A Racial Slur and a Fort Myers High Baseball Team Torn Apart

Just over a year ago, the players and coaches of a high school baseball team walked off the field soon after the game began while the parents applauded. They weren’t protesting an umpire or the other team’s behavior, though; instead, they were abandoning their own team’s only two Black players. Over the course of 8,000 words, Howard Bryant tells the story of the Fort Myers High Green Wave’s sickening display—the fracture that led to it, and the chasm that resulted from it. An ire-inducing feat of reporting from one of baseball’s best.

While many team issues fell under the common soap opera of high school sports — a nationwide epidemic of meddling parents and overbearing coaches, the unending battle between fair participation and winning at all costs — virtually the entirety of the grievances that destroyed the 2023 baseball team can be traced to two specific areas: the internecine racial history of Fort Myers, and, more urgently, the enforcement of conservative mandates playing out in education in Florida and around the nation.

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Riding the Baddest Bulls Made Him a Legend. Then One Broke His Neck.

Sally Jenkins gives us a searing portrait of the life of the bull-riding cowboy J.B. Mauney—a life filled with pain after sustaining multiple horrific injuries flung from bulls. Breaking his neck in his last ride was career-ending, and in this piece, he reflects on a his different future. 

Mauney, too, cuts a black outline. From under a black felt cowboy hat, hair blacker than coffee runs to the collar of his black shirt. The impression of severity is relieved by blue eyes the color of his jeans and a smile crease from the habit of grinning around a Marlboro. It’s an arresting face, burnished by years of outdoor chores, smoke, roistering humor and pain soothed by shots of Jägermeister. It befits arguably the greatest rodeo bull rider who ever lived and certainly the hardest-bodied, a man who never conceded to any power. Until a bull broke his neck.

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Variations on the Theme of Silence

In this deeply thoughtful essay for The Common Reader, Jeannette Cooperman considers silences both healing and harmful. This layered and nuanced piece will give you a much-needed pause; you may not think of the absence of sound quite the same again.

Most days, life’s demands come at me like flung Frisbees, but here, they cannot reach me. Here, I feel at home in a way I do not even feel at home, because here, all I need do is be. This is the silence I craved all along: not an absence of noise but a freedom from my tiny, petty self. As I move through the trees, I am listening, but not hard-focused for connotation or tone. In nature, I eavesdrop on what I once thought of as silence and realize it is only the gentle noise of a world going on without me. This world does not need me to hoist it on my shoulders, spin it dizzy, or yell instructions. I can let go.

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Most People Are Disgusted by These Animals. These New Yorkers Are Filling Their Homes with Them.

Pigeons. Rats. Opossums. Raccoons. Most people consider these critters as pests—they don’t belong in our homes and neighborhoods and should be exterminated instead. But there’s a group of people across New York City’s boroughs who rehabilitate these injured creatures, and their compassion makes you wonder: Why have humans become so disconnected from nature? Why do we despise these smaller living beings so much? Benji Jones spends time with some of the city’s amazing rehabbers, who are essentially volunteers and care for these creatures without pay.

You might be thinking: What are they thinking? People are commonly disgusted by the animals that have adapted to live alongside us — to eat our garbage, to sleep in our streets. We typically want them out of our homes, not in. Wild animals, no matter the species, can also be noisy, dirty, and sometimes diseased. (One of Martin’s pigeons pooped on her bed, and of course, I sat right in it.)

What’s even more puzzling is that most of these rehabbers work for free, often around the clock, to care for these animals until they’ve healed. They often spend what little money they have on feed, specialized equipment including syringes and IV bags, and medicine. One rehabber told me that she can’t afford to buy herself new clothes. “I’m so broke right now,” they said. “All of my money goes to the animals.”

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Inside the Kenyan Cult That Starved Itself to Death

As COVID-19 swept across the world, a preacher in Kenya lured thousands of people into a remote forest, promising them safety and salvation. Then he told them to stop eating. In this feature*, Carey Baraka details the terrifying rise and fall of a cult:

On April 14th 2023—after weeks of bureaucratic delays—a group of police officers, pathologists, grave-diggers, human-rights activists, journalists and locals (including Mangi) descended on Shakahola forest. It had recently rained and the red soil was slippery, making the road impassable for their 4x4s. The group had to walk the last few kilometres in the heat, their eyes locked nervously on the ground. They were terrified of stepping on snakes, scorpions—or something more gruesome.

In the bushes, the group began finding bodies that had not yet been buried. Meanwhile, the five boys who had fled from the forest pointed out graves, now sprouting with vegetables. Many of them contained a number of corpses—one held 12. Some bodies had decayed so much that all that was left were bones.“When you saw a suspicious spot, you’d poke a long stick into the ground,” recalled Alex Kalama, a journalist who was present. “After two metres, a strong stench would waft up.”

A few people in the settlement were still alive. Some were inexplicably naked; others were lying on the ground or tied to trees with ropes. Many of these starving people refused the rescuers’ help, telling the group that they were on their way to heaven. Mangi remembered one woman asking him to leave her because she “wanted to meet Christ”. Mathias Shipeta, an employee of haki Africa, an ngo that promotes human rights, said that he started telling the victims he had been sent by Jesus to persuade them to accept his assistance.

Over the next two days, 67 adults and 27 children were taken back to town in ambulances, police vehicles, cars driven by journalists and aid workers, and the arms of rescuers. They were very weak—one woman died on Mangi’s back. Later he wondered whether the people in the forest had been “brainwashed” into killing themselves. Then he paused, his voice growing quiet. “But they were all very educated. You can’t say they don’t know the Bible. They had so many Bibles in their houses—and money.”

*This story is behind a paywall.

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Locked In, Priced Out

Ramen that’s more than three times as expensive than it is at Target. Water prices that shot up 50 percent in a year. Peanut butter marked up 70 percent. These are just a few of the findings from a nine-month investigation of of prison commissaries. This project comes with a searchable database, so that you can get acquainted with the costs incarcerated individuals are forced to bear to access items they need:

The Appeal’s investigation reveals that incarcerated people in many states are charged significantly more for essential items than those outside prison even though they typically earn pennies an hour—or no wages at all. The Appeal found prison prices up to five times higher than in the community and markups as high as 600 percent. This financial burden, which can cost hundreds of dollars per month, is often passed onto prisoners’ loved ones.

In just one example, Indiana prisons charged about $33 for an 8-inch fan, even though a similar item sells online for about $23 at Lowe’s. Incarcerated people in the state, who are often confined to dangerously hot prisons in the summer, can earn as little as 30 cents an hour, meaning it could take more than 100 hours of work to afford the fan. 

The Appeal’s investigation also shows that prisoners can be charged vastly different prices for similar religious items, depending on their faith, with wide variations across states. In Connecticut, the Bible sold for $4.55, but the only Quran available for sale, The Noble Quran, cost $25.99. 

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‘Did Something Happen to Mom When She Was Young?’

For Politico, Jessica Bateman shines a light on the secret history of politically motivated adoptions after the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949. Thousands of Greek kids were adopted abroad in the 1950s and ’60s; some children, whose parents were rebel leftist fighters, were orphaned or abandoned, while others were taken from mothers who were coerced or manipulated. Children were adopted mostly by Americans—ideally well-off and conservative families—during a time when Cold War politics softened immigration laws. Today, most of these Greek adoptees don’t know the truth about their past or who their biological parents are.

From looking through the unpublished memoirs of Maria’s uncle, the Stanford professor, and comparing them to emails and interviews with her biological family in Greece, a different story emerged than the one Maria had been told. Maria’s mother was in her early 20s and became pregnant when she was raped by the owner of a farm she worked on. As an unwed mother she was shunned by her rural community and moved to the capital, Athens, where she took a job as a hospital cleaner. She placed Maria in an orphanage but visited her every single day. Crucially, she did not give permission for her to be adopted.

When Maria’s uncle came to browse the orphanage in 1953, he decided Maria looked like “one of the healthiest” children. The orphanage said he could take her as long as her mother agreed. He and a lawyer confronted her at her workplace and pressured her to sign the papers, telling her the child would have a better life in America than she could ever give it. In his memoir he describes tears rolling down the woman’s face.

The Orthodox Church in Greece was not happy that the family were Mormon, as Greek American parents were still prioritized at that time. But Maria’s uncle was friends with the U.S. ambassador, Cavendish W. Cannon, who knew the head of the Greek Orthodox Church personally, and intervened to complete the adoption.

“I’d been told my mother didn’t want me, but that wasn’t true,” says Maria. “None of it was true.” And there was more. Maria’s mother was still alive.

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