It’s been twenty-five years since the film Titanic dominated the cultural horizon, yet apparently, we are still asking the same questions — about both the disaster and the film. What angle did the ship sink at? Could both Rose and Jack have fit on that door? Megan Garber takes an understandably jaded look at why we still want to know.
Time may heal all wounds, but Hollywood helps things along. For many Americans, Titanic now refers less to those 1,535 people than to just two: Jack and Rose. James Cameron’s semi-fictional film about the disaster—for a long while, the highest-grossing movie of all time—has taken on a memetic familiarity.
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Our stories this week cover why socializing becomes more of an effort as we get older (and why it shouldn’t), the volunteers in Ukraine who are genuinely motivated by the cause, the life of a gambler, soul-saving runs with a dog named Hank, and the Buy Nothing movement. We hope that you enjoy spending time with all of these topics.
Dan Kois | Slate | February 15, 2023 | 2,753 words
Raising a young daughter and feeling socially disconnected as an adult, I constantly think about where I want to live, but also how I’d like to live. I wrote recently about seeking “community,” but I’m unsure what that even means. So this piece, which explores why Americans spend less time these days hanging out with people, really speaks to me. Perhaps what I long for isn’t some kind of mythical tight-knit tribe to be part of, but something far simpler: more opportunities for casual hangouts. But is this simple? Dan Kois reaches out to Sheila Liming, author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, and asks if he can fly to Vermont to spend time with her, a total stranger, for a day. The piece that emerges from the visit is delightful and relatable. I can’t help but recall my college years and my 20s: wandering over to friends’ dorm rooms to see what they were up to, piling onto couches in someone’s living room to sit and chat and laugh for hours, frequenting the dive bars and weekly club nights where I knew I’d run into familiar faces. To borrow Liming’s words, these were “effortlessly social” times — and they seem so long ago. Social media, over-scheduled lives, and the pandemic have all made hanging out harder. While I also attribute my isolation to age, Kois notes how young people, including his teenage daughters, still find it hard to put themselves out there or carve out time for casual socializing. While I may not be brave enough after reading this to knock on my upstairs neighbors’ door and sit on their couch to shoot the shit, I’m inspired by Kois’ openness and curiosity. —CLR
Matt Gallagher | Esquire | February 23, 2023 | 6,935 words
Matt Gallagher is no stranger to warfare. His Army deployment in Iraq became the basis of the memoir Kaboom, and (after publishing two novels) he visited western Ukraine with other combat veterans to train civilians. His return to Ukraine for this Esquire feature, however, is to chronicle the “volunteer ecosystem” that has taken root: the men and women who have converged upon the country from both sides of its borders to defend it against prolonged Russian aggression. These aren’t cosplayers or U.S. extremists trying to get militia cred — “all those bitches got weeded out quick,” says one volunteer, an Air Force vet who’s training Ukrainian recruits — but they’re not all mercenaries, either. Over the course of nearly 7,000 words, Gallagher meets a wide swath of people who have moved by the nobility of the cause, from a Ukrainian woman who coordinates medical training to a one-time Clinton administration staffer who travels through Ukraine writing checks and chipping in. This is wartime reporting I never thought I’d read, a reminder that in an age of geopolitical deceit and oil greed, there still exist people willing to take up arms in service of a democratic ideal. Add in the rich vignettes threaded throughout, and you’ve got a piece you’ll not likely forget anytime soon. —PR
Marina Benjamin | Granta | February 9, 2023 | 4,596 words
There’s the thrill of the doing, but before that comes the anticipation, which for some is richer, offering everything the imagination can conjure, without the limits placed by the actual experience. When Marina Benjamin talks about ditching Ph.D. studies to hit the road as a professional gambler, you want to jump in the passenger seat of the hired convertible and burn rubber, right along with her. But what happens when gambling isn’t about winning so much as a way to quantify all that you’ve lost? Benjamin writes: “I now think it more likely that I was toying with loss itself — as one might toy with fire! — trying to figure out at a time of profound change in my life, my entry into the adult world, just how much, and what kind of loss I could comfortably tolerate.” —KS
Caleb Daniloff | Runner’s World | February 22, 2023 | 3,324 words
This essay is about addiction — and a dog called Hank. Hank couldn’t help his 25-year-old owner, Shea, overcome her struggles with heroin and fentanyl, but he could help her father, Caleb Daniloff, who looks after him when Shea cannot. In this beautiful essay, Daniloff describes how running the Fells outside Boston, with Hank, helps ease his torment over Shea and draws him into the present, even if only briefly. He is searingly honest, not shying away from what he views as his failings, making it clear why occasionally pulling himself out of the punishment of his own mind is so important. Weaving between his time on the Fells and a narrative of Shea’s addiction and eventual recovery, Daniloff shows the complexities of his life against the straightforward pleasure of watching Hank bounding after a squirrel. A reminder that simple things can be oh-so-important. —CW
Vauhini Vara | WIRED | February 23, 2023 | 7,267 words
It’s a worthy concept: hyper-local Facebook community groups connecting those in need of gently used items with their owners, a practice that offers environmental benefits in reducing waste with reuse, as well as a chance to thumb your nose at capitalism. But what happened to the Buy Nothing movement founded by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller, which by 2022 had expanded to 6 million members in 60 countries? Vauhini Vara discovers that to be able to propagate your values, sometimes you need to accept the compromises of free community access at scale or risk the wrath of the community you created. “The truth was that turning Buy Nothing into a business had come with far more expenses than revenues,” Vara writes. “If Facebook profited from Buy Nothing members’ activities, it also covered many of their costs. With the launch of the app, the resources that came for free with Facebook — software development, computing power, visibility — were suddenly Clark and Rockefeller’s responsibility.” —KS
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Perhaps the youngest musical genre to achieve global visibility, reggaeton is barely 30 years old, which means that many of its most popular artists don’t know life without it. As Felipe Maia explores, that has led to the emergence of some nuanced conversations around identity, art, and ownership — especially in Spain, whose relationship with the rest of the Spanish-speaking world is, to say the least, fraught.
The genre’s continuous rise in Spain has raised urgent questions about cultural ownership, colonialism, and race as a result of centuries-old social hierarchies between Europe and Latin America. While some fans and industry stakeholders consider this phenomenon a valuable cultural exchange and a natural outcome of the genre’s global ascent, reggaeton’s rise in Spain has also frustrated many Black and brown Latin Americans, especially Caribbean ones. The issue is layered: There is concern about Spanish artists profiting off the music of Afro-diasporic cultures once colonized by Spain, sometimes even eclipsing the visibility of those who founded the movement. Moreover, Spaniards and Latinos are often conflated in the public imagination. Latinidad is an ethnic identity category, not a racial one—two realities that erase significant differences and structural inequalities around skin color, educational access, and class. Meanwhile, other industry executives and cultural commentators hail reggaeton’s takeover in Spain as a sign of globalization’s advantages.
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File this under “TIL”: In the early ’80s, virtually all of the high-level Black journalists working in U.S. broadcast news moved to Lagos as part of an effort to overhaul Nigeria’s state-owned television news network. With help from many of those journalists, Feven Merid pieces together what happened. Read it now, because it’s hard to think there won’t be a movie or podcast about this soon.
For as long as Nwobodo had worked at the network, the news had depicted the government only in images and terms sanctioned by officials; newscasters typically thought of themselves as civil service workers. “You take everything you hear on the news with a hefty, hefty pinch of salt,” she said. A critical portrayal of a bureaucrat could result in trouble for NTA staff. Nwobodo saw colleagues lose their jobs for even subtle criticisms. “You didn’t try that,” she said. “We knew a lot of the stories that we had to read were not in the public interest. But you want a job, you want to put bread on the table, so you don’t have a choice.” The presence of the Americans inspired a different outlook. “The Jacaranda intervention was a complete eye-opener to me,” she said. “We thought, ‘We haven’t been doing this right the entire time.’”
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Chloe Schama’s praise of Florence Pugh is a little unrelenting in this piece, but it is still an enjoyable profile that manages to focus on the actress herself, rather than the dramas around her. It is also the place to go if you want to see Florence holding a giant fish.
Pugh at 26 is the kind of actor—thrillingly talented, coming off a series of stunning performances, and with compelling projects ahead of her—who is not just supremely comfortable in her skin, but also charmingly game. Perhaps it’s more precise to say she is the kind of person who exudes a let’s-go gameness.
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Hank the dog’s owner left him with her parents while she wrestled with her addiction. Lost and anxious at first, Hank found joy running the Fells with his new carers, while they found joy in him. A beautiful essay reflecting on how simple things can provide an anchor in rough seas.
Over the months, Hank and I built gentle three-mile jaunts in the Fells into rugged five-mile loops and eventually technical eight-mile circuits. The sound of my feet scraping across hardened dirt, the clinking of Hank’s tags, and the breath filling my ears, soon grew into a chorus that began, little by little, to drown out the cacophony of guilt, rage, and failure that kept me company.
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Marina Benjamin writes on how she rolled the dice to find out whether or not gambling was a latent, hereditary addiction.
Gamblers get into trouble, not least vortices of debt, because they cannot help pitting themselves against fate. They know that luck is capricious, evasive, flighty, which is part of its dangerous appeal; but they’re also convinced that they can somehow divine it.
Those who study the phenomenon of loss aversion point out that what someone is willing to lose is always related to a reference point, and usually that reference point is the status quo: most people will put up with some degree of loss if it doesn’t upset their world too much. But if the point of reference is less stable the logic shifts. If you believe, as my father did, that you were born to have riches beyond compare then you will risk much more to lessen the gap between reality and expectation. If like me, however, the bar of your expectations is set differently, calibrated for reality, then your approach to risk is more calculated.
I wish that I could go back and tell my younger self that the world is kinder than I knew, or believed it to be. That opportunity did sometimes come knocking out of the blue. That emotional precarity is a state that one might gird oneself to wait out instead of put to the test, while expecting to fail. But I guess there are always some things one needs to learn the hard way. That cannot be learned in any displaced arena, or field of play, or even a funhouse palace, however defanged or neutered to protect against real loss.
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