In 2007, a gasoline truck crashed on the MacArthur Maze, a high-trafficked tangle of multiple freeways in Oakland. The explosion from the crash melted the overpass. In this compelling story for Popular Mechanics, Mitch Moxley recounts how Clinton “C.C.” Myers, a construction boss known for high-speed emergency bridge repair, took on the challenging job and rebuilt this section of the freeway in only 26 days.
As dawn broke, officials across California were asking, “How the hell are we going to fix this?” The guy they looked to: Will Kempton, the director of Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. A trim man with graying hair and a matching mustache, Kempton presided over a massive agency notorious for slow, expensive roadworks that snarled traffic around the state.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was Kempton’s big boss. As a young man, Schwarzenegger had worked as a bricklayer between bodybuilding competitions. Now, he saw infrastructure as a way to publicize the government’s capacity to do good. What’s more, Schwarzenegger remembered that the last Republican governor of California, Pete Wilson, had gotten the Santa Monica Freeway, one of the busiest freeways in the world at the time, rebuilt in just 66 days after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Schwarzenegger was a ferocious competitor—in bodybuilding, at the box office, even with his in-laws, the Kennedys (“I’m the only Kennedy in elected office,” he liked to brag). He told his staff to call Governor Wilson. “Find out how he did it,” he said. “Then figure out how to do it faster.”
The solution to Schwarzenegger’s request was C.C. Myers. Back in 1994 Caltrans had estimated it would take 12 to 18 months to repair the Santa Monica Freeway, but Governor Wilson, facing a tough reelection, told the agency to get it done in 140 days. Caltrans opened the job to bids, and Myers won.
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Marilyn Monroe is causing a kerfuffle, well, a 26-foot statue of her is. Dan Kois explores the warring factions of Palm Springs, who can’t decide if Seward Johnson’s Forever Marilyn belongs there. A delightful, fun piece, where Kois refuses to stay objective!
A tall, gregarious gadfly who met me wearing a vibrant aloha shirt, Hoban spent his career conducting market research for television networks and then working in Silicon Valley, until his husband made him retire after a heart attack. Now he keeps getting involved in various Palm Springs kerfuffles: a battle over short-term vacation rentals, a fight about the establishment of a community college campus in town. He’s the one, he said, who negotiated the purchase with the Seward Johnson Atelier, which disassembled the 30,000-pound statue, loaded it onto several tractor trailers, and sent it across the country. He’s the one who spent “50 different days walking around this area, looking at every possible spot.” When he decided that Museum Way, with its mountain backdrop, was perfect, he’s the person, he said, who made the case to City Council members one by one.
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What would it be like to watch a baseball game—in London? Imogen West-Knights heads to Stratford, to a stadium in London that’s the home of Premier League football club West Ham, to find out. It’s the Phillies vs. the Mets that day, and over the course of the game, West-Knights observes the “light-hearted bit[s] of cultural exchange” between attendees, and the differences between an American baseball game and, say, a UK soccer (ahem: football) match. She writes a fun, breezy essay for The Dial commenting on the distinct Americanness of the event.
It is nice, I suppose, that you can go for a wander, get drinks or go to the toilet, and not really feel you’re missing much. This is a major cultural contrast, however. Football games are much shorter than baseball games, yes, but even so, you would not catch any self-respecting football fan queuing for any length of time, let alone 45 minutes during the game in order to enter the merchandise tent. But this is what I find several hundred people doing when I leave my seat to go and buy a hot dog. I overhear one woman describing her intention to buy nine T-shirts for her nine grandchildren as she checks the score inside the stadium on her phone.
I decide to postpone the hot dog and instead join the queue for the merch tent, where I meet Caesar, a 43-year-old from the Bronx who’s been living in London for 10 years. This weekend is a complex puzzle of allegiance for him, he tells me. He’s from the Bronx, so he should be a Yankees fan, but his Dad was from Queens via Puerto Rico, so the Mets. He considers himself a Mets fan, but he also supports the Phillies because he went to college in Philadelphia. Yesterday he came in full Mets gear, and he thought about coming in Phillies attire today before remembering that he’d be sitting next to the same people who saw him yesterday, and he didn’t want to be considered some kind of freak. He’s split the difference today by dressing entirely in Puerto Rican baseball player-themed clothes. When we finally get in the tent, I find a Phillies Mets crossover jacket available for $325.
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Cameron Maynard recounts his time as an amateur competitive eater, an attempt to find the emotional fulfillment he sought by eating in bulk for a cheering crowd.
At the time, the “amateur” world of competitive eating—encompassing small holiday events and local restaurant challenges—looked like a way to recapture a sporting life I’d lost, a means of once again reliving the fast-twitch tension of a stolen base, the chest-clattering thunder of a hardwood shuttle run. But food competitions didn’t help wrest back control. If anything, competitive eating became just another way to fold in on myself like a piece of dough, to reframe the consumptive appetites that led to fights, a DWI, and stints of flunking out of college. I was no good to anybody during this episodic decade and a half, but with its trophies and cheering crowds, competitive eating appeared on the horizon like a totem to noble excess, an opportunity to offer up my worst impulses as a virtue-seeking endeavor.
I had grown up on canned food, the kind of peas and green beans that basically disintegrate when you bite into them, and the closest I ever got to a home-cooked meal was my father’s valiant attempt at baked salmon, a smell I still recoil at today. On my mother’s side, we were hyperreligious, the type of churchgoing stalwarts who deny pleasure as a means of penitence. Even though we liked to eat and drink, we denied these feelings and hid them in shame. My mother was the most accomplished at this. The energetic, two-jobbed divorcée could subsist on almost nothing at all, then revel in a banquet of booze, cigarettes, and chili cheese Fritos. Somewhere along the line, I learned this lesson as well: how a person could temporarily stop listening to their body and its pangs of need. I could go days and barely eat, then summon the strength to throw my bones against a wall for a coach’s approval.
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J.K. Nickell | Texas Monthly | June 10, 2024 | 10,640 words
As we all know, the US housing market is a nightmare. Property prices and interest rates are sky-high, rendering the prospect of buying a home unthinkable for many people. Renters face a dire landscape, too: according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, “affordability conditions are the worst on record.” (I urge you to look at the data in that JCHS link; it’s jaw-dropping.) Policymakers are doing little to remedy the burden of housing costs, even for the most vulnerable, or to protect renters from landlords who—excuse my language—don’t give a crap about the people living under their roofs. But in Dallas, Texas, woe is the landlord who finds themselves on the radar of a local lawyer named Mark Melton. When readers first meet Melton in this superb profile by J.K. Nickell, he’s wearing “a sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap . . . [and] an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans.” In my imagination, that T-shirt is emblazoned with the phrase “ENOUGH!” because that, in a word, is Melton’s mantra. Since 2020, Melton has been doing everything in his power to stop unlawful evictions in Dallas County. He’s recruited an army of people to help him—attorneys who literally intercept renters on their way to eviction hearings before justices of the peace, elected public servants who “are not required to have a high school diploma, much less a law degree.” (Seriously?!) These advocates demand that landlords follow the law by, say, providing due notice before kicking someone out of their home. As for lawful evictions, ones based on policies that seem intended to punish people when they fall on hard times, Nickell shows that there’s little reason for hope: renters in Texas shouldn’t expect the law to change soon, if ever. This fact clarifies Melton’s character. He’s a person doing what he can with what he has rather than being daunted by the big picture. It’s not everything, but it’s something—and for the people he helps, it’s a lot. I tore through this story, fueled by admiration for Melton and by rage against Texas’s eviction machine. —SD
Conor Niland | The Guardian | June 27, 2024 | 3,845 words
Wimbledon is a world of Pimms, strawberries, and crisp all-white tennis outfits. It is also a world that revolves around the show courts—Centre Court and No. 1 Court—where the big names play and the crowds fawn. The lower-ranked players battle it out on the courts around the edges of the grounds to a smattering of people: a visual representation of the extreme hierarchies in tennis. Only the top 112 players in the world (plus some wild cards) even make it to Wimbledon. And, as Irish player Conor Niland explains in this stark portrayal, the lower down the ranks you are, the more brutal life in tennis becomes. We often hear about the journeys of the best in the world, but what about those who hover between number 300 and 600, “winning just often enough to keep their dream faintly alive[?]” I appreciate The Guardian running a piece about those who never quite make it into the spotlight—one that shows us how difficult it is if you are talented but not talented enough. Stories rarely told. Niland is certainly not opposed to having a good moan in this essay, but as he reveals poor earnings, exhausting travel, dingy hotels, long waits to play, and never-ending loneliness, you can forgive him. Without people like Niland who fight to climb the rankings, players like Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic would not exist, but it is tough to be a stepping stone for others. This essay will give you a new appreciation for the underdogs who never make it to the top. —CW
Wendell Brock, Paul Kwilecki | The Bitter Southerner | June 26, 2024 | 6,957 words
For The Bitter Southerner, writer Wendell Brock mines photo archives, books, journals, and more to sculpt a satisfying portrait of Paul Kwilecki, an irascible self-taught photographer who had such a deeply emotional response to his hometown that it became the subject for his entire body of work. Brock highlights Kwilecki’s persistence, dedication, and his trust in the process of making art. “The desire and energy to continue year after year come from seeing layer on layer of subject matter peeled back before your eyes, material you didn’t know existed until you penetrated the layer above,” says Kwilecki. “Eventually, you realize the supply is inexhaustible, a lesson in itself, and that how much of it you can exploit depends on your patience and skill.” This piece is much more than a profile of a dedicated photographer, it’s a celebration of art: what it means to make it, and its everlasting influence if you have the courage to keep showing up. I love the slowness of this essay. It meditates, it ruminates. It’s like a slow walk on a beautiful day for no reason other than the joy of the journey. It feels like a fitting tribute to Kwilecki, who captured bits and pieces of Decatur County, Georgia, on film over four decades, giving us an indelible portrait of a place over time. What’s most poignant about this story, and something I will never forget, is that Kwilecki never felt like he fit in, never felt seen. And yet, he spent his entire creative life documenting the people and spaces around him—bearing patient witness. —KS
Ally Jarmanning | WBUR | June 13, 2024 | 3,526 words
We all have our quirky reading obsessions. Mine include poop and eco-friendly death, and—I suppose as an offshoot of the latter—an interest in what might happen to our bodies after we die, intact or not. I debated whether or not to recommend this story, as the thought of trading body parts is unsettling. But ultimately, Ally Jarmanning’s glimpse into this macabre market is fascinating. On Facebook, people openly discuss selling and shipping body parts like they’re items at a garage sale, and if you can believe it, this marketplace is legal—provided that the body part up for grabs is not stolen. That brings us, then, to the case of Cedric Lodge, a man who managed the morgue at Harvard Medical School for nearly 30 years. At some point in his career, he decided to steal body parts from cadavers and sell them to customers. Apparently, no one at Harvard tracked what happened to bodies after medical students had finished their work, and Lodge trafficked body parts for at least four years. As Jarmanning reports, he sold remains to buyers across the US. One collector within this network, Jeremy Pauley, works in the niche field of oddities and has since become the face of a larger criminal investigation. I don’t want to spoil you on all the details, but I’ll say that underneath the grisliness is a thought-provoking piece about property, collecting, and preservation. —CLR
If you’ve seen a Tesla Cybertruck in person, you know that photos can only do it partial (in)justice. It’s massive. It’s massive. It looks exactly like what a seventh-grade boy would draw in his notebook alongside pictures of, like, throwing stars. It looks like it comes with a preinstalled vanity license plate that reads B4D4SS. It looks like a can of energy drink became sentient and watched Starship Troopers without noticing the subtext, then designed a car. Yet, it exists. People own them and drive them down the street, seemingly without shame. Drew Magary is not one of those people. He is also not an automotive journalist. He’s a columnist and a very funny writer who happens to resemble the quintessential Cybertruck owner. And when he rents one, the result is the perfect piece for a hot summer week: short, breezy, and refreshing. “You know how Apple will occasionally confuse the world by doing away with standard features like a headphone jack?” he writes. “OK, well, imagine a car built entirely out of that kind of gimmick.” Magary’s experience with the car is as entertaining as you’d imagine, even when people aren’t giving him the finger simply for driving it. He’s offended by its fighter-pilot steering wheel. He can’t figure out how to turn off the one giant windshield wiper. He nearly crushes himself with the retractable roof. But really, it’s his disdain for Elon Musk and the Cybertruck’s obvious target audience—“the kind of men who use speakerphone on airplanes”—that really animates the proceedings. Writing about people rather than things is where Magary has shined since his Deadspin days, and this piece is no exception. Will it make Cybertruck owners happy? Definitely not. Will it make you happy? Massively. —PR
Audience Award
Congrats to the most-read editor’s pick this week:
In this piece, Luke Winkie asks, “[C]an anyone truly optimize their way back into the good graces of an ex?” The various “get-your-ex-back coaches” on the internet would have you think so. Winkie questions their advice—which boils down to avoiding contact for a while—and asks whether these notoriously expensive “gurus” are taking advantage of people in an emotional state. Another question to consider: should you get back with your ex? —CW
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Every time I see a Tesla Cybertruck in person—which is sadly frequent, since I live in the Bay Area—I have to quash the urge to give it the finger. The people Drew Magary encounters while driving one, however, do not quash. It’s hard to know whether that’s solely because of the cartoonishly aggressive car, or because Magary also looks like the stereotype of a Cybertruck owner. But such questions only distract us from the joy of this piece. If you wondered what people with money to burn and a Mad Max fantasy experience inside these testosterone chariots, wonder no longer.
As for the interior, the Cybertruck is as barren as most other Tesla interiors. I got a big-ass touchscreen, a fighter pilot steering wheel and little more. Tactile pleasures were nonexistent. No buttons. No switches. I felt like I was driving around in an unfurnished apartment. But the truck did have a pleasing strip of white leather trim bordering the interior, which gave me the impression that somewhere, deep inside Tesla headquarters, a person with legitimately good taste fought a battle and actually won it. Also, the gas and brake pedals had a brilliant chrome finish to them, and the seats were both roomy and comfortable, which is a big deal for large men such as myself. This was a far more attractive ride on the inside than out, which was good because I was afraid that the driver’s seat would be covered in iron spikes. It was not. It was a normal seat, and I felt at home sitting in it.
Then I turned the truck on and was instantly escorted back to Elon’s technocarnival of suck.
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For The Bitter Southerner, writer Wendell Brock pored over notebooks and photo archives to create this deeply ruminative and compelling portrait of Paul Kwilecki, a self-taught artist who spent his entire creative life—four decades—documenting the people and places of Decatur County, Georgia.
“But with photography — and his eye for the beautiful and the poignant — he could express feelings that might be impossible to put into words. The process was a way of looking inside his heart, and out onto the world, in an instant.”
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