It did not come easy, and it also came down to the 72nd hole.
But in the end, Scottie Scheffler got the job done once again.
He won the Memorial Tournament by one stroke over Collin Morikawa, despite shooting a 2-over 74 on a difficult day at Muirfield Village. Only 11 players finished under-par for the week, as Sunday’s final round had a scoring average of 74.93.
The drama unfolded on the 18th, where Scheffler airmailed his 8-iron from the fairway over the green. Because of the firm conditions, players struggled to find the putting surfaces all day.
Morikawa, trailing by one at the time, did the same from the fairway bunker, which turned things into a chipping contest with the tournament on the line. Morikawa went first, as his third shot almost went in for a remarkable birdie.
“I don’t know what it looked like on TV, but from my vantage point, it didn’t look like it was too close to going in,” Scheffler said of Morikawa’s third shot on 18.
“I was just trying to stay in my own little world out there and focus on trying to get my ball up and down. I had kind of an iffy lie there in the rough. So as [Morikawa’s] chip was rolling up to the cup, I wasn’t really paying that close of attention to it. I was more just trying to gauge the speed as it went down the hill because I was coming from a pretty similar angle.”
Morikawa was also asked about this shot.
“To be honest, I thought it was breaking right,” Morikawa said.
“Completely whiffed that one and it broke left. But that’s such a tough chip shot. All you had to do was just nestle it on the green. I hit it exactly how I wanted it and you can’t complain when you’re hitting shots like that down the stretch and you’re doing things like that.”
After getting a good read off Morikawa’s shot, Scheffler left his chip about five feet short. It stopped outside Morikawa’s mark, which set the stage for a chance at victory. The World No. 1 then holed the winning putt, thus securing his fifth win of the season.
His first victory of the year came at Bay Hill for the Arnold Palmer Invitational. The following week, he won The Players. Then, in April, Scheffler won at Augusta National and Hilton Head for the RBC Heritage in back-to-back weeks again.
And now, Scheffler won the Memorial the week before the U.S. Open. His win at Muirfield Village marks his first career PGA Tour win after the month of April.
“Was it the hardest one this year? I don’t think so. It’s hard to rate the difficulty of wins,” Scheffler said.
“Maybe The Players? I think that would maybe be the hardest just because I was coming off a win, and my neck was bugging me pretty bad that week. But as far as satisfaction at the end of the week, this one’s up there pretty significantly. You know, being at Mr. [Jack] Nicklaus’s golf course and being at a tournament where I’ve had a few close calls in the past, it’s very satisfying to hole that putt on 18 and walk off with a win and shake Mr. Nicklaus’s hand.
“A couple of years ago, I missed a putt that maybe would have been for a playoff, and he told me, ‘You didn’t make the putt today, but one day, ‘you’ll make the putt on 18, and you’ll be walking off to shake my hand.’ So it was pretty special thinking about that as I was walking over to shake his hand today.”
Two years ago, Scheffler finished in solo third at the Memorial, missing out on a playoff between Morikawa and Patrick Cantlay.
But this time, Scheffler got to shake Nicklaus’ hand in victory, which also carries historical significance.
Only one man has won the Arnold Palmer Invitational, The Players, the Masters, and the Memorial, all in the same year, and it happened in 2001. That, of course, was Tiger Woods, whose 7-shot victory at Muirfield Village that summer marked his fourth win of the season.
As for Sunday’s round, Scheffler did not look like the top player in the world at times. He could not save par out of the bunker on the par-3 4th, which marked his first bogey of the day. Another bogey at the par-3 8th followed as Scheffler could not get up and down from the thick rough beside the green. In between that, though, Scheffler did make a birdie at the par-4 6th.
But that marked his only par-breaker of the day.
“I know Scottie didn’t have his A game on several holes today like a lot of fellas didn’t have their A games on several holes today,” said tournament host Jack Nicklaus.
“But he put enough of his A-game together to win the golf tournament, and that’s what it’s all about.”
Still, Scheffler made plenty of pars, with none bigger than a 25-foot par save on the difficult par-3 16th, which maintained his two-shot advantage.
He also made numerous pars because he missed a few good chances at birdie, specifically on the 12th and 13th holes. He came up empty-handed after two excellent approaches on those two holes.
Nevertheless, on the par-4 17th, Scheffler left his approach in the rough short of the green. He could not save par on back-to-back holes, thus giving him a one-shot lead going into the 18th and ramping up the drama in the process.
But in the end, Scheffler took care of business under pressure, just as Woods did for all those years in his prime.
And best of all, he won for the first time as a father, with his wife Meredith and son Bennett there firsthand to witness it all.
“Watching her be a mom the last month or so has been really special, and I’m so proud of her,” Scheffler said.
“I definitely could not be doing what I do out here on the golf course without her support, and yeah, having Bennett there today to celebrate, even though he has absolutely no clue what’s going on, but it’s fun for us as parents, and so we’ll always be able to look back fondly on this tournament and Benny’s first week out on the road with us.”
Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. In the summer, Grand Marais’s art galleries, shops, and restaurants swell with tourists drawn to what the website Budget Travel once dubbed “America’s Coolest Small Town.” The wait for a table at the Angry Trout Café, which serves locally sourced cuisine in an old fishing shanty, can run to more than an hour. When summer is over, the town retreats into itself again, which suits full-time residents just fine. “Even though we’re a tourism economy, most of us live a life where we just don’t want to be bothered,” said Steve Fernlund, who published the Cook County News Herald in the 1990s and now writes a weekly column for The North Shore Journal. “I’m at the end of a road, and I’ve got 12 acres of land. My closest neighbors are probably about 600 feet away through the woods. So, you know, we appreciate being hermits.”
Yet privacy only extends so far here. Gossip travels fast while having breakfast at the South of the Border café, or in chance encounters along Wisconsin Street. Everybody knows everybody else’s business—or thinks they do. “Even though there are differences of opinion—we have an eclectic collection of opinions—this is a close-knit community,” said Dennis Waldrop, who manages the Cook County Historical Museum. “Anything that happens here is discussed extensively.”
The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres near town owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk.
But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice. Grand Marais is still trying to piece itself back together.
Every small town has its cast of offbeat characters. Larry Scully was one of Grand Marais’s. Larry, who was 77 in 2023, dwelled on the fringe of town, where Fifth Street meets Highway 61, and on the fringe of reality. His two-bedroom house, which used to belong to his parents, was crowded with items he’d hoarded over the years. The mess spilled into his front yard, which was cluttered with satellite dishes, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a wood-frame sign advertising “antler bone art.” The sign was decorated with several of Larry’s scrimshaw carvings, which he hawked at art fairs. In addition to carving, he’d tried his hand at an array of other pursuits: refurbishing broken electronics, selling solar-powered generators that could run home appliances in the event of an emergency, and even fashioning leather lingerie that he peddled to women. Larry had had no stable career to speak of since he arrived in town in the early 1980s.
Larry was a conspiracy theorist. On his Facebook page, he posted videos and articles declaring that the federal government controlled the weather, that Sandy Hook was a hoax, that Timothy McVeigh was a “CIA patsy,” that the totalitarian New World Order was real. Around Grand Marais, Larry was also known to be exceedingly religious. He attended Mass on Saturday evenings at St. John’s Catholic Church, always sitting in the front row, and he believed that the statues there cried actual tears—sometimes of blood. He carried a lock of hair that he said once belonged to Father Mark Hollenhorst, a priest at St. John’s who died in 1993, in a leather pouch around his neck; he claimed that it could effect miraculous cures.
Larry referred to himself as a prophet and would often appear around town dressed in a cloak and sandals and carrying a wooden staff. He once showed up on the courthouse steps for the National Day of Prayer clad all in black, his head covered by a medieval-type chainmail hood, and fell to his knees screaming. Another time he berated a group of gay people who’d gathered in downtown Grand Marais, shouting through a bullhorn that God didn’t approve of them.
Many locals found Larry’s zeal exhausting. “When I’d see him, I’d know I was going to be there for a long time, because he’d go on and on,” said Laura Laky, a Grand Marais resident. “He’d talk about the end-times, the Book of Revelation, Christ coming again.”
Other people were scared of Larry. Rumors that he abused children circulated around Grand Marais for years. People whispered about him watching kids from his parked car. There were claims that he’d videotaped girls’ volleyball games and children at Sven and Ole’s, the local pizzeria. A member of the nearby Chippewa tribe told me that Larry had been banned from the Grand Portage powwow after parents complained about him passing out candy to their children.
Larry once approached a man named Gary Nesgoda at a gas station and asked if he had kids. When Nesgoda said that he did, Larry showed him pictures of a fairy garden he’d built behind his house. There were miniature staircases and doors, and little figurines set amid tree roots. Larry insisted that Nesgoda, who had recently moved to Grand Marais, should bring his kids over to see it. “Everything he was telling me sounded pretty neat,” Nesgoda told me. Then, in the gas station parking lot, someone who’d overheard the conversation stopped Nesgoda. “Do not bring your children over there,” they warned.
This was a common theme. “Larry was the boogeyman,” said Brian Larsen, editor and publisher of the Cook County News Herald, who is a father of four children. “You’d tell your kids to stay the heck away from him.”
In 2014, Larry decided to run for mayor of Grand Marais. In a candidate forum broadcast on WTIP, a community radio station, he ranted about Christianity. “We can’t sit by and let our government stop us from having the Bible in the military, taking out the crucifixes, taking out the Ten Commandments in our federal buildings and establishments,” he said. Then, just before election day, the Cook County News Herald ran a front-page article that seemed to confirm the longstanding speculation about Larry. The piece detailed his criminal conviction for the sexual assault of a six-year-old girl.
Before he became an object of fear and fascination in Grand Marais, Larry was married—twice. For a time he lived with his second wife, Sheila, in Ramsey, about 25 miles outside Minneapolis. On Ash Wednesday in 1979, Sheila went to evening Mass and then to bowl in her weekly league, leaving Larry home alone with their five children: three young boys from his first marriage and six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, from hers. While the other children slept, according to police and court records, Larry invited his stepdaughter into his bedroom.
The little girl later told a police investigator that he showed her “pictures of naked people,” touched her “potty area” with a vibrator, then stuck his tongue and finger into her vagina. She said it wasn’t the only time he’d touched her, and that he’d warned her not to tell anyone, but she went to her mother anyway. Sheila reported the incident to child welfare services, who notified law enforcement. She told the police investigator that her husband had also recently become violent and suicidal.
The police arrested Larry. In a recorded statement with investigators, he admitted that he’d had sexual contact with his stepdaughter on two Wednesday evenings while his wife was bowling. A psychiatrist determined that he was competent to stand trial, finding no evidence of “any kind of psychiatric disorder.” Rather than face a jury, Larry confessed to second-degree criminal sexual conduct, and the prosecution recommended a sentence of five years. Two court psychologists submitted reports indicating that Larry wasn’t open to receiving treatment. At an October 1979 hearing, the judge urged Larry to reconsider. “Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.”
Larry was incarcerated in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison, and in records from his time there, there’s no mention of him receiving counseling or treatment, though he did join a Bible study. Soon, changes to the state’s sentencing guidelines allowed Larry to seek early release. Since the state did not provide evidence that doing so would “present a danger to the public,” the court approved Larry’s request. He left prison on January 19, 1982, after serving a little more than two years for his crime.
In those days, there was no sex offender registry in Minnesota, or in most states. Larry was at liberty to go where he liked. Sheila had divorced him by then, and his three sons were living with their mother. Larry, who was 36 at the time, hitchhiked to Grand Marais to move in with his parents.
Three decades later, Larry lost the town’s mayoral election, 345 votes to 42. Many locals were surprised that he’d gotten any votes at all, especially after the story broke about his criminal record. “Forty-something people voted for him,” said Amber Waldrop, who lived down the street from Larry. “They knew about this guy. For anybody to even think that someone like that should become mayor of this town is sickening.”
Some of those votes came from Larry’s friends, many of whom shared his belief in conspiracy theories. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they also believed what Larry told them: that the accusations against him were made up, that his ex-wife had encouraged her daughter to lie to the police, that he only took the plea deal to avoid a long prison sentence.
Larry’s friends knew that he tended to hijack conversations and go on at length about topics ranging from the Rapture to homeopathic cures, and that he engaged strangers in ways many people found uncomfortable. But being an oddball, they said, isn’t a crime. Some of his friends thought Larry was on the autism spectrum, which made it hard for him to read social cues and show empathy. “This man has been persecuted all of his life,” said Bob Stangler, a Vietnam veteran who knew Larry for years. “The citizens of the area have labeled him a pervert, and he’s not a pervert at all. He’s a genius with Asperger’s who’s overcaring of people.”
A woman I’ll call Carol, who asked that her real name not be used, said she was so close with Larry that she spoke to him almost daily for 12 years. She knew him to visit sick people, distribute food to the needy, and take care of his ailing mother, who died in 2013. At her memorial service, Larry displayed his mother’s ashes in a cookie jar resembling the Star Wars character R2-D2, saying that it was what she wanted. (His father passed away in 1997.) “As long as I’ve known him, he never hurt anybody,” Carol told me.
She knows that hers is a minority opinion, that for many people in town Larry was foremost a convicted sex offender. “You can never get rid of that label,” she said.
Once they learned about his 1979 conviction, many parents in Grand Marais were more worried than ever that Larry posed a threat to their children. It’s a common enough fear. On the far right, popular conspiracy theories such as QAnon decry a global cabal of child molesters, but even among the general population, concern about the danger posed by pedophiles is widespread. In a Lynn University poll, 75 percent of roughly 200 Florida adults said they believed that sex offenders would reoffend. Yet according to a meta-study conducted by researchers at Public Safety Canada in 2004, one of the most comprehensive available, only 23 percent of people convicted of child sexual abuse were charged or convicted of a similar crime within the next 15 years. (The study’s authors concede that many victims never come forward.) In interviews for this story, researchers noted that recidivism rates have declined even more in recent years.
No one came forward to accuse Larry of more recent abuse after his 1979 conviction. Still, perception alone was enough to put many Grand Marais parents on edge. For one young man, that concern became an obsession.
If you were passing through Grand Marais a few years back and stopped for gas at the Holiday station on the corner of Broadway and Highway 61, you might have met a stocky cashier with a round, friendly face. While making change, he might have told you one of his homespun puns or signature dad jokes: Why does Paul Bunyan trip in the woods? Because he’s always felling.
That cashier was Levi Axtell. He was raised by his parents, Denise and Treg, in Hovland, a small community located 18 miles from Grand Marais. The Axtells were devout Christians and widely respected in Grand Marais, where they both worked. Denise was a nurse, Treg a physical therapist. The couple had three children: daughters Karlee and Katrina, and Levi, the youngest.
Levi grew up in a picturesque log cabin in a clearing among birch and pine trees. The woods were his playground. He spent hours there as a child, often with his friend and neighbor Cedar Adams. They roasted marshmallows over campfires, tried to catch fish barehanded, and played make-believe, running through the trees as if an attacker were pursuing them.
But Levi couldn’t outrun his demons. There was a history of addiction on Denise’s side of the family, and Levi seemed to have inherited a predisposition to substance abuse. At Cook County High School, he played football, ran track, and drank. Brad Wilson, a carpenter in Grand Marais who was a few years behind him in school, recalled Levi getting caught with liquor bottles in his locker and running from the cops.
Levi’s parents sent him to finish school in Duluth, but he was cited twice within two months for underage drinking. The first time was at Duluth East High School. On the morning of May 29, 2014, when a resource officer tried to restrain him, an inebriated Levi pulled away. The officer wrestled Levi to the ground, but he pushed himself up and army-crawled—with the officer on top of him—down the hallway, until he wore himself out. Levi spent two days in jail and was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process with force. “I didn’t know it made the charges worse if you resisted arrest,” he later told Cedar Adams.
Not long after, a law enforcement officer stopped Levi as he walked along the shoulder of Interstate 35. The officer smelled booze on his breath, and Levi admitted that he’d been drinking. The officer cited him and let him go after Levi dumped out a container of alcohol he was carrying.
Three days later, Levi was given a year of probation for his disorderly conduct at Duluth East. (The obstruction charge was dropped.) A judge also ordered him to obtain a chemical-dependency assessment and follow any recommendations. Levi satisfied the terms of his probation, including a stint in treatment.
By 2015, Levi had started dating Anna Ross, who was from Duluth. Their daughter was born on June 17, 2016. Anna had just turned 19; Levi was 20. At first they didn’t live together—Anna stayed in Duluth, while Levi lived with his parents in Hovland. He adored his daughter and beamed when she was in his arms.
Despite the new light in his life, Levi remained burdened at times by darkness. About a year after his daughter’s birth, on the Sunday evening of Memorial Day weekend, Levi got drunk, taped a vacuum hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, ran the other end through the back window, and started the engine. When he texted Anna about what he’d done, she called the sheriff’s department. While she was on the phone with them, Levi called her, and she talked him into turning off the car. Deputies arrived at his home and transported Levi to the hospital. It appears that he received some psychiatric treatment after the incident; a year later he indicated in a court document that he’d been a patient in a mental hospital and had seen a psychiatrist.
Despite his troubles, Levi was by all accounts goofy and lovable. Christina Conroy, a friend who worked with Levi briefly at the Holiday station, described him as “a beautiful soul.” Cedar Adams said, “He’s the best person you’ll ever meet. He’s joyful.” Michael Farnum, another friend, told me, “Levi is very kind and caring. He’d give you the shirt off his back.” His mother, Denise, described Levi as “a sweet, thoughtful boy.” (Levi’s family otherwise declined to talk to me.)
People who knew him casually from encounters at Holiday or Grand Marais’s Whole Foods Co-op, where he also briefly worked, described Levi as personable and a hard worker. Pat Eliasen, the Cook County sheriff and a former assistant coach for the varsity football team at the local high school, coached Levi, who played nose tackle and offensive guard. “You’d tell Levi to do a technique or something and he would just go do it,” Eliasen told me. “You couldn’t find a better football player than that.”
A photo posted on Facebook in 2023 shows Levi with his daughter climbing on his shoulders. According to friends, she was his everything. He was often her primary caregiver while Anna completed a social work degree and later held down two jobs. In the winter, Levi built his daughter snow forts that were so solid he could light a campfire inside. He and his daughter cooked together, drew pictures, and took walks. “She’s his life,” Adams told me.
Levi could not bear the thought of anything bad happening to his little girl. Like any parent, he was on the lookout for any threat to his child. At some point, his attention came to rest squarely on Larry Scully.
The Milky Way has grown over time as other galaxies have approached, collided with, and been torn apart and consumed by our Galaxy.
Each collision triggered wrinkles that still ripple through different families of stars, affecting how they move and behave in space.
One of Gaia’s aims is to unravel the history of the Milky Way by studying these wrinkles — something it’s doing by pinpointing the positions and motions of over 100,000 stars near to our own, a tiny fraction of the about two billion sources it observes.
“We get wrinklier as we age, but our work reveals that the opposite is true for the Milky Way. It’s a sort of cosmic Benjamin Button, getting less wrinkly over time,” said Dr. Thomas Donlon, an astronomer with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Alabama.
“By looking at how these wrinkles dissipate over time, we can trace when the Milky Way experienced its last big crash — and it turns out this happened billions of years later than we thought.”
The Milky Way’s halo contains a large group of stars with unusual orbits, many of those thought to have been adopted into our Galaxy during an event that astronomers call the last major merger.
As the name suggests, this is the last time the Galaxy experienced a significant collision with another galaxy — proposed to be a massive dwarf galaxy that flooded the Milky Way with stars that pass very close to the Galactic center.
Astronomers had dated this merger to between eight and eleven billion years ago, when the Milky Way was in its infancy, and it is known as Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus.
But the data from Gaia’s Data Release 3 now suggests that another merger may have delivered the unusually moving stars.
“For the wrinkles of stars to be as clear as they appear in Gaia data, they must have joined us less than three billion years ago — at least five billion years later than was previously thought,” said Dr. Heidi Jo Newberg, also of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
“New wrinkles of stars form each time the stars swing back and forth through the center of the Milky Way.”
“If they’d joined us eight billion years ago, there would be so many wrinkles right next to each other that we would no longer see them as separate features.”
The finding suggests that rather than these stars originating from the ancient Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger, they must have come from a more recent event dubbed the Virgo Radial Merger, which took place less than three billion years ago.
“The Milky Way’s history is constantly being rewritten at the moment, in no small part thanks to new data from Gaia,” Dr. Donlon said.
“Our picture of the Milky Way’s past has changed dramatically from even a decade ago, and I think our understanding of these mergers will continue to change rapidly.”
“This result — that a large portion of the Milky Way only joined us within the last few billion years — is a big change from what astronomers thought up until now.”
“Many popular models and ideas about how the Milky Way grows would expect a recent head-on collision with a dwarf galaxy of this mass to be very rare.”
“It’s likely that the Virgo Radial Merger brought in a family of other small dwarf galaxies and star clusters with it, which would have all joined the Milky Way at around the same time.”
“Future exploration will reveal which of these smaller objects that were previously thought to be related to an ancient Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus are actually related to a more recent Virgo Radial Merger instead.”
In the landscape of modern American music, few stories are as compelling as the rise of Jelly Roll. Born Jason DeFord in the Antioch neighborhood of Nashville, he spent a significant portion of his youth navigating the revolving doors of the Tennessee justice system. Today, he is a multi-genre powerhouse, a Grammy nominee, and a symbol of redemption. Across from him, in a conversation facilitated by Interview Magazine, sits Jon Bon Jovi, a man whose name is synonymous with the global architecture of rock and roll. On the surface, they are an unlikely pair—the Jersey rock god and the tatted-up Nashville renegade. However, as their dialogue unfolds, it becomes clear that they share a profound commonality: the burden and the blessing of being the "frontman" for their respective communities.
The Architecture of Authenticity
The conversation begins not with the technicalities of songwriting, but with the weight of celebrity. Bon Jovi, having navigated four decades of fame, approaches Jelly Roll with the curiosity of a veteran observing a new kind of phenomenon. He notes that Jelly Roll doesn’t just have fans; he has a congregation. This is a distinction that Jelly Roll embraces. For him, the music was never about "making it" in the traditional sense; it was about survival.
Jelly Roll explains to Bon Jovi that his transition from hip-hop to country and rock wasn’t a strategic pivot but a natural evolution of his storytelling. He speaks candidly about his "sweeter side," a disposition that seems at odds with his rugged exterior. This vulnerability is what draws people in. In a world of curated social media personas, Jelly Roll’s willingness to discuss his stints in prison, his struggles with addiction, and his journey toward fatherhood provides a tether for people who feel discarded by society. Bon Jovi recognizes this, drawing parallels to his own songwriting in the 1980s and 90s, where he often wrote about the working-class struggles of New Jersey.
Redemption as a Brand
One of the most poignant moments in the discussion centers on the concept of the second chance. Jelly Roll is perhaps the most visible "success story" of the American penal system, but he carries that title with a heavy sense of responsibility. He tells Bon Jovi about the "survivor’s guilt" that comes with his success. While he is performing in sold-out arenas, many of the men he grew up with remain behind bars or have succumbed to the opioid crisis.
Bon Jovi, who has spent years working on philanthropic efforts through his Soul Foundation, connects with this sense of duty. They discuss the idea that once you reach a certain level of influence, the music becomes secondary to the mission. For Jelly Roll, the mission is providing hope to the "underdogs." He describes himself as a "broken man who found a way to be useful," a sentiment that resonates deeply with Bon Jovi’s own philosophy of using the "bully pulpit" of rock stardom for the greater good.
The Craft of the Song
Despite their differing backgrounds, the two men eventually find their way to the "shop talk" of songwriters. Bon Jovi asks Jelly Roll about his process, specifically how he handles the transition between genres. Jelly Roll’s answer is simple: it’s all "southern music." Whether he is rapping over a beat or singing a soulful country ballad like "Son of a Sinner," the emotional frequency remains the same. He prioritizes the "truth" of the lyric over the "trend" of the production.
Bon Jovi offers a seasoned perspective on longevity. He warns Jelly Roll about the "meat grinder" of the industry—the relentless touring schedules and the pressure to replicate a hit. He advises the younger artist to protect his voice and his spirit. It is a moment of mentorship, a passing of the torch from a man who has survived the highs and lows of the stadium-rock era to a man currently standing in the middle of a cultural whirlwind.
The Sweetness in the Struggle
The title of the feature, "Jelly Roll Shows Jon Bon Jovi His Sweeter Side," is more than just a clever hook. It describes the emotional intelligence that Jelly Roll brings to the table. Throughout the interview, he treats Bon Jovi with a mix of reverence and peer-level honesty. He doesn't shy away from his rough edges, but he also speaks with a gentleness that surprises the rock legend.
They talk about family—the anchor that keeps them grounded. For Bon Jovi, it has been a decades-long marriage and a stable home life in the midst of the madness. For Jelly Roll, it is his daughter, Bailee Ann, who he credits with saving his life. This shared domesticity provides a stark contrast to the "outlaw" and "rockstar" archetypes they embody on stage. It suggests that the secret to their success isn't just talent, but the ability to remain human while becoming a hero to millions.
A Final Chord
As the conversation concludes, there is a palpable sense of mutual respect. Bon Jovi sees in Jelly Roll a spark of the old-school grit that made rock and roll vital in the first place. Jelly Roll sees in Bon Jovi a blueprint for how to grow old with grace and purpose in a business that often discards its elders.
This encounter is a reminder that music is the ultimate bridge. It can connect a boy from the projects of Nashville to a legend from the suburbs of Jersey. It proves that whether you are singing about the "working man" or the "outlaw," the human heart beats to the same rhythm. Jelly Roll might have started as a man looking for a way out, but through his music and his "sweeter side," he has found a way into the very heart of the American songbook.
When a leading contemporary choreographer approached Thomas Bangalter to score a ballet using a symphonic orchestra, the former Daft Punk co-creator leapt at the chance.
"I was very attracted by the idea of writing for the orchestra, and orchestrating myself," a soft-spoken Bangalter told NPR's A Martínez. This was his first major solo endeavor since Daft Punk disbanded in February 2021, though the project actually took root long before, in 2019.
Angelin Preljocaj choreographed this commission by the Opéra National de Bordeaux. Composing the accompanying music allowed Bangalter to return to the dance of his youth in Paris, where his mother was a ballet dancer and his father a songwriter and producer. The first performance took place in July 2022.
On Friday, French classical label Erato released the 23-track instrumental score for Mythologies, composed for symphony orchestra. The inspirations are drawn from Baroque compositions (à la Jean-Philippe Rameau) and American minimalism (such as Steve Reich or Philip Glass), rather than the broad rock, house and jazz influences — and samples — behind Daft Punk.
While the music makes a definite break from the dynamic, thumping sheen of the electronic duo, it is still dance music, with its own idiosyncrasies. And there are subtle echoes of a now bygone era in the way Bangalter uses the orchestra.
His approach to melding different melodies and sections is akin to sampling — reusing and modifying pieces of existing music, which Daft Punk used heavily. There is little counterpoint, with the melodic lines mostly distinct rather than combined. Most of the tracks resemble a patchwork — albeit a unified one — of various, often short, components artistically sewn together.
These vignettes of sorts also match the broad narrative arc of the project, featuring fragments of various foundational myths. There are references to the Gemini (Castor and Pollux), Zeus, Danae, the Minotaur, the naiads, Aphrodite and Icarus. "It allowed a certain freedom and creativity that would take away the fear of the process maybe for me," Bangalter explained.
But whether mixing electronics or writing for an orchestra, Bangalter says he's working "with the same love of contrasts and oppositions, in very sweet things and very violent things, going from one thing to another."
The seeds for Mythologies were sown years earlier, when Daft Punk mixed electronics with a symphony orchestra for 2010's sci-fi action film Tron: Legacy. But Joseph Trapanese, not Bangalter, arranged and orchestrated that score.
After three decades of working with synthesizers, drum machines, guitar pedals and computers, Bangalter says he found the constraints of classical music to be liberating. "There's somehow a fixed palette with the orchestral music, but there is still an infinity of things you can do with that fixed palette," he said. "In electronic music, there's some kind of infinity of sounds available to you. And somehow that infinity of sounds becomes a little bit troubling and disconcerting, and you don't even know anymore where to start in some sense."
Ultimately, Bangalter says, writing music for dozens of individual musicians brings him "closer to human heartbeats."
The task was a daunting one. And a lengthy one too, involving some 220 pages of notes to create just 90 minutes of music. "It was like climbing a mountain... The first thing when you start with a blank paper is, 'How am I going to get there?'" he said.
Bangalter studied piano as a child and later took up bass guitar after meeting Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — with whom he later formed Daft Punk — while attending the Lycée Carnot school in Paris. They launched the rock band Darlin' at the time with Laurent Brancowitz, who himself later joined the pop rock group Phoenix. A negative review dismissed Darlin' as "daft punky thrash," which ultimately inspired the name for the groundbreaking duo Bangalter and de Homem-Christo subsequently formed.
With little formal musical training, Bangalter took a crash course in classical composition to prepare for what became Mythologies. He pored over orchestration and music theory treatises, including a seminal 19th century one by Hector Berlioz. "At each page and each bar, I was trying to keep a fresh ear and a fresh eye about things to experiment and rules to follow and rules to break," Bangalter said.
He also developed a "fruitful relationship" with the conductor of the orchestra with whom he recorded the album, Romain Dumas of the Orchestre national Bordeaux Aquitaine, who also happens to be a composer. And Bangalter avoided writing at the keyboard, as he once had for Daft Punk.
Composing can be a rather "solitary process," Bangalter remarked, but that changed entirely come rehearsal time, with 20 dancers, a 55-piece unamplified orchestra and numerous technicians in Bordeaux's 18th-century opera house.
Daft Punk may now be "a thing of the past," but Bangalter says he's still keeping his drum kits and synthesizers. "We're very happy and very proud and in peace with how fortunate we were to express ourselves so freely and how we were able to express what we wanted to express together," he said.
RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli strikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah overnight killed 22 people, including 18 children, health officials said Sunday, as the United States was on track to approve billions of dollars of additional military aid to Israel, its close ally.
Israel has carried out near-daily air raids on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza's population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from fighting elsewhere. It has also vowed to expand its ground offensive against the Hamas militant group to the city on the border with Egypt despite international calls for restraint, including from the U.S.
"In the coming days, we will increase the political and military pressure on Hamas because this is the only way to bring back our hostages and achieve victory. We will land more and painful blows on Hamas – soon," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. He didn't give details.
The first Israeli strike in Rafah killed a man, his wife and their 3-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies. The woman was pregnant and the doctors saved the baby, the hospital said. The second strike killed 17 children and two women from an extended family.
"These children were sleeping. What did they do? What was their fault?" asked one relative, Umm Kareem. Another relative, Umm Mohammad, said the oldest killed, an 80-year-old aunt, was taken out "in pieces." Small children were zipped into body bags.
Mohammed al-Beheiri said his daughter, Rasha, and her six children, the youngest 18 months old, were among those killed. A woman and three children were still under the rubble.
The Israel-Hamas war has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, at least two-thirds of them children and women. It has devastated Gaza's two largest cities and left a swath of destruction. Around 80 percent of the territory's population have fled to other parts of the besieged coastal enclave.
The $26 billion aid package approved by the House of Representatives on Saturday includes around $9 billion in humanitarian assistance for Gaza, which experts say is on the brink of famine. The Senate could pass the package as soon as Tuesday, and President Joe Biden has promised to sign it immediately.
The conflict, now in its seventh month, has sparked regional unrest pitting Israel and the U.S. against Iran and allied militant groups across the Middle East. Israel and Iran traded fire directly this month, raising fears of all-out war between the longtime foes.
Tensions have also spiked in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Israeli troops killed two Palestinians who the military says attacked a checkpoint with a knife and a gun near the southern West Bank town of Hebron early Sunday. The Palestinian Health Ministry said the two killed were 18 and 19, from the same family. No Israeli forces were wounded, the army said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said it had recovered 14 bodies from an Israeli raid in the Nur Shams urban refugee camp in the West Bank that began late Thursday. Those killed include three militants from the Islamic Jihad group and a 15-year-old boy. The military said it killed 14 militants in the camp and arrested eight suspects. Ten Israeli soldiers and one border police officer were wounded.
In a separate incident in the West Bank, an Israeli man was wounded in an explosion Sunday, the Magen David Adom rescue service said. A video circulating online shows a man approaching a Palestinian flag planted in a field. When he kicks it, it appears to trigger an explosive device.
At least 469 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Most have been killed during Israeli military raids, which often trigger gunbattles, or in violent protests.
The war in Gaza was sparked by an unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which Hamas and other militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. Israel says militants are still holding around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.
Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to call for new elections to replace Netanyahu and a deal with Hamas to release the hostages. Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until Hamas is destroyed and all the hostages are returned.
The war has killed at least 34,097 Palestinians and wounded another 76,980, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between combatants and civilians in its count. It says the real toll is likely higher as many bodies are stuck beneath the rubble or in areas that medics cannot reach.
Israel blames Hamas for civilian casualties because the militants fight in dense, residential neighborhoods. The military rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children. The military says it has killed over 13,000 Hamas fighters, without providing evidence.
An unusual right-to-repair drama is disrupting railroad travel in Poland despite efforts by hackers who helped repair trains that allegedly were designed to stop functioning when serviced by anyone but Newag, the train manufacturer.
Members of an ethical hacking group called Dragon Sector, including Sergiusz Bazański and Michał Kowalczyk, were called upon by a train repair shop, Serwis Pojazdów Szynowych (SPS), to analyze train software in June 2022. SPS was desperate to figure out what was causing “mysterious failures” that shut down several vehicles owned by Polish train operator the Lower Silesian Railway, Polish infrastructure trade publication Rynek Kolejowy reported. At that point, the shortage of trains had already become “a serious problem” for carriers and passengers, as fewer available cars meant shorter trains and reduced rider capacity, Rynek Kolejowy reported.
Dragon Sector spent two months analyzing the software, finding that “the manufacturer’s interference” led to “forced failures and to the fact that the trains did not start,” and concluding that bricking the trains “was a deliberate action on Newag’s part.”
According to Dragon Sector, Newag entered code into the control systems of Impuls trains to stop them from operating if a GPS tracker indicated that the train was parked for several days at an independent repair shop.
The trains “were given the logic that they would not move if they were parked in a specific location in Poland, and these locations were the service hall of SPS and the halls of other similar companies in the industry,” Dragon Sector’s team alleged. “Even one of the SPS halls, which was still under construction, was included.”
The code also allegedly bricked the train if “certain components had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number,” 404 Media reported.
In a statement, Newag denied developing any so-called “workshop-detection” software that caused “intentional failures” and threatened to sue Dragon Sector for slander and for violating hacking laws.
“Hacking IT systems is a violation of many legal provisions and a threat to railway traffic safety,” Newag said, insisting that the hacked trains be removed from use because they now pose alleged safety risks. Newag’s safety claims are still unsubstantiated, 404 Media reported.
“We categorically deny and negate Newag’s uploading of any functionality in vehicle control systems that limits or prevents the proper operation of vehicles, as well as limiting the group of entities that can provide maintenance or repair services,” Newag’s statement said. According to Newag, Dragon Sector’s report shouldn’t be trusted because it was commissioned by one of Newag’s biggest competitors.
Dragon Sector maintains that the evidence supports its conclusions. Bazański posted on Mastodon that “these trains were locking up for arbitrary reasons after being serviced at third-party workshops. The manufacturer argued that this was because of malpractice by these workshops, and that they should be serviced by them instead of third parties.” In some cases, Bazański wrote, Newag “appeared to be able to lock the train remotely.”
Newag has said that “any remote intervention” is “virtually impossible.”
Lawsuit threats fails to silence hackers
Dragon Sector got the trains running after discovering “an undocumented ‘unlock code’ which you could enter from the train driver’s panel which magically fixed the issue,” Dragon Sector’s team told 404 Media.
Newag has maintained that it has never and will never “introduce into the software of our trains any solutions that lead to intentional failures.”
“We do not know who interfered with the train control software, using what methods and what qualifications,” Newag said. “We also notified the Office of Rail Transport about this so that it could decide to withdraw from service the sets subjected to the activities of unknown hackers.”
Dragon Sector and SPS have denied interfering with the train’s control systems.
While Newag has contacted authorities to investigate the hacking, Janusz Cieszyński, Poland’s former minister of digital affairs, posted on X that the evidence appears to weigh against Newag.
“The president of Newag contacted me,” Cieszyński wrote. “He claims that Newag fell victim to cybercriminals and it was not an intentional action by the company. The analysis I saw indicated something else, but for the sake of clarity, I will write about everything.
Newag president Zbigniew Konieczek said that “no evidence was provided that our company intentionally installed the faulty software. In our opinion, the truth may be completely different—that, for example, the competition interfered with the software.”
Konieczek also accused Cieszyński of disseminating “false and highly harmful information about Newag.”
404 Media noted that Newag appeared to be following a common playbook in the right-to-repair world where manufacturers intimidate competitor repair shops with threatened lawsuits and unsubstantiated claims about safety risks of third-party repairs. So far, Dragon Sector does not appear intimidated, posting its success on YouTube and discussing its findings at Poland’s Oh My H@ck conference in Warsaw. The group is also planning “a more detailed presentation” for the 37th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, at the end of December, The Register reported.
Because of the evidence gathered during their analysis, the Dragon Sector team has doubts about whether Newag will actually follow through with the lawsuit.
“Their defense line is really poor, and they would have no chance defending it,” Kowalczk told 404 Media. “They probably just want to sound scary in the media.”
In an unusual right-to-repair battle, members of the ethical hacking group Dragon Sector discovered deliberate software locks in Polish trains that caused them to "brick" when serviced at independent repair shops. The manufacturer, Newag, has denied the allegations and threatened legal action, but hackers successfully restored the fleet to service by uncovering a hidden "unlock code" within the trains' control panels.In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.
So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.
Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.
It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered.
The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.
That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.
They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies. For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have captured almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over 80%. Google runs 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems run on Google or Apple software. Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure make up over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.
Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark and repopulate a ruined world, but can’t run an open, global “network of networks” where everyone has the same chance to innovate and compete. No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”
Walled Gardens Have Deep Roots
The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency, it also ensures that the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth.
Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, generality and create room for innovation.
Initially funded by the U.S. military and designed by academic researchers to function in wartime, the internet evolved to work anywhere, in any condition, operated by anyone who wanted to connect. But what was a dynamic, ever-evolving game of Tetris with distinct “players” and “layers” is today hardening into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates. Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it’s the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.
In 2019, some internet engineers in the global standards-setting body, the Internet Engineering Task Force, raised the alarm. Daigle, a respected engineer who had previously chaired its oversight committee and internet architecture board, wrote in a policy brief that consolidation meant network structures were ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create “permanent favorites.” Consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services.
As Daigle put it: “The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation.” Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships — competitive, collaborative — into a single predatory one.
Since then, standards development organizations started several initiatives to name and tackle infrastructure consolidation, but these floundered. Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers’ interests and deeply held professional values of simplification and control, most internet engineers simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?
Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.
What Is Rewilding?
Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More ambitious and risk-tolerant than traditional conservation, it targets entire ecosystems to make space for complex food webs and the emergence of unexpected interspecies relations. It’s less interested in saving specific endangered species. Individual species are just ecosystem components, and focusing on components loses sight of the whole. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative.
Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in their book “Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery,” rewilding pays attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems … a move from linear to systems thinking.”
It’s a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: Hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command and control.
Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?
Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology’s tired old stock.
What Ecology Knows
Ecology knows plenty about complex systems that technologists can benefit from. First, it knows that shifting baselines are real.
If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.
But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.
Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. If the internet for you is the massive sky-scraping silo you happen to live inside and the only thing you can see outside is the single, other massive sky-scraping silo, then how can you imagine anything else?
Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. What scale is needed for rewilding to succeed? It’s one thing to reintroduce wolves to the 3,472 square miles of Yellowstone, and quite another to cordon off about 20 square miles of a polder (land reclaimed from a body of water) known as Oostvaardersplassen near Amsterdam. Large and diverse Yellowstone is likely complex enough to adapt to change, but Oostvaardersplassen has struggled.
In the 1980s, the Dutch government attempted to regenerate a section of the overgrown Oostvaardersplassen. An independent-minded government ecologist, Frans Vera, said reeds and scrub would dominate unless now-extinct herbivores grazed them. In place of ancient aurochs, the state forest management agency introduced the famously bad-tempered German Heck cattle and in place of an extinct steppe pony, a Polish semi-feral breed.
Some 30 years on, with no natural predators, and after plans for a wildlife corridor to another reserve came to nothing, there were many more animals than the limited winter vegetation could sustain. People were horrified by starving cows and ponies, and beginning in 2018, government agencies instituted animal welfare checks and culling.
Just turning the clock back was insufficient. The segment of Oostvaardersplassen was too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Because the animals had nowhere else to go, overgrazing and collapse was inevitable, an embarrassing but necessary lesson. Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. But rewilding, itself a human intervention, can take several turns to get right.
Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we discover (yet again) that relying on one app to host global conversations creates a single point of failure and control. New systems are growing, like the Fediverse with its federated islands, or Bluesky with algorithmic choice and composable moderation.
PARK CITY, Utah — Park City officials will decide this week whether to approve a proposed consent agreement that would end years of litigation over a planned luxury home at 220 King Road by adopting a City Council resolution that replaces contested land-use decisions. If approved, the parties would seek dismissal of the pending cases and the project would move forward under the agreement’s terms, without a court ruling on whether the approvals complied with city code.
The agreement, scheduled for a City Council vote on Jan. 15, would resolve three pending Third District Court cases involving the project, owned by Pesky Porcupine LLC, an entity tied to Cloudflare founder Matthew Prince.
Prince is the founder and CEO of Cloudflare (NYSE: NET), a publicly traded technology company. According to Forbes, he is Utah’s richest resident, with an estimated net worth of $6.3 billion. Prince and his wife, Tatiana Prince, live in Park City and own The Park Record, a local newspaper. The couple are also up-and-coming civic donors, including a commitment of at least $20 million to Podium34, an Olympic fundraising initiative supporting Utah’s 2034 Winter Games.
This past December, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox introduced Prince during a fireside conversation at the Utah AI Summit as Cox referred to Prince as “a dear friend and Utahn,” and later called him “one of the most brilliant people I know.”
Background of the dispute
In February 2024, the Park City Planning Commission approved a plat amendment and multiple conditional use permits allowing demolition of two existing structures and construction of a single-family residence within the city’s historic district at 220 King Road. Neighbors Eric and Susan Hermann appealed the approvals.
In July 2024, the city’s Appeal Panel upheld the Planning Commission’s decision, finalizing the approvals. The Hermanns then filed petitions for judicial review in Third District Court, where the cases remain pending.
Separate disputes arose over the project’s Historic District Design Review. The Planning Director approved the design with conditions, but the Board of Adjustment later reversed portions of that approval. That decision led to additional litigation by both Prince’s company and the Hermanns, resulting in three related cases now consolidated in district court.
The proposed consent agreement
The Park City Council is scheduled to consider Resolution 03-2026 on Jan. 15, which would approve a consent agreement between the city and Pesky Porcupine LLC.
The draft consent agreement was posted publicly this week, marking the first time its full terms have been disclosed after being negotiated between attorneys for Pesky Porcupine LLC and Park City municipal legal staff.
According to the draft agreement and a legal memorandum from the city’s outside counsel, the agreement would:
Affirm the Planning Commission approvals upheld by the Appeal Panel.
Reinstate the Planning Director’s Historic District Design Review approval, with specified design modifications.
Require additional mitigation by the applicant, including expanded landscaping and road safety improvements.
Require Pesky Porcupine LLC to indemnify and defend the city against future legal challenges related to the agreement and associated development activity.
Resolve all three pending lawsuits, with the city and applicant jointly seeking dismissal on the basis that the agreement replaces the contested land-use decisions.
The consent agreement does not require a substantial redesign of the home; instead, it largely reinstates earlier approvals, with added mitigation measures but no significant changes to the home’s size, massing, height, or overall architectural design.
If adopted, the agreement would seek to end the litigation without a judge ruling on the legality of the prior approvals.
Legal authority and broader implications
The consent agreement relies on authority granted under Senate Bill 262, passed by the Utah Legislature in 2025. The law allows city councils to resolve land-use litigation through council-approved consent agreements while court cases are pending.
City attorneys have advised that the agreement would reduce litigation costs, resolve conflicting administrative decisions, and provide finality. In a Jan. 9, 2026 memorandum to council members, outside counsel wrote that city staff had “worked diligently to defeat multiple attempts to preempt city authority over the course of several state legislative sessions, successfully retaining local control and preserving the City’s historic design review authority.”
Mayor Ryan Dickey has made similar comments publicly. In an interview with KPCW, Dickey said the city has spent years defending its historic district authority at the Legislature.
“We’ve been in this three-year defense of our historic district,” Dickey said. “And you’ve seen us at the legislature fighting back on attempts to take away any sort of local control around the historic district. That defense has been successful and really hard. I mean, at times feeling like it was going to go away, and making the decision, hey, this is just the right thing. We have a house that doesn’t meet code, standing up for a process, standing up for the code.”
Dickey did not name specific individuals or projects when making the remarks. The memo did not attribute those legislative efforts to Prince personally, but acknowledged sustained state-level pressure affecting local land-use authority.
Concerns about state influence on local land-use decisions have surfaced elsewhere in Summit County, including approval of the Dakota Pacific development, where County Council Chair Roger Armstrong said the project moved forward under legislative pressure, stating, “If there wasn’t someone with a club standing behind Dakota Pacific saying ‘do it or else,’ we could get it right.”
Community opposition
The proposed agreement has drawn criticism from project opponents, including the Hermanns, who argue the matter should be decided by the courts rather than resolved by council action.
In a recent email circulated to TownLift, the Hermanns wrote that the district court is scheduled to hold a hearing later this month and that the case “must be heard before an impartial judge.” They characterized the proposed consent agreement as “an end run around the legal process” and urged the City Council to allow the litigation to proceed.
They also raised concerns about precedent, writing that “other wealthy people are watching and hoping this will be a precedent for their own grandiose plans in Old Town.”
City legal counsel says the consent agreement “does not create new precedent because a final approval by the City Council would be site-specific.”
Opposition has also taken the form of a public petition. A Change.org petition titled “Tell Park City to Make Billionaire Matthew Prince Follow the Same Rules as the Rest of Us” posted an update on Sunday Jan. 11 urging residents to attend upcoming meetings and speak out against approval of the consent agreement. The petition states that “this week is a turning point for Park City Old Town—and for whether the rule of law applies equally in our city.”
What is at stake
If the City Council approves the consent agreement, the lawsuits will be dismissed, the project will move forward under the agreement’s terms, and the court will not rule on the merits of the approvals.
If the council rejects the agreement, the litigation will continue, and a district court judge will determine whether the city’s prior land-use decisions complied with the law.
The City Council meeting is scheduled for Jan. 15, 2026, beginning at 5:30 p.m. at the Marsac Municipal Building, City Council Chambers, 445 Marsac Ave., and will be available via Zoom.
This week fellow Substacker Elle Griffin published “No one buys books,” which looks at quotes and stats from the DOJ vs. PRH (Penguin Random House) trial where the government successfully blocked PRH’s $2.2 billion purchase of Simon & Schuster. Griffin’s article has gone viral for its near apocalyptic portrait of publishing. Much of the overall thrust of Griffin’s article is right: Most people don’t buy many books, sales for most books are lower than many think, and big publishing works on a blockbuster model where a few couple hits—plus perennial backlist sellers—comprise the bulk of sales. But I hope Griffin wouldn’t mind my offering a rebuttal of a few points here. As I think a few things are off.
I was alerted to the article by people rebutting it by sharing my 2022 article about the hard-to-believe claim that 50% of books only sell 12 copies. This claim, and similar ones, go viral pretty regularly despite making no sense. In the comments of my 2022 post, Kristen McLean from BookScan attempted to recreate the viral statistic and couldn’t come close even by restricting sales to frontlist print sales in a calendar year. It seems unclear what the 12 copies claim is referencing at all.
While I think Griffin does great work collecting these quotes, I would offer a word of caution. PRH’s legal strategy was to present publishing as an imperiled, dying industry beset on all sides by threats like Amazon. PRH allegedly even paid high fees to have agents and other industry professionals testify on their behalf. I’m not saying any of the quotes are lies. I’m saying the quotes and statistics are fitting a specific narrative in the context of a legal battle.
First though, let’s step back and look at the biggest question. Do people buy books?
How many books are sold in the United States? The only tracker we have is BookScan, which logs point of sale—i.e., customer purchases at stores, websites, etc.—for most of the market. BookScan counted 767 million print sales in 2023. BookScan claims to cover 85% of print sales, although many in publishing think it’s much less. It does not capture all store sales, any library sales, most festival and reading sales, etc. (Almost every author will tell you their royalty reports show significantly more sales than BookScan captures. Sometimes by orders of magnitude.)
Still, I’ll be very conservative and assume 85% is correct. This means around 900 million print books are sold to customers each year. Add in ebooks and the quickly growing audiobook market, and the total number of books sold is over 1 billion. Again, this is the conservative estimate.
Is one billion plus a lot of print books? Depends on your point of view. For comparison’s sake, there were 825 million movie tickets sold in the US and Canada in 2023. So roughly as many books are purchased as movie tickets, two somewhat comparable entertainment options in terms of price. OTOH, that’s new movies in theaters versus all books in publication. Additionally, far more books are published each year than movies, meaning that—as everyone knows—most individual movies are watched far more than individual books are read.
Whether this number is big or small, it’s fairly stable. Print book sales have not been decimated by digital sales/streaming. That’s right, despite the introduction of ebooks, various Netflix for books services, and endless cries about the death of publishing…. overall print sales have held pretty steady. And when we add in ebook sales, that means overall book sales are actually increasing.
Again, keep in mind the top chart is only counting print sales at retailers. It is not including the millions of ebooks and audiobooks sold. It also doesn’t include library sales—which, for certain books, make up a huge percentage of sales. It also doesn’t include used book sales, which is a whole other market.