What Happened When a Pacific Island Was Cut Off from the Internet
Plus, happy spooky season
It’s pumpkin season. For some people, this means they’ll head to the pumpkin patch this weekend or next, carve a jack-o’-lantern, and call it good until they hand out candy on the 31st. At my house, we’ve had our 12-foot skeleton and other Halloween decor up since Labor Day, and I seriously considered purchasing a season pass to our local pumpkin patch.
I love spooky season (and am delighted that my three-year-old does, too). It’s so much less complicated than all of the other holidays, and comes with so much less invisible labor. There are no presents to buy (or accidentally forget someone who gets one for you); there’s no five-course meal to cook while you frantically clean your home before guests arrive. Halloween is about doing exactly what you and your family want to do without the added pressure.
Tomorrow, we’re headed to the pumpkin patch to get our big, carving pumpkins, because last time we only picked up a few tiny ones. I guess I should have opted for that season pass after all.
What I’m Reading
Extremely Offline: What Happened When a Pacific Island Was Cut Off from the Internet
A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world—and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life
By Samanth Subramanian
That was the moment when Sam Vea’s mobile phone gave out. Landlines died as well, because in Tonga, as in many other countries, even ordinary telephone calls are now routed through data cables. In Southampton, Clare could look at satellite photos and see that the eruption had blessedly left Vava‘u, Tongatapu and other islands in the Tongan archipelago intact, but Tongans themselves couldn’t be sure of that. They had no way of communicating with each other, no way of learning about the condition of other parts of their own, small country. “For a week, I didn’t know what happened to my family on Tongatapu,” one man in Vava‘u told me. “I have a brother in Nuku’alofa. I had to assume he was OK.” Another said: “We thought Tongatapu was obliterated. There was just no way to know differently.”
The Last Resort
At Bombay Beach, a half-ruined former vacation town on the edge of the Salton Sea, absurdist philosophers, artists, and everyday townsfolk have undertaken a postapocalyptic experiment in radical living
By Ash Sanders
You feel as if you’ve stepped back in time, into a place people have forgotten. The town isn’t large—a little over a half-mile square, its dirt roads named with numbers and letters. But it’s big enough to be a lot of things at once. On some streets, you could be forgiven for thinking no one lived here. Old trailer homes sigh on their blocks, their screen doors rusted and hanging. A sign announcing BOMBAY BEACH ESTATES sits next to a huddle of concrete buildings, their doors and windows gone, their abundant graffiti tending toward alien iconography. The scene reads like a developer’s erstwhile dream, and a homeowners association’s worst nightmare.
But the sense of ruin is not uniform. Here and there, the feeling of absence is replaced by a strange sort of presence. On one street, someone has lined up a series of junked vintage cars to face a movie screen. The cars are empty. The vibe: rapture at the drive-in. Down the road, old TVs have been stacked side by side, their screens painted with abstract shapes. On the roof of a nearby house, there sits, inexplicably, a giant sculpted egg. The scene puts you in mind of Whitman. Does it contradict itself? Very well, then: It contradicts itself. The town contains multitudes.
No, Hundreds of Climbers Were Not Rescued on Mount Everest. Here’s What Happened.
Amid the exaggerated headlines, our articles editor provides a handy explainer for the rescue mission to save 800 people near the world’s highest peak
By Frederick Dreier
Wait, so none of these people were climbing Mount Everest?
No.
But they were Mount Everest climbers, right?
Nope. They were hikers, with zero intention of ascending the actual Mount Everest.
But were they on Mount Everest?
I suppose it depends on your definition of “on” a mountain. If you define it as I do—being located between the base of the mountain’s prominence and the summit—then no, they were not.
Last but Not Least
Mychal Threets, the new host of Reading Rainbow, is a national treasure.
