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For Slate, Stephen Lurie covers what’s known as Dawn to Dusk to Dawn, an ultramarathon in which participants run as many laps as they can around a 400 meter track in 24 hours. “D3,” as it’s known, takes place in Pennsylvania and is one of the oldest 24-hour races in the world. This past May, it attracted 36 participants aged 16-82.
Most people do not run. Most people who run do not run long distances. Most people who run long distances do not run extremely long distances. And most people who run extremely long distances do not decide to do so on a 400-meter track for 24 hours straight. But this year, at least 36 people did, enough to fill the high school track field in Sharon Hills where D3 was held in mid-May.
In this gorgeous essay for Vittles, the poet Seán Hewitt recalls weekend nature walks in England and his grandfather’s lessons on the wonders of foraged food. Inspired by the abundant hawthorns in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Hewitt writes about making his own hawthorn gin.
When the hawthorns were all done and the gin was in the jar, I put it into the cupboard, then checked on it every week, turning it, watching the colours darken. Now I’ve learned to leave it in peace, and I don’t turn it that often anymore. I just bide my time until December when, on some foggy, cold evening – when it feels like winter has begun – I take it out of the cupboard.
The main difference between sloe and hawthorn gin is that, where sloe gin is fruity and sweet and mixes well with tonic or soda, hawthorn gin is like a dark sherry, perfect for winter. It has a velvety texture, a rich smoothness. I also like that, unlike sloe gin, you can’t buy it anywhere, so hawthorn gin becomes a secret, shared thing between friends, a preservation of summer pulled into winter.
I started composting a couple of years ago using two bins in my yard. Ever since then, I’ve dutifully collected fruit and veggie scraps, egg shells, and coffee grounds, alternating these “greens” with layers of “browns” — dead leaves from the oak trees in our yard. This spring I will harvest my first batch of compost and I don’t know if it’s possible to be more excited about moist mulch. That’s why Clio Chang’s Curbed story caught my eye. I’ve always wondered what happens in the industrial composting process and Chang’s piece does a terrific job going behind the scenes of a compost collection service that begins under the cover of darkness in Queens, New York.
This is the sorting phase of the process, and no fewer than six Waste Management employees have been assembled to take me around. First, we watch as the trucks line up to be weighed, since customers pay by weight to dump. “Is it priced by pound?” I ask. “Tons,” everyone responds in unison, and we all laugh at my inability to grasp orders of magnitude. One-third of the residential trash — some 4,000 tons daily — that New Yorkers throw away is food or yard waste that could be diverted from methane-emitting landfills. The heap of food scraps we are looking at, which has cartoon-like steam rising off the top, is massive, but only constitutes a tiny fraction of what it could be. There are pigeons resting and scavenging on its peak. Darryll Persad, the site manager, tells me that they have an air-filtration system and a deodorizer that puts out a scent to help control the odor. There are multiple scents to choose from, but Persad says, with a decisiveness that I can only dream of, that he “just orders cinnamon.” (Since all I smell is trash, I’ll just have to take his word for it.)
If you didn’t grow up with a kooky, kitschy cookie jar in your kitchen, you likely know someone who did. “Each kitchen should have a cookie jar to reflect the person’s personality,” advises (Mercedes DiRenzo) Bolduc. “It makes them happy.”
The joy of cookie jars, for many, is finding a jar that feels perfectly suited to one’s own personal taste or identity. In this hunt, the world of vintage cookie jars offers near infinite options. In Chicago, pastry chef Mindy Segal remains smitten with a vintage 1940s ceramic cookie jar that she’s had for decades. “I call him Chef,” says Segal, coauthor of the cookbook Cookie Love. “I’ve had him since I was in my 20s and it was my first major purchase into the vintage world. I love him and will never get rid of him. He’s like my guy.” Chef dons a stiff white chef’s hat and he has been dubbed guardian of dog treats. Recently, Segal bought a second cookie jar, which lives in her popular Mindy’s Bakery. “I put pretzels in it and sometimes I put candy in it. I don’t put cookies in it,” she says.
John Lewis-Stempel visits Ashdown Forest in Sussex, England, to closely observe a 300-year-old oak tree (Quercus robur). From first light until midnight, Lewis-Stempel describes the animals, birds, insects, and flora that depend on it in careful detail. In addition to astonishing you with the sheer variety and volume of creatures that inhabit and visit the tree, this piece will gently slow your heartbeat. You’ll feel your shoulders loosen as you follow Lewis-Stempel’s keen observations. It’s exactly the type of relaxation meditation we can all use.
7.01 am
The leaves of autumn, brought down by the screaming Halloween wind, still lie around the tree in a thick sodden copper mat; the mould is soft on the pads of the returning vixen as she slinks down into her den among the tree’s roots, a rabbit clamped in her jaws from her night prowl. A present for her cubs.
5.16 pm
The ecology of the oak tree is a game of consequences: the newly emerged leaves of the oak are eaten by the pale-green caterpillar of the wintermoth, which, in turn, feeds the blue tit, whose brood has just hatched in yet another of the tree’s cavities; the sparrowhawk, terror of the copse, flashes between the tangled branches, to catch and feed on the blue tit.
In a piece that stares down tragedy and refuses to give up, Jen Agg recounts the agonizing weeks following her husband’s stroke, which took place at the onset of the pandemic. This is a gripping essay about being strong for someone else, but it’s also a piece about the devils and angels in the medical system: those who think dashing your optimism is some sort of sadistic duty vs. those who understand their role is to offer not only medical help, but most importantly, kindness and hope.
I started describing a stroke as a twenty-car pile-up on the highway of your brain’s quickest route. Recovery is the next car getting off the highway just before the devastation and twisted-up metal of cars blocking the road, except it’s night time, and the power is out, and it’s a thunderstorm and actually, turns out there is no road. So one car slowly and timidly draws a new path where there never was one. Your brain is resourceful this way, but it’s slow going. After a while, all the cars start taking this newly formed exit and your brain learns a whole new way of communicating with your body.
At first it was the destabilizing uncertainty: would it be a bad day, or a rare good day? How could I keep both our moods afloat when I was working really hard on the basics of our survival while maintaining an unbreakable facade of hopefulness? Was there effort in that? I don’t remember. Roland was sad a lot at the beginning and I knew I couldn’t let that sadness drown us both. Many of life’s challenges force reaction and demand a change of perspective, but particularly with health issues, you have to really be committed or the ugliness of it can win. I absolutely refused to let it. This was not going to be the thing that unwound our love—a love born in a fireball of attraction, bonded over a shared enemy and nurtured over decades of simply never being bored of each other or running out of fascinating things to talk about while remaining enthralled with each others’ faces.
At age 90, Jane Miller relates her ongoing battle with a self that wants to “indulge my lurking wish to spend longer in bed in the morning reading the Guardian and listening to the Today programme than I already do,” and the one that obsessively logs steps and reads classics in their original Russian, to make the most of her physical and mental abilities.
I am freer than I’ve ever been, yet I quite often feel edged out, and it’s clear that I have become actually and metaphorically deaf to significant contemporary sounds. My spectator’s view of it all doesn’t fail to remind me that other people are not so lucky or so detached, that some of them are sad beyond hope, that there are young people who don’t want to stay alive and people who worry to distraction and despair or who suffer all kinds of untreatable pain. I became an adult just after the end of the Second World War, and I think of the 1950s, so often described by younger generations as bleak and impoverished, as a time of idealism and optimism. I find it difficult to detect that sort of faith in the future now, though I hope against hope that it’s there in some form I’m simply too old to recognise.
A hunt for treasure that ends in nautical disaster? Scurvy and mutiny on the high seas? I’m all in. At The New Yorker, read an excerpt of the prologue and the first chapter of David Grann’s forthcoming book, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.”
For days, it watched as the strange object heaved up and down in the ocean, tossed mercilessly by the wind and the waves. Once or twice, the vessel nearly smashed into a reef, which might have ended our story. Yet somehow—whether through destiny, as some would later proclaim, or dumb luck—it drifted into an inlet, off the southeastern coast of Brazil, where several inhabitants laid eyes upon it.
More than fifty feet long and ten feet wide, it was a boat of some sort—though it looked as if it had been patched together from scraps of wood and cloth and then battered into oblivion. Its sails were shredded, its boom shattered. Seawater seeped through the hull, and a stench emanated from within. The bystanders, edging closer, heard unnerving sounds: thirty men were crammed on board, their bodies wasted almost to the bone. Their clothes had largely disintegrated.
How, in bid to get off of Facebook as a platform, Buy Nothing founders Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller have struggled to find a viable business model for a gifting movement conceived to flout capitalism while building community.
AT THE ONE-YEAR anniversary of its launch, the Buy Nothing app had been downloaded 600,000 times, but only 91,000 people were regularly using it, not many more than at the beginning. Meanwhile, the Facebook groups from which the founders had disengaged were thriving without them. Global membership had surpassed 7 million. When I asked what Rockefeller and Clark thought would happen to Buy Nothing Inc. if they couldn’t come up with additional funding, they said they weren’t interested in thinking in such fatalistic terms.
As she navigates her mother’s fainting spells, and through the process of testing and diagnosis, Nona Fernández considers the similarities between stars in the sky and the busy neurons of her mother’s brain, lit up on the test screen by a happy memory.
An astronomer indicating different constellations with a laser pointer, explaining to a group of tourists and me that all those distant lights we see shining above our heads come from the past.
Depending how far away they are, we might be talking about billions of years. The glow from stars that may be dead or gone. Reports of their death have yet to reach us and what we see is the glimmer of a life possibly extinguished without our knowing it. Shafts of light freezing the past in our gaze, like family snapshots in a photograph album or the kaleidoscopic patterns of our own memory.
We exit the neurologist’s office and I look at my mother with new eyes. Now I know that she’s carrying the whole cosmos on her shoulders. I tell her what I saw on the doctor’s screen. I tell her how much her brain looks like the night sky. I tell her about the electrical patterns of her neurons, the glow of her memory, the constellation that lit up the moment she summoned it, the luminescent reflection of her own past. I ask which happy scene it was that I saw twinkling on the monitor in the doctor’s office and she smiles and says she was remembering the moment I was born.
Ayize Jama-Everett interviews Pulitzer Prize finalist and Booker Prize-shortlisted author Percival Everett on what training horses has taught him about writing novels, his rules for writing, and the work schedule that’s helped him produce everything from novels and poetry collections to short stories and paintings over his 40-year artistic career.
What does training horses teach you about writing a novel?
Patience. Not to get stressed out. It never pays to get excited around a half-ton animal. It’s not going to calm the animal down, and it’s not going to do you any good. With novels, it is the same thing. Why get stressed about it? And even after you publish it. What if nobody likes it? What are you going to do? Maybe somebody will enjoy the next one.
Are there any rules that you follow in terms of writing? A road map for success or knowing that the project is going where you want it to go?
No, not really. I try to be honest in terms of my vision. I never think about readers — not to say I don’t want to be read. But there’s no profit in imagining some ideal reader when everyone is different. So, I’m the reader I’m trying to appeal to. Which, sadly, explains my book sales. [Laughs.]
What’s the writing routine, the schedule?
I work all the time but only sometimes. It comes from ranching and training horses. I wake up, feed, fix stuff, write for about 20 minutes, train an animal, fix stuff, and write for 20 minutes. Constitutionally, I’m lucky, because when I sit down, I’m immediately working. I don’t have to clear the deck, and I don’t go online, surf the web, or anything like that. I don’t sleep a lot.
Telegram, the messaging app created by Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, is said to be private and secure. So why does the Russian government seem to be able to read anything people share on it? At Wired, Darren Loucaides investigates.
Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests.
Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping.
When Telegram emerged as one of the last remaining oases of information and discussion for Russians, it also became a kind of funnel for Kremlin agents. Agora’s Seleznev believes that Telegram’s API allows investigators to monitor public groups at a large scale and then zero in on potential suspects, who can subsequently be pursued into private channels by undercover agents—or perhaps via a court order to Telegram.
It’s only recently that I’ve started to read and become a lot more interested in literature in translation. To be completely trite, a whole new world has opened up for me. That’s why I was drawn to Wei Ting’s piece at Electric Lit in which she explores a little of the history of Eastern translation, looks at the differences between Eastern and Western children’s lit, and advocates for more books to be translated, so that we as readers can understand the world and others just a little bit better.
Translation holds a particular and peculiar power. It is how we come to understand the world outside our own; that is, the world that exists outside of our own language. The Latin root word for translation comes from latus, the past participle of ferre or “to carry”; in Teju Cole’s beautiful metaphor, the translator is a ferry operator, carrying words from one shore to the other. To take this metaphor further: if the translator is the ferry operator, language is a current.
Soon after I gave birth, my writer friends arrived at my house with piles of classic English picture books. Determined to have my children rooted in their own culture, I set out to find children’s books with characters that not only looked like them, but stories that would help them navigate the complex world they will inherit. Just by the act of searching, I came to read wonderful writers from Japan, South Korea, and China with a completely different sensibility from Western children’s literature.
Reading children’s literature again as an adult, the difference between Western and East Asian stories was startling: Western children’s books are often centered on the individual’s journey, while stories by Chinese, Japanese and Korean authors emphasize respecting other people’s feelings, patience, and acceptance. As a child, I found many of these old Chinese stories moralistic and preachy. But to my surprise, I also discovered many wonderful children’s books which conveyed these same values without being didactic, and helped me as a mother understand my own feelings and moderate my response towards my child’s behavior.
In 2013, Matthew Greene went missing while climbing in California. In researching the story of his disappearance, Jason Nark attempts to come to terms with his own grief over a dear friend’s suicide. This is a moving and ruminative piece on what it feels like to mourn after an event you’re powerless to prevent, and what it feels like as you give yourself permission to begin healing.
He didn’t tell anyone where he was going that day and never returned.
Anthony died on September 23, 2013, a few months after Matthew Greene disappeared.
Grief, we’re told, has distinct stages. We expect to pass through each one, like a doorway, from denial all the way to acceptance. I expected that too. As the months wore on, a sense of guilt metastasized inside me. Friends and family said I tried my best with him. I had no special power, they said, to keep him alive. I rejected those words and turned inward. Grief warped my ability to love, and to accept it, too. I spent a lot of time in bed, barely present with my kids. I sobbed in my car during commutes.
The flower I took from the Minaret trail was wilting on my hat. The colors still blazed burnt orange but it would never be this bright, this beautiful, again. So I left it there, draping it over the post at Matthew Greene’s campsite, and said goodbye.
At Astra Magazine, Elif Batuman looks at what Charles Schultz’s had to say about American values and society with a deep dive on the Peanuts character, Pig-Pen.
Pig-Pen first appears in 1954. Violet’s judgmental friend, Patty, sees him playing in the sand and asks his name. Pig-Pen replies that he doesn’t have one; people just call him “insulting things.” Patty asks for specifics. “I’ll tell you if you won’t laugh,” Pig-Pen says. His name is a punch line. For a long time, Pig-Pen’s name consistently appears in quotation marks, reminding us that it isn’t really a name — that he has, presumably, another one that he doesn’t know. From 1980 to 1997, the quotation marks disappear, blurring the line between Pig-Pen’s “true self” and a reductive description directed at him by other people, which is in effect what a name comes down to.
In this excerpt from her book, Conversations with Birds at Orion Magazine, Priyanka Kumar delights in the birds and animals of the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, and cranes in particular.
Sandhill cranes are monogamous birds; during courtship, the male valiantly tosses vegetation or mud into the air and fans its wings above the body, before dancing with abandon and letting out a unison call. Then the pair throw their heads back—the male at a deeper angle—and the female lets out two calls for each call the male emits. Lifelong pairs rely on this short, sharp unison call for relationship maintenance—it’s a pair’s shorthand to stay connected, or to alert a mate to a threat in their breeding area. Dancing, too, is used not only in courtship rituals, which are said to be infrequent in lifelong pairs, but also as a communal activity. These cranes have at least ten different types of dances and as many calls; their dances are so lively, with leaps, bows, and head pumps that I wonder whether this is why a group of cranes is also referred to as a dance or swoop of cranes.
Humpback whales use bubbles to screen their young, corral prey, and ward off aggressors, among other things. But do they have special bubble signatures used only when humans are present?
This young female whale approached my boat, then dove and began “drawing” with bubble curtains released in a thin stream from her blowhole. There was no food around and no other whales in sight. She rolled to one side so that she could look upward to admire her handiwork. Was she practicing making bubble structures that could be useful tools on the feeding grounds, or was she just enjoying the visual beauty of the scintillating bubble spirals? Was it art for art’s sake? Certainly, other animals, including captive dolphins, sea lions, rhinos, and elephants have learned to paint with brushes, and both wild bowerbirds and pufferfish produce visual art to impress potential mates.
Deprived of face-to-face contact with his parishioners during the height of the pandemic, Michael Coren, an Anglican priest, had to get creative to minister to the sick, the dying, the elderly, and the lonely.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the pandemic to shape the practice of my new ministry in profound ways. My daily tasks as a priest? Lead services at retirement and care homes; meet people who need housing, employment, money, and advice; visit the sick and housebound; help with feeding the hungry. I work as a priest independently (which also means that clergy anecdotes are, by their very nature, personal; there are no witnesses). A constant of all this activity is direct and personal contact. A constant of COVID-19, of course, was the absence of direct and personal contact. How do you counsel, listen to, pray with—and for—people if you can’t share the same space?
So I started two prayer groups and a bereavement group and chaired a meeting of parents of adult children with mental health issues. All on Zoom. I also started a telephone support group. Every week, volunteers called to check in with parishioners unable to leave their homes. Our job was to ask after people, be a friendly voice. Since there were certain things I couldn’t do, I had to compensate. You don’t need to embrace someone to show you care. Indeed, hugging is so common as to be drained of meaning. I tried to develop listening skills to reach further than where the usual words and actions could take me. One example remains: a young woman crying at the death of her mother. It was a phone call. I paused. A lot. When you can’t see the person, it’s hard to pace your moments. Instead, you give them plenty of time to complete their weeping, and you stay silent with them in their grief.
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