Zozobra & Weeds
Santa Fe's secret to happiness. Also, the weeds are winning.
Featured Articles
One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy
New York Times • 7 Nov 2024 • ~3350 words • Archive Link
Every year, Santa Fe incinerates a giant puppet of Zozobra — a ritual meant to purge anxiety and promote a reset.
A towering ghoul points down from a mural on one of the city’s busiest streets with no context. At a local confectionery, a scowling white figure in a cummerbund is rendered in chocolate — why? Even if you clock that the big-eared goblin tattooed on the biceps of a local electrician is the same creature depicted (being consumed by flames) on the cab of a municipal fire truck, you will encounter nowhere an explanation of who or what this monster is — unless you happen to be in Santa Fe on the one evening a year when locals construct a building-size version of this thing and set it on fire.
The Weeds Are Winning
MIT Technology Review • 10 Oct 2024 • ~2850 words
As the climate changes, genetic engineering will be essential for growing food. But is it creating a race of superweeds?
Weeds have developed surprising ways to get around chemical control. One 2009 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that a mutation in the Palmer amaranth genome allowed the plant to make more than 150 copies of the gene that glyphosate targets. That kind of gene amplification had never been reported in plants before. . . . It’s not just chemicals. Weeds can become resistant to any type of control method. In a classic example from China, a weed called barnyard grass evolved over centuries to resemble rice and thus evade hand weeding.
Recommended Articles
Why I gave up trying to delete myself from the internet
The Economist • 8 Nov 2024 • ~1950 words • Archive Link
What would it take to try and get yourself deleted from the internet?
In practice, getting information taken down is not easy. As an experiment, I chose a random webpage with my name on it – an article I wrote as a student for a newspaper in Florence, Italy – and filled in a form asking Google to remove it from searches. I acknowledged that the article wasn’t lewd or violent, but it included a few personal details about where I went to university and what I studied. Three days later my request was approved, but there was a catch. Google could delist the link only from searches in Britain and Europe. To get the article wiped completely I would need to contact the website itself.
