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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.
After novice hiker Michelle Vanek went missing on Colorado’s Mount of the Holy Cross in 2005, the search for her went cold. Nearly 20 years later, an all-women team of rescuers found her body. Heather Hansman writes about the case, including how a dream helped to re-open it.
(5280 Magazine, approx 17 mins reading time)
It’s not uncommon for hikers to run into trouble on Holy Cross. Vail Mountain Rescue responds to about 15 individuals or groups there each year. Scott Beebe, a longtime member of the team, says hikers tend to get confused near the summit. Instead of taking the correct route to the North Ridge trail, which looks steep from the top, they can mistakenly head down mellower-looking paths that actually dead-end above cliffs. The searchers traced these and many other routes, looking for Vanek, to no avail. A few days in, snow began to fall. By the eighth, when rescuers were trudging through two feet of powder, the search was called off. Everyone was baffled. “We ended up the last day with not a clue, not a gum wrapper, not a boot print, absolutely nothing,” wrote searcher Tim Cochrane in his report to the sheriff. “How can anyone just vanish into thin air?”
A disturbing story about what can happen when a surrogacy doesn’t go according to plan.
(Wired, approx 26 mins reading time)
Bi sees a model for surrogacy in the antiabortion laws that “recognize and protect the right of a fetal life.” The baby, she believes, should come first. Bi thinks that when doctors see surrogates go against medical advice, they should report it to the police. Bi isn’t anti-surrogacy—in fact, she frequently advises other investors who are pursuing it and sends me links to startup after startup. Sheel Mohnot, a venture capitalist friend of Bi’s who has commissioned twiblings, said the problem is that information is siloed when “each agency has their own database of wombs.” In this model, surrogates are the gestational equivalents of Uber drivers or Amazon warehouse workers. “There should be a database of carriers allowing us to filter on what we want: age, BMI, willingness to abort the fetus,” Mohnot said.
Netflix have been using users’ data to make films that will have a broad appeal to their viewers. Only, the films they’re making all seem to have similar easy-to-follow plots that make them pretty forgettable, and it’s becoming a problem in the industry.
(The Guardian, approx 22 mins reading time)
Netflix’s model, and its enormous success, gives it unprecedented influence over cinema’s future. It’s unclear how far the shape of that influence is determined by the algorithm. Certainly any Netflix viewer will have noticed the proliferation of films that seem to fit the category of “algorithm movie” – but they are not algorithmic in the sense of being directly machine-generated (at least not yet). The company’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, has denied “reverse-engineering” films from its data, telling Vulture.com in 2018 commissioning was “70% gut and 30% data” (though in an interview three years earlier, he had it the other way around). Netflix’s PR department declined to let me talk to any of its senior executives for this story, but it reiterated the line about “the misconception that we commission by algorithm”. A number of the company’s former executives, and others in the film industry, would only speak to me on condition of anonymity; aware of Netflix’s current dominant position in the industry, and its caginess about its use of data, they fear it could harm their careers if they spoke publicly about their experiences.
It looks like the computers taking over à la WarGames and The Terminator isn’t too far away. According to Michael Hirsh, experts fear the Pentagon’s efforts to keep up with China and Russia’s advancements is a slippery slope where humans can’t keep up.
(Politico, approx 23 mins reading time)
“I’ve heard combatant commanders say, ‘Hey, I want someone who can take all the results from a war game and, when I’m in a [crisis] scenario, tell me what the solution is based on what the AI interpretation is,’” says Schneider, a self-described “geriatric millennial” and mother of two who, along with many of her university colleagues, is worried about how fast the shift to AI is happening. In the heat of a crisis, under pressure to move fast, her fear is that it will be easier for those commanders to accept an AI suggestion than to challenge it. In 2023, the Department of Defense updated its directive on weapons systems involving the use of artificial intelligence, saying that “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force” are required in any deployment. But critics worry the language remains too vague; the directive, called 3000.09, also includes a “waiver” if a senior Defense official decides to keep the system autonomous. The humans, in other words, can decide to take themselves out of the loop.
There’s a new face-lift in tinseltown that promises to give undetectable results, and the 1% can’t get enough of it. Bridget Read has the details, the cost, and the before and after photos from some happy patients.
(The Cut, approx 17 mins reading time)
I don’t see Hall until two weeks later, back in Alemi’s office for her one-week checkup. Her recovery is proceeding much faster, as is almost always the case in younger patients. Aside from some remaining bruising and swelling — what Hall calls her “Jay Leno chin” — she does not look as though she had major surgery seven days ago. Alemi lines Hall up again against the backdrop he uses to take photos and uploads them onto his computer so we can see the difference. “See how square and bottom-heavy your face was?” Alemi says. Now, he explains, her face is narrow, almost heart-shaped. And her cheeks have been moved up. Even just a few millimeters undoes years of gravitational pull. Hall is thrilled. “I’m on a pink cloud,” she says. “It just was, like, this abstract idea in my future. And now it’s real. This is gonna be so subtle and fabulous for school drop-off.”
There are more missions scheduled to land on the moon in the next six years than in the last six decades. This interactive read warns that it could end up looking like a junkyard of billionaires’ dreams if we’re not careful.
(National Geographic, 24 approx mins reading time)
The road to a successful lunar economy will be built on one thing: dirt. Moon dirt. Lunar dirt, called regolith, is everywhere, blanketing the surface to the horizon in all directions. Regolith is unappealing in almost every way. It is dull gray, gritty, sharp, clingy, electrostatic, abrasive, damaging to equipment, and dangerous to people. It’s also the resource on which everything else on the moon will depend. Delivering equipment and supplies to the moon is so expensive—one gallon of water rocketed from the Earth to the moon will cost anywhere from $100,000 to more than a million dollars to transport—that the only economically practical way to develop the moon will be to use what’s there. As unpromising as it looks, regolith is loaded with what you’d want if you were thinking about setting up a moon base: aluminum, iron, titanium, silicon, oxygen. If you heat regolith to 2900ºF so it melts, magical things start to happen. Once regolith is molten, you can skim off its components and make things with them.
He haunted the woods of Central Maine for 30 years. Then one day, he came out of the forest. From 2014, this is the strange story of the last true hermit, from 2014.
(GQ, approx 34 mins reading time)
For close to three decades, Knight said, he had not seen a doctor or taken any medicine. He mentioned that he had never once been sick. You had to have contact with other humans, he claimed, in order to get sick. When, said Perkins-Vance, was the last time he’d had contact with another person? Sometime in the 1990s, answered Knight, he passed a hiker while walking in the woods. “What did you say?” asked Perkins-Vance. “I said, ’Hi,’ ” Knight replied. Other than that single syllable, he insisted, he had not spoken with or touched another human being, until this night, for twenty-seven years.
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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