The type of wandering traveler and location-independent worker we now refer to today as a “digital nomad” has existed as other iterations over the decades: think “backpacker” and “travel blogger,” or even “distributed worker,” before the pandemic made remote work more common. This nicely presented Rest of World feature by Stephen Witt explores the phenomenon: Where are most digital nomads from, and where do they go? Neighborhoods in Medellín and Mexico City are experiencing radical changes — boosting local economies and improving city infrastructure while also pricing locals out. Come for the interesting facts, stay for the sometimes eye-rolling remarks from foreigners.
“Instead of building a life in Ohio, we were like, let’s just get out of our leases, sell our cars, and basically all of our possessions,” Ryan said. “We’re just gonna travel the world.” Wagner sipped coffee out of a mason jar through a striped straw. “When we started, we thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll try it for a couple months,’” she said. “But now it’s almost been a year, and we haven’t talked about stopping.”
Wagner and Ryan were halfway through the circuit. In 11 months, they’d visited 10 countries, including Croatia, Morocco, Romania, Portugal, and Turkey. Their remaining itinerary included Argentina and Chile, followed by Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.K. Even as they traveled, they saved money, by arbitraging their first-world incomes against the low cost of living in their stopover destinations. “We will probably buy a house eventually,” Wagner said. “But the more you travel, the longer the list of places you want to go.”
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I’ve always marvelled at the ingenuity of Dyson vacuums after reading Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson many years back. To call Dyson obsessed with improvement when it comes to his products is a hopeless understatement. For The Verge, Alexis Ong tours Dyson’s Singapore headquarters to learn about what clean means according to the company in a post-pandemic world. At nearly $1k for a vacuum cleaner, I can only hope Dyson becomes as obsessed with improving the cost of his products to make them more affordable for more people.
Dyson shows us the Submarine, an admittedly impressive wet roller head attachment — only available on the company’s new vacuum models — that effortlessly sucks up a blotch of ketchup on a swatch of rug liner. And finally, there’s a new crop of Gen5detect stick vacuums, which supposedly mark the first time Dyson can make a virus filtration claim on its products thanks to a “whole-machine HEPA” filtration system that captures germs and dirt and prevents them from escaping back into the home. Pricing and availability is TBD on most of these new products, but the new Gen5detect models will start at $949. The company’s demo of the new vacuums becomes a source of deep personal horror for me: we’re shown how it sucks up a grainy pile of dust (an analog for dust mite feces) through six layers of fabric. It’s all a logical continuation of Dyson’s pursuit of engineering perfection in the commodity-driven world of home care.
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An intriguing account of the Guinness World Records company: An organization that pays homage to human endeavor of any kind. But has some of the magic been lost over the years? Imogen West-Knights asks whether record-breaking has now become too much of a business — and entertains us with some of the obscure records that have been achieved along the way.
Furman keeps his GWR certificates, more than 700 of them, in a clear plastic box in his wardrobe. He has so many that he has stopped even applying for the certificates when he breaks a record. This is a man who knows precisely how many forward rolls will make you throw up, which brand of eggs are easiest to balance on a flat surface and which muscles in your feet fatigue first if you stand on a yoga ball for too long. He pulled out his copy of the first Guinness book, evidently well-thumbed, and read me the quote in the foreword about turning heat into light with the reverence an evangelical might quote a passage from the Bible.
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
In today’s edition:
An investigation into the dangerous work conditions of marine observers.
A review of two new books on cars and contemporary society.
An essay on the international laws that govern the world’s oceans.
Personal reflections on a mysterious teepee and one’s connections to nature.
Lee van der Voo | Civil Eats | May 23, 2023 | 5,262 words
Marine observers collect data about the fish caught at sea and monitor the practices of crews aboard commercial fishing vessels. They are the eyes and ears on the water: the people that ensure safe and responsible fishing. But the canned tuna you eat may not be as safely caught as you think. As Lee van der Voo reports in this excellent investigation, the people tasked with upholding sustainable seafood standards face dangerous situations. Many of them, like Fijian observer Simi Cagilaba, experience harassment and abuse, while others have disappeared or been murdered at sea. Stronger safety measures, action from major retailers to push for better practices, and more robust technology to track illegal activities would help to improve observers’ work conditions. Van der Voo exposes the dark underbelly of Big Tuna, and will make you think twice about the origins of those tins of tuna in your pantry. —CLR
Adam Gopnik | The New Yorker | May 15, 2023 | 3,792 words
I recently spent a month living and working in a different Canadian city, walking distance to a couple of grocery stores, a hardware and a pet store, and a few local pubs. How wonderfully liberating it was not to need a vehicle to pick up some bread, fruit, and oatmeal. How lovely to be able to wander down to the pub for a pint in the evening and then walk home. We put miles and miles on ourselves that month, enjoying the outdoors. This luxury is one I would love to have where I live, but alas, transit service is infrequent and we must rely on a car to get around. It’s with this recent experience in mind that I enjoyed Adam Gopnik’s review of two new books about cars and society. Daniel Knowles’ Carmageddon decries cars as “agents of social oppression, international inequality, and ecological disaster.” Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise says that parking is a scourge, one that has compromised the quality of life in urban centers: “The American town lost its heart, became strip-malled and overrun, because the street front had been consumed by places to put the cars that brought you there,” writes Grabar. According to Gopnik, understanding that cars cause problems ignores the allure to own them. “Nonetheless, the argument for the car, like the argument for homeownership, resides simply in its appeal, an appeal already apparent to the majority of people on the planet,” writes Gopnik. “It is not only that the car provides autonomy; it provides privacy. Cars are confession booths, music studios, bedrooms.” —KS
Surabhi Ranganathan | The Dial | May 9, 2023 | 5,038 words
Most of us have an old-fashioned cartographic mentality of the earth. And that’s not our fault: Conflicts between nations over time have formed the lines that make up the world as we know it. But as waters rise, the boundaries between land and sea shift. What is the ocean? Who has freedom on the sea? These are the types of questions that Surabhi Ranganathan, a University of Cambridge professor focused on international law, history, and the ocean, poses in this essay. With Ranganathan as our guide, we’re taken on a delightful journey across the surface and into the depths of the sea, as she examines and predicts challenges that will emerge due to climate change. When a sovereign island nation sinks, what happens? What issues arise from an ever-expanding continental shelf? Could seasteading reimagine civilization? Ranganathan presents an elegant narrative of the world’s oceans that is at once curious and imaginative yet grounded. She considers the international laws and politics that govern and control the sea, and opens our eyes to new ways to remake the world. —CLR
Masha Udensiva-Brenner | The Delacorte Review | May 23, 2023 | 8,016 words
I grew up in a ramshackle house across from some woods. Many a day, I would trot over the grass and disappear into those trees — dragging the family dog behind me — on an adventure dependent on the book I was reading (searching for pirates during my Swallows and Amazons era, looking for magic trees amidst The Faraway Tree phase). These memories enveloped me as I read Masha Udensiva-Brenner’s beautiful essay about Manhattan’s only natural forest, Inwood Hill Park. As a child, Udensiva-Brenner also found wonder in trees, spending hours playing at Inwood Hill and taking particular delight in a clearing holding a mysterious teepee and flower circle (I would have been thrilled by such a discovery). Udensiva-Brenner now recognizes her childhood memories may be hazy: The woman who made the teepee, Isabel Amarante, thinks she first built it much later. But facts and dates are irrelevant — everyone remembers something different about the teepee. What is important is that it is a place of solace for the many people who go there. For Udensiva-Brenner and Amarante, both immigrants, it is a place to feel a connection: to place, to the past, to nature. The parks department has a less romantic notion of this unlicensed structure. Udensiva-Brenner attempts to stay neutral in her reporting of the battle between Amarante and the park rangers to keep the teepee down, but I suspect she would be delighted if it popped up once again. —CW
Mikey O’Connell | The Hollywood Reporter | May 18, 2023 | 5,573 words
In our 14 years as a couple, there is only one TV show that my husband and I have watched together consistently, and it’s Top Chef. (He leaves Outlander to me; I pass on Painting with John.) We’re not rabid fans like the people who, as this oral history of the series details, paid to go on a cruise with the hosts and several popular contestants and judges. “What really stayed with me is a lady, incredibly inebriated, running down the hallway to me,” season 10 winner Kristen Kish recalls. “I assume she was going to hug me but ended up fully licking my right cheek.” However, we never miss an episode of the show, which offers a window into the diversity and difficulties of the culinary world. Top Chef prompted me to master the art of risotto — a work in progress — and I’ve never been so excited to tell my husband, well, pretty much anything as I was to announce that I’d seen Padma working out at our gym while she was filming the Washington, D.C., season. This is all to say that I loved THR’s oral history, which is making the rounds online as the show’s 20th season wraps up. The season, which features contestants plucked from Top Chef‘s various international productions, is a testament to the show’s cultural impact. In related news, thank goodness producers didn’t go with the alternate title Grillers in the Mist. —SD
Audience Award
This editor’s pick was the most popular among our readers this week:
Maxwell Strachan | Vice | May 17, 2023 | 6,339 words
As an experiment in work-life balance and personal productivity, Maxwell Strachan gave ChatGPT complete control over scheduling his day-to-day household, personal, and work tasks. At first, the bot’s cheery veneer seemed to help take the guesswork out of creating a personal schedule; however, its complete lack of emotional intelligence made for some awkward — if not potentially damaging — interactions with Strachan’s wife, Jessica. —KS
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As Top Chef‘s twentieth season heads toward the finish line, producers, hosts, and contestants dish on the history of the wildly popular reality series. Come for the alternative titles (Grillers in the Mist!), stay for the skinny on a cruise attended by some of the show’s most rabid fans:
BERWICK Bravo is fortunate enough to have many shows that have a serious fandom to the point of real passion — and, maybe in some cases, obsession.
LIPSITZ But Bravo didn’t have a show like this. After spending so much time with the chefs, we started talking about possibilities and pushing the network on these ancillary projects. Not just the foreign distribution, but the cookbooks, the cookware, the frozen meals, the cruise.
BERWICK That was just a boat full of 2,000 Top Chef fans. Hubert Keller, a Michelin star chef, deejayed.
KRISTEN KISH (SEASON 10 WINNER) What really stayed with me is a lady, incredibly inebriated, running down the hallway to me. I assume she was going to hug me but ended up fully licking my right cheek. I now avoid very drunk people.
COLICCHIO I thought it was going to be a lot worse. After a few days, the people started to chill out. It was actually kind of fun.
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A young French man named Louis came home one day in 2018 and saw a small red plastic brick sitting in his driveway. Right away, he knew something was wrong. Dive into the world of AFOLs — Adult Fans of Lego — and a crime that pitted two childhood friends against one another:
As months passed with no progress on the case, Louis began trying to solve the crime himself. Late at night he would chat on Discord with 13 of his AFOL friends from around the world: gamers, students, chess players, professionals. Acting as Lego detectives, they crafted a list of suspects and pored over it for motivations and clues. Maybe it had been an avid collector who prized Louis’ Clone Scout Walker so much he was willing to break in to get it? Or perhaps a member of the Polish Lego gang suspected of robbing French toy stores was now targeting Lego influencers? They scoured websites in the lucrative Lego secondary market — Brick Link, Brick Economy, Brick Picker — searching for serial numbers that matched the stolen sets and checked garage sales around Paris. “It’s very exhausting,” Louis says, “because you have thousands and thousands and thousands of sellers.”
They found nothing. But they did reach one conclusion: This was not just a crime about money. The thieves left behind other valuables in Louis’ house, and the destruction of his builds seemed too violent, too targeted. The smashed sets, the dismembered Minifigs: It felt more like a massacre than a burglary. This, Louis and his fellow sleuths decided, was a crime of passion. As Jehan Mesbah, one of Louis’ friends, tells me, “This had to be about vengeance.”
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A former Marine argues that it’s no surprise Daniel Penny, the man who killed Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, served in the armed forces, or that his legal team is from a firm founded by former officers in the Army National Guard Judge Advocate General’s Corps:
Understanding the integral relation between the warriors at home and abroad is crucial to understanding the war. So is understanding how this war’s apologists are constantly flipping upside down hierarchies of race and capital, and moral universes altogether. Where the slightest aggressions of the dominated get sold as existential threats, and the regular, disproportionate death-dealing of status quo devotees is marketed as noble necessity.
After Neely’s killer turned himself into authorities, received a second degree manslaughter charge, and was released on bail, Florida governor Ron DeSantis tweeted:
We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets of law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine . . . America’s got his back.
DeSantis encouraged his followers to contribute to the killer’s legal defense fund, an effort reminiscent of the right rallying behind Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three men, killing two, during protests against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Yet DeSantis himself is a former JAG officer credibly accused of complicity in suspicious deaths and abuse at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. So his rhetoric supporting Penny’s actions should also call to mind Trump’s pardons of arraigned war criminals like Eddie Gallagher and Mathew Golsteyn, or further back, chauvinist support for Lieutenant William Laws Calley after the My Lai massacre.
When you’re the eternal good guys, it’s remarkable all the bad things you can get away with doing. Here or anywhere. Plain-clothed or uniformed. The gap between the virtuous mythology and vicious actuality keeps expanding, just like your imperial birthright.
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