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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.

Today we’re featuring stories about YouTube pranksters, marathon cheats, cephalopods, sleep and a massive collection of restaurant menus.

1. Vigilantes for Views: The YouTube Pranksters Harassing Suspected Scam Callers in India

Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar | Rest of World | January 10, 2023 | 5,737 words

Justice can mean equality, and it can also mean retribution. In the case of Artsiom Kulik and Ashton Bingham, who have carved out a robust career orchestrating “scambusting” videos, their conception seems to skew heavily to the latter. But Kulik and Bingham’s gleeful payback has a discomfiting subtext. Somewhere along the way, Trilogy Media graduated from simply annoying phone scammers to releasing mice and cockroaches into a Kolkata call center — and as the stakes have gotten bigger, so has the sense that this isn’t really about justice at all. Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar’s piece is a profile on its face, and an investigation at its core. With the fake Best Picture Oscar on display in their office, the Trilogy duo sees itself as destined for bigger and better things; what they don’t see is that they’ve gone from coming up to punching down. This isn’t the first story to reveal the craven heart of a content creator’s ambition, but it’s the rare example that goes a step farther to tease out the troubling power dynamics at play. —PR

2. The Not-Quite-Redemption of South Africa’s Infamous Ultra-Marathon Cheats

Ryan Lenora Brown | Business Insider | December 30, 2022 | 5,363 words

In 1999, Sergio and Arnold Motsoeneng stunned the running world by cheating in the Comrades, an ultra-marathon in South Africa. The country was barely out of apartheid’s grip, and the twin brothers’ decision to swap clothes in a portable toilet was seen as a betrayal. In the eyes of racists, it was also a harbinger. “It felt to many like it was saying something … about the moral character of Black South Africans generally,” Ryan Lenora Brown writes. “Look, they said, this is who you’ve handed our country to.” Twenty-three years after the fact, Brown found the brothers, and they agreed to be interviewed. The resulting feature is a “where are they now” story, but Brown also considers where they were then. When the brothers cheated, there was serious money on the line — the Comrades winner would receive the equivalent of more than 70 years’ worth of the salary earned by the twins’ father. “Nobody wants to be poor forever,” Sergio told Brown. This is a complicated story, written with grace, and Brown does a memorable job describing both scenes and their stakes. —SD

3. Downward Spiral

Kate Evans | bioGraphic | June 4, 2022 | 4,304 words

Stumbling upon this piece, I didn’t expect to find it gripping, never having had a particular penchant for giant snails. I was wrong. The world of the nautilus is fascinating, and Kate Evans’ buoyant writing had me hooked. Only a handful of scientists have studied these creatures, even though they have survived all five of Earth’s past major extinction events; for centuries, writes Evans, their beautiful swirling shape has inspired “art, architecture, and math across many cultures.” These guys are both survivors and influencers. They are also smart: In one experiment, they are taught to navigate to deeper water by a beacon in their tank, but when the beacon moves and the tank shifts, they unexpectedly start to orient themselves using a wall poster of 20th-century chemist Rosalind Franklin, which hangs in the lab. I appreciated Evans taking the time to break from the science and detail their cheeky side — spending time with some nautiluses is akin to hanging out with “a gang of troublesome 12-year-olds.” However, it is not all lighthearted, and the nautilus researchers Evans spends time with have some stark warnings about a warming ocean; climate change may be the one event these cephalopods can’t survive. —CW

4. Trying to Stay Awake

Jenny Diski | London Review of Books | July 31, 2008 | 2,791 words

In the last few years, sleep and I have had a strained relationship. I make appropriate advances in the form of a consistent bedtime, dutifully parking my screen for a paperback during pre-sleep reading. My phone remains in Do Not Disturb mode 24/7, yet sleep spurns me. As humans, we always want what we can’t have. That’s why I was drawn to the late Jenny Diski’s 2008 essay at the London Review of Books about her childhood love affair with the process of falling asleep, of lingering in that liminal stage between sleep and wakefulness, confident in the fact that sleep would surely come. (If only!) “Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness. So I remember it, and so it still is, at its best, the border territory of sleep. The whole point is to extend the unsleeping moment, and to drop into a state where all logic and reason disappears, while I nevertheless retain an essential degree of awareness of the strangeness I’ve achieved. ” —KS

5. Getting Lost in the World’s Largest Stack of Menus

Adam Reiner | Taste | January 1, 2023 | 2,243 words

“Menus provide a window into history, a vital connection to our foodways,” writes Adam Reiner in this fun read about restaurant menus. Frank E. Buttolph, a volunteer archivist at the New York Public Library, amassed 25,000 menus from around the world before she died in 1924. Today, the NYPL’s Buttolph Collection numbers 40,000, dating back to 1843, with most menus from between 1890 and 1910. What was served in the first Japanese and French restaurants in New York? What dishes were considered expensive or high-end or adventurous in the early 1900s? The collection’s menus, writes Reiner, are sources of inspiration for today’s chefs, researchers, and the simply (epi)curious. The scanned ones featured in his story are lovely to look at, and make you want to visit the NYPL yourself so you can pore over these pages. In our era of restaurant apps and QR codes, Reiner has also opened my eyes to the value of a physical, printed menu; I’ve always enjoyed reading the descriptions of dishes and cocktails, but after reading his piece, I realize how much a menu can also illuminate the historical and cultural context of the food they describe. —CLR

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Number 3 was the teacher’s pet. Number 13 was always trying to break out of her car seat. Number 9 lived the longest in captivity, 10 years, and he was Basil’s favorite: “Oh, he was a prince.” He would curl his tentacles around her finger when she reached into the water, and when he got old, Basil gave him a “retirement tank” and his favorite food—lobster carapaces she scrounged from fancy New York restaurants.