The Slow Scroll
@theslowscroll.com
Collecting the best #longform writing. Visit https://theslowscroll.com/ to see all our recommendations, and subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates.
@shannabaker.bsky.social writes about the “savior” fish of the Nishga’a Nation. “When it’s time to make grease, each camp has its own proprietary process, just as each has its own fishing strategies. The details are not mine to share.”
Where the Savior Fish Still Swims
In an era of collapse, a fabled fish keeps coming back to Nisga’a nation.
biographic.com
Featured #longread: @jcljules.bsky.social writes about the efforts of maritime archeologists and the Slave Wrecks Project to locate and excavate slave shipwrecks.
Dredging Up the Ghostly Secrets of Slave Ships
A global network of maritime archeologists is excavating slave shipwrecks—and reconnecting Black communities to the deep.
newyorker.com
@chittimarco.bsky.social on the modernization of Italian railways “Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the Italian railway network wasn’t either. But day after day, law after law, project after project, the Italian railway network was able to keep pace with the changing society's needs ...”
The Long Modernization of the Italian Railways
Why High-Speed Rail is not the only modern rail.
marcochitti.substack.com
@joezadeh.bsky.social on bulldozers. He explores its origins in violent voter suppression to its weaponization in war and state-sanctioned home demolitions, and how it has been a symbol of both creation and destruction. “To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.”
The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer | NOEMA
Both creator and destroyer, the bulldozer offers a cautionary tale for how technology can sometimes be misused to the detriment of individual and collective life.
noemamag.com
Featured #longread by @maggie-slepian.bsky.social in @longreads.com “To be trapped in this mind is like revisiting the most potent mental and emotional elements of the eating disorder without the physical symptoms and behaviors.”
Present Tense: The Long Shadow of an Eating Disorder - Longreads
Eating disorders never truly go away. They just go quiet. For awhile.
longreads.com
“Pushbacks” is the illegal practice of forcibly returning refugees to where they came from. @laurenmarkham.bsky.social writes about how reports of them have soared in Greece, and how volunteers and journalists can face time in prison for assisting and documenting them.
The Fourth Wall
Recently, reports of illegal “pushbacks”–an illegal practice of forcibly returning refugees from whence they came–in Greece have soared. Tommy Olsen faces years in prison for documenting pushbacks onl...
inthesetimes.com
I'm thrilled to see that this piece has been named a finalist for the 60th National Magazine Awards. It's one of the best articles I've read all year and serves as a powerful reminder of how even a single civil servant can make a significant impact. This message feels more relevant now than ever.
The Slow Scroll@theslowscroll.com · 2y agoI will post my favorite #longreads of 2024, a few every day, until the end of the year. Starting with: The Canary www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...
Featured #longread: @aresluna.org with a fascinating piece about the font “Gorton” and its ubiquity. “Gorton was there on typewriter keyboards, too. And on office signs and airline name tags. On boats, desk placards, rulers, and various home devices from fridges to tape dispensers.”
The hardest working font in Manhattan
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
aresluna.org
@swilliamsjourno.bsky.social and @kjknodell.bsky.social on the "Pacific Drug Highway," in @newlinesmag.bsky.social “Latin American drug lords are using the same currents and trade winds that islanders have relied on for centuries to connect and expand their colossal, criminal empires.”
Tracking the Pacific Drug Highway
How Latin American cartels are reshaping the narcotics trade across the world’s largest ocean
newlinesmag.com
@alexclapp.bsky.social on how Turkey is becoming a dumping ground for Europe's plastic waste. “No sooner had Erdoğan announced her initiative than Turkey emerged as one of the biggest recipients – and one of the biggest dumpsites – of plastic waste anywhere on the planet.”
Turkey said it would become a ‘zero waste’ nation. Instead, it became a dumping ground for Europe’s rubbish
When China stopped receiving the world’s waste, Turkey became Europe’s recycling hotspot. The problem is, most plastics can’t be recycled. And what remains are toxic heaps of trash
theguardian.com
Featured #longread, in @grantamag.bsky.social: @aubereylescure.bsky.social recounts a journey back to China after years of absence, the return to a homeland that feels both familiar and foreign in unexpected ways.
The Secret Pattern | Aube Rey Lescure | Granta
‘Filtered only through headlines, China had become a political entity more than a physical place where I had grown up, where half of my family still lived.’
granta.com
@eedugdale.bsky.social and Hanisha Harjani report on the safety practices of apps like Tinder and Hinge. “Court documents show that he had already allegedly sexually assaulted nine women and drugged 10. Not only did the apps allow him back on, they featured Matthews’s profile.”
Rape under wraps: how Tinder, Hinge and their corporate owner chose profits over safety
Match Group has known for years about abusive users on its dozen dating apps, but leaves millions of people in the dark
theguardian.com
@kitchenbee.bsky.social reviews Nicola Twilley's book “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves.” in @londonreview.bsky.social “... for every virtue, refrigeration has a corresponding vice.”
Bee Wilson · Artificial Cryosphere
You might think that fridges and freezers have enabled us to eat more of the foods that we always wanted to eat, and...
lrb.co.uk
Kit Fox in @defector.bsky.social “I know this whole endeavor is silly ... But also understand that my dad created a culture in which German coaches passed strategic tips to Australian competitors. Where Japanese teenagers became pen pals with suburban Texans.”
If You Ever Stacked Cups In Gym Class, Blame My Dad | Defector
The boxes came from Tokyo: first by tanker, then overland via container truck from a Pacific port, across the Continental Divide, and finally backed into a driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac in a sou...
defector.com
Featured #longread: @leifw.bsky.social offers an analysis of Aaron Rodgers’ career as it declined, framing it within the context of societal shifts and struggles. “America can’t throw off that founding violence, and neither can Aaron.”
Permanent Decline | The Point Magazine
You can see the Achilles tear. Live, it was already clear, in a much-replayed clip that has since become canon for anyone paying attention to the National Football League.
thepointmag.com
@antonhowes.bsky.social continues to trace the history of how coal rose to become the most prominent energy source. “By the 1590s, London’s consumption had expanded by eight- or even tenfold over what it had been in 1560, with the vast majority now burned in people’s homes.”
Age of Invention: How Coal Really Won
The Coal Conquest, Part II
ageofinvention.xyz
Featured #longread: For @placesjournal.bsky.social, Stathis G. Yeros writes how the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco became a sanctuary during the AIDS epidemic. “Within the building, AIDS was a familiar plight — a point of connection, a common bond, a shared grief.”
Life and Death at San Francisco's Ambassador Hotel
During the AIDS epidemic, San Francisco activists transformed a downtown residential hotel into a center for medical care, community life, and queer kinship.
placesjournal.org
Featured #longread: @agreenberg.bsky.social tells the story of how Tigran Gambaryan, a former IRS agent and crypto compliance officer, became a pawn in a multibillion-dollar extortion scheme.
The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison
As a US federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan pioneered modern crypto investigations. Then at Binance, he got trapped between the world’s biggest crypto exchange and a government determined to make it pay.
wired.com
This piece from @samirashackle.bsky.social in @theguardian.com explores issues of trust, consent, and medical ethics within vulnerable communities. “The only mention of the women’s perspectives is the single sentence saying two of them did not recall giving consent.”
The Coventry experiment: why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without their consent?
When details about a scientific study in the 1960s became public, there was shock, outrage and anxiety. But exactly what happened?
theguardian.com
Featured #longread: By Lawrence Wright in @newyorker.com “I thought about how these women had been living the quietest life imaginable, until their sudden plunge into a dark and complicated world had filled them with new purpose.”
The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row
Sisters from a convent outside Waco have repeatedly visited the prisoners—and even made them affiliates of their order. The story of a powerful spiritual alliance.
newyorker.com
In @newyorker.com Burkhard Bilger writes about how marching bands have evolved into something bigger. “They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores. They don’t call it marching band anymore. They call it the marching arts.”
High-School Band Contests Turn Marching Into a Sport—and an Art
Band kids today don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers.
newyorker.com
@natashawalter.bsky.social writes about how the women of Rojava fought to turn their slogan “woman, life, freedom” into reality. “But every single day I’m in north-east Syria, ... I feel my breath taken away by the depth of commitment that women show to what they have created here.”
‘Woman, life, freedom’: the Syrian feminists who forged a new world in a land of war
In a society riven by conflict and misogyny, the autonomous region of Rojava has a government with perhaps the most complete gender equality in the world
theguardian.com
Highly recommend this excerpt from the new memoir by @kategies.bsky.social “With Uncle Louie, I became two bodies: the one I experienced and the one he measured.”
I Was Born Missing an Ear. To the World, It Was a Problem to Fix | The Walrus
Surgeons promised to make me whole. No one asked what I wanted
thewalrus.ca
Florence Williams writes about Ukrainian war widows healing through adventure therapy in @nautil.us “I realize just how much of the positive-psychology dogma naturally emerges when you’re dangling on a cliff face.”
Ukrainian War Widows on the Edge
Adventure therapy takes on the challenge of helping war-torn families
nautil.us
Featured #longread: @kennytorrella.bsky.social on how Big Meat tries to silence its critics, and more importantly, why. “... without heavy subsidization, deregulation, and dependence on taxpayers to either tolerate its pollution or pay to clean it up, [the industry] wouldn’t stand on its own.”
They spoke up about factory farming. Now, they’re being threatened by their neighbors.
How Big Meat silences its critics.
vox.com
Featured #longread from @timothywhite77.bsky.social in @nytimes.com “He took stock of what really mattered to him at his core.” he writes, “And then he reshaped his beliefs, practices and work around that …”
Opinion | How My Dad Reconciled His God and His Gay Son (Gift Article)
How did my dad go from hating homosexuality to imploding his church by embracing me? His journal entries show how he changed his mind.
nytimes.com
Timothy Ryback writes about Hitler's relationship with oligarchs, who once reviled him but ultimately empowered his rise. Sound familiar? “German corporations, large and small, helped retool the Weimar Republic as the Third Reich.”
The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler
They helped him in pursuit of profit. Many ended up in concentration camps.
theatlantic.com
Featured #longread: An excerpt from @otroedgargomez.bsky.social 's new book “Alligator Tears.” “I looked like the real me, not that other, shame-filled version of me I’d been living as before ... I didn’t need to hide ever again.”
Fake Teeth Will Solve All My Problems - Electric Literature
With a full set of veneers, I could get any job, date anyone I wanted
electricliterature.com
In @yalereview.bsky.social Mina Tavakoli questions R.E.M.'s cultural relevance after their mainstream shift. “[Her teacher] slammed his laptop shut after reading the band’s retirement announcement to a silent classroom. 'Finally,' he said, frowning into the distance.”
Mina Tavakoli: “What Happened When R.E.M. Went Mainstream”
Peter Ames Carlin’s book The Name of This Band is R.E.M. charts the band’s path from kings of alternative rock to elevator muzak.
yalereview.org
Featured #longread: Ashley Abramson chases Sophie Cress, a therapist who may exist only to fool search engines. “AI doesn’t have to be involved for slop to be created. Humans are perfectly capable of producing low-quality content and spreading misinformation.”
This Therapist Is Not Who She Seems to Be
But she’s quoted as a mental health expert all over the internet.
allure.com