Mega-McMansions & Oaks

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The Mountain West’s Mega-McMansion Problem

The Nation • 26 Jan 2025 • ~4650 words

The rich have turned the region into “ultra-exclusive enclaves,” creating hazardous living conditions for everyone else.

In such places, the word *gentrification* doesn’t do justice to the magnitude of this shift. In the context of the huge changes to real estate markets and the massive displacement of local workers, a new term is needed. In his book *Billionaire Wilderness*, Justin Farrell, a professor at Yale University’s School of the Environment, describes an “awe-inspiring concentration of wealth and a canyon-size gap between the rich and the poor,” all of which has led to a wholesale transformation of these Mountain West hubs into “ultra-exclusive enclaves.” A better word for what is happening in the Mountain West might thus be ultra-gentrification.

An L.L. Bean Heiress Suspected Neighbors of Poisoning Her Trees. What Happened Next Roiled Camden, Maine

Vanity Fair • 28 Jan 2025 • ~6000 words

When Lisa Gorman noticed that a grove of her majestic oaks had died, she cast her suspicions on seasonal neighbors who wanted a better view of the harbor. The fight that ensued became a town drama that rages on to this day.

The oaks, in particular, elicited public sympathy and imagination. In Maine, oak trees have been medicine, as used by Wabanaki tribes, and building material for furniture, the ribs and beams of ships, lobster-trap runners. With their wide canopies and dense, broad trunks, oaks can capture more than 48 pounds of carbon per year, while their vast, shallow root systems are excellent at managing watershed; they host about 430 moth and butterfly species, according to Kate Garland, a horticulturist at the University of Maine, and support a complex food web. The National Wildlife Federation describes the species as the “tree of life.” When another oak, located in Laite Park, just yards away from Gorman’s property, came down during Tropical Storm Lee, someone left mums at its base, and news of its demise appeared in two local papers.

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What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End

The New Yorker • 27 Jan 2025 • ~4500 words

Some fear we’ll be buried in brimstone; others expect to be extinguished by A.I. But is there comfort to be found in our apocalyptic visions?

Apparently, we’ve been thinking about wholesale termination at least since about 1800 B.C., the date ascribed to the myth of Atrahasis, a Mesopotamian creation story that predates Biblical writings by several hundred years and features a world-cleansing flood. In Zoroastrian scripture, a comet called Gochihr collides with the Earth and wreaks havoc, as comets will. Hebrew prophets, in turn, began transforming pagan cycles of birth, death, and renewal into a rectilinear history. They kept the flood but lost the comet and installed a monolithic God who thundered and roared against his land, threatening to pass judgment on all mankind and to put the wicked to the sword.

The CRPG Renaissance, Part 1: Fallout

The Digital Antiquarian • 22 Jan 2025 • ~7600 words

Jimmy Maher writes about the story of the video game Fallout, its place in the computer role playing game resurgency of late 90s, and what made it such a unique game.

By following the breadcrumbs embedded in the finished game and its sequels, we can deduce that their timeline diverges from ours just after the Second World War — more exactly, in 1947, in which year a team of researchers at Bell Labs *failed* to invent the transistor in this alternate universe. Coincidentally or relatedly, the postwar era of uninhibited Big American Government that brought such wonders as the Moon landing and [the Internet](https://www.filfre.net/2022/04/a-web-around-the-world-part-8-the-intergalactic-computer-network) even in our timeline never petered out in this one. Meanwhile the march toward miniaturization that occurred in our timeline once high-tech became the purview of corporations rather than governments failed to occur in this one: no transistor radios, no portable televisions, no personal computers, no Sony Walkmen, no smartphones. Technology continued to grow up rather than grow down, to emphasize the monumental at the expense of the personal. The lack of innovation at the scale of individuals did much to allow the stifling social conformity of the 1950s to persist. *Fallout’*s version of the 1960s saw no acid rock, no sexual or feminist revolutions, no civil-rights movement and no anti-war movement. Not having to deal with protestors and draft dodgers, the American military was eventually victorious in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Cold War didn’t end in 1989, in fact went on for 130 years.

Who Really Took the Famous “Napalm Girl” Photograph?

Vanity Fair • 26 Jan 2025 • ~4900 words

A new Sundance documentary, which questions the provenance of a Vietnam War icon, has set off a pitched battle between photojournalists and the filmmakers.

It is understandable that such an allegation would also raise hackles at AP. Santiago Lyon, a former vice president and director of photography at the news agency, tells me: “The AP is like a religious order. They are the Jesuits of the news business. They revere the truth. They have a pantheon of [photographic] idols: The Hindenburg. The burning monk. Iwo Jima. Eddie Adams’s Vietnam execution photo. And on and on. For somebody to come to the church and question their connection to the truth of a picture is unnerving to them.”

The Quest for Universal Flu Vaccines

Asimov Press • 26 Jan 2025 • ~3500 words

Modern flu vaccines have an average efficacy of just 40 percent, and they must be revamped each year. How can we make vaccines that are “universal” — both broadly-protective and highly potent?

A universal flu vaccine may seem elusive, but consider that in the 1920s, many doctors believed curing bacterial infections was impossible. There was, as Thomas Hager writes in The Demon Under the Microscope, a sense that "medicine had reached its limits" — a collective resignation to the belief that infectious diseases would continue to claim lives unchecked. Scientists at the time knew that dozens of different bacteria could cause disease and couldn’t imagine how a small number of drugs could possibly combat them all. Influenza and pneumonia alone caused nearly 30,000 deaths amongst U.S. Army soldiers during World War I, comprising more than half of the 52,000 non-combat deaths recorded.

Are You Lonely? Adopt a New Family on Facebook Today

WIRED • 28 Jan 2025 • ~4950 words

A goat farmer in rural Minnesota, estranged from her biological children, finds new purpose as a surrogate grandparent.

Karen lurked on the group for six months before deciding to post a message. “I’d love a mother/daughter relationship, and we are hoping for grandkids,” she wrote. “We have a goat farm … so lots of fun for kids.” The premise didn’t feel so strange to Karen. As a girl, she’d been taken under the wing of her childless next-door neighbors. They took her to a lakeside cabin each summer and bought her presents—a bike, jewelry, glass animals. When they died, Karen inherited the majority of their estate. So why couldn’t something similar happen again? Karen added a selfie to her Facebook post, along with a photo of her and the goats. Ten women responded. (View Highlight)

How Fanum Built an Empire Streaming Much More Than Video Games

GQ • 28 Jan 2025 • ~4150 words

He got big streaming videos of his gaming exploits. He got huge (like, millions-of-fans huge) streaming videos of his offline life. Now, one of Gen Z’s wildest success stories explains his plans to revolutionize the rest of the media landscape.

Even among high-earning streamers, Fanum represents something new. He is not performing wild stunts, he’s not a pro gamer, he doesn’t even have a magic voice. He’s…just a dude recording himself vibing out. Chillness is key to his everyman appeal. That, and his uncanny ability to create viral phrases: The phrase “Fanum tax,” which refers to Fanum’s habit of “taxing” his friends by taking bites of their food, jumped from the land of internet-born brain-rot humor into the real world, spawning countless articles trying to enlighten boomers—and terrifying countless zoomers with their first taste of losing touch with internet slang. It was an early example of Fanum’s ability to cross over—something he seems to want to do more often.

A Montana town is waging war on its unhoused citizens. One shelter is fighting back

The Guardian • 27 Jan 2025 • ~3050 words

Kalispell, Montana, has blocked residents from using the bus and parks, but a federal injunction has stopped it from closing a shelter

They’ve issued one ruling after another expressly designed to restrict unhoused residents’ access to city services, many of them far-reaching. To stop people sleeping on bus stop benches, they did not just remove the benches. They got rid of every bus stop and switched to a high-tech public transport system requiring riders to call a bus via an app linked to their credit card. Since unhoused people rarely have fully functional cellphones or credit cards, they were suddenly unable to use the bus system, too.

They Saved 54 Horses From the L.A. Fires — But Lost Their Farm

Rolling Stone • 27 Jan 2025 • ~2150 words

Cha Cha Jago Levinson’s life’s work, Jigsaw Farms, was consumed in the blaze that ravaged the Pacific Palisades.

By the time they reached the field, it was chaos. The area had been converted into a staging area for firefighters. Helicopters landed, refueled, and took off. Bright red trucks ferried in and out as their lights spun with urgency. First responders zigzagged in between the vehicles while chopper blades kicked loose sod into the air. For a moment, the Jigsaw team marveled at it all.

A Witness in Assad’s Dungeons

The New Yorker • 27 Jan 2025 • ~9300 words

Mazen al-Hamada fled Syria to reveal the regime’s crimes. Then, mysteriously, he went back.

Hamada was not a fighter. He served the rebellion by proclaiming the bloody facts of Assad’s treatment of his own people. His work as an activist had landed him in prison several times, including a final stint, starting in 2020, from which he did not emerge. After the rebels surged into the city, his body was discovered in the morgue of a military hospital, along with those of forty other victims of the regime. A coroner found that Hamada had died of “the shock of pain.” In other words, he had been tortured to death.

The Lost City

Intelligencer • 28 Jan 2025 • ~6450 words

City workers and celebrities, teachers and tycoons talk about what they lost in the Los Angeles fires — and how they’ll rebuild.

The Santa Ana winds come from the eastern deserts, picking up speed as they descend from Nevada toward the San Gabriel Mountains before turning toward the sea, where they reach Santa Monica, the Pacific Palisades, and Malibu. Indigenous inhabitants of this region lit fires to lessen its natural fuel load. Experts often say that, in landscapes like this, a fire put out is a fire put off. But prescribed burning around Malibu had since been impeded by colonization and the establishment of permanent and lavish homes where, as the author Mike Davis put it, “hyperbole meets the coast.”