This Week’s Top 5 Long Reads

This week’s list:

• Maintaining the internet through 800,000 miles of undersea cables
• What auto shows say about America
• Art framing acts as a lens through which we can see what we value
• A (somewhat) disastrous voyage Snow Drop
• Life as an artist – a crazy, raw look

Josh Ziesa | The Verge | April 16, 2024 | 8,856 words

I wouldn’t call myself a hardware geek, but lately I’ve been fascinated by stories that help us understand and appreciate the infrastructure that is essential for modern society to function. Physically, hardware that exists somewhere on Earth, hidden, inert, seemingly lifeless: the servers in a data center outside Dublin that store the memories of Ireland; or the vast undersea cable network that runs the internet, stretching for 800,000 miles along the ocean floor. This immersive feature by Josh Zisa, packaged with art by Kristen Radtke and photography by Go Takayama, delves deeper into the latter, Ocean LinkThe 1970s cable maintenance vessel was one of 22 deployed around the world that rushed to repair snapped cables after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011. The engineers on this aging ship are just a handful of the roughly 1,000 workers in this highly specialized industry who perform the precise, physically demanding tasks that keep the Internet (and all the businesses, banks, and government agencies) running every day. These workers spend most of their time at sea, far from home, facing precarious conditions and performing invisible, undervalued labor. Given the current transoceanic cable boom, their skills are only going to be in higher demand. But it’s the sense of adventure, purpose, and incredible scale of the work that keeps them there. Dzieza does a great job of showing just how essential they are. But you probably didn’t even know they existed. —CLR

Mark Krotov | 1+1 | April 16, 2024 | 4,423 words

Oddly enough, I 1+1 Stories that happen in professional gatherings. I usually avoid such awful repetitions, but you have to bring it up 1+1 Thanks for placing your article somewhere in the middle of my personal Venn diagram. Mark Krotov’s report from the New York International Auto Show (as you probably already guessed from the headline) is hilariously sarcastic, deeply knowledgeable, and unexpectedly heartbreaking. In short, it’s the ideal form of this kind of article. Krotov has been writing about cars for over 30 years and has seen the cycle of trends up close, for better or worse. But now he seems at a loss – if not about individual cars, then about where the industry is heading. After all, he’s a driver like most of us, but also a human like all of us. “Every time a child walking down a four-lane suburban road is killed by a driver who veers onto the shoulder, every time someone drives 98 mph on a road with a 55 mph speed limit, every time a family of seven is killed in a seemingly safe minivan despite the self-evident technological capabilities of speed limits, road redesigns, and enforcement of existing regulations, it seems reasonable to surmise that the essence of car culture is not sexy concept cars and futuristic taillights. The essence of car culture is death.” It’s not often that a book starts with a joke and then gradually gets darker from there. That Krotov manages to do so without overwhelming the reader is remarkable in itself. —public relations

Wendy Brenner | Oxford American | March 19, 2024 | 4,448 words

I have an endless curiosity and interest in the work of others. Oxford AmericanWendy Brenner writes about art framing. This job may seem like a monotonous and boring job. But it is not. To frame something is to preserve it, to perform a little ritual, so to speak. So what do we choose to frame? Commercial and personal art, our accomplishments, our treasures, our memories – things that give us insight into who we are and what we value as human beings. “It’s been a few months since I started my new art framing job, and the art that piles up on my workbench each day still feels like a miracle, like a surprise party just for me,” she writes. “Art feels like a tornado that blows through me. I feel euphoric and empty and refreshed. Words and thoughts are blown away, my eyes washed clean.” Brenner contrasts her work of preserving beautiful and precious things for her clients with the aging and decay of her mother, a time when old resentments fade and relationships soften. I love the way Brenner describes her work. It’s tactile, all-consuming, and satisfying. The small wounds she incurs on the job are self-inflicted, not the wounds that family members inflict on each other. The shop itself is fully realized as a character here, complete with its quirky boss, art-covered walls, and the satisfyingly analog ways of doing business that have been purposefully preserved. Brenner’s essay is both a striking portrait of art as a rewarding job and a stark reminder that we are fragile and fleeting, and that our relationships are worth rebuilding. —KS

Paul Brown | Unique Discoveries | April 11, 2024 | 5,012 words

I have always been fascinated by daring journeys, none more daring than the journey of a small whaling ship that set off from Scotland to the North Pole in 1908. Paul Brown wrote: Snow DropIt vividly describes the voyage of the 1910s, relying on written and oral accounts of most of the crew, who didn’t return to Scotland for 18 months after their little boat struck an iceberg and sank. (The captain laments leaving his glasses behind after the return.) The protagonist, 21-year-old Alex Ritchie, is vividly portrayed from oral accounts transcribed by his family. Ritchie casually recounts that when they left Dundee dock, “the weather was fine, but the whole crew, from the captain to the cook, were drunk.” Presumably sober at one point, the Scotsman caught a rather disastrous number of walruses and seals before sinking. Snow Drop The crew was stranded on a frozen peninsula in the Arctic Archipelago, along with a few Inuit families who came on board to ask for help. They relied on the Inuit to survive. It was Ritchie who asked for help, but without his Inuit companions he would not have survived. I appreciated Brown’s efforts to highlight the unity between the two groups, along with some fun facts about Inuit survival techniques. The treatment for frostbite was to place sandbags over the patient’s head to render them unconscious, then “attack the frostbitten limbs with ice saws.” (I thought for a moment of Prince Harry’s frostbite.) So grab your rum, grab your limbs, and enjoy this epic tale. —translation

Andrew Norman Wilson | The Baffler | April 4, 2024 | 5,166 words

In this episodic essay, Andrew Norman Wilson, a visual artist who works primarily in video, takes the reader on a multi-year career journey. If that sounds niche and boring, I assure you it isn’t. This is one of the funniest and most heartbreaking stories I’ve read in recent months. I laughed, I shivered, and it became a part of me. Year after year, exhibition after exhibition, house after house, Wilson shows how the art world impoverished him, undermined his mental and physical health, and killed his idealism, despite his ever-growing resume. He situates this journey in 2016, exemplifying how art-world gatekeepers eager to burnish their social justice legitimacy in the wake of President Trump’s election have perversely limited the industry’s definition of what art is and why it matters. “It has become fashionable to believe that images in the context of contemporary art can directly achieve the goals of political struggle,” Wilson writes. “I am sick of the pervasiveness of spiteful gestures towards political change and the romanticization and consumption of other people’s suffering, especially when these tropes continue to be used to fund the financial gains of oil barons, arms dealers, and other vampires.” It’s a heartbreaking passage. In one funny scene, when Barneys came to photograph Wilson for some reason, Wilson put up a drawing of Barney on the wall of the place he was staying. In another, during a snorkeling trip, Wilson was surrounded by sea lions. “I found what I was looking for on this island. It’s the polar opposite of poring over an ordinary object in a white room, reading a quote-filled press release, and finding out it was made by prison labor, and prison labor is bad.” The essay could read like the bitter ramblings of a complainer, but it’s not. It’s too self-conscious for that. Instead, it reads as a scathing and darkly funny indictment of late capitalism’s pernicious effects on the arts.SD

Audience Award

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