Spreadsheet Superstars

“Go to Las Vegas to compete in the Excel World Championship” is the sort of assignment any tech-adjacent journalist dreams of getting. But few could pull it off the way David Pierce does for The Verge—with descriptive reporting, humor, and more than a little insight into how a spreadsheet program became arguably the most important piece of software since the dawn of personal computing. Add in some of the best design I’ve seen in an online feature this year, and you’ve got a winner.

Rose says go, and the most problematic thing about competitive Excel becomes blindingly obvious to me once again: it is damn near impossible to figure out what’s going on. All eight players are moving so fast and doing so many things with keyboard shortcuts and formulas that there’s practically no way to see what they’re doing until it’s already done. What’s happening around me looks like a sport, it’s lit like a sport, and the anxiety levels suggest aggressive competition, but even the other competitors in the room can barely keep up. They’re squinting at the screens in front of each workstation, trying to decipher each move. Really, they’re mostly just waiting for the score to update.

In the commentary booth, du Soleil and Acampora are doing their best to keep up and explain the maneuvers, but watching eight spreadsheet whizzes simultaneously requires multitasking brainpower I’m not sure any human can attain. And if you can figure out what =SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””) means in the few seconds it’s shown onscreen, well, you should come to Vegas next year.

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This is Not an Escape Story

In this inspirational story, Paige Kaptuch explores the life of Darlene Barlow Stubbs (a woman she has competed against in marathons without even knowing). Raised in an FDS community, which she later ran away from, Stubbs shows us how running can help to heal and build community.

The route takes us on some back roads at the edge of town, revealing the jagged red vistas that have been featured in so many documentaries and news stories about the area. Shown on film, the view is often accompanied by haunting music meant to evoke the unthinkable crimes that took place here. For many in the Short Creek Running Club, being called a runner is part of a new identity. Participating in a club that has nothing to do with religion is a novel concept. And a run with me, an outsider? Ten years ago, it would have been out of the question: Darlene tells me that “play” and “fun” were once like swear words here.

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Home for a Season

Krista Diamond reflects on the temporary housing she lived in while working at various national parks in the United States. Given her transience and impermanence in these spartan, often dilapidated spaces, she considers what it means to make a home for yourself. Sharing the landscape with the insects, mammals, and amphibians that inhabited these wilderness outposts, she comes to the realization that home is much more than simply a location.

The contracts were short. A summer. A winter. But I moved in like I meant it, like I was staying forever. With each new park, the cycle began again. On each first night, panic and regret and loneliness transformed into a desire to make the bed, put clothing into the drawers, hang photos on the wall. And with this homemaking came a home. And with a home came community, familiarity, a sense of belonging. And then, the season ended.

The goodbye party, the packing of boxes, the stuffing of clothes into garbage bags. Enough gas money to drive somewhere new. Everything back in the car.

The cruel irony: by the time you get settled, it’s over.

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The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined

Last year, on June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreckage, killing all five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. In this WIRED story, Mark Harris sheds light on the development of the company’s submersible technology and the events leading up to the tragedy, sharing information from internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs. It’s clear, from the tens of thousands of pieces of evidence, that in his quest to conquer the deep sea, Rush cut corners financially and viewed tests and safety practices as hurdles that stifled innovation.

Titan reached a similar depth again in April, with a crew of four including Rush. While OceanGate touted the dive as history-making proof of its submersible’s bona fides, even Rush was getting worried about loud noises the hull was making at depth. Then on June 7, three weeks before Titan’s maiden voyage to the Titanic, an OceanGate pilot inspecting the interior with a flashlight noticed a crack in the hull. He sent Rush an email warning that the crack was “pretty serious.” A detailed internal report later showed that at least 11 square feet of carbon fiber had delaminated—meaning the bonds between layers had separated.

This time, Rush couldn’t ignore the data. The hull that was meant to last for 10,000 dives to the Titanic had made fewer than 50—and only three to 4,000 meters. It would have to be scrapped, and the Titanic missions would be delayed for yet another year.

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The Mayday Call: How One Death at Sea Transformed a Fishing Fleet

The opioid epidemic has made fishing, already a dangerous job, even more deadly. When there’s an overdose at sea, fishermen have to take care of one another. C.J. Chivers examines how one man’s death in 2021, a mere 72 hours into his fishing career, may have prompted a sea change:

Eight days after Brian Murphy died, Kelsey and a co-worker showed up at the Ocean Wave, one of Alexander’s scallopers, to train its crew. The instructors mixed demonstrations on how to administer Narcan—one spray into one nostril, the second into the other—with assurances that the drug was harmless if used on someone suffering a condition other than overdose. The training carried another message, which was not intuitive: Merely administering Narcan was not enough. Multiple dispensers were sometimes required to restore a patient’s breathing, and this was true even if a patient resumed seemingly normal respiration. If the opioids were particularly potent, a patient might backslide as the antagonist wore off. Patients in respiratory distress also often suffered “polysubstance overdoses,” like fentanyl mixed with other drugs, including cocaine, amphetamines or xylazine. Alcohol might be involved, too. With so many variables, anyone revived with naloxone should be rushed to professional care. In an overdose at sea, they said, a victim’s peers should make a mayday call, so the Coast Guard could hurry the patient to a hospital.

After the partnership trained two more Alexander crews, Warren heard positive feedback from his captains. He issued his judgment. “Now it’s mandatory,” he said. Within weeks of the Jersey Pride’s mayday call, Narcan distribution and training became permanent elements of the company’s operation. Alexander-Nevells credits Murphy. He spent about 72 hours as a commercial fisherman, died on the job and left a legacy. “He changed my dad’s fleet,” she says. “I know for a fact that without Brian Murphy, this program doesn’t exist.”

In New Jersey, where Murphy’s family suffered the agonies of sudden, unexpected loss, followed by the humiliation of being ghosted by those who knew what happened to him aboard the Jersey Pride, the changes to the Alexander fleet came as welcome news. His brother, Doug Haferl, recalls his sibling with warmth and gratitude. Their parents divorced when the kids were young, and their father worked long hours as a crane operator. Brian assumed the role of father figure. “He took me and my brother Tom under his wing,” he says. The thought that Brian’s death helped put naloxone on boats and might one day save a life, he says, “is about the best thing I could hope for.”

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The Worm Charmers

For Oxford American, Michael Adno follows Gary and Audrey Revell on the hunt for earthworms. The Revells—fourth generation worm grunters—have used a piece of wood called a stob and a metal file to harvest earthworms, earning a seasonal income for the past 54 years in Sanborn, six miles west of Sopchoppy, Florida.

“Alright, Mama,” Gary said to Audrey before changing into a pair of boots, fastening knee pads, and slipping on gloves. We walked through the burnt palmettos, coated in a film of black soot, before he pointed to a few holes in the soil. They were clues to where worms were and where they were headed. He took his stob, one his son had hewn out of black gum, and knocked it a foot into the earth with his steel file before rubbing the file against the stob’s head. He called each pass a “roop.” With every roop, he mirrored the sound himself, groaning first in a low pitch then ascending to an abrupt stop. Gary would roop, pause, tell a story, then start again. It didn’t take long before a dozen large earthworms began crawling around the earth between us as Audrey gathered them by hand.

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The Love Machine

The latest entry in the annals of coverage of the Netflix reality show Love Is Blind goes behind the scenes for the filming of season seven. Creator Chris Coelen drops a new group of singles into his “experiment”—and wrestles with the lawsuits against the show:

Love Is Blind’s production company, Kinetic Content, of which Coelen is the founder and CEO, has denied all the allegations. They are a continuing source of irritation for Coelen, who often brings them up unprompted. Our conversations are studded with long, off-the-record interjections. He is aggravated by what he views as an untruthful characterization of the show. From Coelen’s perspective, participants decide whether to have sex, whether to drink, whether to get into fights—that’s all on them. From another perspective, calling it a documentary can be a way to avoid liability for what happens during production.

And Love Is Blind is, of course, not a documentary. The stories may not be produced in the same way “soft-scripted” reality shows are, as Coelen puts it. But in practice, the lines are blurry; producers are neither as fully controlling as some cast members believe nor as purely hands-off as Coelen suggests. There is both coercion and freedom on Love Is Blind: Producers do not script what cast members say, but they do ask leading questions, and some cast members have said they’re encouraged to stay even if they’ve expressed a desire to leave. The interactions I witness are like a form of influence, making some paths feel easier than others, making some choices feel like rebellion and others like following the rules.

Near the end of pods filming, a cast member tells her fiancé that, earlier that day, she had been so overwhelmed she thinks she had a panic attack. Coelen shoots me a glance. “That phrase gets thrown around a lot,” he says. It’s a colloquialism, he adds. It doesn’t mean she really had a panic attack.

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