Chatter Marks

Sam Davenport writes the AK IRL newsletter. It dissects Alaska reality television as entertainment and as a cultural lens that shapes how Alaska is perceived from the Outside — an idea often signaled right from the start in show titles filled with buzzwords like wild, survival, and frontier. As if there’s a checklist for how Alaska gets branded and sold. She writes about the manufactured drama, the narrative structure, the way reality TV can feel like a funhouse mirror — recognizable, but distorted. And yet, within that distortion, there are moments of truth. Shows like Deadliest Catch have introduced millions of viewers to the commercial fishing industry, offering glimpses into lives they might otherwise never encounter. There’s a reason people keep watching these reality shows about Alaska: there’s a fascination with remoteness, solitude, escapism, and the idea of living outside the noise.  But Sam also looks at what gets left out of these shows. The recurring image of Alaska as an empty, unpeopled wilderness erases the Alaska Native communities who have lived on and stewarded this land for thousands of years. She points to how exaggeration, assumption, and spectacle can flatten the complexity of a place into something consumable, and how that flattening has consequences. Some shows approach that responsibility with more care than others, but the broader pattern of Alaska as novelty, extremity, and myth persists. From fishing boats to gold mines to even dating shows, the state has become a stage where outsiders project their fantasies. And what Sam’s newsletter does is turn that image back onto itself, reflecting both Alaska and the assumptions and expectations of the people watching it.

Julia O’Malley is a journalist, a cook, a baker, and lately she’s been researching and re-creating Cold War cakes. During the Cold War era—roughly the decades between the end of World War II and the early 1990s—cake mix transformed a food once associated with luxury into something democratic, something anyone could make at home. Julia says that those boxed mixes, and the recipes people built around them in the ‘70s and ‘80s, are more than just dessert. They’re cultural artifacts that reveal how women navigated creativity, expectation, and changing ideas about domestic life. They reflect a moment when women were entering the national conversation from within domestic space. Experimenting, adapting, and reshaping expectations. That shift raised a question inside the kitchen itself: What happens when packaged ingredients, appliances, and new food technologies promise women time—time to work, to control their finances, and to claim a larger role in public life? In Alaska, where fresh ingredients were often scarce and communities had long relied on shelf-stable foods, brought in through supply chains and institutional systems, cake mixes made a lot of sense. For generations, Alaskans have adapted to what’s available—working with canned goods, powdered ingredients, and foods designed to travel long distances before reaching the table. A box of cake mix fit easily into that reality. Julia has been tracing these stories through old cookbooks and community recipes, even digging into ones from boomtown Fairbanks in 1909, to understand how something as ordinary as cake can tell us about women’s lives, shifting ideas of feminism, and the creativity that unfolded in Cold War kitchens. Because food, Julia says, is always a story. It’s one of history, origin, climate, and longing. And in the Cold War kitchen, when the threat of nuclear annihilation hovered in the background of daily life, even something as simple as baking a cake could feel like a small act of reassurance.

Jeremie McGowan is an artist, designer, and researcher. Amund Sjolie Sveen is an artist. And together, they created Real. Arctic., an exhibition that examines how the word “Arctic” is used in branding, institutions, geopolitics, and everyday consumer products — and how the use of that word shapes what we think we know about the arctic. Their work blurs the line between critique and commodity, asking who gets to define the Arctic, who profits from it, and what gets flattened in the process. Throughout the exhibition, the work shifts form — from displays of “Pure Arctic” deodorant to an expanding archive of Arctic-branded objects — asking viewers to reconsider what is real and what has been manufactured. It explores how art and design can both construct and unravel powerful narratives about place, and what responsibility comes with working inside those systems. Jeremie and Amund collect and document products from around the world that call themselves “Arctic,” or borrow the image, the light, or the myth of the Arctic to sell something. Even when those products have no connection to the place itself. Deodorants that promise Arctic purity, chewing gum that offers polar freshness, outdoor brands that are marketed around rugged endurance and masculine extremes. Again and again, the Arctic appears as clean, untouched, and invigorating — a blank canvas for refreshment or conquest. As Jeremie points out, much of that marketing is driven by an outsider fantasy: the idea that you’re the first, the only one to witness the wilderness or the Northern Lights, even as that experience is packaged and sold en masse. Amund says that the Arctic’s power as a word may lie in its perceived remoteness. Because it feels unknown, it can be filled with whatever we want it to mean. And in that process, the realities of the place itself and the people who live there often fall away and what remains is a brand. And then, beneath all of that, is a deeper question about power: who gets to define a place, and whose version of that place becomes the story that guides our understanding of it.

Paul Koberstein is a journalist, whose recent book, “Canopy of Titans,” explores one of the most overlooked ecosystems on Earth: the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest. Stretching roughly 2,500 miles from just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to the western Gulf of Alaska, it’s the largest temperate rainforest on the planet. Fueled by Pacific storms and cool ocean currents, it supports towering redwoods, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and cedar — some of the largest and oldest trees in existence. Acre for acre, these forests store more carbon than tropical rainforests like the Amazon, with vast reserves locked in massive trunks, deep soils, roots, and centuries of accumulated woody debris. But even though it’s one of the most carbon-dense ecosystems we have, and a critical buffer against climate change, it remains largely overlooked in global climate conversations. Paul pushes back on some of the most common narratives about forests and climate. He points to those industry ads that promise for every tree cut down, three more will be planted. It’s an argument that sounds reassuring until you realize a young sapling can take a century to store the amount of carbon held in the massive tree that was felled. Trees are about 50 percent carbon. Through photosynthesis they pull carbon dioxide out of the air, lock that carbon into their trunks and roots, and release the oxygen we breathe. Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest alone holds more total carbon than any national forest in the country. That scale of storage is central to Paul’s point: the science doesn’t say we’re powerless. It suggests that we can still influence the climate back toward something more stable. If fossil fuels loaded the atmosphere with excess carbon, then forests, if protected and restored, can help draw it back down. Forests have stabilized the climate for thousands and thousands of years. Whether they continue to do so depends largely on us letting them do their job.

Emily Sullivan is a writer, a photographer, and a director whose work is grounded in questions of land, community, and responsibility. Throughout her work, she focuses on uplifting Indigenous perspectives — not by speaking for communities, but by listening to what people are already saying and doing. Her first film, Shaped by Land, is currently screening at festivals. It’s a documentary about Greenlandic skiers and their connection to place, set against the backdrop of the new Greenland Tourism Act — legislation designed to protect land, center local ownership, and resist extractive tourism. Emily’s interest in Greenland is shaped by her experience in Alaska, where many of the same tensions play out under different economic structures. In both places, people arrive seeking experience, adventure, and meaning, often without reckoning with what those desires take from the communities they move through. Emily’s path to this work started when she was just a kid. She’s always been an observant person, someone who noticed small shifts in light and weather — that’s where her photographic eye comes from — and that sense of awe never really left. It grew out of curiosity, and later, into a belief that anything capable of stopping you in your tracks is probably worth paying attention to. And then, through her work and time spent in Alaska, climate change became personal and immediate — visible in rivers that don’t freeze when they should, unstable ice, unfamiliar weather patterns, and disrupted fish runs.  Much of her education in climate change came from Alaska Native peoples, specifically women who have been leading this work for generations. That learning shaped Emily’s commitment to bringing Indigenous knowledge, solutions, and sovereignty to the forefront of her storytelling — using careful observation and conversation to explore the forces shaping our collective future.