“Canada’s world-leading Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program” was instituted in 2016 to help the terminally ill avoid intolerable suffering. But as Cassandra Kislenko reports at The Baffler, the Canadian government, in expanding the program, may broaden the number of conditions that could qualify for state-supported suicide, including, possibly, terminally-ill newborns. Given that Canada’s health care system is an underfunded disaster, where people cannot access necessary physical and mental health care, “disabled people and advocates fear that medically assisted suicide will become a weapon for the state to do away with what capitalism considers unproductive bodies.”
Living in poverty, Gwen felt her only choice was to become one of the growing number of disabled people using Canada’s world-leading Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program simply because the state refuses to provide them with quality of life. “My doctor was acting like she couldn’t hear me,” she remembers of her initial attempts to communicate this decision. “She kept encouraging me to try anything else . . . but there was nothing else to try.”
However, as early as April 2019, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities expressed she was “extremely concerned” that Canada was not ensuring disabled people seeking state-assisted suicide had been provided with viable alternatives before making the choice. In a report to the Human Rights Council, she warned that “assisted dying must not be seen as a cost-effective alternative to providing services for persons with disabilities.”
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A mysterious scammer conning Instagram influencers. A grim account of illegal gold mining in South Africa. A read on time and the science of the perfect second. An examination of one’s birth — and the control that documents have over us. An ode to the soybean and the world of tofu.
Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis | ProPublica | March 26, 2023 | 4,629 words
If you’ve ever lost your Instagram account to a hacker or requested aid from Meta in any way, you understand feeling helpless trying to get a faceless corporation to pay attention. Egregious tech company irresponsibility and complete disregard aside, where Meta failed, ProPublica may have succeeded in tracking down a man known for hijacking accounts by exploiting security loopholes, then hounding their owners for money. A scammer known as OBN claims to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars plaguing people who earn a living on Instagram “because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.” Not only does he shut down lucrative influencer accounts, he antagonizes account owners with taunts and threats. Meta’s response? They intend to offer a program that would charge for customer support from a real person, something that most tech companies consider not just the right thing to do, but table stakes for being in tech: “Meta has acknowledged that it needs to invest more in customer support. In February, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would offer people the ability to pay for account verification and enhanced support, including ‘access to a real person for common account issues.’” —KS
Kimon de Greef | The New Yorker | February 20, 2023 | 7,676 words
A decade ago, I traveled to South Africa as part of a public health research project focused on the country’s mining industry. Countless miners — almost all of them Black — suffered from silicosis and tuberculosis from their time spent toiling underground, looking for gold. They were owed compensation for their suffering, but most of them had never received it. Our research question was simple: Why? The answer was a tangled web of institutional dysfunction, racism, inequality, poverty, and neglect. It was also wholly predictable. South Africa’s mining sector was designed during the colonial era to benefit a few at the expense of many (to say nothing of the toll on the natural environment). Black workers were paid slave wages to work in horrific conditions; for some it was the only means of providing for themselves and their families. When the industry collapsed in the ’90s, leaving behind labyrinths of shafts and tunnels, illegal mining emerged in force because people still needed money to survive. Kimon de Greef masterfully shows how an array of historical forces and failures brought South Africa to the era of zama-zamas, illegal miners who spend months, even years at a time deep in the earth working for criminal syndicates. If there is a lesson to be learned from South Africa’s mines, it is that cruelty begets desperation, which in turn begets more cruelty. —SD
Tom Vanderbilt | Harper’s Magazine | March 20, 2023 | 5,339 words
How do you count seconds? By feel? Mississippily or Mississipilessly? Can you ever trust a New Year’s party countdown? If you’ve ever even considered these questions — or if you just have a lifelong love of calipers and other measuring devices — you’re in for a treat. Tom Vanderbilt (who, like me, had a childhood fascination with the time/temperature line in his hometown) heads off in search of the ground truth of our chronological system. That quest brings him to Colorado’s Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, itself operated by a federal agency that oversees all things measurable in the United States. As it turns out, time is just as slippery as you thought it was while waiting for thunder to follow lightning; it’s the only one of seven international “base units” that has never had a physical constant. Since 1967, a second has been the time it takes for a ball of cesium atoms to reach 9,192,631,770 microwave-induced oscillations, but even that’s only an approximation. But Vanderbilt’s story isn’t simply a tale of numbers and methods; it’s a chronicle of curiosity, of the way we can be captivated by something that sounds so utterly rigid. Tick-tock, you don’t stop. —PR
Diane Mehta | The Kenyon Review | Winter 2023 | 6,018 words
“The FS-240, or Consular Report of Birth Abroad, that my parents filled out on my behalf, three months after my birth, is a way of avoiding the truth: I have no status inside or outside any clear borders unless I consider my mother’s uterus my original country.” In this gorgeous essay, Diane Mehta examines the unknowns surrounding her birth in postwar Germany, and reflects on the life trajectories of her parents — her father, an Indian Jain physician, and her mother, a Jewish American woman. Mehta intimately explores her family history while also placing it within a global context; she writes about what it means for written documents and pieces of paper to dictate our lives and seal our fates, but also how imagination can help someone reshape and control a narrative filled with blanks. —CLR
George Stiffman | Asterisk Magazine | March 9, 2023 | 3,278 words
Having been vegetarian for the last couple of years, I have eaten many a chickpea and a lentil, but not much in the way of tofu. My efforts at cooking with it generally result in a sad, limp affair that has more than a passing resemblance to pond sludge. But this delightful essay has single-handedly turned my tofu thoughts around, with luscious descriptions that pour off the page and make you want to reach in and grab a piece of the joyfully named “exploding-juice tofu.” And if exploding juice is not your thing, fear not, for there are more than 20 other types of tofu in the world, all with “different mouthfeels.” I was as surprised as you. George Stiffman briefly touches on how the perceived value of vegetarian food differs between East and West — but for the most part, this essay is unashamedly just about how good this soybean curd can be, and is no poorer for it. (So good that Stiffman waits for a tofu teacher outside a Chinese brothel at 4 a.m. while “jotting down tofu goals.”) I have a new reverence for my pond sludge. —CW
Suzanne Heywood | The Guardian | March 25, 2023 | 5,574 words
In this excerpt from her book, Wavewalker: Breaking Free, Suzanne Heywood recounts the misery of her unconventional childhood. A three-year sailing adventure ended up being nearly a decade trapped on her parents’ boat — which Heywood remembers here with a brooding resentment. This edited extract gives a full picture of her remarkable story. —CW
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The residential school system is just one of Canada’s dirty secrets. For decades, the Canadian government, in partnership with the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and United churches, took Indigenous children away from their families and imprisoned them in residential schools designed to “take the Indian out of the child.” Children were stripped of everything indicative of their culture. School officials cut their hair, put their clothing in the garbage, and punished them severely for speaking Indigenous languages. Many children suffered physical and sexual abuse; some died under these horrific conditions. At The Walrus, Annie Hylton highlights survivors’ stories from the community in and around Delmas, Saskatchewan, so that they can start the long, difficult process of healing.
Annie has written about Indigenous issues for Longreads. Read “Searching for Mackie,” a story about Immaculate “Mackie” Basil, a young Indigenous woman who went missing in British Columbia in 2013.
Jenny Rose Spyglass was three years old when the men came for her.
As Spyglass recalls, her family lived in poverty—her father had recently been deployed by the Canadian military, leaving her mother to care for six children. That fall day, Spyglass remembers, a black vehicle drove up the gravel road and approached her house. A few men emerged: federally appointed Indian agents—who enforced Ottawa’s policies across First Nations reserves and Indigenous communities in Canada—and two priests. The men pointed at Spyglass as her mother pled. “I hung on to my mom,” she says. The men snatched her from her mother’s grip and tossed her, along with her two elder brothers, Martin and Reggie, into the back of the vehicle. During the drive, Spyglass fell asleep and later awoke to children sobbing and gathered near another vehicle. All of them had been torn from their homes in neighbouring reserves—Moosomin, Poundmaker, Sweetgrass, and Red Pheasant, among others—after their parents were threatened with jail or fines if they resisted their child’s attendance at the Thunderchild school.
One day, when she was about four years old, Spyglass learned that her brother Reggie, a year older, had become ill. She and Reggie were close—best friends. Reggie was isolated in a small room, and nobody was permitted to see him. “They just let him suffer,” Spyglass says. “He never made it home.”
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Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Abdul Sharifu was one of tens of thousands of immigrants who have settled in Buffalo, New York, in the last two decades. Sharifu was a one-man mutual-aid operation — he had access to his cousin’s leased car, which meant he could run errands and give rides to those in need. But the very systemic failures Sharifu was working to patch over claimed him this winter. As journalist Albert Samaha conveys, Sharifu’s story is a window into one of America’s most diverse and unequal cities:
The tragedy underscored inequities that continue to grip the city. Rita Jones, who grew up on Buffalo’s East Side and manages Caudle’s flea market, said the area’s residents have complained for years that the city often neglects to pour snow-melting salt on most of the roads in their neighborhoods, as it does in more affluent and commercial districts. City officials issue blizzard warnings but otherwise leave residents to fend for themselves. Those without fully stocked pantries are more likely to brave the conditions to obtain supplies. Those unable to take time off work have less time to prepare before a storm hits.
Because of the city’s reputation for harsh winters and its lore of producing hard-scrabble steelworkers toughened by mills that filled their lungs with asbestos and carcinogenic fumes, outsiders’ perception of Buffalo is usually framed by an admiration for its peoples’ resilience. But resilience is exhausting when repeatedly called upon — a trait honed out of necessity, foisted upon those with no choice but to navigate scarcity.
People turned to Abdul Sharifu because they had nobody else to turn to, and he provided services that nobody else would provide. His death brought pain to those who loved him, but also left a vacuum for those who needed him.
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Yes, it has one of the best hed/dek combos I’ve seen this year, but Jayson Greene’s look back at the spuming cultural wave known as the pop-R&B gigahit “Blurred Lines” doesn’t stop there. It aims primarily at Robin Thicke, though Greene’s got heat for everyone from Thicke collaborators Pharrell Williams and T.I. to Miley Cyrus. Sometimes the best culture-crit is steeped in a vat of acid. (That said, I regret to inform you that “Shooter” still goes superduperhard.)
Now, 10 years since its March 2013 release, “Blurred Lines” is a poisonous time capsule. In many ways, all of them unfortunate, it could be considered the song of the 2010s. Pick any disheartening pop-cultural trend of the past decade and chances are it applies to “Blurred Lines”: The hollow outrage cycle in news, increasingly reliant on hot takes tossed out with superhuman speed, often without a speck of human logic? The predatory power dynamics of the entertainment industry, and American society’s ongoing dismissal of consent? The increasingly litigious pop landscape, in which lawyers and music publishers fight for scraps, and every pop song feels safely Xeroxed from the last one? Every decade gets the songs it needs and the songs it deserves.
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In South Africa, there are men who have lived underground for months or years at a time. They’ve suffered from malnourishment and tuberculosis. They’ve watched friends die in falls and sudden explosions. They’ve been subject to the whims of criminal syndicates and violence of security forces. These men, known as zama-zamas, are illegal miners, seeking flakes of gold in the carcass of tunnels and shafts left behind when the legal — but still-odious — mining industry collapsed:
The crash came in 1989. The price of gold had fallen by nearly two-thirds from its peak, inflation was rising, and investors were wary of instability during South Africa’s transition to democracy. (Nelson Mandela was freed the following year.) The rise of powerful unions, in the final years of apartheid, meant that it was no longer possible for the industry to pay Black workers “slave wages,” as the former chairman of one large mining company told me. The Free State goldfields eventually laid off more than a hundred and fifty thousand mine workers, or eighty per cent of the workforce. The region was almost wholly reliant on mining, and Welkom’s economy was especially undiversified. The town’s sprawling urban design was also expensive to maintain, leading to a “death spiral,” Lochner Marais, a professor of developmental studies at the University of the Free State, told me.
I first visited Welkom in late 2021. As I drove into the city, Google Maps announced that I had arrived, but around me it was dark. Then my headlights picked out a suburban home, followed by another. The entire neighborhood was without electricity. South Africa is in the midst of an energy crisis and experiences frequent scheduled power outages, but that was not the cause of this blackout. Rather, it was symptomatic of chronic local dysfunction, in a municipality ranked South Africa’s second worst in a 2021 report on financial sustainability.
Welkom is surrounded by enormous flat-topped mine dumps that rise from the plains like mesas. The roads have been devoured by potholes. Several years ago, zama-zamas began breaking open wastewater pipes to process gold ore, which requires large volumes of water. They also attacked sewage plants, extracting gold from the sludge itself. Now untreated sewage flows in the streets. In addition, zama-zamas stripped copper cables from around town and within the mines. Cable theft became so rampant that Welkom experienced power failures several times per week.
As the gold-mining companies scaled back in South Africa, they left behind wasted landscapes and extensive subterranean workings, including railway lines and locomotives, intact winders and cages, and thousands of miles of copper cable. Many companies had devised protocols for withdrawing from depleted mines, but these were seldom followed; likewise, government regulations around mine closures were weakly enforced. “It’s as if they just locked the door — ‘Now we’re done,’ ” a mine security officer said of the companies. Shafts were often sold many times over, the constant changing of hands allowing companies to evade responsibility for rehabilitation. By the early two-thousands, according to authorities, South Africa had a large number of “derelict and ownerless” gold mines across the country, creating opportunities for illegal mining. Mining researchers in South Africa sometimes joke that the story of gold mining runs from AA to ZZ — from multinationals like Anglo American to zama-zamas.
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Despite hearing “Bad Habits” on the radio at least twice a day, I know very little about Ed Sheeran, but I found myself unexpectedly charmed by Brian Hiatt’s interview with him for Rolling Stone. Sheeran comes across as a genuinely nice guy — and one who has had to deal with a tremendous amount of loss.
Sheeran isn’t afraid to say what he means in his songs, at nearly all times. If he’s grown up and is a father now, he sings, “I have grown up/I am a father now” — the opening line of 2021’s =. His use of metaphor is sparing. He loves Van Morrison, but if Sheeran wrote a song called “Listen to the Lion,” it would probably be about a trip to the zoo, and a Top Five worldwide hit to boot.
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