The Freedom Convoy, a disparate group of legitimate protestors, conspiracy theorists, and troublemakers—ostensibly fed up with COVID-19 health mandates—shut down Ottawa, Ontario back in January, 2022. The three-week protest terrorized residents, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to invoke the little-used Emergencies Act to clear the streets of trucks and protestors ensconced for the long haul. In this excerpt from The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau, Stephen Maher recalls the genesis of the event, police inaction, Ottawa’s much-delayed response, and the criticism that ensued.
For the protesters, it was a great party, a joyful and peaceful expression of freedom and togetherness. Most of the protesters were not truckers, but many were tradespeople. They built temporary shelters and set up hot tubs for adults and bouncy castles for kids.
For residents of downtown Ottawa, few of whom agreed with the protesters, it was a sudden nightmare in their neighbourhood. Many protesters were uncouth, drunk, and aggressive, taunting the masked and refusing to wear masks in stores and restaurants. The massive Rideau Centre mall had to shut; small businesses lost their customers. Protesters danced on the National War Memorial, put a protest poster and a ball cap on the statue of Terry Fox. Staff at the Shepherds of Good Hope soup kitchen reported being harassed and assaulted.
The residents of the many high-rise buildings near Parliament Hill were constantly bombarded by the chaos in the streets, the stench of diesel fumes, and the sound of horns, making it difficult to sleep or relax. “The first thing you noticed when you stepped outside was all the snow, because services were unable to be rendered due to the occupation that was going on,” Zexi Li, a young public servant who lived downtown, told the commission. “The snow was often coloured yellow or brown due to the public urination and defecation that took place gratuitously. . . . And oftentimes there were illegal bonfires and just trash burning right next to cans of fuel or near the same areas where these individuals would later set off fireworks.”
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David Pierce | The Verge | June 12, 2024 | 7,191 words
Even before I read this feature about the Excel World Championship, I had been charmed by its design. The visuals are chef’s-kiss perfect: paragraphs rendered as spreadsheet cells; an old-school palette of green text on a black background; bitmap-style illustrations that chunk together as you scroll them into view. Even the footer and credits tab feel considered, consistent, and—most importantly—not so assertive that they overwhelm the reading experience. (Achieving a balance between spectacle and legibility is all too rare in the post-“Snow Fall” era.) Thankfully, the piece’s creative director, Kristen Radtke, shares byline billing with author David Pierce. But don’t ignore Pierce’s role in a fantastic story. This is a scene piece of sorts, in which he heads to Las Vegas for his completely unrealistic shot at the big prize, but it’s also a surprisingly lyrical meditation on what makes a program like Excel both powerful and poetic. “In a spreadsheet world,” Pierce writes, “everything is comparable, reducible to some base figure that eventually explains everything if only you know how to ask. Spreadsheets promise the world isn’t actually complicated — you just have to know the formulas. I don’t know if that’s beautiful or bleak or both, but it’s certainly big business.” What’s so lovely about the project as a whole is that the story and art work in perfect concert. Neither takes itself too seriously, yet both execute at the highest level of their form. I smiled as soon as I opened the tab, and I didn’t stop until I finished the last word. An easy formula to hope for, but a hard one to accomplish. —PR
C.J. Chivers | The New York Times Magazine | June 6, 2024 | 7,449 words
Some of the finest journalism of the last several years has been about the opioid crisis: the people who created it, the ravages it has inflicted, the inequities it has deepened. C.J. Chivers’s masterful feature is a new kind of entry into the canon, one that bridges widely known consequences with increasingly available solutions. Chivers focuses his attention on the fishing industry, populated by contractors who pride themselves on their grit and independence. Substance abuse is rampant in this grueling line of work; virtually everyone in Chivers’s story—whether workers, their families, or their friends—have been touched in some way by addiction. In 2021, one fisherman, just 72 hours into his career, fatally overdosed at sea, and his death prompted a family-owned fleet to consider keeping Narcan on its vessels. Why not make the nasal spray that can reverse an overdose as ubiquitous as, say, fire extinguishers? Chivers chronicles a handful of people’s efforts to save lives and transform an industry, the travails of which he depicts with gorgeous prose. “Hands worked fast, flicking adductors into buckets and guts down chutes that plopped them onto greenish water beside the hull. Large sharks swam lazy circles alongside, turning to flash pale undersides while inhaling easy meals,” Chivers writes of 11-hour shifts worked on a scalloper. “When enough buckets were full of meat and rinsed in saltwater, two deckhands transferred the glistening, ivory-colored catch into roughly 50-pound cloth sacks, handed them down a hatch into the cool fish-hold and buried them beneath ice. Everyone else kept shucking.” (Shameless promotion: read this feature, then, if you have the time, check out The Atavist’s story “Revive,” about the little-known, deeply personal origins of Narcan.) —SD
Paige Kaptuch | Runner’s World | June 5, 2024 | 4,568 words
Paige Kaptuch begins her piece with a powerful image: an unidentified woman in a prairie dress with “a collar buttoned up to her chin, sleeves down to her wrists” running up and down a hill in the 90-degree heat of a Utah summer. When Kaptuch spotted this woman a few years ago, she knew she was a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a community living in Short Creek. Kaptuch has a clear fascination with the FLDS, touching on her own family connections to it. But it’s Darlene Barlow Stubbs who is the focus here, a former FLDS member who discovers running after fleeing the group in 2005. Stubbs leaves at a time when Warren Jeffs is the “prophet,” a leader who normalized not only polygamy but underage marriage and child labor. By 2018, things had changed: Jeffs was in prison, the land was in different hands, and the Short Creek population had plummeted. Returning to try and reclaim a family property, Stubbs sees that she can help her old community, and starts the Short Creek Running Club. This club—about health and fun, and nothing to do with religion—would have been impossible 10 years ago. Kaptuch writes how the group finds healing as they run against the backdrop of “jagged red vistas that have been featured in so many documentaries and news stories about the area . . . often accompanied by haunting music meant to evoke the unthinkable crimes that took place here.” They are reclaiming their lives. Kaptuch does some lovely storytelling as she weaves through the years, ending up running with the club herself—everyone in sports gear, not dresses. —CW
Michael Adno | Oxford American | June 4, 2024 | 4,991 words
Somewhere in the Apalachicola National Forest in Sopchoppy, Florida, Gary Revell is using a piece of black gum wood, known as a stob, and a heavy metal file to conjure worms right out of the ground. Audrey, his wife, is picking worms as they surface, storing them in a bucket. They call it worm grunting, which is also known as worm fiddling, worm rubbing, worm snoring, and worm charming. The Revells sell worms as fishing bait to local stores and to walk-up customers on the honor system. “The Revells’ intuition was like that of the fishermen they were collecting bait for, a catalog of knowledge assembled from spending time out here and bound together by deep curiosity,” Michael Adno writes. As fourth-generation worm grunters, they’ve earned a seasonal income this way for the past 54 years, one that has survived the advent of small plastic fishing lures and nightcrawler farming. I’m powerless against a story like this—one filthy with history and culture, complete with a mystery that gets solved along the way. Adno writes well about Florida, and this piece is now my favorite of all his work. One pass of the file over the stob is called a roop. Rooping creates vibrations in the soil, urging worms to move to the surface for picking. Through the Revells, Adno reveals the lore and scant history of the practice. Things get even more fascinating when Kenneth Catania, “a neuroscientist with a bent toward ecology and biology,” arrives to test a scientific theory that reveals why grunting works. Does it have to do with moon cycles? Cosmic vibrations? Incantations uttered while rooping? I couldn’t possibly spoil the surprise for you—read this piece and you’ll be glad to find out for yourself. —KS
Jessica Winter | The New Yorker | June 5, 2024 | 1,664 words
In this piece, Jessica Winter discusses great examples of adult creators using their parents in films and TV shows over the years. Think back to John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence. Or the amazing scene in Goodfellas when Tommy, Jimmy, and Henry have a meal with Tommy’s mother—played by Martin Scorsese’s real-life mother, Catherine—right after they kill and stuff a dead guy in a trunk. Or, more recently, the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, in which the gay comedian interacts with various people on his quest for love and connection, including his parents, who’ve struggled to accept his sexuality. I initially dismissed Winter’s piece as a Top 5 contender because it’s shorter than most longreads. But I kept returning to it, and to one beautiful line in particular: “[It] can be a twentysomething rite of passage to realize that your parents are more than your parents; that they had a life before you; that they were beautiful and moved beautifully and were desired, and still are.” It’s a profound realization, and one that’s taken me into my 40s to really grasp. (For this reason, I got a kick out of the recent wave of #80sDanceChallenge clips in which TikTokers filmed their dancing parents, moving like they did in the ’80s, to the unmistakable beat of “Smalltown Boy.”) For a while now, I’ve wanted to do something similar—not record my parents letting loose to catch a glimpse of their younger selves, but to sit down with them, and all of my aunts and uncles, to ask them questions about their lives, especially their early years: their childhoods in the Philippines, their many firsts. As Winter explores here, the process of turning our parents and elderly family members into entertainment fodder can be fun, emotional, and rewarding, but it may also become tense and uncomfortable, revealing complex generational and family dynamics. This is a quick yet thoughtful read, with a few must-click links that go to Francesca Scorsese’s delightful TikToks, in which she records herself with her famous filmmaker dad in genuinely warm and funny exchanges, like this one where she asks him to identify feminine products. —CLR
Emma Copley Eisenberg | The New Republic | June 7, 2024 | 1,923 words
Emma Copley Eisenberg calls out the publishing industry for weight prejudice in this fascinating essay. Reading the piece, you will realize how few times you have experienced an overweight main character while reading fiction. And that will make you think. —CW
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“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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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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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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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 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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