There are about 800,000 miles of internet cables that traverse the Earth’s ocean floors. These thin underwater cables carry the world’s data and are essential for governments, banks, corporations, and, well, the entire world to function. In this fantastic Verge feature, Josh Dzieza goes inside the subsea cable maintenance industry and highlights the crucial yet invisible work of highly specialized engineers on aging ships that keeps modern civilization from collapsing.
Once people are in, they tend to stay. For some, it’s the adventure — repairing cables in the churning currents of the Congo Canyon, enduring hull-denting North Atlantic storms. Others find a sense of purpose in maintaining the infrastructure on which society depends, even if most people’s response when they hear about their job is, But isn’t the internet all satellites by now? The sheer scale of the work can be thrilling, too. People will sometimes note that these are the largest construction projects humanity has ever built or sum up a decades-long resume by saying they’ve laid enough cable to circle the planet six times.
The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. Others, like Global Marine’s Wave Sentinel, were once ferries. Global Marine recently told Data Centre Dynamics that it’s trying to extend the life of its ships to 40 years, citing a lack of money. One out of 4 repair ships have already passed that milestone. The design life for bulk carriers and oil tankers, by contrast, is 20 years.
But perhaps a greater threat to the industry’s long-term survival is that the people, like the ships, are getting old. In a profession learned almost entirely on the job, people take longer to train than ships to build.
The lifestyle can be an obstacle. A career in subsea means enduring long stretches far from home, unpredictable schedules, and ironically, very poor internet.
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Last year’s Hollywood triple strike (writers, directors, and actors) led to no small number of reported features about labor and the entertainment industry. But none have provided such a thorough analysis of the literal century’s worth of regulation and deregulation that led to the current moment. Daniel Bessner’s piece ain’t a feel-good story, but it’s also required reading if you want to understand how we got here—and why it feels so irredeemable.
In the years following the recession, there was, as Howard Rodman put it, “a slow erosion” in feature-film writers’ ability to earn a living. To the new bosses, the quantity of money that studios had been spending on developing screenplays—many of which would never be made—was obvious fat to be cut, and in the late Aughts, executives increasingly began offering one-step deals, guaranteeing only one round of pay for one round of work. Writers, hoping to make it past Go, began doing much more labor—multiple steps of development—for what was ostensibly one step of the process. In separate interviews, Dana Stevens, writer of The Woman King, and Robin Swicord described the change using exactly the same words: “Free work was encoded.” So was safe material. In an effort to anticipate what a studio would green-light, writers incorporated feedback from producers and junior executives, constructing what became known as producer’s drafts. As Rodman explained it: “Your producer says to you, ‘I love your script. It’s a great first draft. But I know what the studio wants. This isn’t it. So I need you to just make this protagonist more likable, and blah, blah, blah.’ And you do it.”
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O.J. Simpson died this week. In light of this news, here’s radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin’s brilliant essay about Nicole Brown Simpson, the abuse she suffered at the hands of O.J., and how the help she needed never came. Dworkin, herself a survivor of domestic violence, originally published pieces of this essay in the Los Angeles Times; she then compiled and revised that writing for her 1997 book, Life and Death. The essay has since been republished by Evergreen Review:
You won’t ever know the worst that happened to Nicole Brown Simpson in her marriage, because she is dead and cannot tell you. And if she were alive, remember, you wouldn’t believe her.
You heard Lorena Bobbitt, after John Wayne Bobbitt had been acquitted of marital rape. At her own trial for malicious wounding, she described beatings, anal rape, humiliation. She had been persistently injured, hit, choked by a husband who liked hurting her. John Wayne Bobbitt, after a brief tour as a misogynist-media star, beat up a new woman friend.
It is always the same. It happens to women as different as Nicole Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt—and me. The perpetrators are men as different as O.J. Simpson, John Wayne Bobbitt, and the former flower-child I am still too afraid to name.
There is terror, yes, and physical pain. There is desperation and despair. One blames oneself, forgives him. One judges oneself harshly for not loving him enough. “It’s your fault,” he shouts as he is battering in the door, or slamming your head against the floor. And before you pass out, you say yes. You run, but no one will hide you or stand up for you—which means standing up to him. You will hide behind bushes if there are bushes; or behind trash cans; or in alleys; away from the decent people who aren’t helping you. It is, after all, your fault.
He hurts you more: more than last time and more than you ever thought possible; certainly more than any reasonable person would ever believe—should you be foolish enough to tell. And, eventually, you surrender to him, apologize, beg him to forgive you for hurting him or provoking him or insulting him or being careless with something of his—his laundry, his car, his meal. You ask him not to hurt you as he does what he wants to you.
The shame of this physical capitulation, often sexual, and the betrayal of your self-respect will never leave you. You will blame yourself and hate yourself forever. In your mind, you will remember yourself—begging, abject. At some point, you will stand up to him verbally, or by not complying, and he will hit you and kick you; he may rape you; he may lock you up or tie you up. The violence becomes contextual, the element in which you try to survive. You will try to run away, plan an escape. If he finds out, or if he finds you, he will hurt you more. You will be so frightened you think dying might be okay.
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Stephanie McCrummen | The Atlantic | April 8, 2024 | 8,385 words
The pastoral, semi-nomadic Maasai have lived on their land in northern Tanzania since the 17th century. But under the guise of conservation and modernization, the Tanzanian government is resettling the tribe, destroying their compounds and seizing their cattle—in other words, erasing their traditional way of life. This makes way for ecotourism, carbon offsets, and supposed conservationist efforts that work toward the goal set by global leaders to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. But is the violent displacement of an Indigenous group, one that has sustained the Serengeti ecosystem and its lush grasslands over time, necessary for such environmental progress? Setting aside this land for “conservation” also means fueling a lucrative safari industry that still sells a romanticized version of Africa, catering to billionaire trophy hunters, and partnering with powerful foreign interests, including the Dubai royal family (for whom land has been annexed as a private hunting playground). This story is eye-opening and upsetting, and Stephanie McCrummen’s reporting is admirable: she balances big players, sweeping actions, and power moves with smaller details and quiet telling moments. But it’s the emotional narrative weaved within—of one Maasai man, Songoyo, who navigates terrain that was once his home—that is most effective here. You’ll likely come to this piece to understand the larger humanitarian crisis that has unfolded, but leave it stunned by McCrummen’s gorgeous writing, which centers the journey of one herder as he feels and watches his community and culture slip away. —CLR
Mark Warren | Esquire | April 3, 2024 | 11,242 words
I won’t mince words: this story hurts. It hurts because it holds a great deal of pain—the pain of Bubba Copeland, a Baptist pastor who took his own life when his personal secrets were exposed to the world, and the pain of the grieving community he left behind. It hurts because it lays bare the infuriating hypocrisy of the self-righteous trolls who made Copeland decide he could no longer go on. And it hurts because it is a searing reminder that right-wing pseudo-media threaten more than democracy: with their commitment to publicly humiliating the perceived enemies of conservative values, they also threaten individual lives. “The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure,” Mark Warren writes. Warren does heroic work in this feature to reclaim Copeland’s story from the jaws of 1819 News, whose coverage of Copeland I won’t deign to link to. He approaches his project with a respect so strong it is almost palpable. You can feel it in the way Warren writes about Copeland, his family, and his friends, especially in the description of the careful, compassionate process of approaching subjects wary of speaking to a journalist for obvious reasons. You can also feel it in the way Warren writes about faith, tolerance, mistakes, and forgiveness. If you let the hurt wash over you, there’s grace on the other side. —SD
Trina Moyles | Hakai Magazine | March 12, 2024 | 3,100 words
One of the things I love about Hakai Magazine is how it uses awe and wonder to make nature and wildlife science accessible to lay readers. As the piece opens, Trina Moyles puts us on a viewing platform over a tumultuous river. Below, salmon catapult themselves upstream to return to their spawning ground as huge bears compete for fresh fish. “A 350-kilogram male submerges in the frothy pool of water beneath the falls, surfacing with a salmon 10 seconds later,” she writes. “He clutches the fish between his two front paws, as if praying, then skins it whole.” The scene is immediate and visceral, but this story is about another brown Alaskan mammal who spends its winter in torpor, albeit a much tinier one: the little brown bat, weighing in at 10 grams. Jesika Reimer is a chiropterologist who wants to better understand the interconnections between Alaskan bat colonies. You might wonder why she’s leading the world’s first gene-flow study to learn where bat colonies hibernate to help manage and protect their populations. Aren’t bats a rabies-carrying scourge? It turns out that they don’t deserve their bloodthirsty reputation. There are 1,400 documented species and counting, ranging from “massive fruits bats—the size of a small human child—to the tiny bumblebee bat, which weighs in at just two grams.” Each species fills “ecological niches, pollinating specific flowers, distributing fruit and tree seeds that help sustain and regenerate forests, and regulating insect populations.” This is just a small sample of their contribution to the planet, and yet we sit back while white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations across North America. If you think, though, that we don’t have much in common with bats, consider our hands and their wings. The human hand has 27 joints; a bat’s wing, 25. Reimer became interested in bats, who are often overlooked by conservationists, as a less-beaten scientific path. “I want to ask the questions that haven’t yet been asked,” she says. As a reader, I’m grateful for her curiosity and awe of these tiny flying bears. In the end I learned that when it comes to bats, it’s not about what they can do for you, but what you can—and should—do for them. —KS
Laura Preston | n+1 | April 10, 2024 | 8,200 words
Few subgenres are as dependable as the Writer Visits Industry Conference variant of subculture piece. Similarly, few topics offer more fertile ground for Wrestling With the Moment than artificial intelligence. Put those two things together, season them with insightful, wry writing, and you’ve got Laura Preston’s account of her visit to a conversational AI conference. The key here is that Preston was invited to the conference as the “honorary contrarian speaker,” based on a piece she’d written for n+1 about a real-estate chatbot. She sees the trap, but she also sees the paycheck, so she walks into it willingly. Her decision benefits us all; the conference’s emphasis on avatars provides an important preview on how the AI industry is turning chatbots into simulated humans, and Preston’s impeccable note-taking (and unfailing ear for good quotes) exposes the uncomfortable energy beneath each interaction. As much as the conference’s attendees pay lip service to avoiding ethical and cultural pitfalls, every single use case she encounters here sounds like an express train to dystopia. Medical-advice avatars who wear stethoscopes to coax disclosure but aren’t doctors. Customer-support avatars who convince people to euthanize pets. Senior-home avatars who are designed to palliate dementia patients in their darkest days. Services that promise to diagnose your mental and physical health based on a snippet of your voice. “What really frightened me,” Preston writes, “was the future of mediocrity they suggested: the inescapable screens, the app-facilitated antisocial behavior, the assumptions advanced as knowledge, and above all the collective delusion formulated in high offices and peddled to common people that all this made for an easier life.” With the news this week that Meta and OpenAI are seeking to create AI that can remember and reason, it’s tempting to look at the future and see eradication, just as Preston’s Lyft driver does. Thankfully, Preston suffuses the piece with a gallows humor that proves absolutely crucial. Laughing to keep from crying has never felt quite so necessary. —PR
Jack King | British GQ | April 9, 2024 | 2,522 words
It took a moment for me to forgive Jack King for making me feel very old with this interview. It’s been 20 years since Shaun of the Dead was released. Yes, 20 years since a motley group of Brits chose to ride out the zombie apocalypse at their local pub. (A plan I always admired.) A bastion of understated humor, the film is full of lines I can still quote today, and if I ever receive a zombie bite, I’ll aim to state, “I’m quite all right, Barbara, I ran it under a cold tap.” King honors the passage of two decades by bringing together the stars of the film, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, along with the director, Edgar Wright, to talk about the making of this first-ever zombie romantic comedy (rom-zom-com). There are fascinating insights into how the film got commissioned and went on to spawn two further spoofs, and I particularly enjoyed learning of the debate over which vinyl records to fling at zombie heads, and the real tears that were shed when Shaun’s mum—the aforementioned Barbara—became a zombie and died. Pegg and Frost are as baffled as I am by how much time has passed, remarking how bizarre it is that they are around the same age as actor Bill Nighy was when he made the film. (They describe Nighy as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” of the film shoot; imagine realizing you are now the same age as your Obi-Wan.) But the trio remembers the filming vividly, and warmly, with time not diminishing the dry sense of humor they share. While reading this, I felt like I had wandered into The Winchester for a pint and a chinwag with Shaun and Ed. I didn’t want to leave. —CW
Gary Shteyngart | The Atlantic | April 4, 2024 | 9,099 words
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. —PR
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The Maasai people were stewards of the Serengeti for centuries. Now they’re being evicted and violently displaced by the Tanzanian government in the name of “conservation,” and so the land can be set aside for ecotourists, safari companies, trophy hunters, and powerful foreigners like the Dubai royal family. An important but upsetting read—one that’s both incredibly reported and beautifully written by Stephanie McCrummen.
Songoyo headed north with his next herd of sheep, through a clearing with a seasonal stream and smooth rocks. He skirted Serengeti National Park, where he was not allowed to be, then crossed over a low mountain range that marked the Tanzania-Kenya border, his sandals splitting at the soles. At the gates of the park, some of the half a million people who visit every year were lining up in Land Cruisers, the bumpers displaying flag decals representing the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the United States. And as the sun rose one morning, in they went, tourists with bucket lists, anniversaries, dreams, and romanticized images in mind.
They roamed the dirt roads through grassy plains that really did seem to stretch on forever—a rolling sea of greens and yellows and flat-topped trees. They slowed for herds of gazelles and elephants. They sped to a leopard sighting in trucks bearing the wishful names of various outfitters—Sense of Africa, Lion King Adventures, Peacemakers Expeditions—and soon they began gathering along one side of the Mara River.
“We got ’em!” yelled a woman holding up a camera, and as far as anyone could see, the view was wildebeests, river, trees, and the grassy savanna beyond—no cows, no goats, no Maasai herders, no people at all, except the ones beholding the spectacle they’d been promised.
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Laura Preston didn’t really believe in the promise of artificial intelligence—which is exactly why Project Voice, a conference about conversational AI, invited her to come speak at the event. She would be their “honorary contrarian speaker.” So she did. But more importantly, she spoke to the people who are trying to get a cut of the AI-dominated future. The result is immersively reported and somehow as entertaining as it is terrifying. (Well, almost.)
Everyone at this conference kept invoking loneliness and claiming the antidote was conversation. That didn’t track with my own experience. My most desperate moments of loneliness have been in conversation: on a Hinge date, doomed but persisting as a form of protocol. At a publishing party, surrounded by people who look and talk like me, all of us a little drunk but maintaining our nervous, manic professionalism. My moments of connection, by contrast, have been beyond language. Biking along the east edge of Prospect Park on an August night, hearing cicadas chant their reedy iambs, as loud on that stretch of Flatbush as they would be in the countryside, remembering summers of childhood, a house that’s gone, and my grandmother’s two-handed wave from the threshold.
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Daniel Serrahas has been studying the food habits of the Vikings for over 20 years—and demonstrates them to be farmers, rather than “gnawing off the meat of the bones of wild animals.” Maddy Savage and Benoît Derrier give a respectful report of Serrahas’ work and provide his recipe for Viking fish porridge for good measure!
Viking imagery often focuses on seasonal banquets of roasted lamb accompanied by mead. While the elite did enjoy this kind of food (and used it as a way of expressing their wealth), Serra’s research suggests that everyday cooking was quite different.
He said most people focussed on developing simple, “tasty”, “feel-good” dishes that could be easily shared and helped keep them warm in Scandinavia’s harsh climate. “The winter would have been cold. So, yes, people working in those conditions would probably need a hot meal. A hot, comforting meal – filling.”
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