Pacific, Aegean, Gorton & Anorexia

Featured Reading

Tracking the Pacific Drug Highway

New Lines Magazine • Published on 2025-02-18 • ~3750 words
By Sean Williams & Kevin Knodell

Sean Williams and Kevin Knodell examine the evolution of drug trafficking across the Pacific, tracing how Latin American cartels have shifted their focus to New Zealand and Australia. They expose the alarming rise of the "Pacific Drug Highway," uncovering a web of criminal networks that are now infiltrating small island nations. The piece delves into the societal impacts, including addiction crises and corruption, as these regions struggle to cope with the influx of narcotics.

To many outside the region, the Pacific can appear intimidating — even terrifying — in its vastness. But the ancestors of Oceania’s Indigenous people navigated, settled and fished its 60 million square miles in simple outrigger canoes. In these tiny and dispersed places, it is often said that water connects communities rather than separates them. Now, Latin American drug lords are using the same currents and trade winds that islanders have relied on for centuries to connect and expand their colossal, criminal empires.

Even in the European ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp, authorities are only able to search 8% of containers. In New Zealand, that figure is 2%. In some Pacific Island nations, it’s closer to zero. For this reason, busting shipments is almost entirely reliant on human intelligence, which becomes tougher if cartels pay off or threaten workers. According to Berry, cartels can lose 9 out of 10 shipments and still make a profit. And besides, they’re still innovating.

The Fourth Wall

In These Times • Published on 2025-02-19 • ~4600 words
By Lauren Markham

Tommy Olsen is a Norwegian schoolteacher turned advocate documenting the perilous journeys of migrants crossing into Greece. Lauren Markham tells the story of his work on the Aegean Boat Report, highlighting the practice of pushbacks, where authorities forcibly return refugees to dangerous waters even though it is illegal to do so.

Greek authorities had effectively outlawed volunteers, NGO workers and even journalists from coming to refugees’ assistance. Anyone found at a boat landing risks arrest. That means there are fewer people assisting refugees upon first arrival (in contrast with just a few years ago, when Greek beaches would sometimes be packed with more eager-to-help volunteers than refugees on boats). It also means there are few witnesses.

This crackdown on solidarity workers isn’t only happening in Greece. Italy, for instance, charged four members of the Iuventa — a ship that has rescued more than 14,000 people in the Mediterranean — with “aiding and abetting illegal migration.” Italy also charged Pia Klemp, the German captain who piloted ships for the rescue organization Sea-Watch, with “aiding and abetting illegal immigration to Italy” — a crime for which she faced 20 years in prison. French farmer Cédric Herrou routinely found refugees passing across his land and provided them shelter — an act for which he was charged with the crime of “facilitating irregular entry.”

The hardest working font in Manhattan

Aresluna • Published on 2025-02-14 • ~6100 words
By Marcin Wichary

Marcin Wichary takes us on a fascinating journey while exploring the surprising ubiquity of the font “Gorton” in New York City. Despite its quirky and often imperfect designs, this font can be found in both mundane and extraordinary settings, from office signs to the Apollo spacecraft.

Gorton wasn’t just on computer keyboards, intercom placards, and sidewalk messages visited by many shoes. Gorton was there on typewriter keyboards, too. And on office signs and airline name tags. On boats, desk placards, rulers, and various home devices from fridges to tape dispensers.

A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect them close enough.

I even spotted Gorton a few times in Spain, or the U.K., and didn’t make too much of it, not thinking about the likelihood of machines from George Gorton’s company in a small town of Racine, Wisconsin making it all the way to different continents. In hindsight I should have.

Present Tense: The Long Shadow of an Eating Disorder 

Longreads • Published on 2025-02-20 • ~6700 words
By Maggie Slepian

Maggie Slepian writes about eating disorders and their lasting impact beyond the initial struggle for recovery. Her personal reflections reveal how the shadows of anorexia and bulimia continue to affect her relationship with food and body image years later.

My world was reduced to fear, hunger, and shame. There was no self anymore. I feel like everything is gray and I miss color, I scrawled in a barely legible journal entry, one of only a few coherent thoughts in a notebook filled with run-on sentences panicking about food and weight and sadness and self-loathing.

The unfortunate truth of eating disorders is that no matter how “recovered” you feel, act, and look, there are some elements that might never go away. Body dysmorphia is the last thing to go, if it ever does. To be trapped in this mind is like revisiting the most potent mental and emotional elements of the eating disorder without the physical symptoms and behaviors. And it’s all inward facing—I do not judge bodies of different shapes and sizes. This cruelty is solely reserved for me.

Recommended Reading

Democratic Decarbonization?

Phenomenal World • Published on 2025-02-17 • ~5550 words
By Ben Kodres-O’Brien

Ben Kodres-O’Brien reviews Sandeep Vaheesan's new book, "Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States." The book explores the dominance of corporate interests in electricity generation, advocating for a more democratic approach to decarbonization.

Few books summarize the policy changes that led to restructuring so succinctly and comprehensively as Democracy in Power. Cost pressures for regulated rate increases—a profit squeeze—in the mid-twentieth century set the stage for this disaggregation of functions that defines the business today.

Understanding the scale of the problem of governing electricity, and its role in the historical development of the US political system, allows us to appreciate more fully the challenge of Democracy in Power. Electricity demand growth today has come roaring back, largely driven by data centers performing energy-intensive computational procedures. With the partial exception of the switch from one fossil-fuel to another, there has moreover never been a true energy transition in the US electricity mix.

Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’

Undark Magazine • Published on 2025-02-19 • ~9150 words
By Fletcher Reveley

As Chile commemorated the 50th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's coup, President Gabriel Boric's unveiling of the National Search Plan aimed to confront painful historical wounds. The initiative seeks to find the remains of many Chileans who disappeared during the regime, but trust in the state's efforts remains fragile.

For Lazo, it has been a lifetime of fighting. Several weeks after Boric’s announcement, she sat in the dining room of her home in Buin, near Paine, her arms folded across a dark oak table — the same table, she explained, over which her family had enjoyed their final meal together all those years ago. She was 15 years old the night her father and brothers were taken. Now she is 66. Speaking softly, her eyes smoldering, she leaned forward and began to describe those 50 years: armed men with faces painted black, anguished crowds, a skeleton on an aluminum tray, a shattered grave. “A long, long, long, long road,” she said, “in search of the truth.”

In the end, the investigation determined that the Lazo men had never been held in the National Stadium, or any of the countless other detention centers where Flor Lazo and the other women from Paine had searched. Nor had they ever been buried in Patio 29. Just hours after they were taken from their homes, the men were driven to the ravine. There, they were pushed to the bottom, arranged in a line, and executed. From the very beginning, Lazo and the others had been searching for ghosts.

The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself

New York Times • Published on 2025-02-19 • ~3900 words
By David Yaffe-Bellany

In a major cryptocurrency scam, Shan Hanes, the president of a small Kansas town bank, made unauthorized wire transfers totaling over $47 million. He converted the funds into cryptocurrencies, only to lose them to a crypto crime network. The town has been left devastated by the losses. David Yaffe-Bellany tells the story with an engaging narrative.

As he sat in Hanes’s glass-walled office, Mitchell wondered what his friend had gotten himself into. Mitchell was not interested in sending $12 million to a mysterious crypto operation in Hong Kong. “Go there, hire an interpreter and get a cashier’s check,” he told Hanes. “If you think you’ve got $40 million in an account, go get it.” But Hanes seemed to have stopped listening. He was staring past Mitchell into the bank lobby, where his staff was arriving to start the day. He barely reacted when Mitchell offered his verdict: “Shan, I think you’re in a scam.”

Turkey said it would become a ‘zero waste’ nation. Instead, it became a dumping ground for Europe’s rubbish

The Guardian • Published on 2025-02-18 • ~4200 words
By Alexander Clapp

Despite committing to become a "zero waste" nation, Turkey has become a dumping ground for Europe’s plastic waste, with dire consequences for local farmers and the environment. Alexander Clapp reports on how much of the imported plastic is either burned, dumped illegally, or converted into low-quality goods.

Only there was one small problem with Turkey’s self-coronation as a zero-waste nation worthy of such international emulation. No sooner had Erdoğan announced her initiative than Turkey emerged as one of the biggest recipients – and one of the biggest dumpsites – of plastic waste anywhere on the planet.

For decades, Akman – a slim, middle-aged man with cheeks peppered by scraggly stubble – had, like generations of Akmans before him, made his living harvesting oranges and lemons and exporting them to Europe. Now Europe appeared to be sending its trash in the opposite direction, to the very edge of his citrus groves. Akman couldn’t help but be bemused by the occasional charred carton of juice jutting out of the pile. “That might have been made with my oranges,” he told me …

Art Adviser. Friend. Thief.

New York Times • Published on 2025-02-18 • ~3050 words
By Sarah Maslin NirZachary Small

Lisa Schiff, once a prominent art adviser, now faces the possibility of two decades in prison for stealing millions from her clients. This piece not only recounts how this happened, but also how Schiff reflects on her descent.

While her clients and friends saw a successful woman at the top of her career, she hid a secret. She was stealing from them. To conceal her theft, she would do things like pay one client with another’s money, or leverage their friendships to keep them believing that late payments were always almost on their way.

The Future Looks Ratty

bioGraphic • Published on 2025-02-19 • ~1850 words
By Benji Jones

Urban rats are thriving in a warming world, and the implications are troubling. As temperatures rise, rate are finding more opportunities to eat and reproduce, leading to a surge in sightings across major cities like New York and Washington, D.C. Benji Jones explores the links between climate change and rat populations, and why our traditional methods of control are failing and what cities can do about it.

Taken together, this means that as cities warm, rats have more time to eat and mate, and they can more easily locate food. This could help explain why New Orleans didn’t see an increase in rats, Parsons says. The city already has a warm, subtropical climate, so additional warming may provide less of a benefit for its rats. Too much heat could eventually become a problem, Richardson says, but rodents seem to be less limited by heat than by cold.

“Rats would still be in northern Mongolia hanging out in their burrows if it weren’t for these food crumbs that were dropped all the way across the continents,” he says. “It’s just so much easier for us to kill another species and bludgeon it to death—in some cases, torture it—than it is for us to just pick up after ourselves.”

Why Place-Names Matter

Pioneer Works • Published on 2025-02-05 • ~4750 words
By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Names are not just labels; they carry stories, power, and cultural memory. In this excerpt from his book, “Names of New York,” Joshua Jelly-Schapiro invites us to reconsider how the names we encounter daily affect our perceptions and connections to the places we inhabit.

If language is consciousness and humans are a “place-loving species,” then place-names—toponyms—may mold a larger piece of our minds than we think.

Place-names have the power not merely to locate experience, but to shape it: not merely to label the locales to which they refer but also “in some mysterious and beautiful way become part of [them]” as the writer Henry Porter put it. Portals through which to access the past, place-names are also a means to reexamine, especially in times of ire and tumult, what’s possible. And nowhere is this more true than in a great city—a place, Tuan wrote, that “can be seen as a construction of words as much as stone.” Cities are monuments to civilization, and its opposite. They’re condensers of experience and creators of encounter. They’re nothing if not generators of tales.