King Charles’s Very Hobbity Coronation

In something straight out of “The Great British Bake Off,” King Charles III declared an official quiche for his coronation. Helen Lewis ruminates on this and other glorious frivolities in this lovely essay, where she demonstrates a particular aptitude for hat descriptions. A piece that will get you quietly chortling, in a polite British way.

Petronella Wyatt offered my single favorite paragraph on the whole hoopla: “It is particularly disturbing that the Earl of Derby has not been asked to provide falcons, as his family have done since the 16th Century. These little things deprive people of their purpose in life.”

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Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop

It’s true that the national media, spurred in large part by culture-war opportunism, has unfairly painted San Francisco as a city in a death spiral. However, it’s also true that in certain quarters, gutted by the pandemic and vaporizing tech money and apathy, the most palpable vital sign is human misery. What that means for the city at large remains an unanswered question — but Elizabeth Weil’s Curbed piece, one of the few national stories written by an actual SF resident, tries to engage with it as well as one person can.

A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the east-coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’ed, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”

I shook my head.

“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”

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How Two Friends Sparked L.A.’s Sushi Obsession — and Changed the Way America Eats

In 1965, Noritoshi Kanai and Harry Wolff Jr. were on a trip to Japan, looking for an interesting food product to import to the U.S. Instead, one of their dinners in Tokyo led them to another idea: sushi. Daniel Miller recounts how the two friends and business partners brought the Japanese cuisine to Los Angeles, at a time when the city felt primed for something new. How did sushi spread across the region? Which restaurants jumped on board right from the start? When were the exact moments that the sushi bar and the California roll were invented? This is an entertaining piece of regional foodie history, and explores whether food can truly bring different people — and cultures — together.

Sushi was, of course, known to Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in L.A. well before the efforts of Wolff and Kanai, but it was typically simple and homespun. Among the items frequently served in Japanese American homes, Matsumoto said, were inari sushi, a fried tofu pocket stuffed with rice; and futomaki sushi, a thick roll usually filled with vegetables and sometimes cooked seafood.

Their timing was impeccable. In the 1950s and ’60s, Rath said, three innovations made it much easier to import products from Japan: refrigerated shipping containers, regular and direct transpacific flights, and the globalization of Japan’s fishing fleet.

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The Elusive, Maddening Mystery of the Bell Witch

Colin Dickey gives a detailed account of the legend of the Bell witch of Tennessee, before questioning why this story has lingered throughout the centuries, finding the answer in the anxieties that define American culture. A scary tale and a cultural analysis in one, what more could you want?

This complexity could be why we can’t look away from the story of the Bell Witch amid all the other ghost stories that drift in and out of the American consciousness. Storytellers look for explanation, resolution, clarity. The only clarity in the story of the Bell Witch and its endurance over more than a century is the way it taps into white, male American anxieties, anxieties that are of culture’s own making.

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The Free Dogs of India

British colonialism spread the idea that dogs are only legitimate if they belong to a breed, while others are inferior, dirty creatures who should be culled. India has the world’s largest population of street dogs, which were historically labeled as “pariahs” and “strays” by the British and ultimately viewed as a symbol of the decline of India.

But as Krithika Srinivasan explains in this piece, dogs existed before breeds, before fancy dog shows, and before the upper class groomed them as they wished. Shouldn’t India’s street dogs be free to live in public places and coexist with its human inhabitants? Despite the need to find their own food, water, and shelter, and their exposure to mostly human-made harms like traffic and cruelty, these free-living dogs actually live autonomous and peaceful lives. Srinivasan challenges us to reconsider the long-held idea that dogs are meant to be human companions, and to rethink how humans can coexist with other beings on the planet.

Too often in the West, dogs are seen through the prism of pedigree, and connected to their owner via collars and leashes. All too often, the realities of how dogs and humans live together in the Global South are overlooked. As a country with a significant street-dog population, India is a good place from which to explore how humans and canines share street life in cooperative ways that move beyond images of free-living dogs as dangerous.

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Saving the Monarch Butterfly Migration

Sadly, as of July 2022, monarch butterflies have become another member of the endangered species list. At Atmos Magazine Romina Cenisio visits the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico to learn about the hazards and odds these amazing creatures face for survival and what some humans are doing to help them thrive.

Though the butterflies’ numbers fluctuate yearly, they’ve been trending downward. In July 2022, monarch butterflies officially joined the endangered species list.

From loss of habitat to the instability and unpredictability of climate change, the butterflies’ vast migration that traverses Canada, the U.S., and Mexico faces a patchwork of different threats. In the U.S., habitat loss and pesticides threaten milkweed, a native perennial flowering plant that’s a crucial piece of the migratory species’s survival. It’s the one plant on which monarchs lay their eggs and the one food source for the monarch caterpillars during the spring migration. In Mexico, deforestation due to illegal logging threatens the butterflies’ winter home. With such mounting challenges, the very survival of the monarch butterflies is at stake.

Their awe-inspiring migration is a cycle that repeats each year, spanning three countries. This journey is part of a deeply interconnected symbiosis with other species that ultimately supports us too. From grasslands to roadsides to forests, monarchs are essential pollinators that enrich diversity in flowering plants across North America.

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On the Trail of the Dark Avenger

Welcome to 1980s Bulgaria, a country on the brink of economic collapse and a hotbed of computer viruses. In an excerpt from his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks, Scott J. Shapiro details the work of a notorious virus creator known only as the Dark Avenger, who wreaked havoc on computer systems because, well, he could:

Others had been pumping out viruses for months, but Dark Avenger built his to be lethal. His first creation would be known as Eddie. When a user ran a program infected with Eddie, the virus would not start by attacking other files. It would lurk in computer memory and hand back control to the original program. However, when a user loaded another program, skulking Eddie would spring into action and infect that program. These infected programs would be Eddie’s new carriers.

Eddie also packed a payload that slowly and silently destroyed every file it touched. When the infected program was run the 16th time, the virus overwrote a random section of the disk in the computer with its calling card: “Eddie lives … somewhere in time.” After enough of these indiscriminate changes, programs on the disk stopped loading.

Destructive viruses were not new. Vienna, for example, destroyed every eighth file. But Eddie was far more malicious. Because Eddie infections took a while to produce symptoms, users spread the virus and backed up contaminated files. When users discovered that their disk had turned into digital sawdust, they also learned that their backups were badly damaged. Dark Avenger had invented what are now called “data diddling” viruses — viruses that alter data in files.

Dark Avenger was proud of his cruel creation and claimed credit in the code. First, he inserted an ironic copyright notice: “This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988–89 Dark Avenger.” The “Eddie lives” string that wreaked such destruction was a tribute to his love of heavy metal music. “Eddie” refers to the skeletal mascot of the band Iron Maiden; Somewhere in Time is the name of Iron Maiden’s sixth album, in which Eddie appears on the cover as a muscular cyborg in a Blade Runner setting, next to graffiti that reads “Eddie lives.”

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