Aliens, Nuns, Meat & Freedom
Today, we have a packed list of fourteen articles, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. If you do, please consider sharing them with your friends or on social media!
Featured Reading
The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row
The New Yorker • Published on 2025-02-10 • ~22000 words
By Lawrence Wright
Sisters from a convent outside Waco are visiting women on death row in Texas to offer spiritual support. This piece from Lawrence Wright explores the profound connections that develop between the sisters and the inmates, and how visits filled with compassion and understanding contrast against the realities of their crimes, convictions, and the wait for their execution.
The nuns knew nothing about the women’s crimes. They also knew little about one another. The sisters seldom speak, and the lives they’ve left behind are rarely discussed. It’s a kind of forced naïveté, in which gossip and news are replaced by prayer.
I thought about how these women had been living the quietest life imaginable, until their sudden plunge into a dark and complicated world had filled them with new purpose.
How Big Meat Silences Its Critics
Vox • Published on 2025-02-07 • ~3150 words
By Kenny Torrella
Factory farming is destructive to the environments that many people call their homes. When people take a stand and fight, though, they face harassment, intimidation, death threats, and social ostracism. Kenny Torrella reports on the stories of some who opposed factory farming, and the consequences they faced.
Jones said that the whole ordeal further revealed the industry’s fragility — without heavy subsidization, deregulation, and dependence on taxpayers to either tolerate its pollution or pay to clean it up, it wouldn’t stand on its own.
The postcard had been sent out by a shadowy group called Iowa Citizens for Truth. One of two people named on the group’s 2016 IRS tax form is Steve Weiss, the same name of the founder and former chief financial officer of Iowa Select Farms — the state’s largest pork producer and the fourth largest in the US. Weiss is now the CEO of NutriQuest, a livestock consultancy in Iowa.
‘Woman, life, freedom’: the Syrian feminists who forged a new world in a land of war
The Guardian • Published on 2025-02-08 • ~3650 words
By Natasha Walter
Rojava, an autonomous region in northeastern Syria, has a government with perhaps the most complete gender equality in the world, in a society fractured by conflict and misogyny. Natasha Walter explores how women in this region have forged a movement for rights and empowerment amid adversity.
Too often, it seems to me, as I hear discussions in the west of what the new Syria will look like, this impassioned feminism is completely overlooked. Maybe it’s too Kurdish. Maybe it’s too militarised. Maybe it’s too socialist. Maybe it’s just too unlikely. Maybe what western onlookers want when they think about feminism in the Middle East is something more polite, less determined, less angry? But every single day I’m in north-east Syria, whether I visit a university or a justice council, an ecology academy or a demonstration, I feel my breath taken away by the depth of commitment that women show to what they have created here.
Believing in Aliens Derailed This Internet Pioneer’s Career. Now He’s Facing Prison
Bloomberg • Published on 2025-02-04 • ~7350 words
By Brent Crane
Joseph Firmage, a Silicon Valley pioneer, faces accusations of fraud and elder abuse after a series of failed ventures fueled by his obsession with antigravity technology and UFOs. Brent Crane traces Firmage's rise and fall, from founding successful tech companies to his increasingly erratic behavior and alleged business improprieties. Is he a visionary genius or a con artist who exploited people's desire to believe in the impossible?
What Marmer believes Firmage really wanted him to see was a check made out to him from the Mega Millions lottery for $500 million. Firmage claimed he’d been awarded the enormous sum after reverse-engineering the lottery’s random-number generator. Alarm bells were dinging loudly for Marmer by then. “When the scales fell from my eyes was when I finally met Joe in person,” he says.
Some physicists were happy to accept Firmage’s patronage. Others ridiculed him. In 1999 a newsletter published by the American Physical Society mentioned that Firmage had been awarded the satirical “Flying Pig Award” by a skeptics organization. He “gave up a two-billion-dollar computer business to spread the ‘truth,’ which is that humans aren’t smart enough to have invented the computer chip,” the newsletter read. “It was reverse-engineered from debris from crashed UFOs. The government is hiding the truth to preserve our self-esteem.”
Recommended Reading
In Defense of Synthetic Comics
The Comics Journal • Published on 2025-02-10 • ~2750 words
By Ilan Manouach
Ilan Manouach makes a case for embracing generative AI for comic production, or at least, against stigmatizing it. He argues for using the term "synthetic comics" over "AI comics," highlighting the historical symbiosis between comics and technological innovation.
… the apprehension surrounding the introduction of ML tools in comics contradicts the medium’s longstanding, symbiotic relation to technology. I believe it’s fair to write that in a medium that has historically served as a laboratory for today’s global entertainment industries, the vast majority of contemporary comics artists are not only unwilling to see the potential of computational tools, but are also vehemently opposed to the idea of integrating them for the production of their work.
It is surprising that this industry, which has historically embraced "swiping"— the deliberate replication of panels or pages from prior works and arguably one of comics' most innovative contributions to the history of creativity— would now rigidly assert the "human hand" as the only warrant of authentic creativity. While comics communities have long celebrated artistic borrowing and reinterpretation as sources of innovation, they pain to understand how new technologies can help them, much like previous generations refused to acknowledge how digital tools would empower them. Today, few would claim that contemporary comics are a weaker form of expression due to digital photo editing tools such as Photoshop or Procreate.
Barcoding Brains
Asimov Press • Published on 2025-02-08 • ~4650 words
By Alexandra Balwit
Connectomics — a technique that maps physical connections between neural cells — is expensive and inefficient. E11 Bio, a non-profit research group, is designing a tool to expedite progress.
The first breakthrough E11 Bio exploits is expansion microscopy. Microscopes have distinct resolution limits, meaning they cannot easily “see” exceptionally small things. Rather than boost the resolution of a microscope, expansion microscopy flips this idea on its head and instead expands the size of a sample.
The Hallucinatory Thoughts of the Dying Mind
The MIT Press Reader • Published on 2025-02-10 • ~2450 words
By Michael Erard
Michael Erard writes about the phenomenon of delirium that often accompanies the dying process. He contrasts our cultural expectations of last words with the chaotic reality of a disoriented mind, revealing how this disconnect can affect both patients and their families.
… delirium seems to outstrip people’s ability — and their willingness — to grasp a phenomenon as simultaneously biological, emotional, and social. It has what David Wright called a relational dimension, in the sense that any individual’s delirium impacts other people’s perceptions of the relationship. Some find it traumatizing and distressing, others less so. In either case, what seems to help is when delirium is described as a normal part of dying, in the same way that baby babbling is described as a normal feature of language acquisition.
I Was Born Missing an Ear. To the World, It Was a Problem to Fix
The Walrus • Published on 2025-02-08 • ~2650 words
By Kate Gies
In this excerpt from Kate Gies’ memoir, she reflects on her childhood experiences with the medical system that sought to "fix" her missing ear through a series of surgeries and the emotional impact of these interventions.
He pulled up my shirt and motioned to his men to come closer. They each took turns pushing into my bottom ribs. I could feel the cartilage bend to their touch. I could feel the bone curve into my guts. I wanted to curl into myself, turn into a ball like an armadillo.
With Uncle Louie, I became two bodies: the one I experienced and the one he measured
After the Raid
Texas Monthly • Published on 2025-02-07 • ~2900 words
By Jack Herrera
In December 2006, a mass ICE raid transformed the small Texas town of Cactus, leaving a significant portion of its immigrant workforce detained. Jack Herrera explores the immediate chaos of the raid and its long-term effects on the community, which has become one of the most diverse small towns in Texas.
In the locker room, where employees would normally go to change out of bloody clothes, workers wedged themselves into lockers and other hiding spots. Some removed ceiling tiles and climbed into the crawl space above. Back near the cutting tables, others reportedly hid inside beef carcasses. In the cafeteria, ICE agents lined up workers to take fingerprints.
Even as ICE agents combed the factory, Valdez assumed that after they left, he might be missing a handful of Guatemalan workers, who were the more recent immigrants. So he was stunned to see people he had known for fifteen years—long-term residents who owned their houses, who spoke English—being detained.
How the Tiger Really Got His Stripes
The New Yorker • Published on 2025-02-04 • ~2100 words
By Rivka Galchen
Scientists are getting closer to figuring out what determines the patterns that animals wear. Rivka Galchen’s story takes a look into how research is progressing with two examples, the patterned skin of boxfish and the stripes of African striped mice.
There was a set of genes that they had identified but whose role they didn’t understand. Further experiments predicted that they might underlie the patterning. With genome editing—CRISPR—they bred mice with one of those genes knocked out; just as their mathematical model predicted, the width of the stripes had changed.
High-School Band Contests Turn Marching Into a Sport—and an Art
The New Yorker • Published on 2025-02-10 • ~9600 words
By Burkhard Bilger
Burkhard Bilger writes about how marching bands have evolved into a competitive and artistic form known as the "marching arts." These bands now incorporate complex choreography, formations, and creative themes into their performances.
Marching band is more than a pastime in Bourbon County. It’s an extreme sport. The real reason the students rehearse so hard isn’t to play well at football games. They can do those shows in their sleep. It’s to prepare for a series of fiercely competitive marching-band contests in the fall, culminating in the Grand National Championships, in Indianapolis. There are more than twenty thousand high-school band programs in America, some with as many as four hundred members. Over the past thirty years, their shows have evolved into spectacles that John Philip Sousa couldn’t have imagined. The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores. They don’t call it marching band anymore. They call it the marching arts.
Ukrainian War Widows on the Edge
Nautilus • Published on 2025-02-07 • ~5200 words
By Florence Williams
A group of Ukrainian war widows embark on a five-day journey of healing through adventure therapy in Slovenia. Led by psychologists and combat veterans, the program aims to help these women confront their grief and trauma.
I follow them down, heart hammering. There’s no choice but to accept that I’m dangling from a rope high above the ground. It’s an exercise in surrender. I realize just how much of the positive-psychology dogma naturally emerges when you’re dangling on a cliff face. The present moment eclipses the ruminating mind. Focus on where your foot lands. Trust it’s going to work out. This moment, like every moment, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Keep going. And then I notice the lichen on the wall, the warm air on my shoulders, the feel of my legs in the harness.
Elon Musk put a chip in this paralysed man’s brain. Now he can move things with his mind. Should we be amazed - or terrified?
The Guardian • Published on 2025-02-08 • ~5550 words
By Jenny Kleeman
Noland Arbaugh was the first human to receive a brain chip from Elon Musk's Neuralink, allowing him to control computers with his thoughts. His story raises questions not only about the potential of this technology but also about the ethical implications of merging human minds with machines.
It might all be hype and bluster. But it’s possible to imagine a future where the sum total of all human knowledge is available to anyone with a brain implant. They could switch off their anxiety – or their empathy – as required. With total recall of every moment in their lives and every piece of information they ever encountered, every problem solved before the conscious mind could consider it, life for these people would be pretty much frictionless. In that world, wouldn’t there be incredible inequality between those who had BCIs and those who didn’t?
Can the nuclear industry find a better way to build?
Financial Times • Published on 2025-02-10 • ~2650 words
By Robert Wright
Building nuclear reactors is difficult and expensive. The industry is hopeful that using almost exact copies of existing reactors can help keep costs down and prevent delays for new projects.
Yet even the simplest nuclear plants present difficult construction challenges. Such complex systems afford little chance during building for engineers to test whether individual segments are working effectively. The whole thing either works when powered up or fails.
