The Candy Sellers

The poignant tale of the immigrant children who sell candy to travelers on the New York subway. Spending their lives underground among the rumbling trains, these kids miss home, and Jordan Salama subtly raises the question of whether America really is the promised land. Compassionate reporting is on display in this dispiriting story.

Multiple people, most of them Spanish speakers, stopped the candy sellers to tell them that what they were doing was wrong. “You can’t work like this. You have to be in school,” one older woman scolded a child in Spanish when he offered her candy on the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue platform. “Where are your parents?” She was intent on speaking with the boy’s mother, but the boy’s mother was nowhere to be found. Instead, she watched him warily as he continued selling along the platform until the next train came and he could slip quietly aboard.

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The Republic of Cows

Somewhere off the coast of Alaska lies the island of Chirikof, which is home to zero full-time humans but somewhere north of 2,000 feral cattle. The herd has been there for a century, its habitat enshrined as a federally protected wildlife preserve. However, as Jude Isabella makes clear in this beautifully rendered travel/nature feature (with photography to match), such a status might not be best for the rest of the area’s wildlife—or even for the cows themselves.

On the floor, a cow’s head resembles a Halloween mask, horns up, eye sockets facing the door, snout resting close to what looks like a rusted engine. Half the head is bone, half is covered with hide and keratin. Femurs and ribs and backbone scatter the floor, amid bits and bobs of machinery. One day, for reasons unknown, this cow wedged herself into an old shed and died.

Cattle loom large in death, their bodies lingering. Their suffering—whether or not by human hands—is tangible. Through size, domestication, and ubiquity, they take up a disproportionate amount of space physically, and through anthropomorphism, they grab a disproportionate amount of human imagination and emotion. When Frank Murkowski said Alaska should leave one island to the cattle, he probably pictured a happy herd rambling a vast, unfenced pasture—not an island full of bones or heifer-buckling bulls.

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What Happens to All the Stuff We Return?

A hundred years ago, David Owen tells us, about two percent of purchased goods were returned to the store. Now, the rate is over 20%, and clothing is double even that. However, while online retails accept returns, virtually none of the stuff returned gets sold as new—and Owen’s examination of “reverse logistics” explores the many solutions, from liquidation lots to straight-up incineration.

You can register as a buyer on Liquidity Services’ Web site right now, as I did recently, and place bids in any of hundreds of auctions. I didn’t do that, but I did spend a pleasant morning studying items that other people were bidding on, among them a two-pallet lot containing six hundred and fifty-four pounds of sports-related Amazon returns. The lot included seven pellet guns, six clear-plastic umbrellas, an assortment of punching bags and punching balls, a double-bladed lightsabre toy, a shatter-resistant over-the-door mini basketball hoop, eight yoga mats, a minnow trap, an indoor exercise trampoline, a pair of hiking poles, a kickboxing shield, a car refrigerator, two hoverboards (one with Bluetooth and one without), a jump-rope rack, a quiver’s worth of crossbow bolts, a fourteen-gallon red plastic gas can with a siphon pump, a set of four badminton racquets, and a mountain-bike handlebar. There were a hundred and fourteen items in all, and Liquidity Services had estimated their combined original retail value as six thousand five hundred and seventy-six dollars. The lot ended up attracting fifty bids. The winner paid nine hundred and twenty-five dollars, shipping not included. None of the fifty bidders were willing to offer more than fifteen cents on the dollar, and even at that price they were taking a chance, since there was no guarantee that any particular item would still function. Returned items are often damaged, dented, scratched, or inoperable, and even ones that don’t look too bad can be missing parts or accessories.

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Slavery Reparations Are Coming

Slavery isn’t a thing of the past. The descendants of people who profited from it are still profiting, while the descendants of those held in bondage bear the burdens of generational poverty, trauma, and racism. Barbados, where Black slaves worked sugar plantations for centuries, is demanding justice:

Reparations have moved from a fringe idea to a thing everyone is talking about. And this island, long regarded—some would say intentionally misconstrued—as so compliant with the colonial project that it is sometimes called Little Britain, has moved into a regional leadership position.

“Barbados is that country,” says Dorbrene O’Marde, chairman of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparation Support Commission and vice chair of the regional CARICOM Reparations Commission. (CARICOM, or the Caribbean Community, is an intergovernmental organization with 15 member and five affiliated states.) CARICOM’s Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on Reparations for Native Genocide and Slavery, five elected officials led by Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley, is expected this year to request that 10 European countries begin negotiations for reparations. Almost a decade ago, CARICOM’s Reparations Commission developed a 10-point plan calling for, among other things, a careful accounting of what occurred; formal apologies; attention to the psychological and cultural toll of centuries of oppression; European funding to strengthen infrastructure, education, and health care; and debt forgiveness. European countries rebuffed this request, but an updated 10-point plan will be finalized in the next few months, O’Marde says.

This year’s demand for reparations—which will call for a Marshall Plan–like public investment, not the individual payments that have dominated the conversation elsewhere—will arrive with more force. African countries, about two decades after they were first asked, have agreed to support the claim, and CARICOM officials have built alliances with reparations activists in the U.S. The letters are expected to say the time has come to negotiate reparations to improve infrastructure and human conditions in the Caribbean. Come to the table, they will say, or prepare to see much of the Caribbean in international court. Lawyers who won a reported £14 million ($17.86 million) settlement in 2012 on behalf of three Kenyans brutalized by the British have been retained.

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True Crime, True Faith: The Serial Killer and the Texas Mom Who Stopped Him

In yet another true crime story—but one that can still surprise—Margie Palm gets kidnapped by serial killer Stephen Miller and talks about her religious beliefs until he finally lets her go. Julie Miller recounts the bizarre, terrifying day and the even more bizarre friendship that followed. By smartly delving into the background of both characters she provides the necessary context to understand an otherwise unfathomable scenario.

In the years since she survived Morin, Palm was approached by agents, authors, and name-brand Hollywood producers eager to turn her abduction into books, a dramatized movie, or a miniseries. Invariably, they wanted to package her story either as a two-dimensional thriller or a Christian parable in which God comes to her in a car and saves her life and a mass murderer’s soul. Palm turned them all away, making her story a white whale even in our era of peak serial killer content. She’s telling her story in full for the first time here partly because she finally understands what happened to her.

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‘Move forward. Flap around a little!’ How learning to swim in my 50s set me free

A beautiful homage to swimming. Diane Mehta explores what swimming means to her, alongside some keen observations of those she shares the pool with.

I observed other swimmers intensely, memorising their moves, admiring their technique, and I probably seemed a little creepy. Instead of dreading the hard slap of cold water, I let it flow over me and refused to tense my shoulders. I told myself that, like ice, the water would help prevent migraines. When I pushed off the edge, I said to myself, “blue”, like a mantra key to the sublime. My mind emptied when I was submerged. Time was blue. My old friend who died was blue and every day she met me there underwater. Thinking got left behind as I entered the thrill of that quiet blue world.

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How Athletic Beer Won Over America

After an annoyingly enlightening Dry January this year, I was on the lookout for non-alcoholic beverage options that would not only taste great but also replicate, at least in part, the ritual of a rewarding nightcap. That quest led me to Athletic Brewing, which makes non-alcoholic beers that taste amazingly like beer beer. (And high-quality beer at that; their Hazy IPA is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.) It was no surprise then that I found myself frequently nodding in agreement—along with other imbibers, I’m sure—while reading Gabriella Paiella’s piece about how Athletic found a way to make a great product and take the social sting out of teetotaling.

And that might be the single most appealing thing that Athletic has provided people. We’re already in an existing nationwide loneliness epidemic. If you’re not drinking alcohol, for whatever reason—from sobriety to marathon training—it can add to the sense of isolation.

Even if chugging beer isn’t physically healthy, there’s something about cracking open a cold one around other people that is. Athletic proved that it doesn’t have to be alcoholic to provide the same much-needed ritual pleasure.

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