We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest essay in The Paris Review is, on the face of it, about the game Red Dead Redemption 2. It even gets the rubric “On Gaming” stamped at the top, a tiny taxonomic flourish. But while the piece does detail how and why Abdurraqib plays the game a specific way—upstanding, moral, and ultimately futile—it’s far more about the way we flesh-and-blood beings adjust our own compasses to deal with the Wild West that is human existence.

It has always been easier for me to convince myself that the sins I’ve been immersed in and the average time I might have left to make up for them simply don’t align. I’m a better person now than I have been in the past, though I’ve also dislodged myself from binaries of good and bad. If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say. I don’t think about it, until I do. Until I get sick and wonder if I am sick with something beyond routine, or until I swerve out of the way of a car on the highway and feel the sweat begin to bead on my forehead. It’s all a question of how close I feel like I am to the end.

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Forbidden Fruit

In this dispatch from Cherán, a municipality in Michoacán, Alexander Sammon tours the operations of a self-governing Indigenous community that outlawed avocado cultivation over a decade ago. The ever-expanding consumption of avocados in the U.S. comes with costs: competition for its control; the depletion of resources, namely water; and cartel violence in the regions of Mexico that grow it. Cherán police spend their days monitoring the land for illegal logging and planting of avocado trees, and the community focuses on the reforestation of native pines to nurture economic growth and address water scarcity in a changing climate.

Can this “breakaway eco-democracy” stay intact in a time of high avocado demand? Sammon writes a well-reported piece on the violent and environmentally destructive consequences of America’s obsession with the green fruit.

I understood their suspicion. Just weeks prior, the neighboring state of Jalisco had sent its first-ever shipment of avocados to the United States. Violence in the sector was increasing, with reports of drone-bombed fields. A few months earlier, inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which verifies the fruit’s quality for export, had received threatening messages. And there were plenty of reasons for avocado groups to size up Cherán: its fertile soil, its abundant water. Besides, what revolutionary regime isn’t a little paranoid?

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Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur

Adam Reiner makes room behind his gueridon and gives us a behind-the-flambé look at food-as-performance as he prepared meals and fancy desserts tableside at The Grill, a Manhattan chophouse.

Eventually, that night at the Grill, I put my game face on and roll the gueridon over to the woman who hates bananas. “Be careful,” I say, measuring out the rum. “I’ve never made one of these before.” All waiters have their secret arsenal of stale humor to deploy when they need to butter up the crowd. As the caramel sauce begins to bubble, I pour the rum over it, gently tipping the rim of the saute pan forward to allow the fire to contact the liquid. Flames shoot skyward, casting a soft, amber glow around the table. The woman is so engrossed in my performance that she forgets to take a video. She fumbles around with her purse, but the alcohol burns off by the time she finally gets her phone out. “Oh no, I missed it! Can you do it again?” she asks, expecting a mulligan. “Of course, I can,” I answer politely, spooning the molten bananas over ice cream and sprinkling the bowl with an almond crumble. “But you’ll have to order another one.”

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How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes

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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What Does It Mean to Protect Children?

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 Specters on Screen, The Monsters Among Us: An October Longreads Collection

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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The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

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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