Hair, With a Twist | Has Blast Fishing Met Its Match?

Entrepreneur Noel Durity is a grinder on a mission — to get your hair in shape easily.

The bad news arrived via Instagram: Pirated versions of Noel Durity’s innovative Twist it Up comb were popping up in convenience stores. Most entrepreneurs would quickly seek legal advice, maybe write a strongly worded letter. Durity instead channeled Liam Neeson. “I decided to confront them,” he says.

A solo tour to 100 stores in 24 cities — from New York down through the East Coast and ending in Texas — netted him 500 knockoffs of his device resembling a tennis racket to tease out Afro-centric hair. He also collected more than 40 invoices, a paper trail to the source of the knockoffs. For a budding businessman who looks in the mirror and sees a superhero, it was just another day at the office.

To figure out Durity, 31, you have to go all the way back to the start, when he was born two and a half months premature — his extended hospital stay nearly bankrupting his family, which had no insurance. “He is my million-dollar baby,” says Durity’s mom, Cheryl.

The explosive practice is destroying Southeast Asian and African coral beds, but data is helping agencies fight back.

When there’s an underwater explosion, “it feels like the entire ocean collapses on you,” longtime diver and environmentalist Terence Lim says. Diving in Malaysia’s waters for 25 years, he has felt the pressure waves from fishermen’s homemade bombs and seen how explosions turn once vibrant reefs into rubble. Though outlawed, this explosive fishing method is common in Southeast Asia and along the Tanzanian coast due to its extreme efficiency.

Now, after decades of largely futile attempts to crack down on blast fishing, environmentalists and marine scientists are turning to what they believe could prove the missing link in their efforts: acoustic data. In Malaysia’s Sabah province, Lim and his fellow members of the Hong Kong-registered NGO Stop Fish Bombing have devised a way to record blasts up to 12 miles away. By placing hydrophones 2 to 8 meters underwater, attached to a boat or a pier, they record the blasts and through triangulation — cross-verification of data — they can pinpoint their location.

Like the idea of lusty royal types sweeping mere mortals off their feet and into bed? Royal romances are for you. Start here.

It was early 2019 when Casey McQuiston’s queer royal romance, aptly titled Red, White and Royal Blue, became an unexpected New York Times bestseller. In doing so, it made clear that while royal wedding fever may have died down, the thrill of reading a royal romance most definitely endures. But what’s the appeal of fantasizing about a system as colonial and imperialistic as the monarchy?

“We love the idea of a prince falling for someone just like you or me,” with flaws and insecurities, says Melanie Summers, royal romance author and longtime royal watcher. “There’s something about it that makes us feel like anything is possible.” Romance writer Krista Lakes echoes this view: “Romance novels are opportunities to lead the lives we wish we could have, so royal romances are a great way to have that fantasy for a few hours.”