What Boredom Actually Means - The Atlantic (Full Access)   

In 1933, the writer James Norman Hall had a bone to pick with the concise nature of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It defined boredom as “being bored; ennui.” “To define [boredom] merely as ‘being bored,’ appallingly true though this may be, is only to aggravate the misery of the sufferer who, as a last desperate resource, has gone to the dictionary for enlightenment as to the nature of his complaint,” Hall wrote in The Atlantic.

Hall proceeds to explain that a dictionary can’t help those suffering from boredom; exercise can’t do much either, in his view (“I have climbed mountains, and boredom has climbed with me”). All a person can do, he argues, is hold on until the moment the boredom chooses to leave. But Atlantic writers in recent years have also pointed to the benefits of boredom—how it can slow us down, how it can motivate us. Today’s reading list takes a closer look at what we really mean when we say, “I’m bored.”

Take a cue from the Danish philosopher: Instead of seeking a new life, go deeper into the one you have.

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Skull and Bones and Equity and Inclusion - The Atlantic (Full Access)   

They wanted to tear down Yale from the inside. Then they got into its most exclusive secret society.

One evening in 2019, in a windowless building known as the “tomb” in the center of Yale’s campus, the members of Skull and Bones snapped. There they were, having been granted membership to the most elite secret society at one of the most elite universities in the world—part of a rare group that for generations included individuals from the most powerful families on the planet. Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Buckleys have all been in Skull and Bones. Three Bonesmen would go on to become president of the United States. Their traditions (including oaths of secrecy upon admission) and antics (stealing the gravestone of Yale’s founder), and the rumors about them (that the Bones tomb contains several human skulls), are legendary—and an intense source of campus gossip.

But there in the tomb, surrounded by oil portraits of former Bonesmen—all white, all chosen by the society’s alumni board—the current members felt overcome not by the achievements of those who had come before them, or by the possibilities that lay ahead, but instead by the organization’s long history of exclusion. So the students did what they felt had to be done: They pulled the portraits down, and replaced them with homemade signs criticizing the secret society’s record of keeping people of color out of its ranks. “Portraits is a relatively straightforward and easy ask,” one member who participated in the redecoration told me. “The way a space looks can have a large impact on a person’s psyche.”

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A Surprising Success Story for Humpback Whales - The Atlantic (Full Access)   

In November 1904, the Norwegian explorer Carl Anton Larsen landed in South Georgia. It was his second visit to the remote island, roughly 1,800 kilometers east of the tip of South America, where the waters of the South Atlantic Ocean were home to huge numbers of whales—and he’d returned with a whaling ship and crew to catch them.

Just a few weeks after establishing a camp in Cumberland Bay, a deep, two-pronged fjord in the rugged island, Larsen’s men killed their first humpback. So many whales foraged in the bay that the mariners didn’t need to venture to the open ocean. By mid-April 1905, they’d killed 91 whales—67 of them humpbacks.

What followed was grisly and swift. South Georgia became a whaling epicenter. Within 12 years, whalers stationed on the island had slaughtered 24,000 humpbacks. “The whalers absolutely exterminated them,” Jennifer Jackson, a whale biologist with the British Antarctic Survey, says.

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The Return of TV’s Most Soulful Show - The Atlantic (Full Access)   

Ever since C. Auguste Dupin pinned the death of a Parisian mother and daughter on an escaped orangutan, the murder mystery has remained one of mainstream culture’s most enduring, flexible, and popular narrative formats. The lonesome detective—with a stern constitution, hair-trigger nonsense detector, and endearing alcohol dependency—is a reliably compelling protagonist, capable of crossing legal lines and meting out justice. This figure is found throughout books and film, but especially on television, where dozens of detectives—be they police officers, licensed PIs, or talented amateurs—have charmed viewers over the decades.

Meet Liz Danvers (played by Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis, a former boxer turned actor), two of the latest entrants into this wide canon. Danvers and Navarro are policewomen stationed in Ennis, a fictional Alaskan town where the gruff white residents frequently clash with the region’s Indigenous Iñupiat people over the economy, environment, and other territorial concerns. Danvers has a bad habit of sleeping with the local men and feuding with their wives; Navarro, an Iñupiat herself, is frequently caught between the soft racism of the police force and the suspicious eyes of her people. The two women have some unexplained beef, making for natural tension when they’re roped into the same case: the grotesque deaths of all the scientists at a nearby research station who had been studying the origins of life on Earth.

This scenario might unfold on any number of shows, which could air on any number of cable networks, but it’s more notable because it unfolds underneath one specific banner: HBO’s True Detective, an anthology series about unsettling murders and the serious people who solve them, which became an overnight phenomenon a decade ago and fizzled out just as quickly. Each of its prior three seasons opened with a different murder, but the show’s particular flavor was using these murders to explore how American institutions such as the Church, the government, and corporations use their power to marginalize the powerless and control society. And though many fictionalized detectives are moody and self-destructive, True Detective’s breakthrough debut season transcended formula with its lead character Rust Cohle, portrayed by veteran movie star Matthew McConaughey, who approached his job as part holy man, part super cop, all heartthrob.

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