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This week’s edition features stories on progressive activism, dwindling salmon, how Chicago protects birds from an untimely death, the future of the craft of coding, and a profile of an odious (and powerful) literary agent.

1. Not One Tree

Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko | n+1 | October 26, 2023 | 16,313 words

Whether you’ve been following the Cop City saga closely, only just heard about it this week, or have no idea what I’m talking about, you should read this essay. For those who fall into the third category, here’s a quick primer: Cop City is the nickname of a law enforcement training campus under construction near Atlanta, on forested land once inhabited by Native people before they were forcibly removed, then turned into a slave plantation, then into a farm worked by prisoners. (“The plantation, the prison farm, the police academy: it sounds like a history of America,” Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko write.) Opponents of the project are known as “forest defenders,” and in an incident last January, one of them was shot and killed by police. This essay is an insider account of the Stop Cop City movement. It is detailed, smart, and very moving. It is about the beauty and the bloodshed of progressive activism, the stories that the land beneath us holds, the racist history of policing, and much, much more. In a word, it is epic. —SD

2. Salmon are Vanishing from the Yukon River — And So is A Way of Life

Max Graham | Grist | November 9, 2023 | 4,931 words

Salmon stocks are dwindling in the Yukon. That should concern all of us. As Max Graham reports for Grist, fewer and fewer fish are returning to spawn, causing governments to restrict or shut down harvests. The health and cultural consequences for remote indigenous populations that rely on annual salmon runs to feed their communities over a long winter—where a tin of Spam can cost $7.95—are impossible to quantify. The main culprit? Rising river and ocean temperatures due to climate change. “Salmon are cold-water species, so when temperatures go up, their metabolism increases, so they need more energy to just be, just live,” said Ed Farley, an ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “That means they’re going to have to feed more.” Of course, with an ecological conundrum such as this, cause and effect is far more complicated than that, and Graham deftly weaves fact and color from harvesters, elders, fishery officials, and scientists to help lay readers understand not just the scope of the problem, but the potentially devastating outcomes, for the fish and the people who rely on them. Can all the humans with their various interests come together to allow salmon stocks to rebound? For everyone’s sake, I hope that notion is more than just a fish story. —KS

3. City of Glass

Ben Goldfarb | bioGraphic | October 31, 2023 | 3,514 words

My previous house on an idyllic wooded half-acre in California’s rural West Sonoma County had lots of huge windows. So many, in fact, that birds often flew into them. Some were briefly stunned before flying off; others were not so lucky. Applying frosted decals and patterned coating to all the windows made our house more bird-safe. But what happens when an entire city is a lethal landscape for our winged friends? As Ben Goldfarb notes in this bioGraphic feature, Chicago is the most perilous city in the US for birds: its location within the Midwestern flyway—a migratory route for birds in the spring and fall—and its glass architecture and glittering lights make a deadly combination. (Case in point: on a single morning, conservation volunteers once collected around a thousand birds at McCormick Place, a massive convention center next to Lake Michigan, which is largely covered with glass and considered a collision hotspot.) Architects, building managers, and even politicians are taking measures to make Chicago more bird-friendly, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Goldfarb writes an informative piece that has something for everyone, including bird conservation, Chicago architecture and history, and urban design. —CLR

4. A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

James Somers| The New Yorker | November 13, 2023 | 4,735 words

The age of the centaurs is here. While not beaten by Artificial Intelligence (yet), programmers have a new power—and the half-human, half-AI coding team is an impressive force. While dabbling with ChatGPT-4, Somers muses on his long coding career, and it was with a jolt that he reminded me of the “era of near-zero interest rates and extraordinary growth,” when coders were gods with endless free espressos. It’s changing fast. There is a lot out there on AI, but by putting this development in the context of his own career, Somers shines a bright, glaring light on the pivotal time in which we live. It’s not necessarily frightening: sure, things are changing, but they always have, and they always will. While coders of “agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheel and crop varietals,” the ones of the future may “spend their late nights in the guts of the AIs their parents once regarded as black boxes.” No doubt the centaurs will soon be replaced by full-on AI horses, but Somers is still confident coding isn’t dead. —CW

5. Days of the Jackal

Alex Blasdel | The Guardian | November 9, 2023 | 7,941 words

Reading this profile of Andrew Wylie, the most powerful agent in book publishing and apparently one of the most odious people alive, is like eating several Big Macs: an experience so delicious you don’t mind that it leaves you queasy when it’s over. The piece’s astounding anecdotes about a man whose life is as glamorous, and legacy as enormous, as his ego is hideous beg to be binged. Wylie, who is in the twilight of his career, is the kind of person who said of his favorite chain restaurant for weekday lunches, “You feel right next door to extreme poverty when you eat at Joe and the Juice, which is a comfortable place to be.” Wylie is also the kind of person who used the following words to describe his desire to dominate the Chinese publishing market: “We need to roll out the tanks…. We need a Tiananmen Square!” I tore through this profile and was soon texting lines from it to friends, gleeful with horror and liberal in my emoji deployment. Yes, readers, I was lovin’ it. —SD

Audience Award

Our most-read editor’s pick this week. Drum roll please:

Every year, the monitors collect around 7,000 birds, doubtless a tiny fraction of the unknowable number that die every year. Some days the work is constant: One recent October morning, the Monitors scooped up around a thousand birds at McCormick Place, a convention center abutting Lake Michigan whose massive glass façade makes it a particularly egregious hotspot. Prince joked that the volunteers measured their busyness in Valium gulped. “People call and say, hey, is there some kind of disease outbreak going around?” she said wryly. “No, it’s just architectural design.”

In Nuttall’s day, glass was comparatively rare: windows tended to be small and set within brick or granite. Today it’s everywhere—particularly in Chicago, longtime home of the mid-century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose preference for vast glass facades still influences the city’s aesthetic. van der Rohe’s purpose, he once said, was to fuse nature, humans, and structures in a “higher unity.” The virtue of glass was that it connected indoor spaces with outdoor ones. The irony is awful: We prize a material that kills birds because it makes us feel closer to nature.

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This edition features stories about:

• U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his GOP-donor-funded fancy travel.
• One man’s obsession with profiling Robert Johnson, blues genius.
• What you should know before you allow your dog off-leash at the beach.
• Life as a woman working as a long-haul trucker.
• A love letter to kitschy cookie jars.

1. Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski | ProPublica | April 6, 2023 | 2,936 words

No matter where you get your news, you’ve likely seen this story sometime in the last 24 hours. It’s a bombshell investigation that reveals how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has received lavish gifts from a billionaire Republican donor named Harlan Crow, likely in violation of federal law. Said gifts include international cruises on a staffed superyacht, a Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass, flights on a private jet, and annual vacations to Crow’s luxury compound in upstate New York. Anyone with an iota of respect for democracy should be appalled — albeit unsurprised, given everything we already know about Thomas’s associates, including his wife. Read it and rage. But also read it and admire the craft that went into telling the story. It is rich in detail, yet precise. Its tone is finely tuned. The selection and placement of quotes are [chef’s kiss]. The writers dole out gobsmacking information throughout the piece, right down to the kicker. This is top-notch reporting and delivery. A+ all around. —SD

2. Hellhounds on His Trail: Mack McCormick’s Long, Tortured Quest to Find the Real Robert Johnson

Michael Hall | Texas Monthly | April 4, 2023 | 8,672 words

The legend of Robert Johnson dwarfs the man himself in many ways. Johnson wasn’t the first recorded blues musician, nor the most prolific of his era. Yet, his brief career and early death shrouded him in mystery and mythology, ultimately influencing the evolution of popular music itself — and confounding would-be biographer Mack McCormick. McCormick, who spent much of his life chasing down the stories and music of men like Johnson, is the focus of this remarkable story, but he’s by no means a hero. He may have been once, when Texas Monthly executive editor Michael Hall first profiled him 20 years ago; that was before his obsession overwhelmed his clarity, and his remarkable research into Johnson’s life turned into something far more toxic. Now, Hall revisits McCormick’s life after his death, teasing the truth from hagiography and telling the long, twisting tale of a man crushed by his own masterwork. Having helped titans like Lightnin’ Hopkins find the spotlight, McCormick long ago achieved his own legendary status. The question that persists is whether a legacy like his can be tainted by a flawed final act. —PR

3. Gone to the Dogs

Ben Goldfarb | Hakai Magazine | April 4, 2023 | 2,400 words

A reported essay on the intricacies of dog-leashing rules could have felt like a real slog. But Ben Goldfarb’s piece lifts off the page. In the opening paragraphs, we meet Kit, Goldfarb’s dog, as she runs along the beach with the wind flying through her floppy ears. It’s an image I could instantly relate to: Like all dog owners, I love watching my own dog dash around off-leash. (Well, meander around. She isn’t the speediest.) But, sometimes, there can be an environmental cost. Goldfarb meticulously takes us through the problems of letting dogs off-leash on a beach, raising some concerns I had never considered. I felt for the shorebirds trying to rest after a long migration; as a contributor eloquently puts it, “Imagine you’ve just gotten home from work and want nothing more than to chill on the couch with a beer — and then a pack of barking dogs tears into the house and chases you outside, over and over again.” Combined with some horrific facts about little blue penguin deaths, this piece will make you think about when to unclip that leash. —CW

4. Highway Star

Meg Bernhard | n+1 | March 2, 2023 | 3,367 words

This week, Meg Bernhard’s piece hit the sweet spot for me as a reader, offering insight into a world I know nothing about: what it’s like to be a female long-haul truck driver. I’m fascinated by the minutia of others’ jobs and this piece delivered. You’ll meet members of REAL Women in Trucking, a rights advocacy group for women drivers, and get to know Jess, age 39, who escaped an abusive relationship to see America behind the wheel of her rig dubbed “The Black Widow.” “Jess kept a secret credit card,” Bernhard writes, “and left their home only with the clothes she was wearing. She went to her stepdad’s, applied for a trucking job, and was on a bus to a training facility in Indiana four days later. Halima spent fifth grade on the road. They solved math problems with dry erase markers on the truck’s windows and played catch in warehouse parking lots.” —KS

5. How Cookie Jars Capture American Kitsch

Angela Burke | Eater | March 24, 2023 | 1,533 words

At an early age, I had mastered a critical skill in our house: lifting the lid on our humongous cookie jar to pilfer a treat, then replacing that lid in complete silence. As a cookie burglar, I was an apple that hadn’t fallen far from its tree. My Dad was always there first. And when my mom complained about dwindling stock, dad pointed the finger directly at me and my brother. (The nerve!) That cookie jar (a brown ceramic wooden stump with a creepy, grinning gray squirrel on top) sits on their kitchen counter to this day. At Eater, in this love letter to the kooky cookie jar, Angela Burke introduces us to artist and vintage ceramic cookie jar maker Hazy Mae. Her custom jars, in homage to Dolly Parton, Andy Warhol, Elvis, and Madonna (among others), can run $800 or more. That may feel steep, but can you really put a price on a vessel that could eventually contain fond memories, too? —KS

Audience Award

This is the piece our audience loved most.

We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead washed-up thing. She looked happy; she looked free; she looked right.

A dead whale furnishes vital data about the health of our oceans; reconnects us to nature; and nourishes the scavengers whose waste-management services support our own health. A dead whale, as our forebears knew, was both tragedy and gift, an object to be cherished and learned from, not reflexively discarded.