Sour & Dust Money

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Sour

The Players' Tribune • 2 Dec 2024 • ~9100 words

Ettore “Big E” Ewen shares his struggles with depression and self-acceptance, and how ultimately found a sense of connection and strength through wrestling.

And at some point I looked around and it was like……. Who even am I? I didn’t feel like a student, because I was so ashamed of how I’d struggled as a pre-med. And I didn’t feel like an athlete, because I was so ashamed of how I’d torn both ACLs and couldn’t play. And if I wasn’t a student, and I wasn’t an athlete — if I didn’t have either of those things?? Then maybe I was just no one. It’s like all of a sudden, I lost whatever was left of that layer holding the mess of me together. And I pretty much started falling apart.

Dust Money

New Lines Magazine • 4 Dec 2024 • ~10600 words

Indonesia is in the middle of a rush for nickel, a metal that is vital to the green economy. The country’s government wants to dominate the market, making nickel a national project. Years into the boom, the costs of its obsession with the mineral are mounting.

But the sheer speed of this frontier’s growth and the economics behind it have brought it into conflict with communities and placed pressure on ecosystems and landscapes. To feed the furnaces at the smelters, hundreds of thousands of acres of land have been licensed for exploration, much of it occupied by the country’s dwindling rainforests or close to communities that were already among the poorest in Indonesia. Millions of tons of coal are being burned to power the smelters, reversing the country’s progress on reducing its carbon emissions. To head off dissent, the government has rewritten the law to prevent Indonesians from protesting against the industry and even deployed the military to protect these new “strategic” assets. In the smelters, injuries and deaths are mounting, as is the tension between locals and the Chinese companies that have driven the boom

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The triumph of Paddington Inc

New Statesman • 4 Dec 2024 • ~2550 words

How Paddington Bear became one of Britain’s most distinctive international brands.

The simple answer offered by those in the Paddington business is that Paddington represents something else – but what, exactly? He can be seen both on protest signs reading “Refugees Welcome” and in popular royalist memes (in one viral illustration, he appears to be leading the late Queen into the afterlife). He is an optical illusion that looks different depending on the angle you view him from. As the cultural critic Henry Wong noted in Esquire: “Paddington is, now more than ever, a four-quadrant bear: cute to the young, comforting to the old, poster boy for immigration, pals with royalty.”

After Jail Deaths and No Justice, This Kentucky Lawyer Tried to Make a Difference

The Marshall Project • 4 Dec 2024 • ~4750 words

A tough legal precedent had kept his clients from their day in court, so Greg Belzley decided there was only one thing to do — try to change the law.

Helphenstine’s wife sued the county, an on-call doctor, law enforcement officials and several jail staffers. Though Belzley believed he could show the jail staff’s treatment of Helphenstine amounted to a violation of the man’s constitutional rights, a district judge had thrown the case out. In lawsuits over medical care in prisons and jails, proving negligence is not enough. Instead, you have to prove something called “deliberate indifference” — basically that staff intentionally ignored your serious medical need. Deliberate indifference is an extremely high legal standard that has undermined lawsuits over jail deaths across the country.

Geoengineering Could Alter Global Climate. Should It?

Undark Magazine • 3 Dec 2024 • ~4550 words

Scientists and companies increasingly support blocking some sunlight to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

. . . skeptics sometimes associate geoengineering with supervillain behavior, like a famous episode of The Simpsons in which the robber baron Mr. Burns blocks the sun. They warn that outdoor experiments could set humanity down a slippery slope, allowing powerful billionaires or individual countries to unleash hazardous technologies without input or agreement from the public more broadly, all of whom would be affected . . . Such an approach could also distract people from expanding decarbonization efforts.

In the Wake of the Water

Places Journal • 3 Dec 2024 • ~4900 words

In the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, homes are at high risk of flooding due to climate change. Residents remain reluctant — or unable — to leave.

The homeowners on Conimicut Point aren’t fans of paying high premiums. Deluise, when he paid off his mortgage, stopped paying for flood insurance altogether. At the same time, they don’t deny climate change. They’ve adapted to living with the water, and in some ways, their firsthand knowledge is more precise and information-dense than even state-of-the-art climate models. But it’s also true that their knowledge is partial and occluded. Even Lacki’s 42 years on the peninsula — caring for four decades of children and grandchildren in the same home — is a mere heartbeat in geological time.

An Arctic Hamlet is Sinking Into the Thawing Permafrost

New York Times • 2 Dec 2024 • ~2550 words • Archive Link

Canada is losing its permafrost to climate change. The Indigenous residents of Tuktoyaktuk know they’ll have to move but don’t agree on when.

For centuries, the Western Arctic has been home to Mr. Dillon and his ancestors, the Inuvialuit, as the region’s Inuit are called. But these days, the thaw slumps — like the one Mr. Dillon’s team was documenting 10 miles south of their hamlet, Tuktoyaktuk — are the most dramatic evidence of a phenomenon that could turn the local Inuvialuit into Canada’s first climate refugees.

The Deep Elation of Working with Wood

The New Yorker • 2 Dec 2024 • ~2900 words • Archive Link

In “Ingrained,” Callum Robinson honors not just the art of carpentry but the passion of labor itself.

Extraordinary precision is Robinson’s forte: a necessary gift for his career, and a boon to his writing. In an account of creating a commissioned rocking chair, he writes, “A pair of one-piece sinuous sides, each built up from several smaller parts but sculpted with templates to feel like one smoothly transitioning component. Linked not by a footrail, but by slim braces and the chair’s angled wooden seat. The backrest, by client request, will be one great swathe of tensioned bridle leather.” He’s conjuring the blues music of Sonny Boy Williamson while sketching with a pencil, trying to imagine the design into being, considering how the materials might come together. “Leather like this will stretch and move over time, softening and slackening as it ages and molds to the client’s back, mellowing like an old shoe. Predicting the right tension, and allowing for adjustment, will be challenging. To tackle this, we have added buckling straps at the back, like corsetry. Something we hope will feel more like saddlery than S&M.”

Noema’s Top 10 Reads Of 2024

NOEMA • 3 Dec 2024

Noema publishes a lot of good long-form journalism and essays, and this is their selection of their best content of 2024.