Cat-astrophe

Sorry, cat people: According to some ecologists, your feline friends are terrible for the planet. And the problem is even worst with unowned cats, like those who cluster on one particular street in San Juan, Puerto Rico. But as Carrie Arnold unpacks in this essay, solutions are tough to come by.

Each year, cats collectively kill billions of birds, rodents, insects, reptiles and amphibians. They routinely make lists of the world’s worst invasive species. Free-ranging cats have been implicated in the extinction of Lyall’s wren in New Zealand and contributed to the extinction of 33 other species , and are considered a major threat to others, especially on an island like New Zealand — where birds, otherwise, have no natural land predators. To conservationists, it’s a major crisis.

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Tethered Together

This essay is an interesting analysis of male friendship, set against the backdrop of a near-death canoeing experience. Nathan Munn’s vivid description of paddling rapids with his friend is sure to get your heart racing. A piece that manages to be both gripping, and thoughtful.

It wasn’t long before we both heard a deep rumbling. We stopped paddling and let the canoe drift in the current, wondering if we were hearing a highway nearby. After a moment, we realized it was the sound of the rapids ahead. I prickled with fear but we pressed on. A few minutes later we crossed a line of small red buoys that neither of us recognized as our last warning.

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My Benihana, Myself

You may not expect that a chain restaurant known for performative griddlework would inspire intense self-reflection, but that’s part of what makes Jaya Saxena’s piece about training to be a teppanyaki chef such a lovely surprise. Come for the onion volcano, stay for the many other layers Saxena peels back.

I think about the toll of that kind of performance and the burden of framing your culture primarily as “fun.” The menu that has barely strayed from steak and shrimp and fried rice. Spending all night slicing and dicing and flipping to applause, then reemerging into a world that values you only for your ability to conform to its preconceptions. Perhaps you think of yourself mainly in terms of how well you live up to others’ expectations, even if you never agreed to them, and fret about performing that role. Perhaps there’s barely room to think of what else you could — or want to — offer. Anyway, there is no show good enough to earn you acceptance. But still, you hope.

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Hitting Zero

Jana G. Pruden spent three days observing the Canadian Cheer National Championships in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and discovered that cheerleading no longer takes place on the sidelines. For some, it’s become the ultimate in team sport, requiring dedication, rigorous training, and a fairly high pain tolerance to excel.

The Canadian Cheer National Championships is the largest tournament in Canadian cheer. This year, 8,000 athletes journeyed from around the country to compete at Nationals, with at least double that number of supporters paying to watch. The youngest competitors were five, the oldest in their 40s. Some of the 428 teams, including both the Golden Girls and Great White Sharks, would be heading to the world cheer competition in Orlando the following week.

There are places for all kinds of bodies in cheer – small flyers, lithe tumblers, powerful bases – and with seven different skill levels and no upper age limit, virtually anyone can find a place. Though there are co-ed teams, cheer in Canada is overwhelmingly female, with girls and women making up an estimated 98 per cent of competitors.

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The Age of Goggles Has Arrived

On Monday, Apple announced its first new product in eight years—a mixed-reality headset. Basically goggles with computers in them. Ian Bogost asks if this is even new, and why we would need such a thing.

Maybe goggles can recover some of what the internet has lost. One might use them not to foster or exploit connections (as in the old—and failed—mission of social media) but to slow down and go somewhere rather than tapping and scrolling and posting into oblivion.

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Voices On Addiction: Speaking Ill Of The Dead

Juliane Bergmann’s poignant essay looks at the intergenerational judgement between a mother and daughter and the fraught consequences of love in a strained relationship, where neither party can meet the other’s needs. “I could not be honest with my mother in life or death because she couldn’t handle the truth,” she writes. “And, also, because I couldn’t handle telling it.”

It seems easy for some to leave their families when those relationships are rotten and poisonous. They create their own families, chosen, not assigned. It has never been that easy for me. I feel the pull of blood and name and birthplace and biology. I have always felt stuck in the quicksand of Wanting-Things-To-Be-Different. Even my mom’s death was not enough proof for me that things would never be—could never be—different. The grief over what I wanted and didn’t have, what I wished to be true but could never make true, didn’t die along with my mom’s body.

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‘A Good Death’

Saskatoon artist Jeanette Lodoen wanted Canadians to understand the realities of medically-assisted dying and so she and her family granted a CBC News reporter and videographer unrestricted access in the weeks before, during, and after her death.

Jeanette said her family, which included several great-grandchildren, was her greatest pride. But her “second love” was art.

“I’m really proud. I was looking back and I realize that I’ve done a lot more than I thought I did,” she said, pausing to gather a breath. “I’ve never thought of that because, you know, your life is in pieces. Your life is always now, right?

“I used to think I was lazy because I hated housework. I hated it to the Nth degree. Even when I was young, my brother used to accuse me of being lazy. And so when I did all this [art] work, I realized I wasn’t lazy. I was working at something that I love, not at something I hated, you know?”

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