Category: Longform

Corncrake, spotted

Just after 3am when I finished my survey one night, I pulled away slowly in the car and something unexpected happened: I saw a corncrake. It was just a moment but it was in the road right in front of me, running into the grass verge. Its image — the pink beak and ginger wing — keeps darting through my mind: just a second that confirmed the existence I’d spent months searching for. My first and only corncrake. Usually dawn comes slowly but tonight I drove out of a cloud and suddenly it’s a new day.

Night Life by Amy Liptrot

The metrics of humane slaughter

Today, Dr. Grandin is a best-selling author, and her Animal Welfare Audit is the standard in the industry. Half of the cattle in the United States and Canada are now handled by equipment Grandin designed. Some of the nation’s largest beef servers and suppliers— McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Cargill, Tyson— pass the points of her audit: at least 95 percent of animals stunned on the first shot (usually with a captive-bolt gun that shoots a steel bolt into the head). No more than 1 percent falling. No more than 3 percent mooing. No more than 25 percent being hit with an electric prod. At this point, she says, “You can take someone right to the stunner line at one of the biggest slaughterhouses in the world,” and they’ll approve of what they see.

This Is What Humane Slaughter Looks Like. Is It Good Enough?

Jim Giles on being acquired by Medium

We just took our first article [“Do No Harm”], which was published in November, and brought it out from behind the paywall and put it up on Medium, and then we commissioned a bunch of commentaries on the piece itself. Medium’s really nicely suited to that because all the articles are arranged in collections. So you’ve got this one piece that anchors the collection [“Amputees & Wannabes”], which is our original longform piece, and then you’ve got a bunch of follow-ups, in this case mainly from scientists talking about issues in the piece.

Matter Co-Founder Jim Giles on Being Acquired by Medium and the Future of Longform Journalism by Hamish McKenzie