To anyone who lives south of the Arctic Circle the problem can seem abstract—another distant note of sadness in an era heavy with extinctions. But this is not how it appears in the far north.

In small communities scattered along the tree line or set in the open tundra, towns such as Anaktuvuk Pass that are often isolated, often Indigenous, where imported food and gas can be astronomically expensive and hunting caribou is often the cheapest and fastest and certainly the most satisfying way to provide for a family, the decline brings a peculiar dread. An Inupiat elder in a coastal town told me it was like feeling the symptoms of a cold coming on. The cold arrives, and it lingers. You don’t get over it. Then it worsens, until you become gaunt and haunted, until you’re afraid it isn’t a cold at all but something deeper. Something that’s shot through your whole system.

This is how the caribou problem feels to many Native people in the north, including the Nunamiut. Their name means “people of the land,” but anyone will tell you that they are, most of all, a caribou people. They are also sometimes called America’s last nomads, because only in about 1950 did the Nunamiut give up a mobile life, a life spent hunting and following caribou. They chose to settle in Anaktuvuk Pass exactly because the herd poured through it like a river. The name Anaktuvuk means “the place of many caribou droppings.”

One night after I’d gone out hunting with Clyde Morry, his father, Mark, made a quiet comment about the choice his people had made. Mark Morry was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Thick gray hair, thick old glasses. He sat in a recliner by a window in the house he had built, watching his family eat caribou that Clyde had brought home.

“It was a big gamble for them to settle down like that,” Mark said of his own father and mother and uncles and aunts, the generation who gave up nomadism. “They figured the caribou would always be here.”

*This story is only accessible to National Geographic subscribers.

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How two incarcerated men bonded over Dungeons & Dragons. The wonders of parasitic fungus. Greenwashing egg yolks, the Arctic search for Sir John Franklin’s tomb, and the hunks of hip-hop.

1. When Wizards and Orcs Came to Death Row

Keri Blakinger | The Marshall Project | August 31, 2023 | 4,584 words

A great longread educates, and in doing so, offers an unexpected poignancy. Keri Blakinger’s profile of Tony Ford and Billy Wardlow, two men who bonded over games of Dungeons & Dragons while incarcerated in Texas, does just that. She gives us a glimpse into death row, where there are no educational or social programs because the men will never return to society, where the isolation is so extreme that the United Nations has condemned these conditions as torture. For Ford and Wardlow, Dungeons & Dragons gave them purpose. The men were incarcerated as teens, well before they had to earn a paycheck or pay rent, and D&D helped them learn to manage money. But most of all, as Blakinger so deftly reveals, Dungeons & Dragons gave them something to look forward to, a simple yet necessary form of hope. Ford and Wardlow built not just a friendship, but a deep connection in a place where the only human contact comes when the guards handcuff you. In a stroke of journalistic brilliance, Blakinger uses details from Wardlow’s D&D character Arthaxx d’Cannith, a magical prodigy, to deepen our understanding of Wardlow and his true character. “Every day, Arthaxx used his gifts to help the higher-ups of House Cannith perfect the invention they hoped would end a century of war. At night, he came home to his wife, his childhood sweetheart,” she writes. If only this Dungeons & Dragons dream could have come true. —KS

2. The Last of the Fungus

Zhengyang Wang | Nautilus | August 30, 2023 | 4,497 words

Molecular phylogenies and caterpillar fungus are not topics I expected to find riveting until I read Zhengyang Wang’s essay. His story bounces along like a thriller: Mountaintop expeditions, dodgy deals, and even death are part of this fungal world. However, the most gripping thread is Wang’s PhD. Yes, that’s right: He makes his PhD research project on parasitic fungus sound fascinating. The parasite in question is reminiscent of Alien, invading ghost moth caterpillars and taking over their brains until stroma blasts out of their heads and sticks up from the soil. (Wang describes this much more eerily and beautifully.) In China, this stroma is celebrated for helping with a different kind of protrusion and is known as “Himalayan Viagra.” The attributed medical and aphrodisiacal powers (by no means proven) mean the sale of this fungus equates to a massive tenth of Tibet’s gross domestic product. Inevitably, people are attempting industrial farming, and mountain vistas are being devastated as caterpillars are collected to sell to fungus breeders. But it isn’t working. Spraying caterpillars with spores of the parasite O. sinensis does not infect them. Wang’s PhD explains why these centers are failing: The complicated, intricate ecosystems where these hosts and parasites evolve together are impossible to replicate. His research proves the decimation of delicate montane habitats is pointless, but not enough people are reading it. You can. —CW

3. Orange Is the New Yolk

Marian Bull | Eater | August 17, 2023 | 5,025 words

Free-range! Cage-free! Pasture-raised! Certified humane! I’ve felt a slight sense of relief in buying eggs with any of these promises stamped on the carton. But what do these terms really mean when it comes to living conditions for laying hens? For Eater, Marian Bull examines our current food fetish, an ongoing quest for “shockingly orange yolks” that denote hen health and somehow help us to feel better about the food we’re eating. Bull isn’t chicken about pecking into the truth, scratching well beyond the surface to help us lay readers understand what these terms mean and how our love-and-sometimes-hate relationship with egg yolks has brought us to this quest for the perfect egg, both in color and cooked consistency. What’s more, Bull does it with style and a sharp wit. “We want it over easy, its yolk sploojing across the plate,” she writes. “And we want its color to convince us that it was not hatched in some animal welfare hellscape.” You didn’t know you needed 5,000-plus words on the state of egg farming in America, but with Bull, you get a much-needed education, and that’s no yolk. —KS

4. Seeking To Solve The Arctic’s Biggest Mystery, They Ended Up Trapped In Ice At The Top Of The World

Mark Synnott | National Geographic | July 25, 2023 | 5,835 words

Do you love stories about historical mysteries, extreme adventures, or scientific expeditions? Or do you, like me, love all those things as well as season one of the AMC show The Terror? If you answered yes—and honestly, even if you didn’t—this feature is for you. In 1847, Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men disappeared while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage. In the decades since, there have been rumors and ghost stories but no conclusive evidence about their fate. Recently, a National Geographic team sought to find that evidence, namely Franklin’s tomb. But as the headline of this story states, “the Arctic doesn’t give up its secrets easily.” That isn’t merely a reference to the terrain, which at one point threatens to lock the team’s sailboat in winter ice—which, as it happens, is the last thing that we know for sure happened to Franklin’s ships. Superstition also hangs heavy in this compelling narrative. “I’m convinced that the Inuit may have once known where Franklin’s tomb is located,” one of the story’s main subjects says, “but they didn’t want it to be found because it was cursed.” —SD

5. The Evolution of the Hip-Hop Hunk

Clover Hope | Pitchfork | September 6, 2023 | 2,781 words

My wife’s in love with Method Man. Why shouldn’t she be? Dude is … very attractive. I mean, that’s just science. Besides, we’re all afforded celebrity crushes, especially those that took root in our younger years. Clover Hope was in love with Method Man too, but she was also in love with LL Cool J, DMX, Ja Rule, and Nelly, just to name a few—and in plotting her own life of crushes against the arc of hip-hop’s evolution, she elucidates how sexuality became an indispensable marketing ploy for male artists. Sometimes that entered problematic waters, as when Tupac grew into sex symbol. But times change, and when Hope surveys the present landscape, she sees little that gets her heart racing. Some of that is age, maybe, but much of it is archetype: When you’re the dominant cultural aesthetic on Planet Earth, the commercial behemoths need to flatten and trope-ify you any way possible. So we don’t have Andre 3000s anymore; instead, we have Drakes and Jack Harlows. Besides, female artists have come along and cornered the market on sexual fantasy, and queer artists have spun and subverted the the gaze as well. (“A single second of a Megan Thee Stallion Instagram workout video is worth a million and one Drake gym mirror selfies,” she writes.) This piece trades on looking backward, but Hope’s genius is in nudging our expectations—and our appetites—forward. —PR

Audience Award

And with no further ado, here’s the story our audience loved this week:

Our crew of five had left Maine in my sailboat, Polar Sun, more than two months earlier to follow the route of the legendary explorer Sir John Franklin. He’d set off from England in 1845 in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, a sea route over the icy top of North America that would open a new trading avenue to the riches of the Far East. But Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, and his crew of 128 men had disappeared. What no one knew at the time was that the ships had become trapped in ice, stranding Franklin and his men deep in the Arctic. None lived to tell what happened, and no detailed written account of their ordeal has been found. This void in the historical record, collectively known as “the Franklin mystery,” has led to more than 170 years of speculation. It has also spawned generations of devoted “Franklinites” obsessed with piecing together the story of how more than a hundred British sailors tried to walk out of one of the most inhospitable wildernesses on Earth.

Over the years, I too had become a Franklinite. With morbid fascination, I read all the books I could find on the subject, imagining myself as a member of the doomed crew, and puzzling over the many unanswered questions: Where was Franklin buried? Where were his logbooks? Did the Inuit try to help the crew? Was it possible that a few of the men almost made it out? In the end, I couldn’t resist the urge to go looking for some of these answers myself and hatched a plan to refit Polar Sun so that I could sail the same waters as the Erebus and the Terror, anchor in the same harbors, and see what they saw. I also hoped to complete the voyage that Franklin never did: to sail from the Atlantic into the mazelike network of straits and bays that makes up the Northwest Passage and emerge on the other side of the continent, off the coast of Alaska.

Now, after nearly 3,000 nautical miles—roughly half the journey—my quest to immerse myself in the Franklin mystery had become a little too real. If Polar Sun were iced in, I could lose her. And even if we somehow made it safely ashore, a rescue here could be difficult. And of course, there was also that polar bear.

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The past few years have drastically changed how we think about our relationship to work, perhaps permanently. However, they haven’t changed the fact that billions of people on this planet spend about half their waking hours exchanging labor for money in order to secure food and shelter. As such, work has remained an inescapable part of one’s identity. “What do you do?” is still a small-talk question not because the answer is usually interesting, but because the answer tells you something about the skills and knowledge that person has amassed. And when the answer is interesting, it’s hard not to feel some measure of admiration for someone whose experience falls so outside your own.

I’ve always been fascinated by those whose daily occupations carry meaning, promise adventure, or are in any way out of the ordinary. Of course, everybody’s dream job is different, but imagine swapping sitting at a computer or working on a production line for clearing landmines, dodging tornadoes, or braving the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Not for everyone, of course—but what astonishing ways to earn a living. 

The examples you’ll encounter below range from the inspirational to the unfathomable. Who would want to toil 18-hour days, or climb to dizzying heights with little to no protection? For some, that sort of life holds a deep appeal, and herein lies the hook that draws you into these stories: In attempting to understand the motivations of others, we are by reflex attempting to understand ourselves. Each of these pieces moved me in some way, and I hope that they move you also.

Chasing Tornadoes (Priit J. Vesilind, National Geographic, April 2004)

As this mesmerizing article points out, it was the 1996 film Twister that first brought the occupation of “tornado chaser” to widespread public attention. Twister was a big deal upon its release, and I can vividly recall being spellbound by the then-cutting-edge special effects: dark and furious tendrils reaching down from the sky to pluck people, cars, and houses into the sky, spinning like toys, seemingly cut adrift from gravity itself. That film, as all movies do, exaggerated the hazards faced by its protagonists—but, judging by this primary account, not by very much. That meteorologists are still throwing themselves at deadly storms nearly 30 years on tells much of the complexity behind this destructive and spectacular weather phenomenon. 

In order to study tornados, you have to get close enough to manually drop heavy probes in their path, sometimes less than 100 meters from an approaching maelstrom. In a way, it’s comforting to know that, for all our technology and sophistication, we are in no way removed from the natural systems that surround us. Nature can always outdo us, will always win. That’s not to minimize the human cost, however, nor the bravery and determination of the tornado chasers. From the very beginning, in which an entire village is sucked into the air, this piece delivers mind-boggling drama, immersing us in a disparate group of specialists who race across the United States to seek out something most others would sooner avoid—all in the interest of furthering our understanding of an uncontrollable phenomenon.

But we’re late, and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm, we won’t have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to “punch the core” of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the “bear’s cage,” an area between the main updraft and the hail. It’s an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.

And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour (97 kilometers an hour) on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero. Anton is less than comforting. “The hail in the bear’s cage smashes windows and car tops,” he shouts, grinning. “The smaller stuff is kept aloft by the updraft, and only the large chunks fall. It’s like small meteorites banging down. Ha-ha-ha!”

In The Race For Better Cell Service, Men Who Climb Towers Pay With Their Lives (Ryan Knutson and Liz Day, ProPublica, May 2012)

Once again, we encounter a piece that draws aside the invisible curtain to glimpse the grueling efforts that enable our everyday creature comforts—in this case, the world of mobile communications networks. If you’ve ever shuddered at a TikTok video of a worker balanced precariously atop a tower at vertigo-inducing heights, this article probably isn’t for you. Yet, for such a dangerous job—cell tower climbing routinely claims up to 10 times the number of human lives as the conventional construction industry—it pays a relatively modest wage. What is it, then, that drives people to take up such work?

As a project manager quoted in the piece says, “You’ve got to have a problem to hang 150 feet in the air on an eight-inch strap.” Yet the workers featured in this piece, despite some suffering horrible injuries, clearly love their jobs. It’s not hard to understand the buzz that must come from routinely doing something that most people could not (and would not) do, along with sense of freedom that must come with climbing aloft to look down upon the world. As with the cobalt mining industry—itself the subject of another story in this list—there is a dark underside to this business, as sub-contractors routinely cut corners and take risks in the quest for a few extra dollars.

The greatness in Knutson and Day’s article, as with others collected here, lies in its ability to bring to life the stories and personalities of the people whose hard work makes life easier for us all. If you’re reading this on your smartphone, take a moment to consider the often-obscured reality behind mobile technology—a technology that, by its very nature, is largely invisible.

The surge of cell work forever altered tower climbing, an obscure field of no more than 10,000 workers. It attracted newcomers, including outfits known within the business as “two guys and a rope.” It also exacerbated the industry’s transient, high-flying culture.

Climbers live out of motel rooms, installing antennas in Oklahoma one day, building a tower in Tennessee the next. The work attracts risk-takers and rebels. Of the 33 tower fatalities for which autopsy records were available, 10 showed climbers had drugs or alcohol in their systems.

The Cobalt Pipeline (Todd C. Frankel, The Washington Post, September 2016)

This is where mobile technology begins: the dangerous and dirty business of mining for cobalt, a mineral essential to the construction of smartphones and laptops. As a species we are finally becoming aware that every modern amenity carries an ecological price, and that price is often paid most dearly (and ironically) by nations that are monetarily poor but resource-rich. In our relentless drive “forward,” it is often the most vulnerable who pay the price. Mining is not a calling for these men; it is a necessity.

However, there is hope to be found in this troubling story—specifically, the very fact of its existence. The best journalism reduces global issues to a human scale, and by taking us into the lives of Congolese miners risking life and limb in pursuit of the rare metal, writer Todd C. Frankel forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.  

But Mayamba, 35, knew nothing about his role in this sprawling global supply chain. He grabbed his metal shovel and broken-headed hammer from a corner of the room he shares with his wife and child. He pulled on a dust-stained jacket. A proud man, he likes to wear a button-down shirt even to mine. And he planned to mine by hand all day and through the night. He would nap in the underground tunnels. No industrial tools. Not even a hard hat. The risk of a cave-in is constant.

“Do you have enough money to buy flour today?” he asked his wife.

She did. But now a debt collector stood at the door. The family owed money for salt. Flour would have to wait.

Mayamba tried to reassure his wife. He said goodbye to his son. Then he slung his shovel over his shoulder. It was time.

Making Our Home Safe Again: Meet the Women Who Clear Land Mines (Jessie Williams, The Observer, January 2021)

War leaves scars on every country it touches, sometimes literally: one of its most insidious instruments is buried explosives, set to trigger at the touch of a human foot. Land mines have been a topic of discussion for many years, catapulted to the front of the news in 1997, when Princess Diana raised awareness by walking through a field of live explosives in Angola. (She was a guest of the Halo Trust, an organization that undertakes the arduous and dangerous task of clearing such places for the local populace.)

Little can be more terrifying than the knowledge that each step you take could be your last. It’s a sudden, senseless, death, one without discernment or mercy. But in this inspiring story, life comes full circle, as Hana Khider returns to her ancestral homeland of the Sinjar mountains in northwestern Iraq. When Khider was a child, her mother told her stories of the family homeland they were forced to flee; now, as an adult, she works as part of a team of deminers, making that homeland safe once again. As meaningful as this work is, it also carries with it the deadliest of dangers: an average of nine people a day still fall victim to these terrible remnants of conflict.

At the start of this month, a 24-year-old man working for MAG was killed in an explosion at a munitions storage facility in Iraq’s Telefar district – a reminder of the dangers these deminers face every single day. Iraq has around 1,800 sq km of contaminated land (an area bigger than Greater London) stemming from multiple conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Gulf War, the 2003 US-led invasion, and the Isis occupation of 2014. The Iraqi government has a target deadline of February 2028 to clear the country, which Morgan thinks is optimistic. “Last year, operators cleared just over 15 sq km,” he says. Covid-19 hasn’t helped. This year MAG has managed to disarm 1,200 mines; usually it would be 6,750 mines.

Dispatches: Life on an Alaskan Crab Boat (Andy Cochrane, Men’s Journal, April 2021)

We have always projected a certain romance onto the idea of working on the high seas, and a dignity upon those individuals brave enough to do so. For this piece, journalist Andy Cochrane signs up for a week’s work on the fishing boat Silver Spray, one of just 60 such vessels responsible for supplying all of North America with snow crab. Facing long hours, rough water, and freezing conditions, the work is as grueling as could be imagined, but surprisingly Cochrane encounters only good humor, pragmatism, and an inspiring sense of brotherhood amongst the crew.

This is work that is as fundamental to human existence as can be found. People have to eat, after all. But what really strikes me about this piece—and is a sentiment echoed by its author—is the remarkable positivity of the fishermen, which surely can’t be put down to a sense of pride and decent wages alone. Perhaps it’s the extreme conditions and the hardships that help foster such a sense of togetherness and wry determination. Whatever the cause, this is another absorbing peek into a job few of us would wish to undertake.

I was curious how these guys found their way to the industry and how they hadn’t burned out. Attrition is incredibly high, for obvious reasons—freezing temperatures, rough seas and long, exhausting hours. All three laughed off my greenhorn question, and we returned to tips on how I would survive the week.

Jose, an immigrant from El Salvador and father of two, has lived in Anchorage since the ’90s. Quiet, always smiling, and always working, he’s fished his entire career. Leo, raised in Samoa and now living in Vegas, also has two kids. Even with frozen fingers and toes, he never stopped making jokes. Jeffery, who lives half the year in the Philippines with his wife and three kids, would often give me a fist bump and say “you’ll be all right, everyone goes through this” after I puked, which happened 11 more times the first day.

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: Carolyn Wells

I tell the pilot that if I am not back in camp in two days I will be over on the Lewis River, headed back to camp, and I gesture. The casualness of this request will come back to haunt me, but for now I am walking across what feels like a newly minted, untrod land.

I sleep with my very own glacier that night. Try it sometime if you want to know just how insignificant you can be. Melting throughout day, the ice releases what sounds like barks, then pistol shots. It groans, a sound like no other, and shoots out thick streams of snowmelt that arc high above, luminous in the half-light of a dim reeling sun, before plunging down, down into the dark lake.

Winning FISM requires more than merely fooling other magicians: It demands a new technique, a compelling story, a hilarious twist. And so some performers wove narratives at times surreal and poetic. One Japanese magician romanced an empty shirt that somehow wrapped her in its arms. A 15-year-old German student who goes by the name Magic Maxl dueled with a soft-boiled egg that seemed to come alive while he pretended to get ready for school. Others opted for simple, self-deprecating humor. “I spent two thousand dollars to be here,” one French competitor deadpanned, munching fistfuls of potato chips while pulling the four queens from a messy pile of facedown cards with inexplicable ease.

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

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.

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

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1. Into the Depths

Tara Roberts | National Geographic | February 7th, 2022 | 5,200 words

According to academic research, the transatlantic slave trade comprised at least 36,000 voyages — that’s how many trips it took to forcibly transport some 12.5 million Africans from freedom to bondage. But 1,000 or so of those ships likely sank, taking with them the bodies and stories of the people on board. A remarkable group of Black divers is now searching for these lost ships. When writer Tara Roberts joined them — quitting her job, giving up her apartment, and dipping into her savings to make it happen — she learned more than she ever thought possible about the power of history, including her own family’s roots. Roberts’ beautiful piece documenting her journey complements a six-part podcast about the slave trade and its shipwrecks. There’s a moment in the piece I won’t soon forget, when divers pour soil from the island where a group of slaves was captured over the waves near Cape Town where 212 of them perished in a capsized ship. “For the first time since 1794,” a diver tells Roberts, “[these] people can sleep in their own land.” —SD

2. Why King Tut is Still Fascinating

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | February 7th, 2022 | 3,545 words

Whenever I am back in London, I visit the British Museum. I love to gawk in wonder at gold coins retrieved from Viking treasure hordes or at an Anglo-Saxon helmet from 625 AD — a date that swirls in front of my eyes as I try to imagine it. However, it is rooms 62 and 63 that I am most drawn to, for these are the rooms that hold the exhibition Egyptian death and afterlife: mummies. I was there a couple of months ago, but this time found myself feeling uncomfortable as I stared at the small withered bodies, wrapped — but still exposed — in their sarcophagi. The immense care Egyptians took in arranging burials implies that a glass case steaming with the breath of thousands of tourists is not where they wanted their dead to end up. However dubious, these rooms are the most crowded — and here I was, part of that. So I was intrigued to come across Casey Cep’s article detailing our fascination with Egyptology — and in particular, the endless appeal of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, 3000 years after his death and 100 years since Howard Carter found his tomb. Cep reports on how a recent global tour of Tutankhamun’s treasures “attracted larger crowds than the Beatles did, breaking museum attendance records and generating tens of millions of dollars in ticket sales.” I enjoyed that this piece took a different perspective — not just the story of Tutankhamun, but about the “Tut glut” that followed. A glut I find myself contributing to with this blurb…and so it continues. —CW

3. The Race to Free Washington’s Last Orca in Captivity

Benjamin Cassidy | Seattle Met | February 8, 2022 | 5,447 words

“For nearly all of her almost 52 years in captivity, a whale weaned on voluminous Northwest waters has performed for gawking tourists in the country’s smallest orca tank.” For Seattle Met, Benjamin Cassidy reports on the Lummi Nation’s quest to bring Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut — Washington State’s last orca in captivity — home to the Salish Sea. Taken from her native waters in 1970, the orca was sold to Miami Seaquarium, renamed Lolita, and has lived there ever since. This is a somber read, but there’s also so much beauty in the way Cassidy describes the connection between the Lummi and the region’s orcas, whom they consider their spiritual relatives. (“Growing up, Tah-Mahs learned about the whales known as qwe’lhol’mechen, or, loosely, ‘our relations below the waves,’ through stories passed down by elders.”) The decades-long effort that’s called for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s release is more urgent than ever, especially given the news this past week about her ill health. —CLR

4. The Visionary

David Alm | Runner’s World | February 3, 2022 | 5,748 words

Now that society’s thinking about cannabis finally seems to have changed permanently, it’s little wonder that athletes are being more outspoken about their use of the plant. NBA athletes and ultrarunners have already gone on the record; now, a profile of Thai Richards chronicles how the literal face of last year’s New York City Marathon is nurturing a similar attitudinal shift in the road-running community. Alm, who made our Best of 2021 list with his GQ feature about The Bronx’s community of elite Ethiopian runners, doesn’t recede entirely — as a runner and cannabis user who had never crossed the streams, he had to go gonzo in the name of journalistic immersion — but he tells Richards’ story with compassion and reserve, teasing out the fraught path so many Black and Brown athletes tread in the quest for wellness. Make no mistake, though: This isn’t about catching a buzz. It’s about connecting with your mind, being at ease in your body, and maintaining that inner balance even when the world at large does everything it can to knock you off your pivot. —PR

5. Suzanne Takes You Down to Her Place Near the River

Lacy Warner | Guernica | February 7th, 2022 | 5,082 words

Suzanne Verdal, the infamous muse and subject of the Leonard Cohen song that bears her name, is a real person. And unlike Cohen who passed away in 2016, she’s still alive. Because she’s a human being, we know that Suzanne is much more than simply a muse, but did she have artistic aspirations of her own? At Guernica, writer Lacy Warner is surprised by what she finds out about Suzanne’s true super power: “In Suzanne, I saw the possibility not only of reckoning with what muses might be owed, but the chance to strike a blow for all the women who have inspired men’s art while struggling to be recognized for their own.” —KS