Courage & Entangled
The courage of an abused teenager. Also, letting gardens go wild.
🙏
Before starting today's articles, please follow us on Bluesky if you are a Bluesky user, and repost some of our daily posts!
Featured Articles
The Unflinching Courage of Taylor Cadle
Mother Jones • 21 Nov 2024 • ~7050 words
The police said she lied about being raped. Then she hit record.
Taylor is one of hundreds of victims alleging sexual assault who have been charged with false reporting nationwide. No federal agency tracks the prevalence of false-reporting charges, but over a multiyear investigation, documented in the Emmy Award–winning film Victim/Suspect, the Center for Investigative Reporting (which produces Mother Jones and Reveal) identified more than 230 cases of reporting victims charged with crimes, originating from nearly every state.
The Entangled Garden
NOEMA • 19 Nov 2024 • ~4400 words
To take a conscious step back from controlling the hybrid spaces we call gardens allows native citizens a chance to make their own choices about where and how to live.
I’m standing in an oxymoron: a garden that has itself become a wild sea of grass. It’s summertime and as the increasingly unstable weather swings between heatwave and inundation, growth has become luxuriant. In our patch of meadowland the mallows and wild carrot are up to my ears. Self-sown oaklings shoot through the borders. The grass is threaded by an intimate path structure created by the footfall of voles and water birds. This is how I want it to be: capricious, innovative, ungoverned — or at least ungoverned by me. But every year I know I have to intervene or face the next decade living in an impenetrable scrubland. And I still don’t know how to reconcile these two desires. Living alongside nature is as problematic in a garden as in the world outside.
Recommended Articles (6 Articles Today)
Can a Comma Solve a Crime?
The Dial • 21 Nov 2024 • ~2350 words
How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.
According to forensic linguists, we all use language in a uniquely identifiable way that can be as incriminating as a fingerprint. The word “forensic” may suggest a scientist in a protective suit inspecting a crime scene for drops of blood. But a forensic linguist has more in common with Sherlock Homes in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” “The man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence?” the detective asks in the 1891 short story. “A Frenchman or a Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.”
