It’s not the first Palahniuk piece you’ve read, but Jonathan Russell Clarks threads a nice line between profile and criticism—steeping himself in the novelist’s oeuvre before meeting with him, then using Palahniuk’s latest book to guide the conversation while also allowing space to bounce his own reads off the man.
When Palahniuk talks about this moment, I sense a real note of resignation in his voice. “That […] scene is the most human scene I’ve ever written,” he says. “But nobody will appreciate that. Nobody will appreciate the pathos of that scene, because they’ll fix on the sort of dirtiness of it.”
He’s hurt. It hurts him that people rarely grasp the emotional punch of his writing, that they aren’t more moved by the grounded feelings and earned catharses of his characters. Readers don’t see how much his own personal anguish and history informs his fiction. But they can’t. They aren’t privy to enough of Palahniuk’s life to make the connections. They’re understandably distracted by the heightened plots and grotesque imagery and lurid themes. The emotions are there, certainly, but sometimes the visceral intensity overpowers the soulful underpinnings.
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What price would you pay to summit K2, a mountain far more technical and challenging than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain? Could you literally walk past a dying man in order to get there? This past July 27th, 100 people bypassed Pakistani porter Mohammed Hassan on their way to the summit as he lay dying after a fall. For Insider, Matthew Loh tries to understand.
By the end of the summit window, at least 102 people had conquered K2. All paying climbers would descend the mountain safely, and regroup at base camp.
Mohammad did not.
His death would shake the mountaineering industry in the weeks to come, and eventually make headlines worldwide. The climbers who summited K2 that day were swept into the heart of a bitter debate. Speculation churned as people argued whether a man more than 8,000 meters above sea level could have been saved from the Mountain of Mountains — or whether greed for glory had blinded more than 100 climbers and left Mohammad stranded on the ice.
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A nail-biter of a yarn about a journey into frozen terrain, in search of evidence of what happened to a British expedition that vanished in 1870:
Our crew of five had left Maine in my sailboat, Polar Sun, more than two months earlier to follow the route of the legendary explorer Sir John Franklin. He’d set off from England in 1845 in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, a sea route over the icy top of North America that would open a new trading avenue to the riches of the Far East. But Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, and his crew of 128 men had disappeared. What no one knew at the time was that the ships had become trapped in ice, stranding Franklin and his men deep in the Arctic. None lived to tell what happened, and no detailed written account of their ordeal has been found. This void in the historical record, collectively known as “the Franklin mystery,” has led to more than 170 years of speculation. It has also spawned generations of devoted “Franklinites” obsessed with piecing together the story of how more than a hundred British sailors tried to walk out of one of the most inhospitable wildernesses on Earth.
Over the years, I too had become a Franklinite. With morbid fascination, I read all the books I could find on the subject, imagining myself as a member of the doomed crew, and puzzling over the many unanswered questions: Where was Franklin buried? Where were his logbooks? Did the Inuit try to help the crew? Was it possible that a few of the men almost made it out? In the end, I couldn’t resist the urge to go looking for some of these answers myself and hatched a plan to refit Polar Sun so that I could sail the same waters as the Erebus and the Terror, anchor in the same harbors, and see what they saw. I also hoped to complete the voyage that Franklin never did: to sail from the Atlantic into the mazelike network of straits and bays that makes up the Northwest Passage and emerge on the other side of the continent, off the coast of Alaska.
Now, after nearly 3,000 nautical miles—roughly half the journey—my quest to immerse myself in the Franklin mystery had become a little too real. If Polar Sun were iced in, I could lose her. And even if we somehow made it safely ashore, a rescue here could be difficult. And of course, there was also that polar bear.
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Among the numerous benefits ascribed to the new flood of AI software is greater productivity across a wide swatch of industries. Increased content production, faster coding, better data analysis; more more more. To what end? Inevitably, it’s money (a.k.a. “revenue”) and status (primarily for executives) sitting at the end of the rainbow. I can’t think of a better counterpoint to that idea than Zena Hitz’s new piece in Plough exhorting readers to pursue leisure as an end in itself. And not just any kind of leisure—a deeper, more fulfilling version. There are ideas found within that I’ll be returning to again and again. In my down time, of course.
What is leisure, and why is it necessary for human beings? The leisure that I am interested in is not the first thing you may imagine: bingeing Netflix on the couch, lounging at the beach, attending a festive party with friends, or launching yourself from the largest human catapult for the thrill of it. The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life.
Let’s pause and ask ourselves: What parts of our lives seem to be the culminating parts, the days or hours or minutes where we are living life most fully? When do you stop counting the time and become entirely present to what you are doing? What sorts of activities are you engaged in when this takes place?
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Not exactly surprising: the person who created Chuck Norris Facts was a high school senior at the time. Somewhat more surprising: the person who created Chuck Norris Facts now works in AI research, and is smart, funny, and thoughtful—a (non-Chuck Norris) fact that makes Ryan Hockensmith’s profile much more than a trifle.
The site continued to take off, and he came home from Brown after his first semester still a little baffled by his own creation. He remembers sitting in his parents’ living room one night during the break, watching “Lost” and wondering what was in the hatch, when the phone rang.
“Ian, the phone is for you,” his mom yelled.
“I’m watching something,” Spector said. “I’ll call them back.”
Then she said something that made him forget all about the hatch. “Ian, pick up the phone,” she said. “It’s Chuck Norris’ wife.”
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The true price of nuclear power. The nation’s longest-imprisoned man. A man takes on a stealthy global scourge. Competitive eating’s colorful characters. A filmmaking legend’s younger years. All that and more in this week’s installment. Read on!
Rachel Greenley | Orion Magazine | August 1, 2023 | 3,504 words
Despite medical science’s many advances, anyone who has ever supported a loved one through a catastrophic illness knows that science has much farther to go. Where you need answers, often there are only questions. For Orion, Rachel Greenley considers America’s love affair with nuclear bombs and nuclear power—a race for supremacy in the name of war and science that has killed countless, both directly and indirectly, as those who live downwind and downstream endure water and soil contaminated by toxic waste and the cancers that ensue. “It’s clear as thirst when life leaves a body,” she writes. “The heavy vessel left behind is void of the personality and warmth that brightly colored the world. My world…He was thirty-five years old.” It’s not that Greenley doesn’t believe in science; rather, as she so poignantly notes in this gripping essay, she cannot trust fallible officials in charge of managing nuclear projects and disasters, those who deflect concern and downplay the danger of a threat that cannot be seen with the naked eye, one that may have taken her husband and the father of her children. Is ignorance to blame, or ambivalence, or perhaps a combination of both? For Greenley and so many others, it’s a question that deserves to be answered. —KS
Annalisa Quinn | Boston Globe Magazine | July 5, 2023 | 4,693 words
Sometimes a passage in a story hits me in the solar plexus. It hurts, but it’s also a gift, because the pain means that what I’m reading is very, very good. In the opening of Annalisa Quinn’s story, we meet a man named Frank Smith on the verge of his execution—the eighth time the state of Connecticut has tried to kill him, and the second time it came close enough to doing so that prison staff shaved his head, before the Board of Pardons and Paroles decided at the last minute to spare him. Then we learn that this all happened in 1954, and that Smith was only recently paroled; at 98 years old, he is likely America’s longest-serving prisoner. The passage in question comes later in the piece, when Quinn asks an administrator at the secure nursing home where Smith is now housed if talking about his life, including the eight times the government tried to end it, might upset him. The administrator assures her that it’s fine. “But in our conversations,” Quinn writes, “he would return again and again to the electric chair, still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear all this time later. ‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’” I can’t wrap my head around what it means to carry that kind of fear for so long. But I know that no one should bear that burden. —SD
Amit Katwala | Wired | August 22, 2023 | 4,403 words
Every year, the elementary schools in my area would take students on field trips to a preserved one-room schoolhouse; we’d drink from a well, substitute our usual classes with teachings from McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer, and glumly play with the saddest collection of 19th-century toys you can imagine. It was on one of those trips when I realized I had no godly idea what the teacher was writing on the chalkboard. So: glasses at age seven, contact lenses at 13, and a life spent with high myopia. But I had no idea I was a trendsetter until I read Amit Katwala’s fascinating Wired feature. Nearsightedness has swept the globe, but it’s particularly endemic to East Asia. In China, South Korea, and Taiwan, 90% of young adults are myopic. It’s the leading cause of blindness in those countries, and represents a very real (if very slow) public health threat. Enter eye surgeon Pei-Chang Wu, whose journey of discovery serves as the spine of the piece. This is a mystery story, as all good science writing is, and Katwala gives Wu’s search the perfect balance of history and specificity so that lay readers like you and me can appreciate its evolution without being conversant in cyclopegic autorefraction. (By the way, I highly recommend saying that phrase out loud. It makes you feel very smart.) Wu’s ultimate solution, as so many do, has a healthy dose of common sense to it, but that’s kind of the point—and, as Katwala’s kicker makes clear, it’s also a bit of a panacea. Before you take his advice, though, read the piece. It’s worth the eyestrain. —PR
Jamie Loftus | The Takeout | July 14, 2023 | 3,483 words
I didn’t know I needed to consume 3,500 words on the world of competitive eating until I read Jamie Loftus’ piece in The Takeout. As a reader, you feel like Loftus has handed you a bib and after a few paragraphs, you’re ready to tie it on and take your seat at the table as she introduces us to the fascinating characters (with surprising causes) who inhabit the world of Big League Eating. You’ll get to meet “Megabyte” Ronnie Hartman, a.k.a. “The People’s Hot Dog,” a military veteran and indie pro wrestler who uses his plate—er, platform—to advance the cause of veterans’ rights. Then there’s Mary Bowers, a Korean American project manager for the Department of Homeland Security who hand-crafts food-themed outfits and uses her profile to highlight human trafficking. (Mary learned that she was kidnapped as a child and illegally trafficked out of South Korea.) What I loved most, though, is that in addition to the warmth and respect they have for each other, Hartman and Bowers both champion gender inclusivity at the competition. “It doesn’t matter what your pronouns are,” says Hartman. “Once you step on that stage, you’re an eater.” Come for the carnival atmosphere, stay for the camaraderie. —KS
Werner Herzog | The New Yorker | August 21, 2023 | 3,482 words
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Every Man From Himself and God Against All, Werner Herzog reflects on his time spent in Pennsylvania’s westernmost city. I’ve watched Herzog’s films, but this was my first experience of him conjuring pictures from a page. Unsurprisingly, he is very good at it: a keen eye for detail, astute character observation, and the ability to tell a good yarn make this a riveting piece. His prose knocks up another notch when he meets the Franklins, a family that takes him in during his studies at Duquesne University. His love for them is apparent in the warm descriptions of the hustle and bustle of the busy household, complete with twins, grannies, a dog, and a failed rock musician named Billy, who would only emerge from bed in the afternoon, “stark naked, stretching pleasurably.” Throughout, Herzog notes inspiration for his films—fascinating tidbits that included the dancing chickens in Stroszek deriving from a hallucination while traveling from Mexico with hepatitis. He can’t resist a bit of name-dropping and grandiosity, as might be expected, but these well-crafted scenes more than compensate. —CW
Audience Award
What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.
Charlie Warzel | The Atlantic | August 22, 2023 | 2,290 words
Those looking for unbiased, trustworthy product reviews once had an easy first step: Check Wirecutter. But as Charlie Warzel points out, it’s not so simple anymore. Between its parent company growth expectations, the increasing influence of product discussions on Reddit and other social platforms, and SEO chicanery, Wirecutter often feel a little bit … less. But with a pleasingly meta approach, Warzel tries to answer his own question. Is the result definitive? Impossible to say. But such is true of any product review these days. —PR
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This is a brutal—but necessary—read about the harsh reality that climate change is bringing. By systematically laying out different ways the country will be affected, Anne Shibata Casselman provides a thorough look at Canada’s future, with just a glimmer of hope in how we could improve these outcomes.
Across the region, roads buckled, car windows cracked and power cables melted. The emerald fringes of conifers browned overnight, as if singed by flame. Entire cherry orchards were destroyed, the fruit stewed on the trees. More than 650,000 farm animals died of heat stress. Hundreds of thousands of honeybees perished, their organs exploding outside their bodies. Billions of shoreline creatures, especially shellfish, simply baked to death, strewing beaches with empty shells and a fetid stench that lingered for weeks. Birds and insects went unnervingly silent. All the while the skies were hazy but clear, the air preternaturally still, not a cloud in sight. The air pressure was so high they’d all dissipated.
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