The Inside Job

A cop with expensive taste and money troubles. A wealthy woman who loved and supported him. An old man with dementia with a large estate and no next of kin. And a secret girlfriend and a fake will. Mix these elements together and what do you get? Katherine Laidlaw’s latest story for Toronto Life about a romance and scam gone wrong.

It was easy to keep the women apart. They occupied different worlds within Toronto. Dixon attended high-society balls and charity galas. She travelled broadly and often. Balgobin—whom he always contacted using a burner phone or through ­Snapchat—had modest means and ambitions. She lived in a studio apartment near the Rogers Centre and worked with society’s elderly and most vulnerable. She brought snacks to Konashewych’s office down the street on her breaks. She was dutiful, eager to please. Over time, her position at the OPGT, where she oversaw the ongoing care of clients and their financial decisions, would prove surprisingly lucrative.

That Sommerfeld didn’t have a will or documented next of kin wasn’t unusual—many OPGT clients don’t. But it is rare for someone with substantial assets, and he had an $834,000 estate. A 2018 audit of the agency found that just six per cent of its clients had assets of more than $100,000. That made Sommerfeld a member of a very small group. His medical care and financial decisions would be entrusted to the most senior client representatives at the agency, each overseeing anywhere from 80 to 100 cases at a time. In January of 2017, a new public servant took over the caseload that included Sommerfeld’s estate: Adellene Balgobin.

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Heavily Persecuted, Highly Influential: China’s Online Feminist Revolution

Reporting from China—at least the sort that appears in Western publications—tends to ignore the nation’s residents in favor of invisible-hand macro forces. Economy. Technology. Geopolitics. But Rest of the World presents a much-needed alternative to that approach, and Wanqing Zhang’s feature about feminism’s deepening foothold is a perfect distillation of why it’s necessary. If you want to understand what’s going on somewhere, you talk to the people who live there; it’s as simple as that.

Weibo, which has more monthly active users than X (formerly Twitter), remains the most popular platform for general discussion in China. But in part because of the platform’s harsh policing and relentless trolls, women have increasingly congregated on Xiaohongshu, where they outnumber male users more than two to one. Women have found ways to trick the app’s recommendation algorithm so their posts are shown mostly to other women. Douban, where many interactions happen within semi-secluded groups, is another feminist refuge.

Lü, the activist, describes the retreat from Weibo to Douban and Xiaohongshu as a shift from “a public plaza” to “a friend’s living room.” In the latter spaces, female empowerment is less about trying to create structural change and focuses more on less sensitive everyday topics: conflicts with boyfriends or discussions about whether to marry, have children, or use makeup.

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Cairo Song

In this beautiful braided essay for Granta, Wiam El-Tamami mines conflicted emotions about modern Cairo, Egypt, as she remembers the city before and after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

My father would tell stories of his daily stroll as a student from his home to Cairo University among peaceful, tree-lined avenues. Of his adventures with his siblings: sneaking into the cinema, the sandwiches they would buy at a street stall afterwards, all for a few piasters. The family had eight children and humble means, but still managed to live well and eat well and share much of what they had with others: my grandparents’ small home was always open, the table always laid, the rooms always filled with innumerable guests.

When my parents finally returned – my mother in 2000, my father in 2010 – they returned to a different place than the one they had left behind: a country disfigured, a city almost unlivable, choked with traffic, ear-splitting noise, unbreathable air and 20 million people jostling for space. A country mired in corruption and repression and simmering with discontent – on the cusp of boiling over. Just months after my father’s return, the country erupted into revolution.

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What $500 Means to Zinida Moore

Zinida Moore works multiple jobs. The mother of three typically goes from an overnight shift at one job to another one in the morning. She was one of 5,000 Chicago residents who were given monthly $500 payments for one year, no strings attached, as part of a pilot guaranteed income program. A more limited approach to UBI—or universal basic income—the program focused on assisting a randomly selected group of people. It’s a simple yet bold idea, writes Elly Fishman, giving a boost and “breathing room” to low-income residents. Within the group, 72 percent were women; among those, 70 percent identified as Black and nearly 60 percent had children.

But how effective is such a program? The extra cash won’t pull a family out of poverty, nor would it allow Moore to buy a house, for example. But “that breathing room can turn into substantial, sustained change,” reports Fishman, and over the course of the year, Moore was able to pay off two of her largest bills and pay for three months’ rent up front. She was also able to improve her credit score and find relief in other, less-quantifiable ways—moments of calm and joy because she was able to provide a bit more for her family.

City officials around the U.S. are exploring similar programs. Whether it’s the right kind of government aid remains uncertain, but Fishman’s portrait of one resident shows that a little bit of money can go a long way.

Working multiple jobs is how Moore has long managed to cobble together enough income to supply her kids with basic necessities at home and for school. And then there’s the not-strictly-necessary stuff — trendy clothes, trips to the movies, money for the mall — that she wants them to have. It all adds up. Her financial stability has always been precarious, and she worries that one emergency could quickly spiral her into even deeper debt.

Moore’s phone dings. It’s Ziniya. She needs a new uniform for her cheer squad. Her text breaks down the cost of each piece: $45 for an oversize hair bow, $25 for a collar, $110 for shoes, $125 for the backpack. Then there’s the rest of the uniform. All told, it will run $630.

In previous years, Moore might have sent out a text to family and friends seeking donations for the uniform. She might have asked the school if she could pay in installments. But this year, for the first time, she can cover it all herself. That’s because she has an extra $500 a month coming in — not from a third job or a side hustle but from the City of Chicago, which gives her the money to spend or save as she chooses.

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Revisit 51 Years of Giant Pandas at the National Zoo, From Beloved Babies to Fun in the Snow

A lovely piece put together to bid farewell to Tian Tian, Mei Xiang, and Xiao Qi Ji, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo pandas who are due to return to China in December. Illustrated by five decades of media coverage, it’s a touching—and fun—essay on the Zoo’s panda history.

Named Xiao Qi Ji, which translates to “little miracle,” after a public vote, the cub “brought a lot of renewed attention and sparked a lot of joy,” Monfort said in December 2020. Panda lovers stuck at home during the Covid-19 pandemic followed the cub’s every move, and keepers posted near-daily updates on his development. “The chief arbiter of joy in 2020,” declared Washingtonian, was Xiao Qi Ji.

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How Three Bros in Their Thirties Turned Their Animal Obsession into a Binge-Worthy Podcast

An excellent insight into the relationship between the three people behind the Tooth and Claw podcast. Paul Kvinta sets us up with an extensive background to the podcast, before enjoying a trip to the zoo with the gang. The recipe for a successful podcast is here, although this chemistry might not be easy to recreate.

Twenty-six minutes into the episode, Mike and Jeff were hanging on every turn of Bye’s dire situation, as described to them by Wes Larson, a wildlife biologist who is also Jeff’s older brother. Each week for the past three years, Wes has shared a harrowing tale of human-wildlife conflict, peppered with scientific insights, conservation intel, and tips on surviving dustups with nature’s scariest predators—or, in this case, predators the color of a Barbie Dreamhouse.

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Finding Hope in the Dark Power of Fungus

I’ve experienced the power of fungi in my own life: I think of the magical mycorrhizae mix that helped my first-ever vegetable garden grow into a lush paradise, and I suppose all of those shrooms I ingested in my twenties. I dove into this piece, then, with interest and wonder. Fungi can “fortify soil and lower the use of pesticides, provide a model of connection for our increasingly fragmented and lonely society, heal psychological trauma and chronic illness, remediate the toxins of industrial society and much more,” writes Joanna Steinhardt. For Noema, Steinhardt dives into the fascinating world of DIY mycology, and specifically mycoremediation, the promising process of using fungi to break down pollutants and clean our waste. But mycoremediation is a tough, messy process to sell; it works in small-size projects (think petri dishes and gardens), but to replicate that success on a larger scale—to clean up an oil spill, for example—would be more challenging. Steinhardt writes a thoughtful essay on a complicated organism, and an interesting field that is inspiring optimistic environmentalists to take action in new ways.

In short order, Thomas found an article that showed that fungi can’t degrade bunker fuel on their own; the molecules in the heavy fuel are too complex. He proposed something simpler: composting. Take the hair mat lasagna, blend in plant waste, aerate regularly. And it worked. The pile began to naturally decompose. After a few months, they brought in earthworms to finish the job. Lab tests showed that the most toxic chemicals had broken down. “It took 18 months and a lot of manual labor, and it was really a mess,” Lisa told me. But in the end, they had usable (“freeway grade”) compost. Matter of Trust even got a grant from Patagonia to sell the final product at Costco.

Fungi was at the intersection of their political, environmental and personal concerns: It could fortify soil and lower the use of pesticides, provide a model of connection for our increasingly fragmented and lonely society, heal psychological trauma and chronic illness, remediate the toxins of industrial society and much more.

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