How does it feel to lose the ability to conjure the right words? Kelly Barnhill explains the long, difficult process of recovering from a brain injury in this moving essay on loss—and resilience.
Healing from any injury is a process of rebuilding cells and tissues and structures — taking that which is broken and making it new again. Healing a brain injury is the process of rebuilding not only tissues and cells and the connections between those cells, but also memory, thoughts, imagination, the fundamentals of language and our very concept of ourselves.
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In this beautiful essay at Ruby Literary Magazine, poet Terry Kirts explores the deep pleasures of ice cream, whether by observing a stranger enjoy a cone or by eating it himself.
It’s just that, of all foods, ice cream seems a communal one, whose flavor is intensified by the visual and auditory exuberance of those you’re sharing it with. Birthday parties, barn raisings, summer socials. “I scream, you scream, we all scream. . .”
I know I will not write about it, except to tell you there are sorrows even ice cream cannot drive off, though I hope there is someone to share yours with every time you eat it.
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Richard Moore, an avid outdoorsman, vanished this past August while hiking with his dog on Blackhead Peak, a 12,500-foot mountain in Colorado. Miraculously Finney, his Jack Russell Terrier, survived and was rescued 72 days later. For Outside, Frederick Dreier tries to figure out what happened.
The sheriff’s office has yet to publish an official cause of death, but rescuers told Holby that Moore had likely died of hypothermia and exposure. He was lost, stranded on a steep ridge on the eastern side of the peak, far from the trail. He had smashed his glasses and probably could not see where he was going. His body was about 500 yards from the farthest boundary of the search.
Holby has a final theory of how her dog made it through the ordeal, one that she thinks about on lonely afternoons. From her living room in Pagosa Springs, Holby can look out her windows and across the valley to the east and see the scraggly profile of Blackhead Peak rising in the distance.
“I keep feeling as though she was sent to me by Rich,” Holby says, “Who probably told her to go home and take care of me.”
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In this beautiful essay at Maisonneuve, Kate Barss considers the mating and family habits of bees in examining the societal barriers and prejudices she and her partner Bear must navigate as a lesbian couple trying to start a family.
First, a young queen flies two to three kilometres from her hive. It’s a rare moment of solitude—the only time in her life she’s alone. Aside from this flight and to swarm, she never leaves the hive. If she dies, her hive risks dying too, each generation depending on her to reproduce; aside from a few exceptions, the queen is the only reproductive female bee in the hive. Once she reaches the drone gathering area, usually open airspace above a visibly-distinct landmark (perhaps a boulder or a steeple) she mates with ten to twenty drones, or male bees. With this act, the queen packs a lifetime of sperm into her spermatheca — a small pearl-shaped organ located just above her poison sac and stinger. She never has to mate again and, over her two-to-five-year lifespan, will lay 150,000 eggs from spring to fall, hatching into about 1,500 bees per day. During sex, the drone’s phallus explodes, killing him immediately. His purpose singular and disposable, his role complete.
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In Brian Payton’s fascinating profile, you’ll meet a highly intelligent, little-known corvid called the Canada Jay, as well as 81-year-old Dan Strickland, the world’s foremost authority on the bird species.
This jay’s name, recorded in the data as WLKOSR, is an acronym for the color combination of the three bands on his legs. He is a member of the corvid family, which also includes ravens, crows, and magpies—all extremely intelligent birds. They have a brain-to-body ratio that is equivalent to dolphins and chimpanzees and almost rivals humans. Unlike their fellow corvids, Canada jays have become remarkably bold. While other corvids patiently (or impatiently) wait for the cookie to drop, Canada jays swoop right in and take it from human fingers, much to the delight of skiers, hikers, and researchers alike.
It’s easy to fall for this dusky charmer, but there are countless other birds and animals to study. Why spend a lifetime on this one?
“A lot of wildlife biologists spend ages putting out traps for animals, then catch them, put radio collars on them, and release them,” Strickland says. Those researchers get radio signals from animals who often flee at the sight of humans, or are only active at night. He, on the other hand, has for decades enjoyed intimate views of his subjects’ lives—all the rivalry, intrigue, courtship, mating, and rearing of offspring.
Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information. London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.
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This week’s edition features stories on progressive activism, dwindling salmon, how Chicago protects birds from an untimely death, the future of the craft of coding, and a profile of an odious (and powerful) literary agent.
Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko | n+1 | October 26, 2023 | 16,313 words
Whether you’ve been following the Cop City saga closely, only just heard about it this week, or have no idea what I’m talking about, you should read this essay. For those who fall into the third category, here’s a quick primer: Cop City is the nickname of a law enforcement training campus under construction near Atlanta, on forested land once inhabited by Native people before they were forcibly removed, then turned into a slave plantation, then into a farm worked by prisoners. (“The plantation, the prison farm, the police academy: it sounds like a history of America,” Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko write.) Opponents of the project are known as “forest defenders,” and in an incident last January, one of them was shot and killed by police. This essay is an insider account of the Stop Cop City movement. It is detailed, smart, and very moving. It is about the beauty and the bloodshed of progressive activism, the stories that the land beneath us holds, the racist history of policing, and much, much more. In a word, it is epic. —SD
Max Graham | Grist | November 9, 2023 | 4,931 words
Salmon stocks are dwindling in the Yukon. That should concern all of us. As Max Graham reports for Grist, fewer and fewer fish are returning to spawn, causing governments to restrict or shut down harvests. The health and cultural consequences for remote indigenous populations that rely on annual salmon runs to feed their communities over a long winter—where a tin of Spam can cost $7.95—are impossible to quantify. The main culprit? Rising river and ocean temperatures due to climate change. “Salmon are cold-water species, so when temperatures go up, their metabolism increases, so they need more energy to just be, just live,” said Ed Farley, an ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “That means they’re going to have to feed more.” Of course, with an ecological conundrum such as this, cause and effect is far more complicated than that, and Graham deftly weaves fact and color from harvesters, elders, fishery officials, and scientists to help lay readers understand not just the scope of the problem, but the potentially devastating outcomes, for the fish and the people who rely on them. Can all the humans with their various interests come together to allow salmon stocks to rebound? For everyone’s sake, I hope that notion is more than just a fish story. —KS
Ben Goldfarb | bioGraphic | October 31, 2023 | 3,514 words
My previous house on an idyllic wooded half-acre in California’s rural West Sonoma County had lots of huge windows. So many, in fact, that birds often flew into them. Some were briefly stunned before flying off; others were not so lucky. Applying frosted decals and patterned coating to all the windows made our house more bird-safe. But what happens when an entire city is a lethal landscape for our winged friends? As Ben Goldfarb notes in this bioGraphic feature, Chicago is the most perilous city in the US for birds: its location within the Midwestern flyway—a migratory route for birds in the spring and fall—and its glass architecture and glittering lights make a deadly combination. (Case in point: on a single morning, conservation volunteers once collected around a thousand birds at McCormick Place, a massive convention center next to Lake Michigan, which is largely covered with glass and considered a collision hotspot.) Architects, building managers, and even politicians are taking measures to make Chicago more bird-friendly, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Goldfarb writes an informative piece that has something for everyone, including bird conservation, Chicago architecture and history, and urban design. —CLR
James Somers| The New Yorker | November 13, 2023 | 4,735 words
The age of the centaurs is here. While not beaten by Artificial Intelligence (yet), programmers have a new power—and the half-human, half-A.I. coding team is an impressive force. While dabbling with ChatGPT-4, Somers muses on his long coding career, and it was with a jolt that he reminded me of the “era of near-zero interest rates and extraordinary growth,” when coders were gods with endless free espressos. It’s changing fast. There is a lot out there on A.I., but by putting this development in the context of his own career, Somers shines a bright, glaring light on the pivotal time in which we live. It’s not necessarily frightening: sure, things are changing, but they always have, and they always will. While coders of “agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheel and crop varietals,” the ones of the future may “spend their late nights in the guts of the A.I.s their parents once regarded as black boxes.” No doubt the centaurs will soon be replaced by full-on A.I. horses, but Somers is still confident coding isn’t dead. —CW
Alex Blasdel | The Guardian | November 9, 2023 | 7,941 words
Reading this profile of Andrew Wylie, the most powerful agent in book publishing and apparently one of the most odious people alive, is like eating several Big Macs: an experience so delicious you don’t mind that it leaves you queasy when it’s over. The piece’s astounding anecdotes about a man whose life is as glamorous, and legacy as enormous, as his ego is hideous beg to be binged. Wylie, who is in the twilight of his career, is the kind of person who said of his favorite chain restaurant for weekday lunches, “You feel right next door to extreme poverty when you eat at Joe and the Juice, which is a comfortable place to be.” Wylie is also the kind of person who used the following words to describe his desire to dominate the Chinese publishing market: “We need to roll out the tanks…. We need a Tiananmen Square!” I tore through this profile and was soon texting lines from it to friends, gleeful with horror and liberal in my emoji deployment. Yes, readers, I was lovin’ it. —SD
Audience Award
Our most-read editor’s pick this week. Drum roll please:
Caroline Tracey | The Baffler | November 6, 2023 | 5,564 words
For The Baffler, Caroline Tracey reports on the important work of the humanitarian forensic anthropologists working with Operation Identification (OpID), a program helping to bring closure to loved ones by identifying migrants who died in their attempt to enter the United States from Mexico. A fascinating discipline, “. . . .humanitarian forensic anthropology starts with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team: ‘the world’s first professional war crimes exhumation group,’ as Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman write in Mengele’s Skull.” —KS
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In this thoughtful essay, James Somers suggests that while ChatGPT-4 has forever changed the role programmers play and the tasks they perform, it can’t alter the puzzle-solving spirit that inspires people to become coders in the first place.
Computing is not yet overcome. GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson can’t wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my profession. In fact, I feel somewhat more secure than before. As software gets easier to make, it’ll proliferate; programmers will be tasked with its design, its configuration, and its maintenance. And though I’ve always found the fiddly parts of programming the most calming, and the most essential, I’m not especially good at them. I’ve failed many classic coding interview tests of the kind you find at Big Tech companies. The thing I’m relatively good at is knowing what’s worth building, what users like, how to communicate both technically and humanely. A friend of mine has called this A.I. moment “the revenge of the so-so programmer.” As coding per se begins to matter less, maybe softer skills will shine.
So maybe the thing to teach isn’t a skill but a spirit. I sometimes think of what I might have been doing had I been born in a different time. The coders of the agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheels and crop varietals; in the Newtonian era, they might have been obsessed with glass, and dyes, and timekeeping. I was reading an oral history of neural networks recently, and it struck me how many of the people interviewed—people born in and around the nineteen-thirties—had played with radios when they were little. Maybe the next cohort will spend their late nights in the guts of the A.I.s their parents once regarded as black boxes. I shouldn’t worry that the era of coding is winding down. Hacking is forever.
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