Today’s internet is fragile, toxic, and broken, with tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta “consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure.” In this thoughtful essay, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon make their case for “rewilding” and rebuilding the web and look to ecologists for inspiration, vision, and actionable next steps. Rewilding doesn’t mean repairing, but restoring—considering the internet as an entire habitat, making it more resilient via diversity, and allowing more people to make, remake, and innovate.
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.
But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?
Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view.
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Muskrat populations in North America are declining. But why? For Hakai Magazine, Brandon Keim dives into the reasons why the number of these under-appreciated, semiaquatic rodents are dwindling, to help us understand their contribution to the environment and the others species that share it.
The animals are often mistaken for beavers, another semiaquatic rodent, albeit one whose adults weigh as much as a six-to-eight-year-old child; muskrats tip the scales at a couple kilograms. That lack of appreciation extends to the ecological roles performed by muskrats. Though their influences are subtle when compared with the wetland engineering of beavers, muskrats are still important habitat makers and nutrient movers. They help the world come to life, even if we don’t readily notice them doing so; their diminishment would reverberate far beyond them. It is also foreboding. What does it portend, and what does it say about how humans have transformed the world, when in so many places such a common, hardy animal can no longer thrive?
In his review of muskrat ecosystem impacts, Ahlers describes how these disturbances produce dramatic increases in plant species richness. One study suggested that muskrats were primarily responsible for an increase of more than 70 percent in the variety of plants found in the disturbed areas of a cattail marsh; by grazing on abundant plants that would otherwise become dominant, muskrats also create space for rare plants to grow. Meanwhile, their houses—a meter or more from the water and up to two meters wide, lasting for a year or two before gradually degrading—become habitat features themselves. “Birds are probably the most conspicuous beneficiaries of the muskrat’s influence on wetlands,” writes Ahlers, including the ducks, terns, grebes, and other wetland avians who use muskrat houses as nesting sites. Turtles, water snakes, and frogs also dwell in them, and even skunks and shrews—more than 60 vertebrate species altogether, by one count.
These animals also avail themselves of the reed feeding platforms that muskrats construct. So do beetles and other invertebrates, and in turn their predators benefit. As the platforms decompose, they even increase local microbial diversity. And where muskrats dig dens in banks along the water’s edge rather than build houses, their burrowing aerates riparian soils, and those subterranean chambers become habitat for reptiles and amphibians. “When you remove them,” says Smith of muskrats, “the ecology of the wetland changes.”
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“The Merv Griffin Show” is a perfect Seinfeld episode: Kramer finds discarded pieces from the show in a dumpster and sets them up in his apartment, Jerry is obsessed with his girlfriend’s toy collection, Elaine is annoyed by a new coworker who “sidles” up behind her and takes credit for her work, and George . . . well, George. In one scene, he and his girlfriend are driving through the city. She asks him to watch out for pigeons in the road, but he dismisses her, saying they’ll get out of the way. They don’t, and he hits them. “Don’t we have a deal with the pigeons?” he later asks Jerry. On a subsequent ride, poor George faces the same predicament—but when he swerves to avoid a pigeon, he ends up hitting a squirrel. While reading this delightful piece by Benji Jones about the people in NYC who rehabilitate injured or abandoned creatures like rats, baby opossums, and stray birds, I couldn’t stop thinking about this pact that George mentions—the idea that we and the wild critters we live alongside in cities have some kind of understanding, one that favors humans: we’ll let you live on our streets as long as you don’t bother us or invade our personal spaces. In contrast, the rehabbers who care for these small animals out of their own pockets are incredibly kind and humane; after spending time with these folks, Jones begins to understand why they do this intense work, often for free. “They view these species not as pests but as part of nature—as part of the New York City ecosystem. As part of their home.” Sure, some critters can be dirty, destructive, or diseased. But is pigeon poop so terrible? Has the subway rat brought real harm to society? Why do humans hold such contempt and disgust for these tiny creatures? Jones shows how giving them respect, love, and the space to heal has, in turn, enriched these people’s lives. Personally, I’ve always felt a kinship with squirrels, but there’s an underlying dividing line between “us” and “them” that has somehow conditioned me, like most people, to think they are less worthy of compassion than, say, a cat or a dog. Jones writes that we need to be better stewards of our environment. But that can only happen when we truly see these critters as living beings, too, trying to survive just like us. So perhaps, the next time I’m driving and see a creature on the road, I won’t assume it’ll move. And better yet, I’ll slow down, even stop, to acknowledge it—and be grateful that our world is full of such a wonderful variety of life. —CLR
Howard Bryant | ESPN | April 23, 2024 | 8,079 words
Not many baseball writers are more experienced or accomplished than Howard Bryant, and he brings all his skills to bear on this story about a high school team fractured by racism. Beginning from a jaw-dropping scene in which the Fort Myers High Green Wave’s white coaches and players walk off the field, abandoning the team’s two Black players, Bryant expertly unpacks the festering effects of white grievance. The team’s issues may have started internally, but the flames were fanned by white players’ parents; when an assistant coach was fired for texting the team a message including the N-word, they all rushed to his defense, singing from the dog-eared hymnal known as Why Can’t White People Say It Too? The result: the team’s Black players became scapegoats for players and parents alike. Bryant’s deep reporting pulls together FOIA requests, personnel records, and interviews with parents to make the case that the whole gut-wrenching saga was an offshoot of “conservative mandates playing out in education in Florida and around the nation.” He smartly devotes an entire section to Lee County’s racial-political history, adding valuable context for those who might dismiss this as an isolated phenomenon. (And yes, that’s Lee as in Robert E.) This is only a sports story because it involves a sports team. In reality, it’s a story about how major swaths of this country—including state legislatures—have decided that other people catching up means you’re falling behind. —PR
Carey Baraka | 1843 | April 19, 2024 | 6,030 words
I love horror movies, and the opening of this story sounds like a sequence from a great one. A mysterious group of outsiders moves into a foreboding forest that no locals would dare try to live in. They won’t explain who they are or why they’re there; men with machetes tell observers who ask questions to mind their own business. Then people in the group start to disappear: first the children, then the women. Finally the truth emerges, in the form of chilling personal testimonies and shallow mass graves containing hundreds of bodies. The people were part of a cult called Good News International (GNI), and their charismatic leader, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, had convinced them to kill themselves—not by drinking Kool-Aid, but by consuming nothing at all: Mackenzie’s followers starved themselves to death. Carey Baraka does fantastic work telling this story, which happened in his native Kenya. The writing is taut and evocative. Again in the vein of the best works of the horror genre, Baraka takes care to show how a seemingly outlandish tale of fear and suffering is the product of familiar social, political, and cultural forces—a fact, I would argue, that makes it all the more terrifying. Those forces include the legacy of white colonialism in Kenya, the enduring influence of evangelical Christianity on the country, the basic human desire to find community and purpose, and even the global spread of COVID-19, which accelerated cult recruitment. When Baraka asks one of the survivors of GNI what would make her life better now, she says money, land, food, and a home—essentially, security. “What she described was the life that Mackenzie offered to her and thousands of others,” Baraka writes, “before the fasting began.” —SD
Sally Jenkins | The Washington Post | April 20, 2024 | 7,807 words
Every May, there is a rodeo held near my house. It’s like entering a different world. Horses, cows, and cowboy hats wherever you turn, a muffled speaker adding its indiscernible drone to the noise of excited families (and their dogs and trucks). There is a general party atmosphere, which ramps up a notch when the bulls come out. Muscles rippling in the sun, sweat on their flanks, they kick up a tornado of dust as they rip across the ring, determinedly flinging their massive torsos back and forth to dislodge the intrepid rider clinging to their back. These bulls are celebrities in their own right, and, when I watched, they were the winners, with not one rider staying on for the eight seconds required to earn a score. I came to Sally Jenkins’ piece hoping to learn more about this alien world, and I was not disappointed: Jenkins is swift in pulling you into Texas rodeo life. She profiles J.B. Mauney, who was, as she writes, “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.” Picture a cowboy and Mauney is it, his craggy features framing the Marlboro cigarette hanging from his lips. Jenkins describes him perfectly: “an arresting face, burnished by years of outdoor chores, smoke, roistering humor, and pain soothed by shots of Jägermeister.” She details his career, along with the harrowing beating his body has taken from years of falls, and her skill lies in describing this rough life with great beauty. She also explores the mentality of bull riders, undoubtedly forms of addicts, who need “doses of centrifugal and vertical speed as well as sluices of dopamine and epinephrine and a sense of conquering the well-nigh unconquerable.” That addiction is now over for Mauney, who spends his retirement with his family and Arctic Assasin, the last bull he ever rode—the one that broke his neck. Mauney bought Arctic Assasin and retired him to a quiet pasture on his ranch. He is oddly grateful to this bull. He may have ended his career, but he did it while Mauney could still stand up and walk away. —CW
Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | March 26, 2024 | 4,575 words
Blessed silence. Quiet time. The absence of small, empty talk. That’s the kind of silence I had in mind as I read Jeanette Cooperman’s thoughtful essay for The Common Reader. I hadn’t contemplated other kinds of silences, but as she notes, there are many. Consider the silent treatment, where someone chooses to inflict pain by withholding their words. Silence becomes fraught and tense. Consider a moment of silence, usually for a life or lives lost. That silence signifies a deep, collective pain. “Silence like a cancer grows, whenever power refuses to hear truth,” she writes. “Silence is an unblown whistle, a disappeared activist, a dismembered journalist. Silence slides down one generation to the next, keeping pain a secret. Silence is what neighbors remember about the shooter.” I hadn’t considered the litany of ways in which silence harms. But in addition to giving me so much to think about, Cooperman reminds us of silence’s ability to heal, a welcome reprieve from the hollow cacophony of life which depletes me. “Yet as far as I can tell, every wisdom tradition since time began has praised silence. The stillness they urge is a letting-go, a slowing down, an unclenching of our hands and our stubborn, intractable desires. It empties us, yet is far from empty.” We often define silence by what is missing, an absence. But in many cases—mine included—silence is what fills us up. —KS
Audience Award
The piece that our audience engaged with the most this week is . . .
Jessica Bateman | Politico | April 19, 2024 | 4,143 words
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. —CLR
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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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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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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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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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