A citizen sleuth in Portland, Oregon, uncovered hundreds of stolen bicycles online, all sold by the same company. Would law enforcement care? Christopher Solomon tells the wild story:
Before the Facebook page for Constru-Bikes disappeared, Hance had written down an email address listed on it as a contact. He plugged the address into Google. This took him to different web pages, some of which had bikes for sale, too, and contained more breadcrumbs of information. On one page he found a phone number. He plugged the number into Google. This took him to still other websites. The digging also led to cached pages with an advertisement for a raffle, of all things, with bikes as prizes. The ad bore a phone number and, oddly, bank account information where people could send money to enter that raffle. And right there on the raffle’s ad, he came across a name: Ricardo Estrada Zamora. The man’s nickname, the web told him, was Ricky.
Eventually, Hance discovered that the Constru-Bikes Facebook page hadn’t disappeared entirely; whoever was running the page had simply blocked users in the US from seeing it. Hance used a VPN to route his internet traffic through another country and regain access to the page. Now he could see both Constru-Bike’s Facebook page and its Insta account, and that bikes would appear for sale on both accounts, only to be taken off the Facebook page once they sold. Hance and the people helping him could now see the full scale and history of the business—and just how many bikes were coming and going.
Soon, Hance and a volunteer found Zamora’s personal Facebook page. They saw that he lives in La Barca, a city of about 68,000 people in southern Jalisco, more than an hour outside Guadalajara. They also found ample evidence that Zamora and Constru-Bikes were one and the same. The same bicycles often appeared on his personal page. And for a period of time the owner of the Constru-Bikes Instagram page had forgotten to turn off the geotagging feature, so Hance could see that some images were tagged as La Barca. Hance also noticed that certain architectural features appeared in the background of many bike ads and in photos of proud customers standing with their new bikes. One day during my visit with Hance, he surfed over to Google Street View and typed in the address they had found for Zamora: There, within feet of the address, was a golden garage door; bits of an address on a wall; the same vibrant, tropical paint—the same details I could see clearly in the bike ads.
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For five days straight, Morgan Meaker used her grocery budget to experiment with an app called “Too Good To Go,” all to try to better understand and reduce food waste in London, England. The app matches bargain-hunting users with hotels, restaurants, and markets that sell leftover food for a reasonable prices, meals and groceries that would otherwise be diverted to the garbage bin.
Over the next two days, I live like a forager in my city, molding my days around pickups. I walk and cycle to cafés, restaurants, markets, supermarkets; to familiar haunts and places I’ve never noticed. Some surprise bags last for only one meal, others can be stretched out for days. On Tuesday morning, my £3.59 surprise bag includes a small cake and a slightly stale sourdough loaf, which provides breakfast for three more days. When I go back to the same café the following week, without using the app, the loaf alone costs £6.95.
TGTG was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by a group of Danish entrepreneurs who were irked by how much food was wasted by all-you-can-eat buffets. Their idea to repurpose that waste quickly took off, and the app’s remit expanded to include restaurants and supermarkets. A year after the company was founded, Mette Lykke was sitting on a bus when a woman showed her the app and how it worked. She was so impressed, she reached out to the company to ask if she could help. Lykke has now been CEO for six years.
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Jeremy Collins grew up in Atlanta, but his Indiana-reared father made sure his Hoosier love for Larry Bird lived on through his son. (As a Hoosier with a father from Boston, I arrived at the same outcome through different variables.) In 1991, though, after almost 15 years of soaring NBA excellence*, Bird came crashing back down to earth—as did Collin’s adolescence. A beautiful, thrumming piece about basketball, family, and vulnerability.
At the line, your dad sinks free throw after free throw and recounts Bird at the line against the Clippers, immune to the tricks of the San Diego Chicken. He details the left-handed jumper of New Albany’s Terry Morrison, who played AAU with Bird for Hancock Construction. He then asks if you know what’s happening to Hoosier families right now. Poor families like the Birds once were. Farm families in Fort Wayne? Working families in Gary? You don’t. You’re fourteen. “Right now,” he says, “and across America, the rich hoard third homes and second yachts while steelworkers and mill workers donate blood to feed their families.”
His words form a background noise, a music you try to tune out. When he tells you to bend your knees deeper and hold your follow-through longer, you tune in. Swish.
*This soaring was figurative only, even though Bird could, against all odds, manage a reverse dunk from time to time.
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Cameron Carr | Longreads | June 18, 2024 | 4,284 words (15 minutes)
We left the house with the terraced flower beds full of phlox and black-eyed Susans, with the backyard where squirrels feasted on our flowers and competed in a miniature Olympics, leaping from the fence and trees. We left the house with three floors and a balcony jutting out from the spare bedroom we’d filled with guitars, drums, and amplifiers. From that house, my partner, Sierra, and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment. Space was limited. A consolidation was needed.
We sold the drums and half the speakers, but it made little difference. A corner of our new place is decked in black, filled with plywood caskets dressed in leather plastics. These are our guitars, eight of them, in cases leaning warily against the walls and each other, learning to make friends with the dust. Before, I played the guitars every day, sometimes only one of them, but often two or three. The last time I touched them all within a day, the cases at least, was when I lugged them in and out of the moving truck at each stop on the three-day drive across the country—I still held them so tender then, couldn’t bear to leave them outside overnight.
The move is a clean cut between periods of my life, an incision that I’m still not sure if I should view as malignant or benign. Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a musician—a rock star, I said when I was little. At least since I was a teenager, I thought some quieter version of that could come true. But then it didn’t, or maybe I gave up in the midst of it. Before the dream could mute itself, I moved across the country to become a writer. At the old house, in the extra room, pastel-colored shag rugs muffled the echoing shouts between amplifiers, hardwood floor, and plaster walls, but then I found the rugs served just as well for cushion while I read in silence. What I’m struggling to determine is what remains after everything’s gone silent.
What I wanted, always, was to create something worthwhile of music, something great and meaningful.
I suppose the before period began when, at age 11, I purchased a CD called Ramones Mania. I chose it over others because I calculated that for the price of one CD, I could have 30 songs instead of 12. Thus began my primitive understanding that the worth of something could be measured by music. When I got my first job at 16, I saved my money to buy microphones so I could record my own music. As I got older, my understanding shifted, refined. I chose jobs based not on how much money they would allow me to spend on music, but on how little they asked of my time and mind. I worked in a shipping warehouse and a children’s play café. I delivered Italian catering and convinced friends and then other musicians to let me record their music in my basement. I made very little money, but I made music freely, and that was what I cared about.
I did all this believing sometimes in a dream that held a constructive future—a career, fame, at least stability—but mostly wishing only to make songs and hold the lingering hum quietly within me. What I wanted, always, was to create something worthwhile of music, something great and meaningful. That unspecificity felt poetic, generous, but it left room for compromise, a complacent middleground somewhere between the worth my parents taught me and the intangible worth I felt when I first heard, say, Jimi Hendrix tending to a guitar he’d set aflame.
Before turning 16, I’d read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success and calculated that I could reach his 10,000-hour bar for greatness by practicing three hours every day until I turned 26. I’m not sure I’d thought of greatness before, but what more could a person want? Greatness seemed worthwhile, meaningful even. I had questions though: Was I training to be a guitarist? Songwriter? Performer? Did it count as practicing if I only rehearsed things that I already knew? And what would this greatness do? Who defined the success that followed? Even if I didn’t understand, the promise of greatness was enough to make me want.
Support for the 10,000-hour theory in Outliers comes from a study of the prestigious Academy of Music at Berlin University of the Arts. The researchers asked instructors to assess the student violinists: who would become the great, the good, the rest? Then, they helped the students to estimate their lifetime hours practiced. By age 20, the lowest group had logged some 4,000 hours while the greats, of course, had reached 10,000. The greats, the study proposed, would go on to be top-tier soloists. The lowest group would become teachers. This was inherent: these students were selected from a music education program at the academy.
The researchers conducted a partner study, this one more blunt: what separates professional and amateur pianists? Thousands of hours. There were no outliers.
So I practiced daily. Why risk it? It couldn’t hurt to spend more time making music. If not success, something good had to come of it.
By this 10,000-hour standard, success is of a specific type: it involves performing, traveling, acclaim. In the version of success proposed by these studies, success means to be one distinct from many—an outlier. Teaching stands in contrast. Those who choose to dedicate their abilities and passions to support others disappear into a mass. The implication is that to exist within a community or to practice a craft out of passion and joy is not success. To many, maybe, that is true. But how limited is our potential, our community, our creativity when success is defined like that?
What might happen if those hours were packed away, put in cases and stuffed in a corner—not forgotten, but repurposed? I don’t mean to question the value of practice, effort, time. My questions are about how we choose to look at both skill and success. I want a specific definition of what skill it is that anyone is building and what success it will bring them, and then I want to look at another part of their life, any other. What fulfillment might time bring outside the intention of those hours? I’d like to imagine a world where time spent forming chords and fitting words to feelings does not have so limited an application. I’d like to imagine a world where time spent on any task or craft or passion does not only apply to a single predetermined purpose. I’d like to hear the echoes.
It has occurred to me that these questions are self-serving. I’ve been rereading my copy of Outliers and discovered its margins full of anxious math. I’d highlighted a line that declares 10,000 as “the magic number for true expertise.” This math guided the rest of my teenage years. I would shut myself in my room immediately after school, set timers, allot extra practice time before taking trips. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s working,” my older brother said of my singing. I took it as proof, but I’d started near tone-deaf, and the song of 10,000 hours moved to a glacial rhythm.
This logic seemed to hold little appeal to anyone else I knew. They preferred to think of themselves as naturally inclined in their passions or of their art as dealing more with inspiration than practiced craft. They were uninterested in art transformed into work. At other times, they shifted the topic from process to ethos and said they didn’t have the motivation to work that hard or said they didn’t understand the motivation to become an expert; they would rather have the purity of an innocent and untrained mind. They turned greatness into a dirty word. I didn’t blame them, but I kept up my routine as best I could.
I’d like to imagine a world where time spent on any task or craft or passion does not only apply to a single predetermined purpose. I’d like to hear the echoes.
My pursuit of success faltered after moving back to Ohio from New York City, a year after finishing college. Before I left my boss warned me, “You know if you leave you’ll never work in music again, right?” I didn’t want to let music go, but love was calling me elsewhere and I could not reckon those two things. At that point 10,000 hours and my questions of what reaching that milestone meant felt either more vital than ever or beside the point. If I didn’t want success in a traditional sense, 10,000 hours didn’t matter. But I needed to know, or thought that I needed to know, what kind of success I did want. New York had enchanted me, but I missed the unfinished basements and uncovered ceilings pasted with signs to watch your head. I missed the chains of duct-taped power strips threatening the electrical wiring of an entire house. I felt more at home in those spaces, in any space where I could make as much noise as I wanted without worrying about the neighbors. In New York, instead of making noise, I spent time writing and reading books. In hindsight that seems an obvious foreshadowing.
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That same summer, Sierra’s parents bought a farm. Property, they called it. This was a lifelong dream for them, having grown up in rural Ohio. On the property they built a house, tucked a quarter-mile from the road on a winding drive they called Disaster Lane, plotted fields of lavender and sage, and made a kitchen garden beside the house to grow tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, squash.
Each time we came to visit they would have something new for us to see or do. The tractor came first—I think Sierra’s dad, Brian, mowed the lawn (the pasture, he calls it) three times a week that summer. A German shepherd followed. Then a golf cart they call the mule. Chickens and a coop, a bigger coop, bees, another German shepherd. I helped lay the irrigation system in the fields and plant the first seedlings of lavender and sage in even rows. I came to pack stones into the wall that would form garden beds around the house, and when we built a windmill to aerate the pond, I was the one who climbed to its top to start the propeller.
“Where did you learn all this?” I asked Brian one day while weeding. He tells stories of his dad’s upbringing, where cows could be cherished pets, but Brian’s dad did not grow up on a farm. His memories are inherited. I expected him to explain how much time he’d put into learning this, but he didn’t. “I guess it’s in my blood,” he said. I found that hard to believe, as we were weeding with a blow torch, but he didn’t think that was as funny as I did. I asked if the flames would actually kill the roots below the dirt, but he shrugged me off and we kept using the blow torch.
A week later the weeds were back. I haven’t seen the blow torch since.
I wonder where the farm fits in all these attempts to trace success. It’s miniscule in comparison to the megafarms that feed the country, but this is success for the family, the realization of a lifelong dream. They want self-sustenance, the security of owning the place you live, a place to play with fire unquestioned. This part of the country—the Midwest, Appalachia, the Rust Belt—tends to value that independence. The farmers and residents may be physically apart from each other, but they enjoy the separation as a means of blending in rather than distinction.
After Sierra’s parents bought the property, they quickly put up no trespassing signs around its border. When the house was finished and the family moved in, Brian set up cameras throughout the surrounding woods and an alert at the bottom of the driveway. The electronic voice repeating alert—zone—one annoys me, but it’s pure excitement for Sierra’s dad and grandpa. They can hardly bear the two minutes it takes a vehicle to make it up the driveway. Is it Amazon? UPS? A guest? They go out to greet whoever it is. They live so far away but are so eager to share it.
It’s the same with the cameras. Security is mentioned first, but the only trespassers they’ve had are lost hikers and high school runners at the property’s edge. The cameras, like the alert, are mostly for entertainment. They move around and multiply as Brian learns the best places to spot animals overnight. He must spend hours watching the footage and researching his findings. Then he shares his work on social media. He becomes an amateur biologist.
I love him. I claim him as my own: an amateur like me.
I like Sierra’s dad. Before Brian and I met, Sierra showed me a picture of him with wraparound sunglasses and a long goatee, one fist flexed in rock horns. I was surprised to have to coax words out of him in person. He was more like me than I’d expected, a collector of odd interests and passions. Before the farm, Brian was a photographer. Before that, an archaeologist. At some point, he ran marathons. He is a serial amateur.
When he and I first met, the living room of their house doubled as his photo studio for greeting clients. Family pictures, senior photos, and action shots from sports doubled as promotional images, framed alongside people with no relation to the family who I memorized all the same.
He’d probably take offense to the term amateur. He does run a business. Brian was one of the first in the area to offer overhead drone shots and 3D interior images—prime opportunities for realty. He gave up weddings and family photos for housing complexes and factories. But his love is for photography, not real estate or industry. Landscapes and nature are what he really wants to shoot. On the farm, he’ll wake up at two or three in the morning to capture the moon and stars in an empty midwestern sky.
Since moving out there, Brian seems to spend less time on photo jobs, but the gigs he does take on are bigger. In one weekend he might cover a month’s salary. They’re never landscapes or nature shoots, though. “Those don’t pay,” he tells me.
I love him. I claim him as my own: an amateur like me.
The last time I touched all of my guitars on the same day was on a trip to the farm. Sierra and my band had decided to record an album in the barn. It felt like a homecoming but in retrospect seems more like a goodbye: a last great musical act before leaving that period of my life. It felt romantic, anyway, to record in a barn. We set the drums next to the tractor, tried to coax the chickens into cooing for the microphone, and had a bonfire at night. The biggest appeal was that we could all record together. In a basement we had to squeeze side by side, cautious not to swing the head of a guitar into the head of a person. The sounds were so close together that a microphone on a guitar amp would inevitably also record the bass, the drums, the air conditioner kicking in, so we recorded one person playing at a time. In the barn we were able to spread out but still play together.
Earlier that summer I’d helped my dad remodel the house that I grew up in. I drove out on weekends to plant flowers, repaint doors, tear out the old floor. He could’ve paid a professional to do it, but he said he liked having me around and would rather give me the money. I was in a dry spell of freelance gigs, delivering garlic dough and pomodoro pasta while waiting for the school year to bring back a regular substitute-teaching paycheck, so I didn’t argue.
My younger brother sometimes came too, and we found our initials in the grout between kitchen tiles where we’d hidden them two decades before. Then we smashed the tiles with a sledgehammer. My brother was training to lead construction crews, so this was familiar to him. I was an amateur at tearing up tile and using a sledgehammer. I pretended to know my way with the tile. I didn’t need to pretend much with the sledgehammer; you just lift it up and smash it down. It is kind of exciting.
We didn’t save the grout with our initials, but from the carpet I cut giant fabric swatches, lopsided rectangles big enough to roll a body in. I knew they would be good for music—carpet makes a buffer to still the echoes of hard surfaces. I added them to my other collections of oddities: power strips from the ’80s, grocery store twist ties, large cardboard boxes. These are the types of things it pays to have handy as a hobbyist. Cardboard on a drum creates a fatter thunk. Twist ties organize the tangling gnarls of cables. Power strips anticipate that there are never enough outlets (and the ’80s was the decade that power strips improved in safety and needed replacing, according to a school where Sierra’s grandpa had done maintenance and collected unused odds and ends).
When we recorded our album in the barn, I used all of this. In a professional recording studio, the instruments would move to isolated smaller rooms that still let the musicians see each other, with an elaborate web of headphones, mics, and cables allowing them to hear each other, too. At the least, an engineer would separate them with gobos—jargon for movable acoustic panels that go between. But we didn’t have any of those things, so we used carpet and old mattresses propped up between chairs. Half the carpet covered concrete below us, and the other half hung above in the rafters between our instruments and the metal roofing. We wanted to hear the barn, but we didn’t want to hear it that much. The challenge when recording is to hear just the right things, just enough.
The album came out mostly as we hoped, but the chickens refused to speak. I can hear everything else, though: that little bit of barn, us playing to each other, battered power strips, even the carpet I had walked on for almost all my life. It sounds perfect, at least for me.
The first time I visit the farm after we move across the country, Brian offers me his home office, “in case you need somewhere to work,” he says while he mimes typing. I spend an afternoon in there beside his Iron Maiden beer bottle collection and his We the People mouse pad. The window to my right looks toward the edge of the farm and the freckled autumn leaves. He comes in only once, as the daylight sinks into the tree line, and silently grabs camera equipment so as not to interrupt me.
I feel guilty because he’s making accommodations for me to work, but really, all I’m doing is reading. I take notes on the décor and try to find words to describe seeing fall leaves after returning to Ohio from the desert. I wouldn’t call it work. Mostly, I look at trees out the window and I read.
Here, I am able to be idle in a way—isolated from the pressures and productions of whatever job I have at the time. But nature is never idle. It works toward desires unapparent to an unfocused human eye.
In his office, I’m reading “Mrs. Mean,” a story by Ohio-raised writer William H. Gass about a man who spends his days observing and considering his neighbors. He doesn’t seem to work at all. “When I bought my house I wished, more than anything, to be idle,” the narrator says, “idle in the supremely idle way of nature; for I felt then that nature produced without effort, in the manner of digestion and breathing.”
Idleness and nature are part of the appeal of the farm—the rural valued as an escape from the contemporary stresses of the city, from the constant emails and social media and devices that track and nudge and notify you at every step. I do love the isolation of the farm, but mostly for its sounds. I can hear the leaves falling. If I walk to the wildflower field, full of goldenrod and blue wood aster, I can hear the bees humming. I don’t believe in the strict dichotomy between the country and the city—a cellphone tower was essential when they built their house here—but I do see how nature and natural can relate. Here, I am able to be idle in a way—isolated from the pressures and productions of whatever job I have at the time. But nature is never idle. It works toward desires unapparent to an unfocused human eye. Here, I have the privilege of idleness, of attending to the things that I can’t get out of my head when I’m supposed to be working.
One thing I envy is that Brian has never worked for anyone, excluding part-time jobs. As an archaeologist, photographer, and farmer he has always had his own business by choice. He tells me this with as much anxiety as pride. He couldn’t imagine adopting another’s purpose. He spends his time on things that allow joy rather than require work.
What he does “breaks the rules of work by playing, rather than working,” as Eula Biss writes in Having and Being Had, the other book that I’ve brought with me to the farm. The quote refers to how a musician’s work doesn’t appear as working at all. I don’t want to say that what Brian is doing doesn’t take effort—I’ve spent enough time alongside him sweating in the rows of lavender and splitting wood behind the barn to know otherwise—but Gass is right that it sometimes feels like producing without effort. It’s more about conscious effort. What the family wants from the farm is the space and opportunity to do what they naturally desire, for their effort to feel as natural, as Gass writes, as breathing.
Later in Biss’s book, she considers the other end of the paradigm, how what is commonly seen as pleasurable—playing music, reading, planting—can come to feel like work. Why, she asks, does one do these things that turn pleasure into strain? Of course, no one asks this of work in the traditional sense: we’re expected to tolerate the displeasure of it. For this other type of work, Biss concludes a different word may be needed. I agree.
During our barn recording, Sierra’s dad kept working through the weekend, though he made a point to save his lawn mowing and loudest work for when we took breaks or rehearsed. Work, again, feels like the wrong word. He tended to lavender that they hoped to sell but didn’t need to. Need feels wrong, too. Do we need lavender? Music? Yes, I think we do.
What I’m struggling to understand is what things mean when moved to different contexts. Like how what words mean is not always what I mean when I use them—and that meaning is also not always what I interpret when I hear them. In this, I do not think I am alone. I let the purposes shift. I ask questions but let myself move on without expecting tidy answers.
The implication is that to exist within a community or to practice a craft out of passion and joy is not success. To many, maybe, that is true. But how limited is our potential, our community, our creativity when success is defined like that?
The barn recording now feels like the last great act of a prior time in my life when I still believed myself to be a serious musician. But that phrasing feels wrong, too: I am still a musician and serious. The problem is a lack of a word to describe my relationship to music and its making. I’m as much an amateur as before, but there’s a difference in aspirations. I do still have dreams some nights after spending time with a guitar in my hands, but I don’t see my future revolving around music anymore. Perhaps I’ve moved from one phase of amateurism to another. In one, the passion is the purpose of a life. In the other, the passion brings purpose, but it is not the center of it.
On this first trip back from our new home, we arrange our time by what to do around the farm in the same way we might organize another trip by museum hours or dinner reservations. Brian and I spend a morning in the woods cutting thin, fallen tree limbs into timber that we use to replace fences. The natural wood doesn’t last as long as store-bought, processed planks, but this doubles as cleanup, and we think the repurposed stray limbs look more appealing anyway. When we’re done, we split wood, making a circular pile next to the circular pile leftover from last year. We’re making work for ourselves, but we like what we’re doing, and we like doing it together. It’s about process more than product.
When the sun sets on my final night there, I finish working in Brian’s office and find him outside on the porch, standing behind a tripod. He’s waiting for the moon, he says, pointing to where its light is starting to illuminate the trees. In the meantime, he’s found Jupiter. He shows me the planet in his camera’s viewfinder. It looks like any other star in the sky, but in his pictures it’s blown up and flanked by moons on both sides. He can’t get the image right, though. Jupiter appears washed out—a smeary gob of light no matter how much he spins the settings. He concedes he would need a telephoto lens to get the shot he wants. But that would cost thousands of dollars, and he can’t justify the expense for something that doesn’t pay back, something that isn’t work. Nothing will come of these attempts—the time goes uncounted. But we stay there anyway, because it counts for something to us. Besides, the sky is speckled with beauty. Each tiny star a dot of distant magnificence. He takes a few more pictures and keeps waiting for the moon. We wait together.
Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Hedgehog Review, The Smart Set, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona and at work on a book about amateurism, failure, and love in the arts and everyday life.
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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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