The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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• The psychology of a mass shooter.
• Wrestling with the phenomenon of Novak Djokovic.
• Using plant anatomy to understand human emotion.
• Lunches with a literary legend.
• Surfing . . . in a mall.

1. Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother

Mark Follman | Mother Jones | May 16, 2024 | 14,073 words

In 2014, Elliot Rodger murdered six people, wounded 14 others, and killed himself in Isla Vista, California. As Mark Follman shows in this thoughtful, compassionate feature, Rodger was an unwell, unstable young man whose actions—like those of many mass shooters—were likely preventable. The key component of any prevention strategy for gun violence is reducing people’s access to firearms, but Follman approaches the matter from a complementary angle: one focused on a troubled person’s experiences, needs, and risks. “Many mass shooters remain ambivalent about killing themselves and others—and most engage in observable warning behaviors well before they attack,” Follman explains. If these red flags are documented and reported, what’s known as “behavioral threat assessment” can kick into gear: “Made up of psychologists, administrators, law enforcement, and other trained practitioners who meet regularly to handle cases, the team conducts interviews and gathers information to gauge the danger. Then, over weeks or months, they use constructive tools like counseling, social services, and education support to guide the troubled person away from what the field calls ‘the pathway to violence.’” Follman delves into threat assessment as a growing field of study and action through the lens of Rodger’s mother, Chin, who became interested in it a few years after her son’s crime. Chin is now using her son’s story and her experience as his mother to help experts better understand what compels mass shooters to act and what it takes to stop them. In a profound act of grief, love, and generosity, she has made herself a case study. Follman’s piece is essential reading, going beyond the headlines and assumptions about mass shootings to illuminate root problems and cracks in various systems—social, familial, educational, therapeutic—that people like Rodger too often slip through. —SD

2. The Unbearable Greatness of Djokovic

Scott Stossel | The Atlantic | May 28, 2024 | 4,580 words

Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to study with the late, great Phyllis Garland, an arts critic who believed that criticism deserved the same rigor and care as any other form of journalism. I think of her often, but one thing she said influenced me more than any other: it’s easy to write a negative review; it’s much harder to write a positive one. That axiom has an unwitting corollary, though. In truth, writing a memorable takedown—one that interrogates not just the subject, but the critic’s own stance—is an art of its own. Scott Stossel’s piece about tennis player Novak Djokovic emobdies this phenomenon. At its heart, it’s a deconstruction of why Djokovic has a legitimate claim to being the best men’s tennis player of all time, yet Stossel manages to seethe through the compliments: “He revels in playing possum, cavalierly frittering sets away early against weaker players in order to make the eventual comeback and execution all the more delicious.” The piece lacks the usual hallmarks of a takedown. It’s meticulously reported and venomously structured. There are no zingers or insults, just Djokovic’s play style, off-court carriage, and gamesmanship. (Seriously, what’s with the bathroom breaks?) Stossell even cops to the smallness of his own resentment, adding yet more seasoning to a thoroughly enjoyable read. He’s by no means the first person to dislike a win-at-all-costs champion, but he’s one of a rare few who can marshal facts and critical acumen to elevate a sports fan’s grudge to something more like art. —PR

3. Little Seed

Wei Tchou | Virginia Quarterly Review | May 14, 2024 | 8,135 words

Have you ever felt helpless and illegible to others, searching for a way to process loss and turmoil? For Virginia Quarterly Review, Wei Tchou uses her deep appreciation for ferns to better understand herself, and her brother’s mental illness. Studying books and field guides she becomes a taxonomist, finding inspiration in their variation and resilience. Ferns “make a home out of catastrophe,” she writes. “In a world where so much truth is malleable and relative, there is a subset of that world in language where truth is fixed. Either way, ferns grow regardless of our names for them. They spiral relentlessly.” In learning about the plant’s parts and varieties she absorbs a new vocabulary to better understand the world and her place in it: a new poetry, courtesy of ferns. “Instead of leaves, for instance, ferns have pinnules (the tiniest petallike leaves) and pinna (a set of them, waving from the body of the fern-like a feather). Stems or stalks are called petioles. You call the full articulation of pinnae, without the petiole, a blade.” Through this stunning essay, Tchou puts us in that rare place where the ordinary and the extraordinary sit together for a time, in conversation—that fertile spot where understanding and insight can grow. —KS

4. My Lunches with Judith Jones, the Queen of Cookbooks

Sara Franklin | Taste | May 28, 2024 | 4,156 words

“This is a story told in lunches,” writes Sara Franklin at the start of this sumptuous essay. The technique works. Each exquisite new meal description joins a joyous thread that will leave you craving fresh, home-cooked food. And Franklin takes even more delight in her lunch companion: celebrated editor and writer Judith Jones, perhaps best known for discovering Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl in a publisher’s slush pile. Serendipity calls when The Julia Child Foundation asks Franklin to collect Jones’ oral histories for an archive. (Jones edited Child.) An ardent fan, Franklin is thrilled by this opportunity. But, in this piece, the interviews take a back seat, with just a few snippets of Jones’ life history thrown in: this essay is on friendship. (And food, but the food is the conduit of friendship.) Before each interview, Franklin and Jones make their lunch and, over each one, steadily develop a companionship, preparing their spread in a lovely, unrushed, sometimes silent waltz that becomes more adept with time. The slow formation of their friendship—despite the 60-year age difference—is written with tenderness and beauty, and, toward the end, I found I had to brush away a tear. You will come away replete.—CW

5. Surfing the American Dream

Alexander Sammon | Slate | May 23, 2024 | 5,569 words

I’ve always wanted to learn how to surf. I’ve lived near the California coast for most of my life and have traveled to many places where beginner lessons are plentiful, but I still haven’t taken the opportunity. What if there was a more accessible and less intimidating way to get me closer to my goal? In this enjoyable Slate read, Alexander Sammon visits the American Dream mall, a massive entertainment complex in New Jersey, to ride the artificial waves at Skudin Surf, the largest indoor surfing wave pool in the US. I expected Sammon, who grew up surfing outside in San Diego, to dismiss the chlorine-filled, Shrek-themed experience in a climate-controlled dome as completely soul-stripping, and to write a piece bemoaning another beloved activity now commodified, privatized, and optimized. But Sammon is thoughtful and nuanced, with insights on today’s youth, the future of IRL retail and the American mall, the death of subculture, the unique pastime of surfing, and ultimately, the things we choose to do that bring us joy. He writes that his $250 surfing session was a silly and manufactured experience, but it was also sort of fun and memorable: “[D]espite seeming like the fakest fucking thing imaginable for an activity obsessed with authenticity, there was actually something somewhat legit in the root of the experience.” —CLR

Audience Award

Which piece got our audience reading this week?

Blood Money

Krista Diamond | May 18, 2024 | Slate | 1,915 words

Faced with crushing academic debt and unable to find gig economy jobs in Las Vegas, Krista Diamond started to sell her plasma. After some react with horror when she reveals how she makes ends meet, she considers the far more demeaning work experiences she’s had in the past—in contrast with the kindness she’s experienced at the plasma bank. —KS

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Where the Wild Things Are: the Untapped Potential of Our Gardens, Parks and Balconies

In this edited extract from One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate, Kate Bradbury examines the distressing rate at which gardens in the United Kingdon are disappearing. It is an important reminder that our properties can be home to more than just us.

Years later I was living in Brighton and took a trip to Manchester for work. In the morning, before my train left to take me back down south, I went for a walk, to the gay village, to the bars and the clubs, and finally to the estate where I used to live. The flats had had a makeover – the balconies were now sealed with airtight windows that presumably made the flats warmer and more soundproof, but which further separated the residents from the natural world. The gardens of the houses had been paved over and there seemed to be more space for parking. It wasn’t just the people who would be suffering from the loss of green space; I wondered how the hedgehogs were getting on.

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Little Seed

In this stunning essay, Wei Tchou turns to ferns as a lens through which to better understand herself and her place in her family, amid the turmoil of her brother’s mental illness.

Names, for me, use certainty as their lure. They’re above and beneath us, a universal interface, a boulder on the earth. The safest place I find myself is in a heavy book I can flip through to find the name of anything I don’t recognize, rendered in a dead language that I know won’t change. In a world where so much truth is malleable and relative, there is a subset of that world in language where truth is fixed. Either way, ferns grow regardless of our names for them. They spiral relentlessly.

Here’s something soothing: Everything alive exists within one of three taxonomic categories called Domains, and, within that, one of five or six subdivisions under Kingdoms (depending on the zoologist you’re speaking with). All plants, including ferns, exist in the Kingdom called Plantae. No matter what language you speak, these names remain the same.

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Fuel, Medicine, Pleasure

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Krista Diamond | Longreads | May 30, 2024 | 9 minutes (2,660 words)

Before I climb the mountain, I stop at 7-Eleven and buy a sandwich. The 7-Eleven is in Tromsø, Norway—technically the northernmost 7-Eleven on earth, but what’s really special about it is the food: tikka masala, soft-serve frozen yogurt, fresh smoothies, croissants, and most relevant to my hiking plans, paninis. The sandwiches are too big, I think, looking at them behind the glass deli counter. A big meal is a source of shame to me. A big meal is not something I like to consume in front of other people; I only eat it in secret, by myself, after I’ve had a tiny meal in public. But the panini is the size that it is and I need lunch for this hike, so I order and stuff it into my backpack.

I tell myself I’ll only eat like, half of it, tops.

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We’ve had the pleasure of publishing Krista Diamond in the past. Be sure to read ‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed,’ her reported personal essay on risk in the wilderness.

When I was 19, I signed up for a summer outdoor adventure program. For two weeks, I sailed the coast of Maine, living on a 30-foot sailboat with 10 people. We slept on the oars, dove into the cold Atlantic each morning, saw phosphorescence dance beneath the current each night. When the wind wasn’t in our favor—which was often—we couldn’t sail so we rowed. We rowed in the fog, in the rain, in the wet cold past uninhabited islands where sheep improbably grazed. We rowed and we sang. We rowed and we cursed. And on breaks from rowing, we ate. We ate graham crackers with peanut butter and then graham crackers with regular butter and then best of all, graham crackers with peanut butter and regular butter. All of this fat was so good. So good at keeping us warm and full and happy. Those peanut-butter-regular-butter graham crackers made us kinder to each other. They allowed us to see the ocean as beautiful. They gave us the strength to guide the sailboat home. 

Those peanut-butter-regular-butter graham crackers made us kinder to each other. They allowed us to see the ocean as beautiful.

When I was 25, I climbed Mount Whitney, which, at 14,505 feet, is the highest mountain in the contiguous United States. To train for it, my boyfriend and I did a series of hikes above 10,000 feet. I got altitude sickness on every single one of them: nausea, headaches, fatigue so heavy that each step was exhausting. Altitude sickness is frustrating; it makes you feel less capable than you are. The only real cure for it is to get off the mountain, but in the meantime you can treat it the way you’d treat the worst hangover of your life: fluids, electrolytes, bland carbohydrates. For me, this means blue Gatorade and salted pretzels, two food items I’d personally avoid at a gas station in the real world. But in the mountains, this combination is medicine. This combination is what got me to the top of Mount Whitney, even though I felt like throwing up, even though I kept looking down from the 99 switchbacks above Consultation Lake and thinking of what it would be like to turn around, to be in a motel bed in Lone Pine. I ate pretzels on the trail. I ate pretzels on the summit. I ate pretzels and was grateful. 

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In a 2015 interview with Backpacker, longtime search and rescue ranger Bil Vandergraff warned against packing your backpack with items you think you should eat on a hike. Instead, he suggested going for what you actually crave: junk food, like cold pizza. His reasoning was both psychological and physical. On a psychological level, the slice of pizza just might be the thing that pushes you to keep going instead of turning back. This is crucial at the Grand Canyon, where Vandergraff worked for 25 years. Visitors who hike from the rim to the river lose almost 5,000 feet of elevation along the way. Sometimes, when they’re standing at the bottom it seems impossible to get back up. Some of them end up requiring rescue not because their bodies have given up but because their minds have. Vandergraff calls this “having the psychology to get yourself out of the canyon.” On a physical level, a salty, high-calorie meal can prevent hyponatremia, a life-threatening condition that occurs when you’ve been drinking water all day but not replacing the electrolytes you’re flushing out. In the interview, Vandergraff said the park service at the Grand Canyon—a place that regularly sees temperatures above 100 degrees at its lowest elevations—actually deals with more rescue cases involving hyponatremia than dehydration. 

Some of them end up requiring rescue not because their bodies have given up but because their minds have.

Reading Vandergraff’s interview, I thought of all the times I’d arrived at the top of the mountain, sweaty, out of breath, ready for a good long break on a warm rock, only to reach into my backpack and find plain almonds, carrots, an apple. So I tried it his way. I wrapped a slice of pepperoni pizza in foil and drove to Death Valley for a hike in the park’s Funeral Range. It was a revelation, as much as grocery store frozen pizza can be. After that I switched entirely to taking food I liked with me on hikes—bacon breakfast burritos from gas stations, chocolate-covered raisins, almonds with spicy dill seasoning instead of the plain ones. And cold pizza. Cold pizza, always.

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When you’re hiking, you eat what you’ve brought with you, what you can get. Eating, even eating junk food—sometimes especially eating junk food—is not just a good idea but potentially the difference between life and death, or at the very least the difference between an enjoyable experience and a grueling one. No one has ever opened up a packet of Oreos on a mountaintop and said, “I’m being so bad.” But bad is a word I’ve heard a lot in the real world. Bad is the word my mother used when she brought out ice cream after dinner. Bad is what my friends and I were when we ate zebra cakes in our high school cafeteria. Bad is what the women’s magazines told me I was being when I ordered the french fries instead of the salad. Bad is how I felt each time I ate a slice of birthday cake at a party where I’d vowed to stick to the crudités. Sugar is bad. Carbohydrates are bad. Fat is bad. All the things you want are bad and you are bad for wanting them. For me, this is complicated further by the fact that I live in Las Vegas, a city that paradoxically values both indulgence and conventional beauty in equal measures. In Las Vegas, there are buffets with hundreds of items, there are mini ferris wheels containing fried appetizers, there are Bloody Marys garnished with crab legs, there is a downtown restaurant famous for its nearly 20,000-calorie burger. In Las Vegas, there are also ultracompetitive auditions for bikini-clad cocktail server jobs, there are showgirls with flat stomachs, there is the privilege of skipping the line if you are beautiful. In Las Vegas, it is possible to exist around so much pleasure and feel bad when you give into it. 

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When you’re hiking, you walk and you run and you reach and you climb because this is how you get up the mountain or through the canyon or to the lake. Every movement is a necessity. On the trail, I don’t think about how many steps the health app on my phone is counting, if I’m doing enough to please it. I don’t think about the calories I’m burning or the fat I’m shrinking or the muscles I’m growing. There is no part of me that hopes that if I do this enough my waistline will be smaller. In the real world, exercise is a punishment. I go to a gym and run on a treadmill, which, unlike hiking, is just going nowhere. Sometimes it feels like the point is to go nowhere, to watch the numbers on the machine, to look up at the beautiful people on the muted televisions anchored to the ceiling and know that I will never reach them. 

All the things you want are bad and you are bad for wanting them.

When you’re hiking, you wear what is comfortable, what keeps you warm or cool or dry. Sometimes when I try on hiking pants at a store I am concerned about how my butt looks or I feel guilty when the bigger size fits better than the smaller size. But out in nature, I do not care. Fifteen miles into a 30-mile hike in Glacier National Park, when the blue sky turned black and lightning struck the mountains and made the very soil feel electric, it sure as shit didn’t matter what I looked like. On the summit of Mount Whitney, I wasn’t thinking about how my shorts fit; I was only thinking about the view and how hard it had been to get there to see it, how proud of myself I was that I’d made it. Women’s hiking apparel is marketed with words like “durable, versatile, lightweight.” Materials are described in terms of what they can do for you: protect you from the sun, reduce chafing, allow mobility. Women’s everyday apparel is advertised with the language of aspirational thinness. I scrolled through 30 pairs of pants on one popular retailer’s website and 18 of them used some variation of the word “slimming.” 

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Sometimes I think the meal I eat after a long hike is the happiest I ever feel. Chicken nuggets from the drive-through on the way home from the mountains. Chinese takeout on the couch after I throw my backpack on the floor. But then I realize the only reason I am happy is because I’ve earned it, because I burned thousands of calories earlier in the day, allowing me a free pass to not feel bad. The moment of eating the meal marks a transition from the hiking world to the real world. The meal is motivated by hunger and the need to eat, as is the case with all meals in the wilderness, but it is tainted by the exchange of calories for work performed, the kind of diet commerce bound to a city where there are mirrored walls for you to catch your reflection in, gyms telling you it’s not too late to get a head start on your New Year’s resolution, and crowds full of people to compare yourself to. 

When I am hiking, I care for myself. I wear comfortable clothes. I eat food that tastes good. I rest. I move. I thank my legs, my arms, my breath, my heart. 

What would it mean to treat my body like that in the real world? To give myself everything I need to keep going? No punishing, no guilt, no withholding. Just nourishment.

This, I learned accidentally while scrolling TikTok, is an idea other people have too. In between videos titled debloat breakfast smoothie and everything I ate to lose 54 lbs, I started hearing the phrase intuitive eating. It seemed like just another fad, just another person selling a diet plan, but I got curious, so I looked it up and found that the concept predated social media. Intuitive eating comes from the 1995 book of the same name by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. There are 10 principles practitioners of intuitive eating follow—things like honoring your hunger and respecting your body. There’s a lot of stuff about learning to separate physical hunger cues from emotional hunger cues and talk of gentle nutrition and challenging the food police, but basically, what it comes down to is just eating when you’re hungry. That’s it. If this sounds obvious to you, know that I envy you deeply, that I have spent my entire life wishing I could be you and failing. Failing as a teenager in church when I skipped communion because I was worried about the carbohydrates in the wafer. Failing as an adult at a restaurant, watching my friends order what they wanted instead of what they’d decided they had earned. Failing at breakfast, at lunchtime, at dinner, in bed after eating too much, in the morning when I woke up hungry. 

Fifteen miles into a 30-mile hike in Glacier National Park, when the blue sky turned black and lightning struck the mountains and made the very soil feel electric, it sure as shit didn’t matter what I looked like.

But I have never failed on a hike. 

Unfortunately, though, I can’t live in that world. 

After learning about intuitive eating, I typed “intuitive eating dietitian near me” into Google and found a website with a photo of Red Rock Canyon, home to the same trails I hike in Las Vegas. It seemed like a sign or at least a passable coincidence. We’re a good fit if you want to feel better, the website said. We’re a good fit if you’re not sure where to start. I made an appointment.

“Let’s begin with something easy,” the dietitian asked me. “What does an average day of eating look like for you?”

I thought of a day in the city, being good. Eating plain nonfat Greek yogurt for breakfast, a salad for lunch, salmon and steamed vegetables for dinner. I thought of a day in the city, being bad. French toast, mimosas, a steak and cheese sub gooey with white American cheese, the hot oil of a mozzarella stick. And then I thought of packing for a hike, taking my boots off and standing in a lake, eating lunch on the shore. 

“I’m not sure what an average day is,” I said, “But I know what I want it to be.”

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In Tromsø, the mountain has other plans. It’s a 10-mile hike with 2,000 feet of elevation gain. Two-thousand feet of elevation gain doesn’t sound that bad to me, but then a few miles in I encounter a sign that says god tur (good journey) indicating the final push to the summit and I realize that that 2,000 feet of elevation gain is going to be condensed into a single mile. And it is hard. The route up is near vertical. I claw my way up loose talus at an achingly slow pace into a white cloud that rings the summit and then I realize when I get there that that’s not the summit; the real summit is still higher. And then I get to that point and see more cliffs rising up, and another summit after that, like, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Black rock in the white sky. The blue of the ocean and the green of Arctic islands so far below. Never has a mountain had so many false summits. At this point, my body is doing the things my body does on a steep hike. My calf muscles burn each time they contract, release. My quad muscles tighten. My toes ache like they’re bruised, broken. My heart is loud and my blood is hot. The air I pull into my lungs never seems to fill me up. A tenth of a mile from the summit, there is another signal emerging, one that becomes louder and clearer the harder I push myself. It is my stomach, gnawing and turning like an angry animal. It is hunger, deeper than I’ve ever felt hunger before, because I had plain yogurt and black coffee for breakfast, because I have not stopped—rarely do stop—for snacks on the trail, preferring to maintain momentum. 

And now my body is telling me what it wants so clearly it might as well be a pet, a child. Hey, it is saying, I need food. This is how it works. I need food to keep going. 

The sandwich, once embarrassingly huge, becomes a source of motivation. When I finally reach the top, I unwrap it. I eat the entire thing, a protein bar, and some chips. I drink a bottle of Powerade. The clouds evaporate. The sun lights up the fjords, the snow. Seabirds coast on the wind. Below me, there is a village, a white cathedral. The sandwich, it seems, has gone from too big to just right through some kind of mountain alchemy. Of course, that’s not what happened. Nothing has changed about the meal itself, only the way I see it. Standing on the ridgeline above the ocean, it is what it has always been. Exactly enough food. 

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Krista Diamond‘s essays and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Hazlitt, HuffPost, Catapult, Joyland, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Bread Loaf and Tin House. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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My Lunches with Judith Jones, the Queen of Cookbooks

When Sara Franklin embarked on gathering oral histories from Judith Jones, she was not expecting the gorgeous lunches they would prepare together before each interview. This lovely piece entwines food and friendship to create something truly satisfying.

When I see Judith on the day of the sauce gribiche, the tantalizing tease of spring hangs in the air. She greets me at the door in pressed slacks and a gorgeous, cream-colored silk blouse, with pearl studs in her ears. Her white hair, cut into a girlish bob, is held away from her face by a slim headband. She wears a brightly striped full-length apron cinched tightly around her tiny waist. When I’d called to set a date for our first interview, she’d suggested a midweek afternoon. “But let’s have lunch first,” she’d said.

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Surfing the American Dream

The American Dream mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, is home to the largest indoor surfing wave pool in the U.S. What’s the experience like for someone who grew up surfing in San Diego . . . outside? Are predictable artificial waves the future of this coastal pastime? Alexander Sammon writes an enjoyable, thoughtful essay on the trend, as well as the privatization and commodification of surfing and subcultures in general.

It’s tempting, of course, to stand on the hunched shoulders of Didion and Wolfe, the two patron saints of disdain, to blast this thing. But I felt so much more conflicted about it.

Because yes: The artifice was extreme, the wave was mediocre, and the whole thing was aggressively unnatural, near, and perhaps well beyond, the point of perversion.

And yet: Despite the surfeit of Shreks, despite its spot in the mall, despite seeming like the fakest fucking thing imaginable for an activity obsessed with authenticity, there was actually something somewhat legit in the root of the experience. As anyone who surfs will tell you, the surf anywhere almost always sucks. The wind is always wrong, or the size is too big or too small, or the tide is too high or too low, or there are too many people in the water, or none of those things are wrong but you just aren’t surfing that well that day and it’s easier to blame the conditions. So, yeah, the surf kind of sucked, which made it seem realer and certainly more democratic—more so, at least, than any of the perfection Kelly Slater cooked up.

Did I have fun? Yeah, I guess so. Did I get better at surfing? Maybe. Describing it as memorable seems a bit saccharine, but it’s not wrong.

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The Mad Scientist and the Killer Whales

Since 2020, orcas off the Iberian coast, particularly in the Strait of Gibraltar, have taken up a hobby: ramming boats. Sailors have reported almost a thousand attacks. This behavior is atypical, as killer whales have rarely targeted boats in the past. Tomas Weber visits the region to understand what might be going on, and various orca experts and animal biologists have different theories. Are they seeking revenge against humans? Is it a display of orca culture or the group’s dynamic? Or are the instigators simply young whales who are playing with the rudders of boats? Weber tags along with Spanish orca expert Renaud de Stephanis to report on this whale of a tale.

Many captains now carry illicit firecrackers on board to throw at the whales. Some blast death metal on Bluetooth speakers. Others bash steel sticks against their hulls when orcas approach. Orcas have sunk at least three boats and damaged hundreds more. Nobody has died. Wild orcas, as far as we know, have never killed a human being. But sailors worry it’s just a matter of time, while orca biologists are anxious about captains arming themselves and taking things into their own hands.

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