Where did all the roaches go?
Today, you meet America's cockroach mystic.
Happy Friday Searchers,
This’ll be a skinny letter. I’m writing it on the way to Zipolite, Mexico (the beach of the dead, I have belatedly learned). I’m taking a few days off work. If you have recommendations for me while I travel: songs, podcast episodes, great TV shows, or fiction, please drop in the comments. I am a captive audience.
We’ve got a new one for you, a story from two reporters whose work I really admire, The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin and Dan Engber.
This one’s about cockroaches, a scourge that once blighted American cities. Cockroaches have now been decimated. Where’d they all go? A mystery of eradication, solved this week.
More on the wonderful Hanna Rosin
Hanna once hosted the late, beloved podcast Invisibilia for NPR. She reported such classics as The End of Empathy, about whether we should have empathy for people we hate. And this piece, The Call Out, about a series of very charged events in a local punk scene in Richmond. Hanna is also a very accomplished magazine writer. An unfair distribution of talent in one person, but that happens sometimes.
These days she’s been cooking up a weekly podcast for The Atlantic called Radio Atlantic. Over at Search Engine, we are fans, as well as appreciators of a fellow band of lunatics and psychopaths who are committed to publishing new episodes on a weekly basis.
Some great Radio Atlantic episodes you should check out:
And this one, about someone who develops a deep relationship with an AI. What happens when one day, the underlying code gets changed?
A music recommendation
I saw this punk (pop-punk?) band called Militarie Gun last week at Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan with frequent Search Engine guest Kelefa Sanneh. One of the best live shows I’ve seen in awhile. Here’s a song that’s been lodged directly into the center of my mind. Listen once, listen twenty times.
Who knew you could still find something new to do with punk music?
Some news and notes on newsletter notes
The newsletters are going to be short for the next few installments. We’re in the process of switching from Substack as our premium subscription service to a different service. The new service isn’t newsletter-based, it’s optimized for audio.
We love being a small team over at Search Engine, but there are moments where doing something new (setting up a new service) means we have to take some energy and effort from something we’re already doing (writing epistolary missives to podcast listeners). We ask for your forgiveness.
We’ll switch over to the new service in March. If you’re a paid subscriber, your subscription will roll over, you don’t need to do anything. And you will start getting … exciting new things. What are they? You’ll see. As always, if you want to help support us, please sign up, we depend on you.
After we switch over, the current plan is that I’ll keep sending out free newsletters on Substack but they’ll be on the brief side (“here’s the episode, plus a couple links”). Except for when I have something pressing to share with you. It’s nice to have a place to reach people in paragraphs, but I want to make sure I’m not just writing to write. There are already so many sentences in the world, I don’t want to contribute to sentence pollution.
Thanks as always,
PJ
These are both about a year old now but if you have a chunk of time to fill, the podcasts “City of the Rails” and “The Girlfriends” are two standouts that I keep coming back to. They are smart and exploratory and, for me, convey a sense that the creators are feeling their way through the story as they tell it - something that I love about Search Engine.
Militarie Gun & Dazy - Pressure Cooker is my favorite of theirs.