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Today’s selection of stories includes:
A Texas nurse counts the dead because a gorilla's death sparked more outrage than thousands of murdered women, building a database that becomes both memorial and indictment.
Amazon's Oregon data centers concentrate poison in well water while local officials secretly profit from billion-dollar deals, turning desert farmland into a Flint-style catastrophe.
A homeschooling mother watches ultraconservatives capture her Idaho school board seat by seat, discovering that defending normal institutions requires the stamina of zealots.
And a childhood terror—monks, darkness, a shrieking skeleton—leads decades later to a forgotten film where medieval miners dig so deep they tunnel into the future.
Grab your lunch. Let's go.
By Sean Patrick Cooper, Photograph and Video by Jenny Kane
Amazon's eastern Oregon data centers are accelerating a water crisis that's been poisoning residents for decades. In 2022, county commissioner Jim Doherty tested random wells and found toxic nitrate levels in 68 of 70 homes—some four times the federal safety limit, linked to miscarriages and cancers in otherwise healthy adults. The contamination stems from industrial agriculture's massive fertilizer use, but Amazon's facilities worsen the problem significantly. Data centers pull millions of gallons from the aquifer to cool servers, then dump that water into the Port of Morrow's system, which sprays it back over fields as "recycled fertilizer." The process concentrates nitrates further—water entering data centers at 13 ppm emerges at 56 ppm, eight times Oregon's limit. Behind the environmental disaster lurks spectacular corruption: local officials including Port director Gary Neal secretly bought a fiber optic company servicing Amazon while negotiating billions in tax breaks for the tech giant, using insider knowledge to drastically undervalue their purchase. Oregon's attorney general is now suing for fraud. Doherty's whistleblowing ended his political career after a recall campaign by Neal's allies. A class action lawsuit targets Amazon and agriculture operators, with settlement talks reportedly approaching $100 million.
Atavist Magazine: Inside a Texas nurse’s quest to document the life and death of every woman killed by a man in America.
By Christa Hillstrom
Dawn Wilcox, a Texas school nurse, maintains a database of every American woman murdered by a man—over 14,000 cases and counting. She began the project in 2016 after noticing a gorilla's death sparked more public fury than daily femicides. The article traces how women worldwide have undertaken similar work, from Mexico's disappeared to murdered Native Americans, often alone with spreadsheets and Google alerts. Wilcox doesn't just tally deaths; she hunts for photos, learns victims' quirks, calls their families. One sister describes her murdered twin as hilarious, a Star Trek fan, an electrical engineer who hoarded romance novels. The database reveals grim patterns: staged suicides, surveillance technology, murders after breakups, religious justifications for violence. While Latin American trackers ignited mass protests and legal reform, America treats femicides as isolated incidents rather than epidemic. Wilcox calls her work sacred, a form of witnessing that automation would profane. She continues despite uncertainty it matters, believing these women deserve collective mourning as victims of mass atrocity.
The Hechinger Report: A Republican homeschooling mom came to love her public schools. Now she’s fighting other conservatives she thinks will destroy them
By Laura Pappano and Emma Epperly
Suzanne Gallus once educated all seven children at home before embracing Lakeland schools after her daughter's suicide revealed how administrators rallied around her family. Now she's battling the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, which has weaponized candidate endorsements to install MAGA loyalists across local government. The KCRCC's vetting process asks school board hopefuls about gay marriage rather than education experience, recruiting political novices like Jeff Brodhead, who wants creationism taught and admits he's running to prevent "satanic" influences he can't prove exist. Meanwhile, the board's ultraconservative members have instituted Byzantine review processes that halted drama rehearsals for five weeks because committee members deemed fairy tales "witchcraft." Teachers are quitting. School levies keep failing. The district cut 25 positions. Election Day exposed voter exhaustion—parents who once reliably defended their schools simply stopped responding to Gallus's texts. The ultraconservatives won decisively, securing a 4-1 board majority. Gallus now aims for a May takeover of the KCRCC itself, recruiting traditional conservatives to win precinct seats and dismantle the endorsement machine that's strangling local institutions.
By Asa West
A writer spends decades haunted by a single image: medieval monks huddled in darkness, then a skeleton vulture suddenly shrieking across the sky. No one remembers the film. Google searches fail. The memory persists like a splinter until, in her forties, she finally identifies it: The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, an obscure 1988 Australian-New Zealand fantasy that bombed commercially but earned standing ovations at Cannes. The actual film exceeds the memory. Plague-threatened medieval miners tunnel so deep they break through to 1980s Auckland—not through science fiction logic but medieval mysticism, where the future exists as a physical place you can reach by digging. They perceive highways as rivers of beasts, construction equipment as monsters, the deserted modern city as simultaneously holy and hellish. Director Vincent Ward shoots their odyssey with surrealist intensity, using stop-motion animation and practical effects that feel more uncanny than any CGI spectacle.
That’s it for this today.
Really hope you enjoyed the selection of stories today. I am always interested in hearing from you. If you have thoughts on how I can make this email even better, do not hesitate to reach out.
Brett
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