Cruise & First Responders

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Featured Articles

They Missed Their Cruise Ship. That Was Only The Beginning.

Curbed • 18 Dec 2024 • ~6800 words • Archive Link

Nine stranded passengers made a mad dash across Africa to meet back up with their boat.

The stranded eight were starting to feel like they were somehow being pranked. They were stuck on a remote island. They had stumbled upon an injured fellow passenger, who was suddenly under their care. Now, the company that left them all was not responding to their pleas for help. They didn’t realize at the time that this outcome was almost predictable. Cruise companies are labyrinthine bureaucracies that manage to avoid nearly any responsibility for their passengers, especially in times of chaos, accident, or bad luck. To start, they’re mostly incorporated in places like Liberia and Panama, although half of their customers are American. The individual ships, too, are foreign; the Dawn, for example, is registered in the Bahamas. For some cruise lines, this structure equals billions of dollars in tax savings. It also enables them to employ workers for 18-hour days, seven days a week, and to pay them poverty wages.

The First First Responders

Hakai Magazine • 24 Dec 2024 • ~4500 words

When disaster strikes along British Columbia’s coast, Indigenous rescuers are often the first on the scene. Government-led initiatives are now formally recognizing that work.

For a government that has made many promises around reconciling past injustices with First Nations people, it would be convenient to point to the CNSAR program as proof of progress, a box checked. While the initiative has clearly shown success, Carrow is cautious about using the word reconciliation lightly. True reconciliation doesn’t come with a program, he says. “It’s got to be a personal relationship.” Building relationships and trust takes time, especially with government.
After almost a decade working closely with Carrow and the CNSAR program, Dick can feel the shift. He’s experienced new levels of openness and trust, and he sees an agency committed to more meaningful involvement with First Nations. “Not just to see them, but to hear them,” he says.

Recommended Articles

H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Astral Codex Ten • 1 Jan 2025 • ~4500 words

Don't give your true love a partridge, turtledoves, or (especially) French hens.

The severity of any given flu epidemic depends both on the innate severity of the virus, and on how closely the human population’s circulating flu antibodies match the epidemic strain. Humans usually have good antibodies to the seasonal flu, because it’s only slightly different from last year’s seasonal flu. For the big new animal crossovers, the level of protection provided by existing antibodies is kind of random. Older people may have antibodies left over from the last time that particular flu crossed over from animals to humans; younger people probably won’t. In some cases, people’s immune systems will be permanently synced to the first flu they encounter, with less protection against subsequent versions.

Narendra Modi’s Populist Facade Is Cracking

The Atlantic • 31 Dec 2024 • ~8400 words

India is now a testing ground for whether demagoguery or deteriorating living conditions exert a greater sway on voters.

I asked Shukla why he had lost faith in Modi. One reason, he said, was “animals.” When I looked confused, he pointed helpfully to the street, where a huge cow was meandering down the middle of the road. “Look, here's an animal coming now.” It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. The BJP's preoccupation with protecting cows—for Hindus, a symbol of divine beneficence—was driving people crazy. No one was allowed to touch them anymore, Shukla said. They wandered at will, eating crops and fodder. Cows had even become a source of corruption, he claimed; funds have been set up to protect cows, Shukla said, but “the money disappears.” This is what Modi's rhetoric about building a Hindu nation often amounts to at the local level, especially in villages that have no Muslims to blame.

Life Without Stars: Stanets and Ploons

The Egg And The Rock • 31 Dec 2024 • ~6500 words

The implications of an important 2023 paper have not been fully understood: it is possible most life in our universe is in the deep oceans of icy moons, orbiting planets that do not orbit stars.

An evolved universe, with the basic parameters of matter fine-tuned by that evolution to generate conditions suitable for life, doesn't mean you will find life in all these liquid water oceans on all these icy moons, and ploons. Evolution is a messy business, as my grumpy friend the biologist Yogi Jaeger constantly reminds me. And evolved life is exuberant, excessive, wasteful. Most seeds do not become plants; most plants do not make it to their maximum size. Most liquid water oceans will not generate intelligent life. But enough of them will.

Revealing Ground Zero of the Swiss Adoption Scandal

New Lines Magazine • 30 Dec 2024 • ~5750 words

Switzerland is under scrutiny for fraudulently rehoming thousands of babies. The failures go back further than previously understood.

Honegger was first connected to illegal adoptions in 2017, some 20 years after she died. That year, the St. Gallen canton issued a report saying that up to 70% of the 750 adoptions of Sri Lankan children sent to Switzerland from the late 1970s to the 1990s were illegal. The report sent shockwaves across the Swiss adoption industry. Today, adopted people from the 1950s and ‘60s are looking for answers. They want to know the truth about their adoption. They want to discover their birth parents and understand who is responsible for their lives.

How climate change is redrawing Europe’s wine map

Financial Times • 31 Dec 2024 • ~2600 words • Archive Link

Extreme weather is pushing viticulture into colder northern territory and forcing traditional winemaking regions to adapt.

. . . for many wine growers the most effective adaptations are also the most controversial: embracing grape varieties more suited to the changing climate and irrigating the soil. Producers like Torres in Spain are reviving forgotten, heat-resistant native varieties, while Bordeaux has made the landmark decision to incorporate Mediterranean grapes such as Marselan and Touriga Nacional into its appellation rules.

Alice Munro’s Passive Voice

The New Yorker • 23 Dec 2024 • ~20200 words • Archive Link

The celebrated writer’s partner sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro’s fiction, but she left it to Andrea to confront the true story.

Andrea started to talk about how she’d blamed herself for the abuse for years, and it was now apparent that her parents had, too. She remembers her mother looking at her with an expression of cold annoyance. “I know we can’t go on what I thought she was thinking by the look on her face over 20 years ago,” Andrea wrote me. But the expression, more than anything Alice said, made Andrea feel that her mother didn’t think her emotions were real.

Half-Life

The Digital Antiquarian • 20 Dec 2024 • ~7100 words

Another piece of video game history from Jimmy Maher, this time on the production of one of the most influential games of all time.

Half-Life sold its first 200,000 copies in the United States before Christmas — i.e., before glowing reviews like the one above even hit the newsstands. But this was the barest beginning to its success story. In honor of its tenth birthday in 2008, Guinness of world-records fame would formally anoint Half-Life as the best-selling single FPS in history, with total sales in the neighborhood of 10 million copies across all platforms and countries. For Newell and Harrington, it was one hell of a way to launch a game-development studio. For Sierra, who in truth had done very little for Half-Life beyond putting it in a box and shipping it out to stores, it was a tsunami of cash that seemed to come out of nowhere, the biggest game they had ever published almost by an order of magnitude.

Energy Cheat Sheet

Construction Physics • 20 Dec 2024 • ~3750 words

Building an intuition about energy.

Because I write about infrastructure, and there’s an enormous amount of energy infrastructure that needs to be built for the US to decarbonize, I’m spending an increasingly large amount of time writing about energy and energy-related topics. One challenge I have with this is that thinking about energy doesn’t come especially naturally to me. I have an engineering background, but it’s in structural engineering, which only requires analyzing things that are sitting perfectly still. To improve my thinking around energy and to try and build some better intuitions around it, I put together a little “cheat sheet” of various energy infrastructure facts.

A Woman With a Rare Gene Mutation Fights to Avoid Her Mother’s Fate

New York Times • 22 Dec 2024 • ~5250 words • Archive Link

A mutant gene is coming to steal Linde Jacobs’s mind. Can she find a way to stop it?

The doctor finally popped up on the computer. Wasting no time on pleasantries, she shared her screen and zoomed in on one line of laboratory paperwork: POSITIVE. Linde was 33. Within about two decades, in all likelihood, her daughters would watch her become selfish, manipulative, reckless — the opposite of everything she’d taught them to be. Just like Allison, Linde would turn into someone hard to tolerate, let alone love.