In 2019, hackers used SolarWinds software as a vector into thousands of the company’s customers to steal data from U.S. federal government agencies and tech giants like Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft. For WIRED Kim Zetter recounts what little is known about the hackers, their intents, and the repercussions, four years later.
Adair and his colleagues dubbed the second gang of thieves “Dark Halo” and booted them from the network. But soon they were back. As it turned out, the hackers had planted a backdoor on the network three years earlier—malicious code that opened a secret portal, allowing them to enter or communicate with infected machines. Now, for the first time, they were using it. “We shut down one door, and they quickly went to the other,” Adair says.
The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers. Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet. Even Microsoft and Mandiant were on the victims list.
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Andreessen Horowitz is more than just a Silicon Valley investment firm — it’s a media hype machine. Its tech-can-do-no-wrong mentality bolstered some of the most charismatic CEOs of our era, including now-disgraced founders like Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and Adam Neumann (WeWork). As Elizabeth Lopatto points out in The Verge, this strategy is ill-suited to a post-pandemic landscape of tech layoffs and higher interest rates, yet the firm presses on, making recent investments in Neumann’s new venture, as well as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. Can Andreessen continue using the same tired script or will they be able to pivot to the times? As is always true in Silicon Valley, it’s the returns that will have the final say.
In many ways, a16z created the playbook for the boom times in tech. During the era of fawning tech journalism and low interest rates, valuations of private companies exploded. Founders were “geniuses” and “rockstars”; it was easy to raise and easy to spend. There were herds of “unicorns,” companies that are valued at more than $1 billion. (This is to say nothing of “decacorns.”) Startups stopped running lean and instead got fat, attempting to outspend their competition.
This strategy is now at least two vibe shifts behind.
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Dan Musgrave | Longreads | May 4, 2023 | 21 minutes (6,022 words)
I had been volunteering at the ape house for four months before I was invited to meet Nathan. It was December and I’d just spent my first Christmas with the apes. Everyone but the director and I had left for the day. The night sky spilled over the glass-ceilinged, central atrium we called the greenhouse. Despite the snow outside, the greenhouse air was warm and ample. Moving toward the padlocked cage door, I felt light, as if I was about to float up into that dotted black expanse above me, rather than enter a room I’d cleaned feces and orange peels out of hours earlier.
I juggled my keys and the offering I’d brought with me — a tub of yogurt, a couple of bananas, Gatorade, and some blankets. With the two padlocks removed, I entered, sat, and arranged the gifts in an arc around me. Even though I was planted firmly on the glazed concrete floor, I swayed.
In the adjacent room, watching everything I did through the glass portion of a mechanical sliding door, was Nathan. Five years old to my 21. He was stout, wide-shouldered, with thick muscled arms, but almost twiggy legs. Nathan was, simply put, a cool little dude. We studied one another as we waited for my supervisor to turn the key and remove the barrier between us. His eyes were as big and soft as three-quarter moons, always holding a question. Though, more often than not, that question was really a dare.
Sitting in the greenhouse, everything in the world was in alignment. It was right that Nathan would be the first ape I ever truly met. While the adult males still made crashing displays of warning at me, and the adult females mostly ignored me or found me to be a mildly useful, but mostly superfluous, component of the building, Nathan had always welcomed me warmly. I was a new playmate, willing to run back and forth along his enclosure in games of chase, over-eager to please.
A racking ka-chunk filled the greenhouse as the mechanical door separating us was activated. It rocked and then jerked to the side in its steel track. The doors had been created for use in prisons, originally, and they were always jamming on us. The third or fourth time we called a repairman out, he’d said we needed to take it easier on them — they hadn’t been designed to open so often.
My breath stilled. I saw Nathan behind the door, then I saw the night sky. Nothing in between. I was on my back like some upturned turtle, my legs still crossed but now pointed at the stars. He was a heat-seeking missile. The impressions of both his feet were on my chest; the last breath I’d taken in a Homo-centric world evicted from my lungs. When I levered my body upright, I saw him waiting, peering at me from a foot or so away, head cocked. The air that rushed back into me was sweeter, lighter, than what had been there before.
“Hi,” I said, grinning.
I guess I passed the test. He plopped himself in the bowl of my still-crossed legs, plucked the lid from the yogurt, and began to pour the thickness down his throat. He peeped contentedly and put his spare hand around the back of my neck. Where everything had been so fast that I couldn’t take it in seconds before, now time was suspended. He smelled so clean, like construction paper and newly fallen leaves. We sat there, me running my fingers through the hair of his back, he slurping yogurt. Eventually, he pulled the blankets into a corner to construct his night nest. The director told me that meant it was bedtime. I told Nathan goodnight and we parted for the evening.
I’d initially applied to the ape house because I believed in their stated scientific mission: to communicate across the species boundary and illuminate the nonhuman and human mind. I had been one of those children at the zoo that try to make the right sound to get the animals to speak back. Now I was that kind of adult.
Not long after meeting and warming to the eight bonobos who were essentially my bosses, the science became much more personal. I was having trouble at college. My small rural campus felt like my cage. Though the school marketed itself as a home for outcasts looking for their place, I never felt entirely welcome there. I was shy and anxious to the level of needing therapy and medication (not receiving either), but I looked like a jock. When I did venture beyond my dorm room on weekends, I usually drank until I could approach and socialize with others (read: too much).
In the ape house, amongst the bonobos, I found the refuge my alma mater had promised to be. There, nothing rested on my ability to wrench words from my throat in front of my peers. In fact, my trend toward quiet was an asset while my athleticism was less intimidating than it was an invitation to play. For the first month, I tentatively hoped that the apes would have me. But after that month, had the humans offered me a room in one of the unused enclosures, I would have abandoned my degree and moved in with relief.
I saw Nathan behind the door, then I saw the night sky. Nothing in between. I was on my back like some upturned turtle, my legs still crossed but now pointed at the stars.
In my first weeks there, I asked my supervisor for tips on how to interact with them. “Just treat them like you treat me,” she said. “Speak to them, not about them. Assume they’re listening and can understand. They are and they can. These are people in nonhuman bodies and they know it.” I could handle that. I was familiar with the fallacy that bodies accurately matched the selves they contained.
Likewise, it was comforting to be a part of a project that sought the person in the ape, to whatever degree it was present, rather than force the transformation. My research into the field showed that other ape language experiments had not been so accepting or accommodating. In the majority, the test subjects were taken from their mothers as infants and placed in human homes or labs. This was considered scientific. Rigorous. Rearing was the independent variable. To allow these subjects to remain with their birth families would be a confound.
While that December evening was my first time crossing the divide between Pan and Homo, Nathan had already been doing it for years. He was the third generation and fourth individual entrant into this ape language experiment. His upbringing was unusually casual for an experimental subject, and he spent nearly equal time with both his ape and human family. On a cultural spectrum from wild-caught bonobo (his grandmother and father), to human-reared language apes (his mother and brother), to human experimenter, Nathan sat exactly at the midpoint. He was the fulcrum upon which worlds balanced. The hope for him was that, under the direct tutelage of his mother, and with frequent but unstructured interactions with humans, he would show just how self-sustaining ape symbol use could be across generations. The avoidance of structure was the scientific methodology.
As poetic as I found it that Nathan was my point of first contact, he was simply the logical choice. He was small enough to handle — even if he was already stronger than me — and young enough that it was unlikely he’d attack should I misstep. Culturally, he was also optimally situated to understand my inexperience. He was an interpreter, an emissary. He was my bridge into the ape world.
I got no more training for being with Nathan than that first night. For every meeting thereafter, the only suggestion the director gave me was that I should always use the symbols — easily quantified, discrete images. One per word. There were nouns, verbs, and even references to abstract concepts like time and feelings. The director thought maybe Nathan would help me learn them faster.
It seemed, at the time, that the only complication in Nathan’s life was his big brother, Star, who was so perfect it was offensive. Star was irritatingly handsome, with a smile that smoothed over any and every slight. He spit on me daily but blew kisses to all the female staff. Like many beautiful people, he was given credit for being smarter than he actually was and better behaved than he ever cared to be. Star’s shadow was long and hard to escape. So, if Star showed an interest or proclivity for anything, Nathan either dismissed the activity outright or tried to do it harder/faster/better/stronger than anyone had ever done it before. The symbols were one of these things.
Nathan used the symbols like my father uses text messages, infrequently, out of the blue, and with suspicious competency. I often caught Nathan in the corner of a room, his back to the door, symbol board in his lap. He’d be touching it, talking to himself. Thinking out loud, as it were. Other times, he’d saddle up before one of the touch-screen computer stations containing digital versions of the symbol board and rattle off a string of 20 or 30 symbols so fast the computer got bogged down in its processing and lagged in displaying them. I suspected he always meant exactly what he said, though I had no way of scientifically confirming this.
We ended up with a routine. I pretended that we were part of the experiment, doing important research, and he pretended not to understand what I was saying. A normal conversation between us using the symbols would look something like this:
Me: NATHAN YOU WANT FOOD, QUESTION?
Nathan somersaults into my lap, right over the symbol board.
Me (after extracting the board from under him): WANT FOOD, QUESTION?
Nathan pushes the board away. Hops up and runs away after biting me on my forearm. Playfully, but not without pain.
Me: I GET APPLES, QUESTION? GET CELERY, QUESTION? GET MILK, QUESTION?
Nathan approaches, holds my gaze from under his robust brow. I put the symbol board on the floor between us. He gestures, finger crooked, knuckle between his teeth. [Bite.]
Me: “Nathan, can you use the keyboard please?”
Nathan, hand snapping out: CHASE.
He springs away at full speed, a single fart helping propel him away down the hallway.
Me, following: “Okay, but no fair using rocket boosters.”
He smelled so clean, like construction paper and newly fallen leaves. We sat there, me running my fingers through the hair of his back, he slurping yogurt.
I wasn’t as diligent with the keyboard as I could have been, in part because I never had difficulty simply talking to him. In terms of receptive, rather than productive, competence, Nathan could handle it all. The rub was that he only listened when he felt like it. I often talked to him as I would any other person, except I was more honest and open. I started, genuinely, to consider Nathan one of my best friends.
He helped me work with the other apes, too. I would lay out maneuvers for shifting the apes between rooms and he would facilitate. He’d lead his family, including his grandmother, Worry, and his half-brother, Momo, through the door I’d indicated, then slip back through at the last moment, separating them in the new room while he and I got space to interact.
Me: “Okay, here’s the plan. Nathan, I want Worry and Momo to go to the greenhouse, but I want you to stay here so we can see each other and tickle and chase. Can you help me get them to move and you can stay here?”
Nathan peeps excitedly, and Worry and Momo echo him.
Me: “They will have really good blueberries and lettuce and Gatorade in the greenhouse. We can have some surprises over here. Ready to help me move them? Okay, here we go.”
Nathan sits by the door to the greenhouse, enthusiastic. He peeps to get the others interested. I operate the door and the others follow him into the transfer space between rooms. I start to close the door. At the last moment, Nathan slides through and sits alone in the room.
Me: “Nathan you did it. Great work, man.”
Nathan runs to the mesh for a tummy tickle.
This went both ways, as the other apes used his skills, too. It was hell on data collection. I can’t even count the number of times he ruined an experimental session because the non-language bonobos would drag him to the computer by the hand and wait while he performed their sets. He’d tap at the screen while they sat at the reward dispenser eating fruit chunk after fruit chunk produced for his correct answers.
One afternoon, after we had become full partners in crime, Nathan and I lounged in a pocket of space between the roof of the walk-in fridge and the kitchen ceiling. Sunlight floated lazily through the kitchen windows, warming the stainless steel of the countertops and cabinets, making the room toasty and our eyelids heavy. It was late spring, months since we’d first met, though it felt longer. Something about being with the apes made time less distinct.
When it was me and Nathan together, I could forget I was an employee and Nathan essentially my work. Our relationship had grown through months of one-on-one encounters. With each visit, we gained new privileges until there was hardly an inch of the building not available to us, so long as it wasn’t occupied. It could just be me and my friend. He, a boy, and me, his cool but slightly irresponsible guardian. Gone were my problems at college. Gone were the impenetrable complexities of human relationships. My anxiety around humans was inversely proportional to my comfort in the cage with the bonobos. Apes made so much more sense to me, Nathan most of all. It eventually got to the point where I stopped going to school, seven credits short of a degree, to work with the apes full-time.
Nathan used the symbols like my father uses text messages, infrequently, out of the blue, and with suspicious competency.
Between us in our nest atop the fridge was a pile of empty Diet Coke bottles, Go-GURT tubes, and half a bag of plump, red grapes. There were plenty of vegetables in the fridge under us, but they held little appeal. When Nathan and I went to the kitchen, we were raiders. We descended like locusts and went straight for the good stuff.
The kitchen was our favorite place to go. It held not just food, but choice. There, Nathan could eat whatever he wanted, not what was brought to him by a caretaker. However, the kitchen was, ultimately, a human place, and as a result, I wasn’t able to fully relax. There were all these reminders of how human spaces were not made to accommodate us. Blenders with stainless steel blades, kitchen knives, toxic cleaning agents, gas stove burners. Dangers everywhere.
Nathan dropped the last Diet Coke bottle between us and burped. I retrieved a paper board with the symbols on it. “Nathan,” I asked, pointing to symbols to accompany my words.
WANT MORE COKE? WANT APPLE?
He pushed the board away, then pulled me in for a hug and tickle. If anything, Nathan taught me how impossible the science of ape language was to perform. His whole body was an instrument of expression. He manipulated the space between us like prose, varying the pressure of his teeth on my skin to change the tone of a message, his every touch held its own grammar as questions and statements. Nathan didn’t perform language in a way that would be easy to parse and study, he embodied it. He performed it in the way of a dancer. He lived it.
Nathan preferred gestures. Words filled him up and he had to expel their captive energy through his limbs in a way the symbols couldn’t facilitate. Crooked index finger between his teeth: Bite me. Point at keys hanging from my belt loop on a carabiner: [Keys/Open]. Crooked middle finger twisting at a door: [Open/Unlock]. Hand raised to his neck, motioning as if to let steam out of an Oxford shirt: [Collar].
If he gestured for a collar, I’d ask, “You want to go outside?” Or “You want to go to the kitchen?” He would vocalize in response, then sit with his chin raised to expedite the process. I didn’t really like the collar, but whenever I could, I looped the thick nylon strap around his neck and locked the full-sized padlock that secured it. The heavy pendant hung between the ends of his collarbones. He inspected it with his fingers, adjusting to its heft. The thing was incongruous with this person, this child.
He asked for it every day I saw him. Often repeatedly. Switching between that gesture and the one asking for my keys. He wanted, more than just about anything else, to traverse the boundaries between ape and human space. For every step I took into his world, he was equally desperate — more so, even — to take one into mine. Every time I successfully begged, cajoled, and (sometimes) argued with humans for the opportunity to enter his world, he would greet me by asking for me to take him back to where I’d come from. Get me out of this place, he seemed to say.
So, I traded my discomfort with the collar for the chance to make him happy. He traded the cage he lived in for the one he wore around his neck. The easiest days were the ones when I didn’t have to say “no” to him. When he asked for keys or a collar and I could say “Of course” and we would go gorge ourselves and loiter on top of the walk-in fridge.
I lived for those days of forgetting. The times when we found the right balance between the demands of our worlds and our own desires, but I was lucky if there was enough staff to accommodate us having half the building once every few weeks or so.
Nathan didn’t perform language in a way that would be easy to parse and study, he embodied it. He performed it in the way of a dancer. He lived it.
Though Nathan had been raised to be both bonobo and human, his was a secondary type of personhood. Not like that of a human child. He could enter the kitchen, but only on a leash. He was taught, but could not go to school. He had the language to ask to go outside, but he could never venture beyond the walls of the facility. I kept trying to find ways to make up for that disconnect, but, as a frustratingly junior member of staff, I couldn’t.
One day we lazed on top of the fridge until Nathan stirred and descended. My thoughts came slow in the sun-warmed room. I thought he wanted a different kind of snack until he moved toward the sink. His head disappeared as he ducked under with his leash dragging behind him.
“Nathan, c’mon man,” I said. “Nothing good down there.”
I scrambled down, imagining a montage of him ingesting jugs of cleaning solvents or blinding his eyes with toxic sprays. I approached but before I could reach him, Nathan hung from the sink lip, reared back, and kicked the garbage disposal with all his considerable muscle. He planted several rocking blows to it before I got him turned around.
The spell he cast that made me forget the human world dissipated with the thuds of his feet against metal. I was a human and, worse, an employee. He was an ape then. It hurt to be reminded of that.
I didn’t want to get in trouble. I couldn’t afford to replace the garbage disposal. Worse, I couldn’t afford to have my time with Nathan revoked or reduced to less than it already was. But even more than that, I wanted to prove that we had something. That our connection was real and tangible. I knew he was special, but I wanted us to be special too.
I pulled him away from the sink, my ears hot. He’d never been so blatantly destructive around me before.
“What’s wrong with you?” I used the voice I give to my dogs when they misbehave. “No!”
Nathan didn’t meet my eyes. He squirmed away only to plant another rocking blow on the disposal. I pulled him back into position with firm hands on his shoulders.
“No, Nathan. No! That’s bad.” I was near to shouting.
Nathan’s eyes were hard at the corners. He tested my hold once more, paused, then opened his mouth and screamed. He wailed long strings of ear-splitting EEEs. The whole ape house heard him. They barked, sharp, in response. He screamed so hard and so much that within minutes all his skin had broken out in half-dollar-sized hives. I unhanded him and he left my side to go sulk in a corner, screaming all the while.
The director, who’d heard the commotion, joined us after a few minutes. Nathan sprang into her arms and hugged her close, looking at me the whole time. Using his proximity to her and distance from me to express his displeasure. She soothed him and I explained the situation. Before she returned him to his ape family with a dose of liquid grape children’s Benadryl in him, I apologized. I gave him some M&M’s and a special juice box and, after a pause, he offered his back for a tickle. He would accept my offering, but he wanted me to be sorry for longer.
“Disagreements,” the director said after returning him, “are part of having language.”
The hives were no surprise to her. Nathan often got so worked up that his body rebelled. As if his emotions, same as his words, were too strong for their little container and pushed against his skin to escape.
They were the main reason why we didn’t notice when he got actually sick.
The study of ape language is a field of broken promises. Its history is littered with the allegedly well-meaning intentions of seemingly caring people and the tragic, too early passings of their charges. Their failures are made all the more devastating in that, despite what they call the apes — subjects, participants, entrants — they are the failures of parents toward their children.
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Ape language research, at its heart, seeks to investigate the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Since raising human infants in a context removed from all human influence is ethically impossible, they performed the inverse: raising apes in entirely human environments. That has historically not met the same ethical barriers, despite infants being involved in each case.
Take Gua, adopted by a pair of psychologists, the Kelloggs, who had recently given birth to their first child, Donald. The Kelloggs stressed that for any co-rearing experiment to work, the ape must be treated as human in all regards, to avoid bias. As such, Gua lived in the Kelloggs’ house, ate at the table, and generally did everything with Donald. They were inseparable, like twins, and they developed at almost identical rates in everything but their speech.
Winthrop Kellogg’s original hypothesis, that Gua would develop aspects of human behavior, proved true. What he did not anticipate, however, was that this cultural blending would be a two-way exchange; the spectrum between Pan and Homo traversed in both directions. While Gua grew more human, Donald also took on some of Gua’s apeness, such as extensive biting. The two children met in the middle, the primary contributor to the end of the experiment.
For every step I took into his world, he was equally desperate — more so, even — to take one into mine
In each ape language study, there is one overriding and unspoken promise — we will give you a new family if you become sufficiently like us (but not if our children become like you). Unlike Gua and others, Nathan kept his ape family. Still, the promise of his life was the same, if the terms slightly altered. It all boiled down to this: We will make you one of us.
No study has yet been able to make good on that promise. No matter what the shape, be it a collar, a mesh enclosure, or a house, there is always a cage around the apes involved. They are never truly welcomed into human society. The humans, meanwhile, get to go home at the end of the day.
Of the approximately 100 years of other ape language studies, hardly any of the apes had Nathan’s freedom. These apes were almost all taken from their mothers as infants, some as young as 2 days old, and placed in human homes or labs. Nearly all lived short, tragic lives compared to the potential 60-70 years available to them naturally. As if a stark contrast between the mental and physical self invariably tempts tragedy. Kellogg’s Gua was returned to a research center after nine months in their home (pneumonia, 3); Ladygina-Kohts’ Joni ate paint from the walls of her home (lead poisoning, 3); Hayes’ Viki fell sick during the study period (viral meningitis, 7); Temerlin’s Lucy was released back into the wild after living in a human home in Oklahoma for years (suspected poaching, 23); and Nim Chimpsky was “retired” to a research lab, which sold him into biomedical research, from which he was rescued by an animal sanctuary to live as their sole chimpanzee (heart attack, 26). So many either didn’t survive their studies or barely did. The handful of language apes, like Washoe, Koko, and Kanzi who have lived into and beyond their third decade are rare exceptions.
Several months after the garbage disposal disagreement, factors outside our control interrupted our time together. In the human half of the building, new leadership took over, stiffening the rules about contact with apes. Months passed. Then, just as we were about to renew our one-on-ones, Nathan got sick. I saw him daily during this time but it was always through the mesh of the cage. I pushed so far through it to touch and tickle him that it hurt the web of skin between my fingers.
It came out of nowhere. One day his face just swelled up. His eyes shrank to crescents between his puffy brow and cheeks. No one had any answers for it, not even the vet. Every morning I came in, Nathan looked like he had been in a boxing match the night before. We gave him Benadryl and Claritin over and over. It made him groggy, but it didn’t seem to help his swelling. Nothing seemed to help. We eliminated potential allergens. Changed cleaning solutions, avoided wheat gluten, and banned food with certain dyes. All to no effect.
As the sickness swept through him, he maintained a front of normalcy. When he chose to talk using symbols, it still came out in torrents. When he wanted to chase, he ran as fast as he could, even if the run was more of a tumble and the game didn’t last as long as usual. The vet, whose practice focused primarily on Iowa farm animals, visited often. She did her best, but Nathan was a boy, not a horse.
It didn’t go away. I asked that he see a different doctor, a human one. But in this, he was not human enough. There were ape-specific risks of a more thorough workup and, it was assumed, they outweighed the benefits given his symptoms. A full workup would require sedation and transportation and more. Nathan’s father had died two years earlier from complications with anesthesia for an elective procedure and his loss was still fresh in everyone’s heart.
Over the course of half a year, Nathan’s swelling receded as mysteriously as it had arisen. By the time spring rolled around, he was almost normal, though his hair was a little wirier and his arms had lost some of their beef. His eyes also drooped at the outside, making him look eternally tired. But he was nearly his old self, if more subdued.
By May, with the fields outside bursting with purple, orange, and yellow wildflowers, I finally got the supervisor’s approval to go in again with Nathan. I’d been requesting it for months. Just after I got the green light, however, Nathan stopped eating and our reunion was put on hold. It didn’t matter the meal, he took a couple of bites and set it aside. Then his breathing became labored. He wheezed and coughed so loud I could hear it throughout the building. His energy gone, he spent most of his time napping. I knew I had to see him, so I did.
Nathan was dozing when I entered his room for the first time in over a year. It was late morning. I didn’t ask permission, I simply told the other caretakers that I would need that half of the building.
“Hi, Nathan,” I said as I entered. He was lying on a pile of blankets. He didn’t move at the sound of the door, but as I spoke, he lifted himself and approached. The slump of his shoulders told me just how uncomfortable he was. His swagger was gone. I didn’t think anything could take the strut out of his walk. Now, he was deflated. He hadn’t eaten more than a couple of bites in days.
And yet, he didn’t miss a beat. He hugged me about the legs, slapped my thighs, and sprung away awkwardly. Just like we normally greeted one another, only in slow motion. Now his sprint was more of a lope. I shuffled so I didn’t overtake him. We did one round of this before he led me back to his bed, laid down, and asked me to tickle him. As my fingers probed his ribs, he grunted a laugh that became wheezing and quickly turned into a racking cough. It passed, and he looked at me with his mouth hanging slightly agape as if all the strength required to close it was concentrated at the corners of his wincing eyes. I began to tickle him again, this time softly, but he brushed my hands away.
I shouldn’t have let so much time go by, I thought as we sat there, my back to one wall and Nathan inert across my thighs. It used to take hours before he’d slow down enough that we could relax like this. Today it took barely a minute.
My fingers tentatively massaged him. They met bone much easier than before. The curving mounds of his muscles were reduced, his skin slack. During the worst of his sickness, when the swelling and itching were at their highest, he’d pulled most of his arm hair out. The baldness highlighted his new angularity. I ran my fingers over his bare forehead. His sideburns were plucked clean and what hair was left was brittle stubble, bending and snapping like sun-bleached grass.
Someone brought a scale to get Nathan’s weight for the vet. He didn’t want to move and threatened to bite me when I suggested it. I waited a minute for him to doze off again, then picked him up and carried him to the scale. He’d lost over 20 pounds in under three months.
It came out of nowhere. One day his face just swelled up. His eyes shrank to crescents between his puffy brow and cheeks. No one had any answers for it, not even the vet.
We spent the remainder of the day resting. With me running my hand over his skin, and him in a near-constant adjustment of his position. Intermittently, I’d leave to get him a popsicle or some juice. I took one of his bare feet in my hand and nibbled on his toes. He huffed one laugh as if to humor me, but nothing more. I brought him M&M’s, but these were too hard for him to eat and he set them aside.
That night, I entered his cage with fresh blankets and a bowl of yogurt, an echo of our first meeting. He tried a bit of yogurt, then put the bowl down next to his bed. I’d been asked to get a blood oxygen reading for the vet with a clip that went on the end of Nathan’s finger. I moved to his side while he slipped in and out of an uneasy sleep and took his hand in mine. A coworker threaded the sensor through the mesh. Before I could clamp the device on his index finger, he woke, lunging and snapping at me. He didn’t get me, but the anger in his movements stung as much as a bite would have.
I felt like I was betraying him, putting human obligations above his very clear refusal. He let me hold his hand again. This time I just held it. When he seemed to be fully asleep, I tried again. Once it got a reading, I unclamped it quickly, whispered good night, and slunk out of his room.
Eight hours later, he was carried out of the building on a blanket, finally breaking free of its walls, to get a full medical workup. During the night he had briefly gone into respiratory arrest. The risks of getting him checked out were now outweighed by the seriousness of his condition. They carried him by me, sleeping, but with his hands curled and ready, thumbs against the ends of his drawn index and middle fingers. I saw the potential in them. They were poised as if ready to ask for his Collar or my Keys at the very instant he woke.
In the years since I have often wondered what we accomplished in the ape house. What exactly was it that I was a part of? Did those in charge really believe all that they were saying? I thought we were doing it better, in knowing no one ever needed to tear infant apes from their mothers to learn about the limits of language. The other ape language studies had got the question wrong, I thought. They all asked whether an ape could talk if we made them sufficiently in our image. I thought we were asking if we could understand each other as equals. The true test not being in the apes’ ability to speak but in our capacity to listen.
I thought we were different. Better. But, we were not, our bonobos no more equal than the charges of any other study. Our cages and facilities were simply nicer; our methods softer.
So much of my understanding of language, and its limits, came from Nathan. His silences especially. Language is messy and incomplete and variable and profound and decidedly unscientific. There is no single, controllable, independent variable. After all, there are so many things that are beyond the ability of words to express. So much meaning outside that which is merely spoken.
For example: There was no symbol for CANCER on the symbol keyboard. No one had ever needed to say LYMPHOMA. The lexicon was limited, but HURT was there, and I had never once seen Nathan use it. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand, it was that he would never admit such a thing. He had too big a chip on his shoulder.
For example: The way my coworker’s voice caught on the phone, starting several utterances until “He didn’t make it” could escape, and I had already known what he had to tell me. And the way I made the same stutter stop code of not-quite-shock and not-yet-loss before managing “I’m on my way” in response, and he had already known that as well.
For example: How the people I passed as I walked through the ape house, hood over my head, made soft, unintelligible noises at me. Emitting contributions to the pall over the building. I kept moving, unsure of whether a response was expected. Unable to make one if it was. I just continued walking toward the van that had taken him to the hospital and back, parked at the other end of the facility.
For example: In the van — the gray — the interior gray — sky gray — world gray — the cold of his hand — he — splayed — the coolness of his forehead — kissing the stubble of his forehead — kissing and muttering — same three syllables — waiting for warmth to return.
For example: The stillness of the building as he was carried in and laid before the glass of the greenhouse where his family waited, pressed against the window, shoulders one against another, crowding together. The silence as deep and absolute as the understanding in his mother’s eyes.
Dan Musgrave was raised by animals in rural Kansas. He is a writer and photographer with a particular interest in the intersections of the human and animal world. For nearly seven years, he did linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral research with captive bonobos while they trained him in the art of being a better person.
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The dark side of the transmigrante industry. A meditation on the true meaning of public safety. Staggering new health recommendations around alcohol consumption. Insight into the writers’ strike and an ode to the beauty of bees. For more great reading, be sure to check out our editors’ picks.
Through a special visa program, transmigrantes are able to drive goods and vehicles from the U.S. to Central America via Mexico, without paying for high import and export fees. These truckers, many originally from Central America, are able to connect with their home countries through this line of work, while the industry as a whole transforms America’s excess items into valuable goods abroad. In 2014, one trucker, Guatemalan-born Enrique Orlando León, took a contract job from a Colorado employer to deliver a truck, apparently full of furniture, to his homeland. It was a journey he’d taken many times before, but this time, it all went horribly wrong. Chris Walker recounts the kidnapping, explores the unknowns around Orlando’s capture that still plague him, and describes how this terrifying ordeal has affected his entire family. Through this one man’s story, Walker exposes a dark side of the transmigrante industry. —CLR
Katie Prout | Chicago Reader | April 20, 2023 | 2,890 words
I was going to pick a different story this week, but then a man named Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator, was killed on the New York subway. He was unhoused, hungry, tired, distressed. He said as much to a car of people. In response, another passenger put him in a choke hold until he died. The best thing I’ve read about this appalling crime is a short, poignant piece in Defector. As a companion, I recommend this essay by Katie Prout, who recently spent time on Chicago’s public transport system talking to people who live there because they don’t have much other choice. Prout interrogates what politicians, the media, and many American citizens mean when they talk about public safety. Safety for whom, and from what? Who counts as part of the public, and who is cast aside? Jordan Neely should still be alive. He deserved better. America owed him more. —SD
Tim Requarth | Slate | April 23, 2023 | 4,656 words
Not so long ago, a glass of red wine with dinner was considered a health benefit. Apparently there was research to back this moderate approach to tipple. New guidelines from the World Health Organization, the World Heart Federation, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction tell us something anyone who imbibes, even just a little, already knows: Alcohol is essentially poison. (Did they really have to gang up on us?) “’Mainstream scientific opinion has flipped,’ said Tim Stockwell, a professor at the University of Victoria who was on the expert panel that rewrote Canada’s guidance on alcohol and health. Last month, Stockwell and others published a new major study rounding up nearly 40 years of research in some 5 million patients, concluding that previous research was so conceptually flawed that alcohol’s supposed health benefits were mostly a statistical mirage.” For Slate, science writer Tim Requarth does a great job investigating what led to this staggering discovery. (For more Tim Requarth, be sure to check out “The Final Five Percent,” his award-winning reported personal essay on traumatic brain injury.) —KS
Michael Schulman | The New Yorker | April 29, 2023 | 2,085 words
For the first chunk of adulthood, I thought about my TV-writer friends as having hit some sort of lottery. Here I was, writing about real people and real events like a chump, while they were sitting around a table with their friends, eating junk food and making up stories — and earning ungodly amounts of money (or so I imagined) in the process. Finish a season, go to another show, climb the ladder, rinse, repeat. Then streaming came to town, and my friends’ dispatches from the front started to change. Uncertainty. Anxiety. Short-term gigs with no sense of security. All of a sudden, TV writing started to sound a lot more like the journalism game than I’d thought. Michael Schulman’s recent New Yorker piece bears out that suspicion with a clear, anecdote-driven explanation of exactly how streaming accelerated the devaluation of the creative act. The writers’ strike that began this week isn’t solely about residuals and streaming, of course — AI’s ever-advancing inroads are maybe even more existentially concerning — but after reading this piece you’ll realize that the Final Draft crowd isn’t different from any other labor force whose bosses are privileging profits over people. Seeing your name on a screen doesn’t necessarily pay the rent. —PR
Celia Bell | Texas Highways | May 2, 2023 | 2,847 words
Celia Bell’s warm descriptions make bee society sound lovely, with her bees visiting “flowers or the quiet creek, or, on the hottest days, hang[ing] in clusters like elderberries on the outside of the hive, waiting for a breath of cool air.” The pleasure she finds in their world is not taken for granted. After entering beekeeping during the pandemic, Bell is conscious of how it grounds her and keeps her present. A video game fan, she draws thoughtful comparisons to the rendering of the natural world in gaming. While appreciating the artistry of game developers, she feels outside of her body in their virtual landscapes, whereas sweating in an apiary her body calls out its needs, forcing her to connect with her physical self. Although online life can creep in — a buzzing phone is never far away — the bees open up “the wonder and specificity of the world.” This reflective essay will make you consider which reality you choose to spend your time in. —CW
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Tyler J. Kelley | Bloomberg Businesweek | April 28, 2023 | 4,851 words
Dave Chappelle has lived full-time in the tiny, idyllic Ohio town of Yellow Springs for more than 15 years; at this point, it’s as much a part of his personal brand as the everpresent cigarette. But as Tyler J. Kelley reports, Chappelle’s impact on Yellow Springs — including his many real estate purchases and a number of questionably zoned live shows — has become a point of contention among townspeople who fear the end of affordability and find themselves torn between pride and preservation. —PR
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On May 2, a young man named Jordan Neely was killed on the New York City subway. Neely, who was an unhoused New Yorker, was reportedly behaving erratically, so a fellow passenger, an ex-Marine who as of this writing has not been arrested or named by law enforcement, put him in a choke hold until he died. In the wake of this shocking crime, Aaron Gordon of Vice‘s Motherboard vertical examines how public transit became the front line of America’s housing crisis:
[J]ust because it is a known problem doesn’t mean there is an intelligent, evidence-based public discourse on what to do about it. The fact is that transit agencies have, to varying degrees, been dealing with this question for decades. Paradoxically, many members of the public, politicians, and the political commentariat clamor that transit agencies do something, even though the root cause of homelessness is quite obviously a housing problem and not a transit problem. And that something usually involves the same short-term non-solution that hasn’t worked for decades — ramping up police presence and enforcement at great cost — while ignoring the cheaper and more effective long-term solution of investing in outreach workers, drop-in centers with food and facilities, shelter beds, and supportive housing.
For this article, I spoke to local and national housing and transportation experts, organizations that work closely with the homeless on a daily basis, and transit agencies around the country. I asked them: What are transit agencies doing about homelessness, and what should they be doing?
I found near-universal agreement that the old approach of relying on police-based enforcement — creating a code of conduct that bans specific things homeless people do in public, then arresting them for it — is losing favor. Instead, transit agencies have embraced a model of “partnerships” with existing city agencies and nonprofits that tackle homelessness, a move that sounds sensible on its face but is often used as another excuse to continue to invest little or no money in the problem.
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It was a warm winter’s day in San Francisco, and the city’s main port, the Embarcadero, bustled with activity. Men dressed in waistcoats, blazers, and homburg and bowler hats smoked their pipes and fidgeted with their mustaches. Women in elegant blouses and skirts so long they touched the ground sheltered from the sun under broad-brimmed hats trimmed with feathers, ribbons, and flowers. Children clung to their mothers and watched wide-eyed as crewmen hauled more than 1,400 tons of cargo and freight—canned goods, fresh fruit and vegetables, crates of wine—into the forward hatch of the steamship Valencia, soon to depart for Seattle.
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Frank Bunker and his family stood in the crowd waiting to board the ship. Today, January 20, 1906, marked the beginning of a new chapter in Bunker’s life. In his late thirties, with dark, neatly parted hair and a clean-shaven face, Bunker had recently accepted a prestigious job as assistant superintendent of the Seattle school district. He had built his reputation as a bright young teacher and administrator in San Francisco—one newspaper touted him as being among “the best educators in the state.” Seattle presented an exciting new opportunity. It was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, with a population that had exploded from 3,553 people in 1880 to more than 80,000 by 1900. Bunker hoped to leave his mark on the city’s school system.
Seattle was thriving for one reason: gold. With the discovery of bullion in the Yukon and Alaska in the late 1800s, Seattle became known as the “gateway to gold” among prospectors looking to head north and make it rich. In a few short years, the frenzy had transformed Seattle from a frontier town into a metropolitan hub. Real estate, shipbuilding, and other economic sectors were booming.
Industry was why F. J. Campbell, his wife, and their 16-year-old daughter were traveling to Seattle on the Valencia. Campbell was of average build, with a finely groomed mustache. He had been employed as an agent by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in Alameda, just across the bay from San Francisco, until he struck up a friendship with an employee of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, who convinced him that they could start their own machine business in Seattle. Eager to chase his fortune, Campbell quit his job, packed up his family, and secured passage north.
The Bunkers and Campbells were among the roughly 100 passengers booked on the January 20 journey. Originally, a ship called City of Puebla was scheduled to carry them to Seattle, but the vessel’s tail shaft had snapped on a recent voyage, so the Pacific Coast Steamship Company commissioned the Valencia in its place. The iron-hulled ship boasted three decks, a single smokestack, and two masts, as well as a 1,000-horsepower engine that allowed it to reach a cruising speed of 11 knots. The ship looked sleek, with a bow stretching 100 feet long. Because the Valencia was designed to run the warm Atlantic waters between New York and Venezuela, however, it could be challenging to guide through the notoriously volatile seas of the Pacific Northwest, where it had been sailing for the past several years.
Tasked with getting the Valencia safely to port was a crew of more than 60, led by Captain Oscar Marcus Johnson. A man of slender, rigid frame, Johnson came from a family of mariners. Born in Norway, he had traveled to America as a teenager. He started as a common seaman and worked his way up. Now 40, Marcus had been married to his wife, Mary, for five years. The couple resided with their three-year-old daughter on Powell Street, which connected San Francisco’s main fishing wharf to Market Street. Mary worried about her husband when he went to sea; she looked forward to the moment when she could wave to him from their front window upon his return.
Mary wasn’t the only woman on Powell Street anxious for her husband’s well-being. Among the Johnsons’ neighbors were the Valencia’s fourth officer, Herman Aberg, and his wife. According to Mrs. Aberg, not long before Herman departed on the trip to Seattle, a fortune-teller arrived at their doorstep, knelt, and laid out what the Seattle Daily Times later called “ancient grease-covered cards.” The fortune-teller predicted that Herman would soon be shipwrecked, leaving Mrs. Aberg a widow. Herman laughed. Mrs. Aberg begged him not to go on the journey, but Herman went anyway.
Mrs. Aberg would describe the unheeded premonition later, when Herman did not return to Powell Street, meeting his end in the cold, cruel ocean hundreds of miles from home. It would prove just one haunting detail in a story full of them.
The fortune-teller predicted that Herman would soon be shipwrecked, leaving Mrs. Aberg a widow. Herman laughed. Mrs. Aberg begged him not to go on the journey.
A person prone to superstition might be forgiven for thinking that the Valencia was cursed. Built in 1882, the shipwas fired upon the following year near the island of Curaçao, and again four years later, this time by a Spanish warship just off the Cuban coast. During the Spanish-American War, it was leased to the U.S. Army and used to transport troops to the Philippines as part of an unofficial effort to aid rebels who, like their Cuban counterparts, were vying for independence from Spain. When the conflict ended, the Valencia’s owners put it to work transporting gold-crazed passengers to and from Alaska and the Yukon, but the ship’s luck didn’t change in the new environment. In March 1898, during its maiden voyage to Alaska’s Copper River, rough seas and poor food quality almost led to a mutiny. In February 1903, another steamship rammed into the Valencia a quarter-mile from Seattle’s harbor, nearly wrecking it. And in 1905, Captain Johnson ran it aground just outside St. Michael, Alaska; the crew had to move 75 tons of cargo onto another vessel before they could free the Valencia.
It is impossible to know if this legacy was on Captain Johnson’s mind after passengers finished boarding the Valencia and the ship sailed away from the Embarcadero, past Yerba Buena Island, and through the Golden Gate to the open ocean. Though Johnson occasionally commanded the Valencia, taking the ship up north during the summer months, he had only taken the route to Seattle as captain of a different steamship, called Queen. The trip required sailing through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, part of the stretch of ocean between southern Oregon and the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where hundreds if not thousands of ships had wrecked by the early 20th century, earning it an ominous moniker: Graveyard of the Pacific.
The region’s unpredictable weather and ocean currents often pushed ships toward the wet, rugged, foggy coastline, creating a navigational nightmare. The farther north a ship traveled, the worse the conditions tended to get, particularly in winter. Unlike the Atlantic coast, which had numerous harbors where ships could shelter during storms, the shore of the Pacific provided little refuge. Between San Francisco and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a distance of approximately 660 nautical miles, there were maybe ten harbors that could be used by ships the size of the Valencia, if conditions were favorable. If a vessel was in distress, running aground on a sandy beach was rarely an option, as there were few such beaches to speak of. Meanwhile, of the 279 U.S. coastal lifesaving stations, only a handful were on the Pacific.
Johnson and his crew planned to keep the ship between five and twenty miles of the coastline for the duration of the voyage. They hoped to reach the Cape Flattery lighthouse on Tatoosh Island, marking the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, within 48 hours. They hoped, too, for calm seas. In November 1875, the steamship Pacificsank 80 miles south of Cape Flattery in under an hour, taking as many as 300 souls to their deaths.
The first day of the Valencia’s voyage was uneventful; the ship steamed smoothly into the starry night. By roughly 5:15 a.m. on Sunday, it had traveled 190 miles and passed the lighthouse at Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point in California. It was the last time the people aboard would have a clear view of the shore until they reached Washington State. Upon passing Cape Mendocino, it was typical for a ship’s captain to chart a course to the Umatilla lightship, 477 miles north. The lightship was at a critical junction in the voyage to Seattle, a beacon signaling that Cape Flattery, and a ship’s necessary turn eastward, was just 14 miles away.
As the Valencia steamed up the coast, the weather worsened. On Sunday afternoon, the wind shifted from a northerly breeze to southeastern gusts. Gray clouds gathered over the ocean, and as the sky became hazy, the seas grew heavy.
At 5:30 p.m., Johnson noted in the Valencia’s logbook that the ship, then ten miles offshore, had passed Cape Blanco on the Oregon coast, meaning that it had traveled 335 miles from San Francisco. However, second officer Peter E. Peterson would later say that no one on the ship’s bridge could see the Cape Blanco lighthouse, perched atop 200-foot chalky-white cliffs.
The sun briefly appeared on Monday morning, but conditions declined as the day went on. Peterson later said that visibility reduced to the point that he could see only a couple of miles into the distance. It was evident that Captain Johnson was starting to feel anxious. That evening, around 8 p.m., he asked Peterson, “When do you think we are going to make Umatilla lightship?”
Peterson was an experienced seaman who had worked for the Pacific Coast Steamship Company for nearly a decade. He had started as a sailor on the ship Pomona, where he lost a finger. By 1906, Peterson knew the route from San Francisco to Seattle well, having traveled it more than 100 times, including on the City of Puebla as second mate.
Now Peterson studied the Valencia’s log, an instrument trailing behind the ship to help estimate its speed, and concluded that they had traveled 307 miles beyond Cape Blanco. In theory that meant the ship was only 13 miles away from the Umatilla lightship and should pass it sometime around 9:30 p.m. However, Johnson and first officer W. Holmes believed that the Valencia’s log was overrunning by approximately 6 percent—in other words, they thought that the ship was traveling slower than the log showed. It’s not clear why Johnson and Holmes held that belief, though Johnson’s previous experience in the area may have held a clue. He had commanded ships in the area during spring and summer, when northerly winds prevailed. In winter the opposite was true; winds from the south propelled ships up the Pacific coast at higher speeds.
Peterson told the captain that he trusted the log, given the weather conditions and his knowledge of the ocean at this time of year. If anything, he suspected that the log was underrunning. But he did not press the point. This was Peterson’s first trip on the Valencia; he had joined the ship’s crew at the last minute, to replace an officer who had been transferred to another vessel. Peterson knew virtually none of the men on board, save for a few servers, two cooks, and a fireman. He had never worked with any of the other officers, and it was a violation of the accepted order on any ship to defy the captain. Later Peterson would say that he took no part in the calculations required to plot the Valencia’s course—that was Johnson’s and Holmes’s responsibility.
By 9 p.m. on Monday, the Valencia’s logshowed that the ship had traveled 652 miles, which would have put it very close to the Umatilla lightship. However, Johnson was adamant that the lighthouse was still some 40 miles away. Privately, Peterson believed that the Valencia was likely past the lightship, nearing the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Around this time, Johnson ordered a course change that would bring the ship closer to the coastline. He also told the crew to gauge the depth of the ocean beneath the ship every half-hour by taking sounding measurements. To do this, the men dropped an 1,800-foot cable into the water until it hit bottom. At 9:30 p.m., the crew detected a sounding of 480 feet. An hour later, they measured 360 feet. The shallower water likely meant that the ship was getting closer to land.
By 11 p.m., the ship was moving dead slow, just four or five miles per hour. Johnson was sure the Valencia was approaching Cape Flattery. The captain stood on the bridge, waiting to hear a fog signal bellow from shore. No sound came.
Peterson later claimed that Johnson and Holmes had discussed taking the vessel west and waiting in the open ocean until daylight to figure out their exact location, but Johnson never gave that order. Instead, the Valencia continued chugging east. The sounding measurement at 11:15 p.m. was 240 feet. At 11:35 it was 180. Ten minutes later, the ocean’s depth was just over 140 feet.
These were not the expected readings for the area where Johnson thought the ship was—the water was getting too shallow too quickly. Panicked, he changed course again, plotting a northwest route. Soon after, Peterson spied a dark object on the ship’s starboard side. He ran across the bridge and pointed it out to the captain.
When Johnson saw the dark silhouette, he cried out, “In the name of God, where are we?” He ordered Peterson to direct the crew to turn the ship “hard to starboard.” Peterson sprinted to the telegraph to issue the instruction.
The ship turned sharply, but it was too late. Just a few minutes before midnight, the Valencia collided with a rocky reef.
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In 1986, Barbara Lowe won five games of Jeopardy! in a row, qualifying for the Tournament of Champions. But she didn’t appear in the tournament, and her games vanished from reruns of the show — only recently did Jeopardy! uber-fans recover and digitize the only known recordings of her episodes. In pop culture lore, Lowe became a villain: Rumors circulated that she had lied on her application for the show, violated contestant policies, and behaved badly on set. Claire McNear, who published a book about Jeopardy! in 2020, tracked Lowe down to try to get the bottom of what happened and found that the short answer might be, well, sexism:
In 1993, Harry Eisenberg, a writer turned producer during the first seven years of the Jeopardy! reboot, published a dishy account of his time at the program. Inside Jeopardy!: What Really Goes on at TV’s Top Quiz Show swiftly landed Eisenberg in hot water with his former employer, chiefly over his description of the show systematically altering game material to provide easier clues for female contestants — an act that would amount to a violation of fairness rules enshrined by the Federal Communications Commission in the wake of the 1950s quiz show scandals. Jeopardy! denied that the show did any such thing; a later edition of Eisenberg’s book dropped the claim.
But both versions of the book featured Eisenberg’s reflections on Lowe. Eisenberg radiated a strong dislike: Lowe, he wrote, “appeared rather strange” and prompted the most letters objecting to a contestant’s “mannerisms and behavior” that the show had ever received. Eisenberg described a fractious moment after Lowe rang in on a clue reading: “Sons of millionaires who killed Bobby Franks as a ‘scientific experiment.’”
“Her response was, ‘Who were Leopold and Leeb?’” Eisenberg wrote. “Alex ruled her incorrect, at which point she immediately shot back, ‘Leeb is just the German pronunciation of Loeb.’ Rather than get into an argument with her right in the middle of the show, Alex went ahead and gave it to her.”
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