Like Dan McQuade, I’m a cat person, and this piece on all the cats he’s known and grown to love hit me in the heart. I’m reminded of my first cat, Striper, who we adopted when I was 10 and lived until I was in my early 20s, and think about our two current cats, Kaia and Ashira, who have also become lovable companions to my 5-year-old daughter. McQuade writes about the unique bonds formed with cats in our own household, but also the felines we encounter in our neighborhood; those connections, while more casual, also touch us deeply. McQuade also reflects on the influence of the comic strip Garfield, and a moving short from a 1988 special, Garfield: His 9 Lives, that beautifully captures the lifelong cat-human experience. This is a sweet little essay, and “Diana’s Piano,” the five-minute short McQuade recommends, is worth a watch.
I prefer cats to dogs. They’re smaller, you don’t have to walk them, and they generally like to be left alone. I also like that you seem to have to earn their attention. And once you make friends with a cat, it is a stream of cuteness. Detective now sleeps next to my chest or behind Jan’s legs, purring throughout the night. In the wild, cats only really meow to their mom when they’re kittens; it’s how they ask for food. But they do meow at humans, whenever the spirit moves them. The way I see it, the cats I meet are intentionally being cute in order to get me to do things for them—give them food, pet them nicely, the usual. I accept the terms of this agreement.
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Forty years ago, the Denver suburb of Thornton was trying to be forward-looking when it bought land and water rights 60 miles north of its location, near bucolic Fort Collins. But instead of being able to use that fairly and legally bought water, the city has run up against decades of small-town politics and NIMBYism—and now, Thornton really needs that water.
With business and residential development forced to slow, city officials are trying to change residents’ traditional American desire for a lush green lawn, which nearly triples the town’s water use in the summer months. Water reduction alone won’t solve the problem, though. The bigger question of who gets access to water—and how—is what David Gelles explores in this piece that’s part of the Times “Uncharted Water” series on the unfolding water crisis. It’s not just newsworthy, but prescient too: This type of municipal battle will become far too common across the American West in the years to come.
After years of legal rancor, most of Thornton’s neighbors grudgingly agree that the city has a legal right to the water from up north. But no one can agree on precisely how Thornton should access it, and a fight is raging over the city’s plans to move that water down to the Denver suburbs. With the pipeline stalled, Thornton is forced to limit its growth, with all kinds of negative fallout.
City officials recently told a fast-growing company that makes a meat alternative using mushrooms that it had to pause expansion plans for lack of water. A major affordable housing project is on hold for the same reason. In total, the city says 18,000 housing units, which could accommodate about 54,000 people, are not being built because the pipeline is tied up in red tape.
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Mountain habits in Tibet are being decimated to collect caterpillars that, when infected with a parasite, produce a particular fungus. However, trying to create this fungus in a factory setting is not working—and the fungus has never been proven to have any benefits anyway. An essay on ruining nature for a whole lot of pointless other than greed. Too often the case.
Over the course of seven years and thousands of rugged miles, I intermittently followed Tenzin and other treasure hunters on the fevered trail of the caterpillar fungus. Along the way, I worked on my Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University, probing the mysteries of the caterpillar fungus. I hoped to uncover a solution to avert the disaster I saw looming for the millions of rural Tibetans whose lives depended on it.
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For Wired‘s latest cover story, veteran journalist Steven Levy does what he’s done for so much of his career: profile a company that presents the possibility of a seismic technological shift. In this case, it’s the outfit that brought generative AI within reach for anyone with a web browser—and now is trying to convince the world that this isn’t humanity’s final Pandora’s Box.
The name that Radford and his collaborators gave the model they created was an acronym for “generatively pretrained transformer”—GPT-1. Eventually, this model came to be generically known as “generative AI.” To build it, they drew on a collection of 7,000 unpublished books, many in the genres of romance, fantasy, and adventure, and refined it on Quora questions and answers, as well as thousands of passages taken from middle school and high school exams. All in all, the model included 117 million parameters, or variables. And it outperformed everything that had come before in understanding language and generating answers. But the most dramatic result was that processing such a massive amount of data allowed the model to offer up results beyond its training, providing expertise in brand-new domains. These unplanned robot capabilities are called zero-shots. They still baffle researchers—and account for the queasiness that many in the field have about these so-called large language models.
Radford remembers one late night at OpenAI’s office. “I just kept saying over and over, ‘Well, that’s cool, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be able to do x.’ And then I would quickly code up an evaluation and, sure enough, it could kind of do x.”
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Marian Bull’s writing proves that you can make any topic fascinating just by how you write about it. For Eater, Bull surveys the history of our love-and-sometimes-hate relationship with egg yolks to arrive at the latest craze in eggs: “shockingly orange yolks” and how—sadly—this vibrancy is brought to us mostly by virtue signalling, meant to help us feel better about our egg-buying choices.
Last spring, my boyfriend brought a dozen of these eggs into my kitchen. They seemed harmless at first, but when he scrambled them, I found myself eating a plate of eggs closer in color to Bugs Bunny’s carrot than a simple French omelette. Later, I fried one next to my last CSA (community-supported agriculture) egg, laid in the Catskills by a pasture-raised hen. Once transferred to a bowl of rice, they looked like a clone experiment gone wrong. The CSA yolk was a deep goldenrod, fat and happy-looking. The Happy Egg yolk was such an aggressive reddish orange it looked like a pustule.
And as the last decade’s farm-to-table and locavore movements (and, importantly, their aesthetics) have gone mainstream, the “farm egg” has become ubiquitous, its yolk an object of our undivided attention. We want it jammy, that sludgy midway between soft- and medium-boiled. We want it over easy, its yolk sploojing across the plate. And we want its color to convince us that it was not hatched in some animal welfare hellscape.
Egg carton marketing, which is at best opaque and at worst a pernicious lie, would have us believe that the hens who imparted these eggs to the bourgeois grocery shopping class are twirling through pastoral fields like Maria in The Sound of Music.
If you walk the aisles of Mr. Mango or just about any feel-good grocery store, a binary narrative might appear in your brain. There are the bad farms — styrofoam carton, diseased hens shitting on each other — and then there are the good ones, whose hens are happy and free to roam, and lay eggs abundant with nutrients and vibrant color.
In reality, that binary is a spectrum, and a muddy one. Yes, factory farms wreak environmental and ethical havoc. And it is possible to buy eggs from hens who have lived a much more humane and carefree life than you have. (The easiest way to do this is to buy directly from a small farm whose practices you’ve researched or asked them about.) But the middle ground between those places is far wider, and more common, than egg labels would like us to think. And where the question of flavor is concerned, the equation becomes even jammier.
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This is an excerpt from issue no. 142, “Dead Reckoning.”
There is a noise that, for a Navy captain, may well be the worst sound imaginable—worse than the boom of cannon fire, the whistle of a missile, or the whoosh of a torpedo. That noise is the long, piercing scrape of metal against rock. It’s the sound, quite simply, of everything going wrong.
Edward Howe Watson heard that noise on September 8, 1923, at 9:05 p.m., while sitting in his ship’s quarters, directly beneath the bridge of the United States Navy destroyer Delphy. Watson was a 49-year-old naval commander—a privileged and pedigreed, blue-blooded son of an admiral, Kentucky born and Annapolis trained. A year earlier, he’d taken command of the Delphy’s entire squadron of 19 destroyers. This had been a promotion, a welcome sign of forward momentum in a long and varied Navy career. Privately, Watson told his wife that he’d have preferred a battleship. But he seemed just one promotion away from getting that too, and after that perhaps an admiralty, like his father before him.
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The Delphy had left San Francisco that morning and spent the day speeding south along the coast of California. Thirteen more ships in Watson’s squadron trailed behind. The destination was their home port in San Diego. This was a training exercise—a speed trial, the sort of thing the Navy, under considerable budget pressures, hadn’t tried since the war. All day the destroyers maintained top speeds in challenging conditions: bad weather, massive waves, a civilian vessel requiring rescue. By late afternoon, no one on any of the ships could make out the coastline through the haze. Watson wasn’t concerned; he had one of the Navy’s best navigators for the Delphy’s skipper, and he was using dead reckoning—the time-tested technique of calculating location from a ship’s compass direction, estimated speed, and the amount of time traveled—to ensure that they were where they needed to be. Best of all, a rival squadron of destroyers, part of the same training exercise, were making worse time. Watson was winning the race.
By nightfall, the Delphy was coming close to the Santa Barbara Channel, with San Diego in reach by dawn. A few minutes before 9 p.m., Watson ordered a turn east toward the coast for the final approach into the channel. The entrance was a risky place for a squadron traveling at 20 knots—littered with rocks, reefs, and shipwrecks just beneath the water’s surface—but it was the shortest route, and using it all but guaranteed that Watson would win. The other ships would follow, and they’d all be home in record time.
That was when Watson heard the noise—first the scrape, and then a thunderous boom. In that flash of a moment, Watson knew. They were running aground. Careers would be destroyed, reputations and legacies wiped away—and, worst of all, lives could be lost. But he could not have known that what happened next would become the greatest peacetime disaster in the history of the U.S. Navy. That it would prompt a court-martial of 11 officers, also the largest of its kind in history. And that, in the aftermath, he would be forced to rethink everything he believed about the price of honor and the true meaning of leadership.
And that, even now, 100 years later, there would be no end to the arguments over who exactly was to blame.
The destroyers under Watson’s command were known as four-stackers, marked by a quartet of tall, identical cylinders arrayed neatly in a line down the ship’s center, like the bristles of a toothbrush. Each ship was 314 feet long and 32 feet wide, nimble and powerful enough to target German submarines during the First World War. But by the time Watson took command of Squadron 11 in 1922, the war was over, fuel was being rationed, and military funding had been slashed across the board. While four-stackers could carry as many as 131 men, budget cuts reduced the number on board to roughly 100. It was an unfortunate time to be rising in the Navy. America may have just won a war, but the nation’s reputation was fragile. Washington was a hotbed of corruption; President Warren Harding’s Teapot Dome bribery scandal had implicated naval secretary Edwin Denby. Now more than ever, the Navy needed a demonstration of confidence, of authority. And Watson needed the Navy, too, in his own way.
Watson had grown up amid privilege, his only care, perhaps, the burden of expectation. He was the eldest son of a powerful Kentucky family, a member of America’s brand of aristocracy. One of his great-grandfathers had served as governor, was a five-term U.S. senator, and advised two presidents. The family superstar was his father, John Crittenden Watson, who earned his place in history as a Union Navy lieutenant during the Civil War battle of Mobile Bay. In 1864, Captain James Farragut of the battleship Hartford led a squadron of ships into Confederate waters and shocked everyone around him when he ordered his fleet into a mine-strewn waterway, crying out, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Watson’s father was Farragut’s faithful aide-de-camp. He’d heard the captain say it, and quoted him for years afterward, codifying the legend.
Watson grew up with that story, which was also becoming the Navy’s story—the daring squadron commander defying all odds, cheating death, seizing his place in the world. He entered the Navy in his father’s shadow: The elder Watson went on to be an admiral, and often told the tale of how he’d been the one to lash Farragut to the Hartford’s rigging, so his body would be found if the ship went down. Between the younger Watson’s many postings—on the Amphitrite, the Maine the Brooklyn, the Baltimore, the Richmond, the Prairie, the West Virginia, the Detroit, the Iris—his father would step in and offer plum assignments; Watson even went along as his father’s aide to the coronation of King Edward in London. He married well—a St. Louis socialite named Hermine Gratz, whose sister married a Rockefeller—and a life of ease awaited once his time in the Navy ended. But during the Great War, Watson only managed to take command of a battleship late in the effort, and he never saw combat. So when the destroyers of his squadron were given a chance to prove their worth, the opportunity couldn’t have come soon enough.
On Friday, September 7, 1923, Watson summoned Squadron 11’s commanders to a meeting. The ships were docked in San Francisco, where the crews were on shore leave. Watson announced that he’d lead them to their home port in San Diego on a training exercise, coupled with gunnery and tactical drills. Their orders, Watson said, were to travel at 20 knots, faster than any ship had been permitted in years.
For the first time since the war, these destroyers would do what they’d been built to do, although it would come with some risk. There was no telling what toll such an extreme pace would take on the ships’ turbines when sustained for 453 nautical miles. Watson shrugged off such concerns; that was what the exercise was for. Besides, Squadron 11 wouldn’t be the only fleet of destroyers bound for San Diego that day. Squadron 12 was going, too. This would be a race, and Watson intended to win it.
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Tom Vanderbilt eloquently describes the joys of downhill biking, a sport that truly forces you to be present in the moment. Determined to push himself further, he seeks out how to get air and truly fly.
Perhaps that’s why, as small as my jumps were, they felt like magic. It reminded me of being a ten-year-old on Peter Pan’s Flight at Disney World in the 1970s, when the roller-coaster-like track you’re riding in your pirate ship comes to a visible end and then you somehow soar into the air.
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