Bear & Suburb

Featured Articles

Lake Tahoe’s Bear Boom

The New Yorker • 25 Nov 2024 • ~7600 words • Archive Link

The vacation hot spot has been overrun by people—whose habits are drawing fast-moving animals with sharp claws and insatiable appetites.

Greg told me, “You’d be absolutely amazed at how fast they move. See that fence? See the stump? I’ve seen a bear, at a full-tilt run, jump on that, vault its back legs onto the fence, and then roll over the top of it—that fast.” Usain Bolt topped out at 27.8 miles an hour; bears can hit thirty. Greg was awed, not angry. Bears were “just trying to live, and this is free food. So, if you don’t protect it, it’s your fault.”

The secret history of the world’s first suburb

The Mill • 23 Nov 2024 • ~2050 words

David Rudlin explores the history of Whalley Range, which may be the world's first suburb. Created by Samuel Brooks in the 1830s, it was built by the desire to move away from the crowded and polluted city center of Manchester, the world's first industrial city.

Until this point people used to measure their status by how close to the centre of the city they lived — how close they were to the centre of commerce and power with the factories and poorest housing pushed to the edge. But as Manchester industrialised, the centre became increasingly overcrowded, insanitary and intolerable.

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If My Dying Daughter Could Face Her Mortality, Why Couldn’t the Rest of Us?

New York Times • 25 Nov 2024 • ~5050 words • Archive Link

Sarah Wildman writes about the societal aversion to death and the critical need for open conversations about end-of-life care, particularly for children facing terminal illness.

Doctors know parents of critically ill children are endlessly searching to find the miracle, the untried drug, the new treatment, the expert with a plan that will reshuffle the cards. Hearing “There is no cure” is not the same as hearing “She is dying. She will die,” nor is it the same as saying “Death is near.” Many of us with terminally ill children need to be told that our child is going to die over and over again to really believe it.

In the Rockets’ Red Glare, by Rachel Kushner

Harper's Magazine • 18 Nov 2024 • ~10300 words • Archive Link

The past and future of hot-rodding in America.

But to appreciate what’s happening at a drag strip—what you are hearing and seeing, what all the different race classes are—it’s necessary to understand some basic properties of petroleum distillates, which Remy could explain to me. He impressed upon me how strange and incredible it was that nitromethane, burned by funny cars and Top Fuel dragsters, the two fastest classes of vehicle, is not a traditional fossil fuel but an industrially made “monopropellant” that is highly explosive, on account of its containing its own oxygen. When you burn it in an engine, it can produce ten to twenty times as much power as the equivalent amount of gasoline.

Murderbot, She Wrote

WIRED • 26 Nov 2024 • ~3850 words • Archive Link

Martha Wells created one of the most iconic characters in 21st-century science fiction: Murderbot, reluctant savior of humanity. Then she faced an existential threat of her own.

What’s also annoying is when people who’ve just discovered Murderbot wonder if she can write anything else. Wells, who is 60 years old, has averaged almost a book a year for more than three decades, ranging from palace intrigues to excursions into distant worlds populated by shapeshifters. But until Murderbot, Wells tended to fly just under the radar. One reason for that, I suspect, is location. Far from the usual literary enclaves of New York or Los Angeles, Wells has lived for all this time in College Station—which is where the nearly 100-year-old library we’re at today resides. Housed on the campus of Texas A&M, her alma mater, the library contains one of the largest collections of science fiction and fantasy in the world.

The Norwegian Archipelago That Became an Unexpected Melting Pot

New Lines Magazine • 26 Nov 2024 • ~4000 words

In Svalbard, near the North Pole, a global community has flourished, but its overseers in Oslo are now challenging the status quo.

It isn’t uncommon to hear stories from people living in Longyearbyen who started out, and will most likely end up, somewhere else. New settlers come from afar, often by word of mouth, arriving in Longyearbyen to find a new job as a waiter or chef, or to reunite with their families who came before them. One can have lunch at a restaurant in the town center prepared by a young chef from Belarus, return to one’s hotel room after it is cleaned by Filipinos and then pop into the local supermarket to buy bread baked by a Uruguayan.

Who can claim Aristotle?

Aeon • 25 Nov 2024 • ~3000 words

The endless battle over his legacy testifies to his great authority – and the power of his thought to make the world better.

Aristotle’s Politics, falsified, was so important in Restoration political discourse because it had forever changed Renaissance and subsequent political theory. Royalists were sensitised to the need to mobilise Aristotle because his discussion of the virtues and vices of different constitutions had been deployed (with far more fidelity to Aristotle’s text) by the classical Republicans opposed to Charles I. John Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, published one month after Charles I’s execution in January 1649, justifies regicide where a king has made himself answerable only to God; Milton used Aristotle’s definition of a legitimate monarch in the Politics as one whose power is held only in trust, being an inalienable possession of the people. Where a monarch is unaccountable to the people, he is effectively the worst kind of tyrant.

How the Indie Rock Boom Went Bust

Hearing Things • 25 Nov 2024 • ~3150 words

Not so long ago, indie music was riding high, minting new stars and lasting careers with ease. But for a new generation of artists, financial stability is all but impossible.

Indie’s commercial decline began to sink in around the mid-2010s—a point when music publications’ collective influence was waning, and streaming services took over as passive tastemakers looking to cut corners on artist royalties, resulting in the decimation of the music industry’s middle class. Then came the pandemic and its ripple effects, including increased touring costs and the persistent threat of canceled shows due to COVID cases. It’s all led to an indie business landscape that’s particularly inhospitable to emerging artists looking to establish careers off their work.

Massacre in the jungle: how an Indigenous man was made the public face of an atrocity

the Guardian • 26 Nov 2024 • ~4250 words

In 2004, 29 people were killed by members of the Cinta Larga tribe in Brazil’s Amazon basin. The story shocked the country – but the truth of what happened is still being fought over.

In a country where dozens of Indigenous groups have been contacted in the past century, legal tradition holds that those accused of crimes who are deemed “isolated” or “integrating” are to receive attenuated sentences, while those who are “integrated” can stand trial like any other Brazilian. Historically, those in the former two categories were said to possess “incomplete mental development”, like children or people with intellectual disabilities. On the face of it, this is racism: a relic of social Darwinism, which relegated the Indigenous to an earlier stage of human evolution. But it also makes sense: how can someone unaware of the existence of laws be punished for firing an arrow at an invader?

Revealed: how a San Francisco navy lab became a hub for human radiation experiments

the Guardian • 25 Nov 2024 • ~3200 words

Operations at a cold war lab exposed at least 1,073 people to radiation. Risks to the nearby communities persist.

While routinely exposing humans in these “ethically fraught activities”, the lab often behaved like an institution in search of a purpose, said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the shipyard in detail. Hirsch and other critics said the lab demonstrated a remarkable disregard for radiation’s hazards and a cavalier attitude toward human health, even by the permissive standards of the time.

Modern Warfare Is Breeding Deadly Superbugs. Why?

New York Times • 26 Nov 2024 • ~6100 words • Archive Link

Researchers are trying to understand why resistant pathogens are so prevalent in the war-torn nations of the Middle East.

What was Iraqi about Iraqibacter? Rumors among American soldiers had turned it into an almost mythical problem, imagining that the insurgents were rubbing bombs with the flesh of dead animals. Dewachi scoured the medical literature and news. “We’re now facing a new enemy invader emerging from Iraq,” Neil deGrasse Tyson said on the PBS show “Nova.” “These guys can survive for weeks at a time without food or water. We don’t know how to fight them, but we’ve got to find out. Guns and tanks won’t help us here.” Tyson added: “What we really need is a good biologist.” “No, man,” Dewachi thought to himself. “What you need is a good anthropologist.” Only an anthropologist, he realized, could get at the confluence of social, historical and medical factors driving AMR.