Her own research and collaborative spirit continue to push the boundaries of forensic entomology. In a paper published in June 2023 in the scientific journal Insects, she and her co-authors outlined protocols for best practices in bug-based crime-solving—for example, routinely obtaining temperature readings from meteorological stations near crime scenes, to accurately factor weather considerations into analyses, and inspecting soil surrounding a corpse for insects rather than strictly on the body itself. In another study, also published in Insects, in July, she and her colleagues wrapped cotton and other common fabrics around 99 stillborn piglets, to simulate human remains, and examined how blowflies, carrion beetles and other unsavory beings ate through the clothing over several weeks. The results showed that bugs can modify existing cuts and tears in fabric or even introduce new cuts and tears that investigators could easily assume are caused by bullets or knives; the paper illustrated how easily police and medical examiners might be led astray by assumptions about analyses that don’t incorporate cutting-edge research about bugs. And in September, she was a co-author of another study, published in the journal Forensic Sciences and produced in cooperation with police in India, that showed how studying ant activity and resultant bloodstain patterns can provide clues about the circumstances surrounding a person’s death, including whether the body has been moved.

A disturbing child psychiatric facility. The changing city of Cairo. An optimistic take on AI supremacy. The mystery of a cookie disappearance. And a joyful 51 years in the Smithsonian Zoo Panda House.

1. The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | September 25, 2023 | 14,695 words

Margaret Talbot’s story about Evy Mages, a woman who was held as a child at a mysterious psychiatric facility in Innsbruck from 1973-74, was the first piece I dove into at the start of the week—and I’m still thinking about it. For the past few years, Talbot has helped Mages investigate her own family history and recall the memories from this cruel place, where children were observed, humiliated, abused, and even given shots of epiphysan—a veterinary drug derived from cattle—to try and suppress sexual urges. This “villa” was as horrific as it sounds, run by a Nazi-trained psychologist named Maria Nowak-Vogl whose sole purpose was to destroy children and extinguish their inner light. This is a devastating story and a hard one to read. But I’ve thought a lot about the long journey Mages has made since that awful experience, and how incredible it is that she’s come out the other side—now a loving mother to her own grown children, and helping other survivors report the abuse they experienced. Talbot deftly writes a moving story of one woman’s resilience and the harrowing child psychiatry of postwar Austria. —CLR

2. Cairo Song

Wiam El-Tamami | Granta | July 20, 2023 | 5,860 words

Wiam El-Tamami was raised in the “the hushed, air-conditioned sterility” of Kuwait after her parents left Cairo, Egypt, for better job opportunities. Her beautiful Granta essay is a sensory study as she recalls the vibrancy of Cairo on her visits and compares it to the city she knows now, more than a decade after she and her mother protested Hosni Mubarak’s regime in the Egyptian Revolution. She recounts air tinged with smoke, car horns blaring, dogs snarling in the streets, and the shouts of protest: “Bread, freedom, social justice, human dignity! The people demand the downfall of the regime!” She juxtaposes this political unrest against memories of her father’s homemade flatbread, “dusted with bran, the top layer thin and speckled with dark spots, the bottom layer soft and moreish,” and the aubergines, tomatoes, and onions she “anoints with oil and spices” to make tagine with a friend. There are no scales of nostalgia covering El-Tamami’s eyes as she gazes at modern Cairo expanding outward in gated communities that delineate the ever-expanding gulf between rich and poor as inflation skyrockets and the value of the Egyptian pound plummets. In this lyrical essay, El-Tamami interrogates the pervasive undercurrent of her conflicting emotions. “There is such an inherent precarity woven into every day here, a sense of tenuousness, of the unknowability of even the most immediate future, of life always being lived on a knife-edge,” she writes. “I ate the things I had missed. I ate mahshi kromb, stuffed cabbage rolls. I ate my father’s fuul. I ate molokhiyya. I ate black-eyed peas with rice: Egyptian white rice, starchy and soft and buttery-sweet, cooked with little tendrils of vermicelli.” Even as she delights in memories of flavor, El-Tamami still hungers for a better Cairo, now a city in chaos that feels impossible to stomach. —KS

3. What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?

Virginia Heffernan | Wired | September 26, 2023 | 3,874 words

By now, most people have read Ted Chiang’s brilliant work about artificial intelligence in The New Yorker, and the metaphors he’s introduced have entered common parlance: it’s a JPEG of the web, it’s the new McKinsey. But Virginia Heffernan’s delightful feature about Cicero, an AI model that plays the strategy game Diplomacy, is the most surprising, most optimistic, and most enjoyable piece I’ve read about the technology since ChatGPT turned the tech world on its head last November. AI has already conquered Go, the strategy game once considered the last bastion of human ingenuity (at least after Deep Blue mopped Kasparov on the chessboard). Diplomacy is a very different beast, however; gameplay and negotiation are one and the same, and the world’s best human player, Andrew Goff, dominates by being kind rather than cutthroat. Yet, somehow, the bot quickly became more than competitive through similar tactics. Is it perfect? Not even close. It says “awesome!” too much for anyone’s liking, and it still struggles with hallucinations. Still, as Heffernan writes, its approach raises the prospect of a very different AI future than the brutal takeover doomsdayers imagine (or the utopia that tech bros evangelize). What truly recommends this piece, though, is how Heffernan suffuses an intrinsically inhuman story with a beating heart. Opening the piece at a Smiths cover band concert arms her with the perfect anti-Chiangian metaphor; relating her pre-teen son’s weekend-long Diplomacy parties grounds you in the game’s earnest DNA; interrogating her own kneejerk reactions on the page rather than in the editing makes you trust her even more. I don’t share her professed outlook on what this means for tomorrow—”[w]e really liked working with you, robots, and are happy you are winning”—but it’s also a vintage Heffernan provocation, the kind of thing that tells you you’re being challenged and indulged at the same time. Some people are great critics; others are deep thinkers; still others are memorable stylists. Heffernan is fortunate enough to be all three, and this story finds her at the height of her sneaky-smart prowess. —PR

4. A Baker’s Secrets

Dave Denison | The Baffler | September 21, 2023 | 5,180 words

In the 1970s, baker Ted Odell created and sold the guerrilla cookie, “a dense, moist granola cookie,” through small stores and cooperatives in Madison, Wisconsin. The cookies were famous and beloved locally until they suddenly disappeared from store shelves around 1990. “I think they contained rolled wheat flakes, but others say cracked wheat,” writes Dave Denison for The Baffler. “I remember raisins, and shredded coconut, and a mixture of honey and molasses. They were sweet enough to be addictive, but not in the way commercial cookies are, where you eat one and then another and another.” Denison—who worked for Odell as a baker’s assistant one summer—became determined to solve the mystery. Why did the cookies disappear? Why did Odell refuse to share his recipe with the world? Denison’s piece is a chewy, satisfying blend of detective work and food nostalgia. As he learns more about Odell, Denison comes to understand the baker’s wholesome ambition: to educate children about good food and the honest work that goes into it, deftly revealing that guerrilla cookies were far more than sweet confections; they were but a small sample of one man’s deeply held convictions. —KS

5. Revisit 51 Years of Giant Pandas at the National Zoo, From Beloved Babies to Fun in the Snow

Meilan Solly | Smithsonian Magazine | September 22, 2023 | 3,700 words

There’s something about pandas: these bumbling teddy bears entrance us humans, First Lady Pat Nixon included. Sitting at a dinner in Beijing with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Nixon commented on a cute panda picture she saw on a cigarette tin. Zhou responded, “I’ll give you some.” “Cigarettes?” she asked. “No. Pandas.” And so our story begins, with the two promised pandas arriving at the Smithsonian National Zoo in 1972. The next 51 years at the Smithsonian Panda House are carefully documented by Meilan Solly in this enchanting piece. Our original pandas—Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing—struggled with fertility issues, which were, rather harshly, reported at the time as being “largely because of ineptness by the male.” (Hsing-Hsing chose some bizarre positions.) But despite their lack of progeny, this pair were adored until their passing. Next into the Big Brother Panda House were Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, with Tian Tian proving a bit more competent in the bedroom department. However, artificial insemination was still necessary for the appearance of cubs—three surviving—including Xiao Qi Ji, a miracle baby born to Mei Xiang at 22. A whopping 639,000 people tuned in live to watch this birth via live Panda Cam. (No pressure, Mei Xiang.) Panda Cam remained hugely popular, with baby Xiao Qi Ji providing some much-needed endorphins to people stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Solly includes some Panda Cam footage (don’t get me started on the pandas sliding in the snow), heartwarming photos, interesting facts, and fun anecdotes. You cannot help but smile. Under an agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association, the current pandas will return to China on December 7, 2023. Smithsonian Magazine has written about the Panda House for over half a century. This essay is a worthy addition as the pandas’ time in America draws to a close. —CW

Audience Award

Now for the big one. The piece our readers most enjoyed this week.

It’s Not Just You. LinkedIn Has Gotten Really Weird.

Rob Price | Business Insider | September 25, 2023 | 2,937 words

Blame the pandemic’s deprivations and our collective need for personal connection. Or maybe blame Gen Z as generational oversharers, but LinkedIn has evolved from a place where people not only post promotions and business and industry-focused content to a platform for revealing the overly personal, leading to—of course—public mockery, because some cannot resist the chance to be funny on the internet.—KS

Neither Stukeley’s hermitage nor Queen Caroline’s boasted a hermit-in-residence. But it wasn’t long before the idea of elevating a hermitage’s authenticity by adding a living, breathing hermit caught on. “Nothing, it was felt, could give such delight to the eye as the spectacle of an aged person, with a long gray beard and a goatish rough robe, doddering about amongst the discomforts and pleasures of nature,” wrote British poet Edith Sitwell in the 1933 book English Eccentrics.

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In November 2012, I moved back home to Scotland after spending nearly all my savings backpacking. I stayed at my friend’s flat near the base of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and began looking for writing jobs. With no end to the recession in sight, it turned out that there were none. I began temping and applying for editing-marketing-anything jobs. Went to an interview in a smart office in New Town. Realized the advertised “graduate marketing position” actually involved stopping strangers in an outdoor shopping center in Leith and trying to sell them phone contracts on commission. Cried. 

On a morning when the temping agency hadn’t called, I took the train north to see my mum and dad. Over dinner, Dad asked how the job hunt was going. I looked down at my shepherd’s pie and said it was going okay. He said things would be fine — I just needed to apply myself. 

I started looking beyond Edinburgh for writing-editing-anything jobs — and eventually moved to Berlin for a content editor internship. There, I was charged with sending out weekly newsletters to subscribers. One week, I was asked if I could theme an email around history’s adventurers. I didn’t really know which women to include, apart from that pilot Amelia Earhart. So I started Googling and soon came across stories of solitude-seeking, mountain-climbing, jungle-running women adventurers I’d never heard of. 

There was no room for Lawrence of Arabia in that week’s email. There isn’t in this reading list, either. 

I Walk Therefore I Am (Robert Macfarlane, The Guardian, August 2008) 

From Berlin, I emailed my mum and asked if she’d heard of Nan Shepherd. After all, she was born in northeast Scotland just 20 miles from my home, although admittedly a century before me. She worked as a quiet English teacher on weekdays. Then, on weekends, she’d morph into a “swirling ziggurat of tawny cardigans, scarves and skirts,” striding over the moors, sleeping on rocks, watching coils of golden eagles overhead, and feeling in every inch “how grand it is to get leave to live.”

Mum replied that she knew of Shepherd. Loved her, really. Said there was a wood engraving by the artist Paul L. Kershaw in the bathroom showing a black-and-white picture of the Cairngorms and a bite of Shepherd’s words. Hadn’t I ever noticed? I’d never noticed. Since then, Shepherd’s memoir, The Living Mountain, has become one of Canongate’s bestselling backlist books. 

This influential essay from Robert Macfarlane begins as a mini-biography of Shepherd, then explodes into a compelling thesis of Shepherd’s belief in what he calls “bodily thinking.” 

We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world — its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits — as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are, literally, losing touch. Shepherd saw this loss beginning more than 60 years ago, and her book both mourns it and warns against it: “This is the innocence we have lost,” she observes, “living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.” Her book is a wry, beautiful hymn to “living all the way through.”

This is her book’s most radical proposition. Radical, because Shepherd was a woman writing out of a Highland Scottish culture in which the cherishing of the body was not easily discussed. And radical because, as philosophy, it was cutting-edge. In the same years that Shepherd composed The Living Mountain, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his influential theory of the body subject. For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had fallaciously divided body and mind.  His work, particularly The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), was dedicated to enriching the idea of the body, such that it could be said both to perceive and to think. Merleau-Ponty described this embodied experience as “knowledge in the hands”, a phrase that could have come straight from Shepherd. “The body is not . . . negligible,” she wrote, “but paramount”.”

Feminize Your Canon: Isabelle Eberhardt (Emma Garman, The Paris Review, February 2019) 

Whether the women in this list are alive today or were 100 years ago, I can imagine them coming across Sylvia Plath’s journals and underlining the following in a fury of black ink:

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars — to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.  My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night. 

Isabelle Eberhardt did all those things. Around the turn of the 20th century, she was dressing as a man and burning across the Sahara on trains, on horseback, and on whatever money she had. She was buying skinned hares from Bedouins, couch-surfing with sheiks, or throwing the last of her cash from town windows because who needs material things? For this Swiss Russian writer, the thrill of sensation came in tasting cigarettes, anisette, and other bodies. It lay in the intoxication of running from the French police in anti-colonial protests turned violent. 

It’d be easy to focus solely on these salacious details of Eberhardt’s life, and Emma Garman is very good at finding delicious vignettes (“on her travels she’d carried a gun, but not a toothbrush” and was known as a child for dancing “about like a little wild animal along the garden paths”), yet what I love most about this essay is the ultimate focus on Eberhardt’s writing. 

These writings, which foreground the lives and experiences of North Africans, have established Eberhardt as a vital early critic of imperial rule. Her perspective, according to the Tunisian scholar Hédi A. Jaouad, “may have inaugurated the theme of decolonization in the Maghreb, for it expounded a theory of sociology and oppression whose theorists and critics would later include, among Francophone writers, the Martinican Frantz Fanon and the Tunisian Albert Memmi.”

Despite the compulsions — sex, drugs, alcohol, travel — that occupied her waking hours, her writing was of central importance, and she was eager for publication. She was driven to maintain, she wrote, “two lives, one that is full of adventure and belongs to the Desert, and one, calm and restful, devoted to thought and far from all that might interfere with it.”

Alexandra David-Néel (David Guy, Tricycle, Fall 1995)

In Eberhardt, in all these women, I adore their ability to thread words around the elementals — sun, wind, water — until they feel, in the words of Berlin revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, “at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” But you don’t need to go on a big trip to feel that. You can walk under twilight trees. Or open a window. Or listen to the rain. Maybe. Sometimes I think I’d like to just go off for years, travel, return, go, and return. Alexandra David-Néel did just that. She was a Belgian-French opera singer who practiced Buddhism in Asia through her 20s, then married a railroad engineer named Philippe Néel in Tunis in 1904. 

Once she had everything her childhood in Paris had taught her to want — a rich husband, a villa, days filled with luncheons — David-Néel unraveled into a world of headaches, nausea, and exhaustion. What she actually wanted was contemplation and adventure.  Attempting to satiate her desires, she’d go off and meditate in “perfect detachment” for an hour each day. But she wanted more of that. More and more and more. 

While her husband was away healing in Vichy’s thermal baths, she left for Asia to further her Buddhist studies. She studied with the Gomchen of Lachen, an esteemed hermit sorcerer. She meditated in a mountain cave for two winters. With a young monk whom she’d later adopt, she disguised herself as a Tibetan and set off through the Himalayas to the forbidden city of Lhasa. What a life! But I’m not sure David-Néel would like how contemporary writers tend to stake stories like hers onto narratives about how “free” a woman can be. The yak butter and rock shelters and people who sheltered her were intertwined with her. She knew that. Independence? No, no. We’re all as connected as can be. 

David Guy doesn’t do this. In this straightforward biography for Shambhala — where he elegantly recounts her life from birth to death — he takes care to focus instead on her religious beliefs. Guy also reminds us that there are many ways of seeing a story. It’s easy now to attribute a kind of colonial arrogance to David-Néel’s flouting of international borders, as she sidesteps into a kingdom that had purposefully closed itself off to foreigners. But Guy reads her actions differently: “To the Tibetans, it seemed perfectly logical for Alexandra David-Néel to have traveled to Lhasa: she was returning to the site of a previous incarnation.”

David-Néel was famous as an adventuress, but that description doesn’t seem adequate to her real accomplishments. She left behind voluminous writings, many of which have not been translated into English, and these are authentic not just because of her scholarship, but because of her lifelong practice. A woman who spent years in a mountain hermitage, who sat in meditation halls with thousands of lamas, who studied languages and scoured libraries for original teachings, who traveled for many years and for thousands of miles to immerse herself in a culture which few people had ever even heard of, writes with far more insight than someone who has only read about such experiences. It is her devotion to Buddhism and her willingness to trace it to its source that are finally most impressive about her life.

Adventurer Elise Wortley Recreates the Journeys of Famous Female Explorers (Claire Turrell, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2023) 

London’s Elise Wortley, aka Woman With Altitude, recently retraced Alexandra David-Néel’s footsteps through the Himalayas without modern-day equipment. She carried her things in a homemade “chairpack.” She wore yak wool clothes instead of Gore-Tex. Having interviewed Wortley about her experience for Outside, I can confidently say she was having the time of her life. (She also spent a summer in the Cairngorms — dressed like Nan Shepherd in a bandana, some tweed, some wartime boots.) 

I like that in this piece about Wortley, Claire Turrell also includes details from an interview with British fashion historian Kate Strasdin, who says that some early women hikers would have cords “sewn into the inside of their skirts, so they could raise them a bit like a Roman blind when they were climbing,” adding, “[o]ne explorer, after climbing snowy slopes, used to tuck her skirts underneath her and use it like a toboggan.”

I was also very excited to see Wortley reveal some of her future plans in this interview. I’d watch a series about this on BBC Sunday primetime over another Bear Grylls show, any day. 

Wortley’s wanderlust has only grown. The 33-year-old now has a wish list of 150 expeditions she’d like to take, all reliving the exploits of past adventurers.

“Some are more possible to do than others,” says Wortley. “There is Bessie Coleman who was the first woman of African American and Native American descent to earn her pilot’s licence in the U.S., who was famous for doing loop-the-loops. One thing I’d like to do is get a vintage plane and someone to teach me how to do loop-the-loops.”

But for now, the modern adventurer plans to bike across Sri Lanka to celebrate the journey of Annie Londonderry, who circumnavigated the globe by bicycle, leaving Massachusetts State House in Boston in June 1894, with a pearl-handled pistol in her pocket (though that’s one addition Wortley is sure to leave out of her suitcase). “I’m trying to get a bike from the 1800s,” Wortley says. “I might have to get it made.”

Wortley is also planning to sail across the Irish Sea in the wake of 16th-century pirate Grace O’Malley, who journeyed from Ireland to England to petition Queen Elizabeth I for the release of her son in September 1593.

“First, I would love to dress like a 16th-century pirate,” laughs Wortley. “But I would love to bring together a group of women and an old gully boat and row from west Ireland to Greenwich.”

A Six-Day Walk Through the Alps, Inspired by Simone de Beauvoir (Emily Witt, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, October 2016) 

Witt writes like a dream on just about anything (Björk, mescaline, orgasmic meditation). And I’m glad that, in this piece, she’s entwining her thoughts on existential philosophy and solitude, personal freedom, and life’s reality for refugees. I suppose it’d be very easy to instead fawn over simple beauty — the French Alps’ wildflower meadows and llamas and lilacs. Surely readers of a travel essay for T Magazine would lap up details like those. But Emily Witt does not fawn. Not over flowers. Not even over Simone de Beauvoir. Instead, she examines. She observes. I can trust a writer like that. 

On the last day I had a daylong descent overlooking the Mediterranean, my knees on the verge of giving out as I picked through rocks and along switchbacks to sea level. The landscape had changed from a stark moonscape to humid deciduous brush to bleached rocks and semi-arid plants. Discarded jeans and plastic water bottles began to litter the underbrush, and then I was walking behind gated villas with manicured topiaries, swimming pools, an aviary of tropical birds. I emerged suddenly at a marina with a flat view of the sea. I had done it. I changed out of my hiking boots on a park bench as motorbikes whizzed along the promenade, then hobbled to the station to take a train to Nice. It was the first station after the border with Italy, and as I approached I saw a group of men of African and Middle Eastern descent being led into a police van, also carrying their backpacks.

It is a delusion to think that life has no wills but your own, or that you can thrive without the care and concern of others. But sometimes you can engineer a temporary condition, and produce a sense of accomplishment and self-reliance that uplifts you. For six days it was enough, as Beauvoir put it, to think of nothing but “flowers and beasts and stony tracks and wide horizons, the pleasurable sensation of possessing legs and lungs and a stomach.”

Skiing and Nothingness (Rachel Kushner, Harper’s, April 2022)

I’d never wish for a mum and dad other than the ones who raised me. But if I’d had Rachel Kushner’s beatnik-ski bum parents leaving me on bunny runs from a young age, I’d be a much better skier than I am today.

At a certain point in my twenties… I could no longer tolerate ski culture. So much time with the [Berkeley Dirt Bag] ski team had burned me out. That realm was bro talk, gear talk, and it excluded too much of the world, and too much of interiority. It still is like that. It reaches new heights in Teton Gravity Research movies, which feature incredible skiers pondering, idiotically, the meanings of “stoke” and “dude.” I’m not threatened by that now. What bothered me, long ago, was the way this dumbing down drew my attention to an internal conflict between mind and body, between thought, the desire to do something creative with my life, and skiing, which came naturally, but excluded art and literature. I could hang with the ski bums, but they were a mirror of what I didn’t want to be. This conflict resolved itself on a life-changing trip with Ben [Benjamin Weissman, the artist and writer] and the artist Peter Doig, who, like Ben, is a fast and strong skier. We were a team, tearing around the mountain, but bantering in the gondola about, say, the pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi, or being quiet, tending to our inner selves. (Some of Doig’s paintings, I came to later understand, are like scenes through snowy goggles.) Skiing, I decided on that trip, could be strange and various, hilarious, with no compromise in speed or steeps.

Going It Alone (Rahawa Haile, Outside, April 2017) 

The Appalachian Trail is one of the most demanding hikes on Earth. Over 2,200 miles, hikers can expect blisters to bubble up and toenails to blacken and fall off. Joints to swell. T-shirts to disintegrate with sweat. For Eritrean-American writer Rahawa Haile, hiking the AT alone during the political upheaval of summer 2016, it wasn’t just these physical demands she had to face — it was also racism. 

In her essay for Outside, Haile says that although her fellow thru-hikers and trail angels were some of the kindest people she ever encountered, by the time she made it through Maryland, “it was hard not to think of the Appalachian Trail as a 2,190-mile trek through Trump lawn signs.” As she walked from Georgia to Maine, Confederate flags flew from hiker hostels to the RVs that swarmed the campgrounds. 

There were days when the only thing that kept me going was knowing that each step was one toward progress, a boot to the granite face of white supremacy. I belong here, I told the trail. It rewarded me in lasting ways. The weight I carried as a black woman paled in comparison with the joy I felt daily among my peers in that wilderness. They shaped my heart into what it will be for the rest of my life.

She Wants to be Alone (Rhian Sasseen, Aeon, February 2015) 

I have a strong desire to quote this whole essay, but I’m going to restrain myself and just say I love this piece for asking in its dek, “When even a simple stroll down the sidewalk is an exercise in self-loathing, why don’t more women run away to the woods?” Rhian Sasseen goes on to ask, what does it even look like to be a hermit if you’re a woman? Perhaps it looks like the life of ecologist and author Anne LaBastille, who built a cabin alone on the shores of a remote lake in the Adirondacks in the 1960s. Perhaps it’s in the visionary experiences of Orgyen Chökyi, the 17th-century Tibetan Buddhist nun. Or in the trials of Mary of Egypt when she fled for the desert in the fourth century. An essay to make you think.

To be alone, you need to know who exactly you are.

There is a reason why humans prefer groups of two or more: it’s easier. It’s easier to delegate tasks, to point to one person and say: You will find our food; to tell another: You will lead us along the way. In fairy tales, kings and hermits are always finding each other. An Italian fairy tale features a holy hermit (male, of course) who, after helping a youth win both a princess and a kingdom’s worth of gold, demands half of everything, princess included. When the youth draws his sword, moving to cut the princess apart, the hermit relents, happy to see that the young man ‘held his honour dearer than his wife’.

The princess is the prize. But Mary of Egypt was no princess. Alone, only one person makes the decisions. Food, shelter, water – they’re all one person’s responsibility. This is what true freedom looks like: if you fuck up, you’re dead. If you don’t, you survive. If you survive, congratulations: no one owns you.

The Inuit Woman Who Survived Alone on an Arctic Island After a Disastrous Expedition (Kieran Mulvaney, History, November 2021)

Ada Blackjack was 23, living in Nome, and desperate for work when four explorers came to town and hired her as a seamstress for their expedition to Wrangel Island. For the next year, it was agreed that Blackjack would come along to sew winter gear out of animal hides for them. 

Wrangel sits 100 miles north of Siberia. It’s a 2,900-square-mile sweep of fog and ice, polar bears and snow geese. When the group arrived on the uninhabited island in 1921, it seems they were in good spirits. They ate stews and bear blubber. They played with Vic, the housecat they’d brought with them. They ate their supplies of hard candy and tins of bread. They slept in canvas tents and seemingly weren’t too worried about rationing. After all, come summer, a fresh crew was going to replace them. 

The crew never came. That summer, the island remained surrounded by thick pack ice. They were stuck. No candy. No bread. Just the abyss of another winter, rushing in to meet them. Three of the four men attempted to cross the ocean ice to find help in Siberia. They were never seen again. Now it was just Blackjack, Vic the cat, and one remaining abusive crewmember — Lorne Knight — who was bedridden with scurvy and eventually died.  

Blackjack, an Iñupiat woman, had little experience hunting or living off the land — she’d spent her childhood at a Methodist mission school. But she looked after herself anyway. She barricaded the tent with boxes to protect Knight’s corpse from wild animals. She figured out how to trap white foxes and shoot seals for food. She picked roots and built a high platform so she could spot polar bears from far away. Then, after two long years on the island, a ship finally came her way. 

I wish I could tell you Ada Blackjack spent the rest of her days in comfort and peace, being fêted from a comfortable distance. That’s not her path. Still, she’s a survivor. 

Kevin Mulvaney brings her story to life in this detailed account of the terrible expedition to Wrangel.

On August 20, she woke from her slumber believing she had heard a noise. She heard it again. And again. She grabbed her field glasses and rushed outside. The perpetual fog enshrouded the island, but for a brief moment it lifted and through her glasses, she saw a ship. She raced down to the beach and splashed into the water just as a boat reached the shore.

She expected Crawford, Maurer, and Galle to be on board; the man who stepped out of the boat, Stefansson accomplice Harold Noice, expected them to be ashore. With the first words they exchanged, they both realized the full gravity of the situation. Ada Blackjack, the Iñupiat seamstress who had been a reluctant afterthought on the expedition, who had been belittled and berated and tied up, who had had to teach herself to hunt and trap and live in the Arctic, was the last survivor. She was alive, and she was going home to her son. And with that, she collapsed into Noice’s arms and cried.

Ailsa Ross writes about people, place, and art for The Guardian, Outside, The BBC, and many others. Her first book is The Girl Who Rode a Shark: And Other Stories of Daring Women.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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The bowerbird, which lives on the east coast of Australia, has an abiding eye for anything blue. Solitary males travel great distances to bring back all manner of blue objects to decorate their nests. Shells, flowers, plastic bottles, and feathers are all fair game, and bowerbirds have even been known to grind up blue pigments with their beaks and paint their homes accordingly. This chromatic fealty is less a matter of design sense than of courtship; the behavior is just one of the bowerbird’s mating tactics. And he has a spiritual brother in ostentatious accumulation: humans.

Collecting as a human practice dates back to at least the third millennium BCE, when the upper circles of Sumerian society gathered extensive hoards of luxury items. Later, the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt (350 – 30 BCE) sought out books from across the known world and housed them in the ill-fated Library of Alexandria. This is all a long way from beer cans, dolls, and genitalia — just some of the obsessions featured below — but the link isn’t too hard to discern. For Tom Hanks it’s typewriters; for Rod Stewart, it’s model trains. 

Although little research has been undertaken when it comes to humans, anecdotal evidence suggests that collectors of the homo sapiens variety also tend to be male. As a broad psychological explanation, a large collection indicates wealth, knowledge, and industry — all traits appealing to a potential partner. But while that explains amassing watches or antique furniture, it doesn’t do the same for those who seek out toenail clippings or soap bars. The collector’s drive, it seems, can suggest as many questions as answers. 

Indeed, reading through these illuminating pieces reveals the many deeper purposes to collecting. Bonding, fellowship, greed, and even education can play a role. There may even be something more mysterious, more primordial, at play: Unearthing a new “treasure” can release serotonin directly into our brains. This mood-boosting reward could well hearken back to our distant past. Some psychologists highlight a link between collecting and our in-built drive to create a safe, orderly environment. As Randy Frost muses in his book on the subject, Stuff, some scholars “suggest that collecting is a way of managing fears about death by creating a form of immortality.” There may be no simple answer, but the art of collecting can certainly provide a simple joy — and reading about it can provide that joy in some small measure as well.

The Men Who Meet Up in Motels Across America…to Trade Old Beer Cans (Deborah Ager, Narratively, July 2018)

In France, it’s wine; in Russia, vodka. China has baijiu, while in Madagascar, rum is the national tipple. But in Belgium, Germany, and the U.S. (the last of which provides the backdrop for this piece), beer stands at the top of the pile. Here, beer is a cultural marker and a personal identifier, an integral part of any meaningful event. With this fantastic article, we move away from the decorative and historical into what I feel is true collector territory: beer cans. 

When I look around at my piles of records and books, I justify these acquisitions as things that provide something definable beyond their physical selves. Beer cans, though, belong in a different category. While they serve a valid role as socioeconomic and aesthetic artifacts — as do all man-made objects —  it’s hard to consider used beer cans worth anything in terms of material value. The Brewery Collectibles Club of America, though, does not agree. This piece introduces you to them and other collectors across several continents, all of whom hold an abiding passion for items that most of us would throw in the recycling bin without a moment’s thought. This is the beating heart of the genuine collector exposed — a heart that quickens over a thing only their fellow brethren would understand.

Dave Larrazolo, an ex-Army drill sergeant, is wearing a bumblebee costume and adjusting his antennae when I speak with him at the canvention. He explains that he doesn’t bother with “rust,” which refers to rusty beer cans. Another collector tells me Larrazolo’s collection is known to be “squeaky clean.”

Despite the group’s communal nature, friendly divisions exist: rusty cans versus clean, new crowns versus old, plastic-lined versus vinyl-lined crowns. Other collectors specialize by geography, brand, or type — West Virginia or California, Ballantine’s Beer or Hamm’s, quarts or 12-ounce size. There are accessories, too, like can openers referred to as “I-7s.”

Wings of Desire: Why Is An Obsessive British Collector Risking Jail To Kill Rare Butterflies? (Tim Lewis, Esquire UK, February 2018)

England’s beautiful Cotswolds is not a place readily associated with international crime, but the picturesque region nonetheless serves as backdrop to this absorbing tale of the murky side of collecting. The practice of lepidoptery (collecting butterflies) has its roots in the 17th century, when explorers and scientists, largely from the West, journeyed thousands of miles under harsh conditions in order to discover new species of flora and fauna. These groups were almost exclusively composed of educated, wealthy white men who possessed the means and opportunity to travel — and who often took with them a sense of superiority and entitlement, together with a distinct lack of respect for the native populations in the lands where they quested. Yet, while lepidoptery’s colonial and ethical legacy remains questionable, its practitioners’ study and documentation advanced our collective understanding by leaps and bounds.

In its time, lepidoptery was a highly fashionable pursuit. You can count at least two 20th-century British prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, among their number, along with highly respected author Vladimir Nabokov. These days, with much more attention focused on humanity’s interactions with nature, butterfly collecting is far from mainstream. Yet, in the U.S. and U.K., lepidoptery is still perfectly legal. There are important caveats — some species and certain designated areas are protected — but where there is prohibition, as this story makes clear, there is always money to be made.

A butterfly’s wings, their colours and patterns, are made up of tiny, overlapping scales. These are at their brightest for the first day or two, but over time, the scales fall out or rub off. No discerning collector would be interested in a faded specimen like this one, but there is still something pulse-quickening about seeing it. The large blue might be persnickety and ornery, but that is what has given this tiny insect its power over humans for centuries. As David Simcox says that day to a middle-aged couple who had driven more than 150 miles on a futile search for a large blue: “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.”

The Garbage Man: Why I Collect Racist Objects (David Pilgrim, Ferris State University News, 2005)

When David Pilgrim began acquiring racist memorabilia in his early teens at the beginning of the 1970s, he could not have known that he would become a sociologist, or that his collection would eventually lead to the founding of the Jim Crow Museum, an institution that may discomfit but whose educational importance cannot be understated. If it feels obvious that he writes “Racist imagery is propaganda,” consider that such imagery is the most powerful social tool in the world. As much as we might like to pretend otherwise, we are deeply susceptible to visual cues, most of which are intentionally designed for just that purpose — whether racist caricatures on 1950s product packaging or modern-day memes. This is what makes Pilgrim’s work so vital.

Perhaps the most telling (and most moving) moment in the piece comes when the author describes how many of the young people he talks to, both black and white, are at first skeptical about the atrocity of the Jim Crow era; when they see the items he has collected, though, the illusion falls away. When in the presence of a large number of such objects, Pilgrim writes, the overwhelming feeling is one of heavy sadness. It is one thing to read about history, and quite another to hold a living piece of it in your hands.

I suppose every sane black person must be angry, at least for a while. I was in the Sociology Department, a politically liberal department, and talk about improving race relations was common. There were five or six black students, and we clung together like frightened outsiders. I will not speak for my black colleagues, but I was sincerely doubtful of my white professors’ understanding of everyday racism. Their lectures were often brilliant, but never complete.

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Unboxing the Doll Collector (Jackie Powers, Slow Notion, July 2021)

This thought-provoking piece acknowledges another driving factor behind collecting: comfort. It’s telling that the author’s collection began at a difficult period in her adult life, and Power’s particular passion, dolls, links back to childhood — a time when, hopefully, we experienced the least stress, worry, and hurt. That said, there is surely an element of solace to all collecting, be it sneakers, records, or beer cans. Childhood memorabilia covers a wide area, and the practice of adults continuing to pursue their youthful obsessions has become, if not quite fashionable, then at least acceptable. As EmGo, a Transformer-collecting vlogger popular with my own son, reminds us: “You don’t stop playing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop playing.” It’s a sentiment eruditely echoed by the author here. 

Powers’ dolls intersect with her other great loves of fashion, art, and design, but she finds herself faced with an ethical dilemma. Dolls mean plastic and packaging. Buying brand-new items is inarguably bad for the environment. The solution, as she reasons, lies in concentrating on the second-hand market — seeking out and even restoring items that already exist. There’s much to be said for this approach, but the real fascination in this piece comes from Powers’ meditations on what it means to be “adult,” and the stigma that often surrounds holding on to our childhood loves.

Although there is no time in my life where I haven’t loved dolls, there was a time in my life when I felt like I wasn’t supposed to love dolls. I can trace this shift into shame to another rough transitional moment in life — age 12. As I’m sure it was for many, for me, being 12 was awful. It was a time when I felt like I was trapped between leaving childhood behind and facing the unknown world of being a teenager and all the social pressures that came along with it.

Welcome to the World’s Only Museum Devoted to Penises (Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2013)

The protagonist of this piece, Icelandic history teacher Sigurður Hjartarson, considers himself a collector just like any other. His chosen subject, however, stands out (pardon the pun) as one of the more unusual on this list, or any other. There is nothing salacious about Hjartarson’s hobby; his interest is scientific and, in a liberal country such as Iceland, largely accepted as such. Reading this absorbing piece, however, it’s hard not to sense that Hjartarson revels, even if just a bit, in the quirkiness of his particular field; the Folklore Section of his museum includes an empty glass jar labeled “Homo sapiens invisibilis.”

Again, though, the real interest lies in the genesis and pursuit of Hjartarson’s hobby. As I suspect is the case with many collections, the teacher received his first specimen as a gift — an entirely unexpected and serendipitous spark that started the Icelander on his unique journey. Think of your own obsessions and interests. Where did they come from, and how would you be different without them? In Hjartarson’s case, you can’t help but admire the extraordinary lengths (again, forgive me) taken to complete his museum, and the disarming charm its curator displays.

He has three more donation letters hanging on the wall—from a German, an American and a Brit who visited the museum and were moved to sign away their penises after death—but every year that passes makes them less valuable. “You’re still young,” he said, poking me in the shoulder forcefully, “but when you get older, your penis is going to start shrinking.”

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

By Rachel Ashcroft

History is supposedly written by the victors. It is certainly written by the people who were taught basic literacy skills. In Ancient Greek and Roman society, this means men recorded almost everything we know about classical antiquity. Men like Herodotus and Livy wrote the history books, while men such as Julius Caesar recorded their military campaigns. Men also wrote the law, literature, letters, speeches, and often the tombstones of the time. 

Greek and Roman women were considered to be inferior. They were barred from voting and public office, while most women (Sparta being a notable exception) did not receive an education. Their activities were largely confined to the domestic sphere. These barriers prevented many women from writing down their thoughts and observations. 

This poses a problem when we want to study the lives of ancient women. As historian Bonnie MacLachlan wrote in Women in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook, we face numerous challenges when we “seek to listen for the female voice, to get access to what mattered for women and girls.” With a few exceptions (poets like Nossis and Sulpicia come to mind), ancient women’s voices are almost impossible to come by. 

Instead, we learn about women’s role in society from male sources. Sorting objective facts from biased reportage can be a frustrating task, especially given that such men grew up in cultures that constantly reinforced their superiority over women. Greek and Roman mythology was particularly effective in this respect. Female figures like Medusa acted as warnings to society about the monstrous nature of women. Myths about ill-fated women like Medea helped to reinforce real-life female subservience to the patriarchy by highlighting the disastrous consequences of female independence.

However, since the 1970s, historians have been unpacking evidence about the lives of real ancient women. After all, women living in patriarchal societies have always found ways to exercise power. Wealthy women spent money on the tools that outwardly reinforced their upper-class status: jewelry, makeup, and expensive clothing. Natural beauty transcended rank and could help women to attract rich suitors, buy gifts, or wield influence over male lovers. Furthermore, upper-class women often had powerful male relatives they could potentially manipulate to their advantage. 

In ancient societies, where men were frequently off fighting in foreign lands, the women left behind held some sway. Between 218 and 129 B.C.E., the Roman Empire was at war with an enemy every year in at least one theater of conflict. Widows and orphans became so numerous that they attracted special consideration from the censors. There are also rare cases of women exerting political influence in public life. The Oracle at Delphi was Greece’s most authoritative seer, while the Vestal Virgins of Ancient Rome held influence in the Senate. Such power came at a price, but it was power all the same.

Examining women’s history requires a great deal of sensitivity, as Jane F. Gardner writes in the book Women in Roman Law and Society, “what the law says people may do, as we must constantly remind ourselves, is not necessarily the same as what they actually do.”

When we examine why inequality existed and how frequently it occurred, we must also explain it in relation to ancient historical and social contexts, rather than our own present-day assumptions.* That said, there is little doubt that Greek and Roman women were born into societies that heavily privileged males over females, and the resulting imbalance has led to a dearth of significant non-academic writing about the women of the time.

But there are exceptions. The pieces below describe ambitious empresses, fearsome gladiators, and ordinary working-class residents; all are glimmering snapshots of the female experience. While mythical monsters acted as warnings to women not to transgress society’s restrictive expectations of them as wives and mothers, some women still chose to bend the rules to their own advantage — or disregard them altogether.

Why So Many Mythological Monsters Are Female (Nora McGreevy, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2021)

Despite women’s inferior status in classical antiquity, female characters abound in mythology from this era. Helen of Troy is a well-known figure in Greek legend, as are powerful goddesses such as Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Furthermore, many of antiquity’s most intriguing monsters are female too.

Myths are not just nice stories we tell each other to pass the time. They often reflect cultural ideals or fears about the behavior of our citizens. As Nora McGreevy observes, ancient myths help to explain the real-life prejudice suffered by Greek and Roman women: “Ancient male authors inscribed their fear of — and desire for — women into tales about monstrous females.” Medusa, for example, is a snake-haired demon who tricks men with her lethal gaze — a deadly symbol of female cunning, during a time when such stories were considered to be a quasi-historical reality.

Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters: Building A New Mythology, which McGreevy reviews in this piece, provides a highly useful basis for this discussion. Zimmerman’s essay collection illuminates the precise ways in which ancient monsters reinforced assumptions about the true nature of women. The article does well at highlighting lesser-known instances of monstrous women, such as the female Sphinx in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Many of the monsters mentioned, such as Scylla and Charybdis, often thwart men like Odysseus who are trying to achieve greatness. 

Particularly illuminating is Lamia, a monster with the upper body of a woman but the lower half of a snake who regularly steals and eats children. She and other female child-killers of lore served as a warning to women: Subvert your role as a nurturing mother or wife, and pay the price. 

Women are expected to care for children, but society remains “constantly worried [they] are going to fail in their obligation to be mothers and to be nurturers,” Zimmerman says. If a woman rejects motherhood, expresses ambivalence about motherhood, loves her child too much or loves them too little, all of these acts are perceived as violations, albeit to varying degrees.

“To deviate in any way from the prescribed motherhood narrative is to be made a monster, a destroyer of children,” Zimmerman writes.

Gossip Was A Powerful Tool For The Powerless In Ancient Greece (Fiona McHardy, Aeon, February 2019)

Ancient Greece was divided into a vast number of kingdoms and city-states. With a few exceptions, most Greek women were second-class citizens who had to find subtle ways to wield what little power they could in society. 

This was easier for wealthy women, who possessed money and powerful male relatives. As Fiona McHardy points out, those with the least rights and resources were generally “low-status women without strong family connections.” However, McHardy argues that gossip was one tool such women could feasibly rely on when they wanted to exact revenge on someone. And revenge was a popular pursuit in Ancient Greek society. 

One example involves Zobia, a non-Greek resident who helps a man named Aristogeiton. He repays her kindness with physical abuse and threats to sell Zobia into slavery. Zobia embarks on a campaign of gossip which is so effective “that his reputation as untrustworthy and abusive spread through the city.” This gossip was then successfully used in court by a male litigant as proof of Aristogeiton’s poor character.

Despite being a woman, and a non-Greek one at that, Zobia’s example shows that justice was possible even for women who didn’t have straightforward resources at their disposal. McHardy’s essay is an excellent example of the type of academic work that women scholars have been carrying out for decades. Through careful analysis of the written evidence from this period, McHardy shows that it is perfectly possible to find instances of everyday female agency.

Athenians were well-aware of the calculated use of gossip to launch attacks on their enemies, and they made careful use of gossip in rhetoric to cast aspersions about their opponents in the law courts. The presence in legal cases of women’s gossip, including gossip spread by low-status members of society, demonstrates that the Athenians did not discriminate about the source, but took advantage of all kinds of gossip in their attempts to defeat their adversaries. Through calculated use of gossip, women, non-citizens or slaves with no access to official legal channels wielded a potent weapon in their attempts to attain revenge against those who wronged them.

Reading Between The Lines: Women On Roman Tomb Monuments (Francis Grew, Museum of London, June 2020)

Alongside written sources, archaeological evidence provides a fascinating window into the past. It allows us to reach out and touch the everyday objects that ancient people interacted with, even to walk the same streets as them.

Tombstones are a common archaeological find. In London, scholars have uncovered a surprising number of women’s graves from Roman Britain. It’s exciting, but also frustrating. Why? As Francis Grew demonstrates, trying to establish basic facts about these women from the commemorations written by male relatives is by no means simple. 

This is because men often used such tombstones to enhance their own reputation. A typical example involves Claudia Martina, a Roman citizen whose husband Anencletus was a former slave. It’s likely that he was partly motivated to celebrate his “most dutiful wife” in glowing terms due to the prominence her Roman citizenship conferred on him. 

It’s tempting to feel disappointment at the idea that even in death, women’s lives and experiences were being manipulated by men. But Grew’s research is exciting because it shows that occasionally, women could play the same games as men. The tomb of procurator Julius Classicianus features unusually large lettering reading U X O R, or “wife.” Julius’ wife was Julia Pacata, the daughter of a great French chieftain who aided the Romans in battle. It’s likely that she commissioned the tombstone in full awareness of how her family had contributed to her husband’s career. “In Julia,” Grew writes, “perhaps, we, at last, find a woman speaking in her own voice.”

There is often an uncomfortable ambiguity about funerals and funerary monuments. They can be more about the living than the dead, a chance to showcase a family’s achievements to a captive audience. This could be the case with the dedications to women from Roman London. None of them came from an ‘ordinary’ family, each had something exceptional to celebrate.

Take Grata (the Latin equivalent of ‘Grace’ or maybe ‘Cheryl’). Her father’s name – ‘Dagobitus’ – betrays the fact that she was of British heritage, almost certainly born here. To commission a gravestone in proper Roman style, with good syntax and phraseology, was proof that her family had ‘made it’ in Londinium.

Roman Empress Agrippina Was A Master Strategist. She Paid The Price For It. (Isabel Barceló, National Geographic, March 2021)

What about the women of whom we know plenty? They were often the female relatives of emperors and generals. Women like Livia Drusilla, married to Augustus, or Valeria Messalina, Claudius’ third wife. Although these women were barred from holding public office, they exploited family connections to enhance their own position.  

Agrippina the Younger was sister to an emperor, wife of an emperor, and eventually the mother of an emperor as well: Nero was her son from her first marriage. Her main asset was her family heritage. She was highly aware of how advantageous her imperial ancestry was to male suitors. She used these attributes to secure a third marriage to her uncle Claudius. Once empress, she worked tirelessly to ensure her beloved Nero would inherit the imperial throne. 

Agrippina wasn’t shy about wielding her own power either. She established close links with the Senate and advised her husband on imperial matters. As Barceló writes, she took the title Augusta and would often appear standing next to the emperor in public — an unprecedented show of power. Indeed, we gain an excellent sense of Agrippina’s ambition throughout this piece. Barceló expertly narrates how Agrippina pushed the boundaries that her position as a woman entailed. It’s a fascinating portrait of Ancient Roman matriarchal power used to its full potential.

We know that Agrippina could write, but sadly her own diaries have been lost. Secondhand accounts of her life were shaped by male authors’ vested interests: Tacitus depicts Agrippina as a temptress tricking her uncle into marriage; others spread rumors about incest between Agrippina and Nero, or that she poisoned her second husband Crispus. The truth of these accounts is still unclear today. What we can’t deny is that Agrippina used all the resources her position afforded her to pursue an unbridled ambition. This wasn’t common for women in Ancient Rome, but it wasn’t impossible either.

Within a year of Nero becoming emperor, Agrippina was ordered to leave the imperial residence and relocated to an estate in Misenum. She had been cast out from the inner circle of power, but she was not safe from her son. Nero tried to drown her by sabotaging a boat, but she survived. Undeterred, Nero sent assassins to the villa where Agrippina had taken refuge and had her murdered there in A.D. 59. There were no funeral honours. To cover up the matricide, Nero and his advisers crafted a misogynistic cover story, attributing various crimes to her, according to Tacitus, that included, “[aiming] at a share of empire, and at inducing the praetorian cohorts to swear obedience to a woman, to the disgrace of the Senate and people.” Her reputation lay shattered, and her birthday would be classed as an inauspicious day.

Despite the innuendos and criticisms, begrudging respect for Agrippina was expressed by some Roman historians. Tacitus wrote: “This was the end which Agrippina had anticipated for years. The prospect had not daunted her. When she asked astrologers about Nero, they had answered that he would become emperor but kill his mother. Her reply was, ‘Let him kill me—provided he becomes emperor!’”

Female Gladiators In Ancient Rome (Joshua J. Mark, World History, April 2018)

Few people are aware that women fought in the arenas, so Joshua J. Mark’s article provides a thrilling insight into the real-life female gladiators of Ancient Rome. Women from all social classes participated: “Women who chose a life in the arena – and it does seem this was a choice – may have been motivated by a desire for independence, a chance at fame, and financial rewards including remission of debt.” Such a choice came at a price: the women’s loss of respectability in wider society. 

Women’s participation didn’t mean that women and men were allowed to fight together, or even against one another (evidence shows that they trained separately and were kept apart by their tutors). However, the arena presented women with some form of independence. They chose their own path and often ended up being celebrated in the same way as their male counterparts. In one example, Mark examines the remnants of an ornate relief found in Bodrum, Turkey, showing two women reenacting the story of Achilles and Penthesilea, the Amazon Queen: “The women in the relief must have been popular performers to have merited the expense of the work.”

What’s refreshing about this article is its refusal to paint women gladiators as being motivated by a desire to rebel against the patriarchy. Rather than feeling tempted to analyze these unusual female figures through a 21st-century lens, Mark uses archaeological and literary evidence to bring these women and their varied motivations to life firmly within an Ancient Roman context. 

Women may have been considered second-class citizens by the patriarchy but this does not mean every woman accepted that status. Many high-born women were able to exert considerable control over their husbands, homes, and even at court. Juvenal, in the same book of his Satires noted above, makes clear exactly how powerful women could be, in fact, in controlling men who still believed they were the masters. In the case of female gladiators, it seems some women were not content even with that level of autonomy, however, and sought to control their own fate in the arena.

***

Rachel is a freelance journalist who has written about arts and culture for The Economist, New Statesman, and more. She is currently based in Edinburgh. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy editors: Peter Rubin, Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

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1. The DIY Duo Behind the Amazon Labor Union’s Guerrilla Bid to Make History

Josefa Velasquez | The City | March 24th, 2022 | 4,200 Words

Amazon workers in Staten Island made history last week by voting to establish the company’s first union. The grassroots effort was led by two men, Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer, who faced all manner of racist and classist indignities, often as a matter of policy created by Amazon officials to derail unionization. On the eve of the vote, The City, a non-profit newsroom, published this fantastic behind-the-scenes look at what was going down on Staten Island. It’s essential reading at a pivotal moment in U.S. labor history, full of rich detail and blistering reminders of why Amazon unions are necessary. For example: “[Smalls] was fired for allegedly stealing two minutes of company time, which he attributes to ‘human error’ for punching in his work time incorrectly.” And: “Sun-faded prayer candles commemorate a 24-year-old [Amazon worker]…killed by a driver in November as she crossed the street during her near-midnight lunch break.” —SD

2. How a California Archive Reconnected a New Mexico Family with Its Chinese Roots

Wufei Yu | High Country News | April 1st, 2022 | 4,116 words

Aimee Towi Mae Tang, a fourth-generation Chinese New Mexican, felt disconnected from her Chinese roots. Amid a rise of anti-Asian hate crimes across the U.S., she wanted a better understanding of her own identity, which included learning how her family had settled in Albuquerque. Born in China and new to Albuquerque himself, journalist Wufei Yu decides to help Tang learn more about her family’s history, and in doing so, perhaps find his own place in a new city. Yu visits the National Archives in the San Francisco Bay Area to dig through documents: “For two days, those 400-plus colorful pages became my world — passenger arrival lists, immigration records, business filings and legal case files, dotted with Chinese characters.” The piece is sprinkled with such pages — lists, photographs, maps — along with gorgeous illustrations by Sally Deng. Yu pieces together the story of Tang’s great-grandfather, previously known to her as Edward Gaw; but deep in these archives, on paper, he is known as Ong Shew Ngoh: a young man from South China who made the journey to San Francisco and fought to stay in America during its anti-Chinese immigration crackdown. He went on to become a businessman in Albuquerque, owning for a time one of the best grocery stores in town until its Chinese community was pushed out. “If my great-grandpa were allowed to have land,” Tang says in the piece, “the Tang family and Chinese Americans could have owned downtown Albuquerque.” I enjoyed Yu’s tracing of the Tang family in these documents, and this glimpse into one of the early Chinatowns of the American West. —CLR

3. H-Town United: An Unlikely Soccer Power Rises in Texas

Tom Foster | Texas Monthly | April 6th, 2022 | 8,905 words

There’s nothing in sportswriting like an underdog story. But sometimes that underdog status persists regardless of the wins column, regardless of championships, regardless even of dynasties. That’s exactly the case with Houston’s Elsik High School soccer team, from its international stock (the school district, in southwest Houston, serves students who speak 90 different languages) to its tough-love head coach Vincenzo Cox, who found in his kids a long-overdue sense of belonging. After all, just being good at soccer doesn’t undo the reality of the world. “There are times when the hurdles life puts in front of his team just break Cox’s heart,” writes Tom Foster. “When a player has to leave town for a bit because his dad’s been drinking again and it’s not safe in the house. When a kid shows up for high school who doesn’t know his ABC’s. When Cox hears about rival coaches speculating that he has recruiting pipelines to Central America and Africa.” Foster is at his assured best here, taking the reader through multiple seasons in a single story that somehow feels like a 21st-century global-Texas version of Hoosiers — and as a Hoosier myself, I don’t use that comparison lightly.  —PR

4. The Kids Orphaned by COVID Won’t Return to ‘Normal’

Tim Requarth | The Atlantic | April 6th, 2022 | 1,776 words

As governments lift COVID restrictions and people attempt to navigate as the pandemic endures, we are only now entering what will be a lifelong phase of discovering COVID’s long-term repercussions on society. What shadow will COVID cast on people who were children when the virus first appeared? At The Atlantic, Tim Requarth* reports on one reality of the pandemic, “some 200,000 American children” who have been orphaned because of COVID. But what is the U.S. federal government doing to help these kids? Very little, as it turns out. “And while a memorandum issued by President Joe Biden yesterday promises that the administration will develop a plan for orphans, it’s poised to be too little, too late. ‘It really doesn’t outline any plan or commitment,’ Rachel Kidman, a social epidemiologist at Stony Brook University, told me. And the inaction goes deeper than that: With a few exceptions, even the parts of the country most inclined toward action don’t seem to be doing much to help these kids…The pandemic’s orphanhood crisis matters most for orphans, but it also matters for the rest of us. If America can’t do anything to help the children most profoundly affected by COVID, what hope is there to make any sort of long-lasting changes as we try to leave the pandemic behind?” —KS

* Tim Requarth’s Longreads essay, “The Final Five Percent” won the 2020 Science in Society Journalism Award in the Longform Narratives category and was included in the 2020 edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing.

5. The Legend of The Music Tree

Ellen Ruppel Shell | Smithsonian Magazine | April 4th, 2022 | 5282 words

I had never heard of “The Tree” until reading Ellen Ruppel Shell’s fascinating essay, but in certain circles, The Tree is not only famous, it is magical. A mahogany tree originating from the Chiquibul jungle in Belize, its beautiful wood is prized by carpenters and luthiers — with musicians claiming guitars made from The Tree produce an extraordinary sound. Shell wanted to discover more about this Tolkienesque-sounding entity and immerses herself in its story: from being cut down in 1965 to the hunt for any remaining stashes of the precious (and finite) material today. A cross between an adventure story and a collector’s tale, Shell throws in some psychology for good measure: Does this wood actually create a unique sound, or is its coveted nature influencing what people hear? This detailed exploration made me sit down and consider the use of rarity to define prestige. —CW

By Kelsey Zimmerman

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Last week I walked a few blocks from my apartment to a grocery store in my small Midwestern town. The wind chill was -18 Fahrenheit, an improvement over the previous day, when it was a blistering -28. It had been several days — maybe weeks — since I voluntarily went outside for any length of time beyond simply getting in or out of my car.

The Land of White Death by Valerian Albanov inspired me to take this walk. The book tells the harrowing tale of a crew of Russian seal hunters who, in 1912, become trapped in the ice in the Siberian Arctic Circle. Remarkable for its first-person narrative — the vast majority of failed adventure/expedition stories are written by people who did not experience the event themselves — and for its narrator’s headstrong, hopeful, and lyrical ruminations, it made me think about what it must have been like trapped in the cold for years on end, far from home.

Considering I’m risk-averse almost to a fault, I’ll never travel the Siberian Arctic Circle, never climb Mount Everest, never go on a challenging backcountry hike by myself. Why? Partly because of simply having read too many narratives like Albanov’s, too many narratives like the ones on this reading list. Yet coupled with this aversion is a fascination of people who, unlike me, seek experiences full of risk and inspiration; and the thrill of experiencing landscapes few humans have walked on, or mountains unclimbed and unknown. And then, of course, there is the fascination with narratives of those who did not seek risk, who were going about their days and were thrust into extraordinary circumstances. This is the question that haunts me: How would I cope with facing a life-threatening situation in the wilderness? I read story after story, book after book, looking for myself: Yes, being the one who keeps people hopeful, maybe that would be me. Or, thinking of cutting open plants in the desert for water, I’d do that too.

After the Plane Crash—And the Cannibalism—A Life of Hope (Simon Worrall and Roberto Canessa, National Geographic, April 2016)

I grew up near Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and too young, learned about Northwest 255. In 1987 it crashed on one of the busy roads outside the airport, killing all but one passenger and two people on the ground. I was sick with fear around airports for the next 15 years, but fascinated, too. I think now that fear is a cousin of obsession, because as an adult I perseverate on what I fear, including plane crashes. In this piece, Simon Worrall interviews Roberto Canessa, one of the passengers on doomed Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 (subject of the ‘90s film Alive) on the circumstances of survival. After his rugby team crashed in the Andes, Roberto, then a medical student, bore the enormous responsibility of trying to keep his teammates and friends alive, with mixed success.

Who survived? It wasn’t the smartest, most intelligent ones. The ones who survived were those who most felt the joy of living. That gave them a reason to survive.

Tragically Lost in Joshua Tree’s Wild Interior (Geoff Manaugh, The New York Times Magazine, March 2018)

My last real vacation was in February 2020, to Joshua Tree National Park. I was on my own, having peeled off from a group trip to Palm Springs, and I’d already read about Bill Ewasko, an experienced hiker and military veteran who disappeared in the park in June 2010. I went on a few short hikes alone, but, with little previous experience in the desert, was mostly happy to drive. It felt like I could see forever in every direction, yet the panorama kept shifting seamlessly and every few minutes I arrived in a landscape entirely new, save for the ash-gold sand and sentinel Joshua trees. How do you get lost in a place where you can see everything? Well, the truth is, anybody can get lost anywhere.

There is an unsettling truth often revealed by search-and-rescue operations: Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot once observed that the British coastline can never be fully mapped because the more closely you examine it — not just the bays, but the inlets within the bays, and the streams within the inlets — the longer the coast becomes. Although Joshua Tree comprises more than 1,200 square miles of desert with a clear and bounded border, its interior is a constantly changing landscape of hills, canyons, riverbeds, caves and alcoves large enough to hide a human from view. Solid canyon walls reveal themselves, on closer inspection, to be loose agglomerations of huge rocks, hiding crevasses as large as living rooms. The park is, in a sense, immeasurable. And now Ewasko’s case, like Joshua Tree itself, was becoming fractal: The more ground the search covered, the more there was to see. As Pete Carlson of the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit put it to me, “If you haven’t found them, then they’re someplace you haven’t looked yet.”

How America’s National Parks Became Hotbeds of Paranormal Activity (Sarah Emerson, Vice, October 2017)

Perhaps tied to the risk-averse aspect of my personality is also a strict scientist’s skepticism. I have trouble suspending disbelief when it comes to the occult, such as while reading Stephen King novels, or when watching TV shows like Yellowjackets.

Humans don’t have a great inherent understanding of statistics, nor as a species do we seem to grasp the extraordinary danger that accompanies the great outdoors. That an adult human can simply vanish is literally unthinkable: So when it happens, people look for a paranormal explanation, not comprehending how the landscape tucks bodies away, subsumes them.

Much of this article focuses on David Paulides of Missing 411 and its wide internet communities: Paulides raises awareness of forgotten missing-persons cases, which is good; he’s also a Bigfoot believer — that’s a little more iffy.

What makes Paulides’ ideas so tantalizing, so salacious, is what he doesn’t say. He denies mentioning Bigfoot in any of his works. But, like a good storyteller, he allows readers to reach these conclusions on their own. Even his fans have questioned his motives.

I do find David to, at times, sound a little bit like a charlatan,” one wrote on Reddit. “I feel like when you get so invested in something you are bound to lose yourself a little bit.”

The Accident on the Pacific Crest Trail (Louise Farr, Alta Online, January 2021) 

In the early days of the pandemic, long-trail hikers were encouraged to head home to prevent spreading the virus to small, vulnerable locales. Not everyone listened: Three young men continued their obsessive hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, to devastating conclusion.

At around 9:30 a.m., as they turned a corner onto Apache Peak, the trail disappeared under what, at this higher altitude, was two to three feet of snow. They checked their maps. If they crossed a small clearing and headed around another corner, they’d be fine. Jannek, about 10 steps in the lead, and the lightest, made it across the precipitous slope to a stand of trees. But as Trevor crossed, he slipped on ice hidden beneath the top layer of powder. He stopped and tried to stabilize his footing, then his feet went out from under him, and he fell onto the snowy trail. For the briefest time, he managed to stay in place. Then, suddenly, he began sliding feet first, gathering momentum until he hit a rock and began cartwheeling into an icy gorge.

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II (Mike Dash, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2013)

When a Russian family was discovered living in the Siberian taiga after 40 years without contact from the outside world, they were astounded by the advances of modern technology, from Sputnik to cellophane. But perhaps the single detail that strikes me the most is the last survivor, the youngest daughter in the family, choosing to live out her remaining days in the cabin in the wilderness, alone. There’s a saying that references “the devil you know” though I can’t speculate on all the reasons Agafia might have chosen to stay behind. Yes, perhaps, fear. But maybe there was also a desire to carry on her family’s legacy, to preserve a way of life she loved. The not knowing — the inability to know — is the true allure of this type of tale.

The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was shown a picture of a horse, she recognized it from her mother’s Bible stories. “Look, papa,” she exclaimed. “A steed!”

***

Kelsey Zimmerman is a writer from the Midwest. Her poetry can be found in Hobart, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. She can be found hiking on the weekends or on Twitter @kelseypz.

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK/ I sleep all night and I work all day.” This is what was playing in my head, in an incessant loop, as I worked on this reading list. It’s a song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a British comedy show, and includes the line: “Leaping from tree to tree/ As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia.” This is accurate. British Columbia is where I now live, and I have seen for myself the vast swathes of felled logs clogging up rivers around the province — just without the leaping lumberjack (aka Michael Palin). Logging is a huge industry here, a business that comes with its share of controversy — which in turn has inspired some thought-provoking writing.

And it isn’t just logging that writers have chosen as a subject matter — the beauty of trees, their communication, their struggles, and their many mysteries have all been tackled. It’s not hard to see the inspiration. On many a hike, I have stood in awe before a towering tree, tried to wrap my arms around a huge trunk to no avail, or breathed in the heady scents of the distinct species as they drift across a trail. Trees are magnificent, and so it came as no surprise that some of the words written about them are as well.

1) The Wolf Tree and the World Wide Web (Suzanne Simard, Wired, May 2021)

This essay from Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard is a wonderful way to start our journey into the woods. Simard conjures a forest scene for us with great reference, almost affection. Here she is in among some Canadian trees, researching the fascinating connections that link a forest together. Fungus plays a huge role for Team Tree, linking old trees and young seedlings by delivering nutrients and messages between them. She beautifully describes this underground network: “This courageous root was as vulnerable as a growing bone, and it survived by emitting biochemical signals to the fungal network hidden in the earth’s mineral grains, its long threads joined to the talons of the giant trees.” This interconnected, familial system leads Simard to ponder on her own family — her children, and a failing marriage.

The roots of these little seedlings had been laid down well before I’d plucked them from their foundation. The old trees, rich in living, had shipped the germinants waterborne parcels of carbon and nitrogen, subsidizing the emerging radicals and cotyledons—primordial leaves—with energy and nitrogen and water. The cost of supplying the germinants was imperceptible to the elders because of their wealth—they had plenty. The trees spoke of patience, of the slow but continuous way old and young share and endure and keep on. Just as the steadiness of my girls steadied me, and I told myself I was strong enough to endure this season of separation. Besides, I’d have a sabbatical in a year, and I could make their lunches again, drumsticks and sliced cucumber and oranges cut into smiles, and I could show them how to build go-carts and plant flowers, and Nava and I could read together more, alternating turns through pages of Mercy Watson to the Rescue. But until that magical year, I’d spirit across the mountains each weekend to reabsorb their lives, my motherhood like time-lapse photography.

2) Do Trees Talk to Each Other? (Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2018)

Others have also been inspired by the intimacy of forest networks, and in this article for Smithsonian, Richard Grant takes a walk into the woods with Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, and author, who has developed a unique way of talking about trees — one that has earned him some scorn among the scientific community. Wohleben takes anthropomorphism to a new level, discussing mother trees who “feed their saplings … and warn the neighbors of danger,” compared to fickle young trees who take “foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light chasing, and excessive drinking.”

While trees may not have “will or intention,” it can still be argued that they are more social and sophisticated than people once thought. This is what Wohleben wants his audience to realize, and it seems his imaginative descriptions deliberately slip into the world of fairytales. People love a story, and this wordsmith uses his narrative skill to engage people with the forests he adores. In the slow-moving world of trees, adding a little drama to the “Crown princes” who “wait for the old monarchs to fall” is a clever tactic, and Wohleben does not seem too phased by the criticism: “they call me a ‘tree-hugger,’ which is not true. I don’t believe that trees respond to hugs.” A dive into Wohlleben’s world certainly isn’t boring — his language, after all, is rather delightful.

Trees can detect scents through their leaves, which, for Wohlleben, qualifies as a sense of smell. They also have a sense of taste. When elms and pines come under attack by leaf-eating caterpillars, for example, they detect the caterpillar saliva, and release pheromones that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and the wasp larvae eat the caterpillars from the inside out. “Very unpleasant for the caterpillars,” says Wohlleben. “Very clever of the trees.”

A recent study from Leipzig University and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research shows that trees know the taste of deer saliva. “When a deer is biting a branch, the tree brings defending chemicals to make the leaves taste bad,” he says. “When a human breaks the branch with his hands, the tree knows the difference, and brings in substances to heal the wound.”

Our boots crunch on through the glittering snow. From time to time, I think of objections to Wohlleben’s anthropomorphic metaphors, but more often I sense my ignorance and blindness falling away. I had never really looked at trees before, or thought about life from their perspective. I had taken trees for granted, in a way that would never be possible again.

3) Illuminating Kirinyaga (Tristan McConnell, Emergence Magazine, October 2020)

In this essay for Emergence Magazine, we go on another forest walk, this time alongside Tristan McConnell, who is documenting a “stubbly, hollow-cheeked sixty-four-year-old” named Joseph Mbaya. Walking in the mountain forests that surround Mount Kenya, Mbaya finds a portal to a “slower and more meaningful world,” and also treatments for ear infections and “pungent wind.” His knowledge of herbal cures makes walking the forest tracks with Mbaya, “like walking the aisles of CVS with a taciturn pharmacist.”

It is lovely to share an insight into the mystical remedies a forest can offer, but this essay quickly takes a darker turn, detailing how these magical forests are shrinking. Fire-clearing for farming, timber plantations, and climate change are all taking their toll — but so is simply the poverty of this region. For many here, “conservation is an unaffordable luxury” — with the forest offering a resource they need to exploit, rather than protect, in order to survive.

DEEP INSIDE THE fractured forests that still ring the mountain, a hallowed sense of wonder persists. One morning, soon after the sun burns mist from the mountainsides and clouds shroud the peaks, I visit part of the mountain’s few remaining areas of old-growth woodland with a pair of young Kenyan foresters from the Mount Kenya Trust. Marania Forest, on the mountain’s northern fringe, is a revelation: thickly towering trunks of eight-hundred-year-old rosewood reach overhead, the trees’ crowns held up to the light of the canopy, pencil-straight cedar and craggy-barked olive are draped with lichen, and moss carpets the earth, muffling sound to a church-like silence. It is dark, crowded, and otherworldly—the ground soft underfoot, the trunks damp to the touch, the trees centuries old, the sunlight breaking through in narrow shafts. At our feet, fallen trunks breach the understory like shipwrecks, gradually decaying and returning to the soil—to its subterranean fungal networks and the spreading roots of neighboring trees—as food for the rest of the forest. We all smile, the foresters and I. It is a routine venture out for them, and my first to these old forests, and yet our reactions are the same: joy and reverential wonder. We instinctively drop our voices to a whisper. We walk and talk, feet sinking into the damp, spongey soil as the foresters teach me about the trees.

4) Inside the Pacheedaht Nation’s Stand on Fairy Creek Logging Blockades (Sarah Cox, The Narwhal, July 2021)

The forests around Mount Kenya are not unique — forest exploitation is a controversial issue around the world. Within my own community in British Columbia, the debate has recently been focused around the logging of old-growth trees in an area called Fairy Creek. For many months now, protesters have been blocking access to the logging cut block — and more than 300 people have been arrested, making it one of the largest civil disobedience actions in recent Canadian history.

A few pieces have been written about Fairy Creek, but I was particularly struck by the insight Sarah Cox provided in her article for The Narwhal. Cox not only looks at the perspective of the protestors and the police, but at the viewpoint of the people on whose territory Fairy Creek lies — the Pacheedaht First Nation. It’s complicated. The Pacheedaht co-manages the annual cut on its territory, and forestry has helped them to provide revenue and jobs — even allowing them to buy back some of their ancestral lands. The Pacheedaht First Nation’s elected leadership has asked the protestors to leave, but an elder, Bill Jones, has welcomed the protestors and garnered extensive media coverage. Cox deftly peels back the layers to look at the tensions within a community that has often been overlooked in this debate.

We scramble onto the boggy shore of an island where four Pacheedaht members in hip waders are planting sedges and grasses to repair damage to fish habitat caused by decades of industrial logging — logging in which the nation played no part and from which it received no benefit. An eagle lets out a high-pitched whistle. Our boots squelch in the mud. Then, slicing through the stillness, comes the throaty chuckachuka-chuckachuka of a RCMP helicopter.

For the Chief, “everything that’s been happening,” refers to the blockades taking place in and around the Fairy Creek watershed on Pacheedaht territory and in the neighbouring territory of the Ditidaht First Nation. From the estuary, we can almost see the green spirals of the Fairy Creek valley, only a few kilometres distant, that has become the epicentre of a flourishing movement to save the last of B.C.’s unprotected old-growth forests. At this very moment, RCMP are arresting protesters wedged into tall tripods hammered together with discarded logs or lying under tarps with their arms chained inside “sleeping dragons” — metal tubes dug into the ground. When the RCMP leave each day, more protesters (or land defenders, tree protectors, tree-huggers or intruders, depending on whom you talk to) drive their cars, camper vans, trucks and SUVs up the inclines of logging roads that provide access to planned logging in the Fairy Creek watershed.

5) When The Toughest Trees Met the Hottest Fires (David Ferris, Greenwire, August 2021)

The past few months have brought home to me that logging is not the only threat to our forests — climate change is increasing the impact of fires year on year. This summer the area where I live reached an unprecedented 46 degrees, a whole town burned to the ground, and I witnessed for myself flames licking up a forested mountain, gleefully jumping from tree to tree with ease.

Old-growth forest is more fire-resistant — and in fact, this is one of the arguments for saving old growth from the saws — but as David Ferris points out in his poignant essay for Greenwire, even the very oldest are now being wrecked by blazes. Ferris tells the story of last August, when the CZU Lightning Complex Fire “climbed the ladder of lesser trees and into the crowns of the giants,” ruining redwoods that had formed “an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible.” Ferris peppers his stories with these jaw-dropping facts — the trees in question are up to 2,500 years old, 350 feet tall, and have six chromosomes compared to a mere two in us humans — they are simply incredible. He also paints a vivid picture of their home, a “cloud forest, dripping and primeval,” steeped in time. In contrast, the story of the fire is tense and fast, the drama played out through the eyes of Cal Fire’s Dan Bonfante, who almost lost his life.

As the forest burns every year, the humans who live near the redwoods will experience heat waves, and evacuations, and blackouts, and droughts, and mudslides, and smoke hanging in the air. Creatures that don’t measure their lives in millennia could find their life spans nastier and shorter.

The shaggy, patient trees that form an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible are in ruins. The sprouts bursting from their trunks suggest that the shaded cathedrals could return, though the healing may take so long that no one now alive will see them. Today’s adults will take their children to Big Basin, and to landscapes across the West where once-verdant forests have been withered by fire. They will point and talk, not of the desolation that is, but of the Eden that used to be — and could be again, one distant day.

“In my lifetime, yeah, it’s not going to look like it used to look,” said Kerbavaz with a shrug. “But in the next lifetime, probably.”

In movies, the music industry’s shady opportunists are often cast as overly tan white men with heavy gold chains, who wear their dyed hair teased high. In 1969, a shady opportunist with an actual six-inch pompadour fooled singer Mary Jane Jones into playing what she believed would be a string of shows opening for Aretha Franklin. Instead, this man forced her to perform as Aretha Franklin.

For Smithsonian, Jeff Maysh tells the dramatic story of this wildly talented mother of four and how she fit into the once thriving economy of celebrity impersonators and legitimate soul singers. I don’t mean impersonators hired to perform like celebrities at parties or corporate events. I mean people hired to fool large audiences by acting like the real thing. Even though Jones’ career got sidetracked slightly, her talent offered her redemption. The original scam seems too preposterous to have worked. But it did for a little while. How?

According to newspaper reports, Hardy’s “Aretha Franklin Revue” played three small towns across Florida. After every performance, “Aretha” dashed to her dressing room and hid. On the strength of these smaller shows, Hardy eyed bigger towns and talked of scoring a lucrative ten-night tour. Meanwhile, he fed Jones two hamburgers a day and kept her locked inside a grim hotel room, far from her boys, who were being cared for by her mother. Even if she’d been able to steal away to call the police, she might have felt some hesitation: In nearby Miami just a few months earlier, a “blacks only” rally had turned into a riot where police shot and killed three residents, and left a 12-year-old boy with a bullet hole in his chest.

In Fort Myers, the promoters booked the 1,400-seat High Hat Club, where the $5.50 tickets quickly sold out. Hardy’s impostor had fooled a few small-town crowds, but now she had to convince a larger audience. He dressed Jones in a yellow, floor-length gown, a wig and heavy stage makeup. In the mirror, she looked vaguely like a picture of Franklin from the pages of Jet. “I wanted to tell everybody beforehand that I was not Miss Franklin,” Jones insisted later, “but [Hardy] said the show promoters would do something awful to me if they learned who I really was.”

When Jones peered out from backstage she saw an audience ten times larger than those she’d seen at any church or nightclub. “I was scared,” Jones recalled. “I didn’t have any money, no place to go.”

Through the fog of cigarette smoke and heavy stage lighting, Hardy hoped his hoax would work.

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