Trance Is Back—and It’s No Joke

Trance music never went away, writes Philip Sherburne, and I agree. But I’ve not progressed with the sound since I first fell for it 25 years ago, when I was a wide-eyed, impressionable teenage raver. Whenever I listen to my “Old School Trance Favorites” playlist on Spotify, I’m whisked back to 1998 — on some dance floor in some dark warehouse, with a classic track like Three Drives’ “Greece 2000” or Veracocha’s “Carte Blanche” blasting in the room. The trance we danced to in those years was uplifting, life-changing. But as I ventured deeper into this world, the sound was a mere step in a longer journey — it marked a period of raving with training wheels, of hours-long DJ sets of spoon-fed transcendence.

Still, as some of Sherburne’s sources perfectly put it in the piece, there’s just something about trance, and listening to a “vintage” trance anthem from the late ’90s and early ’00s, however schmaltzy it may be, can give me shivers like no other type of music.

Sherburne writes a fun piece about the revival — or perhaps reimagination — of trance among a younger generation of producers and DJs who are outside the scene and, thus, more open-minded and experimental.

But where those projects carried a whiff of mischief, the new wave of trance feels like a more earnest and direct homage. Perhaps it’s a generational shift, as artists who first discovered electronic music from their friends’ stepdads’ Tiësto CDs begin to look back on their own musical upbringing. Maybe it’s just that people are jonesing for all the euphoria they can get right now.

Vestbirk believes that the shift is partly generational. A new wave of clubbers doesn’t have the same prejudices about trance that the old guard did. And the artsier end of the scene is bored with techno, which—in its overground, festival-filling incarnation, with an emphasis on formulaic structures, identikit sound design, and gaudy spectacle—has become as stale, commercialized, and ridiculous as mainstream trance once was.

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Nona Fernández on the Constellations We Create With Our Memories

As she navigates her mother’s fainting spells, and through the process of testing and diagnosis, Nona Fernández considers the similarities between stars in the sky and the busy neurons of her mother’s brain, lit up on the test screen by a happy memory.

An astronomer indicating different constellations with a laser pointer, explaining to a group of tourists and me that all those distant lights we see shining above our heads come from the past.

Depending how far away they are, we might be talking about billions of years. The glow from stars that may be dead or gone. Reports of their death have yet to reach us and what we see is the glimmer of a life possibly extinguished without our knowing it. Shafts of light freezing the past in our gaze, like family snapshots in a photograph album or the kaleidoscopic patterns of our own memory.

We exit the neurologist’s office and I look at my mother with new eyes. Now I know that she’s carrying the whole cosmos on her shoulders. I tell her what I saw on the doctor’s screen. I tell her how much her brain looks like the night sky. I tell her about the electrical patterns of her neurons, the glow of her memory, the constellation that lit up the moment she summoned it, the luminescent reflection of her own past. I ask which happy scene it was that I saw twinkling on the monitor in the doctor’s office and she smiles and says she was remembering the moment I was born.

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Children of the Ice Age

Children comprised around half of the prehistoric population, but until now our knowledge of their lives has been limited. In this fascinating essay, April Nowell explores how this is changing; including some delightful descriptions of how these children learned, played, and contributed to their community.

But using new techniques, and with different assumptions, the children of the Ice Age are being given a voice. And what they’re saying is surprising: they’re telling us different stories, not only about the roles they played in the past, but also about the evolution of human culture itself.

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‘iPhones Are Made in Hell’

It’s been more than a decade since Foxconn made international headlines after several workers committed suicide at the manufacturer’s iPhone factory in Shenzhen, China, which prompted revelations about inhumane working conditions. Now Foxconn’s facility in Zhengzhou, which produces about half the world’s iPhones, is under the media microscope. Viola Zhou of Rest of World kept in close contact with a few Foxconn assembly-line workers over the course of three months to capture what life is like in the mega-factory during peak production:

In December, as Western holiday shoppers were preparing Christmas presents, Foxconn renewed efforts to rev up its iPhone 14 Pro production. To attract a new crop of workers, the company again raised its pay. One contract seen by Rest of World promised a monthly bonus of 6,000 yuan ($885) if recruits worked at least 26 full days in December and 23 days in January. On social media, people described the proposition as the “60-day Foxconn challenge.”

Hunter had planned to return home once his quarantine ended, but the bonus made him reconsider. Going through a routine he was well familiar with, he lined up at the factory’s recruitment office, had his blood taken as part of a mandatory health check, and carried his belongings into an eight-person dorm room. The next day, he completed a mental health questionnaire, which asked whether he had insomnia or relationship issues — a practice that dates back to the spate of suicides in 2010 — and spent eight hours watching orientation videos on his phone. A frequent pop-up asking for a facial scan made sure he was paying attention. After three more days of quarantine, he started his most recent role — working the screws on the iPhone 14 Pro assembly line.

Inside the workshop, Hunter said he felt a kind of oppression he had never experienced in his previous Foxconn jobs, which were away from the factory floor. With no windows, he said that it was impossible to tell day from night without checking a clock. Managers required such a high tempo that he felt he could not stop for a second. Hunter even witnessed one colleague getting his pay reduced for spending too long drinking water. The constant scolding was humiliating, he said, even though he was rarely the target. Colleagues broke into tears under the stress.

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Avenging Billy

“The first time most people in Los Angeles heard of gay porn actor Billy London — a.k.a. Bill Newton — was when his head and feet showed up in a dumpster.” With a lede like that, a story promises to be riveting. Writer Kevin Rector delivers, telling the tale of a horrific cold case and the amateur sleuths who finally solved it:

The suspect was first identified as a person of interest in Newton’s murder not by detectives but by Clark Williams, a stay-at-home dad turned empty-nester. Williams became obsessed with the case after seeing so many similarities between the dead man and himself: He and Newton were born just a week apart in 1965 in the same part of northern Wisconsin, where homophobia was rampant, and each had fled to a bigger city to find a better life.

How Williams figured it all out, said lead Det. John Lamberti, was amazing.

“I like to think I’m a pretty good detective — been doing homicide for a while — and I never would have made this connection,” Lamberti said. “Not in a million years would I have come up with what Clark came up with.”

“The hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Williams said of the moment it all clicked. “I’m like, ‘What the f—? How is this possible?’”

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The Out-of-Control Spread of Crowd-Control Tech

A handful of companies are making billions selling “less-lethal” weapons to police, militaries, and governments around the world. The consequences are devastating, as journalist Wil Sands knows all too well: He was shot in the face with a projectile while covering a 2020 protest against police brutality. (Read more about the experience of survivors like Sands in Long Lead‘s project “The People vs. Rubber Bullets.”) As a physician tells Sands in this piece for WIRED, less-lethal weapons are “as dangerous as the person firing them wants them to be.” Sands’s story is an examination of a problematic industry’s past, present, and future, told through an urgent personal lens:

The theory behind all less-lethal crowd-control devices, from the simple billy club to the infrared laser dazzler, is that they allow security forces to suppress a riot without committing a massacre. Law enforcement and military experts have described them, again and again, as a “humane” alternative to conventional arms—and often as the frontier of high-tech innovation. Perpetually just around the corner, it seems, is the widespread adoption of futuristic weapons like sticky foam, net guns, and heat rays. 

That rhetoric obscures how remarkably stagnant the main menu of less-lethal crowd-control weapons has remained. Tear gas has been around for about 100 years, rubber bullets for 50, flash-bang grenades for 45, and Tasers for 30. The language has also masked how brutal these weapons can be, and how much they’ve been neglected by oversight bodies. Tear gas — probably the most important less-lethal weapon for crowd control — has been prohibited for use in war since the 1925 Geneva Protocol. But no international treaty bans countries from using it against their own citizens. Less-lethals are also specifically excluded from the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty, a binding agreement that prohibits the sale of weapons to countries with documented human rights abuses. And in the United States, the world’s leading producer of less-lethals, no federal legislation specifically regulates their manufacture. 

Unhindered by the kind of oversight on production, sale, use, and export that applies to typical small arms, the less-lethals industry has been left pretty much to its own devices. It is to the armaments trade what dietary supplements are to the pharmaceutical industry: a supposedly more benign sector that is, in practice, largely unsupervised and often slipshod. 

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Creatures That Don’t Conform

At Emergence Magazine, Lucy Jones turns her keen eye to the many mysteries of slime mold and finds beauty, wonder, and higher truths in the moist crevices of her own back yard.

My eyes were starting to learn slime mold. My ways of seeing were altering, thanks to my new friends who were showing me what to look for. What was once invisible was quickly becoming apparent. It challenged my sense of perception. How little and how limited was my vision! How vast was the unknown world.

Iridescent rainbow orbs bursting into tangerine spun sugar. Pearly spheres of goo. Sorbet corn dogs leaning into one another with matching bouffants. Bright yellow blackberries. A bunch of Mr. Blobby’s babies. Golden goblets overflowing with effervescent honeycomb. Opalescent spherules in crinkled sweet wrappers. Amaretti flecked with flakes of soap.

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