DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: October 26, 2025
Sulawesi–The Island That Holds The Earth’s Secrets?:
Sulawesi, Indonesia, is a spectacular and singular place, blurring the boundaries between myth and ecology. This mountainous island is home to some of the most majestic and ancient sights on the planet, from verdant rainforests to explosive volcanoes to the oldest narrative cave paintings yet discovered. Over 21 days this summer, I traversed the island, seeking to understand the universal patterns of our world and to photograph them with an appropriately transcendent approach. What might this dynamic land reveal to us about our collective past — or destiny?
On this equatorial island, evolution can happen in real time. Sulawesi’s topographies — which first emerged from seismic rifts some 50 million years ago — are continually being reshaped by tectonic plates. Rivers of bats course through the dusk sky, while bioluminescent mushrooms cast their green glow underfoot. Late-summer lightning storms illuminate seas cloaked in night.
Over 100 ethnicities and languages populate Sulawesi. One group, the Toraja, places tremendous importance on rites for the dying and the dead; while Western cultures largely view death as final and private, Torajans see it as a communal and ongoing process requiring honor, care and celebration. In the south of the island, the Bugis culture centers on the bissu — revered priests thought to embody multiple genders and act as conduits between the human and spirit realms. Across Sulawesi’s modern inhabitants is a deep understanding of life as an unbroken line linking the ancient past with the present day.
An interactive story replete with photos and GIFs from this biodiverse island.
Halloween Attractions That Are Not Halloween Attractions:
For years, Eastern State Penitentiary’s Terror Behind the Walls was arguably the most popular Halloween attraction in Philadelphia, drawing thousands to the 19th century prison that towers like a castle over Fairmount Avenue.
Actors dressed as sadistic guards and disturbed prisoners, jump-scaring visitors from the prison cells. Giant gargoyles looked down on crowds waiting to get inside a controversial prison with practices British author Charles Dickens once called “cruel and wrong.”
Today, though, there is no more terror behind these walls, at least not in the way it used to be. The jump scares are still here during the Halloween season, but they’re fictional phantoms like zombies and vampires. The atmosphere is more family-friendly and festival-like, with food and beer, live music and fire pits.
Eastern State is just one of the troubling historical locations grappling with how to celebrate Halloween, educate visitors and acknowledge the real-life suffering that happened. Locations, including Pennhurst Asylum, Waverly Hills Sanatorium and the Lizzie Borden House, draw what one researcher calls “dark tourism,” with tragedy and suffering at the center of their respective histories.
“Dark tourism,” may present some moral quandaries, but it’s not inherently wrong, according to Marius Pascale, professor of applied and professional ethics at Guilford College.
Pascale, whose research centers around moral psychology and the ethics of fascination with morbidity and death, said a big consideration is whether that fascination is directed toward real or fictional horrors. “It can help people process their questions around death, sadness, and it’s not innately bad but neither do we want to sign off on all of it and say it’s all fine, too.”
Does the attraction foster empathy? Does it feature a real-life story? How recently did the tragedy happen? Do visitors learn something? Those are the kinds of questions Pascale has in mind when talking about a “Dark Tourism” location.
How You Can Turn Back Brain Decay By Mental Exercise. Too late for Donald Trump:
Scientists are reporting the first compelling evidence in people that cognitive training can boost levels of a brain chemical that typically declines with age.
A 10-week study of people 65 or older found that doing rigorous mental exercises for 30 minutes a day increased levels of the chemical messenger acetylcholine by 2.3% in a brain area involved in attention and memory.
The increase “is not huge,” says Étienne de Villers-Sidani, a neurologist at McGill University in Montreal. “But it’s significant, considering that you get a 2.5% decrease per decade normally just with aging.”
So, at least in this brain area, cognitive training appeared to turn back the clock by about 10 years.
I’ll take it.
The Death Train Of South Florida:
The Brightline is a beautiful train. Ultra-quiet and decorated with streaks of highlighter yellow, it carries passengers between Miami and Orlando, sometimes moving as fast as 125 miles per hour. It restores glamour to the humble railroad: During your ride, if you wish, you can order a half bottle of Veuve Clicquot for $59; the on-board bathrooms are large and clean enough to take a decent mirror selfie in. Condé Nast Traveler has called it “super chic.”
Privately owned and operated and transporting about 250,000 passengers a month, the Brightline is only the second high-speed train in the United States and the first outside the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak operates the Acela. Its newness and sleekness make it a novelty in a country where trains are mostly old and ugly. Its existence shows that America can still build great things and that private industry can build them quickly and with style. If a beautiful high-speed train can work in Florida—whose former governor famously rejected more than $2 billion in federal funding for such a train—maybe it can work anywhere. But right now, something is very wrong.
What the Brightline is best known for is not that it reflects the gleam of the future but the fact that it keeps hitting people. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.
Oh. Well, it’s only right that Chris Smither sings us out:
