In this essay at The Dial, Jessica Traynor writes about the proliferation of data centers across Irish cities and towns, which store much of Europe’s digital information while increasing Ireland’s energy footprint and straining its power grid. Today, people generally think the cloud is an effective and secure way to preserve knowledge, but here, Traynor argues that the digital preservation of a nation’s records and memories is not as stable as we think. “The benefits of the data center economy are diffuse, intangible,” Traynor writes. “Unless Ireland figures out a way to surge forward with its slow development of renewables, these data centers seem impossible to sustain.” This is an interesting read on data, memory, and sustainability.
We drive back from Clonshaugh through Priorswood and Darndale, estates built during the 1980s, a time when Ireland suffered successive recessions, mass emigration and a heroin plague. The estates seem to have changed little since those days, even though the country as a whole has seen massive economic and social shifts, and I start thinking about the fragility of social and national memory. I wonder if data centers such as the one in Clonshaugh will contribute to the kind of record keeping Ireland has not always excelled at as a nation. Ireland is a country with a long memory, but a patchy one. . . .
“We have a black hole opening in history. When Irish government departments started using computers in the 1970s, there was no network, and many of those files can’t be read any longer. There’s no real policy for digital preservation of state records. A nightmare is facing us. Emails, Excel, Word, PowerPoint — they’ll all vanish — unless there’s a decision made by the government.”
I was surprised by the projected speed of deterioration of the images we were creating for our database; even TIFF files, the largest and most detailed of commonly used image file types, were prone to quick degradation. And so all that material floating around in the cloud — which is in reality being bounced from server to server, degrading each time this happens — is not really being preserved in the way we might imagine. Its continued existence is dependent on a steady flow of electricity, the continued provision of which is contingent upon governments reaching renewables targets they can’t agree upon.
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For the 17 families who lost loved ones in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018, Valentine’s Day is not a day of chocolates and candy hearts. And for Linda Zhang and Kong Feng Wang—the parents of Peter Wang, one of the children murdered that day—the process of grief and healing has been complicated by language and culture barriers. Amy Qin’s story is a heartbreaking look at how isolating life has been for their Chinese American family in the years after the Parkland tragedy.
“I am Peter Wang’s mom. It is so difficult to write this letter because I don’t know how to use language to express the pain of losing my oldest son, Peter.”
A few months before, prosecutors notified the victims’ families that they had the option of reading an impact statement at the sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz, the gunman. Ms. Zhang had initially been unsure whether she would accept. Even in Chinese, talking openly about grief felt so unnatural. And what could such a statement really accomplish?
Peter developed a sense of responsibility from a young age, Mr. Wang and Ms. Zhang said. Like many children of immigrants, he was his parents’ bridge to the English-speaking world, translating correspondence from school and interpreting at doctor’s appointments.
Peter often played the roles of caretaker and translator for his extended family, too. During a family trip to Disney World, Peter insisted on holding the toddler daughter of a family friend in his arms for 20 minutes so she could see the fireworks. When his cousin Aaron moved to Florida from China, Peter took him under his wing at school and helped him communicate with the other students.
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A suspicious death in London, England. How AI could unlock the secrets on ancient scrolls. The struggle to convey a massive glacier’s beauty. How plants experience time. And the hot mess behind the sriracha shortage.
Patrick Radden Keefe | The New Yorker | February 5, 2024 | 14,311 words
I didn’t read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing when it first came out. Not because I wasn’t interested—rather, I knew that I was going to like it so much, that it was going to be so annoyingly good, that I needed to crack it open when I had time to get lost in its pages. It was one of those leave-me-alone-I’m-reading books. In the case of PRK’s latest feature for The New Yorker, I waited two days to dig in: I finished a long, complicated edit, a bunch of admin work, and household chores, then found myself with a solid stretch of an hour to just read. The story is about Zac Brettler, a young man in London who posed as the son of a Russian oligarch and wound up dead in the Thames after jumping from the balcony of an apartment owned by a gangster; his death appeared to be suicide, but it might have been something else, and we’ll never know for sure because the gangster, who was the last person to see Brettler alive, is now dead too. As I suspected, I had to read the piece in one gulp. Every inch of it is fascinating: the twists and turns of Brettler’s story, the portrait of London as a playground for conmen and fabulists, the revelations that stunned Brettler’s family after he was gone. Needless to say, when you can, clear your own plate and get to reading. —SD
Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 5, 2024 | 3,688 words
The Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls, were buried by the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. To date, about 800 scrolls have been found from excavations at the site, but historians think there may be thousands more, which could shine more light on the world of classical texts and thought. Attempts to unroll them over the centuries, however, have been unsuccessful—in some cases, these fragile scrolls have literally crumbled into pieces. This entertaining story by Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet has all the elements of a modern-day Indiana Jones adventure, minus the villains: Precious artifacts buried beneath layers of volcanic ash in a villa thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. A Silicon Valley executive-turned-Roman history buff who holds a competition in which promising young programmers around the world race to uncover the secrets on pieces of papyrus that were last unrolled 1,900 years ago. A team’s breakthrough discovery of hidden ink, which opened the door to deciphering Greek letters on the scrolls using AI. It’s a delightful read that blends history, the classics, technology, and machine learning. —CLR
Elizabeth Rush | Emergence Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 4,468 words
In this excerpt adapted from her book The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush recounts an expedition to the Thwaites Glacier, a massive sheet of ice in Antarctica, one whose “calving edge stretches over a hundred miles.” What I love about this piece is that you get a deep sense of the thinking and struggle that went into writing about familiar geography so many have never experienced in person. I revelled in Rush’s attempts to get it right. And at first, the glacier defies her. “The words I conjure—cirque, serac, cleft, torque, ski slope, rampart—all slide off the surface of the ice, plopping one after the other into the bay right in front of Thwaites,” she writes. “I try out different words for white—plaster of Paris, opalescent, pearl—and blue—cobalt, cadmium, torqued turquoise—but none get at the way these colors come together to form a symphony of sorts, a polyphony of light and play, impossible to translate.” This piece is far more than a litany of discarded descriptors. It’s a fascinating account of coming face-to-face with a glacier and trying to comprehend its vast majesty; about grappling with how to convey that singular experience with precision. And in the end, reader? Rush ices it. —KS
Count me among the people who didn’t know that plants experience time in variable ways. We may age trees by their rings, but their growth—and thus those ever-accreting concentric circles—ebbs and flows in response to the world around them. Trees have helped researchers mark climate change over centuries, even tying it to history-changing droughts. That’s why, as Jonathon Keats explains in this enlightening essay, a 12-foot-tall “arboreal clock” will be among the timekeeping devices included in a project he has been shepherding. There will be others, like a fluvial clock marking time the way a river system might. Taken together, they will underscore a crucial point: time is larger than humans, and by experiencing it as other beings do can help us reconnect to the larger natural world. “Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves,” he writes. “We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way.” I’ve recommended stories about time and measure before. None of them gave me pause the way this one does—a pause that, I now know, ripples well beyond any one organism. —PR
Indrani Sen | Fortune | January 30, 2024 | 3,994 words
I started reading this essay in a cafe, with a bottle of sriracha sitting on the table across from me. Staring at the iconic bottle—the bold rooster motif, the cheerful bright green cap—I tried to remember when I first heard the rumors of the “Great Sriracha Shortage.” I believe the mutterings started at a dinner party, whispered tales of bottles selling for $80. Getting home, I opened my cupboard to check my stash—relieved to see two full bottles snugly in place. I would make it. Secure in my immediate supply, the sriracha dilemma fell from my mind, until I came upon this essay and realized I had no idea what actually caused the shortage. I was ready for Indrani Sen to dish the dirt. She begins by artfully filling us in on the history of the sauce, its unexpected rise to fame (it’s never even run a marketing campaign), and the deal between two companies that secured its future with a quality supply of chilies. But this deal—between Underwood Ranches (the chili farmer) and Huy Fong Foods (the sauce maker)—ultimately led to the problem. An argument about money caused a fiery end to the 28-year relationship, costing both companies millions. As Sen writes, the two “soft-spoken patriarchs” remain at odds, even though it leaves: “One man with thousands of acres of pepper fields, but nobody to buy his peppers. Another with a massive pepper factory, and not enough peppers to keep it running.” A Shakespearean-level feud. This hot mess makes for a fascinating read, and hold onto your bottles: it’s still a rocky road. —CW
Kyra Dempsey | Asterisk | January 22, 2024 | 3,422 words
The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. Kyra Dempsey, aka Admiral Cloudberg, explains the governing norms of post-accident investigations. —SD
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Yes, the headline is undeniable. Yes, the story delivers on its promise. Yes, Peter Holley’s story about Austin Riley’s harrowing ordeal will stay with you. A chilling reminder that animals gonna animal, no matter how tight the bond.
Always eager for his owner’s company, Waylon enjoyed following Austin around the family ranch and falling asleep on his chest after feedings. He loved red apples, rough belly scratches, and tender massages on his hardened, bony snout. Before long, the pig and the brawny farm boy were inseparable. “I just kinda became his parent, his dad, really,” Austin said. “Early on, I’d take him with me through the drive-thru at Whataburger and he’d sit in the front seat, happy as can be.”
Waylon soon grew to be “two hundred fifty pounds of pure protein,” as Austin likes to say—more than an average-sized NFL linebacker. By then, Austin had moved him to a large pen a few hundred yards away from the family home. On particularly beautiful days, he liked to lie on the ground in the enclosure, listening to sports radio and watching the clouds pass by. Inevitably, Waylon would lie down beside him, gingerly resting his enormous, wart-covered head on Austin’s thigh. They could remain that way for five or six hours at a time.
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In Noēma, Jonathon Keats unspools a thought-provoking essay about time—specifically, about how every organism other than humans experiences time, and how one key to undoing humans’ ecological impact might just be appreciating those other experiences. To wit: an “arboreal clock” that measures and displays time from the perspective of a massive tree.
Fluctuations in the bristlecones’ growth rate, affected by environmental conditions ranging from local rainfall to planetary climate change, will be measured by analyzing the thickness of tree rings in microcores retrieved from the mountain each year. These data will be used to determine the center of gravity for the pendulum, which will swing slower or faster depending on the tree ring thickness. Though the clock face will display time in the usual way, it won’t serve as a mechanism for human planning — a technology to impose order on the environment for our convenience — but rather to pace our lives to match the lived reality of other organisms.
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This excerpt from Everywhere the Undrowned by Stephanie Clare Smith is a disturbing read, but demonstrates Smith’s skill in getting beneath the skin of her feelings, pulling them out to lay them bare on the page. It’s gripping writing, and it’s all too real.
I left my shoes and underwear on the floor of his truck. Two men on the sidewalk shouted something at me. The way I hated them. I looked back to see if they were chasing me, if the truck was circling around for me. The way pain shot through me as I ran, and blood dripped down my legs and soaked the crotch of my pants. The way I bled for three days.
That Thursday night, for the first time, I piled three silver pots and some glass ashtrays in front of the door, like Laura Petrie did on the Dick Van Dyke Show. I began my practice of laying my head where my feet used to go, so I could see through the living room to the big front door with the too-little lock and my homemade alarm. That way I could sleep until it came crashing down.
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The bus made famous by Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild,” has been relocated. Eva Holland explores the history of this former city transit vehicle—and how it came to hold a special place in people’s imagination. Will it be the same now it’s out of the wild?
I first read Into the Wild not long before the movie came out. At the time, I was around the same age Chris was when he died. It was early in my writing career, and I worked for a website blogging about travel news and trends. That’s how I learned about the dilemma of the bus, the hikers who sought it out and the rescues they sometimes required. Two years later, at 27, I set out on my own big, wild adventure. I bought an aging Jeep and drove west across Canada to the Yukon, where I now live.
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