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Inside the Subreddit Where Men Share Their Dinners—And Their Most Intimate Feelings

r/BoyDinnerDiaries is a subreddit where men post photos of their often rather sad-looking meals alongside their most private worries. Zack Hauptman carefully explores this unusual place for community and care, meeting the men who are learning to share more than just what is on their plate. We hear a lot about the “male loneliness epidemic,” so it’s heartening to glimpse even a small shift in the other direction.

Others use the forum regardless of whether they have a vast social circle. Robert*, 31, says he has many people to turn to but uses Reddit when he needs to unload his feelings further. “I have an urge to vent when I don’t want to call a friend,” he says. In August, after experiencing repeated rejection from women he was seeing, he decided to post about it online. “I’m at the point where I feel so disappointed and let down but also so grateful that I have the opportunity to learn and grow from all of it,” he wrote alongside a photo of mushy canned tuna in a bowl. “I could talk about it pretty much all the time, but I don’t really want to be doing that,” he says. “Going to the subreddit…it’s like throwing it into the void.”

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The People of Utah vs. Kevin O’Leary

In a remote part of Utah, the world’s largest data center project—allegedly—is being fast-tracked in secret. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame was brought in to hype the 40,000-acre complex. But the backlash among Utahns has been strong. Josh Dzieza reports from the front lines of the popular resistance to data centers:

[Brenna] Williams, a former government econometrician and college instructor, speaks methodically in a calm monotone as she enumerates the many reasons why the data center “doesn’t make sense”—a refrain. First among them is the water, an acutely sensitive issue in Utah in part thanks to Gov. Cox himself, who has declared repeated drought emergencies and urged residents to take shorter showers and cut back on watering their lawns. There is no more potent symbol of the state’s water crisis than the Great Salt Lake, which has been shrinking for years, exposing heavy metals on its lakebed that become airborne dust. Now here came a data center on its northern shore, or where its northern shore would have been if it hadn’t receded several miles.

“We have to report on our neighbors if they’re watering at the wrong times or on the wrong days,” Williams says. (There’s a hotline.) “But we have water to cool a power plant and cool the data center? It doesn’t make sense.”

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The True Cost of Rape in America

The horrific story of Jane Doe and the Cornell Seven has spurred nationwide outrage and revived contentious debates around prevention and education. But one question is going unasked: Who really pays after a sexual assault? In terms of actual dollars and cents? The answer, Cosmopolitan finds, isn’t good:

Leah received an email from the first hospital. It was a bill for $3,338, including $663 for lab work and a pregnancy test she hadn’t asked for. She hadn’t been charged for the rape kit, but the price of just checking into the ER was $2,241. After her parents’ insurance was applied, she owed $451.06.

“I was so unbelievably angry,” she says. “I lost it. I was like, ‘You mean it cost me $450 to get raped?!’”

Most people don’t realize this care might not be covered, says Vega, who has worked as an emergency room nurse, emergency room director, and a SANE. But that’s actually common: KFF analyzed a sample of insurance claim data from 2016 to 2018 (the most up-to-date data KFF has) and found that 83 percent of women who received a sexual violence diagnosis were billed for treatment. Another analysis of emergency room department data from 2019 found that the average bill for sexual assault survivors was $3,551, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

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She Died at the San Diego Border. A Surveillance Camera Was in Plain Sight.

There are more than 800 surveillance towers located along U.S. borders, a number that is expected to triple in the next decade. These towers, according to a government accountability report, “detect items of interest, such as people.” But interest can be fickle. As part of “Dying on Camera,” a sprawling package of features co-published by the MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego, Lillian Perlmutter reports on the death of Graciela Gómez Hernández, one among hundreds of migrants whose final moments seem as though they should have been witnessed. “The proximity of so many deaths to high-resolution cameras leaves two distinct possibilities,” Perlmutter writes. “Either the system didn’t detect these people in distress, or it did detect them—and officials offered no response. “

Surveillance towers have proliferated in recent years, as contractors added newer camera systems that use artificial intelligence to distinguish border-crossers from other people and animals, and track their movements, at an overall cost of more than a billion dollars. Yet as the cameras scan the terrain, migrants continue to die in plain sight. 

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