Dark Ages 2.0
We’re about to enter the Digital Dark Ages
Online archives are vanishing — and they’re taking our history with them.
by Adam Rogers
The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post.
Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear.
Here’s the gist: Google used to have an online service that generated pithy, user-friendly versions of long, commercially unwieldy uniform resource locators — the key addresses that identify everything on the web. Shorter URLs are easier to track and better for online commerce. Google stopped shortening addresses back in 2019, but the concise URLs it had already created kept right on doing their job. Click on one and it would take you to the right webpage, the way it’s supposed to.
No more. In the blog post, Google announced that as of next year, all of the existingshortened URLs are getting turned off. Poof. And on the web, if your URL doesn’t work, you might as well not exist. You are unreachable. Without laborious renaming, everything behind those links — billions of them, a decade of digital content — will become inaccessible. Gone. Ask not for whom the 404 message tolls.
Yankees’ Fans Rule!
The Genesis of Warhol’s Sex
Curator Greg Pierce On How the Museum of Sex’s Warhol Show Came to Be
“Warhol was a radical Queer filmmaker because he didn’t pretend to be anyone but who he was, even when he was playing the part of the great pretender.”
Andy Warhol’s obsession with celebrity was one of the defining aspects of his career, and analyses of that career, not to mention of his life, often fixate on it—he gets blamed for everything from our own celebrity obsessions to the narcissism that has become the ugly hallmark of the social media age. What’s lost in that narrative is any attention that might otherwise be paid to his overtly political work and experiments in abstraction (his Piss, Oxidation and Cum series works were both more boring and more beautiful than you might imagine), not to mention any exploration into the person, particularly the queer person, behind the prints and the persona.
In his quest to edge as close as possible to fame and glamor, Warhol surrounded himself with celebrities and documented the comings and goings of The Factory crowd in photos and film. His portrait series, in particular, portrayed the faces of celebrity, capturing the vulnerability beneath fame’s facade. But what lurked behind his facade? “Looking at Andy Looking,” which opened at New York’s Museum of Sex during Armory Week, offers some clue. Organized by the museum in partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, it considers both voyeuristic elements of Warhol’s work and the complexities of identity and self-perception that can be gleaned therefrom.
Albert Serra is “balls”
The Loneliness of the Bullfighter
On ‘Afternoons of Solitude’
The most frequently used word in the new film by director Albert Serra is “balls,” but almost as frequently used is “truth.” Following the killing of a bull in which the subject of the film, the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, took near-insane risks with his own life, a member of his team approaches to embrace him. As the crowd roars in the background, we hear the teammate shout with emotion to Roca Rey, “La vida no vale nada! La vida no vale nada! Nada! Que cojones tienes!”
I found this moment a perfect encapsulation of the world of bullfighting as I have come to understand it: unique masculine intimacy; admiration for suicidal risk and disregard for life itself; and a preoccupation with balls. I, myself, have heard men in the stands at bullfights point to bullfighters in the ring and remark approvingly, “This guy wants to die!” to express their satisfaction many times–but not as many times as I’ve heard them talk about cojones.
Later, in the van which transports the bullfighter and his team–his cuadrilla–to their respective hotels, the cuadrilla continually repeats to Roca Rey that he showed “truth” in the ring and killed the bull “truly.” It’s a word we will hear again and again–but not as many times as we will hear cojones.
The film in question is Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary directed by Catalan director Albert Serra. Having previously won prizes at Locarno and Cannes for his fictional films, Serra has now won the Golden Shell, the top award at the San Sebastián film festival for his first documentary.
Chopsticks
Europa Live
Can an icy Jupiter moon sustain life? NASA’s biggest space probe will investigate.
Story by Joel Achenbach, William Neff, Leslie Shapiro
Europa, one of the four large moons of Jupiter first seen by Galileo 414 years ago, may have a deep, salty, global ocean hidden beneath a thick crust of ice. Where there is water, there might be life. In an ambitious $5 billion mission decades in the making, NASA is poised to send a jumbo robotic probe called the Europa Clipper to see if the icy moon has the key characteristics of a habitable world.
“This is a huge deal,” said Robert Pappalardo, the project scientist for the Europa Clipper at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
NASA officials had hoped to launch the spacecraft Thursday on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. But Hurricane Milton — the eye of which passed directly over Cape Canaveral — put everything on hold. Friday night, NASA said the launch window will open Monday. It extends to Nov. 6.
Life beyond Earth is among the greatest unknowns in science. Finding the first confirmed example of alien life has been a goal of NASA for decades. The scientific community has narrowed its focus to a few enticing targets, and at or very near the top of the list is this strange moon that looks like nothing else in the solar system.
Pete Rose Gone
Cincinnati Reds legend Pete Rose dies at age 83
By: Taylor Weiter
CINCINNATI — Reds legend Pete Rose has died. The Cincinnati native who became Major League Baseball’s hit king was 83.
The 1960 Western Hills High School alum signed a professional contract with the Reds after graduation. Once he made it to the big leagues, Rose immediately made an impact for Cincinnati, batting .273 and winning National League Rookie of the Year.
A key part of the Big Red Machine and “The Great Eight,” Rose was National League MVP and World Series MVP while helping lead Cincinnati to two World Series titles.
Rose then signed with the Phillies in 1979. At the time of the signing, he was the highest-paid athlete in team sports. One year later, he won his third World Series title. He was in Philadelphia until the 1984 season when he was granted a release and signed a one-year contract with the Montreal Expos. In August 1984, he was traded back to Cincinnati.
Kris Kristofferson Gone
Kris Kristofferson Dies: Legendary Country Singer-Songwriter And ‘A Star Is Born’ Golden Globe Winner Was 88
Kris Kristofferson, a country singer-songwriter who revolutionized the genre and Golden Globe-winning actor who starred opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1976 A Star Is Born, has died at 88, surrounded by family in his home in Maui, Hawaii.
As a prolific country music artist, Kristofferson racked up 13 Grammy nominations throughout his career, with three wins including for Best Country Song for the ballad “Help Me Make It Through The Night” off of his 1970 album Kristofferson. In 1984, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score for Songwriter alongside Willie Nelson, with whom he also co-starred in the music drama. “Me and Bobby McGee,” which he penned in 1969 and which Roger Miller first recorded, was eventually performed as a cover by Janis Joplin, and its posthumous release in 1971 landed it atop the Billboard 100 chart.
Portraying John Norman Howard in the heart-wrenching 1976 romantic drama opposite Streisand’s Esther Hoffman led him to a Golden Globe win for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy the following year.
Ive On The Move
After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own
by Tripp Mickle
Five years to the week after he walked away from the top job designing the iPhone, Jony Ive leaned over a hulking model of a San Francisco city block. The dozen buildings, with each brick carved to scale in Alder wood, had become a prototype for his future.
“We’re standing right now, here,” Mr. Ive said, pointing with his black, Maison Bonnet reading glasses at a two-story, 115-year-old building in Jackson Square, a Gold Rush Era neighborhood wedged between San Francisco’s Chinatown and Financial District. “We bought this building first, but then we noticed that it had access to this huge volume in the center.”
Starlink Messin’ Stuff Up
Starlink is increasingly interfering with astronomy, scientists say
by Paige Bruton
An international team of astronomers reported in a study Wednesday that the second generation model of Starlink satellites is hampering radio astronomy, which is essential for the study of the non-visible universe, like black holes, for example. The satellites, which are part of SpaceX’s internet constellation, were found to have interference 32 times stronger than the first generation.
The number of satellites in orbit around Earth is rapidly increasing, with some 100,000 expected to be in place by 2030. And as their numbers grow, so does the difficulty of observing the universe from Earth. In some cases, satellites, such as those of Texas company AST Spacemobile, are so big and bright that they appear more luminous all but the brightest objects in the night sky.
Poetry Rules
Can Poetry Save a Nation?
In a globalized world, why should anyone want to be German, French, Spanish, or Hungarian? “None of the above” isn’t a full-credit answer to the question of national identity. This is the great existential question for the West. Nations are the carriers of cultural continuity. Without the hope that future generations will speak our language, remember our struggles, understand our prayers, and continue our labors, we lose our motivation to bring children into the world. There exists a lullaby in Esperanto, but it has never put a baby to sleep. Only national language embedded in a national culture can provide a bridge between past, present, and future.
Poetry plays an irreplaceable role in the enlivenment of the past and the evocation of the future — not just the national classics, but the less pretentious efforts of popular poets. Molière’s bourgeois gentleman was surprised to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life. The precise opposite is the case: Wittingly or not, we cannot help but speak poetry. Every national language inherits unique poetic expressiveness from its particular tradition. The great poets, and even popular poets on occasion, refine and elevate the poetic content of everyday language. That explains why poetry resonates so powerfully: It awakens a dimension of our thought that lies dormant in everyday speech and makes us conscious of our identity.
Go, Little Pony! Go!
Wildly popular ’80s toy has another shot to overcome long-running snub
My Little Pony has again made the list of finalists for the National Toy Hall of Fame
My Little Pony has again made the list of finalists for the National Toy Hall of Fame. Maybe the seventh time will be a charm.
The pastel toy horse with the silky mane is among this year’s 12 contenders, said the announcement Wednesday from the Strong National Museum of Play, in Rochester, N.Y.
Introduced in the early 1980s, My Little Pony became an immediate hit, for a time outselling Barbie and spawning movies and TV shows. The 2010 animated series “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” led to the baffling trend of “bronies,” a fandom of grown men.
Despite the popularity, My Little Pony has always fallen short in the annual balloting for the Toy Hall of Fame — taking a backseat to not only Barbie, American Girl and Cabbage Patch Kids but a stick and a cardboard box.
Rectal Respiration
Scientists who discovered mammals can breathe through their anuses receive Ig Nobel prize
By Issy Ronald
The world still holds many unanswered questions. But thanks to the efforts of the research teams awarded the IG Nobel Prize on Thursday, some of these questions – which you might not even have thought existed – now have answers.
We now know that many mammals can breathe through their anuses, that there isn’t an equal probability that a coin will land on head or tails, that some real plants somehow imitate the shapes of neighboring fake plastic plants, that fake medicine which causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine without side-effects, and that many of the people famous for reaching lofty old ages lived in places that had bad record-keeping.
Among those collecting their prizes was a Japanese research team led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe who discovered that mammals can breathe through their anuses. They say in their paper that this potentially offers an alternative way of getting oxygen into critically ill patients if ventilator and artificial lung supplies run low, like they did during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Outfuckingstanding
James Earl Jones Gone
James Earl Jones, iconic actor and memorable voice of Darth Vader and Mufasa, dead at 93
By Brandon Griggs and Alli Rosenbloom
You can’t think of James Earl Jones without hearing his voice.
That booming basso profundo, conveying instant dignity or menace, was Jones’ signature instrument. It brought power to all his stage and movie roles, most indelibly as Darth Vader in “Star Wars,” Mufasa in “The Lion King” and as the voice of CNN.
That remarkable voice is just one of many things the world will miss about the beloved actor, who died Monday, according to his agent. He was 93.
Ellison’s Paramount
Larry Ellison Will Control Paramount After Deal, Filing Says
Story by Christopher Palmeri
(Bloomberg) — Paramount Global, the parent of CBS, will be controlled by software billionaire Larry Ellison after a group led by his son David completes its purchase of the Redstone family’s interest in the film and TV company, according to a regulatory filing.
Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle Corp., is backing his son’s proposal to buy the Redstone’s National Amusements Inc. and take control of Paramount for more than $8 billion. According to a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission, the older Ellison will own 77.5% of National Amusements through a trust and series of corporations.
Across The Worst
Hemingway’s Worst Novel Gets Worse: ‘Across the River’ Is a Dull, Pointless Misfire
Liev Schreiber and Venice can’t save this lifeless adaptation of Hemingway’s least beloved work.
By Rex Reed
Does anyone know how to make a movie these days that makes sense, with enough plot, narrative coherence and character development to keep a viewer from falling asleep? Hope springs eternal, but the answer, from almost everything I’ve seen lately, is no.
The newest time-waster is Across the River and Into the Trees, a dismal disappointment based on the last full-length novel written by Ernest Hemingway and published to abysmal reviews in 1950 (later came The Old Man and the Sea, but that was a short novella, not a novel). Now, more than 70 years later and for reasons unexplained, along comes a dull, pointless movie version of Across the River, proving Hemingway’s worst book has not improved with age. Director Paula Ortiz, obviously obsessed with the source material but understandably realizing how resistant it has always been to film, has changed practically everything about the book, including the plot, the characters and even the postwar years in which it takes place. Nothing, I regret to say, helps. It’s lifeless as a stump, and destined for box-office doom.
Revisiting The Silk Road
China Reaches Back in Time to Challenge the West. Way, Way Back.
The country’s archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road to trace the reach of ancient Chinese civilization, disputing long-held beliefs
By Sha Hua
HINOR, UZBEKISTAN—China’s leader, Xi Jinping, says he is striving to make sure Chinese civilization wields global influence far into the future. One little-noticed part of that vision: an effort to expand its reach into the very distant past.
After decades of digging in their own backyard, Chinese archaeologists are now fanning out across the world, trying to unearth connections between Chinese civilization and pivotal moments in global history.
On the plains of southern Uzbekistan, a team of Chinese scientists is working to excavate burial sites they discovered in 2019. The tombs offer potential clues about the fate of a mysterious nomadic tribe with roots in what is now considered China that could rewrite the history of the Silk Road, the network of trade routes that connected the East and West over two millennia.
Dark Oxygen
‘Dark Oxygen’ in depths of Pacific Ocean prompts new theories on life’s origins
Scientists have discovered that metallic nodules on the seafloor produce their own oxygen in the dark depths of the Pacific Ocean. These polymetallic nodules, generating electricity like AA batteries, challenge the belief that only photosynthetic organisms create oxygen, potentially altering our understanding of how life began on Earth.
By: NEWS WIRES
In the total darkness of the depths of the Pacific Ocean, scientists have discovered oxygen being produced not by living organisms but by strange potato-shaped metallic lumps that give off almost as much electricity as AA batteries.
The surprise finding has many potential implications and could even require rethinking how life first began on Earth, the researchers behind a new study said on Monday.
It had been thought that only living things such as plants and algae were capable of producing oxygen via photosynthesis — which requires sunlight.
But four kilometres (2.5 miles) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, where no sunlight can reach, small mineral deposits called polymetallic nodules have been recorded making so-called dark oxygen for the first time.
AI Eats Electricity
AI’s Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet’s Hyper-Consumption Era
Generative artificial intelligence tools, now part of the everyday user experience online, are causing stress on local power grids and mass water evaporation.
by REECE ROGERS
RIGHT NOW, GENERATIVE artificial intelligence is impossible to ignore online. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Or you might be prompted to try Meta’s AI tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my dreams.
This rush to add AI to as many online interactions as possible can be traced back to OpenAI’s boundary-pushing release of ChatGPT late in 2022. Silicon Valley soon became obsessed with generative AI, and nearly two years later, AI tools powered by large language models permeate the online user experience.
One unfortunate side effect of this proliferation is that the computing processes required to run generative AI systems are much more resource intensive. This has led to the arrival of the internet’s hyper-consumption era, a period defined by the spread of a new kind of computing that demands excessive amounts of electricity and water to build as well as operate.
Neandertal Neighbors
‘A history of contact’: Geneticists are rewriting the narrative of Neanderthals and other ancient humans
Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were discovered in 1856, people have wondered about these ancient hominins. How are they different from us? How much are they like us? Did our ancestors get along with them? Fight them? Love them? The recent discovery of a group called Denisovans, a Neanderthal-like group who populated Asia and South Asia, added its own set of questions.
Now, an international team of geneticists and AI experts are adding whole new chapters to our shared hominin history. Under the leadership of Joshua Akey, a professor in Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, the researchers have found a history of genetic intermingling and exchange that suggests a much more intimate connection between these early human groups than previously believed.
“This is the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture,” said Liming Li, a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Developmental Biology at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who performed this work as an associate research scholar in Akey’s lab.
Read The Classics!
WHAT THE FRESHMAN CLASS NEEDS TO READ
It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead.
By Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland
You’re in. You’ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It’s thrilling. It’s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?
All universities claim to provide some kind of intellectual foundation for their students. Sadly, the reality of what freshmen and sophomores are required to study usually belies the admissions-office propaganda.
In our view, liberal education requires that students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward. If they are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities—an always unfinished tapestry of admirable and shameful lives, noble and base deeds. They must develop an ear for the English language and the language of ancestral wisdom as well as the various languages of intellectual inquiry, including mathematics. They need a good grasp of modern statistical methods. But they must also allow themselves to be inwardly formed and cultivated by the classics—what the English critic Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.”
A classic is an exemplary instance, a work with imperishable cultural vitality. The Hebrew Bible is a classic, as is Homer’s Iliad. They are taproots of the great branching oak of Western civilization. A liberal education must begin at the beginning, where strange, beguiling voices of the distant past speak with authority of what it means to be human.
Oops!
After 4-year-old accidentally smashes ancient jar, museum invites him back.
The 3,500-year-old artifact, on display in a museum in Haifa, Israel, predated the Biblical kings Solomon and David.
By Charlotte Kwan
A 4-year-old accidentally knocked over and shattered a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age jar during a visit to the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa in Israel on Friday.
The museum said the artifact, which is dated from 2200 to 1500 B.C.E., was designed to store and transport goods, such as olive oil and wine, and was characteristic of the ancient Canaan region. The jar, the museum said in a statement, predated the Biblical kingsSolomon and David.
Though similar jars have been discovered in archaeological excavations, many are found in pieces or incomplete, making this jar rare for having been unearthed intact, and for its size.
Laura Dern Dissed
Laura Dern was forced to quit college over ‘Blue Velvet’: “You are no longer welcome”
“Pisses me off”
Laura Dern has revealed she was forced to drop out of college after landing the role of Sandy Williams in David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.
Appearing on a recent episode of Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Dern remembered being told she would no longer be welcome at UCLA film school if she took the part.
“I was 17, so excited to get into UCLA,” Dern said. “I was there for two days, and I had auditioned and got offered the role in Blue Velvet.”
Dean said she was “ecstatic” about landing the role as she “worshiped” Lynch, who had already won an Oscar for directing 1980’s The Elephant Man. However, when she went to ask to head of her college department about getting a leave of absence, she was told “absolutely not”.
Rawdogging
Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves
Rawdogging is a search for purity that cannot be achieved.
By Ian Bogost
It was time to buckle up and face the void. I was going to “rawdog” this flight, a new trend in extreme air travel. Rawdoggers, according to the dubious lore of social-media virality, overcome the longest of long-haul flights (New York to Hong Kong, say, or London to Sydney) by means of nihilism. They claim to spend the entire journey, perhaps as many as 18 hours, doing nothing other than staring at the flight map on the seat-back screen—no movies, no books, and, for the rawdoggiest, not even any meals.
My flight was an embarrassingly modest 78 minutes long, but I didn’t last even 15. A purebred rawdogger might call me weak—unable to endure even the length of one Perfect Strangers before leaning on the artificial crutch of Spotify downloads, Fast & Furious films streamed via in-flight entertainment, young-adult fiction inhaled from an e-book reader, the lure of laptop work, or the foaming head of a Diet Coke poured from the rolling cart. Such is the sorry state of contemporary culture, they might lament, that these temptations of the flesh cannot be relinquished even temporarily.
Avoid Bad People
World’s oldest person, Maria Branyas Morera, dies at 117 in Spain
Story by Adela Suliman
She was dubbed a “supercentenarian” and the world’s oldest person. She celebrated her 117th birthday earlier this year with a small cake with candles, and credited “staying away from toxic people” among the reasons she lived so long.
María Branyas Morera an American-born Spaniard, died in her sleep this week, her family said in a post on X. Having lived to be 117 years and 168 days, she was the eighth-oldest person in history, the Guinness World Records said. The cause of her death was not made public; Guinness said that beyond hearing and mobility issues, she had no major health issues.
Branyas attributed her longevity to “luck and good genetics,” according to Guinness. She also cited “order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity, and staying away from toxic people.”
Why Dad Jokes Are Cool
Funny parents raise happier kids
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Perhaps “dad jokes” are more powerful (and important) than we’ve realized all along. An exciting new study for parents concludes that humor could be the missing ingredient in the recipe for effective child-rearing.
Picture this: It’s a typical weekday morning. You’re trying to get your kids ready for school, but your five-year-old is adamant about wearing her princess costume to kindergarten, while your seven-year-old has suddenly decided he’s allergic to breakfast. As the clock ticks and your blood pressure rises, you have two choices: lose your cool or find the funny. According to this groundbreaking research, choosing the latter might not only save your sanity but could also build stronger, more positive relationships with your children.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, reveals that a whopping 71.8% of participants agreed that humor can be an effective parenting tool. However, it’s not just about cracking jokes or pulling silly faces. The research suggests that parental humor could be a secret ingredient in fostering cognitive flexibility, relieving stress, and promoting creative problem-solving and resilience in both parents and children.
[ from StudyFinds ]
It’s All Going To End Someday
MAJOR EARTH SYSTEMS ON TRACK FOR COLLAPSE, SCIENTISTS FIND
THAT’S GONNA LEAVE A MARK.
Imagine this dire scenario: the Atlantic Ocean’s sea currents which bring warm water to Europe collapses, making large swaths of the continent as cold as the Arctic Circle.
In a grim turn, that’s just the scenario that a team of European scientists are warning about in a new study in the journal Nature Communications: that this catastrophic collapse — along with the ruination of the Amazon rainforest and the melting of polar ice — is on track to actually happen if we continue along our current path.
Specifically, the scientists say these major Earth systems, important for keeping the global climate stable for human civilization, face a 45 percent or greater chance of collapsing in the next 300 years, even if we temporarily bring back global warming below the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. Worse, the collapse may be irreversible.
[ from Futurism ]
No Cel Phones (and the kids don’t mind)
East Jackson High School students ‘relieved’ after cell phone ban
Superintendent initially expected the phone ban to result in a ‘battle,’ but found that wasn’t the case
At East Jackson High School, “engagement is up, and drama is down – exponentially” after school officials last year banned cell phones in class, according to Principal Joel Cook.
“When you take away the compulsion to address Snapchat and TikTok, kids find themselves having to concentrate and participate in some of these debates in the classroom,” he told MLive. “Students, staff and parents have appreciated it.”
The district’s PowerSchool data center shows that since school officials required students to stash their phones in their lockers during class beginning last school year, behavioral referrals have declined by 40%.
Damn these berries are good!
Why America’s Berries Have Never Tasted So Good
Driscoll’s had to figure out how to breed, produce and sell its most flavorful strawberries and raspberries. Now the strategy is starting to bear fruit.
By Ben Cohen
WATSONVILLE, Calif.—The strawberries of America’s future are as rich and juicy as the story of how they came to be.
They look resplendent. They taste like candy and fruit punch. They’re just firm enough to hold their shape when you bite into one and soft enough that it will melt in your mouth. They’re also related to a blueberry halfway across the world that was nearly lost to history.
It’s a typically cool morning in Northern California, before the fog makes way for yet another sunny day, when Soren Bjorn grabs, twists and snaps a perfectly ripe strawberry right off the plant. As the chief executive of Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry company, he knows everything about the luscious hunk of fruit in his hands—and he knows that it’s something of a miracle.
Every year, the company develops and studies 125,000 strawberry varieties in search of the handful that Driscoll’s will sell across the country and around the world. But until recently, one type of strawberry never actually made it to the grocery store.
“We threw out the absolute sweetest, best-tasting berries that we had in our whole gene pool,” Bjorn said.