Looking deeper into the catalysts for violent crime. How an Iraqi U.S. Army interpreter became an underground drug kingpin. What plants have to teach us about life, both real and artificial. Aging, but with vitality and grace. How one Iceland town comes together to help baby puffins take their first flight, and our first-ever audience award. Here are five + one stories to kickstart your weekend reading.
Maurice Chammah | The Marshall Project | March 2, 2023 | 7,750 words
When we look at the face of a criminal in a mug shot or in a courtroom, what do weย see? Many adults facing the death penalty have been shaped by childhood trauma or violence they experienced or witnessed in prison as juveniles. Mitigation specialists work to uncover traumas and dig into the personal and family histories of people on death row โ not with the aim to excuse or justify their crimes, but to help paint more complete portraits of them as human beings. Maurice Chammah spends time with mitigation specialist Sara Baldwin as she works on the case of James Bernard Belcher, a man on death row for the 1996 murder of Jennifer Embry. Itโs a complex story that Chammah reports and tells with great care and empathy, and highlights a little-known profession that helps to illuminate why people hurt one another and are led to violence. โCLR
Benoรฎt Morenneย |ย Wiredย |ย March 9, 2023ย |ย 5,403 words
Thereโs an old episode ofย Portlandiaย in which the cityโs mayor goes on the dark web to buy fireworks, and of course winds upย buying rocket launchers instead. Buffoonery and prosthetic noses aside, that was the impression most people have always had of the dark web: a place where you could buy absolutely anything with total anonymity. Alaa Allawi was one of the people making the first part of that impression come true. After becoming a U.S. Army interpreter at age 18, Allawi developed an impressive proficiency for low-level cybershenanigans โ and when he ultimately left his native Iraq for the U.S., those cybershenanigans became his way out of poverty, courtesy of selling counterfeit Xanax online. But it turned out that โtotal anonymityโ wasnโt quite right, and after the real fentanyl in his fake pills led to overdoses and a campus cop took notice, there wasnโt a prosthetic nose big enough to save him. With precision and a relentless chronological tick-tock, Benoรฎt Morenne details Allawiโs rise and fall, as well as the federal investigation that slowly tightened around him. Sure, youโll find bitcoin and giant champagne bottles and Lil Wayne cameos, but the kingpin stereotypes are few and far between. This story has no heroes, anti- or otherwise. Thatโs the point. โPR
Amanda Gefter | Nautilus | March 7, 2023 | 4,890 words
Professor Paco Calvo used to study artificial intelligence to try and understand cognition. However, he concluded that artificial neural networks were far removed from living intelligence, stating โwhat we can model with artificial systems is not genuine cognition. Biological systems are doing something entirely different.โ The abilities of AI have been dominating many a headline of late, making Amanda Gefterโs essay on Calvoโs theories a refreshing read. Calvo claims we have much more to learn from plants than AI. Plants sense and experience their environment, learn from it, and actively engage with the world, which he sees as the key to consciousness. His theories may be a little out there (I am not convinced neurons are not necessary for thought), but this essay did make me consider the significance of our interactions with our external environment in the thinking process. Rather than leave you with these Big Thoughts, I will end with Calcoโs joyful description of plants: โUpside-down, with their โheadsโ plunged into the soil and their limbs and sex organs sticking up and flailing around.โ You will never look at your roses in the same way. โCW
Jane Miller | London Review of Books | March 16, 2023 | 1,999 words
What makes time meaningful? Is it time spent with a book? Learning something new? Maintaining your fitness routine? Doing things for others? Whatโs the relationship between meaningful time and being satisfied and happy? How does the definition of happiness and satisfaction change over your lifetime? If youโre anything like Jane Miller, age 90, you might ask yourself these and other questions, reflecting on the one resource we share on earth: time. At the London Review of Books, Miller ponders all this and more. โWhen I wasโ 78, I wrote a book about being old. I donโt think Iโd ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that Iโve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool,โ she writes. While I canโt relate to her need to swim a kilometer a day, I can empathize with owning a body much closer to its โbest beforeโ date than its birth and the constant need to evaluate how I spend my time. In sharing her boredom and anxieties, Millerโs given me much to think about. โKS
Cheryl Katz | Smithsonian | February 14, 2023 | 3,125 words
Every yearย Bloomberg Businessweekย publishes what it calls the Jealousy List, featuring articles that authors wish theyโd written or that editors wish theyโd assigned. If I were to have my own jealousy list for 2023, this piece by Cheryl Katz would be on it. I love it so much. Seriously, drop what youโre doing and read it. Katzโs story is about a village in Iceland where, every year, residents young and old work together to save baby puffins, also known as โpufflings.โ The wee birdsย thatย look like theyโre wearing tuxedos often get lost leaving their burrows and struggle to fly out to sea as theyโre supposed to. Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carriesย them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate.โ Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carry them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate. As climate change does its worst to the earth, ushering pufflings into the sky has never been more important. Iโm jealous I didnโt get to write this story. Or maybe Iโm just mad Iโm not in the Puffling Patrol. They get to do good for the world by communing withย adorableย baby birds. How often is something so essential also so joyful?ย BRB, Googling flights to Iceland. โSD
Hereโs the piece our audience loved most this week.
Raquel Rutledge and Ken Armstrong | Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Pro Publica | November 16, 2022 | 13,808 words
This story starts with a house fire in 2013, then takes readers on a journey from the 1970s to the present, tracing the parallel yet wholly different existences of Todd Brunner, the landlord of the property, and Angelica Belen, the woman who lived there with her four young kids. Riveting and infuriating, Raquel Rutledge and Ken Armstrongโs work has been nominated for a 2023 National Magazine Award for feature writing. โSD
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Just your average boy-meets-girl story โฆ if by โboyโ you mean โyoung man with a penchant for computer hijinks who leaves Iraq for the U.S. and becomes a dark-web kingpin by putting real fentanyl in fake pills,โ and by โgirlโ you mean โthe DEA.โ Maybe that Tor browser isnโt everything you thought it was.
Allawi wasnโt content dealing on the street anymore. He was chasing a broader market than San Antonioโhell, a broader market than Texas. He bought a manual pill press on eBay for $600, eventually upgrading to a $5,000, 507-pound electric machine capable of spitting out 21,600 pills an hour. He also used eBay to purchase the inactive ingredients found in most oral medications, such as dyes. On May 23, 2015, Allawi created an account on AlphaBay. He named it Dopeboy210, most likely after the San Antonio area code, according to investigators. That fall, Allawi dropped out of school for good.