IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
A great read from Kalyn Kahler on how some GAA players have gone from kicking 45s and frees to kicking field goals in American Football.
(The Athletic, approx 14 mins reading time)
The Gaelic kickers were inconsistent past 50 yards in their first appearance in front of NFL teams — “I was kicking myself a bit after the combine,” Beggan said, no pun intended — so this time they wanted to prove they had the distance. When Beggan lined up from 50 yards, he banged it through. Then again from 55 and again from 60. Jackson was perfect through 45 yards and narrowly missed from 50-plus. Smyth drilled his 50-yard attempt, missed from 55, then was good from 60.
After Smyth knocked in his last long attempt, a senior NFL executive who’d been on the field said he expected at least one of the Irish guys to sign with an NFL team, a feat that once seemed outlandish. “I have to be very honest, I didn’t expect it,” said Ravens assistant special teams coach Randy Brown. “They were further ahead than everybody expected,” said Saints special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi. “There’s the expression, an ‘NFL leg.’ All of them have an NFL leg.”
Have you ever wondered what happens when some of the 800,000 miles of internet cables that sit on the ocean floors need repairing?
This fascinating feature tells the story of how an invisible, highly-specialised industry does crucial work maintaining infrastructure that the world depends on.
(The Verge, approx 50 mins reading time)
The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. Others, like Global Marine’s Wave Sentinel, were once ferries. Global Marine recently told Data Centre Dynamics that it’s trying to extend the life of its ships to 40 years, citing a lack of money. One out of 4 repair ships have already passed that milestone. The design life for bulk carriers and oil tankers, by contrast, is 20 years.
“We’re all happy to spend billions to build new cables, but we’re not really thinking about how we’re going to look after them,” said Mike Constable, the former CEO of Huawei Marine Networks, who gave a presentation on the state of the maintenance fleet at an industry event in Singapore last year. “If you talk to the ship operators, they say it’s not sustainable anymore.”
You may have noticed that Donald Trump has been in court a lot recently. In this piece, James Romoser writes about the “two-tiered system of justice” that the former US president is benefitting from.
(Politico, approx 12 mins reading time)
Some judges in Trump’s cases may have afforded him unique leeway in hopes of avoiding any appearance that they are meddling in the 2024 campaign. Indeed, Trump’s role as a presidential candidate — one who is always eager to play the martyr — complicates the task of prosecutors and judges eager to lower the temperature of the proceedings. Penalizing Trump before he’s ever convicted of anything could stir a backlash and trigger more heat, not less.
Trump supporters surely bristle at the notion that he’s getting any preferential treatment. After all, he is facing dozens of felony counts across four criminal cases, and a series of massive civil judgments has damaged his reputation and his wealth. But the fact is that no other person in America — if charged with the diverse panoply of malfeasance that Trump has been accused of — would enjoy the same procedural and structural advantages that Trump has harnessed, to great effect, as his legal troubles reached a fever pitch over the past 12 months.
Victor Montalvo will be competing for the US at the Olympics in three months in its newest sport: breakdancing.
(Rolling Stone, approx 21 mins reading time)
The International Olympic Committee made the announcement in 2020: Breaking would be in the 2024 Paris Olympics, transforming what the sport means to the world and what’s possible for its breakers. “It’s fucking great,” says David “Kid David” Schreibman from Los Angeles, a 35-year-old breaking icon and commentator for Red Bull’s BC One competitions. “Because guys like Victor are making a living like I wish I could have.… That was my dream. We never got any of that. We had to be the fucking background dancers for Justin Bieber. Also cool, but not this cool.” However, Montalvo will be 30 years old in Paris, the upper limit of breakers’ competitive prime. He’s concerned. “The kids now are crazy,” Montalvo says. “They’re like, flying. Incredible stamina. I’m not the same as when I was younger. I’m not as fast, as strong. Maybe more creative. But it’s getting tougher.”
An essay by Nicole Lipman on how the world’s most googled clothing brand is taking making ultra-fast-fashion even cheaper and making billions thanks to its presence on social media.
(n+1, approx 34 mins reading time)
TikTok was where I learned about SHEIN. For a while my For You page, which had accurately identified my interest in fashion’s more material impacts, served me videos of sustainable fashion influencers decrying SHEIN’s wretched labor and environmental practices. The textile industry is the second-largest polluter in the world, they said, and of all the fast-fashion producers, SHEIN is by far the worst offender. SHEIN uses toxic chemicals in their clothing production; SHEIN mass-produces fabrics like spandex that never decompose (at this point an image would flash across the screen: an overflowing clothing landfill, or a mountain of discarded clothes in the Chilean desert so large it is visible from space); SHEIN exploits and endangers its factory workers. Employees earn $556 a month to make five hundred pieces of clothing every day, work eighteen-hour days, and use their lunch breaks to wash their hair — a schedule they repeat seven days per week with only one day off per month. A more nuanced TikToker might point out, briefly, that conditions in SHEIN factories are not necessarily unique, or that focusing on suppliers — rather than the larger systems of Western consumption and capitalism that create these conditions — is a fool’s errand, but the platform isn’t built for that kind of dialogue. I clicked on the comments and invariably read ones with several dozen likes saying, “I’m so willing to die in shein clothes.”
With computers now capable of creating images that are almost indistinguishable from reality, Anna Wiener examines how close we are to losing touch with what’s real.
(The New Yorker, approx 38 mins reading time)
Digitizing the real world involves the tedium of real-world processes. Three-dimensional models are created using lidar and photogrammetry, a technique in which hundreds or thousands of photographs of a single object are stitched together to produce a digital reproduction. In the redwood grove, as Caron set up his equipment, he told me that he had spent the past weekend inside, under, and atop a large “debris box”—crucially, not a branded Dumpster, which might not pass legal review—scanning it from all angles. The process required some nine thousand photographs. (“I had to do it fast,” he said. “People illegally dump their stuff.”) Plants and leaves, which are fragile, wavery, and have a short shelf life, require a dedicated vegetation scanner.
Larger elements, like cliff faces, are scanned with drones. Reflective objects, such as swords, demand lasers. Lind told me that he loved looking at textures up close. “When you scan it, a metal is actually pitch-black,” he said. “It holds no color information whatsoever. It becomes this beautiful canvas.” But most of Quixel’s assets are created on treks that require permits and months of planning, by technical artists rucking wearable hard drives, cameras, cables, and other scanning equipment. Caron had travelled twice to the I’on Swamp, a former rice paddy on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina, to scan cypress-tree knees—spiky, woody growths that rise out of the water like stalagmites. “They look creepy,” he said. “If you want to make a spooky swamp environment, you need cypress knees.”
A longread from 2021 about the mysterious fate of nine skiers in Russia’s Ural Mountains in 1959.
(The New Yorker, approx mins reading time)
At first, the U.P.I. sports club assumed that the group had just been held up; there had been reports of a heavy snowstorm in the mountains. But, after several days passed, families of the group began placing frantic phone calls to the university and to the local bureau of the Communist Party, and, on February 20th, a search was launched. There were several search parties: student volunteers from U.P.I., prison guards from the Ivdel camp, Mansi hunters, local police; the military deployed planes and helicopters. On February 25th, the students found ski tracks, and the next day they discovered the skiers’ tent—above the tree line on a remote mountain that Soviet officials referred to as Height 1079 and that the Mansi called Kholat Syakhl, or Dead Mountain. There was no one inside.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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