For The New Yorker, technologist Jaron Lanier delights in his large collection of musical instruments and the singular and ephemeral joy of music made in collaboration with others.
Today, I love to have musicians over to my house, where we can combine different instruments to see what happens. The joy that transpires when things go well is multilayered. There is the pleasure of connection with other people, and there is also the happiness of finding a new little corner of aesthetic interiority together. Music can conjure a new flow, a new pattern, a new flavor, between and inside people. And playing sufficiently obscure instruments forces a different approach to music. How can you be competitive about raw skill, or get into some other macho trap, when the task at hand is so esoteric? Who is to judge the winner in a contest that must invent itself over and over? When music made collaboratively with other musicians goes right, I feel a budding, rising warmth and comfort. Is this my mother smiling on me? Or maybe it’s me, smiling on her.
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While on a writing assignment, Joshua Hunt travels to Mount Fear in Japan to remember and grieve for his Uncle Bill, a man who knew how to keep him connected to their extended family living in the aftermath of intergenerational trauma in Alaska.
I was meant to visit him three weeks after he left that message, but on the morning of my flight to Juneau, Alaska, I tested positive for COVID-19. I’d contracted the virus while working on a story in New Mexico—my first profile for the magazine I hoped to impress by flying halfway around the world to interview a novelist. While listening to old messages from my uncle, I dwelled bitterly on two unfulfilled promises I had made when calling to say I couldn’t make it home in January: the first was that I would get to Alaska and see him again soon; the second was that he was going to love the profile I had been working on in New Mexico. It ended up being published ten days after he died.
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The humanity of “low skill” workers, a child disappearance intertwined with a cult, the resident snow monkeys of Southern Texas, a multi-million dollar mail-order fraud, and the disappointing decline of fish-and-chip shops. These are our editors’ favorite stories from the week.
As a sex worker in a Toronto massage parlor, Lana Hall earned her living from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., three to six shifts per week. In preparing for a particularly repellant final customer one night, Hall is humbled, not by the man she must shower with, but by the kindness of a fellow worker who curls her hair before the dreaded appointment. Reader, this small gift cut me so deeply that I found myself stifling sobs. “I felt so much care in that moment I could barely breathe,” Hall writes, “and it occurred to me that I’d never had a woman, before or since, handle my hair so tenderly.” As Hall recounts how the powerful, and society in general, look down on people with “low skill” jobs, she deftly reminds us that those who must work the wee hours serving the “incessant hungers of others” are often the most adept at conflict deflection and resolution—ironically the skills so often highly prized by those who work in sunlit ivory towers. Hall imparts with grace and nuance that the humanity on offer from those in low vs. high skill occupations is often as stark as night and day. —KS
Benjamin Hale | Harper’s | July 17, 2023 | 14,367 words
As soon as I finished this story, I sent it to two other magazine editors, both of them parents. Trigger warning for child murder, I told them, but you must read this. It’s been a long time since a piece surprised me the way this one did. Except I didn’t read it—I devoured it. Benjamin Hale’s delivery of a yarn involving a missing child, a cult, and perhaps a ghost in the wilderness of Arkansas is so adept that I didn’t get up, didn’t idly check social media, didn’t do anything while I was reading all 14,000 words of it. Hale plots a storyline that seems straight as an arrow then quietly nudges the reader to another path, then another. The twists and revelations are sublime but never showy. I don’t want to say anything else, to risk giving too much away. Suffice it to say, with that trigger warning in mind, you must read this. —SD
Sarah Bird | Texas Monthly | July 23, 2023 | 5,493 words
In 1972, Pelka—the 10-year-old snow monkey at the heart of Sarah Bird’s story—was shunted from her sanctuary outside of Kyoto, Japan, to a ranch in Texas. Too much temple pooping had led to the banishment of Pelka’s whole troop, and 150 monkeys swapped snowy peaks for sun-parched dirt. When Sarah Bird heard of her new Texan neighbors, she rushed to meet them; after all, they shared a history—Bird also grew up in Japan before relocating to Texas. Following a bonding moment with a doped-up Pelka, the snow monkeys become an unexpected force in Bird’s life, but, over the years, she loses track of them. Setting out to find them again, Bird contemplates a clichéd reunion, but the reality is far more nuanced. Her link adds an extra layer to the already fascinating story of this bizarre relocation and subsequent decades of supporting snow monkeys in Texas. Yes, Pelka now has generations of Texan relatives. —CW
Rachel Browne | The Walrus | July 26, 2023 | 5,264 words
I’m a sucker for stories about scams and grifters. As soon as I saw it, I was powerless to resist Rachel Browne’s investigative feature on copywriting con artist Patrice Runner. As a Montréal teen, Runner was enamored with the provocative copy of mail-order ads, especially those that resembled hand-written notes. Imagine being so persuasive in print that people mailed you money for winning lottery numbers and the secrets to luck and wealth. Over the years, over a million Canadians succumbed to Runner’s charm, earning him $200 million. Reporter Rachel Browne sent a hand-written letter to Runner, asking to interview him about his work with Maria Duval, an amateur psychic who claimed to have found missing persons and predicted election and stock market results. Runner licensed Duval’s likeness in Canada and the US, sending countless hand-written direct mail come-ons for astrological readings, lottery numbers, and fortune telling. On the proceeds, Runner led a lavish lifestyle that included heli-skiing and private schools for his kids where tuition was $100,000 a year. Browne expertly unravels Runner’s shady schemes and shell companies, distilling his case into a fascinating moral question: Is deception itself a crime? If you ask Runner’s many many victims they might say they’re more vulnerable than gullible, less cautious than curious. —KS
Tom Lamont | The Guardian | July 20, 2023 | 5,276 words
I first came to this piece because of my own love of fish-and-chips, but also because I knew I’d find a parade of aggressively British-sounding eatery names. In that, I wasn’t disappointed. But I also found something unexpectedly tragic, and unexpectedly resolute. Over the course of a year, Tom Lamont frequented “chippies” around the U.K., concentrating on Scotland’s East Neuk of Fife—a coastal area jutting out of the land between Edinburgh and Dundee, and by many accounts the world’s preeminent purveyor of the meal. When he began, supply-chain issues and soaring energy prices had already driven the industry to the edge of disaster. By the time his year was up, things had gotten markedly worse. Yet, Lamont’s elegy is suffused with love: his love for the “paradoxical richness without grossness” that marks a great fish and chips meal; villagers’ love for the stalwart shops and shopkeepers in their communities; even the friers’ and fishers’ love for the tradition. “Fishing is a serious matter here,” Lamont writes. “Fish and chips is a serious meal.” And as shop after shop closes, from the Lowford Fish Bar to Jack Spratt’s Superior to Jackson’s Chippie, each meal takes on even more weight. It’s a microcosm. A metaphor. And Lamont’s piece unpacks it all deftly, making sure you can take it away and digest it on your own time. Hopefully by the seaside. —PR
Audience Award
Get ready, it’s time to recognize the piece that our readers loved the most this week.
Luc Rinaldi | Maclean’s | July 13, 2023 | 6,259 words
As 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. —CW
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You expect heat in Texas, but Forrest Wilder remembers a far more forgiving climate growing up than the one he is experiencing now. A personal microcosm of climate change that really brings reality home.
Despite growing up in rural South Texas without air-conditioning, I don’t remember being uncomfortable in the summers, at least not in the house. The old thing was uninsulated and drafty, inviting in the sea breezes that bring thunderstorms from the Gulf to the coastal plains. After school and in the summer, I spent hours at the town library, devouring books in the delicious AC. Plus, summers just weren’t as hot in the eighties and early nineties—I know; I looked up the data. The seven hottest summers on record for DeWitt County, where I grew up, have all occurred since 1998.
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For The Walrus, reporter Rachel Browne writes to Patrice Runner, the Canadian king of mail order grift, a man whose persuasive direct-mail copy writing skills deceived vulnerable believers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
When Patrice Runner was around eleven, in the late 1970s, his mother, a writer, began looping him in on the family’s financial struggles, he recalls. Runner’s father had left a few years earlier, sending monthly sums as child support. Thoughts of a career were a long way off, but Runner says he remembers feeling that all he wanted was to “get rich” so he wouldn’t struggle like his mother. He says he once asked a friend, “Do you know a simple way to become a millionaire?” When the friend said he didn’t, Runner replied: “It’s easy. Find a way to only make $1 one million times.” At nineteen, Runner started his first mail-order business, with $80, selling weight-loss booklets and how-to books on a range of topics.
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Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence—but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans:
Today, the view that artificial intelligence poses some kind of threat is no longer a minority position among those working on it. There are different opinions on which risks we should be most worried about, but many prominent researchers, from Timnit Gebru to Geoffrey Hinton—both ex-Google computer scientists—share the basic view that the technology can be toxic. Weizenbaum’s pessimism made him a lonely figure among computer scientists during the last three decades of his life; he would be less lonely in 2023.
There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code.
Weizenbaum liked to say that every person is the product of a particular history. His ideas bear the imprint of his own particular history, which was shaped above all by the atrocities of the 20th century and the demands of his personal demons. Computers came naturally to him. The hard part, he said, was life.
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Sarah Bird has had a lifelong connection to 150 snow monkeys. (Not many people can attest to that.) She has followed their story since they were transported from Japan in 1972—for a new life in Texas—and is now determined to meet them one last time. There is no fairytale ending, but there is a beautiful story.
The national treasures had become public nuisances. Unless a new home was found, the 150 rogue monkeys would become candidates for either lab studies or the dissection table. When no takers could be found in Japan, a five-alarm alert went up throughout the international community to save these members of the only group of primates whose behavior and matrilineal lines had been studied for over a decade. For six years, scientists around the globe searched for a safe home for the endangered monkeys.
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