Author Archives

Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath has written essays and articles for Harper's, The New York Times, Kenyon Review, The Dublin Review, Brick, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and Saveur. He's the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz, the personal essay Everything We Don't Know, and the forthcoming book Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California. @AaronGilbreath

Oh Come On, Dad!

AP Photo/Don Ryan

Both relished and reviled, treated like the tuna casserole you ate too much as a kid but now can’t stop making as an adult, the family tradition known as the dad joke has recently experienced a nationwide appreciation. Not everyone’s laughing, but that seems to be the point: the teller entertains himself and enjoys eliciting a reaction other than laughter. Dad jokes take many forms; they often involve word play and mildly annoying the listener. For The Atlantic, Ashley Fetters, whose own father tells her dad jokes, explores the way this particular type of humor seems to work and where it came from. Thankfully, it isn’t just dads and Americans who are to blame.

How these types of jokes got associated with dads, however, is another question, and there are a few compelling theories floating around. When my colleague McKay Coppins tweeted about his life as a suburban dad and someone responded by asking him how dads get their jokes, he said that it is a “combination of exhaustion and your kids laughing at anything when they’re very young, which creates a perverse incentive system and endows you with false confidence.” (“Then you spend the rest of your life doubling down on dad jokes,” he added in an email to me later. He does, though, hope to pass the dad-joke tradition down to his own son one day.)

Dubinsky likes this theory, both as a researcher and as a parent. As kids get older and less childlike, he says, there’s a sense of loss, and a nostalgia that sets in for when they were smaller. “You don’t have children anymore,” he says. “One way to get back to that time is to go back to the stupid old jokes they used to think were funny.”

Dubinsky also acknowledges, however, that the phrase “dad joke” is sometimes used as a pejorative when someone makes a lame joke—and he believes there’s a specific intergenerational dynamic at work when it is. “One of the things about language is that we judge the sophistication of our peers by how sophisticated they are with use of language. Your smartest friends can use deadpan sarcasm, and your smartest friends can get it when you’redeadpanning sarcasm,” he says. So when someone makes a dumb or unsophisticated joke, they may be on the receiving end of some mild disapproval. Plus, it’s Dubinsky’s belief that every generation holds a somewhat disapproving opinion of the generation just before it. “They love their grandparents, but parents are just a chore and a pain,” he adds. “So one way to disrespect your parents is to note how unsophisticated their humor is.”

Read the story

Auto-Tune: The Music Fad That Keeps on Giving

Photo by Casey Rodgers/Invision for Fruttare/AP Images

In 1998, something called Auto-Tune made Cher’s voice do this weird warbling thing in her international hit “Believe.” Listeners hadn’t heard this vocal effect before, but many of us loved it. Twenty years later, we’re still hearing that incredible effect on pop singers’ and rappers’ vocals; other times, we just hear pitch-perfect singing instead. That’s because Auto-Tune can both smooth vocals and draw attention to them, depending on what singers want.

For Pitchfork, music writer Simon Reynolds puts the now-famous pitch-correction technology under his critical microscope to assess its influence on popular music and narrate Auto-Tune’s fascinating history. Labeled a fad, Auto-Tune has become a fixture, both loved and loathed. So where did it come from? Is the effect as “authentic” as a guitar and drums? And how will all this pop music sound twenty more years from now?

The expressed goal of Antares [Audio Technology] at that time was to fix discrepancies of pitch in order to make songs more effectively expressive. “When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost,” the original patent asserted sweepingly—seemingly oblivious of great swathes of musical history, from jazz and blues to rock, reggae, and rap, where “wrong” has become a new right, where transgressions of tone and timbre and pitch have expressed the cloudy complexity of emotion in abrasively new ways. As sound studies scholar Owen Marshall has observed, for the manufacturers of Auto-Tune, bad singing interfered with the clear transmission of feeling. The device was designed to bring voices up to code, as it were—to communicate fluently within a supposedly universal Esperanto of emotion.

And that is exactly how Auto-Tune has worked in the preponderance of its usage: Some speculate that it features in 99 percent of today’s pop music. Available as stand-alone hardware but more commonly used as a plug-in for digital audio workstations, Auto-Tune turned out—like so many new pieces of music technology—to have unexpected capacities. In addition to selecting the key of the performance, the user must also set the “retune” speed, which governs the slowness or fastness with which a note identified as off-key gets pushed towards the correct pitch. Singers slide between notes, so for a natural feel—what Antares assumed producers would always be seeking—there needed to be a gradual (we’re talking milliseconds here) transition. As [inventor Dr. Andy] Hildebrand recalled in one interview, “When a song is slower, like a ballad, the notes are long, and the pitch needs to shift slowly. For faster songs, the notes are short, the pitch needs to be changed quickly. I built in a dial where you could adjust the speed from 1 (fastest) to 10 (slowest). Just for kicks, I put a ‘zero’ setting, which changed the pitch the exact moment it received the signal.”

It was the fastest settings—and that instant-switch “zero”—that gave birth to the effect first heard on “Believe” and which has subsequently flourished in myriad varieties of brittle, glittering distortion…

Read the story

Building a Life in Someone Else’s Ghost Town

AP Photo/The Deseret News, Geoff Liesik

The American desert can teach you many things. One important lesson is that the desert isn’t empty. Life thrives out there. Another lesson is that one person’s desolation is another person’s paradise.

For High Country News, Sarah Gilman profiles a modern-day pioneer: 34 year old Eileen Muza, who chose to settle in a tiny desert town of rubble and mostly abandoned buildings that outsiders treat as if it were public property. A gardener, explorer, scrapper, and individualist, Muza bought an inexpensive house there to, in Gilman’s words, “make a life, for less than a used car.” Muza is also searching for what the desert can teach her. To survive, she knows she has to be as tough as the plants. Her parents approve of her decision, but they worry about her safety and that the loneliness might drive her crazy.

The most challenging thing about Cisco wasn’t the solitude, though. It was how often Eileen had company she didn’t want. When she bought her place, she hadn’t realized just how many spectators the ruined town drew. She watched flabbergasted as tourists climbed under fences to explore ominous buildings papered with “No Trespassing” signs or wandered onto her own property filming with their iPhones while she was in plain sight. She piled twisted metal and wood to keep people from driving into the desert and circling behind her place, where they were difficult to track. If someone seemed creepy, she’d find a way to mention her shotgun. She kept her buildings lit up all night with solar-powered exterior lamps. When a drone whined over the roof of her cabin, she tried to shoot it down. When someone parked close to the cabin for too long, she blasted a recording of Charles Bukowski reading his grim poetry in a gravelly monotone. Once they hear him “talking about whores and beer farts,” she said, “people hit the gas real quick.”

People seemed to feel entitled to the space because they thought it was empty. Eileen fought this the best way she could think of: She let them think she owned the whole town, so they would listen when she told them to stay on the road. She didn’t like strangers trespassing on private land that absent neighbors couldn’t defend, or taking things for their own use. And she justified her own salvage of bits and pieces from the ruins by explaining that what she took stayed where it belonged: in Cisco.

Read the story

Sorry, But Drug-Induced Homicide Laws Aren’t Going to Solve Our Opioid Crisis

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation via AP

Prosecutors across the U.S. have revived old laws to prosecute the people who supply the drugs that lead to overdoses. Critics characterize this as another ineffective technique in the ineffective tough-on-crime approach to drug addiction. Instead of incarcerating the high-level drug traffickers the laws originally targeted, they treat family, friends, and small-time dealers as murderers. For The New Republic, Jack Shuler looks at a few recent cases of drug-induced homicide, explains this tactic’s origins, and it ineffectiveness.

While this trend began prior to Donald Trump’s election, it has accelerated since he assumed office. According to the United States Sentencing Commission, a federal agency, there was a 10 percent increase in 2017 in the number of people who received federal prison sentences for distributing drugs resulting in death or serious injury and a nearly 200 percent increase since 2013. Trump has made it clear that he favors an aggressive approach to the opioid crisis. “My take is you have to get really, really tough—really mean—with the drug pushers and the drug dealers,” Trump said in February, during a speech in Blue Ash, Ohio.

Trump has pushed this rhetoric to its logical conclusion, suggesting that drug dealers should face the death penalty, an idea he said he got from Chinese President Xi Jinping. He has also expressed admiration for President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for his violent approach to curbing drug trafficking. In March, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo to the 93 U.S. attorneys reminding them that they have the power to pursue capital punishment in certain drug-related cases.

This aggressive approach has filtered down to the local level. In Ohio, residents have ample reason to be frustrated with the bodies piling up in the state’s morgues; the strain on health care, police and emergency services, and the workforce—a cost of up to billions of dollars every year; and the emotional pain it’s causing families. Last summer in Middletown, Ohio, a city of 50,000 near Cincinnati, city council member Dan Picard proposed a three strikes policy for overdose rescues. Overdose victims would be required to perform community service to make up for the cost of treatment—and if a 911 dispatcher determined that someone who was overdosing had not performed community service, they would not dispatch emergency services. “We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to maintain our financial security, and this is just costing us too much money,” Picard told a local news station. First responders balked at the proposal, but the anger that bred it persists. Stickers that say SHOOT YOUR LOCAL HEROIN DEALER have started to appear on truck windows around the state. In Summit County, where the opioid crisis is so bad they have had to use refrigerated trailers as morgues, prosecutors have charged 49 people with manslaughter in connection to an overdose since 2014. And in Licking County, at least four people in addition to Tommy Kosto were charged for supplying drugs that led others to overdose between 2016 and 2017.

Read the story

How Offshore Banking Destroyed Everything

AP Photo/Sang Tan

Right after WWII, a group of governments put a global financial system in place that was meant to ensure economic growth and stability. Called the Bretton Woods System, it used gold-backed US dollars as an impartial international currency and controlled the exchange of currency between nations. That US currency wasn’t impartial, though, and the whole systems slowed British banking so much that bankers became more known for short work days and boozy lunches than for their work.

For The Guardian, Oliver Bullough explains how a banker named Ian Fraser helped upend that old system, which led to offshore banking and allowed for the unprecedented concentration of wealth we now see in a handfull of the world’s richest people. As Bullough points out, this is all like a real life version of Goldfinger, from the James Bond book. Too bad real life doesn’t have as happy an ending. Thanks a lot, Fraser!

Warburg’s new bond issue – these bonds became known as “eurobonds,” after the example set by eurodollars – was led by Ian Fraser, a Scottish war hero turned journalist turned banker. He and his colleague Peter Spira had to find ways to defang the taxes and controls designed to prevent hot money flowing across borders, and to find ways to pick and choose different aspects of different countries’ regulations for the various elements of their creation.

If the bonds had been issued in Britain, there would have been a 4% tax on them, so Fraser formally issued them at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. If the interest were to be paid in Britain, it would have attracted another tax, so Fraser arranged for it to be paid in Luxembourg. He managed to persuade the London Stock Exchange to list the bonds, despite their not being issued or redeemed in Britain, and talked around the central banks of France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Britain, all of which were rightly concerned about the eurobonds’ impact on currency controls. The final trick was to pretend that the borrower was Autostrade – the Italian state motorway company – when really it was IRI, a state holding company. If IRI had been the borrower, it would have had to deduct tax at source, while Autostrade did not have to.

The cumulative effect of this game of jurisdictional Twister was that Fraser created a bond paying a good rate of interest, on which no one had to pay tax of any kind, and which could be turned back into cash anywhere. These were what are known as bearer bonds. Whoever possessed the bond owned them; there was no register of ownership or any obligation to record your holding, which was not written down anywhere.

Read the story

Arranging Your Body in Space: Talking Identity, Memoir, and Twins with Leah Dieterich

Getty Images

“One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins,” Leah Dieterich writes in her memoir, “but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.”

This concept of a vanishing twin, a term coined in the year of Dieterich’s birth, frames the author’s fascinating exploration of love, identity, sexuality and relationships. Though she finds her complement in her husband Eric, the twinship that is their marriage starts to diminish, or ‘vanish,’ just as her body had as a ballet dancer in her youth. Dieterich tries to figure out what drives her to fuse so strongly with certain people, what it is about her that fears being alone, and how individuality vanishes in a union. Maybe she lost her twin? Like the great essayists, her probing mind struggles to understand itself, and she makes fascinating connections between a range of subjects from pop culture to psychology to literature to help figure out who she is and what she wants.

Vanishing Twins is a powerful, poetic memoir, both emotive and cerebral, that casts new light on the familiar issue of relationships, marriage and storytelling, and vividly articulates some of the most subtle aspects of human relationships in a way many readers will recognize in themselves.

When did you start writing about your relationship with your husband and your own identity?

I started writing Vanishing Twins about six years ago, but before that I’d explored some of the same themes of love, language, and identity in fiction. I’d also started a screenplay for a film about a couple trying to define their individual identities while maintaining their bond, who meet a set of identical twins who are trying to do the same. Sexual entanglements ensue. I was really only at the research phase for this film, interviewing a set of twins that my husband was friends with, and I got so into our correspondence and the other research I was doing about twins (and relationships and sexuality) that I realized I needed to pursue this topic in a more essayistic way.

When I tell people about your book, I emphasize not only the subject matter but the way you approached your story. To me, you turn the memoir on its head by staging the text in a poetic way on the page, and by alternating essayistic diversions with the larger narrative to explore related themes. How did you find your book’s inventive form?

I have writers like Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso and many others to thank for the form. I really love the numbered aphorisms in Bluets but knew that felt too academic for my project, though I have always loved the way Nelson can synthesize the ideas of great thinkers into her own personal narrative. I assume it means she’s a great teacher, though I’ve never studied with her. I was a private student of Sarah Manguso’s and learned a lot from her about concision and how it is possible to make something very weighty out of only a few words or paragraphs. I like the term “staging” that you use, as well, because I feel that my writing has been informed by my background as a ballet dancer. In dance, you are constantly arranging and rearranging your body in space. This is how I treated the various sections of the book. I moved them around until they seemed fluid like a dance.

You work in advertising, but did you ever formally study writing?

I haven’t formally studied writing in a degree program. I cobbled my writerly education together from a couple of UCLA extension classes, a week-long workshop in Mexico, and two long-term private student relationships, one with Chris Daley who leads Writing Workshops of Los Angeles with whom I met with weekly for two years while generating the first draft of Vanishing Twins, and the other with Sarah Manguso, who gave me notes on two drafts of the book over the course of the following two years.

How has your ad career informed your literary ventures?

Advertising writing requires a lot of concision, so it has very much informed my inclination toward brevity in my literary work. Being a copywriter and having my headlines or TV scripts rejected (and sometimes accepted, even lauded) by my boss on a daily basis prepared me well for the rejection I’d have to face on the way to publishing a book.

People often describe writing about our lives as “cathartic,” but that isn’t the point of a lot of personal writing. In your book, you’re searching for answers, for a deeper understanding. Do you feel that you’ve achieved a new perspective on your life now?

I definitely gained perspective on the period of my life that I’ve explored in Vanishing Twins. I always write to understand something, whether it’s something about myself or something about the world at large. It’s the way I process my thoughts. When I’m writing or revising with the intent to publish, I’m always doing so with David Foster Wallace’s intention—that the purpose of literature is to connect, challenge, and ultimately make us feel less alone. So while it’s true that writing about one’s life isn’t necessarily “cathartic,” there is a visceral element (connection with other humans) for both reader and writer when it is done successfully.

Sometimes the people who become characters in our stories feel betrayed or mischaracterized, or feel they get should an editorial say in the text. Has writing about the people in your life caused any tensions?

Of course. But these tensions were an important part of the project itself. I had to find a way to honor my autonomy and my individual voice as an artist, while simultaneously respecting the differing opinions, memories, and thoughts of someone I love deeply. In a lot of ways it’s a continuation of the journey begun by the self who narrates the book. Luckily my husband is an artist himself, and a lover of literature and philosophy, which made the process easier. Many of the events in this book happened more than a decade ago. To have the opportunity, though painful, to revisit them has helped us realize how far we have both come together and individually since that time.

The Deep, Confounding Joys of Music

Photo by Diane Bondareff/Invision for Febreze/AP Images

What compels us to listen to music? To bob our heads and learn all the lyrics? To collect the records and lay around alone at home beside our listening devices, savoring every beat, melody, and bridge? For Aeon, professor Roger Mathew Grant looks back in history to the thinkers who have tried to make sense of the pleasure music gives us, from Aristotle to René Descartes to Leonard Meyer. Does music’s pleasure come from the melody, anticipation, or the challenge of deciphering a puzzle? It all gets very theoretical, a far cry from a simple “I dig it,” but in these philosophical inquiries, you might hear something that rings true for you.

Twining and Krause get us closer to the view that music is pleasurable not for its reproduction of objects or imitations of emotions, but for its opacity. In this view, it is the inability of musical tones to refer or represent that affords a certain pleasurable contemplation. This idea – which flips the earlier theories of imitation on their head – received its fullest elaboration in Eduard Hanslick’s The Beautiful in Music (1854), a screed against emotional interpretations of the art. Hanslick took direct aim against earlier theorists such as Mattheson, who had proposed systems for linking musical materials with the emotions. For Hanslick these efforts were sentimental and misguided, and they encouraged listeners to hear music in the same way that they might enjoy a warm bath. Deriving this sort of pleasure from music was, for Hanslick, both lazy and wasteful. To hear music thus was to misunderstand the true nature of the art, which, he suggested, is hidden in the details.

In Hanslick’s thinking, music consists of nothing but sounds and motions, which together create a play of forms. This formal play aims at the creation of the beautiful in music, and while the contemplation of this beauty might arouse various emotions, these are distinct from the beautiful as such. The pleasure of listening to music instead arises from the intellectual satisfaction that derives from attempting to follow the compositional design of a piece. This is a difficult, almost athletic task – not a soak in the tub. Led in unexpected ways from one moment to the next, the listener is sometimes rewarded and other times frustrated in the play of expectations. A particular kind of musical difficulty is prized in this system, which depends on our temporal encounter with varying degrees of musical familiarity and novelty. Hanslick described this as an ‘intellectual flux and reflux’, or a kind of ‘pondering of the imagination’ that is particular to music. The cultivation of this aesthetic listening strategy was, as he saw it, an art itself.

This is an extreme position on musical pleasure. It’s one that divorces music not only from the representation of emotions but also from the outside world. It posits the existence of ideal types of listener and composition, reifying a certain kind of play with formal conventions and expectations as the essence of musical composition. And although this type of thinking has been the subject of withering critique from countless critics and musicians, elements of it persist in our current thinking on musical pleasure.

Read the story

A Cover That Could Launch a Million Retweets

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Despite constant mischaracterizations that magazines are dead, print media endures, and as Beyoncé’s recent Vogue cover image proves, print issues can still create national conversations about celebrities, culture, and politics. But what is the function of a magazine cover now that we have Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter? At The Ringer, Alyssa Bereznak investigates the historical function of a magazine cover and how its design has evolved to adapt to the digital age. Because print issues no longer sell the way they did a decade ago, titles that haven’t ceased operation have made profound changes to their business and editorial teams to stay solvent. Many have also changed their approach to producing covers, hoping to not only grab attention, but to perform well on phones, tablets, and social media.

According to Allure editor-in-chief Michelle Lee, branding a compelling celebrity portrait is still an effective way to pique interest, especially when it’s designed to pop in multiple platforms. Since she took over the magazine in early 2016, she has worked with the magazine’s creative team to establish a clean feel to its covers by cutting back on coverlines, choosing “nontraditional, super-close-up photos,” and having multiple covers for monthly issues. Depending on the medium, her team might tweak the image so that there’s a simplified version for Instagram, or one that moves for YouTube.

“On social media, sharing a plain photo without a brand logo and without cover lines typically gets far less engagement than that same photo if it were put into a cover design,” she told me via email. “Our eyes are trained to assign value and worth to something that makes it to the cover. I think one of the reasons is that print is finite while the internet is infinite. You could keep writing digital stories forever. But there are only a certain number of pages in a magazine and only one story and one subject (in most cases) can make it to the cover. So it represents editorial decision-making. The editors have deemed this person and this subject most worthy of your attention.”

Editors measure a cover’s success from not just sales, but buzz. What’s especially interesting is what the cover reveals about this important moment in media history, which is populated by both traditional subscribers and digital natives.

But for magazines whose main revenue source still depends on a core group of older subscribers and newsstand readers, revamped covers risk siphoning off valuable revenue sources. While Vanity Fair’s April cover made an important statement about the magazine’s new direction, it sold only around 75,000 issues, according to one former editor familiar with the magazine’s newsstand sales. (A representative for Vanity Fair did not respond to a request for comment.) A June-July issue of the newly redesigned Glamour featuring Anne Hathaway reportedly sold only 20,000 copies on the newsstand; eight years ago monthly sales were around half a million, according to the New York Post. Goldberg said National Geographic’s gender issue drew “hundreds of millions of people” to the magazine’s content on various digital avenues. But it also resulted in the loss of about 10,000 print subscribers, either because they were upset by the content, or disappointed that the magazine addressed it poorly. According to Stone, Sports Illustrated’s subscribers sometimes write in to denounce the more forward-thinking coverage—say, its NBA style issue, or soccer coverage—that its online followers celebrate. “You can see the generational divide that exists there because what is popular online is sometimes less popular with our subscriber base, and vice versa,” he said. “What’s unpopular online is sometimes very popular with our readers.”

Read the story

The Africans Who Suffer in a Deportation Purgatory

AP Photo/Sunday Alamba

African immigrants are getting deported from the US with increasing frequency. After months in limbo inside detention centers where they suffer stress and abuse, the African countries the immigrants “return” to are neither familiar or welcoming. Everywhere deportees go, they suffer new traumas: racism, poverty and violence in the US; stigma, hostility and violence in Africa.

For Popula, Ashoka Mukpo details this threat to African immigrants in America and looks closely at two people who have suffered since 9/11: Nora Johnson, who is threatened with deportation to Liberia, and Claudia Smith who was sent to Sierra Leon. There, Mukpo writes, people drift “like ghosts in a halfway realm where they weren’t American anymore, but neither were they quite Liberian.” Some end up homeless, subsisting off of mud mixed with vegetable oil, begging on the streets. The author reminds us: “Some were once our neighbors in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Atlanta.”

“Deportees”—the colloquial word for people ejected from their lives abroad—are trapped in between these two ideas of America. The inadequacy that Liberians are made to feel by their country’s position in the global order can breed resentment toward those with American accents, made worse by disgust at the recklessness and arrogance that it’s assumed lies behind their blown chance at a better life. For those who arrive in Liberia on the heels of a criminal conviction or prison sentence, the reception is cold—even hostile.

“As bad as it sounds, someone told me that once a Liberian knows you a deportee, they will hate you for life,” said one Liberian man. He was deported from Minneapolis in 2010 for robbing a motel with a fake handgun when he was in his late 20s. “But secretly. They will never tell you. You only find out when you get broke, then they wait for it and say, you dirty dog. Look at you now.”

Francis Kollie, a Liberian prisoners’ rights advocate, once saw a crowd gather around a group of recent deportees to throw stones at them and hurl insults. “The mindset is, America is my heaven, so I will do everything I can to get there,” he said. “If you were deported from that safe haven, it means to some extent according to the cultural belief that you are useless.” Upon arrival, deportees are sequestered in lockup at immigration facilities until a relative or acquaintance can sign for them. Those who do not have those connections can be imprisoned indefinitely. If mental illness played a role in their path to deportation, there are few options and their conditions often worsen.

Some deportees have stories of people they arrived with who fell in with bad crowds and, in over their heads, were killed by their new “friends.” Others, defeated and alone, commit suicide. One deportee, speaking to a reporter for a Liberian daily in 2015, described experiences that would be familiar to many of her peers: “Nobody knows why I’m back nor what I’ve gained since being in America. All they care about is that I’m a deportee who messed up. It’s stigmatizing. I can’t get anything because I speak [American English]. We are so hated and divided and because of that, our lives are destroyed out here.”

Read the story

Russian Malware Is Really Killin’ It Lately

Yui Mok/PA Wire URN:34412105

Commerce and data are so interconnected now in our global, digital age that it doesn’t take much to upset the whole world’s supply chain. Russia revealed the world’s economic vulnerabilities and its own capabilities when it waged a cyberattack on Ukraine in 2017. As Andy Greenberg describes at Wired, sophisticated Russian malware named NotPetya spread from one Ukrainian software company’s servers to the many companies that used it, including pharmaceutical company Merck and Danish shipping conglomerate A.P. Møller-Maersk. Maersk manages 76 busy ports, from Spain to India, which make up a fifth of the world’s shipping capability. NotPetya disrupted 17 of those ports. Greenberg calls this under-reported global incident “the most devastating cyberattack since the invention of the internet.” So what does chaos look like in cyberwar? Take the shipping terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, for example:

At around 9 am New Jersey time, Fernández’s phone started buzzing with a succession of screaming calls from angry cargo owners. All of them had just heard from truck drivers that their vehicles were stuck outside Maersk’s Elizabeth terminal. “People were jumping up and down,” Fernández says. “They couldn’t get their containers in and out of the gate.”

That gate, a choke point to Maersk’s entire New Jersey terminal operation, was dead. The gate clerks had gone silent.

Soon, hundreds of 18-wheelers were backed up in a line that stretched for miles outside the terminal. One employee at another company’s nearby terminal at the same New Jersey port watched the trucks collect, bumper to bumper, farther than he could see. He’d seen gate systems go down for stretches of 15 minutes or half an hour before. But after a few hours, still with no word from Maersk, the Port Authority put out an alert that the company’s Elizabeth terminal would be closed for the rest of the day. “That’s when we started to realize,” the nearby terminal’s staffer remembers, “this was an attack.” Police began to approach drivers in their cabs, telling them to turn their massive loads around and clear out.

Read the story