Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville

There’s been a storm brewing in Nashville, epicenter of country music, for some time now. Black, female, and liberal-minded artists are finding audiences like never before—but are also invariably shunted over to Americana, a distinct (and arguably contrived) genre. That separation keeps them off the radio, and out of the upper tiers of success. In investigating how one music can have two souls, Emily Nussbaum covers the waterfront with nuance and expertise.

Whenever I talked to people in Nashville, I kept getting hung up on the same questions. How could female singers be “noncommercial” when Musgraves packed stadiums? Was it easier to be openly gay now that big names like Brandi Carlile were out? What made a song with fiddles “Americana,” not “country”? And why did so many of the best tracks—lively character portraits like Josh Ritter’s “Getting Ready to Get Down,” trippy experiments like Margo Price’s “Been to the Mountain,” razor-sharp commentaries like Brandy Clark’s “Pray to Jesus”—rarely make it onto country radio? I’d first fallen for the genre in the nineties, in Atlanta, where I drove all the time, singing along to radio hits by Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire, Randy Travis and Trisha Yearwood—the music that my Gen X Southern friends found corny, associating it with the worst people at their high schools. Decades later, quality and popularity seemed out of synch; Music Row and Americana felt somehow indistinguishable, cozily adjacent, and also at war.

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They Lost Their Kids to Fortune

A gamer himself, Luc Rinaldi brings personal insight into his reporting on the families bringing a lawsuit against Fortnite’s developer, Epic Games. A deftly woven mix of liability law, Fortnite’s history, and a powerful case study.

Alana allowed Cody to play Fortnite for two hours at a time, a few nights a week. When he was gaming, he wouldn’t eat, drink water or even go to the bathroom. If he lost a round, he’d yell and slam his controller on the ground. When Alana would tell him his time was up, he’d beg to continue. “He was miserable when he couldn’t game,” she says. “That’s all he wanted to do.”

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Chasing the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

For 44 years, Bobby Harrison has been in search of a very specific quarry: the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that has not officially been sighted since 1944. For Garden & Gun, Lindsey Liles profiles the man and his mission.

Species go extinct all the time—most slip in silence out of this world, where they once forged a careful place for themselves, without ceremony or eulogy or mourning. But the ivorybill will not go quietly. Like any we love, it will go with weeping and gnashing of teeth and a litany of mea culpas, because after all, the Lord God Bird has become, through its beauty and its resurrections and its champions, more than a bird—it is a story; a tragedy, a cautionary tale, of how we let a symbol of the South’s wildest, most mysterious heart slip away. And like the ancient mariner who shot the albatross, we are compelled to tell the tale. It haunts us.

What will you do, I ask Harrison, if they declare the ivorybill extinct? At his age, the bulky batteries that power the trolling motor feel heavier. Stepping in and out of the canoe demands more balance. Loading up the van for the five-hour drive to Arkansas takes longer than it once did. “The ivorybill itself isn’t likely to notice that the government declared it extinct,” he answers. “As long as I’m able, I’ll be out here searching.”

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The Balkans’ Alternative Postal System: An Ad-Hoc Courier’s Tale

It’s an understatement to say that the Balkans is a complicated place. Traveling even short distances can mean encountering fraught borders, de jure or not. Mailing items can be exorbitantly expensive, and unreliable to boot. Enter the people who will take packages, letters, and even passengers wherever they need to go. This piece detailing the Balkans’ informal transport networks, originally published last year by Kosovo 2.0 and released again by The Guardian this month, was a runner-up for a European Press Prize:

Sending packages by bus or taxi, by driver, friend or acquaintance, is one of the most functional social inventions in the Balkans. It’s as fast as the speed of a car or bus. And in a place where railway and airline connections have been all but destroyed or simply cancelled, it’s the fastest way to send or receive things.

One specific person—driver, friend or acquaintance—takes care of the delivery. It is a person you either know or have at least met, someone you’ve shaken hands with at some point and exchanged a few words. It seems in those 30 or 60 seconds a level of trust is built that is so much greater than it’s possible to establish with any postal service worker, hidden behind the counter with their promotional stock photos of yellow vans that always arrive on time.

Who would you trust more: a) a company with a slogan that guarantees your shipment will be delivered in the next 48 hours, and offers you the possibility to follow your shipment through a special code; or b) a driver who, when asked “When will it arrive, approximately?”—asked bashfully so as not to appear as if you are, God forbid, rushing him, because he has every right to get there whenever he wishes—first looks into the distance, inhales a smoke, and exhales: “It depends on the rush hour, but not before nine”? And they always give you a time that’s too early. Better for you to wait, than for the whole bus.

Somehow, for an astonishingly high number of people in the Balkans, the answer is b.

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The Final Dead Shows: Part One

With the iconic psychedelic jam band once again making its last stand—this time in its current John Mayer-including incarnation, and in its long-ago hometown of San Francisco—Sophie Haigney makes what might be a final pilgrimage. A (two-part study) in juxtaposition, commercialism, and the enduring power of good vibes.

Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars.

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Jacked

A routine traffic stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, led to a massive investigation that exposed a nationwide network of people stealing and selling catalytic converters from the undersides of vehicles, a criminal operation that involved the exchange of some $545 million for scrap metal:

Cops love a good code name, and by the fall of 2022 the investigation in Tulsa had one: Operation Heavy Metal. In the Riverside precinct, officers began to joke that Kansas Core had never taken a day off, he was so obsessed. Someone posted a printout featuring a meme in which a wild-looking Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia stands before a wall crowded with papers and lines, cigarette in hand. “Larceny from a vehicle?” they’d typed in. “You mean the greatest criminal conspiracy ever devised.”

Operation Heavy Metal now involved not just Homeland Security Investigations, but the IRS, the FBI and dozens of local police departments. Between manpower and geographic reach, some of Staggs’ veteran colleagues reckoned Camp 2 had launched the Tulsa PD’s largest investigation. By chance, law enforcement agents in California had been working a completely independent case involving buyers, which had also led them to DG. The investigations merged into one, soon becoming so unwieldy that agents had to gather in Philadelphia for three days to coordinate the endgame.

On the morning of Nov. 2, Jeremy Jones was in his office at JT Auto, next to Curtis Cores on Highway 51. “I was getting a cup of coffee,” he says. “I look out the window and something caught my eye—it was like a SWAT team. There’s a tank. There’s guys with assault rifles and military gear.” His first instinct was that Curtis had been secretly dealing drugs or guns. When he wandered out to talk to the cops and found out it was in fact the catalytic converter business they were taking down, “it did seem like a little overkill.”

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Black Hole Paradox

For The Baffler, Erica Vital-Lazare explores the gravitational pull that Las Vegas had on her absent father, a man who left his wife and three daughters to for a life in Sin City, gambling under the protection of career criminal Benny Binion.

The Horseshoe is at the center of the circuit my father navigated between the Plaza, the Mint, and the El Cortez. The ringmaster-dealer in a game of craps, the stickman handles the dice with the curved end of his stick, presenting a player with a seemingly fated set of numbers, which they must pluck as is from the table and roll. In a town known for rules skewed in favor of the house, my father refused the dice as the stickman set them. His technique was to re-pattern the bones, turn the sixes up, the fives aligned and facing each other. Essentially, reworking his fate.

Once, when a dealer at the Horseshoe threatened to eject my father for resetting before the toss, Benny Binion stepped in. My father had been previously introduced to the famed casino-mogul by fellow self-made casino legend Sam Boyd. Draping an arm at his shoulders, Binion walked my father from table to table, dealer to dealer. “You see his face,” he said. “This is my friend. Let this man do as he likes.”

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