In 1848, an enslaved couple fled to Boston in one of history’s most daring escapes

The Crafts, a married couple in Macon, Georgia, fled bondage in plain sight: she disguised as a white man, he as her slave. In a riveting excerpt from her new book, Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo documents their flight:

As dawn began to break, the station filled with travelers bound for Savannah. Ensconced quietly in the only car where a Black man was supposed to sit, William carried the cottage key and a pass. And he, or perhaps Ellen, carried a pistol. On this morning, William had to hope that they would not need to use it. He himself had resolved to kill or be killed, rather than be captured.

Traffic at the station thinned as travelers crowded about the train, ready to board. They said their goodbyes. For enslaved riders, this may have been the last time they would see the faces of loved ones, if their loved ones even had permission to see them off.

With the engine fed and the water tank full, the conductor made his final calls. William dared to peek outside. Linked to him, he knew, if only by way of rickety clasps between the cars, was Ellen, who by this time should have been seated in first class. It would be difficult for William to see her before the train stopped. But briefly, William could glimpse the ticket booth, where Ellen, as his master, would have purchased two tickets.

Instead of his wife, he saw another familiar figure hurrying up to the ticket window. His heart dropped. The man interrogated the ticket seller, then pushed his way through the crowd on the platform, with purpose. It was William’s employer — not his legal enslaver, but another white man who “rented” William’s labor in a cabinet shop. This man, who had known William since childhood, scanned the throng as he approached the cars.

The cabinetmaker was coming for him.

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The Incredible Story of Finding My Brother in My 60s

“DNA is the gift that keeps on giving, whether you’re ready or not,” writes Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Palmer and her half-brother, Don Doiron, were born a week apart in 1955, in the same hospital, to different mothers: Florence McLean and Ana Cifuentes. It took 62 years before they learned that they were half-siblings, and were adopted into very different families. Palmer pens a poignant personal essay about searching for the truth, their buried family history in a time when “silence ruled” and “adoption was never discussed,” and their birth father. It’s a moving story about finding one’s place in the world.

Even as adults, adoptees have long been treated like children who need to be protected from our own truths. When we came of age in the 1970s, Don and I had to apply for the scant details, called non-identifying information, the government then permitted us to know. We received sparse biographies of our birth mothers (age, birthplace, education and occupation) and next to nothing about our birth fathers. It wasn’t enough for either of us.

Today, Don and I are still piecing together our stories. Not everything we’ve learned has been happy. Some of our shared history is heart-rending. But we claim every bit of our lives as our truth, as the story we have every right to know, to celebrate and to mourn, to pass on to our children.

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Parting the Waters

“I call my cousin who lives in Crosbyton to find out what it looks like now and if people still swim there,” writes Bobby Alemán. “I ask him if there are still waterfalls. He laughs.”

Silver Falls, once an idyllic swimming hole and recreation spot for families in Texas, no longer exists. But why did the waterfalls go dry? Alemán went back home to investigate why, and on the trip unexpectedly uncovers memories of his father, who died in 2005 at age 50.

She struggles to put words together to tell me about a separate incident involving my father. It turns out my dad once saved a drowning child at Silver Falls. He pulled a 6- or 7-year-old boy out of the water and performed CPR. The boy’s parents were hysterical. Screaming. “They were sure he was gone,” she says. “He just pulled the boy out, right?” I say, puzzled. “No! Your dad brought the boy back,” my aunt emphasizes. “He was as limp as can be.”

I’d never heard this story, but it didn’t surprise me. My grandfather tells me a similar story from many years ago about my dad spotting an injured hiker stranded on a ravine, most likely in the Guadalupe Mountains, when he and his girlfriend were on their way to Mexico for a trip. He was able to flag down help and get aid to the woman. My dad died in 2005 at the age of 50—too young. But since he’s been gone, his stories keep finding their way to me.

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“Monorail!” How Conan O’Brien Came Up With an Iconic ‘Simpsons’ Episode

When a show creates and airs more than 740 episodes of television, finding consensus about the best of those episodes is nearly impossible. Yet, 30 years after it first aired, The Simpsons‘ “Marge vs. the Monorail” might be closest to the crown. This piece from Alan Siegel isn’t the first time an outlet has examined the episode’s impact — see Vice‘s oral history from 2020 — but it gleefully dives into the origin and execution the way few others have. D’ohnt skip it.

The episode was the first true extravaganza for a groundbreaking animated series that was originally conceived as an intimate family comedy. Both visually and narratively, it was an installment that expanded the world of The Simpsons as it moved beyond its first few seasons. All the quotable lines, sight gags, pop culture references, ambitious set pieces, and catchy songs add up to something unexpectedly (and eternally) prescient. The episode is now synonymous with modern hucksterism: Whenever a fancy new transportation system, or a billion-dollar eyesore, or a deal that enriches corporate executives and few others comes along, it can’t escape comparisons to Lanley’s genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail. “I get a kick out of the cultural reach of The Simpsons,” says television writer and producer Jeff Martin, who had a hand in making “Marge vs. the Monorail.” “Now if there’s some shorthand for a dishonest salesman, a flimflam man, it’s a monorail salesman.”

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Can 3-D Printing Help Solve the Housing Crisis?

“It is difficult to build utopian housing in a non-utopian world,” writes Rachel Monroe in this feature on 3-D-printed construction. But Jason Ballard, the co-founder of Icon, a construction startup in Austin, Texas, is determined to do just that. Icon uses a largely automated process to create houses one layer at a time, typically with cement. The company is one of the biggest and most well-funded ventures in the construction space, and even has a NASA contract to develop technology to build lunar structures. It has the potential to show the world that 3-D-printing can be a less expensive alternative, and one that produces more resilient, sustainable housing.

But is the industry ready for this disruption?

A printer can create the shell of a simple building in as little as twenty-four hours, although real-world conditions (rain, cold temperatures, operator error) slow the process. In the past two years, as Icon has expanded, its fleet of printers, called Vulcans, has printed military barracks, disaster-resilient houses, a luxury residence, and, at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, a full-sized simulation of a Martian habitat, for nasa. Other 3-D-printing companies have produced an apartment building, a houseboat in the Czech Republic, and a house for Habitat for Humanity. Dubai has pledged that, by 2030, a quarter of its new construction will be printed.

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I Disconnected from the Electric Grid for 8 Months—in Manhattan

Think you need to move to the woods to live off the grid? Joshua Spodek’s successful experiment proves that you can manage just fine on sustainable energy sources in the middle of a huge city.

I started my personal sustainability drive almost accidentally, when I challenged myself to avoid packaged food for a week. I expected deprivation and sacrifice from avoiding Manhattan’s abundant food options. If I’m honest, part of me hoped to find the challenge untenable so I could say the cure was worse than the disease and give up.

But constraints breed creativity. I learned to cook from scratch, which led to more of what I valued in food: flavor, variety, convenience, nutrition, and socializing, while lowering costs and pollution.

The unexpectedly rewarding results motivated me to keep going. I avoided flying for a year and experimented with unplugging my fridge. By May 2022, when I decided to disconnect completely, I hadn’t filled a load of trash since 2019, hadn’t flown since 2016, had unplugged my fridge for eight months, and had electric bills consistently under $2 (not counting fixed connection charges of about $18).

Attitude was more important than technology, though. Attitude made my setup doable. I’m not suggesting that “because I could do it, you can do it,” but I did tell myself that if humans could do without power for 300,000 years, then I could do so for a month.

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Jelly Is Ready for Its Redemption Arc

I’m not able to make friends with Jell-O. Never have, never will. But maybe you’re more adventurous and curious than I am. Like it or not, Jell-O is enjoying a renaissance. At Eater, Bettina Makalintal interviews author Ken Albala about his new book “The Great Gelatin Revival.”

Eater: You write that you don’t choose book topics but that they choose you. What was your relationship to jelly like before you wrote this book?

Ken Albala: I didn’t like it, for one. [laughs] My mother made it when I was young. My parents were on Weight Watchers and they made this parfait that was lots of different colors, Cool Whip with Jell-O, just awful. I told my mother I figured out where Jell-O comes from — that it comes from calves’ feet — and I wasn’t gonna eat it anymore. That got me out of it.

I didn’t like it until a friend dared me to look at Show Me Your Aspics. I got sucked into it and I started making Jell-O here and there and realized that I was doing it every day. Some of them were good, some were not. I thought I might as well just get a book out of this.

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