Three Fun Things for January 7, 2023

A podcast from Texas, a Tetris wizard, and an essay on Ozempic culture.

Jim Evans, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1 . The Sugar Land podcast.

Sugar Land is a booming suburb just outside Houston, Texas, whose growth over the last 25 years has transformed it from a sleepy company town to a thriving small city with more than 111,000 residents. The growth shifted the city’s geographic and residential center away from the now-closed Imperial Sugar Factory and toward the new, shopping-forward Town Center, which in 2004 became the location of the new City Hall. Sugar Land’s image of itself is a town looking toward the future, never back; even as a kid visiting the sugar factory on field trips, I was taught to think of Sugar Land as a place focused on the future, not the past, to the point that I never really learned its history.

Recently, however, that history is getting new scrutiny, thanks in large part to activists like the late Reginald Moore, who spent the final decades of his life seeking official recognition of the history of convict labor as the original foundation for Sugar Land’s prosperity. Convict leasing, a post-Reconstruction system in which state prisons “leased” their inmates to work on former slave plantations (the workers, many of them Black men jailed for minor offenses, were unpaid), made the ongoing existence of Imperial Sugar possible; the system allowed plantations to “lease” Black workers in lieu of enslaving them.

In 2015, Sugar Land’s history of convict leasing made national news, when the remains of 95 people were discovered during the construction of a technical school on the old plantation site. Those bodies, and that work to un-bury history, are the subjects of the mostly excellent Sugar Land podcast, which describes the still incomplete struggle to tell the stories of the Black men who worked in cane fields under brutal conditions, died of heat exhaustion, malnutrition, and disease, and were buried in unmarked graves.

The podcast focuses on the work of Moore and other activists, including the “descendent community,” to tell the stories of the Sugar Land 95 and to provide closure to their descendants. Even if you’ve read about the broad outlines of the story before (in places like the New York Times or Texas Monthly), the reporters, Brittney Martin and Naomi Reed, cover a lot of new ground, including the ongoing fight over how to honor the buried men and the much broader implications the Sugar Land story has for towns and families across the state. The middle few episodes, which include a lot of show-your-work stuff about genealogical research and digging through state archives, drag—imagine if “All the President’s Men” had replaced the scene in the Library of Congress with 30 minutes on the card catalog system—and the show focuses too much on academic debates at the expense of human stories. Still, it offers an important glimpse into Texas’ history of convict leasing after the Civil War—a history whose legacy includes the state’s use of unpaid inmate labor today.

2. The kid who “beat” Tetris

Technically, it’s supposed to be impossible to beat Tetris—the game is designed to go on forever—but with the old NES system, there comes a point when the game gets overloaded, produces a line break between two lines of blocks, and crashes. The first AI got to this “kill screen” a couple of years ago, but last week marked the first time a person accomplished this feat, when a 13-year-old reached the kill screen using the “rolling” controller technique, which… well, if you’re reading this and interested in knowing more, this link will send you you on your way down that very entertaining rabbit hole. Congrats to Blue Scuti—and the kid who did the same thing two days later, only faster.

3. Kate Manne’s piece on Ozempic in the NYT

I’ve had trouble articulating the unease I feel about the latest class of appetite-suppressing drugs. I don’t agree with critics who argue people should have to “work for” their weight loss through dieting and exercise, or those who say wanting to lose weight is just giving in to fatphobia. But it’s a very troubling sign that the second the body positivity movement got the tiniest foothold, it was buried under a stampede of people touting the benefits of the latest miracle weight-loss drug.

Manne’s piece articulates this unease, which I can’t be alone in feeling, arguing that by suppressing people’s (mainly women’s) desire to eat, and by eliminating most of the pleasure we feel when we satisfy our hunger, the new class of drugs tells users that normal human desires deserve to be silenced.

Imagine, Manne writes, if we had access to a drug that made sleep largely unnecessary, and we began to “pronounce ourselves afflicted with ‘sleep noise,’ rather than simple human tiredness — thereby depicting normal bodily need as weakness and the drugs to treat such weariness as a solution to this non-problem.” To call hunger “food noise” is “to go beyond describing it,” Manne writes, and “to invoke the normative claim that simply loving food, letting food occupy our thoughts and responding to our hunger is suspect. It isn’t.”

Read the whole essay here.