Wednesday, February 07, 2024

What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage?

In this piece, Indirani Sen dishes up the gossip on what went down between the two companies responsible for sriracha: their fiery dispute led to a shortage of this iconic sauce and cost millions. An interesting look at how a crucial business friendship turned sour.

Ominously, there were no unprocessed chilies on hand—none had come in lately. Part of the problem, Tran and Lam explain, is quality control: Freshness is what makes Huy Fong’s sauce better than the competition, and Tran says he often has had to turn away truckloads of that delicate red jalapeño because they didn’t make the journey from suppliers intact, were not properly refrigerated, or were picked when green.



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Misplaced Trust

This project expands on previous research on land-grab universities, as published at High Country News.

Signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the Morrill Act used land taken from Native communities to fund public colleges across the US. For this project, a team of Grist reporters examined publicly available data to locate and map these trust lands. They also identify 14 land-grant universities that continue to benefit from colonization and the natural resources on stolen Indigenous land, including the University of Arizona, New Mexico State University, Texas A&M, and Washington State University.

State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.

In 2022, the year Sierra enrolled, UArizona’s state trust lands provided the institution $7.7 million — enough to have paid the full cost of attendance for more than half of every Native undergraduate at the Tucson campus that same year. But providing free attendance to anyone is an unlikely scenario, as the school works to rein in a budget shortfall of nearly $240 million.

Students like Alina Sierra struggle to pay for education at a university built on her peoples’ lands and supported with their natural resources. . . .

In December 2023, Sierra decided the cost to attend UArizona was too high and dropped out. 



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The Year of Silt

In this feature for New Zealand Geographic, Rachel Morris writes about the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, which devastated the North Island of New Zealand in February 2023 and left thousands of homes filled with silt. As Morris reports, cyclone survivors felt abandoned, not receiving much help from the government or aid organizations like the Red Cross. Instead, silt removal was done almost entirely by volunteers. Morris spent several months with one of these volunteer crews, who provided help to some of the region’s hardest-hit residents.

Unlike the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, which destroyed large swathes of the city, the damage from Gabrielle was intensely concentrated in a handful of communities on the outskirts of Hastings and Napier. Within a few weeks, the main urban areas had essentially returned to normal, while places like Esk Valley, Pakowhai, Omahu, Waiohiki, Puketapu, Rissington, Dartmoor and Pōrangahau remained little apocalyptic pockets, easily bypassed by those who preferred to avoid the mess. So it wasn’t surprising when, about five weeks in, the outpouring of volunteers began to ebb. (As one organiser observed, locals “wanted their weekends back”.)

It’s sweaty, strenuous work, but it was worse before the silt solidified. (“Like shovelling diarrhoea” is the most memorable description.) By now, Peni is a connoisseur of the silt’s geographical variations: in Pakowhai, it has congealed into bricks, like moist clay; in Omahu, it’s sticky mud; in Esk Valley, it floats through your fingers like fine sand.



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A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld

A security camera caught 19-year-old Zac Brettler jumping to his death from a fifth-floor apartment in London. But did he commit suicide? Brettler’s parents’ attempts to answer that question led to shocking revelations, including that their son was posing as the heir of a Russian oligarch, and that he had fallen in with a known gangster, Dave Sharma:

The morning Zac’s body was identified, the private investigator the Brettlers had hired, Clive Strong, visited Sharma at Riverwalk. Sharma, who was short, sharp-featured, and physically fit, liked to box, and told Strong that he’d just returned from a sparring session. According to Strong’s notes, Sharma said that Zac had presented himself as someone whose “father was an oligarch,” and had claimed that he’d clashed so much with his mother—who lived in Dubai, along with four of his siblings—that she’d barred him from their various luxury properties in London. He was therefore homeless, despite being fantastically rich. “I felt sorry for the young man,” Sharma told Strong. “I said that he could stay in my flat”—the Riverwalk apartment.

Sharma, the last person to see Zac alive, told much the same story as Shamji: the previous Thursday evening, Zac and Shamji had come to Riverwalk; Sharma’s daughter, Dominique, joined them; after a few hours, Shamji and Dominique left; Sharma fell asleep, and when he awoke, at 8 a.m., Zac had vanished. In Sharma’s opinion, Zac had been a troubled kid who was “becoming suicidal.” Sharma noted that he was happy to talk to Strong, because he was a private investigator, but he preferred not to speak with the police, as he’d had some “bad experiences in the past.”

Sharma didn’t volunteer what those experiences were, but he did have a history with law enforcement. In 2002, he was arrested on heroin-smuggling charges. He was later implicated in the murder of a bodyguard turned night-club owner, Dave (Muscles) King, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003, as he was leaving a gym in Hertfordshire. It was the first time that a fully automatic AK-47 had been used to murder someone in England. At a high-profile trial, the judge described the assassination as “thoroughly planned, ruthless, and brutally executed.” The gunman and the driver were each sentenced to life in prison.

Sharma had been one of Muscles’ friends in the drug trade, but they fell out. When authorities arrested Sharma and others in the 2002 heroin bust, the only suspect they didn’t end up prosecuting was Muscles, and in front of witnesses in open court Sharma angrily called him a “grass”: an informer. Moments after Muscles was shot to death, the assassin called a mobile phone in France, which the police subsequently linked to Sharma. I spoke to a former official who was involved in the investigation, and he said that Sharma was a dangerous person. At the time of the murder trial, authorities had tried to locate him in France for questioning, but he’d gone underground. “I’ve no doubt Sharma was involved in organizing the shooting,” the former official told me. “But we didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.”



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Glacial Longings

In this excerpt adapted from her book The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush recounts an expedition to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. As she reflects on the thrill of visiting the glacier, she recounts the gargantuan task of communicating the experience with precision.

I hadn’t imagined how profoundly apart this place would feel—how it would appear gigantic and fully formed, an entity all its own, well beyond the limits of human understanding and resistant to whatever language I might try to pin on it.

Afterall, this floating ice shelf is comprised of snow that dropped before the rise and fall of Rome, before Jesus or the Buddha were born, before the invention of the alphabet. Before sound became symbol.

At some point, I sprint to the galley, scarf down two hard-boiled eggs and half a cinnamon bun, and run back up, taking the stairs two at a time. Soon I am outside again, attempting to honor the ice by looking away as little as possible. Thwaites’s calving edge stretches over a hundred miles, and so it takes us hours to travel its length. Sometimes the margin appears steep and sturdy and sheer; in other places it loses its sheen, seems chalky and distressed. We turn a corner and the face rockets upward into a wall. A wild line twists along the top of the shelf, tracing gorges into the blue-white snow. Then, just as abruptly, the parapet has crumbled, cluttering the water with floating pieces of brash.



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How the Codpiece Flopped

A delightful essay about a small piece of history (sometimes not so small). Why did men start wearing pockets of fabric over their crotch? Why did they stop? Zaria Gorvett finds out with some attention-grabbing reporting.

Some time around 1536, Hans Holbein the Younger was finessing Henry VIII’s crotch. With a fine brush in his hand and a palette of watercolour paints beside him, the master artist took pains to give his client’s ornately decorated bulge its due prominence.



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Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World?

In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed several ancient Roman towns, including Pompeii and Herculaneum. It also buried the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls in an Italian villa, in the process. To date, about 800 scrolls have been recovered from site excavations, but classical historians think there may be thousands more. There have been unsuccessful attempts over the centuries, however, to unroll these fragile scrolls.

In this entertaining read for Businessweek, Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet describe computer science professor Brent Seales’ more recent quest over the past 20 years to decipher them. With the help of a former GitHub executive, more advanced technology, and a machine-learning competition called the Vesuvius Challenge, it’s finally happening.

Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.

The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.



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