Tibbetts Brook & Scientific Fraud

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Daylighting Tibbetts Brook

Pioneer Works • 23 Oct 2024 • ~5750 words

An ode to an underground Bronx waterway and the restorative effort to unbury it.

What is the memory of water? Is this captive chapter just a blip in the long life of the brook? Or might the brook be angry, like a poltergeist deranged by degradation, indignity, and concealment? I mean, does the brook hold a grudge? Has the brook been dreaming of freedom, attempting repeated escape? What are the brook’s rights? I don’t wish to anthropomorphize, but how do we match our repair work to the level of harm that’s been done, not to mention, to the soul of the brook?

A scientific fraud. An investigation. A lab in recovery.

The Transmitter • 4 Oct 2024 • ~4900 words

Science is built on trust. What happens when someone destroys it?

But no one else in the lab—including Heinz—could replicate the NPAS4 data. Other lab members always had a technical explanation for why the replication experiments failed, so for years the problem was passed from one trainee to another. Which explains why, on this day in early April 2023, Heinz was poking around the postdoc’s raw data. What he eventually found would lead to a retraction, a resignation and a reckoning, but in the moment, Heinz says, he was not thinking about any of those possibilities. In fact, he had told no one he was doing this. He just wanted to figure out why his experiments weren’t working.

Recommended Articles

In a Word: Getting Latin’s ‘Head’ Examined

The Saturday Evening Post • 22 Oct 2024 • ~1550 words

Explore the wide variety of English vocabulary that stemmed from the Latin word for “head.”

Speaking of farms, one agricultural commodity that takes the form of a bundle of leaves the size and shape of a human head was called in Old French caboce, from a diminutive of caput. In Old North French, it became a caboche, which was adopted into English, and the ch shifted into a soft j sound, giving us cabbage. (Lettuce is head-shaped too, of course; its name ultimately comes from Latin lac “milk,” from the white juice of the plant.)

Call of Duty: Pentagon Ops

The Nation • 24 Oct 2024 • ~4500 words

Inside the weird synergies that launched the videogaming industry—and made the Pentagon fantasies in Call of Duty its stock in trade.

Call of Duty might be the culmination of the digital marketing world’s efforts to capitalize on real-world military planning. For more than a decade, it’s been the best-selling franchise among the estimated 212 million Americans who play video games regularly. (It had clocked $30 billion in lifetime revenue by 2022.) And the FPS fantasies that make up the game’s storylines are steeped in the gaming industry’s cozy relationship with the national security state. Raven Software, Call of Duty’s primary developer, is an outgrowth of the FPS genre’s inventor, iD Software, which drew heavily on military tech in its designs. Oliver North, the famous Iran-contra conspirator, played an advisory role on Call of Duty: Black Ops II (whose plotline toggles between the 1980s and 2025 as players hunt a fictional Nicaraguan narco-terrorist) and even makes a cameo appearance in the game.

The Weapon of Child Separation

Public Books • 24 Oct 2024 • ~2300 words

In “Until I Find You,” historian Rachel Nolan carefully navigates the omissions and fabrications in the documentary record associated with adoptions of children in Guatemala.

Documents from the Ministry of Social Welfare and the few accessible army plans from the 1980s reveal the army’s commitment to the elimination of the Indigenous people of Guatemala, who were seen as an “internal enemy” and a “bad seed” that needed to be stamped out. Child disappearance, whether through murder or adoption, “was another way to attempt to destroy a community and to make regeneration impossible,” says Nolan. There was not necessarily a concerted plan to use adoptions as genocide. Even so, the transfer of children still produced a genocidal outcome. Disappearing Indigenous children was carried out with a particular future in mind: one in which they did not grow up to make claims on the settler state.

My Weekends With the Dead

Slate Magazine • 24 Oct 2024 • ~3950 words

In 2017, I decided to solve a longtime mystery about my family. It led me to a controversial pastime that consumes thousands—and has changed untold lives.

There are, in my view, three categories of gravers: First, there are the mercenaries who, like me, fulfill specific photo requests for users. Then there are those who like to “mow the lawn,” a Find-a-Grave term used to describe volunteers who go up and down the rows of graves in a specific cemetery to photograph each and every stone they come across. (“I thought to myself, ‘I’m just going to photograph the whole darn place,’ ” said O’Donnell, who started as the first kind of graver, and then became the second.) Finally, there are the research junkies who do deep dives into a person’s history to create online biographies. Known as “memorials,” these are a kind of online profile for particular dead people created after gravers read their obituaries in their local paper, take it upon themselves to photograph the newly christened grave, and even sometimes go as far as researching the person’s life to record more information on a kind of Facebook profile for the afterlife.

The Police Chief and the Immigrant

ProPublica • 24 Oct 2024 • ~5900 words

How immigration is affecting one small Wisconsin city.

“I don’t use the term ‘migrant crime,’” Meyer said. The new immigrants, he said, aren’t committing crimes at a greater rate than other Whitewater residents — and research from around the country backs him up. But police have struggled with other very real challenges tied to the arrival of so many people from another country. The new immigrants arrived in Whitewater with limited resources. They didn’t speak English. They were unfamiliar with local laws and norms. And, he said, they had no driver’s licenses and “no real opportunity to get one.”

Will the China Cycle Come for Airbus and Boeing?

Construction Physics • 23 Oct 2024 • ~4750 words

Noah Smith, author of the economics Substack Noahpinion, often refers to a common trajectory in Chinese manufacturing as the “China Cycle”

. . . fielding an internationally successful commercial aircraft requires more than just building the airplane: it also requires a globe-girdling network of repair and maintenance facilities that can keep jets in the air wherever they might be. Boeing and Airbus have these sorts of operations, COMAC doesn’t yet. A less than robust repair and maintenance network has hampered North American operations of Russian aircraft, in some cases forcing them to be grounded for lack of parts.

The Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies

The Ringer • 23 Oct 2024 • ~5500 words • Archive Link

As theaters throughout the country adjust to an ever-changing landscape, many are turning to cinema’s past. Could repertory and revival screenings be a way forward?

The types and number of repertory films being shown are changing, as are the types of people attending them. Since the pandemic, I’d heard the oft-repeated narrative that fewer movies are being released in theaters, movie theaters are dying out at an unprecedented clip, and these are harbingers of streaming ultimately killing the moviegoing experience. But it didn’t feel that way that night at the Lincoln Center. It felt like I was a part of something—a culture or a phenomenon.

Character.ai Faces Lawsuit After Teen’s Suicide

New York Times • 23 Oct 2024 • ~3300 words • Archive Link

The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy says he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death.

A.I. companionship apps can provide harmless entertainment or even offer limited forms of emotional support. I had a mostly positive experience when I tried making A.I. friends for a column earlier this year, and I interviewed users of these apps who praised their benefits . . . But claims about the mental health effects of these tools are largely unproven, and experts say there may be a dark side. For some users, A.I. companions may actually worsen isolation, by replacing human relationships with artificial ones. Struggling teens could use them in place of therapy or asking a parent or trusted adult for support. And when users are experiencing a mental health crisis, their A.I. companions may not be able to get them the help they need.

‘Our nuclear childhood’: the sisters who witnessed H-bomb tests over their Pacific island, and are still coming to terms with the fallout

The Conversation • 22 Oct 2024 • ~4200 words

Manchester mayor Andy Burnham suggests the treatment of nuclear test veterans will be the next major UK public scandal to emerge. But how do the local people of Kiritimati recall these tests?

The Grapple task force resolved that the safe limit set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection should be reduced, to limit the cost of evacuations. A meeting in November 1956 noted that “only a very slight health hazard to people would arise from this reduction – and that only to primitive peoples”. Shocking as this remark sounds, it is typical of the disregard that nuclear planners appear to have had, both for Indigenous communities and the mostly working-class soldiers. These lives did not seem to matter much in the context of Britain’s quest for nuclear supremacy.

Why You Hear the Deepest of Deep Cuts While Shopping at Central Market

Texas Monthly • 22 Oct 2024 • ~2450 words • Archive Link

The grocery store is known for carrying fresh and hard-to-find ingredients. The same can be said of its music.

What the man observed at Central Market was different, and it wasn’t a one-off. Over time, he and his wife developed an inside joke of sorts to mark instances of the phenomenon he first witnessed in the dairy aisle. He texts her a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio dancing whenever he hears a particularly pleasing song—Kurt Vile and John Prine’s charming take on “How Lucky,” Paul Simon’s underrated “The Obvious Child,” plenty of Khruangbin before Khruangbin was a known commodity—while picking up dried mung beans, cumin seeds, and vegan shredded cheese.

The Rip in the World

Longreads • 22 Oct 2024 • ~4650 words

On volcanoes, earthquakes, and our attraction to disaster.

“It seems that we are now witnessing the earliest part of a major eruption episode,” said a volcanologist last June. “Scientifically, we are lucky to be able to observe this,” he added. “But from a societal point of view we are not.” There is another level, of course, besides the scientific and the societal. But apparently no one asked the volcanologist whether he, personally, was lucky. Perhaps the answer was so apparent as to be unnerving. Because, yes, obviously he was. Lucky to be alive and watchful when the ground split open, lucky to be near enough to feel the heat and smell the gas, lucky to see the viscous lava slop slowly downhill like honey from a spoon—even lucky, perhaps, to feel so humbled and afraid.

“I Am the Face of AIDS”: Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS

Public Books • 22 Oct 2024 • ~4850 words

Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the 1980s–1990s AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced artificial and arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.

While Ryan’s “innocence” pushed the federal government to act on AIDS, the “guilt” of marginalized groups fueled the urge “to punish sick people for their alleged lack of moral purity,” as one Philadelphia Daily News editorial put it. Specifically, the CARE Act contained punitive HIV criminalization and notification statutes and prohibited federal funding for needle-exchange programs . . . Though the CARE Act was signed into law in 1990, its grant program would not be fully funded until 1994. The saga of the Ryan White CARE Act thus reveals the limits of respectability politics and the politics of “innocence” during the 1980s and 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic—and beyond.

After the Deluge: Appalachia’s “Climate Haven” Myth Unravels

salvationsouth.com • 19 Oct 2024 • ~3100 words

Transplants, retirees, and second-homers thought western North Carolina would be a refuge from the ravages of climate change. Hurricane Helene thought otherwise.

We clear enough trees by afternoon to get out of the driveway. Now, we discover the scope of the devastation—the houses and barns reduced to rubble, the roads washed away. Every single power line is down; the poles that held them are smashed to pieces. We drive as gingerly as we can, around massive trees, piles of dirt and rock, over and under the lines. We hold our breath superstitiously, hoping it will save us from electrocution. We are silent, except for an occasional Fuck, which neither of us realizes we’ve said or heard.

Writing in Pictures

The Yale Review • 9 Sep 2024 • ~4400 words

Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature

Richard scarry’s work could not have been told just in words, either. As Walter Retan and Ole Risom argue, Scarry “didn’t write his stories; he drew them.” His bestselling book was not titled Best Picture Book Ever, even though that’s really what it is. As children, we see the world in all its detail, texture, and beauty, but when we learn the word for, say, a bird, we cease to see it as clearly or curiously as we did before we categorized and dismissed it . . . Like it or not, just as adulthood runs roughshod over childhood, words chew images to shreds, and it’s up to the artist—or the writer or the cartoonist—to put those images back together again. Pictures are our first language for understanding the world, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored in favor of a second.