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Senior editor at Automattic. Editor at Longreads.

Who Is the Man on the Moor?

Photo of Saddleworth Moor by Smabs Sputzer (CC BY 2.0)

In an immersive BBC News story that unfolds on screen like a true detective case, Jon Manel tells the tale of a man found dead in Saddleworth Moor, in Peak District National Park in Northern England, last December. A cyclist found him in a peculiar position, in clothing inappropriate for a walk, and with no belongings or forms of identification.

Six months later, after tracing his final route across England from London to Manchester with CCTV footage, and examining the few clues the man left behind — including a small container holding strychnine, a poison — detectives have been unable to identify him, or figure out why he traveled 200 miles to die on the moor.

Why did the man travel all the way to the moorland track where he was found? Why there? Why poison? Why strychnine?

Some count the area where the body was discovered as being part of Saddleworth Moor.

It is very popular, especially on a bright summer’s day. Not only walkers but cyclists and climbers come here, and sailors on Dovestone Reservoir.

But it is also a place associated with a number of deaths over the years.

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A Country Verging on Collapse: A Reading List on Venezuela

A manufacturing entrepreneur is jailed over toilet paper in his factory’s restrooms. An American attorney and figure in a once-thriving expat community in Caracas is killed in a violent robbery. There are so many stories of people trying to live amid Venezuela’s instability and chaos. Here are five.

1. “Venezuela Is Falling Apart.” (Moises Naim and Francisco Toro, The Atlantic, May 2016)

“What our country is going through is monstrously unique: It’s nothing less than the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States.” The day-to-day stories of Venezuelans reveal the collapse of the country on all fronts.

2. “Emptying the Tower of David, the World’s Tallest Ghetto.” (Boris Munoz, Vocativ, December 2014)

Boris Munoz reflects on the future of Venezuela as seen through the Tower of David, the infamous 28-story slum in Caracas that has long reflected the country’s hopes and failures. Read more…

Weed Reads: A Reading List About Marijuana

Over the weekend, Pennsylvania became the 24th state in the U.S. to legalize medical marijuana. For your April 20th, here are eight reads on cannabis, from one writer’s journey into America’s first legal pot festival in Colorado to a profile on a scientist researching safe pesticide use in Washington State.

“More Reefer Madness.” (Eric Schlosser, The Atlantic, April 1997)

“More Americans are in prison today for marijuana offenses than at any other time in our history.” In 1997, Schlosser examined the case to decriminalize marijuana. (Dive deeper in his award-winning two-part series from 1994: “Reefer Madness” and “Marijuana and the Law.”)

“The Scientist Pot Farmer.” (Brooke Borel, Undark Magazine, April 2016)

In Washington State, which legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, scientist Alan Schreiber has studied pesticides for 18 years. Working to further agricultural research, Schreiber focuses on safe pesticide use in cannabis production and provides safety workshops for pot farmers. Read more…

I Was a Super Bowl Concession Worker

Last Sunday, Super Bowl 50 descended upon Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. At Slate, freelance journalist Gabriel Thompson describes game day from the perspective of a worker in one of the stadium’s upscale food courts, where he earned less than $13 an hour to serve $13 beers.

It doesn’t take long to realize that the Chrome Grill, which functioned perfectly well for sparsely attended 49ers games, is not quite ready for the Super Bowl and its crowd of 71,000. Our cooks, three temps who earn $10 an hour for typical Levi’s Stadium events, but $15 an hour for the Super Bowl, are cranking out food. Still the lines keep growing. It doesn’t help that the fancy new registers tend to freeze up, or that we sell out of the jumbo dogs an hour before kickoff, which means that we have to waste precious time absorbing complaints. “At the Super Bowl?” one lady asks. “No hot dogs? You have got to be kidding.” I apologize—as sincerely as possible, given the circumstances—but she just stands there, unconvinced. When I pull off the lid of the hot dog container to reveal greasy water, she stomps off.

“The system is not working,” says Khalid Subainati. A jack-of-all-trades at the Chrome Grill, Kal usually works as an expeditor, but today he’s spending much of his time serving as a buffer between angry customers and us, as well as trying to get the registers to work. I’m totally absorbed in slapping pizza slices onto plates while trying to keep five orders straight in my head. Relief finally comes in the form of the national anthem, performed by Lady Gaga. Ticket-holders rush to their seats, which gives us a moment to collect ourselves. “Shit,” says Joshua. I nod. For weeks, our Centerplate supervisors have reminded us about the importance of today, when we’ll put “Fans First!” to “create excitement and lifetime memories at America’s greatest event.” That’s not where this day seems to be headed.

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Journalist Jack Shenker on the State of the Egyptian Revolution, Five Years Later

The future of Egypt lies not in the hands of political leaders and members of the elite, writes journalist Jack Shenker in his new book, The Egyptians: A Radical Story, but in the hands of ordinary Egyptians: Bedouins fighting for their land, DJs producing underground music in garages, and, especially, in Cairo’s youth. In one scene from an excerpt published at the Guardian, Shenker visits Zawyet Dahshur school, where young children spend their lunch breaks playing games of revolution:

A man emerged from a door on the edge of the playground and walked across to ask what we were doing there. He was a young maths teacher, and after we explained that we wanted to see the school where the video had been shot, he invited us to the staffroom for tea. “You have no idea how obsessively the children throw themselves into it,” he confided. “That video became a bit famous but it was just one minute of footage — they’ve been playing like that since the revolution started, during every break time and again when classes finish at the end of the day. Sometimes they do it 20 times in a row, pretending to attack the police, miming being shot and gassed, then picking themselves up again to carry on fighting.” I said that it was brave of them to chant so openly against the army, and the teacher shook his head and laughed.

“They’re braver than that,” he replied. “The sound on the video is very crackly so people didn’t realise; everyone who watched it thought the children were calling for the downfall of the musheer [field marshal], but actually they were yelling ‘el‑sha’ab, yureed, isqat el‑mudeer’ — ‘The people want the downfall of the headmaster.’ They weren’t just copying what they saw on television, they were changing it to carry out their own mini-revolution right here at the school!” He poured out more tea and shovelled a small mountain of sugar into each glass. “The children are completely different now. Within two minutes of the revolution starting they had begun speaking out in class, challenging things the teachers said, asking us about what was happening on the streets and what it all meant. Some of the staff, including me, had participated in the protests in Tahrir, and the students wanted to know everything, they wanted to know how it felt to have a voice at last. We changed, and they changed with us.”

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On the Brink of a Cure: An Innovative Immunologist’s Quest for an AIDS Vaccine

Louis Picker, an immunologist at Portland’s Oregon Health & Science University, believes he’s working toward a vaccine to prevent and cure AIDS: “I think within 15 years we’ll have both.” In 2013, his vaccine research showed the first evidence of monkeys eradicating the AIDS-causing virus from their bodies; he inoculated them with weakened CMV — or cytomegalovirus, an infectious agent in the herpes family — which not only pumped up their immune systems and fought off the virus, but killed it off entirely. At Portland Monthly, Jennifer Abbasi profiles the ambitious researcher, whose project’s first human study is set to begin later this year.

Picker set out to prevent AIDS, not cure it. In 2006, he and his team began vaccinating macaques against SIV, the monkey version of HIV. The researchers placed bits of SIV genes inside weakened CMV, hoping the macaques’ immune systems would then mount their natural immediate, large-scale response to CMV. “The immune system will make a response both to the CMV genes and to the SIV or HIV genes that will be in the same flavor, so to speak,” Picker explains. This approach contrasts sharply with that of most HIV vaccine projects, which typically focus on generating antibodies to block infection. Instead, Picker’s method aims to provoke T cells to prevent an infection from progressing to disease. Two years after he inoculated the first group of monkeys with the CMV-based vaccine, he exposed them to SIV.

In 2013, Nature reported Picker’s surprising findings: not only were most of the macaques able to control SIV, but over time their immune systems completely killed off the virus. It was the first evidence of monkeys eliminating the AIDS-causing virus from their bodies. Says Koff: “Louis straddles the prevention and the cure. The most intriguing thing about his vaccine is that the responding animals appear to clear the infection.”

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Going Underground into New York’s Tunnels: A Glimpse at Life in the Dark

“You’re the first person to visit this week,” he says. “People don’t want to speak to me when they come here. I don’t know, man. They’re scared or something. I can get why, it’s a spooky place when you don’t know it. But people, they like it when it’s scary. They like it when it’s dirty, right? It makes them feel alive. That’s why they make up these stories about cannibalism and stuff. Like alligators in the sewers.”

Jon offers me a sip of vodka. We drink together. He tells me to stay safe and to watch out for trains when I go back walking into the tunnel. I hear him talk to himself as I go away from the entrance and from the white sky.

The smell down here is the one of brake dust and mold. I can see rats scouring for food and drinking from brown puddles in the tracks ballast. EXISTENCE IS FLAWED, a graffiti inscription reads.

The city growls over my head — a distant growl muffled by the concrete, almost a snarl, like something cold and foul spreading over the long stretches of stained walls, like a dark and wild beast curling up around me and breathing on my neck. A dark and wild beast silently trailing me.

— At Narratively, Montreal-based freelance writer Anthony Taille takes us into New York’s underground among “Mole People,” the Amtrak tunnel residents under Riverside Park. Taille has spent time with people who have lived under the city for many years, from Bernard Isaac, a legend among Mole People, to longtime resident Brooklyn, who has lived underground since 1982.

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An Oral History of Langtang Valley, Destroyed by the Nepal Earthquake

We spent our first night there not really sleeping at all, just kind of leaning with our backs against this boulder. It snowed most of the night. Everyone was really on edge, and every time there was an aftershock, people would start screaming and running. I was terrified of every aftershock. We were saying that we couldn’t tell if the earth was still moving or if it was just us trembling.

I had a satellite phone with unlimited minutes, so I became the telephone booth for the village. Some of it was logistical stuff: the leaders of Kyanjin Gomba were using the phone to call the Nepalese army to make arguments for why the helicopters needed to come, but the majority of the calls were people calling family members. Each day, people would line up and have a number written down on a scrap of paper, and we would try calling. These people were crying into the phone. You don’t need to speak Nepalese to understand that.

American mountain climber Colin Haley, in Outside magazine, recounts waiting for help after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Langtang Valley, 40 miles northeast of Kathmandu, on April 25, 2015. In this oral history compiled by Anna Callaghan and Rabi Thapa, residents and foreigners describe this day of destruction, how half of the village population was buried, and what happened in the days that followed.

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Dispatch from the Floor of the Model Minority Factory

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, the founding director of the Asian American Literary Review and a lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, worked for years at Straight A Learning Center, where he taught SAT prep classes and helped build a college advising service. At The Offing, he describes the opportunity to give back to his community and offer support to Asian American students like him — and how it went all wrong:

But there was a deeper problem too that I began to notice: in Helena, that furious striving, and in me, a compulsion to fan it in troubling ways. To not only convince her she could get accepted to top schools, and show her how to get accepted, but to set a dollar value on that acceptance. We were coding high-end acceptance as fulfillment, coding fulfillment as an investment. Which was also, not coincidentally, at the heart of our essay coaching — value. Application writing at all levels works this way. Why should you select me, hire me, give me that scholarship, that fellowship, that grant, that money. It’s the ultimate in capitalist logic: the most fundamentally important skill is being able to articulate your own value. I was not simply teaching this skill to individual students, I was pitching the idea to their parents, threading its logic into the fabric of our communities, creating a market for our business out of thin air. This was not teaching, not learning, not education; it was sales. It was recoding everything as commodity and transaction. It meant asking our prospective clients, the parents, to re-understand themselves and everyone around them, most especially their children, in terms of success narrowly understood in terms of education narrowly understood in terms of value. I was on the floor of the model minority factory, imagining the assembly line into being.

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Travel, Foreignness, and the Spaces in Between: A Pico Iyer Reading List

Pico Iyer’s travel writing — whether he’s describing a long walk in Kyoto, a jetlag-fueled airport layover, or a quiet moment in a monastery — captures not just the physicality of places, but also the spaces within and between them.

In his essay “Why We Travel,” Iyer writes that he has been a traveler since birth: born in Oxford to parents from India, schooled in England and the United States, then living in Japan since 1992 (with annual trips to California). These seven reads reveal Iyer as a perpetual wanderer of both place and time: navigating spaces in flux or forgotten, meditating on finding one’s place in an ever-shifting world, and, as part of this journey, exploring that which is deep within us. Read more…