Courage & Entangled
The courage of an abused teenager. Also, letting gardens go wild.
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.”
During World War II, This Farmer Risked Everything to Help His Japanese American Neighbors
Smithsonian Magazine • 20 Nov 2024 • ~7250 words
When the U.S. government sent the Tsukamoto family to an incarceration camp in 1942, one neighbor stepped up to save the farms they left behind, giving them something to come home to.
As soon as the Japanese families were moved to the camps, Fletcher took over their farms and, per his agreement, began to save money for them. In the process, he angered community members who supported internment. At one point, someone fired a shot into the Tsukamotos’ barn. Interviewed years later about why he agreed to help, Fletcher was characteristically humble. “I don’t think I did anything,” he told Elizabeth Pinkerton in an interview for the JACL, in 1995. “It was just something that needed to be done.” As to the anger he faced in the community and the shooting attempt, he added, “I was too busy to even think about it.”
How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System
Literary Hub • 22 Nov 2024 • ~3000 words
Bartle Bull on the Mesopotamian Origins of Modern Civilization.
At the archaeological site of Uruk, the residential buildings, workshops, and barracks have not yet been excavated. Thus it is still the case that “very little about the actual conditions of life in the city is known.” Yet this is certain: Uruk was the world’s only major city of the fourth millennium BC, marked by public buildings that were “unprecedented and unrivaled at the time.” Most of the labor for such civic projects in Sumer came from free laborers requiring recompense for their work. Trade in livestock and agricultural produce fed them and the residents of nearby towns. The Sumerians needed a way to keep track of it all. This was the setting in which writing was born.
Compassionate time
Aeon • 20 Nov 2024 • ~4750 words
On his final journey through Asia, Thomas Merton found some peace in the dialectic between refusing the world and loving it.
Merton’s own writing is suffused with the sorrow of his personal dilemma: his ambivalence over whether to escape the world or engage with it; the tension between his longing for community and also solitude. He reads Siddhartha, Rumi’s poems, and geopolitical bulletins – the questions that deserve the most attention. Competing with that sorrow is his clear aptitude for delight: his way of thinking prayerfully and bemusedly at the same time. When a soldier heading for Vietnam laughs at a joke in the Reader’s Digest, Merton notes the dissonance between his childish humour and the solemn fate that awaits him, and thinks: ‘God protect him.’
The ‘Love Boat’ faces a tragic ending in a lonely California slough
Los Angeles Times • 22 Nov 2024 • ~4050 words • Archive Link
The MS Aurora, a 70-year-old cruise ship that inspired TV's 'The Love Boat,' sits abandoned in a slough outside Stockton. The ship's demise has broken the hearts of a long line of men who could not save her.
“I’m heartbroken,” said Peter Knego, a cruise ship historian, who has been besotted with the Aurora since he first glimpsed her as a teenager in the 1970s. After she went down on the night of May 22, questions about the circumstances of her downfall have grown more intense. “It’s all very strange,” Knego said, an unsettling storyline wrapped in “all this nefarious dark stuff.” Among the mysteries: Who actually owns the ship? Why did she sink? Who should be held responsible? And what on Earth should happen to the ship now that she has been “refloated” and sits hobbled less than a mile from Stockton’s drinking water intake?
Totally Cooked
Slate Magazine • 20 Nov 2024 • ~6700 words • Archive Link
We picked the 25 most important recipes of the past century. Then I spent one month cooking every single one. I was not prepared.
In the weeks after the great Tunnel of Fudge disaster, I would comb ancient cookbooks for clues. I’d discover new ingredients and techniques I’d never heard of before. I’d spend countless hours on my feet in our kitchen, squinting at weird old recipes while Champions League soccer matches played in the background. I’d ride my bike to halal groceries, kosher butchers, and secular liquor stores, and nevertheless gain like 10 pounds. I would feed my loved ones gourmet masterpieces and misbegotten messes. And I would—through not inconsiderable personal trial and humiliation—discover what a century of new and old American culinary innovation looks like in a modern kitchen. I was not, I admit, fully prepared for what I’d find.
