This week’s top 5 long reads

In this week’s issue:

• A starting point for understanding the genocide happening in Gaza today.
• What will become of the abandoned bus where Chris McCandless spent his final days?
• A nuanced portrait of a Chicago ramen chef.
• Reflections on memory and Ireland in the digital age.
• The past and future of the tiny text files that have kept the Internet in order.

Moderated by Emily Bazelon | New York Times Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 9,019 words

This week I was visiting my parents and helping them pack up the house they have lived in for almost 39 years, and one night the conversation turned to Gaza. Although we don’t agree on everything, one of the most important steps we can take as external witnesses to this tragedy is to look beyond the headlines, statistics, and slogans. I agreed. We have to look at the roots of the conflict, but not as they have been sanitized and presented to Western audiences for too long, the ugly and disgusting roots as they are. The perfect starting point is this discussion, moderated by Emily Bazelon, covering the period from 1920, when the British Mandate of Palestine was established, to 1948, when Palestinians were forced to flee their homes for the state of Israel. is being considered. I read the piece after a conversation with my parents and was particularly moved by Nadim Bawarsa’s description of his family’s Nakba experience. “Since December 1947, no one in my family has entered our home in Jerusalem,” Bawarsa wrote. “During Jordanian rule until 1967, my grandparents were able to temporarily return to Palestine with their children to live with my grandmother’s family in Ramallah, but they were not allowed to go west of Jerusalem. Since 1967, we have only been able to return as American citizens, or tourists.” Now, as I tape together boxes filled with important items, I can’t help but think, “Yes.” I can’t. Your parents will be sad to be away, but at least they’re choosing to be away. —SD

Eva Holland | Outside | February 7, 2024 | 5,325 words

After reading Into the Wild, I was already familiar with the Chris McCandless story (at least Jon Krakauer’s version). This naive explorer left his suburban home in northern Virginia and traveled across the continent, eventually ending up on an abandoned bus in Alaska, where he starved to death at the age of 24. The adventure story drew me in, but I didn’t fully understand it. McCandless retreated from society and cut off all contact with his family. Eva Holland feels the same way, and as his sister Carine McCandless said in her 2014 book, her reporting takes pains to explain the abusive home life he left behind. ing. wild truth. The missing piece finally fell into place. But this essay isn’t actually about McCandless. It’s about the bus. McCandless may be its most famous resident, but he was also part of the story of many people, and of Alaska itself. The Netherlands is weaving the multi-layered history of Bus 142 into its new chapter. Stampede travels from his trail wilderness to his new home at the University of Alaska Northern Museum. By taking the time to piece together her picture, Ms. Holland nods to the thousands of people for whom the bus means something, including herself. (She spoke of her own bus visit with beautiful reverence.) The museum exhibit has not yet opened, but about 700 photos of bus graffiti have already been compiled into an online album and are available to visitors. are encouraged to receive the tag and pass it on to a representative. A story about a visit to the Stampede Trail. In its new life at the museum, we hope Bus 142 will not only tell these stories, but be part of many more.C.W.

Kevin Pan | Chicago Magazine | February 13, 2024 | 6,458 words

A writing teacher once told me that a good profile makes your personal preferences public. Following Lawrence Gonzalez’s “Knives Forged in Fire,” chicago magazine Kevin Pan has done it again with his subtle portrayal of ramen chef Mike Satinover. Both works feature people deeply absorbed in their craft, and as a reader, you get to ride the wave of devotion, savoring every detail along the way. In this case, those details include balls of delicious fat floating atop ramen noodles, made with precision and care. Pan seasons his writing with the same deep respect that Satinover pours into ramen, which Satinover fell in love with after choosing to study Japanese in high school. doing. Since then, he has continued to strive to create the perfect bowl of noodles, earning the handle “Ramen Lord” through careful research and an open-source approach, along with strict notes so anyone can try them at home. We are publishing recipes under development. In addition to providing a flavorful and authentic profile of Satinover’s noodles, Pan also criticized critics who claim cultural appropriation, given that Satinover is a white American who makes traditional Japanese dishes. Don’t be intimidated by this. He said that the criticism comes “primarily from white people on social media” and that “when gaijin come to Japan and challenge their culture’s cuisine, the locals see it as their own rather than appropriating.” I discovered that I view it as an appreciation for cooking. Pan’s creations are so rich and fun and nerdy that I couldn’t help but gulp them down. —K.S.

Jessica Traynor | Dial | February 6, 2024 | 3,423 words

Finished last night Person of interest, a police procedural/sci-fi show that ended in 2016, which feels like years ago, but the show’s premise of a society being monitored 24/7 by artificial intelligence is incredible. It’s timely. The series features many scenes in which rogue teams of hackers and former military operatives infiltrate warehouses and secret office floors, tampering with and destroying servers and computer equipment. As I read this essay by Jessica Traynor about her family’s trip to a data center outside of Dublin, I kept thinking about these physical facilities that ring around the world. Data centers are mushrooming in industrial estates across Ireland, with a total of 82 locations, with a further 40 planned. These centers house much of Europe’s digital information, but they come at a cost, increase Ireland’s energy use and put a strain on the electricity grid. But Traynor’s musings on “the fragility of social and national memory” resonate most with me. Is digital storage, and the cloud uploading important and valuable information, really the most effective way to store knowledge? I realize that the entertainment I currently enjoy depicts an extreme scenario. But it still shows that these data centers are far from indestructible. Here, Traynor points to unsustainable energy pathways, Ireland’s long and “patchy” memory, and the “illusion of technological stability”, saying that digitizing records is not as secure as we think. He claims that there is no. I love coming across thoughtful reads like this about unexpected topics. —CLR

david pierce | The Verge | February 14, 2024 | 2,992 words

This week I read a story that provoked an intense emotional response, and this week I read a story that dazzled me in prose. But nothing I read this week felt as urgent or important as David Pierce’s explanation of robots.txt. robots.txt is a snippet of code on any web page that allows (or disallows) search engines to catalog your content. robots.txt works effectively on the honor system. Search companies agreed not to send automated web crawlers to sites that explicitly prohibited automated web crawlers, and everyone was more or less happy. But 30 years later, a new breed of his web crawler has appeared in town. These new bots flock to websites not to catalog content, but to feed that content to AI. AI is a technology that threatens to replace search as the default means of online discovery (by digesting and spitting out content in giant, unquotable formats). Even worse, AI crawlers don’t necessarily respect robots.txt, and there’s nothing legally forcing them to do so. Pearce frames this challenge perfectly. “As the number of AI companies continues to grow and their crawlers become more malicious, those who wish to sit back and wait for an AI takeover will have to play a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. However, each robot and crawler must be stopped individually. If AI is indeed the future of search, as Google and other companies predict, blocking AI crawlers will be a short-term solution. A success can be a disaster in the long run.” For 30 years, websites large and small have relied on search to grow their readership. They are now stuck in a philosophical quagmire. Do you trust robots or be forgotten? —PR

audience award

Which articles did our editors read the most this week?