Is there bias in popular AI image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion? As Victoria Turk explores in this Rest of World piece, the answer is a resounding yes. Rest of World analyzed thousands of images made with Midjourney to see how AI visualizes the world, feeding it prompt-and-country combinations (“an Indian person,” “a house in Mexico,” or “a plate of Nigerian food,” for example). This generated a data set of 3,000 images, most of which were incredibly stereotypical: men wearing Mexican sombreros, elderly and sage-looking men wearing turbans, and other reductionist imagery. “Interestingly, “American person” generated images of mostly white, light-skinned women posing in front of the American flag, suggesting the overrepresentation of women in U.S. media, which is then reflected in the AI’s training data. Similarly interesting—and weird—are the images of Chinese food with three chopsticks instead of two. A fascinating look at generative AI overall.
Not all the results for “Indian person” fit the mold. At least two appeared to wear Native American-style feathered headdresses, indicating some ambiguity around the term “Indian.” A couple of the images seemed to merge elements of Indian and Native American culture.
Other country searches also skewed to people wearing traditional or stereotypical dress: 99 out of the 100 images for “a Mexican person,” for instance, featured a sombrero or similar hat.
Depicting solely traditional dress risks perpetuating a reductive image of the world. “People don’t just walk around the streets in traditional gear,” Atewologun said. “People wear T-shirts and jeans and dresses.”
Indeed, many of the images produced by Midjourney in our experiment look anachronistic, as if their subjects would fit more comfortably in an historical drama than a snapshot of contemporary society.
“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.”
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Across the U.S., libraries are under attack. “Being a librarian is less and less about books and more and more about community survival,” Lisa Bubert wrote in a recent Longreads reading list. In a dispatch for Mother Jones, Kiera Butler describes how this battle plays out in the small town of Gillette, Wyoming. In October 2022, Gillette’s Campbell County Public Library was the first in the nation to sever ties with the American Library Association, citing the ALA’s Marxist agenda and indoctrination of youth. Gillette is a place that has always been obsessed with its children. “The idea of protecting children animates much of American life,” writes Butler. “What does that mean when that same impulse drives the culture war?”
But most everyone agreed that the library drama started with a single July 2021 Facebook post, in which a county commissioner expressed disapproval of the gay pride month display the library had put up. Soon a dozen or so people signed up to speak at the Board of Commissioners meeting, in a radical departure where the five elected commissioners usually skipped the public comment sessions because of lack of interest. This time comments lasted for more than an hour. “Parents should be informed of the queer agenda the library is implementing,” said one attendee. Another railed against the idea of a pride display in the library. “If we’re not encouraging heterosexuality among teenagers for a month in the public library,” he said, “we definitely should not be doing that with sexual identities that are known to cause things like suicide and HIV.” A stern-looking woman thundered against the young adult room. “I know about their dark basement for the teens, and enough is enough,” she said. Later that month, a local pastor posted on Facebook that he had discovered that the magician who was scheduled to perform at the library was transgender. The magician canceled her show after reportedly receiving threats.
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The spooky season is officially upon us. If you’re looking for reading recommendations to get you in the mood, we’ve compiled some of our favorite Longreads pieces below. Consider Lesley Finn’s “Final Girl, Terrible Place,” a sharp essay on horror films, the male gaze on the female body, and the American patriarchy. Dive into Jeanna Kadlec’s commentary on the witch/mother archetype in the Maleficent films, which is part of her Deconstructing Disney series. Or try “The Corpse Rider,” Colin Dickey’s piece about Lafcadio Hearn, the famous chronicler of Japanese culture, including its ghost stories and folk tales.
We’ve also gathered editors’ picks we’ve highlighted over the past few years about haunted houses, the ghosts of history and in our own lives, famous fictional monsters, and other monsters and figures of evil on our screens—and in our bedrooms.
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Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fishing fleet. These vessels roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas, and military analysts believe the country uses the fleet for surveillance and to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will—according to a recent study, more than 100,000 fishermen die each year, and the conditions on Chinese ships, as Ian Urbina reports, are brutal.
In this massive investigation, Urbina documents the human-rights abuses and illicit fishing practices of China’s fishing industry. It’s a damning report on how the country has become a fishing superpower, but weaved within it is also an emotional, devastating story of one Indonesian worker who went aboard one of these ships to give his family a better life. Incredible reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari.
In February, 2022, I went with the conservation group Sea Shepherd and a documentary filmmaker named Ed Ou, who also translated on the trip, to the high seas near the Falkland Islands, and boarded a Chinese squid jigger there. The captain gave permission for me and a couple of my team members to roam freely as long as I didn’t name his vessel. He remained on the bridge but had an officer shadow me wherever I went. The mood on the ship felt like that of a watery purgatory. The crew was made up of thirty-one men; their teeth were yellowed from chain-smoking, their skin sallow, their hands torn and spongy from sharp gear and perpetual wetness. The scene recalled an observation of the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, who divided people into three categories: the living, the dead, and those at sea.
When squid latched on to a line, an automated reel flipped them onto a metal rack. Deckhands then tossed them into plastic baskets for sorting. The baskets often overflowed, and the floor filled shin-deep with squid. The squid became translucent in their final moments, sometimes hissing or coughing. (Their stink and stain are virtually impossible to wash from clothes. Sometimes crew members tie their dirty garments into a rope, up to twenty feet long, and drag it for hours in the water behind the ship.) Below deck, crew members weighed, sorted, and packed the squid for freezing. They prepared bait by carving squid up, separating the tongues from inside the beaks. In the galley, the cook noted that his ship had no fresh fruits or vegetables and asked whether we might be able to donate some from our ship.
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The exclamation point: Ernest Hemmingway wasn’t a fan. But Salman Rushdie loves to exclaim! Who is right? Florence Hazrat points out that in this digital age, the exclamation point has become “the textual version of junk food.” Overused, aggressively used, used in repetition. But Hazrat is here to plead the case for the line and dot, giving us five wonderful ways “literature can recuperate the abused exclamation point.” So go forth and express!
Punctuation functions as the inky semaphore of the sentence. It tells our eyes where to linger, our minds to assimilate, and our breath to pause, catch itself, and propel the voice forward, whether that one in our heads or mouths. Punctuation is body, and no mark more than the exclamation point. As the period explodes its head, mushrooming into a !, so does the exclamation erupt from our diaphragms, pushing its way through our vocal cords into the ambient air.
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When Miranda Michel, a mother in rural Texas, was four months pregnant with twins, she was told that the babies would not survive: their spines were twisted, organs were undeveloped or in the wrong place, and the ultrasound showed other malformations. But the state’s abortion laws—which make no exception for lethal fetal anomalies—required Michel to carry the pregnancy to term. Reporter Eleanor Klibanoff and photographer Shelby Tauber capture Michel’s devastating journey, up to the pregnancy’s painful end—showing loud and clear how cruel abortion laws shatter the lives of women and their entire families.
Miranda’s twins were developing without proper lungs, or stomachs, and with only one kidney for the two of them. They would not survive outside her body. But they still had heartbeats. And so the state would protect them.
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A glimpse into what it’s like to have aphantasia. An account of escaping wildfire in Yellowknife. A profile of an NBA-reporting phenomenon. An essay about taking control of one’s own story. And a read on meat and the English language.
Marco Giancotti | Nautilus | October 4, 2023 | 3,644 words
Marco Giancotti has aphantasia, which means “the absence of images” in Greek. Ask him to picture a top hat or recall a sound or a smell and he can’t imagine it. He has trouble remembering events unless he can deduce their timing by assembling facts such as where he was living and the people in his circle at the time. For Nautilus, Giancotti does a terrific job breaking down his lived experiences and the studies he’s participating in so that science, society, and the lay reader can begin to understand more about this fascinating condition. “As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind,” he writes. “I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head.” What’s most beautiful and poignant about this piece is how, by learning more about aphantasia and contributing to its study, Giancotti comes to appreciate his condition as an example of what makes humanity so beautifully diverse. “The question I started with—what’s wrong with me?—was both rhetorical and itself wrong. The better question is one we all ask ourselves at some point: ‘What makes me who I am?’” Can you imagine how much better our world would be, if we all dared to do so? —KS
Jessica Davey-Quantick | Maclean’s | October 5, 2023 | 3,842 words
This September, I saw flames licking up the side of a hill near my house. The smoke spiraled above in thick, sinister plumes while the taste of bonfire invaded the once-crisp air. I was lucky: my local wildfire was controlled before evacuation was necessary. Many in Canada were not so fortunate. Nearly 200,000 Canadians were under evacuation orders this summer, Canada’s worst wildfire season since records began. Jessica Davey-Quantick was one of them, fleeing her home in Yellowknife as the area burning across the Northwest Territories reached roughly the size of Denmark. She left reluctantly, boarding one of the last evacuation flights with her cats—Allen and Bruce—squeezed in beside her. Her account is one of both fear and the mundane logistics of evacuation travel, a mixture that makes this piece incredibly relatable. When she finally reaches her destination, the wait begins. She waits to see how long before she can go home. She waits to see if she has a home. When she finally does return, the sky is still smoke-filled. I know how that feels—days on end of murky light, filtered through a hazy lens, air that clings hot and heavy as claustrophobia creeps up to envelop you. This apocalyptic atmosphere brings reality home, as it does for Davey-Quantick, who ends her piece with a desperate plea: Climate change is screaming at us. We have to listen. —CW
Reeves Wiedeman | Intelligencer | October 11, 2023 | 6,695 words
In The New Yorker this week, Choire Sicha tells Kyle Chayka that he pegs 2014 as the beginning of the end of social media. Coincidentally, that’s the same year that a young sports journalist named Shams Charania landed his first big NBA scoop. As it turns out, tweeting first about an impending trade wouldn’t just turn him into a first-name-only phenomenon among basketball fans; it would eventually place him at the dead center of sportswriting’s current existential crisis. Reeves Wiedeman isn’t the first to profile Charania, as he did this week for New York’s Intelligencer vertical. He is, however, the first to do so in a way that lays bare the larger forces set in motion by Charania’s ascendancy: chiefly, The New York Times’ decision to disband its sports department in favor of The Athletic, its $550 million acquisition that just happens to be Charania’s current home. Wiedeman has written stories far more cinematic—2021’s “The Spine Collector” and 2018’s “The Watcher” come to mind—but there’s something undeniably pleasing about how this acts as both unflinching profile and business story. As much as Charania’s indefatigable M.O. is the stuff of legend (and no shortage of resentment from his competitors), it happens to be a prime example of how journalism has been subsumed by that formless extrusion known as “content.” Yes, during the offseason a good #ShamsBomb delivers a frisson. But as a representation of how we consume and share information, it might also be laying waste to its surroundings. —PR
Emily Fox Kaplan | Guernica | October 2, 2023 | 6,552 words
Spellbound. This isn’t a word I use often. But rarely does a piece mesmerize me like this one. Emily Fox Kaplan recounts growing up with an emotionally abusive and manipulative stepfather (who is also a prestigious surgeon). Smartly written in second person, Kaplan uses the power of voice and narration to take back control of her story, shifting effortlessly between her perspective as a child to self-assured present-day narrator. “And you’ll realize, too, that a person can tell a story any way she likes; that the same story — a little girl who loves to read — can be told as a horror story or a fairy tale, depending on the choices of the author.” It’s a tense read, likely triggering for some people, about the power of “bad men” and the effects of toxic family dynamics. But it’s also a brave piece, and I’m glad Kaplan could tell it. —CLR
C Pam Zhang | Eater | October 3, 2023 | 1,300 words
I love words. (I know, shocking.) I am also a vegetarian. So it was with delight and horror that I read C Pam Zhang’s piece all about the English language—and meat. Have you ever considered why most animals are shielded by a fancy term once they hit a plate? Why is it a beef bourguignon, not a cow casserole? Zhang muses extensively on this prissiness—while spatchcocking a chicken, as a student at Cambridge, no less. It turns out (like many things in England) it has to do with the French. And class. Zhang explains: “The names of the living animals have Anglo roots, whereas the names of the ingredients came from the French—a trademark of Norman conquerors who, in the 11th century, hoped to subjugate the ‘savage’ Natives of the British Isles.” (The humble chicken managed to keep its name by being considered peasant food, not worthy of a new anointment.) Zhang compares this coyness with words in Mandarin, where pork can literally be labeled “pig flesh.” It’s a fascinating and fun essay, with the added pleasure of imagining the smell of baked chicken guts wafting down the hallowed halls of Cambridge and into the nostrils of disgruntled young lords who like their veal marinated. (Helped by the marvelous illustration of a chicken running down said halls.) While a little shorter than our usual Longreads offerings, you can’t say “spatchcocked” without encountering some joy, so I hope you will forgive me. —CW
Alexander Chee | Guernica | October 2, 2023 | 2,587 words
What is a monster? Why has a fictional character like Dracula stayed in our minds through the centuries? In this piece for Guernica, Alexander Chee asks us to revisit and sit long and hard with Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic while also considering the modern real-life evils of our world. Chee also makes connections between the story and Stoker’s potentially queer love triangle with Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, the latter a possible inspiration for the Count himself. The essay is the foreword to a new edition of the novel, published by Restless Books. —CLR
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