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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:

Computing is not yet overcome. GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson can’t wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my profession. In fact, I feel somewhat more secure than before. As software gets easier to make, it’ll proliferate; programmers will be tasked with its design, its configuration, and its maintenance. And though I’ve always found the fiddly parts of programming the most calming, and the most essential, I’m not especially good at them. I’ve failed many classic coding interview tests of the kind you find at Big Tech companies. The thing I’m relatively good at is knowing what’s worth building, what users like, how to communicate both technically and humanely. A friend of mine has called this A.I. moment “the revenge of the so-so programmer.” As coding per se begins to matter less, maybe softer skills will shine.

So maybe the thing to teach isn’t a skill but a spirit. I sometimes think of what I might have been doing had I been born in a different time. The coders of the agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheels and crop varietals; in the Newtonian era, they might have been obsessed with glass, and dyes, and timekeeping. I was reading an oral history of neural networks recently, and it struck me how many of the people interviewed—people born in and around the nineteen-thirties—had played with radios when they were little. Maybe the next cohort will spend their late nights in the guts of the A.I.s their parents once regarded as black boxes. I shouldn’t worry that the era of coding is winding down. Hacking is forever.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Caitlin Dickerson, Aaron Edwards, Alice Su, Jia Tolentino, and James Somers.

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1. How Fake News Turned a Small Town Upside Town

Caitlin Dickerson | New York Times Magazine | September 26, 2017 | 23 minutes (5,800 words)

There were few details about the case because they couldn’t legally be released: The crime was a sexual assault between juveniles in Twin Falls, Idaho that involved two refugee boys and a 5-year-old girl. When Breitbart heard about the crime — and tied it to plans to allow Syrian refugees to settle in Twin Falls — the website unleashed a panic of misinformation about Muslims in Idaho that threatened to tear the town apart.

2. Long Live the Group Chat

Aaron Edwards | The Outline | September 27, 2017 | 6 minutes (1,732 words)

Aaron Edwards explores the function the group chat serves in the lives of black and brown Americans today.

3. How One Syrian Fought to the Death for a Free Internet

Alice Su | WIRED | September 27, 2017 | 15 minutes (3,830 words)

When Bassel Khartabil tried to create an open internet culture in Syria, the government executed him. Thousands of other Syrians have disappeared.

4. Gloria Allred’s Crusade

Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker | September 25, 2017 | 33 minutes (8,375 words)

A profile of iconic feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, who has played a key role in changing attitudes and legislation regarding rape and sexual assault, and is currently litigating major cases against Bill Cosby and President Donald Trump.

5. Keepers of the Secrets

James Somers | Village Voice | September 20, 2017 | 12 minutes (3,158 words)

Who are the most interesting women and men in the world? The archivists, guardians of our forgotten stories.

Thomas Lannon is the Acting Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts at the New York Public Library, which is the fancy way of saying he oversees boxes of secrets: the personal documents of people both famous and everyday. Anyone can read a book and learn facts, but archival materials — handwritten, casual, private — connect us to the secret soul of history. James Somers files his first and last Village Voice story on the treasure troves that are archives.

But the real gem of the library, in Lannon’s view, is the stuff that you can find only in boxes like the ones now strewn across the table. “You can get a book anywhere,” he said. “An archive exists in one location.” The room we’re standing in is the only place that you can read, say, the week’s worth of journal entries in which New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal contemplates publishing the Pentagon Papers. It’s the only place where you can read the collected papers of Robert Moses, or a letter T.S. Eliot wrote about Ulysses to James Joyce’s Paris publisher, Sylvia Beach.

These collections aren’t digitized. The only way to find out what’s inside them is to ask for a particular box — often with just a vague notion of what will be in it — and to hold the old papers in your hands. “I don’t know how one could be interested in libraries and not archives,” Lannon told me. They tell you “the stories behind things,” he said, “the unpublished, the hard to find, the true story.” This, I began to see, is why someone might have been inclined to call Lannon the most interesting man in the world: it’s because he knows so many of these stories himself, including stories that no one else knows, because they are only told here.

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“Project Ocean,” a Google plan to scan every book in the world, might not have succeeded, but in the course of trying, they did scan over 25 million books—which now sit, untouched, on a Google server. The story of the lawsuit, settlement, and ensuing Department of Justice response a fascinating record of the tensions between art, technology, commerce, and copyright. James Somers tells the whole story in The Atlantic.

Every weekday, semi trucks full of books would pull up at designated Google scanning centers. The one ingesting Stanford’s library was on Google’s Mountain View campus, in a converted office building. The books were unloaded from the trucks onto the kind of carts you find in libraries and wheeled up to human operators sitting at one of a few dozen brightly lit scanning stations, arranged in rows about six to eight feet apart.

The stations—which didn’t so much scan as photograph books—had been custom-built by Google from the sheet metal up. Each one could digitize books at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The book would lie in a specially designed motorized cradle that would adjust to the spine, locking it in place. Above, there was an array of lights and at least $1,000 worth of optics, including four cameras, two pointed at each half of the book, and a range-finding LIDAR that overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book’s surface to capture the curvature of the paper. The human operator would turn pages by hand—no machine could be as quick and gentle—and fire the cameras by pressing a foot pedal, as though playing at a strange piano.

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Photo: Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for Al Jazeera America

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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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1. For Hire: Dedicated Young Man With Down Syndrome

Michael Bérubé | Al Jazeera America | May 25, 2014 | 14 minutes (3,549 words)

A father reflects on his son’s job search:

What is Jamie capable of doing for a living? Our first checklist filled us with despair: factory work, nope; food service, nope (not fast enough); hotel maid service, nope; machine and auto repair, nope. (Though Jamie expressed interest in auto repair — not a moment of astonishing self-awareness.) With one agency, Jamie had two CBWAs followed by detailed five-page write-ups: one doing setup for conferences and meetings (tables, chairs, A/V), the other doing shelving at a supermarket. Neither went well. He had trouble stacking chairs, dealing with the duct tape for the A/V setup, and attaching skirts to tables. At the supermarket he had trouble with the U-boat, the device that carts dozens of boxes out into the aisles — and besides, they were only hiring graveyard shift.

2. Waiting for Exile

Julia Cooke | VQR | May 1, 2014 | 24 minutes (6,039 words)

Getting by and getting out of Cuba:

“I think I know who can find you an apartment,” Lucía said. I was on her couch picking at its fraying white vinyl. My address book lay open on my knees. I’d moved to Cuba with two suitcases, a ten- month student visa, plans to take a weekly class on popular culture, and visions of a terrace, balustrades, maybe an apartment in Vedado, the downtown heart of Havana. But after two weeks, I’d found nowhere to live. A legal resident foreigner could rent only from an authorized case particular or directly from the state— apartments that were usually bugged, priced for businesspeople and reporters on expat packages. I’d met a “real estate agent” with frosted pink lipstick who set foreigners up in long- term casas and took a cut, but she shook her head when I told her I hoped to pay less than $25 a night for a monthly rent. On a full apartment! She didn’t return my calls. Lucía, the most connected twenty- six- year- old I’d ever met in Havana or anywhere else, was my best hope to map out opportunities.

3. You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary

James Somers | May 23, 2014 | 12 minutes (3,198 words)

What John McPhee and a good dictionary can teach us about writing:

John McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.

The way you do it, he says, is “you draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.” You go looking for le mot juste.

4. Overcome Your Programming And Be A Better Man

Chris Gethard | May 27, 2014 | 13 minutes (3,259 words)

Comedian Chris Gethard on being an angry high school outcast, and how he found a place in a world that “doesn’t owe you anything”:

As someone who’s spent most of his life feeling like a round peg running into many square holes – it is so much more gratifying when you stop trying to force yourself into those square holes, or prove to those square holes that you’re valid too, and instead go out and find the round holes, and even better, the other round pegs. To try to be something you’re not, to try to go places that reject you, to try to fit in, to try to force people who aren’t accepting you to accept you… it drains you of energy and it never works and it makes you bitter and tired and angry.

But to find the other round pegs out there, those loners, those wanderers, those people who get rejected for whatever reason, that’s the ultimate gratification. They’re out there. I just turned 34, and at this age I am friends almost exclusively with other people who didn’t say much growing up, who felt scared a lot of the time, and who felt like they shouldn’t say what they were thinking because it didn’t fit and they didn’t have a right to speak up. A lot of my friends were people who could never get dates, most of my social circle is composed of people who had reasons to feel angry or alone or scared or sad.

And now we have each other.

5. Shot in Missoula

Karin Assmann, Marc Hujer, Fidelius Schmid, Andreas Ulrich | Spiegel | May 8, 2014 | 10 minutes (2,615 words)

Diren D., a German high school student from Hamburg, wanted to get a taste of American freedom during an exchange year abroad. Instead, he ended up dead. Are American gun laws to blame?

Diren spent nine months as a foreign exchange student in the Rocky Mountain town of Missoula, population 70,000. He was in the 11th grade at Big Sky High School, played soccer for the Missoula Strikers, spent time in the mountains, had fun in the snow and enjoyed the friendliness of the people there — people who are proud to live in a place where a handshake still means something.
But Diren’s death laid bare the dark side of this idyll. And it raises the question as to who or what is to be blamed for the tragedy: America’s loose weapons laws that promote a culture of vigilantism? Or the strict rules that make it almost impossible for young men and women to safely test the boundaries, leading them to take stupid risks?

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