It’s late today, but that makes it all the sweeter! Here are the stories we’re keeping our eyes on this week. As always, we’re interested to know what you’re reading, or what you wish you could be reading more of here, so be sure to tell us in the comments.
‘Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves‘ (New York Times)
This amazing interactive feature takes a look at something we’re particularly interested in: Death and dying. What happens to the thousands of unclaimed dead every year, from bodies that wash ashore unidentified to the bodies left unclaimed because their families can’t afford funerals? Something has to be done, and this incredible story plunges into how one of the largest cities in the world copes with the problem.
New York is unique among American cities in the way it disposes of the dead it considers unclaimed: interment on a lonely island, off-limits to the public, by a crew of inmates. Buried by the score in wide, deep pits, the Hart Island dead seem to vanish — and so does any explanation for how they came to be there…To reclaim their stories from erasure is to confront the unnoticed heartbreak inherent in a great metropolis, in the striving and missed chances of so many lives gone by. Bad childhoods, bad choices or just bad luck — the chronic calamities of the human condition figure in many of these narratives. Here are the harshest consequences of mental illness, addiction or families scattered or distracted by their own misfortunes.
‘How the Government Launched the US Gun Industry‘ (Politico)
This made for an extremely intriguing read about one of the most infamous and contentious industries in the United States. The nation has one of the most bizarre and complicated gun cultures in the world, and this is an important piece of the puzzle — but the story isn’t told very often.
In early 1801, Whitney arrived at the muddy, unfinished White House carrying a mysterious black box. He was ready to exhibit its contents to the president and other top officials, and he proclaimed confidently to President John Adams and his advisers that he was now as ready to produce 10,000 muskets as to produce one. Before their astonished eyes, Whitney placed ten of each part of a musket on the table and proceeded to assemble ten rifles out of them. After the meeting, Thomas
Jefferson wrote an introductory letter to Virginia Governor James Monroe, saying that Whitney had made molds and machines ‘so exactly equal,’ that one could ‘take 100 locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundreds locks may be put together … without employing a smith.’
‘Living in the Shadow of Counterterrorism: A Daily Struggle for Muslim Women‘ (Rewire News)
Racial and religious profiling have spread untold damage across Muslim communities in the United States. This excellent feature explores how law enforcement profiling activities, specifically those surrounding counterterrorism, affect Muslimahs across the US.
Other cases, such as the Holy Land Five, demonstrate a pattern in which material support laws have essentially criminalized charitable giving. The case involved the founders of the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity that provided humanitarian aid to the needy, including women and children in Palestine. Though the government concluded that the Holy Land Foundation never directly aided a terrorist organization, it nonetheless prosecuted five of its members for funneling aid through charitable committees into areas controlled by Hamas, a designated Palestinian terrorist group, thereby violating material support statutes. Journalists called the verdict an attack on Islam itself, particularly the practice of zakat, which mandates that Muslims allocate a portion of their wealth or earnings for charitable causes.
‘The Business of Burying Horses‘ (Texas Observer)
A thoughtful feature about a complicated subject in the United States: The sale of horses for meat. In a country that adores horses, the thought of horsemeat is unthinkable and perhaps even horrific, but that doesn’t stop the demand, and the United States has a lot of unwanted horses.
Brito knew that advocating for even tangential involvement in horse slaughter could be touchy, since many people view horses as companion creatures that deserve a better fate. But as a poor town, Presidio has to weigh costs and benefits carefully when it comes to any revenue-generating business. While some in neighboring towns have expressed fierce opposition to a natural-gas pipeline that would cut through the desertscape of the Big Bend region, Presidio officials welcomed it as a potential job creator.
‘Suffocating the Ocean‘ (Pacific Standard)
Dead zones take lots of different forms, and this feature explores a problem that doesn’t get enough media coverage: Hypoxia and the dead zones created through poorly oxygenated water. Since marine life relies on oxygen to survive, these vast deserts are growing, and creating a new set of challenges for the world’s oceans.
When we think about the ocean and climate change, we often imagine ocean acidification, which will make life difficult — and, as it progresses, impossible — for some shell-forming organisms. We learn of melting ice caps and sea-level rise, which could require that humans retreat from the coastline and abandon low-lying regions, like Florida. We don’t hear much about hypoxia. Yet in some parts of the ocean, like the northeastern Pacific, hypoxia may be a greater near-term threat than acidification. And its emergence in multiple other places has caught some in the scientific community by surprise.
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Photo: Rui Fernandes/Creative Commons