michelleweber

“Tony Roach holds Eastbourne together with engine grease and dairy cream.”

Italian farmers get 7.5 cents for a kilo of tomatoes. Consumers pay €2, for a 2,567% markup. It’s a mafia-ridden system that can’t exist without exploiting immigrant labor. “In accepting these industrial prices, we’re actually selling the skin of the farm-workers.”

“It lasted about ten seconds. I was just about to say, ‘This really hurts,’ when, suddenly, it didn’t hurt anymore, and the doctor was snapping off her gloves.”

Washington state’s three-strikes law put alcoholic and drug addict Scott Wharton in jail for life, no possibility of parole, for a string of low-level bank robberies. Ex-judge Matthew Fox helped him get clemency — twice. Now Wharton’s back in jail. How many chances will the state give him?

“I didn’t expect that spending a few days with a couple thousand lesbians on a floating hotel/casino/mall/amusement park would push me to radically reconsider the future I’d been carefully and painstakingly planning for myself.”

“To demand someone enter into and entertain your anxious mind-palace and reckon with your complicated and endlessly fascinating individuality can be an act of power. But who gets to be an individual to the Western public? Who gets to be complex?”

“But losing her friend twice, first to cancer and then to the underworld of the cadaver market, reminded her that, no matter how much she attempted to confront death, there were many unimagined trap doors.”

In 1992, there were 2,641 bank robberies in Los Angeles — “one every 45 minutes of each banking day.” How did L.A. become the epicenter of the heist? Thanks to the dangerous combination of cars, convenience, and cocaine.

Sound is a whale’s main navigational tool. So does ocean noise pollution impair their ability to communicate, to migrate, to mate? “Answers to these questions, among others, have eluded scientists, simply because 40-ton, seemingly healthy humpback whale carcasses with very little decomposition don’t wash up on our shores very often. So when Vector did, every […]

“Within hours of Beierle’s suicide, hate-site habitues had dubbed him “St. Yogacel” and were scrambling to copy and share the online caches of his music and videos that so perfectly reflected their own worldview.”