Textile Waste & Anti-Social Century

Featured Articles

The Messy Truth: Where Your Clothes Go To ‘Die’

Atmos • 8 Jan 2025 • ~4000 words

The Global North’s relationship with textile waste is marked by sensationalism, fetishization, and denial—anything but responsibility.

Kantamanto is not tidy; it is raw. The excess is not only visible; it is felt. The piles take up the limited space that a retailer has in her stall. The weight bears down on the women who carry the bales on their heads, crushing their spines, and every item of clothing is handled by retailers, cleaners, dyers, repairers, upcyclers, and waste pickers. The clothing that cannot be sold leaves the market as waste, and because Accra does not have the trucks nor a sanitary landfill nor an incinerator, this waste ends up in places where it does not belong: burn piles, open dumpsites, the beach.

The Anti-Social Century

The Atlantic • 8 Jan 2025 • ~7800 words • Archive Link

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.

Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden's surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America's “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world's next critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom now has a minister for loneliness. So does Japan.

Recommended Articles

The Great Decentralization

NOEMA • 7 Jan 2025 • ~4200 words

What happens when sprawling online communities fracture into politically homogenous, self-governing communities?

Beyond the challenges of addressing illegal or harmful content, the Great Decentralization raises deeper questions about social cohesion: Will the fragmentation of platforms exacerbate ideological silos and further erode the shared spaces needed for consensus and compromise?

Abbey’s Road

The Baffler • 8 Jan 2025 • ~5350 words

David Schurman Wallace explores ecoterrorism in fiction and film.

Perhaps more radical action is coming soon. In the meantime, the ecoterrorists are not out in there in the wild, but rather as a steady stream of representations in fiction and film. Authors and filmmakers have created legions of ecological radicals, almost as if they hoped to manifest them through their work.

Discover the Astounding Secrets of Scotland’s Stone Age Settlements

Smithsonian Magazine • 8 Jan 2025 • ~4350 words

In the Orkney Islands, archaeologists close the chapter on a legendary excavation, capping two decades of remarkable Neolithic discoveries.

This is the elegant serendipity of archaeology. A person is born toward the end of the 20th century, on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, and through a series of choices and coincidences happens to be in precisely the right spot at the right time—not a foot to the left or right, not five minutes later coming back from a break—to uncover an axe head that someone, around 2800 B.C., had put into the earth for reasons of their own. The Sky Axe may have spoken, to those who knew its origins, of distant horizons; and now, thanks to the young woman who found it, the skies of the American Midwest are part of its story, too.

How a Would-Be Bomber Rebuilt His Life

The Walrus • 6 Jan 2025 • ~5750 words

Zakaria Amara was jailed for his part in the Toronto 18 terror plot. Then came the hard work of redemption.

When he could no longer justify what he once thought was righteous, he worried that he would also have to abandon his faith. In his mind, his radical ideology was connected to his religion. When he finally accepted that they were not, he says, he experienced a “spiritual ascent.”

They Were Looking for Endangered Tortoises. They Found Human Bones Instead.

Outside Online • 5 Jan 2025 • ~7050 words

For decades, field technicians have scoured the Mojave Desert monitoring threatened tortoises. Their searches sometimes uncovered human remains. Our writer untangles a mystery dug up by the turtle counters.

The Mojave, with its vast emptiness so close to the shadows of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, turns out to be the ideal place for ditching evidence, whether that be junk cars or the freshly murdered.

A Fugitive Businessman, Done In by One Law He Couldn’t Dodge

New York Times • 7 Jan 2025 • ~3400 words • Archive Link

Fleeing fraud charges, Samuele Landi evaded extradition treaties, dabbled in crypto, procured diplomatic credentials and took advantage of all the offshore world has to offer.

The universe in which Landi had sought shelter is not so exceptional, after all. In fact, it is all around us, hiding in plain sight. We might buy a bottle of Scotch in a duty-free shop, or vacation on a cruise ship with Panama’s or Liberia’s lightly regulated flag of convenience. We might gamble in a casino or admire a da Vinci that has spent decades in an extraterritorial warehouse. Our clothes, our electronics, the computers we use for our desk jobs are likely to have been manufactured in special economic zones by global companies that behave more or less like Samuele Landi: hopping from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in order to make money and shield themselves as best they can from fiscal, regulatory, legal or environmental responsibilities.

Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?

The New Yorker • 4 Jan 2025 • ~6400 words

Tracy Wolff, the author of the “Crave” series, is being sued for copyright infringement. But romantasy’s reliance on standardized tropes makes proving plot theft tricky.

Romantasy’s reliance on tropes poses a challenge for questions of copyright. Traditionally, the law protects the original expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. A doctrine named for the French phrase scènes à faire, or “scenes that must be done,” holds that the standard elements of a genre (such as a showdown between the hero and the villain) are not legally protectable, although their selection and arrangement might be. The wild proliferation of intensely derivative romantasies has complicated this picture. The worlds of romance and fantasy have been so thoroughly balkanized, the production of content so accelerated, that what one might assume to be tropes—falling in love with a werewolf or vampire, say—are actually subgenres. Tropes operate at an even more granular level (bounty-hunter werewolves, space vampires). And the more specific the trope, the harder it is to argue that such a thing as an original detail exists.