This week’s top 5 long reads

A suspicious death case that occurred in London, England. How can AI unlock the secrets of ancient scrolls? A struggle to convey the beauty of gigantic glaciers. How plants perceive time. And the confusion behind the Sriracha shortage.

Patrick Laden Keefe | The New Yorker | February 5, 2024 | 14,311 words

I haven’t read any of Patrick Laden Keefe’s books. say nothing When it first came out. Not because I wasn’t interested, but because I thought I was going to like it so much, it was going to be cringe-worthy, and I knew I had to crack it open when I had time to immerse myself in the pages.it was one of those leave me alone, i’m reading Book. For the latest features of PRK, new yorker, I waited two days to dig deeper. After long and complicated edits, tons of admin work, and housework, she found herself with a solid hour of time to just read. The story is about Zach Brettler, a young London man who masquerades as the son of a Russian oligarch and dies in the Thames after jumping from the balcony of an apartment building owned by a gangster. His death appears to have been a suicide, but it is possible that it was another death. We don’t know for sure because the last gangster who saw Brettler alive has also passed away. As I expected, I had no choice but to read this work in one sitting. Every detail is fascinating, from the twists and turns of Brettler’s story, to the portrait of London as a playground for fraudsters and fabricators, to the revelations that shocked his family after his death. It goes without saying, if you can, put away your own plate and get to reading. —SD

Ashley Vance and Ellen Hewett | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 5, 2024 | 3,688 words

The Herculaneum Papyrus, a collection of ancient texts, was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. To date, excavations at the site have uncovered around 800 scrolls, but historians believe there may be thousands more, which could shed further light on the world of classical literature and thought. I think there is. However, attempts to unravel them over the centuries have failed, and in some cases these fragile scrolls have literally shattered into pieces. This entertaining story by Ashley Vance and Ellen Huet has all the elements of a modern Indiana Jones adventure, minus the villain. Precious relics are buried beneath a layer of volcanic ash in a villa thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The Silicon Valley executive turned Roman history buff is hosting a contest in which promising young programmers from around the world compete to uncover the secrets of a piece of papyrus that was last rolled out 1,900 years ago. The team’s breakthrough discovery of hidden ink opens the door to using AI to decipher Greek letters on scrolls. A fun read that combines history, classics, technology, and machine learning. —CLR

Elizabeth Rush | Emergence Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 4,468 words

This excerpt is from her book Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush tells the story of her expedition to Thwaites Glacier, a giant slab of ice in Antarctica. What I love about this work is that you can really feel the thought and struggle that went into writing about familiar geography that many people have never experienced firsthand. I really enjoyed Rush’s attempt to get it right. And at first Glacier rebelled against her. “Silk, shellac, crevice, torque, ski slope, rampart – all the words I could think of slipped off the surface of the ice and into the bay in front of Thwaites,” she wrote. . “I tried various words to describe white, such as plaster of Paris, milky white, and pearl, and words to describe blue, such as cobalt, cadmium, and torqued turquoise, but I was not sure how these colors would work together. No one could understand how they could form a kind of symphony, a polyphony of light and play. , untranslatable.” This work is not simply a series of discarded descriptors. This is an interesting account of coming face to face with glaciers and trying to understand their vast majesty. About working on how to accurately convey that singular experience. And after all, what about the reader? Rush ices it. —K.S.

Jonathan Keats | Noema | February 8, 2024 | 3,226 words

Count me among the people who didn’t know that plants experience time in different ways. We may age trees through annual rings, but their growth, and those ever-growing concentric circles, wax and wane in response to the world around them. Trees have helped researchers record climate change over the centuries, and have even been able to link them to history-altering droughts. That’s why, as Jonathon Keats explains in this illuminating essay, the 12-foot-tall “tree clock” is one of his timekeeping devices included in the projects he has led. . There may also be something like a river clock that keeps time like a river system. Taken together, this highlights the important point that time is bigger than us, and that experiencing time in the same way as other creatures can reconnect us with the larger natural world. “Humans seem to be the only species to have devised a clock that counts without reference to anything external to us,” he writes. “We also seem to be the only species that can use such a device and use time in such a unique way.” Previously, I recommended a story about time and scale. None of them gave me pause like this time. We now know that that pause has ripples far beyond any single organism. —PR

Indrani Sen | Fortune | January 30, 2024 | 3,994 words

I started reading this essay at a cafe with a bottle of Sriracha on the table across from me. As I gazed at the iconic bottle, with its bold rooster motif and cheerful bright green cap, I tried to remember the first time I heard rumors of the Great Sriracha Shortage. I believe this tweet started at a dinner party with whispers about bottles being sold for $80. When he got home and opened the cupboard to check what he had stored, he was relieved to find two full bottles neatly in place. I’m sure you can do it. Now that I have a ready supply, the Sriracha dilemma has disappeared from my mind, but I came across this essay and realized that I don’t know the actual cause of the shortage. I was ready for Indrani Sen to do the filth. She begins by skilfully filling us in on the history of this sauce, its unexpected rise to fame (there has never even been a marketing campaign in place), and the contract between the two companies that secured its future by supplying high-quality chili peppers. will explain. But this deal between Underwood Ranches (chili farmers) and Huy Fong Foods (sauce manufacturers) ultimately led to problems. A dispute over money ended their 28-year relationship and cost both companies millions of dollars. As Sen writes, these two “soft-spoken patriarchs” remain at odds, even though he writes: Another factory has a large pepper factory, but it doesn’t have enough pepper to continue operating. ” A Shakespeare-level feud. This hot mess makes for a fascinating read. Hold the bottle firmly. It’s still a rough road. —C.W.

audience award

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