Amway & Aral
A family devastated by promises. Also, how life restores itself even on the edge of apocalypse.

Featured Articles
The ‘Exciting Business Opportunity’ That Ruined Our Lives
The Atlantic • 30 Jan 2025 • ~2800 words
Andrea Pitzer reflects on a childhood shaped by their families devastating experience with Amway. Amway's promises of wealth and opportunity consumed her mother's life for decades, leading to financial ruin and strained family relationships.
When I tell people how I grew up, I get a few different reactions. Sometimes I meet people who thought about joining Amway, and are relieved they never signed up. Sometimes they’re surprised that Amway still exists—they thought it disappeared decades ago. Most barely know what it is. And why should they? They themselves might never fall for such a hustle. But whether they know it or not, Amway has deeply influenced American politics for decades.
Signs Of Life In A Desert Of Death
NOEMA • 30 Jan 2025 • ~3850 words
In the dry and fiery deserts of Central Asia, among the mythical sites of both the first human and the end of all days, I found evidence that life restores itself even on the bleakest edge of ecological apocalypse.
What remained of the South Aral was visible from the yurt camp, a panoramic view over eerily still water. The unreal mirror of its surface captured the changes of the sky as it slid from dawn to dusk, from blue to blood orange. Each morning started with a ritual: The 30 or so tourists who had come here on their separate tours — Canadians, Japanese, Spanish, Russians — were roused from sleeping in their yurts to watch the sun rise over the sea, which produced a light effect I had never seen anywhere before, a reflection like a bar of gold, perfectly vertical, that split the body of the water into scintillating halves. The desert glowed Martian red; the water ran with blood and flames; the half-asleep spectators took pictures on their phones. It occurred to me that this was another form of fire worship — a ball of flame, symbolizing life, rising over the ebb tide of something dying.
Recommended Articles
Brigid, Ireland’s Antiestablishment Saint
New Lines Magazine • 31 Jan 2025 • ~3900 words
Played down by the Catholic Church and resurrected by modern acolytes as a pagan fire goddess, her shifting cultural meanings conceal the remarkable life of a real early medieval abbess.
In most aspects, the saint and the goddess were indistinguishable. The story goes that a pagan goddess named Brig or Brigid, was, like the saint, associated with fire and water, poetry and fertility. She had two sisters by the same name, a healer and a smith. Like the saint, the goddess was connected with holy wells and animal husbandry and, in one telling, reared on milk from a sacred cow. It is said that the goddess was so popular her traditions got absorbed by the Catholic Church, who wove her myths into a make-believe saint. In fact, the reverse is true. There is ample evidence Brigid was a real woman, albeit one with a folkloric flourish to her biography, and no evidence people worshipped such a goddess in Ireland in or before her time.
Hearts and brains
Aeon • 31 Jan 2025 • ~6050 words
Humans always end up with clogged arteries, right? That’s not what the lives of the Tsimane in the Amazon basin tell us.
I did physical exams on about 300 people living in Tayakome and Diamante, another village on the Manú, and was seeing a remarkably healthy group of people, infants to elders, generally fit, active and well-nourished. They were hunters, fishermen, farmers and foragers, had been forever, and they were good at it. I never heard a heart murmur or recorded an elevated blood pressure.
The Enduring Appeal of Magnificent Trees and Fantasy Forests
Reactor • 30 Jan 2025 • ~2400 words
Kali Wallace writes about the allure of large trees and magnificent fictional forests.
This is, I fervently believe, exactly what trees should do. This is why I love the giant sequoias—and the aspen clones, for that matter, as well as bristlecone pines, junipers, cedars, cypresses, and yews, all the different tree species around the world with individuals that have been alive for a thousand years or more. Centuries come and go, and they keep growing. Empires rise and fall, but trees don’t care. Millennia pass, and they keep growing.
The lucrative business of airline loyalty schemes
Financial Times • 29 Jan 2025 • ~2600 words
Air miles and frequent-flyer programmes drive enormous profits but risk becoming victims of their own success.
But things really changed in 1987, when American Airlines partnered with Citibank to launch a co-branded credit card offering users air miles for every dollar spent. This scheme of selling frequent-flyer points to financial institutions transformed mileage programmes into complex but highly profitable businesses in their own right. In theory at least, it seems like a near perfect business model: airlines can create as many points as they like out of thin air, and then sell them on to banks and credit card companies. They can also sell miles to partner hotels, car rental companies or shops, in effect becoming the central banks of a lightly regulated financial ecosystem.
Big Battle on the Little Wichita
Texas Monthly • 28 Jan 2025 • ~2550 words
A North Texas city wants to build a new reservoir to blunt the effect of future droughts. But many local ranchers say it would destroy their way of life.
Historically, reservoir construction has pitted rural people against city planners in a lopsided contest, says Jim Blackburn, an attorney and professor of environmental law at Rice University. That’s how things are shaping up in current-day Clay County. “I won’t count these landowners out, but ultimately they’ll be confronted with the imbalance of the law,” he says. “You can fight as long and as hard as you want, but your greatest reward will just be a bigger pile of money. You’re still gonna lose your property.”