The Atlantic

Over the course of five months, Caitlin Dickerson traveled three times to the Darién Gap and met some of the people willing to risk treacherous terrain, violence, hunger, and disease to make the 70-mile journey from Colombia into Panama. https://lnkd.in/ezmNCpVB “What I saw in the jungle confirmed the pattern that has played out elsewhere: The harder migration is, the more cartels and other dangerous groups will profit, and the more migrants will die,” Dickerson writes. On one of the routes, “the foliage closed in from all sides, making the path hard to discern. We stepped over jaguar tracks and passed a Bothrops, the deadliest viper in South America, coiled around a branch near our ankles. In a ravine, we saw what looked like the scene of a person’s bad fall: a tennis shoe, a skull, and the bones of a leg with a bandage wrapped around the knee like a tourniquet.” Cartels that control the routes and profit from the migrants have guides and porters who take videos on the first day of walking—when people are still able to conjure a smile. The United Nations has stationed migration officials at bus stations and other checkpoints along the way to the Darién Gap, but their efforts to warn people of the dangers have been largely ineffective. “People come with tunnel vision, like, ‘I must get to the United States,’” Cristian Camilo Moreno García, a UN migration official based in northern Colombia, told Dickerson. “Turning back is not an option.” In a few places, migrants can stop to restock. On the sides of houses in Bajo Chiquito—a crucial reception point for people who make it out of the Darién Gap—Dickerson saw “Missing” flyers displaying the photograph of a 9-year-old Vietnamese boy. Dickerson later contacted his mother. She had lost hold of her son while they were crossing a river and still didn’t know what had happened to him. She continues to write to Dickerson. “What do you believe about my son?” she asked recently. “I’m always waiting for news of my baby.” Read our September cover story: https://lnkd.in/ezmNCpVB 📷: Lynsey Addario

When Annie Lowrey was added to a WhatsApp-based investment group chat, supposedly affiliated with Morgan Stanley, she soon realized she was at the center of a pig-butchering scam. https://lnkd.in/eFypqRBS Today, money lost in these schemes account for more than ransomware scams, fake tech-support swindles, web-based extortions schemes, phishing attacks, malware breaches, and nonpayment and nondelivery frauds combined. How did we end up here? “Gradually then suddenly, just like going bankrupt or falling in love,” Annie Lowrey writes. “A confluence of financial and technological factors have made the explosion in pig butchering possible.” Lowrey had no way of tracing the source of the scheme targeting her—but many pig butchers have been forced into the practice by gangs, often kidnapped and held in labor camps in Southeast Asia. “The pig butchering has to stop, for the millions of victims being swindled and for the hundreds of thousands of victims being coerced into swindling them,” Lowery writes. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/eFypqRBS

With a choose-your-own-timeline structure and passages of poetic speculation, a new biography of Audre Lorde takes many liberties—and gets closer to the truth by breaking all the rules, writes Danielle Amir Jackson:

After both World Wars, soldiers dumped bombs into the Baltic Sea. A team of robots and divers is trying to fish them out, Paul Hockenos reports for Hakai Magazine:

In the early 1990s, the historical tether between American identity and faith snapped. In a 2019 article, Derek Thompson explored what happened. https://lnkd.in/eHDHpdBG According to Christian Smith, a sociology and religion professor at the University of Notre Dame, America’s nonreligious lurch has mostly been the result of three historical events: the association of the Republican Party with the Christian right, the end of the Cold War, and 9/11. There have also been dramatic changes in the American family. Divorce rates spiked in the ’70s through the ’90s, following the state-by-state spread of no-fault divorce laws. Just as divorce rates stabilized, the marriage rate started to plummet in the ’80s. “There’s historically been this package: Get married, go to church or temple, have kids, send them to Sunday school,” Smith said. But just as stable families make stable congregations, family instability can destabilize the Church. Divorced individuals, single parents, and children of divorce or single-parent households are all more likely to detach over time from their congregations. Finally, the phenomenon of “delayed adulthood” might be another subtle contributor. More Americans, especially college graduates in big metro areas, are putting off marriage and childbearing until their 30s, and are using their 20s to establish a career, date around, and enjoy being young and single in a city. “By the time they settle down,” Thompson writes, “they have established a routine—work, brunch, gym, date, drink, football—that leaves little room for weekly Mass.” As Smith noted, “They know who they are by 30, and they don’t feel like they need a church to tell them.” The deeper question is whether the sudden loss of religion has social consequences for Americans who opt out. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eHDHpdBG

Life can feel too busy for seeing our friends. But there are ways to “pursue friendships that mold themselves to your particular stage in life,” Isabel Fattal writes in the Wonder Reader:

“There’s a moment, toward the end of a parent’s trip to drop their child off at college, when it feels like the world is changing,” Isabel Fattal writes. In this week’s edition of The Wonder Reader, Fattal explores how the parent-child relationship evolves during college: https://lnkd.in/e9xFS88M Before they say goodbye to their kids, many parents will give parting advice. But “usually,” Ezekiel J. Emanuel wrote recently, that advice “will be wrong.” “When it comes to their children, parents are innately conservative,” Emanuel writes. “They want them to be successful and to lead fulfilled and happy lives. To many parents, that means counseling them to pursue what seem like paths to guaranteed success.” But that conservatism doesn’t help students get the most out of their college experience, Emanuel argues. Read more and sign up for the newsletter, a guide by Fattal to new and classic Atlantic stories, published every Saturday: https://lnkd.in/e9xFS88M

“A niche technocratic movement hyper-obsessed with increasing the supply of housing” has experienced “total and complete victory” in Democratic politics in recent weeks, Jerusalem Demsas writes. National Democrats have gone YIMBY:

A recent DOJ indictment offers a clear look at the state of the far-right media ecosystem, Charlie Warzel writes. It’s a patchwork of content mercenaries, who are a natural fit to become the Russian state media’s useful idiots: https://lnkd.in/eGBcMExj

The term “loneliness epidemic” brings to mind “a nation of friendless hermits who have no one to invite to their birthday parties,” Olga Khazan writes. But according to a pair of new surveys, American loneliness is more complex than that: “Americans have friends. We just never really see them,” Khazan continues. https://lnkd.in/ecgHQfpp In a recent study, the communications professor Natalie Pennington found that Americans, on average, report having about four or five friends. Very few—less than 4 percent—reported having no friends. Still, more than 40 percent of respondents felt they were not as emotionally close to their friends as they’d like to be. There’s “a struggle to figure out how to communicate and connect and make time for” friendship, Pennington tells Khazan. Americans are “spending ever more time alone,” Khazan writes. “This difficulty arises, in part, from a shortage of free time.” There’s also the time and effort that scheduling social gatherings can take. “In recent decades, participation in groups that allow friends to meet up easily—such as unions, civic clubs, and religious congregations—has dwindled,” Khazan continues. Modern friendships are also more likely to require active scheduling of individual friend-dates—which also means that people with more resources are better able to maintain friendships. “People with money and regular work hours can see friends at Orangetheory or their local bar,” Khazan writes, “whereas those who work long days, multiple jobs, or erratic schedules might not be able to.” “Maintaining friendships in this atomized new world might require ratcheting down expectations,” Khazan continues. This could mean that, especially for parents with young kids, a weekly brunch is too difficult to coordinate. Instead, one way to get closer to your friends is by taking an interest in the things they care about and asking to see them for small, specific amounts of time. “We need our friends to see us,” the author Anna Goldfarb tells Khazan. “We need our friends to take all our roles into account.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eeEjYKKQ 🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani