His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him.

Yes, the headline is undeniable. Yes, the story delivers on its promise. Yes, Peter Holley’s story about Austin Riley’s harrowing ordeal will stay with you. A chilling reminder that animals gonna animal, no matter how tight the bond.

Always eager for his owner’s company, Waylon enjoyed following Austin around the family ranch and falling asleep on his chest after feedings. He loved red apples, rough belly scratches, and tender massages on his hardened, bony snout. Before long, the pig and the brawny farm boy were inseparable. “I just kinda became his parent, his dad, really,” Austin said. “Early on, I’d take him with me through the drive-thru at Whataburger and he’d sit in the front seat, happy as can be.” 

Waylon soon grew to be “two hundred fifty pounds of pure protein,” as Austin likes to say—more than an average-sized NFL linebacker. By then, Austin had moved him to a large pen a few hundred yards away from the family home. On particularly beautiful days, he liked to lie on the ground in the enclosure, listening to sports radio and watching the clouds pass by. Inevitably, Waylon would lie down beside him, gingerly resting his enormous, wart-covered head on Austin’s thigh. They could remain that way for five or six hours at a time. 

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A Clock in the Forest

In Noēma, Jonathon Keats unspools a thought-provoking essay about time—specifically, about how every organism other than humans experiences time, and how one key to undoing humans’ ecological impact might just be appreciating those other experiences. To wit: an “arboreal clock” that measures and displays time from the perspective of a massive tree.

Fluctuations in the bristlecones’ growth rate, affected by environmental conditions ranging from local rainfall to planetary climate change, will be measured by analyzing the thickness of tree rings in microcores retrieved from the mountain each year. These data will be used to determine the center of gravity for the pendulum, which will swing slower or faster depending on the tree ring thickness. Though the clock face will display time in the usual way, it won’t serve as a mechanism for human planning — a technology to impose order on the environment for our convenience — but rather to pace our lives to match the lived reality of other organisms.

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‘If You Scream You Are a Dead Duck’: At 14, my Mother Left me Alone All Summer – Then the Man With a Knife Found Me

This excerpt from Everywhere the Undrowned by Stephanie Clare Smith is a disturbing read, but demonstrates Smith’s skill in getting beneath the skin of her feelings, pulling them out to lay them bare on the page. It’s gripping writing, and it’s all too real.

I left my shoes and underwear on the floor of his truck. Two men on the sidewalk shouted something at me. The way I hated them. I looked back to see if they were chasing me, if the truck was circling around for me. The way pain shot through me as I ran, and blood dripped down my legs and soaked the crotch of my pants. The way I bled for three days.

That Thursday night, for the first time, I piled three silver pots and some glass ashtrays in front of the door, like Laura Petrie did on the Dick Van Dyke Show. I began my practice of laying my head where my feet used to go, so I could see through the living room to the big front door with the too-little lock and my homemade alarm. That way I could sleep until it came crashing down.

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The ‘Into the Wild’ Bus Was a Pilgrimage Site in the Wilderness. Can It Hold Up in a Museum?

The bus made famous by Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild,” has been relocated. Eva Holland explores the history of this former city transit vehicle—and how it came to hold a special place in people’s imagination. Will it be the same now it’s out of the wild?

I first read Into the Wild not long before the movie came out. At the time, I was around the same age Chris was when he died. It was early in my writing career, and I worked for a website blogging about travel news and trends. That’s how I learned about the dilemma of the bus, the hikers who sought it out and the rescues they sometimes required. Two years later, at 27, I set out on my own big, wild adventure. I bought an aging Jeep and drove west across Canada to the Yukon, where I now live.

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Rubble From Bone

Four months since Israel launched Operation Iron Swords, Tom Stevenson assesses the devastation in Gaza, situating it alongside the precedents and norms of modern warfare. This essay is a pitch-perfect example of letting the details speak for themselves:

Palestinian men and boys between the ages of 12 and 70 are stripped, cuffed, blindfolded and then loaded onto the backs of trucks to be taken for interrogation. Some have numbers written on their arms. Hundreds detained in Gaza have been transported to the desert prison of Ketziot, near the border with Egypt. Others have probably been taken to nearby military bases. Some men who were taken prisoner in Beit Lahiya were stripped and transported to fenced-off camps where for days they were tied up, beaten and tortured. Others have disappeared. The IDF has subsequently said that between 85 and 90 per cent of these detainees were civilians. Israeli forces have repeatedly raided UN schools and detained any men found inside. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented an incident on 19 December when the Israeli army surrounded and then entered a building in the Remal neighbourhood of Gaza City. “The IDF allegedly separated the men from the women and children, and then shot and killed at least eleven of the men, mostly aged in their late twenties and early thirties, in front of their family members.”

From the beginning, Operation Iron Swords has been an all-out assault on a captive and overwhelmingly civilian population. Israeli tactics have little in common with standard counterinsurgency doctrine or rules of engagement. The war on Gaza is at its core retributive: an act of collective punishment. Like all punishment, to ask whether or not it ‘works’ misses the point that punishment is often an end in itself. But the conduct of the war also has an orgiastic quality. The celebrations of the killing by Israel’s political leaders; the fantastic schemes for the removal of Palestinians to Sinai, or Europe, or Congo; the public figures signing bombs to be dropped on what’s left of Gaza; the gleeful recordings made by individual soldiers—all combine malice and mirth.

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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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