A Taxi on Fire, a Turtle Thief, and a Police Informant
Plus dinner with the people who pick your produce
Illustration by Natasha Donovan
A crowd set a driverless taxi on fire in San Francisco recently, with The Verge reporting on simmering tensions between residents and companies such as Waymo and Cruise after the city gave them a green light to operate in town. In “Rise of the Robots,” Sharon J. Riley explored tensions over automated vehicles in the trucking industry specifically, talking to engineers and drivers:
The most common refrain from truckers, though, was a feeling of powerlessness. They felt that their skills, honed after decades in the industry, were no longer considered of use. As one driver with forty-one years of experience puts it, “It used to be that I could put a nine-sixteenths wrench, a five-eighths, and a three-quarter-inch wrench in my truck and fix [anything],” he says. But that’s changed. “If you’re driving along the road and your dash lights up like a Christmas tree, you can’t do nothing about it.” [Read more]
Another day, another story about someone smuggling a reptile. A man travelling by bus across the US-Canada border was found to have, er, pythons in his pants. Take a deep dive into the wild world of the underground animal trade with Clare Fieseler’s true crime piece, “To Catch a Turtle Thief: Blowing the Lid Off an International Smuggling Operation”:
In August 2014, a padded FedEx envelope arrived at the Calgary International Airport. It had been shipped from an address in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and on the customs form it had been labelled “Book.” As it was being sorted, a customs agent saw the package move. Inside the envelope was a slim cardboard box with holes along its sides. Inside that box were two small fabric pouches with duct-taped edges. An agent carefully opened the pouches into a plastic mail-carrying bin. Golf ball–size baby turtles emerged, crawling toward corners, scrambling over one another’s shells, and shuffling up the box’s walls. [Read more]
The New Yorker just put out a feature on the protection of prison informants. In 2005, we published a piece with startling photos about “John Holloway”: a former clown, trucker, drug addict, and retired police agent. Andrew Mitrovica explored Holloway’s career path and “perplexing” choice to forgo witness protection:
Holloway has rejected it all, choosing instead to visit family and friends regularly and to live and work under his real name in a rural Ontario town close to where he recently participated in an undercover operation.
“People that hide are ashamed,” he says angrily. “I’m not fucking running from anybody. And what are they going to do when they find me? Kill me or die trying.” [Read more]
A new lawsuit is painting Canada’s temporary foreign worker program as modern-day slavery. We’ve covered problems with the program extensively, including in Corey Mintz’s “Eating Dinner with Canada’s Migrant Workers”:
It’s November, near the end of Armando’s third season in Canada. His roommate, Juan, has been coming here for eleven years, much of it spent alongside his father, who worked here for twenty-eight years. This passing down through generations is typical of the migrant agricultural worker experience in Canada, family members living and working here for two-thirds of every year with no clear pathway to citizenship or opportunity to gain a foothold in Canadian society. Workers can change jobs only if both old and new employer agree: the labourers are, in effect, bound to their bosses. [Read more]