Today we've got a writer wandering a Halloween corn maze on his own family's ancestral land in North Carolina, where the real ghosts turn out to be coded diaries and inherited trauma going back six generations. From there we head to Central Africa and the UAE for a yearlong investigation into the parrot trafficking pipeline that TikTok is making worse by the day. The Winter Olympics kick off this week without fluorinated ski waxes for the first time, and it turns out banning toxic forever chemicals is easier than replacing the speed they gave athletes.

We close with a fun one: Foreigner and Lynyrd Skynyrd are touring together this summer with zero original members between them, and the debate over whether that's legacy preservation or expensive karaoke is only getting louder.

Happy reading!

Brett

Jeremy B. Jones stands alone in a Halloween crowd at a haunted corn maze built on his family's land in Fruitland, North Carolina, yards from the cemetery holding six generations of his ancestors. The attraction's fictional blood feud between two mountain families entertains busloads of church youth groups, but the real hauntings interest Jones more. His great-great-great-great-grandfather William Thomas Prestwood kept coded diaries from 1808 to 1859, filling handmade notebooks with a personal cipher that stumped everyone until a retired NSA cryptanalyst cracked it decades later. The entries revealed a complicated man: part naturalist, part mathematician, part serial philanderer who documented trysts in pigpens and barn lofts alongside potato harvests and tax payments. Jones also chases the family ghost story attached to the old Prestwood homestead, where a murdered woman's head supposedly thumps down the stairs at night. Archival research turns up no evidence of the killing, but a 1970s audio recording of his great-grandmother Azalee tells the same tale with convincing authority. Jones weaves these threads into a meditation on inherited trauma, epigenetics, and what it means to carry ancestors in your body while raising children in uncertain times.

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African grey parrots can learn hundreds of words, grasp abstract concepts, and rack up millions of TikTok followers. That viral fame is accelerating a brutal global trade pushing the species toward extinction. Reporter Rene Ebersole spent a year tracing the supply chain from Central African forests, where poachers scale hundred-foot trees and coat branches with homemade glue, to South African export facilities and pet shops across the UAE. At the center sits Gideon Fourie, a convicted wildlife smuggler still moving thousands of birds annually despite a ban on his export license. Wild grey populations in Ghana have collapsed by up to 99 percent since the early 1990s. An international trade ban passed in 2016 was supposed to stop the bleeding, but traffickers launder wild birds through captive-breeding paperwork, smuggle eggs in thermal vests, and falsify species on export permits. A new forensic technique analyzing parrot gut microbes may eventually distinguish wild-caught birds from captive-bred ones. Meanwhile, a Florida couple earns $120,000 a year from their parrot Apollo's YouTube channel, and sanctuaries overflow with surrendered birds whose owners wanted a social media star and got a 80-year commitment.

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The Milan Cortina Games will be the first Winter Olympics without fluorinated ski waxes, capping a years-long reckoning with the toxic "forever chemicals" that once gave racers an almost unfair advantage. PFAS-laced waxes arrived in the 1980s and quickly became essential. Former racer Nathan Schultz recalls the sensation as "floating," and competing without them meant losing. But the chemicals accumulated in technicians' blood at concentrations 25 times the general population, contaminated groundwater near ski venues in Park City, Utah, and persisted in soil across European slopes. The International Ski and Snowboard Federation banned fluoros in 2023, and replacement waxes remain three to five years from matching their performance. That gap has reshuffled competitive dynamics. Equipment choices and ski grinding now account for up to 97 percent of setup speed, favoring wealthy national programs with deeper research budgets. U.S. cross-country skier John Steel Hagenbuch calls the old waxes "a great equalizer" whose absence is widening the gap between haves and have-nots. Still, athletes broadly support the ban. "Do I miss them? Yeah, a little bit," Hagenbuch says. "But for our groundwater and for the environment, I think it's good."

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Foreigner and Lynyrd Skynyrd will tour together this summer, and neither act includes a single original member. They're not alone. The Spinners, the Four Tops, Iron Butterfly, and Blood, Sweat & Tears all operate under the same arrangement: handpicked musicians trained to perform the catalog while the founders age out, retire, or pass away. Producer Ron Nevison argues the songs matter more than the personnel, pointing to Kiss as a template for indefinite reinvention. Co-founder Al Greenwood says Foreigner's Mick Jones personally auditions every replacement and insists they learn the original sounds note for note. Jessie Peck, now the longest-tenured Spinner, was anointed by the group's founders before their deaths and says sellout crowds validate the continuation. Concert promoter Joe Fletcher is less convinced, recalling a pitch for "an experience with REO Speedwagon's music" that turned out to feature zero original members. He sees a cover band wearing a famous name. The debate will only intensify as legacy rock acts confront biology. Greenwood hopes even the Rolling Stones eventually find successors. "As we age out," he says, "it's impossible to keep it going."

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