Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand

After water, sand is the world’s most widely consumed natural resource—it’s the main ingredient in concrete, and a booming global construction industry means a soaring (yet hidden) demand for it. For Scientific American, David A. Taylor offers a fascinating look at the world of sand-smuggling mafias and the devastating impact of sand mining on ecosystems and communities.

Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime’s extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined, he says.

The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity.

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Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change

For LitHub, Rebecca Solnit offers a salve to those fighting for change, be it personal or political. Dramatic turning points are rare and happen most often in the movies; the change we seek only comes after years and years of dedication, baby step after baby step taken on faith.

Anyone who’s gotten over a heartbreak or a bereavement knows that there aren’t five stages of grief you pass through like they were five whistlestop towns on the train route. You are more this way one day and more that way the other, looping and regressing, and maybe building reconciliation or acceptance like a log cabin while living in sorrow, rather than sliding into it like you were stealing third base.

You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient.

And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” but whichever way it bends you have to be able to see the arc (and I’m pretty sure by arc he meant a gradual curve, not an acute angle as if history suddenly took a sharp left). Sometimes seeing it is sudden, because change has been going on all along but you finally recognize it.

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Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows

How was watermelon conscripted in service of a racist agenda, and how can it be reclaimed? A Black writer traces the biological history and cultural significance of the humble fruit, in America and elsewhere:

Martin Luther King, Jr., remembered refusing to eat watermelon in mixed company when he was at seminary in Pennsylvania: “I didn’t want to be seen eating it because of the association in many people’s minds between Negroes and watermelon,” he told a journalist from Redbook in 1956. “It was silly, I know, but it shows how white prejudices can affect a Negro.”

And Dr. King was not alone. It was enough to make whole generations of Black people self-conscious about eating watermelon. Psyche Williams-Forson, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland and the author of Eating While Black, said it is still common for people of a certain age to have reservations about eating watermelon—or, rather, to be seen eating watermelon. “I cite Black people who are absolutely, in some instances, adamant that they would not eat watermelon in public, unless it’s cut up in cubes or unless it’s served a very particular way,” she told me. 

On my latest visit to my parents’ house in Illinois at the tail end of the watermelon season, we bought a big melon in Beardstown, and my father did yeoman’s work cutting most of it into irregular cubes to stash in the refrigerator. The rest he cut into tiny wedges to eat right away. But even when presented with this, the most modest and daintiest wedge of rind-on watermelon, my mother will slice the flesh away with a knife and fork and cut it up before eating it. When I ask why she bothers, she just says that’s how she likes to do it. 

In Senegal, where I moved a decade ago, watermelons are a winter fruit, reaching peak ripeness in November or December when the weather cools, so I have started to associate them with the end of the year holidays. No Senegalese Christmas or New Year’s celebration at my mother-in-law’s house would be complete without one or two watermelons cut into manageable wedges so we can eat them directly from the rind. 

I wonder about these small differences between my husband’s family in Senegal where the watermelon is simply enjoyed, and my own family in the United States where the watermelon isn’t just a luscious fruit, but also a symbol of violence, a metaphorical weapon whose cut still stings and sometimes burns. 

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Finding Jordan Neely

When Jordan Neely was choked to death by a fellow passenger on the New York City subway in May 2023, his death became a political talking point. In this profile, Lisa Miller looks beyond and behind Neely’s killing, telling the young man’s life story in intimate detail. It starts with his mother’s murder at the hands of her boyfriend when Neely was barely a teenager:

The following day, a Monday, Jordan, together with his maternal grandparents, an uncle, and his great-aunt Mildred, was back at the house in Bayonne. A police officer was there too, to help them file a missing-person report. When Jordan’s uncle Christopher reached Southerland by phone, Southerland said Christie had gone on vacation. He bought her a suitcase, he said. But Jordan knew this couldn’t be right because his mother would never leave town without letting him know. All the while, the TV was on in the living room, and amid the confusion, a news broadcast came on: A woman’s body had been found in a black expandable duffel bag by the side of the Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx. Wrapped in black plastic, clad in jeans and a T-shirt, the corpse was decomposed, and the police were trying to make an ID. There, on the television screen, flashed Christie’s belongings: a black-and-silver belt and a turquoise ring. Jordan began bellowing and beating the walls.

By the time Jordan testified at Southerland’s trial, he was 19 years old. He had built a new life as a Michael Jackson tribute artist in New York City. He owned a Michael wig, which he kept neatly styled; military-type jackets in red and black with gilded trim and epaulets; a white glove. At the trial, Southerland was representing himself pro se, which meant that during his cross-examination, Jordan had to answer questions posed by the same man who had intimidated him and lied to him as a child and who would later be convicted of murdering his mother. Under oath and appearing composed, Jordan relived the morning his mother didn’t wake him for school. Southerland referred to himself as “the defendant” or “Mr. Southerland,” but Jordan refused to play along, addressing his questioner as “you.” It was agonizing to watch, recalls Kristen Brewer, then a young assistant prosecutor who observed the trial. Jordan had bounced around in the five years since his mother’s murder, and Brewer was struck by the earnest truthfulness with which he took the stand. She says she remembers thinking, “If this young man can even manage stability, we’ll have asked a lot of him.”

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The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave

D.T. Max manages to get deep below the surface (excuse the pun) in this fascinating piece. Cutting through Beatriz Flamini’s initial bravado, we find out the true psychological impact of spending a remarkable 500 days in a cave.

After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her charisma and commitment. “Everyone wanted me for their classes,” she says. “They fought over me.” By the time she turned forty, in 2013, she had a partner, a car, and a house. But she felt unsatisfied. She didn’t really care about financial stability, and, unlike most people she knew, she didn’t want children. She experienced an existential crisis. “You know you’re going to die—today, tomorrow, within fifty years,” Flamini told herself. “What is it that you want to do with your life before that happens?” The immediate answer, she remembers, was to “grab my knapsack and go and live in the mountains.”

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Who Controls Your Thoughts?

This Nautilus interview with neuropsychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones explores freedom of thought in a time of fast-changing technology and AI. Freedom of thought, says McCarthy-Jones, is “as close to an absolute right as there is in the Constitution.” But even as this right has been explored and lauded through the ages, it hasn’t actually been defined. McCarthy-Jones also discusses how smartly designed public places help to promote group thinking, from green spaces to spacious, well-lit buildings. A conversation with thought-provoking remarks and ideas to chew on.

I think what’s maybe a more immediate threat from new technologies is not brain-reading but more what is called behavior-reading. That is, the idea of measuring our observable behavior—what we like on Facebook, what websites we visit, what music we like, etcetera—that from knowing those facts about us, people could impute our mental states and can have a good idea of what it is we’re thinking—and knowing what kinds of buttons they should press to get us to act in a certain way. The combination of that knowledge with AI technologies could be a really huge threat to our autonomy.

One of my colleagues from Brazil and I were talking at a conference, and he was telling me about how the design of their capital city, Brasília, was intentionally put together by planners to try to avoid street corners—because street corners were places where people would be able to assemble and potentially think things together, which could be threatening to the ruling regime. So city planning can have an important effect upon the public’s ability to think together.

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A Death at Walmart

At age 38, Janikka Perry died of a heart attack at work, on her bakery shift at Walmart in North Little Rock, Arkansas, but you will not find her death recorded by OSHA as workplace-related. The New Republic‘s investigation has revealed that while Walmart touts an enlightened approach to time off, it expects associates to work while sick, or in Perry’s case, deathly ill. “The store was short-staffed, and her manager allegedly told her to ‘pull herself together.’”

Janikka had heart problems and diabetes—conditions management was aware of—and had worked through ailments before, because that’s the norm at Walmart. As recently as 2019, the company allowed employees to accrue nine penalizing points every six months before firing them. Today, it’s five. Workers receive those points for a whole host of reasons, like showing up late, leaving early, or taking unplanned time off, even if they’re sick or need to attend an important family function.

But Janikka rarely missed work or went home early. She once left her own birthday party to go to work, leaving loved ones to vent that Walmart was taking too much of her time. One of her sons, Austin, once pleaded with his mom to quit. “She was like, ‘Who else is going to pay the bills and put clothes on your back?’” he said. “I couldn’t say nothing else.”

Her commitment to Walmart came second only to church. No matter her schedule, Janikka never missed Sunday service at her local congregation. Each week, she would sing and pray in front of the pulpit’s large illuminated cross. On the morning of that shift in January, she attended mass with her mother, Fay, then wished her goodbye. “Mommy, I love you,” she said on her way out the door. “I’ll see you later.”

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