Georgia’s Largest Industry Faces a Mental Health Crisis

Suicide rates in rural areas are higher than in cities, and increasingly so. Meanwhile, farmers—who are typically older, male, and white, three more factors that increase suicide risk—grapple with newer existential risks to their already-fraught profession, like climate change and a real-estate crunch. A mental-health storm has been gathering for some time; Allison Salerno visits a pilot program at the University of Georgia that seeks to break up the clouds with fellowship and human connection.

Jason is now 46 and married, with children of his own. He still manages the farm in Bowersville, where twice a day—every day of the year—those cows need to be milked. Other chores: mix feed rations for milking and dry cows (pregnant or about to deliver), water and feed the animals, care for those that are ailing, deliver new calves, manage manure, monitor herd health and nutrition—and, depending on the season, prep, plant, or harvest fields. Since 2019, Jason has made multimillion-dollar investments in the business. He borrowed money to build an upgraded barn and become the second dairy farm in the state to use robotic milkers. He bought four of the machines, at about $250,000 each. Jason often worries that to ensure the farm’s future, he could have endangered it—that the debt he’s taken on might lead to the farm’s failure. “I’ve taken all that 70-something years’ worth of effort, and I’ve risked it all,” he says. Having witnessed the aftermath of his brother’s death, Jason never considers dying by suicide, but he’s honest about how tough running the business can be. How does he manage the pressure? “Some days are better than others.” Jason lives too far from Blairsville to participate in the Shed program there—he’s about a two-hour drive east—but he’s the type of farmer Haney would love to reach.

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We Are All Animals at Night

Lana Hall recounts the kindness she encountered working in a massage parlour in Toronto’s Finch Alley during the ’80s. She recalls the camaraderie she discovered among her fellow workers and others — such as cab drivers and convenience store clerks —who too worked through the night in low-paying jobs to serve the needs of others.

At night we’re just animals, I was reminded. The clients, yes, seeking release they couldn’t admit during daylight hours, but also the workers who manned the various portions of the strip mall after dark. The way we cared for each other, sometimes more in silent gestures than anything else, felt connected to our deepest instincts as pack animals. No matter how much I wanted to go home, there was some comfort in the simplicity of that connection.

Women filled my Styrofoam cup at the twenty-four-seven coffee shop across the street from the parlour, glancing wordlessly at the strip of bare skin between my coat and the tops of my stockings, but still making sure my cup was full to the top, passing me extra packets of sugar, sometimes a muffin from the day-old basket. Kids in their early twenties manned the counter at all-night fast-food joints, where I’d go between clients on slow shifts, needing something to wake up my neurons: salt, heat, grease. The shock of cold air on my legs at midnight. We knew so little about each other’s lives—how could we?—but forced into this strange cohort of ragged work hours, I felt we sometimes shared a look of recognition: of people whittling time away as we tended to the incessant hungers of others.

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Catch and Release

If we’re lucky, our journey through education features great teachers. If we’re extraordinarily lucky, one of those great teachers becomes a friend, and even a mentor. In signing up for a class about a novelist he’d never even read, Stewart Sinclair unwittingly set himself on a path that delivered all three. A lovely ode to the figures who guide us more than they might ever know.

Sometimes Schaberg would come into class with a deep outdoorsman’s tan and talk about whatever thoughts had come to him while he was casting along the Mississippi River. He’d just had his first child in the years while I was his student, and it seemed like all of his thoughts led to the river or the boy. It was apparent to anyone who took his classes that Schaberg was a person searching for meaning, who didn’t believe he had any answers, and who wanted his students to get excited about the search. A fisherman can show you how to read the river to figure out the best place to cast your line, but he can’t tell you what, if anything, might emerge from the depths. That’s the nature of the fun.

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What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing

Critiques of ChatGPT’s writing appeared almost as soon as the service became publicly available. But most of those criticisms so far have been fairly vague—variations of “The writing just doesn’t feel human.” I certainly agree, but have also been searching for a clearer argument about why exactly ChatGPT’s writing fails on a technical level.

Laura Hartenberger at Noema delivers exactly that in this cogent, masterful analysis and critique of the content that these types of programs spit out. In doing so, she also wrestles with the central question that has inevitably crept up in the midst of this generative AI hand-wringing: What is good writing, anyway?

When we talk about good writing, what exactly do we mean? As we explore new applications for large language models and consider how well they can optimize our communication, AI challenges us to reflect on the qualities we truly value in our prose. How do we measure the caliber of writing, and how well does AI perform?

In school, we learn that good writing is clear, concise and grammatically correct — but surely, it has other qualities, too. Perhaps the best writing also innovates in form and content; or perhaps it evokes an emotional response in its readers; or maybe it employs virtuosic syntax and sophisticated diction. Perhaps good writing just has an ineffable spark, an aliveness, a know-it-when-you-see-it quality. Or maybe good writing projects a strong sense of voice.

But then, what makes a strong voice, and why does ChatGPT’s voice so often fall flat?

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We Failed Amy Winehouse

In this excerpt from Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture Is Failing Women, Lisa Whittington-Hill examines the different ways we remember Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. An analysis that raises some uncomfortable gender questions.

Both Winehouse and Cobain had a complicated relationship with fame, resenting their success once the whole machine got too big. The singers didn’t want all the fancy things their hit songs and sold-out shows afforded: they just wanted to play music. “My music is not on that scale. Sometimes I wish it was, but I don’t think I am going to be at all famous. I don’t think I could handle it. I’d probably go mad,” Winehouse says, in the 2015 documentary Amy, of her pre–Back to Black status, describing fame as a “scary thing.”

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How To Chop An Onion

In this beautiful essay for Joyland, Matthew Medendorp peels back the layers of the lowly onion, an organism with DNA more complex than that of a human. He reflects on its earthly origins and heavenly taste once transformed by fat in the pan, after it meets the knife.

The point is: we have more in common with an onion than we might like. If we share a certain amount of our DNA with a banana ((between 41-50% depending on the source, certainly more than I’m comfortable with), how much more so with an onion? Onions have, in fact, five times the amount of DNA as humans. There’s a famous genetic test associated with the vegetable named the Onion Test. The Onion Test puts us humbly in our place. Scientists used to think the more DNA an organism had, the more complex a being it was. Into this enter the humble onion, with a cellar structure so simple you can identify the building blocks of life under a simple, middle-school science class microscope. That extra DNA, scientists concluded, must be junk DNA – DNA that serves no purpose. The DNA is on standby, like an onion on your cutting board, awaiting something no one can quite predict yet, its final purpose unclear. So, it is possible that when you cut an onion you condemn a complex being to oblivion. Or, alternately, to a higher purpose.

Every time we chop an onion, we remember other onions that we’ve chopped. Even water has memory, and an onion is not without its juices. We compound our onion experience, water, and layers, and chopping, spirit memory and muscle memory. This is all automatic, primal, and elemental. The steel of a good cut is tempered in water, supercooled and given strength by the cold. Every time we chop an onion, we visualize what it will become, therefore invoking its future. Past onions and future onions collide on the cutting board as we slice and dice. This happens all without consideration, but it bears dissection.

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Who Walks Always Beside You?

In 2001, Benjamin Hale’s young cousin went missing in the Ozarks. The search for her led his family down unexpected paths—to a cult, a murder, and possibly a ghost:

They thought it best to leave town for a bit, and they asked Haley where she wanted to go. Her favorite thing she had ever seen in her short life was the Gateway Arch, which they’d visited on a family vacation, so they decided to take a short trip to St. Louis. During the drive up, Haley told them for the first time—told anyone for the first time—about her “imaginary friend,” Alecia.

From the moment Alecia first appeared in the story, Haley insisted on that slightly unorthodox spelling, although she did not yet perfectly know how to read. She also insisted on other specific details. Alecia was four years old. She had long, dark hair tied in pigtails. She wore a red shirt with purple sleeves, bell-bottom pants, and white sneakers. She had a flashlight. She guided Haley to the river.

“I never had imaginary friends before this experience,” Haley told me, “and I never had any after. And I never saw this particular imaginary friend again.” She did not think at any time that Alecia was a real child. “I was fully aware that this was a non-corporeal being that was with me. And she was a little girl, and we had conversations, we told stories, we played patty-cake, and she was just a very comforting presence. But I knew I was alone.” The hallucinations started later, after she’d already made it to the river. Alecia was not a vision of this sort. “I one hundred percent did not think there was another child with me. I knew, physically, I was alone.” But she also says that Alecia guided her to the river, which she didn’t know was there.

There is a phenomenon called third man syndrome, or third man factor: when some sort of unseen or incorporeal conscious presence seems to accompany people—often a person alone—going through a long, difficult, and frightening experience they do not know they will survive. It is not well understood. It may be some sort of emergency coping mechanism. It was most famously experienced by Sir Ernest Shackleton during one of his expeditions to the Antarctic; the mountaineer Reinhold Messner has also reported experiencing the phenomenon, as have the explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft. “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” Shackleton wrote in his 1919 memoir, South, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”

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