How to Get on Survivor: Behind the Scenes of Casting Season 45

The forty-fifth season of Survivor, the OG reality competition show, premieres next week. (Sidenote: looking at recent photos on social media, host Jeff Probst doesn’t seem to age.) I’m not a super fan, but I’ve still watched a good handful of seasons, and I enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at how this season’s final players were selected. Over eight months, the crew whittled down a pool of 25,000 applicants to a shortlist of 30 hopefuls, then 24, and eventually the final 18 players.

What are finalists’ audition videos like? What traits do the producers look for? (Spoiler: drive, self-awareness, and the ability to tell a good story.) Dalton Ross traces the journeys of five different players from the new season. Snippets of their audition videos are entertaining to watch, and Probst’s notes on people’s interviews are also fun to read.

The approximately 24 people who make it past all of that are eventually brought out to Los Angeles in February for the in-person meetings that constitute the last round of casting finals. “If a player is going to panic, this is the stage where it happens,” says Probst. “The pressure ratchets up when the room is full of producers and CBS executives. This too is by design. If you drop the ball at this stage, you probably won’t get on the show this season.” Once those in-person L.A. interviews are complete, the casts for the next two Survivor seasons are finally set.

It’s a long, arduous experience. But for Brandon Donlon, the casting journey started much, much earlier than all of that. Brandon still remembers watching Survivor for the first time during the Gabon season in September 2008. “It felt like this religious experience,” he explains. “It felt like I was watching some higher power who was like, ‘This is going to change your life. Whatever this thing is, you have to do it.'” He immediately sent in an application. Just one problem: Brandon was 11 years old.

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“Florida Man,” Explained

In taking a deeper look at the Florida Man meme, third generation Floridian Kristen Arnett suggests that while it’s easy to point the finger and laugh, maybe we should be more curious about what the chaos says—not just about the Sunshine State—but about ourselves.

The umbilical cord of my Floridian existence has long fed and fueled me, dictating the kind of writer that I’ve inevitably become; someone focused on the messiness of the body, the outlier, the bizarre, a person who craves questions and mystery. Florida refuses to be pinned down. It is that very refusal — a resistance to being known, to being stable — that continues to enthrall and delight those who speak about it. There’s something magnetic about this place.

Maybe I don’t want to reclaim Florida Man. Perhaps I just want to reimagine it. Transform it, turn it into the thing that Florida could someday become and often is. Understand it, finally, as a place that refuses to be categorized. To show care to myself and to the people who live here and our continued questioning and unknowing. In that way, I embrace the roiling sea of Florida Men as my community; as a collective that I can contribute to in a helpful way. We can’t and won’t disregard the fact that we’re going to stay strange and continue to be completely, authentically ourselves; we also can’t forget the wonderful alongside the troubles. We can claim our state proudly, even to sympathetic strangers. We can stay, and live, and thrive. Wacky headlines don’t describe me personally any more than they describe anyone else in Florida. Strange things happen every day, everywhere.

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Man Called Fran

John Jeremiah Sullivan manages to tell a marvelous story all about plumbing, with his prose taking you to the heart of his stinky dilemma and bringing to life the characters he finds to solve it. A fun tale that bounces along merrily.

Oh, Fran! I will never forget that man, the only man named Fran I ever met.
Let me try to summon and draw him as he was when I first set eyes on him.
He wore not cut-off shorts but those denim culottes that hang to your shins.
He wore a white T-shirt covered in stains. He wore white high-top sneakers.
Between the sneakers and denim culottes, his white gym socks were visible.
He was about five feet four and had a buzz cut. The top of his head was flat.
I mean, it was completely flat, to a degree where you couldn’t help noticing.
A vape pen hung from his neck—I don’t actually think Fran was a crackhead.
He moved slowly and was usually smiling. This wasn’t crackhead behavior.
To me he always gave off the distinctive vibe of the weed-pills-cigarettes man.
He looked at you dreamily as if he’d just woken up. He talked the same way.

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The Kids on the Night Shift

At the very outset of Hannah Dreier’s searing investigation, a 14-year-old named Marcos nearly loses his arm while cleaning a chicken slaughterhouse. Given that word, “nearly,” it’s understandable that you’d hope for some kind of happy resolution. But just because Marcos keeps all his body parts doesn’t mean that something fundamental hasn’t been ripped away from him—or any of the other thousands of migrant children who come to the U.S. and work dangerous overnight jobs in hopes of helping their families. A difficult read, but a necessary one.

While teenagers work legally all over America, Marcos’s job was strictly off limits. Federal law prohibits 14- and 15-year-olds from working at night or for more than three hours on school days. Older teenagers are allowed to put in longer hours, but all minors are barred from the most dangerous occupations, including digging trenches, repairing roofs and cleaning slaughterhouses.

But as more children come to the United States to help their families, more are ending up in these plants. Throughout the company towns that stud the “broiler belt,” which stretches from Delaware to East Texas, many have suffered brutal consequences. A Guatemalan eighth grader was killed on the cleaning shift at a Mar-Jac plant in Mississippi in July; a federal investigation had found migrant children working illegally at the company a few years earlier. A 14-year-old was hospitalized in Alabama after being overworked at a chicken operation there. A 17-year-old in Ohio had his leg torn off at the knee while cleaning a Case Farms plant. Another child lost a hand in a meat grinder at a Michigan operation.

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Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins

It takes about 10 minutes to read Adam Shatz’ searching, incisive piece about the late Pharoah Sanders’ only-just-released 1977 album, Pharaoh—in other words, half the length of the album’s opening number, “Harvest Time.” Read the first few paragraphs, then cue up the song so you can experience them together. One of the most pleasing multimedia experiences you’ll have this week.

When Sanders reappears, he explores the range of his instrument, sometimes letting out cries that suggest the falsetto leaps of a soul singer, at others descending, with a quietness bordering on secrecy, into the lower registers of the horn—all the while never losing the thread of the melody. Halfway into the piece he plays his signature flutter, but it’s unusually understated for Sanders, and instead of rising to a scream he descends, accompanied by Muñoz and Neil, into the softest of whispers, until we hear nothing but his mouthpiece—something a more “professional” recording might have corrected, but which only adds to the music’s sensuousness. After the sounding of a gong, Bedria Sanders enters on harmonium, producing a drone that moves toward us and recedes, a sound that Pharoah mimics with long, undulating tones.

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The Wild Quest to Create a Fake Indian Cricket League … That Was Just the Beginning

Inspired by the Indian Premier League, a popular annual spring tournament watched by half a billion people around the world, Shoeb Davda established his own livestreamed cricket tournament from a remote village in India. But the “stadium” was fake, and the games were all fixed. Why attempt such a scheme? On the surface, the answer is easy: the tournament would attract online bettors, which would mean money for the struggling businessman. But as Sean Williams peels back layers and descends into a world of rigged games and online scams, he discovers a larger, shadowy network and money-making machine making the calls.

The cops had identified Davda as the mastermind of the Molipur cricket scam—and that’s how he had been portrayed in global media. As he told his story, standing on the stoop of the bangle store, the notion that Davda was a criminal mastermind evaporated quicker than a lassi in the Gujurat sun. If anything, he was one of the tens of thousands of victims of human trafficking from India each year—of which Gujarat is a key source. What happened in Molipur was clearly being directed by Davda’s former captors. But Davda refused to elaborate on Misha.

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It’s Boom Times for the ‘Real Fox Mulder’

Apparently, the world of UFO experts can be a bitter one, and Nick Pope—who plays upon his image as the ‘Real Fox Mulder’ with numerous media appearances—has attracted criticism. Is he actually such an expert? Is anyone? Francisco Garcia carries out some detailed reporting to find out.

Despite a dedicated fan base and hard-won media career, Pope is by no means a universally beloved presence in ufology’s complex ecosystem. For some, the very fact of his previous employment is enough to render him a figure of permanent suspicion. To others, it boils down to a very different question: what if Pope’s claim to have run the UK’s alleged UFO project wasn’t as clear cut as made out. What if, they ask, it isn’t quite true?

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