Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, check out Louise Hung’s piece about coming to terms with her eyelids, which turned out to resonate with a lot of readers!
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‘The brutal world of sheep fighting: the illegal sport beloved by Algeria’s ‘lost generation’‘ (Hannah Rae Armstrong for The Guardian)
If you think of sheep as tame, fluffy, boring, or insipid, this one’s for you. Glimpses at economic disparity through the lens of cultural activities like this one are always fascinating, and Armstrong’s vivid, intense descriptions turn this into an immense journey.
The men who train sheep for combat belong to a lost generation of Algerians, now in their 20s and 30s, moulded by an era of fear, fighting, corruption and curfews. There are few jobs and no productive roles for them to play in society. They lack relevant skills and education. Most are unmarried. They are not poor by most standards, but they depend on state subsidies that allow them to buy fuel, food and housing for next to nothing. They feel disposable, purposeless, humiliated. Most feel the future lies elsewhere. For many, that means Europe.
‘The Mess at Meetup‘ (Kate Conger for Gizmodo)
Lots of tech companies like to talk about ‘culture’ and how theirs is different, statements tinged with added anxiety in an era when more and more underrepresented groups in tech are pushing back on the white boys club. The tale of Meetup is a cautionary one, and a sign of how much work we still have to do.
In the run-up to the WeWork acquisition, however, Meetup became unfocused, spending energy on revising its supportive culture and getting rid of employees who didn’t fall in line with a newly redesigned set of values, according to multiple former employees and internal documents obtained by Gizmodo. The cultural restructuring appeared to be driven by WeWork’s impending acquisition of the company, former employees said, and by Heiferman’s anxiety over increased competition with another tech behemoth—Facebook.
‘Get Schooled in the No-Nonsense Art of Survival‘ (Eva Holland for Outside)
This journalist traveled for work to one of the most extreme locations on the globe, and then she got dumped there with minimal resources and told to make her way to safety. On purpose. It’s a thrilling read about survival, the human spirit, and the sweeping beauty of the Arctic.
For the past several years, I had hovered on the fringes of the McNairs’ world. I read voraciously about polar exploration, wrote several stories about other people’s adventures at the frozen ends of the planet, and lived within a day’s drive of the Arctic Circle. I joked with friends that the beauty of journalism was precisely that I didn’t have to ski to the North Pole myself; I could just interview someone who had. Deep down, I wanted to be out there on the ice, not just asking questions. But here, now, I finally had my chance, and I was terrified.
‘The Final, Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus‘ (May Jeong for Wired)
Journalists are often cautioned to avoid making themselves the story. This piece shows that this rigid rule should be reevaluated. It is both a deeply reported and researched feature on the death of journalist Kim Wall in extremely suspicious circumstances, and the story of a friendship, a loss, and a desire for resolution.
Kim Wall and I were both freelance writers, both young and female, both reporting from abroad. Our friendship began after we followed each other on Instagram and Facebook. Then, a year or so later, in 2016 we found ourselves in New York. We spent most of the summer sitting across from each other in a glum coffee shop in Williamsburg, working on our laptops. We didn’t yet know where reporting ended and living began. We saw in each other a companion, but also a guide. She was my friend and also the closest thing I had to a colleague. When I left for Afghanistan that fall and she for Denmark and later Cuba, we kept in touch by text, talking every week if not more often.
‘Finding a Lost Strain of Rice, and Clues to Slave Cooking‘ (Kim Severson for The New York Times)
The history of food often carries deep cultural clues, and some of those clues are very dark. When a strain of rice was rediscovered, it was exciting news, but the reason the rice was found thriving so far from its homeland was slavery, and the once thriving trade in human beings.
It is hard to overstate how shocked the people who study rice were to learn that the long-lost American hill rice was alive and growing in the Caribbean. Horticulturists at the Smithsonian Institution want to grow it, rice geneticists at New York University are testing it and the United States Department of Agriculture is reviewing it. If all goes well, it may become a commercial crop in America, and a menu staple as diners develop a deeper appreciation for African-American food.
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Photo: Hamza Butt/Creative Commons