Colleagues using the N-word frequently and openly. Spray-painted swastikas in the parking lot. White-power graffiti in the bathroom. Inappropriate touching and catcalling. On-the-job injuries. A lack of training. The list goes on. Bryce Covert’s cover story for The Nation is a deep dive into the rampant and blatant racism, sexual harassment, and discrimination that Black and female employees face at Tesla, and its factory in Fremont, California, in particular.
After Jermaine Keys’s twins were born, he needed more than the $15 an hour he was earning at a construction company. So in September 2019, Keys got a job at Tesla’s Fremont factory, which paid about $23 an hour. “It was a big difference,” he told me. At first, Keys enjoyed the job. But a few months in, his supervisor started calling him “boy.” Keys heard white coworkers use the N-word and call people “monkey.” There was a swastika drawn with a black marker near where he clocked in to work every day. Black workers, he said, were made to do things like clean up the work area when the assembly line was slow; white ones weren’t. “It was just hurtful,” Keys said. When he said something to a supervisor, he was told to put his head down so he wouldn’t get fired.
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You may have read about the trauma afflicting American workers who do content moderation for tech companies. But these days, moderation work—and, thus, the aforementioned trauma—is increasingly being outsourced. In fact, it’s being sold as a way to help people climb out of poverty:
For companies like Sama, the conditions here were ripe for investment by 2015, when the firm established a business presence in Nairobi. Headquartered in San Francisco, the self-described “ethical AI” company aims to “provide individuals from marginalized communities with training and connections to dignified digital work.” In Nairobi, it has drawn its labor from residents of the city’s informal settlements, including 500 workers from Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. In an email, a Sama spokesperson confirmed moderators in Kenya made between $1.46 and $3.74 per hour after taxes.
Grace Mutung’u, a Nairobi-based digital rights researcher at Open Society Foundations, put this into local context for me. On the surface, working for a place like Sama seemed like a huge step up for young people from the slums, many of whom had family roots in factory work. It was less physically demanding and more lucrative. Compared to manual labor, content moderation “looked very dignified,” Mutung’u said. She recalled speaking with newly hired moderators at an informal settlement near the company’s headquarters. Unlike their parents, many of them were high school graduates, thanks to a government initiative in the mid-2000s to get more kids in school.
“These kids were just telling me how being hired by Sama was the dream come true,” Mutung’u told me. “We are getting proper jobs, our education matters.” These younger workers, Mutung’u continued, “thought: ‘We made it in life.’” They thought they had left behind the poverty and grinding jobs that wore down their parents’ bodies. Until, she added, “the mental health issues started eating them up.”
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Can psychedelics help to restore consciousness in a patient whose awareness is impaired or seemingly gone? Can these powerful drugs give the brain a chance to reorganize and rewire itself? After David’s wife, Sarah, was hit by a car, she suffered severe brain damage; she became unresponsive and remained in a coma, and David explored many treatments with no success. Working with a neuroscientist in Belgium, whose research involves using psilocybin and ketamine in patients with “disorders of consciousness,” he decided to give a dose of distilled liquid psilocybin high enough to induce a psychedelic experience. In this fascinating read, Jonathan Moens recounts the experiment and the science behind it, and poses important ethical questions surrounding consent.
On August 25, 2023, exactly 336 days following Sarah’s tragic accident, David, who is based in Colorado where psychedelic mushrooms are decriminalized, obtained a tincture of distilled liquid psilocybin. He had already given Sarah low and moderate doses of the drug over the course of several months and it had a “remarkable” affect in her bodily movements.
This time, however, he would go all in, using the equivalent of 2.5 grams—a dose high enough to provoke a powerful psychedelic experience and which is often used in clinical trials for therapeutic purposes. At this dose, both Gosseries and Carhart-Harris said an awakening was theoretically possible.
The legalities of what David was about to do were unclear. Colorado’s decriminalization of certain psychedelics in 2022 means that psilocybin is easy to access and magic mushrooms can be grown and consumed. But whether David was crossing a line by giving Sarah the drug, when she could not consent, was not obvious.
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Bubba Copeland was the heart and soul of his community—mayor, businessman. When a right-wing website called 1819 News exposed his deepest secrets, his life wasn’t the only thing that was destroyed:
When the story hit the next morning, Bubba’s son Carter, a junior at Auburn, was still asleep. He woke up to a text from his best friend that read, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.”
“I had no idea what she was talking about,” Carter says. “I called her, and she told me what had happened. Immediately, I looked up my dad’s name online and saw it everywhere. It was early in the morning, and every news outlet I’d never heard of had already jumped on it, like piranhas. I watched the whole world tear him down almost instantaneously.”
Carter and his father were extremely close. Over the years, each had confided in the other about their innermost struggles—in high school, Carter had come out to his father, and Bubba had shared his secrets with his son. Carter was shocked at the meanness of the story and was overcome with a visceral fear that he had never known before. In a panic, he called his dad.
“He picked up and said, ‘Good morning, buddy.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about, Good morning?!’ Trying to calm me down, he again slowly said, ‘Good morning, buddy.’ And I said, ‘Okay, good morning.’ And then I said, ‘Dad, we have to talk.’ And he said, ‘No, we don’t. I need to get into a meeting. I have people I need to take care of. We’ll talk later.’ ”
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At age 20, while beginning to form her worldview and her politics, Eula Biss read the book, “My Traitor’s Heart” by Rian Milan, a young white Afrikaner who “told the story of his country through a series of murders.” Twenty years later, Biss traveled to South Africa for the first time. At first, she’s surprised by all she did not understand about Black living conditions under Apartheid, realizing that her only guide up until that point—the author Milan—was hopelessly myopic as a member of the ruling whites.
The young Rian Malan opposed apartheid, but not in any way that he would later consider meaningful. “We believed that apartheid was stupid and vicious,” he wrote of himself and his teenage friends, “but we also believed that growing our hair long undermined it.” He and his friends spray-painted SAY IT LOUD, I’M BLACK & I’M PROUD in six-foot letters on an embankment in their suburb, and Malan showed a photo to his family’s black maid. Her response: “Ah, suka.” Get lost. Malan had never heard the James Brown song, but he’d read about it in Time. He knew more about American culture than he knew about the culture of the people who lived in his backyard, in shacks. “The strangest thing about my African childhood,” he wrote, “is that it wasn’t really African at all.” Malan was more Western than he was African—because he was, more than anything, a product of apartheid.
At twenty, I recognized myself in the young Malan. I saw my own undeveloped politics, my own failings and my own frustrations, my own crisis of conscience. I saw the deficiencies in my education, which was, in many ways, an apartheid education. I had been fed mostly platitudes about race in America and I was hungry for real talk, so I was drawn to Malan’s impatience with empty gestures and his intolerance of pious pronouncements.
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As Gary Shteyngart is quick to remind you, he’s far from the first writer to chronicle a cruise ship voyage. He may, however, be the first to do so while wearing a daddy’s little meatball t-shirt. And for more than 9,000 words, he adds a worthy entry to the participatory subgenre. It helps that he punches up (and in) more than down, though the result is the same: making you savor terra firma.
The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say icon inaugural ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: warning! may start talking about cruising. Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “husband and wifeCruising Partnersfor life we may not have itAll Togetherbut together we have it all.” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.
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• How Israel uses AI for assassination in the Gaza War.
• A father reflects on his son’s development.
• The rise of the term, “gaslighting.”
• Toni Morrison’s expansive rejection letters.
• The history of PostSecret.
Yuval Abraham | +972 and Local Call | April 3, 2024 | 8,066 words
The biggest news out of Gaza this week was the deaths of seven aid workers affiliated with the non-profit organization World Central Kitchen. The incident was nothing short of perverse: Israel targeted and killed people trying to make a dent in the imminent famine that Israel itself has engineered as part of its strategy to demoralize and destroy, in whole or in part*, the Palestinian population. (*Yes, this is a reference to the international community’s codified definition of genocide.) Perverse was the word that again came to mind when, shortly after the attack on WCK, +972 and Local Call published a blockbuster investigation revealing the extent of Israel’s reliance on artificial intelligence to select targets in Gaza for assassination. Except select and assassination make it sound like the AI systems are precise, which they decidedly are not. Lavender, as the main program is called, “clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants” in the early weeks of the siege, and “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” Israel is also using AI—including a system named, I kid you not, “Where’s Daddy?”—to track targets into their homes and then drop bombs, no matter the risk of collateral damage. Which is to say, no matter the risk of killing other people who happen to be in the home, including children. As technology journalist Sam Biddle wisely put it on social media, this essential investigation, one of the finest published since the war began, shows that “the value of military ‘AI’ systems … doesn’t lie in decision-making, but in the ability to use the sheen of computerized ‘intelligence’ to justify the actions you already wanted.” —SD
Paul Tough | The New York Times Magazine | March 17, 2024 | 4,987 words
Lured by the headline, I dove into Paul Tough’s essay out of curiosity, not sure what to expect. He writes about his son learning to speak Russian, but the larger journey he shares, as a parent full of worry and wonder and emotion, surprised me. By the end, I was in tears. He recalls his son as young child, and how he completely lost himself in his interests, from toys to games to entertainment: “Max would go deep, finding satisfaction not just in the playing but also in the experience of plunging himself into a new and unfamiliar world and mastering all of its contours.” He was shy, and as he got older, these explorations made him more solitary than social. But Max emerges from his shell, first during the pandemic, when he takes up birding as a hobby. To Tough’s surprise, Max interacts with the adult birders around him, finding his way into conversations. When Max turns 12, he decides to learn Russian, a seemingly random choice, but grows more confident and comfortable after he enrolls at a Russian-language school. When they embark on a father-son trip to Uzbekistan so Max can immerse himself in the language, Tough watches as Max navigates his new surroundings with ease. He recounts this beautifully, and it’s a delight to witness a parent learning to sit back as their grown child takes the wheel and engages with the world on their own: “As I watched Max walk off with a group of foreign strangers into an unknown land, it felt like a glimpse of my future, and his. I was slowing down, and he was speeding up.” I’m early in my journey as a mother—challenging and uncertain as it is, with a 5-year-old daughter who is beginning to blossom and discover her own interests. Who will she become? This piece doesn’t have that answer, but Tough’s perspective is comforting and exactly what I needed to read this week. —CLR
Leslie Jamison | The New Yorker | April 1, 2023 | 6,157 words
In recent years, the term “gaslighting” has become increasingly popular in everyday conversation. (Leslie Jamison notes that in 2022, there was a staggering 1,740% increase in people searching for the term.) While language is continually shifting and evolving, we’ve adopted this phrase with particular enthusiasm. Why does a word for someone causing us to question our reality resonate so heavily? Jamison’s exploration into our love for this diagnosis goes deep—from the first use of the word to current case studies to questioning whether she herself is a gaslighter. (She is, to some extent. Most of us are.) As Jamison notes, gaslighting is a spectrum that “happens on many scales, from extremely toxic to undeniably commonplace.” While I came to this piece to read about the development of language, Jamison’s look at the human psyche is what gripped me. A mix of linguistics and psychoanalysis? Count me in. —CW
Melina Moe | Los Angeles Review of Books | March 26, 2024 | 2,493 words
For many younger readers, the fact that Toni Morrison was a book editor before (and during) her legendary fiction career is one of literature’s great “today I learned” moments. This fascinating piece from Melina Moe digs past Morrison’s trailblazer status and glittering roster to focus on that crucial but underconsidered aspect of an editor’s life: rejection. Letting writers down is never easy, or fun, but it’s something editors have to do. A lot. And what Moe found in Morrison’s correspondence—”an asymmetrical archive,” as she calls it, housed in Columbia’s Rare Books & Manuscript Library—illuminates how gifted Morrison was in unfortunate art. Any writer or editor will appreciate her warmth and empathy, her grasp of craft, and her willingness to help writers get a foothold even when not accepting their manuscript. But Morrison also gave submitting writers precious insight into the industry itself. “Often,” Moe writes, “she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press.” Editing is often imagined as a singular art; your talent lies in honing a given work into its best, shining self. That can be as frustrating as it is gratifying, but it’s also just one element of many. Moe’s portrait stands as a rare accounting of editing in all its fullness. No notes. —PR
Meg Bernhard | Hazlitt | April 3, 2024 | 5,908 words
Meet Frank Warren, the creator and curator of PostSecret.com, a site that displays the most private thoughts of anonymous contributors in postcard form. As Meg Bernhard reports for Hazlitt, the project emerged out of deep pain: not long after college a close friend took his own life, Warren began volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline. There, he learned how to listen carefully to callers as they recounted their despair. “Frank realized that people needed a way to talk about the messy topics often off limits in everyday conversation,” writes Bernhard. PostSecret became an in-person art exhibit and a website devoted to the cultural taboos that keep us silent, a way for us to unburden ourselves of what’s unspeakable in public and within our closest relationships. Bernhard’s piece is part profile, part delightfully nerdy deep dive into what secrets mean and why we keep them. “What is a secret?” she asks. “Knowledge kept hidden from others, etymologically linked to the words seduction and excrement. To entice someone to look closer; to force them to look away.” In revealing some of her own secrets, she invites us as readers to look closer, at the risk of us turning away. Since beginning the project in 2004 by distributing 3,000 self-addressed postcards at metro stations in Washington, D.C., Warren has collected and curated over 1 million fears, desires, and quirky notions for public display. Over time, he’s expanded the project into books and public events where attendees share their secrets with the audience, breaking that all-important fourth wall of the project’s anonymity. PostSecret arose out of a life lost tragically to inner turmoil; for those who crave judgement-free emotional release, it’s a lifeline. —KS
Audience Award
Here’s the story our audience loved most this week.
Peter Hartlaub | San Francisco Chronicle | March 26, 2024 | 4,597 words
In 1992, mirroring the plot of the romantic comedy “Never Been Kissed,” San Francisco Chronicle reporter Shann Nix went undercover at a high school. Peter Hartlaub looks back at her reporting and the ethics of this scheme. Imposing our current values on previous work can be fraught, but Hartlaub comes at this with important questions, not judgment. —CW
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