A disturbing children’s psychiatric hospital. The city of Cairo is changing. Optimism about the superiority of AI. The mystery of Cookie’s disappearance. And 51 happy years spent at the Smithsonian Zoo’s Panda House.
Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | September 25, 2023 | 14,695 words
Margaret Talbot’s story about Evi Mages, a woman who was confined as a child in a mysterious psychiatric hospital in Innsbruck from 1973 to 1974, was the first work I fell in love with earlier in the week. -And I’m still thinking about it. In recent years, Talbot has spent the last few years exploring this cruel place where mages research their own family histories and where children are observed, humiliated, abused, and even given injections of Epiphysan, an animal drug derived from cows. I’ve been helping her recall her memories. Suppresses sexual urges. This “villa” is as terrifying as its name, run by Nazi-trained psychologist Maria Novak Vogl, whose sole purpose is to destroy children and destroy their inner light. It was to erase it. This is a shocking story and difficult to read. But I know that Mages has come a long way since that horrific experience, and that she has come back from the other side, now a loving mother to her own grown children, and that other survivors report abuse. I’ve been thinking a lot about how incredible it is to be helping people. Experienced. Talbot expertly writes a moving story of one woman’s resilience and the brutality of child psychiatry in post-war Austria. —CLR
Wiam El Tamami | Granta | July 20, 2023 | 5,860 words
Wiam El Tamami grew up in a “quiet, air-conditioned, sterile zone” in Kuwait after his parents left Cairo, Egypt, in search of better job opportunities.her beautiful Granta This essay is a sensory study in which she recalls the vibrancy of the Cairo she visited and compares it to the city she knows now, more than a decade after she and her mother protested against Hosni Mubarak’s regime in the Egyptian revolution. . She spoke of smoky air, blaring car horns, dogs growling in the streets and cries of protest.Bread, freedom, social justice and human dignity! The people are demanding the overthrow of the government!She parlays this political angst into her father’s homemade flatbreads, which are “dusted with bran, the top layer thin and speckled with black, the bottom layer soft and dense,” and the “greased” eggplants. I think about it alongside my memories of tomatoes and onions. Make tagine with your friends using “and spices.” As inflation soars and the value of the Egyptian pound plummets, El Tamami looks outside her gated community at modern-day Cairo, drawing an ever-widening gulf between the rich and the poor. There are no nostalgia scales. In this lyrical essay, El-Tamami questions the underlying underpinnings of her conflicting emotions. “Here, there is an inherent insecurity woven into every day, a sense of tenuousness, of not knowing even the most immediate future, of a life lived in a constant state of danger,” she wrote. ing. “I ate what I had missed. I ate mashkrombu stuffed with cabbage rolls. I ate my father’s ful. I ate molokhiya. I ate black-eyed peas with rice. The Egyptian white rice was starchy and soft, buttery and sweet, cooked with small vermicelli noodles.”Despite the memory of the taste, El Tamami still craves better Cairo. ing. Nowadays, the city is so chaotic that it is impossible to be satisfied. —K.S.
virginia heffernan | wired | September 26, 2023 | 3,874 words
By now, most people have read Ted Chiang’s excellent book on artificial intelligence. new yorker, and the metaphor he introduced became common parlance: It’s the JPEG of the web, the new McKinsey. But Virginia Heffernan’s delightful feature on Cicero, the AI model who plays the strategy game Diplomacy, is the most surprising, the most optimistic, and the most wonderful. fun I’ve been reading about ChatGPT ever since it turned the tech world upside down last November. AI has already conquered Go, the strategy game once considered the last bastion of human ingenuity (at least after Deep Blue defeated Kasparov at the chessboard). But diplomacy is something completely different. Gameplay and negotiation are one and the same, and Andrew Goff, the world’s best human player, has an edge by being kind rather than brutal. But somehow, bots quickly became more than competitive through similar tactics. Is it perfect? far cry. It says, “Amazing!” It’s too good for everyone’s tastes, and I’m still suffering from hallucinations. Still, as Heffernan writes, that approach offers the possibility of a very different AI future than the brutal takeover doomsayers imagine (or Utopia spread by technology friends). But what really makes this work recommended is that Heffernan fills an essentially inhuman story with a beating heart. Opening the song at a Smiths cover band concert armed her with the perfect anti-Chen An metaphor. Talking about her pre-teen son’s weekend-long diplomatic parties reveals the game’s enthusiastic DNA. You can trust her even more by interrogating her own snarky reactions on her page rather than her edits. I don’t agree with her professed view of what this means for tomorrow—”[w]”Robot, I really loved working with you. I’m glad you won” – but it’s also a vintage Heffernan provocation, feeling challenged and coddled at the same time. It’s also like telling someone. Some are great critics. Some people think deeply. There are other memorable stylists as well. Heffernan is lucky to be all three of those things for her, and this story finds her at the height of her sneaky and clever talents. —PR
Dave Dennison | Baffler | September 21, 2023 | 5,180 words
In the 1970s, baker Ted O’Dell created and sold guerrilla cookies, “thick, moist granola cookies,” through small stores and cooperatives in Madison, Wisconsin. These cookies were locally famous and beloved until they suddenly disappeared from store shelves around 1990. “I think it had rolled wheat flakes in it, but some say it’s cracked wheat,” writes Dave Dennison. The Baffler. “I remember the mixture of raisins, shredded coconut, honey and molasses. It was addictively sweet, but not like a store-bought cookie where you’d eat one piece and then go back and eat more.” Dennison, who was working as a bakery assistant at O’Dell during the summer, decided to solve the mystery. Why did my cookies disappear? Why did O’Dell refuse to share his recipes with the world? Dennison’s work is a crunchy, satisfying mix of detective work and food nostalgia. As Dennison learns more about Odell, he comes to understand the baker’s healthy ambitions. It’s about educating kids about good food and the honest work that goes into it, and it cleverly revealed that Guerrilla Cookies is more than just a sweet confection. These were just some of the deeply held beliefs of one man. —K.S.
Maylan Solly | Smithsonian Magazine | September 22, 2023 | 3,700 words
There’s something about pandas. This clumsy teddy bear fascinates us humans, including First Lady Pat Nixon. President Nixon, who attended a dinner with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing, commented on the cute panda pictures on cigarette cans. Mr. Zhou replied, “I’ll give you some.” “Cigarettes?” she asked. “No, pandas.” And so our story begins in 1972 with the arrival of her two pandas at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. His subsequent 51 years at the Smithsonian’s Panda House are carefully chronicled in this fascinating work by Meiransoli. Our first generation pandas, Ling Ling and Xin Hsing, suffered from fertility problems, which at the time were fairly harshly reported to be “mainly due to male incompetence.” (Shin Shin chose some strange positions.) But despite having no descendants, the pair were revered until her death. next, older brother Panda House is Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, with Tian Tian proving to be a little more competent in the bedroom department. However, artificial insemination was still required for the birth of the three surviving babies, including the miraculous baby Xiao Qi Zhi, which Mei Xiang gave birth to at the age of 22. A whopping 639,000 people watched the birth live on Pandacam. (No pressure, Mei Xiang.) Panda Cam continues to be hugely popular, and baby Xiao Qi Ji is providing much-needed endorphins to those stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was given to me. Solly includes panda footage from his cam (don’t get me started on pandas sliding in the snow), heartwarming photos, interesting facts, and fun anecdotes. You can’t help but smile. Based on an agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association, the current pandas are scheduled to return to China on December 7, 2023. smithsonian magazine has been writing about panda houses for more than half a century. This essay is a worthy addition as the panda’s stay in America draws to a close. —C.W.
audience award
Now, the big story. What readers enjoyed most this week.
Rob Price | Business Insider | September 25, 2023 | 2,937 words
Blame it on the deprivations of the pandemic and our collective desire for personal connection. Or you might criticize Gen Z for being a generational oversharer, but LinkedIn is a place where people not only post promotional, business- and industry-focused content, but also reveal things that are overly personal. It has evolved into a platform for doing so, which naturally leads to public ridicule. Resist the chance to be funny on the internet. —K.S.