, where plentiful internet access gives them a pulpit—or at least multiple phones and webcams—from which to serve a hungry global audience.
This is how Wekesa spends most nights, preaching in front of a congregation of people spread around the country, and as far as Saudi Arabia and the United States. He prays that they’ll find jobs, spouses, business success. He tells small prophecies: This one will soon buy a car, that one will travel abroad to find greener pastures. He heals the sick by asking them to touch the ailing body part as he prays. This is the work of many modern evangelical preachers — and like TV and radio before it, social media has become a tool to expand a ministry’s reach.
The difference with Wekesa’s church is that it exists only in the virtual realm. Its physical presence sits entirely within his apartment. He rarely meets a congregant in person. On this April night in Nairobi, after three hours of preaching, Wekesa culminates his session with a request for offerings. Audience members can send him funds through the mobile money platform M-Pesa, PayPal, or TikTok’s digital gifting option. In a given month, Wekesa makes between 100,000–300,000 Kenyan shillings ($786–$2,358) from donations, well above the average income in Kenya. “As I’ve spoken, so shall it be,” he concludes. “God bless you. I will see you again tomorrow, and your life will never be the same.” Then he clicks off the livestreams and the LED lights.
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I see a piece about attending a cryptozoology conference, I read it. Them’s the rules. Thankfully, this isn’t your average “skeptic heads to a convention center to yuck other people’s yum” takedown. Jason Katz believes in Sasquatch down to his bones, and his faith makes this pilgrimage work even beyond the character sketches.
This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance. She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”
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Drew Anderson profiles Karsten Heuer, a conservationist who has dedicated his life to putting preservation before profit in Alberta, Canada.
In October 2021, Karsten Heuer found himself sprawled on the ground, helpless, at the bottom of an aspen tree.
He had been searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley, perched in a hunting stand nearly eight metres off the ground. Then he fell. He doesn’t know how. He was unconscious, lying on the ground for more than an hour before rescuers arrived.
His back was broken in several places, ribs too; his sternum was cracked and he was struggling to breathe with collapsed lungs.
He was alone in the mountains he loves.
“I wasn’t in pain,” he remembers, sitting in his backyard in Canmore on a June afternoon, sun streaking one side of his still-youthful face. “I was actually okay with it. It was October, the sun was on my back, I could hear trumpeter swans on the lake calling, and other bird songs, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually a pretty nice place to die.’ ”
An immensity looms. The bulk of the mountain, the heaviness of what’s to come for Heuer, Allison, their son and their close friends and colleagues.
Bow Valley Engage continues to fight against the massive Three Sisters development. Heuer and his collaborators are awaiting a judicial ruling on an Alberta government decision to skip an updated environmental impact assessment (the original was conducted 32 years ago, long before the current iteration of the proposal). Heuer says the valley and the proposal have changed significantly over those decades.
It is just one of the foundations Heuer has laid for those he will leave behind. He says he has struggled throughout his life to pass tasks on to others, but he’s learning to let that go and make peace with the fact he won’t know how things end.
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At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers operating through representatives with generic names like “Jenny” will air-ship fentanyl ingredients, also known as precursors, door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough of these chemicals to make 3 million pills. This stellar investigation reveals how drug traffickers are skillfully eluding government efforts to halt the deadly trade fueling the fentanyl crisis, now the top killer of Americans aged 18 to 45:
Reuters couldn’t determine whether any of the Chinese suppliers were the actual manufacturers of the chemicals received or simply middlemen. Nor could the news organization determine where the operations were located. Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.
The address listed in a government database for a precursor seller known as Hubei Amarvel Biotech, for example, led to a Wuhan office tower. A visit to the listed room number showed another company occupying that space, while the building’s management told Reuters that the chemical supplier had never rented space there.
Amarvel is the operation that sales agent Jenny worked for. It is one of three Chinese suppliers that sold Reuters precursors after having been indicted last year by U.S. federal prosecutors. The Justice Department accused Amarvel of exporting “vast quantities” of chemicals used to make fentanyl and similar drugs. Two Amarvel suspects—Wang Qingzhou and Chen Yiyi—are in jail awaiting trial in New York. They have pleaded not guilty. A third, unidentified suspect remains at large.
Wang’s attorney, Leonardo Aldridge, and Chen’s attorney, Marlon Kirton, declined to comment.
A Mexico-based Reuters reporter initially contacted Amarvel via Telegram in July 2023 to inquire about fentanyl precursors, a few weeks after the grand jury indictment was unsealed in New York. Sales agent Jenny denounced U.S. drug policy and the case against the company.
“What we sell is completely legal in China, but the United States always uses this matter to criticize us, and they even pose as buyers to get our information and slander our country,” Jenny wrote in Spanish. “I hate all Americans, they use it (fentanyl) themselves and blame us.”
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Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying on the hand-drawn maps of locals and strangers to find his way. The result is a lovely essay accompanied by Buckland’s own photographs on serendipity, unexpectedness, living in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes.
This teaches me something unexpected about maps. I was asking people how to get somewhere. But more often than not, what they illustrate were the things to which they pay attention. For these farmers, what is important is the number of doors on the cowshed and the limits to the valley they call home.
Later that day in a cafe in Château d’Oex, I talk to Charlotte, the retired schoolteacher sitting next to me. She orders ice cream for lunch. “I have watched my weight for 60 years and now I don’t care anymore,” she says.
Her map includes the number of meters I’ll need to climb and descend to reach the next valley. She remembers them exactly because she once ran over these passes.
Our attention is a gift. Reading maps is an act of empathy. They tell us as much about the person who made them as they do about the world.
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“The weird thing about growing up in oil country was that I had no idea I was growing up in oil country,” writes Jonathan Blake at the outset of this fascinating piece about Los Angeles’ still-active oil industry. Many have seen the wells near Baldwin Hills—it’s tough to miss them when driving down La Cienega—but fewer are aware of how drilling fields persist a century after the original oil boom, particularly in urban residential settings.
A synagogue with the facade of a theater, a school with the facade of a Brooklyn house, an oil drilling operation with the facade of a synagogue: uncanny architecture that gives no hint of the buildings’ actual uses. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that there is active oil drilling just 125 feet from people’s homes, according to the environmental justice group STAND-L.A., a distance that seemed generous to me when I visited recently. Apartments abut the alleyway behind the tower. Some residents have windows that look onto its ivy-covered walls. Without leaving their homes, neighbors could easily read the number for the emergency hotline on the sign by the door to report a leak.
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At one time, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver had a drug overdose rate of 25 times the national average due to the unpredictable composition of street drugs sometimes laced with lethal amounts of fentanyl and carfentanil. Activists Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicums believe that harm reduction via safe supply is the only way to save lives. So, the pair founded the Drug User Liberation Front. At first, they bought cocaine and opium on the dark web with their own money and gave the drugs away for free. Later, they started a group called the compassion club geared toward safe access to drugs.
This is how the compassion club worked: first, Nyx and Kalicum converted crowdfunded Canadian dollars to Bitcoin, then traded that for Monero, an untraceable cryptocurrency. They used private browsers to access the dark web and, for extra security, operated on private servers, which encrypted their IP addresses. To find online drug vendors, they searched discussion boards where people posted tests of substances they received. Careful to avoid international shipments, they only bought from Canadian vendors with good reviews. After selecting one, they’d order a small amount to confirm its purity. If a sample wasn’t received—or if they got a bad product—they could get a refund. Communication was limited to ordering and address details; the goods were delivered by Canada Post.
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From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart.
At least I had my mother’s nose, and, more important, I had inherited her belief in magic. Both of us understood that in order to survive it was necessary to arrange things in a certain way. You had to take life’s terrifying unpredictabilities and rally them, by ritual or formula, into an army that would do your bidding.
There was a period of several months when I kept suggesting my mother play the same three numbers. Seven, one, four. Something about that arrangement seemed friendly, not to mention that the numbers added up to twelve, which, when added again—one plus two—gave you three, meaning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I saw no sacrilege in this reference to the Trinity. Gambling, I sensed, was a kind of prayer—though my mother didn’t always direct these prayers toward God. Sometimes she invoked the dead, playing the birth date of a deceased relative, often her grandmother. Such bets were akin to lighting candles in church, which you had to pay for, too. Both transactions were a request to be remembered by Heaven—to be helped, or saved.
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From scary movies to roller coasters to extreme sports, there are ways we can scare ourselves—for fun. Why do some people enjoy uncertain, risky, or dangerous situations? In this Believer essay, Elisa Gabbert reflects on her fear of heights, and also explores fear as pleasure, the philosophy of games, and anxiety as a luxury.
I collect this kind of story, the kind that reveals a crack in reality. They give me that skin-tingling feeling, a flutter in the chest. We tell ourselves that roller coasters are perfectly safe and that planes don’t crash. I don’t want it not to be true; I don’t want to die on a plane. So why do I like the stories? It’s like I want my sense of reality to be destabilized. It’s like I’m playing some kind of game, a game in which the complex world falls away and I focus on a single threat. A single strange-but-very-real threat. I can stop riding roller coasters, obviously, but it’s harder to avoid planes or other forms of transportation. Trains do get derailed. Bridges do collapse. So the threats are very real—but not immediate. Not for me, when I’m reading the news, when I’m sitting at my desk.
Is there anything useful about that feeling, I wonder? That artificial fear, or fear at a distance? Might practicing fear be a good idea? It seems more useful than anxiety—if anxiety is just the brain burning energy it doesn’t really need, because you’re not currently starving, or trying to outrun a lion. These may be just concepts, words I attach to agitation, but when I call the feeling anxiety, I’m mapping it alongside paralysis and existential dread. I associate anxiety with stasis, with insomnia, lying supine in bed. Fear, on the contrary, is a vertical feeling. It’s activating. If I’m scared, I want to be moving.
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