Search Results for: agriculture

Longreads Best of 2015: Science

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in science writing.

* * * Read more…

What It’s Like to Fly Into a Thunderstorm

Flying near a fast-forming storm in North Dakota.
Flying near a fast-forming storm in North Dakota. (Photo by Shawn,flickr)

Justin Nobel | Atlas Obscura | November 2015 | 14 minutes (3,498 words)

 

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Justin Nobel, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

Read more…

I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig: The History of a Taboo

One of Odysseus' men transforming into a pig. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Essig | Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig | Basic Books | May 2015 | 20 minutes (5,293 words)

Below is an excerpt from Lesser Beasts, by Mark Essig, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

* * *

Built in about 2550 bc, the Great Pyramid of Giza stands 455 feet tall and comprises some 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing about 13 billion pounds in aggregate. Archaeologists still argue over whether those stones were moved into place using levers, sledges, or oil-slicked ramps. Whatever the technical method, building the pyramids involved a feat of social engineering just as impressive as the mechanical: Egyptian authorities had to feed a workforce of thousands of people for decades at a time. Read more…

The Missing History of Ravensbrück, The Nazi Concentration Camp for Women

Sarah Helm | Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women | Nan A. Talese | March 2015 | 48 minutes (13,071 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from Ravensbrück, by Sarah Helm, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

What Happens When We Run Out of Jobs?

After 300 years of breathtaking innovation, people aren’t massively unemployed or indentured by machines. But to suggest how this could change, some economists have pointed to the defunct career of the second-most-important species in U.S. economic history: the horse.

For many centuries, people created technologies that made the horse more productive and more valuable—like plows for agriculture and swords for battle. One might have assumed that the continuing advance of complementary technologies would make the animal ever more essential to farming and fighting, historically perhaps the two most consequential human activities. Instead came inventions that made the horse obsolete—the tractor, the car, and the tank. After tractors rolled onto American farms in the early 20th century, the population of horses and mules began to decline steeply, falling nearly 50 percent by the 1930s and 90 percent by the 1950s.

Humans can do much more than trot, carry, and pull. But the skills required in most offices hardly elicit our full range of intelligence. Most jobs are still boring, repetitive, and easily learned. The most-common occupations in the United States are retail salesperson, cashier, food and beverage server, and office clerk. Together, these four jobs employ 15.4 million people—nearly 10 percent of the labor force, or more workers than there are in Texas and Massachusetts combined. Each is highly susceptible to automation, according to the Oxford study.

Technology creates some jobs too, but the creative half of creative destruction is easily overstated. Nine out of 10 workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5 percent of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from “high tech” sectors like computing, software, and telecommunications. Our newest industries tend to be the most labor-efficient: they just don’t require many people. It is for precisely this reason that the economic historian Robert Skidelsky, comparing the exponential growth in computing power with the less-than-exponential growth in job complexity, has said, “Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.”

—In “A World Without Work,” Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson argues it’s time to plan for a future in which machines, from driverless cars to operating room robots, do most of our current jobs.

Read the story

After Water

Longreads Pick

Family, politics, rural identity—and water: A new Longreads Exclusive by illustrator-journalist Susie Cagle on the plight of East Porterville, California, and what happens to agriculture when the last drop is gone.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 2, 2015
Length: 20 minutes (5,160 words)

After Water

Susie Cagle | Longreads | June 2015 | 21 minutes (5,160 words)

 

The sun was going down in East Porterville, California, diffusing gold through a thick and creamy fog, as Donna Johnson pulled into the parking lot in front of the Family Dollar.

porterville-2-donna-truck_1200

Since the valley started running dry, this has become Johnson’s favorite store. The responsibilities were getting overwhelming for the 70-year-old: doctors visits and scans for a shoulder she injured while lifting too-heavy cases of water; a trip to the mechanic to fix the truck door busted by an overeager film crew; a stop at the bank to deposit another generous check that’s still not enough to cover the costs of everything she gives away; a million other small tasks and expenses. But at the Family Dollar she was singularly focused, in her element. Read more…

An Ex-Industrial Fisherman Rethinks His Job

Bren Smith. Photo by echoinggreen

Diane Ackerman | The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us | W. W. Norton & Company | September 2014 | 16 minutes (3,877 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us, by Diane Ackerman, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

What Nuclear Winter Would Do to the World’s Food Supply

Let me take the most likely one: the nuclear winter case. Say two countries that both have access to nuclear weapons get very angry at each other, and then retaliate, destroying most of the major cities in the opposite country. The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually. Say maybe we lost 5 percent of the population. Ninety-five percent of us would still be alive. But then as those cities burned, you’d end up getting soot in the upper atmosphere that stays there and darkens the entire planet. And all the crops fail.

As the world went dark, you’d have a couple of the more hearty crops survive—the trees would last a little while. But our standard crops? Your wheat, your rice, your corn? That’s all dead. You don’t get that harvest, and that’s what we feed the world with. Vegetable gardens, everything’s just dead. You can’t grow in darkness. As those crops fail, you’ll start to get hungry; you’ll start going into your stored food supplies. The historical assumption is that’s when we all go completely crazy. It’s bad. I’m sure you’ve seen the movies. There’s no good outcome there. That darkness will basically stay for around five years, until it starts to rain out of the atmosphere and then we’ll slowly but surely [get] more and more sunlight and start to rejuvenate agriculture again.

There’d be a little bit of conventional agriculture that survives—like the grow houses. For example, in Japan they have warehouses that just have racks of lettuce growing under LED lights, and that would still work, but what fraction of the population would that feed? I’m sure that the wealthy in whichever culture would still pick tomatoes and lettuce, but the vast majority of the world would not be eating those.

Engineer Joshua Pearce, as interviewed by Yvonne Bang in Nautilus. The interview explores how we as a planet could feed 7 billion people after a global catastrophe.

Read the story

Longreads Best of 2014: Science Stories

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in science writing.

* * *

Virginia Hughes
Science reporter and soon-to-be science editor at BuzzFeed.

The Itch Nobody Can Scratch (Will Storr, Matter)

I’ve thought about this story (an excerpt from Storr’s book, The Unpersuadables) many, many times since reading it. It’s superficially about Morgellons, a disease in which people think that they’re infected with bugs or fibers. But it’s really about the nature of disease and diagnosis, evidence and belief. It’s creepy, fascinating, and profound. The best part about it is the way Storr describes these patients and their delusions. It would be easy to make them seem stupid or crazy or worse. But Storr’s writing creates empathy and understanding. The not-insignificant downside of this piece: it makes you feel itchy. Read more…