Set in the San Joaquin Valley, Jessica Garrison’s LA Times feature exposes an irrigation official named Dennis Falaschi who’s been accused of stealing more than $25 million worth of water from the federal government over the past two decades. Garrison details how Falaschi siphoned water out of the Delta-Mendota Canal—one of the main channels delivering water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Fresno and Merced counties—with a secret pipe. Some farmers considered him “the Robin Hood of irrigation”; others were outraged that a water official had been stealing and selling “liquid gold” to farmers and other districts, and using public funds to pay for everything from housing remodels to car repairs to concert tickets for himself and his employees. A very wild, very California tale.
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Walsh walked over to where the hat was spinning. He peered down at a standpipe that had once connected the Delta-Mendota Canal to an irrigation ditch that extends through adjacent farmland. The standpipe had been cemented closed and was no longer functional. At least in theory.
Walsh moved closer and heard a rushing noise in the pipe — the sound of water running hard and fast.
There must be a leak, he thought. But if the canal were leaking, there should have been water pooling around him. The field where he was standing was dry.
And he saw something even more peculiar. The abandoned pipe was old and rusted. But it had been fitted with a new gate to control the flow of water from canal to ditch. And that gate had a lock. Walsh’s water authority was responsible for every turnout on that canal. But he had never seen this lock, and he didn’t have a key.
“When I saw that, I thought: Someone is stealing water,” he said, a sentiment later echoed in court filings.
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For years, Richie Henderson helped the children of Avenues The World School cross the street. For years, he cared for them like he cared for his own family. And when tragedy struck, that huge extended family did the same for him and his loved ones. A newspaper feature that embodies the best of the genre: sadness, hope, and a feeling that humans still look out for one another.
In the summer of 2023, the school honored Henderson’s contribution by making him a staff employee, something they had never done for a crossing guard before. He’d no longer work as a subcontractor. He would have a benefits package, including health care, a retirement plan and a life insurance policy.
“They gave him his roses,” Dockery said of Henderson’s status as a staff member.
She said her husband, imposing at more than 6 feet tall and more than 200 pounds, could be stern and demanding of his own children, but never with the kids at Avenues.
“Those kids, that school, they got the best of Richie,” she said with pride and not regret.
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In the face of the climate crisis, few pastimes seem quite as frivolous (or doomed) as skiing and snowboarding. Paying through the nose to slide down mountains, even while the planet burns and the ice melts, is rather absurd. Why, exactly, do we care about this sport?
It’s simple, really. Frivolity is fun. Fun attracts people, and those people snowball into groups until a legitimate industry revolves around said frivolity—for better or worse. I’m one of those people. Despite growing up in an English county where the highest hill stands at a whopping 344 feet, I fell in love with skiing during a school trip to Austria, and ultimately moved to Vancouver, Canada, partly in pursuit of bountiful powder.
And I’m one of around 400 million who visit ski resorts (including indoor centers) annually; that’s nearly 5 percent of the planet’s population. The US ski market alone is worth an estimated $4.6 billion and is still growing, climate change be damned.
Skiing’s elitist reputation may be warranted, but it’s also not the whole story. When I ski back to my patchily converted 2005 GMC Savana, I remember that different versions of skiing exist. Frivolity is worth fighting for—for everyone. More importantly, skiing offers a unique perspective on a question that has shaped our present and will shape our future: how we interact with nature.
Until recently ski culture has generally focused on joy, freedom, and conquest. But attitudes are diverging as the planet heats—and alpine environments warm faster than any other. Twice as fast, in the Swiss Alps. Hundreds of abandoned resorts now haunt Europe, and in the US ski seasons shortened by 34 days between 1982 and 2016. Skiing’s plight presents some of the starkest Western proof that the climate crisis is not our future, but our present.
When normality breaks, calls for change commence. But what does adaptation look like for winter sports? Technological innovation, in the shape of giant snow blankets and thirsty snow machines? Reoriented business models and environmental practices? Elitism and corporate consolidation? Activism and democratic accountability? New ways of sliding?
Skiing is not an escape, but a practice rooted in and reflective of society. How the ski world balances competing interests in its responses to these threats will shape livelihoods, landscapes, health outcomes, cultural attitudes, and political possibilities—beyond just ski towns. Skiing is a bellwether, a dress rehearsal, a microcosm.
The outdoor community is starting to take note. Climate change, mental health, and diversity are now common themes in ski media. This is welcome, but much work remains to connect individual stories and collective passion for adventure with systemic change. As the Northern Hemisphere’s ski season draws to a close and the Southern Hemisphere’s season approaches, I present these pieces with this possibility in mind.
Snowfall is falling, in the worst possible sense. In Europe, snowpack depth has decreased by 8.4 percent per decade since 1971. The industry’s most visible response has been technological. Resorts are furiously making fake snow and painstakingly preserving real snow.
For 1843, Simon Willis tells this story through snow-obsessed Finn Mikko Martikainen—a man who once convinced a doctor to set the bones of his broken wrist “in the form of a loose fist so he could continue to grasp a ski pole.” Now one of the world’s leading snow consultants, advising resorts and the Sochi (2014) and Beijing (2022) Winter Olympics, Martikainen has graduated from sliding on snow to conjuring it out of dry air.
In Beijing, the problem isn’t heat but drought. Yanqing, where the alpine ski races will be held, gets an average of 5cm of snow a year; the chance of a flurry during the games will hover around 1%. The barren hillsides are more likely to be dusted by sand blowing in from the Gobi desert than by snow.
The chosen solution to this self-imposed problem, Willis reports in this piece published before the Beijing games, will be snow machines. To affirm the sense of sanctioned insanity, he explains that “in the hillsides outside Beijing, water is as scarce as it is in South Sudan.” European examples further bolster the case.
Ski resorts have used snow machines for decades. They aren’t always so terrible—when water is drawn from responsible sources and melts back into waterways. Nevertheless, this piece outlines the business-as-usual future of skiing, in which problems are innovated away, to just beyond the resort boundary. A future, as one source puts it, of every ski resort “trying to make itself independent of nature.”
We can discern an alternative future in the recent rise of backcountry skiing: in the US, “skinning,” or walking with sticky ski pads uphill to ski lines without resort access, has more than tripled since 2020. Higher ticket prices, busier resorts, COVID-19, and popular backcountry films have all contributed. The result is more skiers seeking a slower, more attuned mountain experience.
For FT Magazine, Tristan Kennedy travels to the Italian village of Montespluga. Four hotels once served a bustling ski community here, with skiers arriving on horse-drawn sleighs whenever snow closed the road to cars.
By the early 1980s, however, numbers had dwindled. The other hotels shut down, one by one, the draglift was dismantled and Montespluga in winter became something of a ghost town. Until the arrival of Homeland.
Homeland represents an interesting facet of the backcountry trend: the flickering dawn of lift-free ski “resorts.” Hankin-Evelyn, here in British Columbia, has been quietly pioneering a rustic model for years, captured in this short Salomon TV film. Bluebird, the first lift-free resort in the US, opened to positive press in 2020 (though it closed in 2023 due to a struggle to find suitable long-term land). Lift-free resorts will never replace traditional ones. But in contrast to the myopic techno-optimism of snow production, they propose a low-impact response to the climate crisis—one rooted in a logic of sufficiency. It’s a space worth watching.
One consequence of the backcountry boom, in conjunction with climate change making avalanche conditions more volatile and challenging to predict, is the increased risk of fatalities.
The microphone dangled on a cord extending from his backpack. But he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t move his arms. He lay immobile, struggling to breathe for about three minutes. Then everything faded to black.
So relays Joshua Hammer for GQ in this harrowing account of a Swiss avalanche incident. Hammer recounts the rescue attempt as if in real time, punctuated by timestamps marking the minutes—each reducing the survival odds—since the victim’s burial.
The piece captures the spectacular illusion of tranquility on a bluebird powder day. Crucially, it also articulates the silence of an avalanche’s aftermath—when buried under snow—as well as its trigger moment. “You hear that crack and the silence while nature holds its breath, waiting for the mountain to go,” says one alpinist, who has lost multiple friends to avalanches. “Even the birds go quiet. You can feel your breath thundering in your ears.”
Ultimately, the story conveys how proper training, quality kit, excellent decision-making, and good luck will all continue to be vital in the backcountry—even with the world’s most storied rescue operation within radio range.
At age 33, Cathleen Calkins fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a ski patroller. But, in this personal essay for Longreads, she tells the story of how through skiing and helping people every day, her “dreams became nightmares.”
As I experienced both trivial and traumatic moments day after day, an emotional narrative emerged, and I began to confront the falsehood that I too would be okay. My thinning confidence overshadowed my passion to rescue others, and seven years into my career, I became terrified to do my job.
Calkins offers a vulnerable account of the incidents that chiseled away her well-being, the culture of qualified bravado that suppressed the symptoms, and the fear, despair, and breakdown that resulted. Coming from the rescuer’s perspective—the red-jacketed hero, ever poised and in control—it hits all the harder.
Gloria Liu’s profile of a Park City, Utah patroller is a worthwhile, complementary take on the challenges and precarity of ski patrolling.
The future emerges from this history in Calkins’ advocacy for a ski culture more attuned to shadow, pain, and trauma. It also lurks in her depiction of how skiing—that frivolous pastime—can snap futures into pieces. And it runs through her reflections on the way skiing, like other pursuits that give young people “freedom, autonomy, and power,” presents a manner of moving into the future, motivations and misdirections included.
Socialism and skiing seem unlikely bedfellows today, but it hasn’t always been so. This fantastic Current Affairs essay by Richard Michael Solomon opens with an old German man in a chairlift, holding forth on the prospect of skiing under fully automated luxury communism. Inspired, Solomon traces the history of skiing from its egalitarian European roots, through a postwar wave of social-democratic skiing projects, and into late capitalism’s Ski Inc. oligopoly.
Ski Inc. is what many will recognize as skiing today, especially in the US: giant corporates like Vail and Alterra gobbling up hills; bumper multi-resort season passes and stratospheric day-ticket prices ($299 in some places) incentivizing yearlong commitments as a hedge against climate change; and ski towns morphing into “aristocrats’ Potemkin villages” of empty chalets, splashy stores, and olde tyme simulacra. Stuart Winchester, Substack’s leading ski journalist, recently (and provocatively) made the point that not all good ski resorts match this description. True enough, but the slide toward consolidation and luxury continues.
Solomon goes further, searching for more radical models. He recommends existing nonprofit and community-owned ski projects. He proposes taxes, more taxes, revenue sharing, and a Public Lands Fund modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund. He also calls for politicization:
Skiers, river rats, scuba people, dirt-bags, surfer bros, biker girls, cavers, bird fanatics, anglers, hiking vagabonds—we are a powerful voter bloc and possess sizable consumer power. Given that the natural world is under relentless assault by a pollutive and commodifying force, the outdoor community must become thoroughly politicized.
Solomon’s vision is fanciful, by his own admission. But fanciful ideas are often so from a political perspective, not a practical one. Fatalism, he argues, is worse than fancy:
On the chairlift, I recall Hans told me that our modern social order is like concrete. To sledgehammer the thing is brutish and unlikely to do much, but to sandpaper the edges is inadequate. For this reason, such ski dreams of his may seem like an exercise in pointless fantasy—fated “to bleach on the plains of the past under a hallucinated utopian sun,” wrote British Marxist E.P. Thompson. But in the boom-bust rhythms, small cracks in that concrete will form. There, radical projects can sink their roots.
As society undergoes an ecological turn, parts of the ski community are turning the same way. In both cases, Indigenous voices have much to contribute—if we can learn to listen. I love Matthew Tufts’ Freeskier profile of Lakota skier Connor Ryan, a modern shredder spreading ancient wisdom, as a step in this direction.
“Dude, I just want to pop up like the little Microsoft Office paperclip and tell other skiers, ‘Oh hey there! It sounds like you’re having trouble describing your connection to nature,’ [Ryan] said with an exasperated laugh between bites of ahi poke ceviche. Our guide to alpine reverence wore a basketball jersey and backwards cap with long braided hair snaking out from the brim. He pointed at us with a tortilla chip. ‘Bro, what if I told you Native cultures have had words for that for thousands of years?”
The piece hangs around a series of Indigenous phrases, each encouraging a reciprocal, animistic, grateful relationship with nature—for skiers and others. It is a paean to the power of language.
Language is not only a tool for communicating intentions and relaying our actions, but also serves as a pillar in the framework of our interpretation of the world and its people. It’s largely held that a people defines its language; it is less frequently acknowledged that a language reciprocally shapes its people.
One of my favorite ski films in recent years, Spirit of the Peaks, explores Connor Ryan’s perspectives—and showcases his skiing—through a visual medium.
Skiing is not the most diverse world, so representation is important. But when abstracted from different communities’ perspectives and particularities, representation can feel tokenistic—especially within marketing campaigns. Not this profile. In focusing on Ryan’s linguistic insights and ritualistic practices—singing songs, and burning sweetgrass—the piece is artful in its articulation of diverse ways of thinking and being.
Connor isn’t out to alter the experience skiers already have with the mountains; rather, he sees an opportunity, through language, to enhance the depth and perspective of these experiences in a way that cultivates a healthier reciprocal relationship between skiers, the land and the Indigenous peoples upon whose land we so often recreate. He hopes to bring some of these Indigenous terms into the skier’s vernacular, integrating long-standing cultural practices into our daily experiences on the mountain. In doing so, the ski community can adopt a new understanding of, and appreciation for, our relationship with the natural world.
To close, a piece that is less literary long-form and more a realist rallying cry. Scottish snowboarder Calum Macintyre is one of the sport’s most outspoken environmental activists. Matt Barr’s Looking Sideways Substack, for which this is a guest post, is one of the most thoughtful corners of the snowsports world. (Macintyre also just appeared on the Looking Sidewayspodcast, discussing the same themes).
Having been involved in the climate movement for some years, I have often been asked by people who have no interest in snow sports or climbing, ‘Where the hell are all of you?’ I have found it difficult to respond to this question. In this piece, I will present my five reasons why I believe our community is not more engaged and why I think more of us should participate in disruptive protests.
I love the simple, direct provocation of this piece. It asks all of us with an affinity for the outdoors to ask some honest questions: Are we doing what we can to protect the environments we cherish? If not, why not? What are the most effective actions we can take? These questions are increasingly animating both ski communities and wider society. Their consequences will come for skiers first—but will catch us all in the end.
Sam Firman is a freelance writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. He writes a newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and how this might help build better systems.
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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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