At 4 P.M. on August 8th, Shaun Saribay’s family begged him to get in their car and leave the town of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The wind was howling, and large clouds of smoke were approaching from the dry hills above the neighborhood. But Saribay—a tattooist, a contractor, and a landlord, who goes by the nickname Buge—told his family that he was staying to guard their house, which had been in the family for generations. “This thing just gonna pass that way, downwind,” Saribay said. At 4:05 P.M., one of his daughters texted from the car, “Daddy please be safe.”
Within ten minutes, it became clear that the fire had not passed downwind. Instead, towering flames were galloping toward Saribay’s house. He got in his truck and drove to Front Street—Lahaina’s historic waterfront drag—and found gridlock traffic. Saribay, a stocky forty-two-year-old man with a tattoo covering the left side of his face, texted his daughters. “Don’t worry. Dad’s coming,” he wrote. Then he lost cell service. At 4:41 P.M., he pulled into the one large open space he could find, a parking lot behind the Lahaina United Methodist Church, which had just started to burn.
Saribay had recently built a closet at the church, so he knew where all the water spigots were. He filled buckets and water bottles and scrambled to find neighbors’ garden hoses. With the help of three other men who had retreated to the lot, he soaked the church, again and again, fighting a three-story ball of fire with the equivalent of a water gun. At times, the men were stomping, even peeing, on sparking debris. Saribay recorded a video for his kids: “It’s bad. All around—crazy,” he said, panning the hellscape behind him. “Remember what Dad said, eh? I’ll come back.” Almost as if to reassure himself, he added, softly, “I know you guys safe.”
Saribay recorded videos throughout the night as he fought the fire. Despite his efforts, flames consumed the church. Well after midnight, the men tried to save a neighboring preschool, but that caught fire, too. When the sun rose and the wind began to ebb, Saribay got on an old bike and rode around town looking for other survivors. “I’m seeing fucking bodies every fucking way,” he recalled. “I’m pedalling through charcoal bodies and bodies that didn’t have one speck of burn—they just died from inhalation of black smoke. I felt like I was the only fucking human on earth.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
At a cheap card table in a South Market loft, Craig Newmark sat with friend and fellow web enthusiast Anthony Batt, mulling over what to call his newest web venture. It was the 1990s in San Francisco, when rent was affordable and the internet relatively new. Newmark, a round-faced software engineer, had just launched an email list that alerted his friends to local events in the city. In keeping with his tendency to take things literally, he floated “San Francisco Events” as a top contender for its name.
Batt was getting impatient; the list already had an unofficial name used by its recipients. “Just call it Craigslist,” he told his friend. And so it was.
Nearly three decades later, the mailing list has morphed into one of the most popular classified advertisement websites in the U.S., with a presence in more than 70 countries. Despite making a killing off its success, Newmark refused to monetize the site except through a handful of minimal revenue streams. He still retains a sense of frugality unique among his fellow tech entrepreneurs—besides multiple streaming service subscriptions and a modest collection of Simpsons figurines, his largest luxuries include hiring a plant sitter when he’s out of town.
A self-described nerd, Newmark has the requisite thick-rimmed glasses and affinity for science fiction. But the Craigslist founder is more likely to be found discussing the ideals of democracy than toying with Perl. He’s explored a varied range of political philosophies, ethical frameworks and social codes over the years, but his passions have stayed centered on how to safeguard the U.S. and its citizens against misinformation and harassment. Since retiring from Craigslist in 2018, he has become a crusader for cybersecurity protections, trustworthy journalism and veteran support.
Now, at 70, he’s preparing for his next stage in life by giving away his sizable fortune. His donations to date haven’t been insignificant by any means. But it’s time to get serious, according to Newmark. “My big mission, simply stated, is to help and protect the people who help and protect our country,” he told Observer.
Read the rest of this article at: Observer
Wherever this story takes you—thoughts on marriage, on food, on work, on the rise and fall of the American century, on your own life and time’s passage through it—I invite you to picture Loukas first.
Loukas, of course, being the small potato-farming village in the Arcadia region of Greece’s Peloponnese. Picture the remains of a nearby medieval tower jutting up from a scrubby hillside. The small agricultural valley below, dotted with pines and oaks and low homes of white walls and red, sunbaked roofs. And picture a young couple pondering it all one last time before boarding a ship for America—for a ragged but not unlovable bit of Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco, where for the next half century they will gamble their lives on doughnuts and sleep deprivation.
Their stretch of Bayshore is like any grungy thoroughfare in any industrial zone—greasy body shop, gloomy carpet place, growing camp of homeless people alongside a Lowe’s—but then there it is: a strikingly red building, a flash of weathered neon, an improbable promise issued since 1970. We Never Close. From the Vietnam War through AIDS and OJ and 9/11 and Iraq, the same couple from Loukas was behind the same counter, pouring the same coffee.
Picture that previous San Francisco, so wildly different when George and Nina Giavris bought the Silver Crest Donut Shop. Nearby factories, robust and well paying, sent workers to the restaurant in droves. Truckers stopped in at all hours. Lines out the door. When George converted an old storage area into a little windowless bar in the back, Bayshore found itself with a thriving nightspot. At its peak, the Silver Crest had 20 employees. Try to picture anything close to a crowd in there now.
Read the rest of this article at: Alta
Haldre Rogers’s entry into ecology came via the sort of man-made calamity that scientists euphemistically call an “accidental experiment.”
She’d taken a job in 2002 on the Pacific island of Guam and the neighboring Mariana Islands to study the invasive brown tree snakes that were introduced to Guam, likely from a cargo ship, shortly after World War II. In the ensuing decades, these large snakes thrived, obliterating many native animals.
Rogers’s initial task was to track reported sightings on nearby islands. The job, she says, “gave me lots of time to just stare at trees, trying to see snakes. And I realized that, ‘Oh, there’s actually all of these differences between forests on Guam and forests on other islands.’”
And so, for her Ph.D. dissertation, Rogers decided to address whether the snakes themselves had changed Guam’s trees and shrubs.
The potential link was this: Many trees and other plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds—and that’s often achieved through fruit. Like mini ecological Trojan horses, fruit evolved to be eaten, its pulp a nutritious lure to make an animal consume it and swallow a plant’s seeds, too.
The animal moves on. After a while, it defecates, depositing the swallowed seeds somewhere within its range. Oftentimes, those seeds emerge in what amount to little fertilizing clumps of manure.
Myriad factors will determine whether a seed ever becomes a mature plant. But by co-opting the wings, legs, guts, and back ends of animals, rooted plants have evolved a way of scattering the embryonic forms of their offspring far and wide.
In Guam, forest trees had relied on seven main species of disperser—six birds and one bat—and the tree snakes decimated them. When Rogers arrived, only one bird disperser remained, and in a limited range, and she says the bat population was down to about 50 individuals. “So, basically, no seed dispersal,” says Rogers, now an ecologist at Virginia Tech.
Across the island, fruits now just drop to the forest floor.
There are winners and losers among Guam’s plants, Rogers found. Some species that are less dependent on animals are thriving. But many native fruiting trees and shrubs are struggling. Less mixing occurs, and forests have a lower diversity of plant species as a result.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
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The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point. When you hear that a 10-foot alligator is going to be released at a rooftop bar in South Florida, at a party for the people being accused of ruining the internet, you can’t quite stop yourself from being curious. If it was a link — “WATCH: 10-foot Gator Prepares to Maul Digital Marketers” — I would have clicked. But it was an IRL opportunity to meet the professionals who specialize in this kind of gimmick, the people turning online life into what one tech writer recently called a “search-optimized hellhole.” So I booked a plane ticket to the Sunshine State.
I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these people making money off of everyone else’s misery?
After all, a lot of folks are unhappy, in 2023, with their ability to find information on the internet, which, for almost everyone, means the quality of Google Search results. The links that pop up when they go looking for answers online, they say, are “absolutely unusable”; “garbage”; and “a nightmare” because “a lot of the content doesn’t feel authentic.” Some blame Google itself, asserting that an all-powerful, all-seeing, trillion-dollar corporation with a 90 percent market share for online search is corrupting our access to the truth. But others blame the people I wanted to see in Florida, the ones who engage in the mysterious art of search engine optimization, or SEO.
Lewis enjoys a rare kind of celebrity among the moneyed men and women of the US. They believe he gets them, that he is the Hemingway of their bullring. He used to be one of them, after all: a Salomon Brothers bond salesman in the late 1980s, and therefore part of the extravagant avarice that defined Wall Street in that decade. Then he quit to write a memoir about it, Liar’s Poker. It was the first in a series of blockbusters about the thin top slice of American society: the one in which Whitney and her muckety-mucks reside, alongside other mavens, savants and powerbrokers. They drive its commerce and politics, its sports and culture – and Lewis is their bard. He’s the kind of writer Vanity Fair will call upon to interview Barack Obama one day, Arnold Schwarzenegger the next. When a rumour surfaced that Vanity Fair used to pay Lewis $10 a word – while most journalists otherwise languish in the 50-cent range – it almost didn’t matter if it was true. (It was, it turned out.) The rumour merely confirmed what everyone knew: Lewis is the most prestigious narrator of American life.
Read the rest of this article at: The Verge