If you’re a runner who also browses TikTok, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of @mrs.space.cadet, a.k.a. Erin Azar, a 39-year-old mother of three who’s taken the running world by storm. Her quirky, lighthearted videos have inspired amateurs and Olympians alike. Unlike other fitfluencers, though, it’s Erin’s relatable, real-life, unglamorous approach to the sport that makes her content so appealing. In this delightful and uplifting Runner’s World profile, Jill Waldbieser gets to the heart of what motivates Azar. As an amateur (and very occasional) runner myself, I’ve never felt more validated.
“People see someone who’s not super skinny and think they must be running to lose weight,” she says. “They’ll comment to the effect of, ‘You’ve been running for three years and you look the same.’” But Erin’s goal is health, physical and mental, not a certain physique or number on the scale. When she did focus on weight loss, running didn’t bring her any joy. “Eating pizza and drinking beer made me happy, so I decided to just be happy.” Besides, she adds, “you can’t train for a marathon and try to lose weight. You have to eat so much.”
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Becoming a single dad ended my sportswriting career; I couldn’t make a West Coast swing during baseball season while responsible for two young girls. So I moved to the Times’ metro desk and became a decent city reporter, doing a mix of hard news and feature stories. Over the years, my girls tagged along on some of my assignments, from the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island to a Hasidic mother in Brooklyn who was one of the most sought-after nitpickers during a plague of lice in local schools. When the Times asked me to help conduct in-house seminars on street reporting, I made a point of telling younger reporters that success is often determined before you get out the door. If you’re fatalistic about getting what you need, failure awaits. If you force yourself to believe that an improbable reporting coup could happen, often as not it does. Corny maybe, but also true, at least in my experience.
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I felt naive, then, when two members of our team returned to the Royal Gardens after venturing out to Al Mabani. Their driver had refused to even slow down while passing by the jail, so fearful was he of being stopped at gunpoint.
I followed my own advice with Libya, trying before I arrived to imagine what reporting there would be like. I foresaw secretive conversations with friends and relatives of jailed migrants in dusty streets outside detention facilities. Maybe there would be a way to talk to prisoners through barred windows. Notes might be exchanged.
Needless to say, the landscape of the city was less than ideal for the kind of street reporting I knew. To merely venture out, by foot or by car, was to risk being confronted by the armed men stationed at a convoluted pattern of checkpoints throughout Tripoli. And then there was the matter of our security team. Though they had been assigned to us with the help of the Red Crescent, a little googling showed that the firm they worked for seemed to be run by a former Libyan military official accused of war crimes. Were they actually government minders monitoring our doings? Militia members themselves? Did it matter?
Libya, I was discovering a little late, was an inscrutable place.
In addition to me and Ian Urbina, our team included Dutch documentary filmmaker Mea Dols de Jong and Pierre Kattar, a video journalist who’d spent years at The Washington Post. Against the odds, we soon got some reporting breaks. A variety of aid organizations had done years of work documenting abuses and offering comfort to the tens of thousands of migrants swept up and detained inside Libya. One of those organizations was able to provide us with the names of the young migrant shot dead at Al Mabani and of a witness to the killing. The dead man was Aliou Candé, a farmer and father of three from Guinea-Bissau, captured by the Libyan Coast Guard as he tried to make his way to a new life in Italy. The witness was a man from Ivory Coast named Mohammad David; he had managed to escape Al Mabani in the tumult that followed Candé’s murder. We had a cell phone number for him.
On our first night in Tripoli, three of us made it to Gargaresh, an area that had become a migrant ghetto. Militias liked to make brutalizing sweeps of Gargaresh’s mix of hideouts and encampments. Along the neighborhood’s main drag, a blur of neon lights, furtive figures, internet cafés, and cheap food joints, we met Mohammad David. He spoke French, and Pierre, whose father once served as a translator for the U.S. embassy in Paris, could make out enough of what he said to extract a rough narrative of Candé’s killing.
There had been a fight inside one of Al Mabani’s crowded, fetid cells. Guards fired their automatic rifles indiscriminately. Candé was struck in the neck, and his blood streaked a wall as he dragged against it before falling down dead. Other detainees didn’t allow his body to be removed from the cell until they were granted their freedom, which was how Mohammad David made it to Gargaresh.
The incident was a stark reminder that Al Mabani, like many other jails in Libya, was run by one of the violent militias that had divided Tripoli into wary, sometimes warring fiefs. These forces extort the families of jailed migrants for ransom payments, steal aid money meant to help feed and clothe their captives, and sell men and women into forced servitude. Candé’s killing, for a rare, brief moment, gave some of his fellow prisoners leverage over their captors.
In the days that followed our conversation with David, other unlikely reporting triumphs piled up. We found a man who served as a kind of informal liaison for migrants from Guinea-Bissau eking out a living in Tripoli. He brought us to Candé’s great-uncle, who showed us police documents pertaining to Candé’s death; a “fight” was listed as the cause of his demise. The liaison said that Candé had been buried in a vast walled-off expanse of dirt that served as the graveyard of Tripoli’s unwanted. We hired a local photographer to launch a drone camera over the acres of burial mounds, most of them unmarked. He managed to locate one into which someone had scratched the name “Candé.”
In subsequent days, our team snuck two other men who’d spent time at Al Mabani into our hotel. One of them, a teenager, told us that he’d taken a bullet in his leg the night Candé was killed. We pushed the limits of prudence in pursuit of these reporting coups. Pierre had brought a drone camera with him, which he flew above Al Mabani. The scene he captured looked a lot like a concentration camp: men huddled under threat of violence after being fed in a courtyard, then marched back to their cells single file, beaten in the head for so much as looking up at the sky.
It soon became clear that our security guys were reporting back to their bosses, whoever they were, at least some of what we were up to. At one point, we got a visit from an American expatriate who said she worked for the security outfit. She warned us that what we were doing was dangerous and demanded we apprise her of any further proposed reporting efforts outside the confines of the hotel.
One morning we notified Red Crescent officials that we wanted to visit the morgue where Candé’s body had been taken. Mea and I got in a van and made our way through Tripoli’s streets. The morgue was part of a complex of squat buildings shielded by an imposing set of walls and fences. Inside was a man at a desk. We asked to see Candé’s records, and he rifled through several filing cabinets.
A freshly wrapped body lay on a gurney in the middle of the main room. In a side room, a worker ran water from a hose over another body. Behind a set of curtains was a wall of refrigerated chambers that could hold perhaps two dozen corpses. It was impossibly hot and completely quiet.
Mea recorded what we were seeing from a small camera set discreetly against her stomach, until someone noticed and reported it to the man at the desk. It was time for us to go.
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Last October, the Bolt Creek Fire helped give Seattle the worst air quality in the world—a dubious distinction more and more North American locations are getting in recent years. While the fast-moving blaze destroyed thousands of acres, no human lives were lost. But two very nearly were. Matt Bishop and Steve Cooper escaped certain death; this is the story of how.
Halfway down the chute, Bishop and Cooper watched in horror as the fire, hungry for fuel, snaked its way around the backside of the ridge and emerged in front of them. Flames engulfed the trail below the gully, consuming their escape route, roaring like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. “Oh fuck,” Cooper said. “That came fast, dude.” “Hopefully you guys get to see this video,” Bishop added, brow furrowed. “Otherwise, we didn’t make it.” He sent another message to his wife: “We’re trapped.”
Their breathing short and shallow, they considered their only option: Scramble back up the scree they’d just descended to huddle below Baring Mountain’s jagged peak, the rocky, open space a potential refuge — or a dead end.
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Amy McCarthy combines a fun look at “Dinner Theater” shows with thoughts on the more sinister side of the tourist town that hosts them. You’ll find playful descriptions and disturbing concepts in this compelling essay.
Still, I was aware that the Branson of today has a decidedly mixed reputation. Those who love it say that it’s a wholesome destination for good, clean, Christian fun in the Ozark Mountains, while its critics would suggest that it’s a haven for aging white baby boomers who are clinging to their God, their guns, and their wistfulness for a bygone era. In the midst of a 35,000-square-foot arena on the city’s theater-packed Strip, Dolly Parton’s Stampede is proof that it’s both — and a whole lot more.
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With apologies to The Shawshank Redemption, The Fugitive might be the greatest Aimless Sunday Afternoon Basic Cable Rewatch of all time. Is it Harrison Ford’s greatest? Nope. But it is a functionally perfect action-drama movie. And yet, it might actually be outshined by this doozy of an oral history—which, for all its lack of Harrison Ford, delivers more “how have I never heard that before?” details per square inch than seems possible. Read it, then watch the movie again. You were going to anyway, right?
Tom Wood: There’s a scene where we’re all sitting on the side of the train-wreck demolition site. We were questioning the dialogue and saying, “Let’s spark this up a bit.” I’m not the fastest thinker and was caught a little off-guard. Tommy turns to me [with the cameras rolling] and says, “What are you doing?” I go, “I’m thinking.” He goes, “How about you think me up a cup of coffee and a chocolate donut with some of those little sprinkles on top?” Later on, at the hotel scene, he says to me, “Don’t let them give you shit about your ponytail.” That was completely improv’d.
Daniel Roebuck: The quote that everyone brings up to me is “If they can dye the river green today, why can’t they dye it blue the other 364 days of the year?” That was an improv. And that was because we had that huge walk that we had to cover. And I remember asking Andy, “Did you shoot the green river?” He goes, “Yeah, we’re cutting it in.” And that’s how it came to be.
Joe Pantoliano: When we first get into the storm drain, I go, “Goddammit, I just got these shoes.” All the lines down there were improvised.
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Inconsistent potency makes doing fentanyl—already up to 50 times stronger than heroine—like playing a game of Russian roulette. Will you get the dose you can tolerate or will you take the hit that leads to overdose? For Esquire, Jack Holmes reports from Portland in Oregon, a state which decriminalized drug possession via Measure 110 in an attempt to treat drug abuse as a behavioural-health disorder.
This was black tar heroin’s last stand,” Morgan told me, referring to the I-5 corridor from Washington to California. These days, she sits on the Oversight and Accountability Council for Measure 110, but years ago she was deep into heroin herself. She was in and out of jail for a long time, including four years on a federal charge when she was held responsible for her friend’s overdose death, but going to prison over and over never did much to stop her using. She was shocked at what she found in Portland when she got out in 2018, as a longtime housing shortage gave way to an explosion of tent cities. Then the state saw a surge in heroin and prescription-opioid use in 2019 and 2020, the culmination of a shift in which Portland’s beaming openness to the world began to fade toward something darker. Then the fentanyl flooded in, and now everything is fentanyl. It has almost completely replaced heroin on the street. A serviceable amount costs three dollars.
The true harm reductionists know that the material aid is about establishing a connection, planting a seed that you have to go back to the garden and tend to week after week until someone starts to believe for the first time in however long that somebody cares what happens to them, that maybe they should care, that they can’t just keep saying none of this shit matters so why not keeping getting high.
Everybody in this field has their own ways to navigate the philosophical quandaries, and nobody getting money through Measure 110 is pretending they have all the answers. Is the solution “housing first,” even before somebody gets sober, or do you give people medication and the supplies to keep living on the streets, hoping they can get clean in a tent? And considering all the many years when patients—especially Black patients—were thrown out of traditional inpatient programs so hastily, how do you decide when and why to toss somebody for screwing up?
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In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, How to Say Babylon, poet Safiya Sinclair recounts her upbringing in Jamaica—a life under livity, to use the argot of her parents’ adoptive Rastafarian tradition. (The culture, so often flattened by others into the stuff of dorm room posters, is rendered here with both nuance and clarity.) As Sinclair finds her own voice, her father retreats into the comforts of parochial repression; that tension propels readers through a happy but fraught adolescence and out the other side.
My father was never going to be a carpenter or a banker or a taximan, he said. He sang for Jah, so he had no choice but to cover the same ten Bob Marley songs for tourists eating their steak dinners in the west-coast hotels. At home, though, he could still be king. My mother placed every meal before him as soon as he beckoned for it. He had never turned on a stove, never washed a dish. Every evening before he left for work, my mother would wash his dreadlocks, pouring warm anointments over his bowed head at the bathroom sink, and then oil each lock as he sat eating fruit that she had cut for him. I imagined a servant, just out of frame, fanning a palm frond back and forth.
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