This is a surprisingly poignant essay about growing up with Kraft dinners. Ivana Rihter manages to make a cheap pasta dish sound beautiful, but it’s not about the food, it’s about the memories of family and heritage that it conjures up.
More than twenty years later, the sound of dried pasta tubes sliding across cardboard soothes me like a rain stick. Kraft was the first meal I ever truly loved, the first one I attempted to cook on my own, and the first food I could not live without. There are four boxes tucked into my pantry as I write this.
Ian Dille unravels the story behind a shocking crime with meticulous care. His detailed reporting sheds a light on the close-knit biking world and human relationships at the root of this case, without sensationalism. It’s a gripping read.
It’s easy to buy a weapon in Texas. So one day around the beginning of 2022, Strickland and Armstrong rode their bikes to McBride’s, a family owned gun shop near the University of Texas. Armstrong picked out a 9mm SIG Sauer P365 pistol and held it up to get a feel for its weight.
The rancher plucked the tiny tooth out of the sand of a dry creek bed. Around him was a grassy plain studded with low, flat hills. The small, dark object in his hand was worn down by use in life and by the water it had encountered over millennia. The tooth had long since petrified into stone.
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Harold J. Cook had uncovered fossils in western Nebraska for much of his life. As a teenager in 1904, he led a paleontologist from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum to a trove of early-mammal bones. The fossils practically tumbled from a hillside on his family’s ranch, known as Agate Springs. Among the bones were remnants of Dinohyus, an animal resembling a pig that stood as high as eight feet at the shoulder, and the still mysterious Moropus, a horse-like creature that dug in the earth with hooves that resembled claws.
The news that the Cooks’ land was bursting with the bones of ancient mammals set off a polite war among the leading natural history museums, which hoped to gain exclusive access to the fossil beds. Harold’s father, however, wanted the institutions to work together to wring all possible scientific knowledge from what would be known as the Agate Fossil Beds. He never profited from the treasure on his land. His family’s contributions to paleontology were celebrated in other ways: One scientist named an extinct rhinoceros in his honor, and an antelope with two of its four horns on its nose after young Harold.
Another scientist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, lured Harold Cook to New York City to work at the American Museum of Natural History and to study with him at Columbia University. Cook returned home after a year to help run the ranch when his mother became ill. That meant he both knew the land and knew fossils, making him a valuable hire for any paleontology expedition in the region.
In 1917, the year the United States entered World War I, Cook assisted paleontologists from the Denver Museum and the American Museum in digs at fossil beds along Snake Creek, some 20 miles south of his family’s ranch. Whether he picked up the tooth while scouting for those excavations, during one of them, or sometime after, he never said. Broken bits of fossil, turned blue-black by iron phosphate, were common in the region, and had little scientific value compared with the bones of entire herds of pony-size rhinoceroses or the corkscrew-shaped dens of prehistoric beavers. But Cook believed he had found something truly special. Based on his knowledge of fossils, he suspected that the tooth belonged to a primate, and not a mere monkey—an ape perhaps. An even more tantalizing prospect was that the tooth belonged to an early human.
If Cook was right it would be a heady find, as scientists had yet to identify either variety of fossil in America. Meanwhile, paleontologists around the world were eager for evidence of so-called missing links—transitional fossils that could help prove that humans evolved from apes. Men who claimed to have found missing links often became famous.
Cook was correct about one thing: The tooth was important. But it would become part of history in a way he never imagined.
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Four years later, in October 1921, William Jennings Bryan stood behind an ornate wooden pulpit in the auditorium of the Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. The room’s delicate stained-glass windows glowed in the fading autumn light. Bryan had strong opinions about fossils and their potential to destroy the worldview that he and others in the room held dear.
The dozens of students and faculty who packed the auditorium, which also served as the seminary’s church, had every reason to expect that Bryan’s lecture would be an experience they would talk about for the rest of their lives. Bryan, then 61, was a national sensation at the age of 36, when as a Nebraska congressman his electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention swept him into position as the party’s candidate for president. He went on to receive two additional Democratic nominations, granting him the dubious honor of being among only a handful of U.S. presidential candidates to receive electoral votes in three elections without prevailing in any of them.
Bryan, a lawyer by training, supported a woman’s right to vote, an eight-hour workday, a progressive income tax, the regulation of banks and the stock market, and the prohibition of alcohol. He despised the way unchecked industrial capitalism ground down working people, sometimes robbing them of their savings in bank failures and stock market swindles. He reserved special disdain for the financier John Pierpont Morgan. That Bryan himself lived a lavish lifestyle didn’t seem to mar his reputation: His plainspoken appeals to the average citizen earned him the nickname the Great Commoner. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson appointed Bryan secretary of state, but Bryan’s pacifism led him to resign the post two years later, when Wilson’s response to the sinking of the Lusitania signaled America’s march toward war in Europe.
Once out of office, Bryan didn’t recede from public life. He kept doing what he did best: give speeches. Public lectures were popular middle-class entertainment in the years before radio and movies were commonplace. Prior to his appointment as secretary of state, Bryan sometimes gave two of them per day on the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits, sleeping in his train seat between engagements and using his coat for a pillow. Now he traveled from coast to coast to speak.
A devout Christian—among his first aspirations as a boy was to become a Baptist preacher—Bryan also wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column about the Bible and taught Sunday school classes to thousands of people in a public park in Florida, where he and his wife had moved for her health. He became such a popular religious figure that he was asked to give a week of lectures at the Union Theological Seminary, an honor typically reserved for the nation’s leading ministers. Bryan focused his talks on a topic outside his usual purview: science.
Bryan’s words, which still echo across America a century later, were some of the first shots fired in a new battle over evolution, pitting science against faith.
It was not a subject he had any special interest in prior to World War I, but during that conflict, Bryan told his listeners, European had slaughtered European without a thought that they were all children of God. He attributed that blind savagery to what in the end was his own flawed interpretation of Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution, which Darwin had introduced to the world some 50 years earlier. Bryan argued that Darwin’s painting of humans as the descendants of apes was a demotion in ontological priority that provided tacit permission for the deaths of millions. Bryan quoted liberally from The Science of Power, a book by Benjamin Kidd that linked Darwin to the “selfish” and “godless” philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. “Darwin’s doctrine leads logically to war,” Bryan declared.
War wasn’t the only thing Bryan blamed on the theory of evolution. He was also disturbed by reports, mostly from parents, that students were losing their religious faith by studying Darwin’s ideas, as well as geology, in college. “If it is contended that an instructor has a right to teach anything he likes, I reply that the parents who pay the salary have a right to decide what shall be taught,” Bryan said.
Bryan’s words, which still echo across America a century later, were some of the first shots fired in a new battle over evolution, pitting science against faith. Bryan further promoted his cause by printing hundreds of copies of a pamphlet containing one of his Richmond lectures. He sent it to editors and friends and in response to fan letters. A year later, the Union Theological Seminary published Bryan’s speeches in a book titled In His Image.
While Bryan was promoting the book, The New York Times invited him to contribute to its pages. Though he loathed big cities and East Coast elites—basically everything the Times seemed to represent—he accepted the offer. Bryan often drafted his public writings in a large scrawl, using either a soft pencil or a thick-nibbed pen. It was up to his secretary, a Mr. W. E. Thompson, to corral the wild stampede of letters into neat, typewritten lines.
Bryan’s New York Times editorial condemning Darwinism, which cribbed generously from his Richmond lectures, was published in the February 26, 1922, paper, a Sunday edition. Despite there being “millions of species,” Bryan declared, scientists “have not been able to find one single instance in which one species has changed into another, although according to the hypothesis, all species have developed from one or a few germs of life.”
Newspapers across the country reprinted the piece or ran glowing commentaries about it. If Bryan hoped to be God’s PR flack, he earned his full commission with that editorial alone.
However, one sentence from it would soon come to vex Bryan. Not only was Darwin’s theory an insult to God, Bryan had noted wryly, but it was also unpatriotic. Darwin “has us descend from European, rather than American, apes,” he wrote. An eminent scientist would soon seize the opportunity to turn Bryan’s quip into a taunt.
Humpback whales use bubbles to screen their young, corral prey, and ward off aggressors, among other things. But do they have special bubble signatures used only when humans are present?
This young female whale approached my boat, then dove and began “drawing” with bubble curtains released in a thin stream from her blowhole. There was no food around and no other whales in sight. She rolled to one side so that she could look upward to admire her handiwork. Was she practicing making bubble structures that could be useful tools on the feeding grounds, or was she just enjoying the visual beauty of the scintillating bubble spirals? Was it art for art’s sake? Certainly, other animals, including captive dolphins, sea lions, rhinos, and elephants have learned to paint with brushes, and both wild bowerbirds and pufferfish produce visual art to impress potential mates.
Tourism to Joshua Tree National Park in California’s High Desert has exploded — it has seen a natural growth over the decades, but in recent years, both social media and the pandemic have created a surge in visitors, some unfortunately only interested in getting the perfect Instagram shot or defacing the park’s beloved trees (Yucca brevifolia). Brad Ressler reports that visitation has nearly doubled since 2014, but the budget and resources set aside for the park has stayed the same.
What can be done to ensure the preservation of the park? It’s up to David Smith, Joshua Tree’s superintendent, to figure out solutions, whether it’s building more roads, establishing a reservation system, prohibiting cellphones, or instituting more visitor rules. Ressler’s piece for Alta is an informative story about the current state of Joshua Tree, but also a great profile of Smith — a nature-loving California native who, naturally, became a ranger for the U.S. National Park Service.
Visitors pilfer rolls of toilet paper from the vault toilets or toss them into the sewage below. They heist or hew entire Joshua trees or decorate them using spray paint and pocketknife; boulders and interpretive signs, too. They drive off-road, creating furrows that will persist for decades and shredding the bacteria-rich cryptobiotic crust. An Andy Goldsworthy wannabe, or perhaps a hyperactive 10-year-old, has erected about 100 small cairns out by the Hall of Horrors, carbuncles in an otherwise unblemished landscape. Why do people do these things? While nobody knows why, they’re by-products of the park’s newfound popularity.
Today we are featuring stories about the decimation of a national park, the survival of Texas Monthly magazine, how a couple escaped slavery in Boston, choosing when to die, and the future of jelly.
Georgina Gustin | Undark | January 4, 2023 | 2,363 words
Once a wildlife paradise, Kenya’s Amboseli National Park has become a wasteland. Tourists on safari arrive excited but leave traumatized, reports Georgina Gustin, as carcasses of starved animals litter the terrain: “Wildebeests are gray-brown lumps with quote-shaped horns. Gazelles, small piles of suede. Zebras, bloated disco-era carpets.” Previously a lush wildlife sanctuary, Amboseli has been plagued by climate change-fueled drought for two years and braces itself for a third. In addition to a parched and changing landscape, clashes between herders and farmers and an increase in illegal poaching also contribute to the dire situation. Wildlife photographs by Larry C. Price accompany Gustin’s piece, and while they may be hard to look at, they’re an important reminder that no creature can escape a warming planet. —CLR
Stephen Harrigan | Texas Monthly | January 17, 2023 | 4,495 words
Fifty years used to be nothing for a magazine. Of course they lasted decades, they were bound collections of journalism printed monthly and delivered via newsstand and mailbox! But for Texas Monthly to hit that mark was in no way foretold — and for it to do so during the long slow decline of physical media is a miracle indeed. No wonder that the magazine commissioned some of its longtime writers to bear witness. What sets Stephen Harrigan’s dispatch apart, though, is its utter lack of nostalgia. Sure, Harrigan was there at the very beginning; sure, he wrote for TM as typewriters gave way to computers and fax machines gave way to computers and [checks notes] everything gave way to computers. This is no elegy to a bygone era, though; it’s an ode to evolution. Turns out that a publication needs to adapt to survive. But that doesn’t mean that its mission has to. “Morale was shaky, salaries were flat, the staff was shrinking,” Harrigan writes of a particularly lean period last decade. “It just didn’t seem like a world anymore where a writer would have the latitude to take three or four or six months to deeply report a feature story, where it was possible for a statewide magazine to maintain a national reputation. But at the same time, nobody wanted to give up on the idea.” Nobody wanted to give up on the idea. Nobody should. And in a time when launching new magazines is far too rare (and their demises far too frequent), it’s crucial to remember that. —PR
Ilyon Woo | The Boston Globe Magazine | January 5, 2023 | 5,786 words
Ellen and William Craft fled slavery not via the Underground Railroad but by actual train: They climbed aboard one bound for Savannah, Georgia, in December 1848 — she disguised as a white man, he as her property. They saw people they knew on their journey, including a friend of their master who sat right next to Ellen in a first-class seat. (She pretended to be deaf so she wouldn’t have to converse with him and risk exposing her identity.) But making it to Boston, where the couple built a new life together, didn’t guarantee their safety. Slave catchers came for them, and in an enthralling turn of events, Bostonians of all colors came out to defend the Crafts by any means necessary. This story, excerpted from Ilyon Woo’s new book, Master Slave Husband Wife, had me on the edge of my seat and, at various points, cheering. It feels as if it’s powered by a locomotive engine, but really the motor is Woo’s exceptional facility with pacing, scenes, and characterization. —SD
Robin Williamson | The Audacity | January 11, 2022 | 4,597 words
Robin Williamson’s mother had secondary progressive multiple sclerosis. A disease that ravaged her body for many years — before driving her to an attempt on her own life. Her family needed to find a different path. Williamson talks about her mother with love, tenderness, and sadness that never creeps into the saccharine. Instead, pragmatism overlays emotion: Faced with death, this family made a plan, wrote a schedule, and decided to face it together, not in secret. Despite her mother being “the strong, stoic sick person,” Williamson knew that — beneath this persona — there was misery and pain, with morphine now “like laying a thin blanket on a stone bed.” Not shying away from the reality of disease, Williamson still manages to write an essay more beautiful than maudlin. The final month the family spends together before heading to Dignitas to carry out “The Switzerland Schedule” is about the tiny, precious moments of nothing: “Picture my father, my brothers, and I spread across the sofas, beer bottles and wine glasses strewn around the room, with my mother on her scooter beside one of the sofas.” The time then spent in Switzerland is about grief, but it is also about finding peace. —CW
Bettina Makalintal | Eater | January 10, 2023 | 1,818 words
“I predict that we are on the threshold of a new aspic-forward aesthetic,” is something I would not have expected to read in my lifetime. I admit it. I’m a dessert fusspot. I have strong opinions: I love sticky toffee pudding and chocolate cake. The only acceptable pies are apple and pumpkin. Custard is bland. Tapioca is revolting. But Jell-O tops the many desserts on my “hard no” list. Way too squirmy! It’s always important to revisit your beliefs from time to time. (I guess.) Could Jell-O become a possibility for me? (Highly unlikely!) “I think that Jell-O, in a way, can be terrifying and delicious at the same time. There’s a little discussion in the book about the sublime: things that are really scary, but they kind of attract you anyway. It’s things that are in the liminal space between what’s acceptable and what’s really bizarre, and people find that fun from an aesthetic perspective.” —KS
Deprived of face-to-face contact with his parishioners during the height of the pandemic, Michael Coren, an Anglican priest, had to get creative to minister to the sick, the dying, the elderly, and the lonely.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the pandemic to shape the practice of my new ministry in profound ways. My daily tasks as a priest? Lead services at retirement and care homes; meet people who need housing, employment, money, and advice; visit the sick and housebound; help with feeding the hungry. I work as a priest independently (which also means that clergy anecdotes are, by their very nature, personal; there are no witnesses). A constant of all this activity is direct and personal contact. A constant of COVID-19, of course, was the absence of direct and personal contact. How do you counsel, listen to, pray with—and for—people if you can’t share the same space?
So I started two prayer groups and a bereavement group and chaired a meeting of parents of adult children with mental health issues. All on Zoom. I also started a telephone support group. Every week, volunteers called to check in with parishioners unable to leave their homes. Our job was to ask after people, be a friendly voice. Since there were certain things I couldn’t do, I had to compensate. You don’t need to embrace someone to show you care. Indeed, hugging is so common as to be drained of meaning. I tried to develop listening skills to reach further than where the usual words and actions could take me. One example remains: a young woman crying at the death of her mother. It was a phone call. I paused. A lot. When you can’t see the person, it’s hard to pace your moments. Instead, you give them plenty of time to complete their weeping, and you stay silent with them in their grief.
