How Every New Yorker Article is Written
A surprisingly insightful, curiously umlauted, zig-zagging exploration of an eclectic topic you were sort of planning to just skip over so you could look at the comics
Author’s note:
This article is dedicated to my grandmother Jennifer Brock, whose sharp wit and iconic personality taught me the value of a good laugh and so much more.
Also, for the record, all of the hippo, history, board game, and movie facts included in this piece that don’t directly involve Sebastian McGuire are true. The politics are entirely bullshit, but you knew that already. You can draw your own conclusions about the rest of the article.
ANNALS OF BIOLOGY
MURKY WATER
Searching for answers after a catastrophic hippo attack
BY REILLY M. BROCK
A few months after Donald Trump narrowly lost reëlection to Joe Biden in 2020, Sebastian McGuire left the country. He wasn’t a Trump supporter or a Biden supporter. McGuire wasn’t leaving for political reasons. He hadn’t even attended the January 6th riot that democratic élites had been so horrified by. On the day of his departure, he struggled to tote cumbersome gear that just wouldn’t coöperate with him through JFK airport. He had a flight to Tanzania to catch.
Sebastian McGuire is considered by many to be the world’s preëminent hippopotamus researcher. Few people truly understand hippos the way McGuire does. Yet it’s not easy to research hippos in New York City, where McGuire lives and works for much of the year. Manhattan’s last two adult hippos, Falstaff and Rosey, left in 1974 when the Central Park Zoo sent them to a new zoo in Toronto. This is why McGuire splits his time between teaching biology at Columbia and his research trips to hippo hot spots in Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya.
While hippos are concentrated in Subsaharan Africa, there is also a small population of them that lives in rural Colombia. They were introduced there by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, who imported them to be an attraction in one of his private zoos. After Escobar’s violent demise, the Medellín Cartel fell, but the hippos persisted and multiplied. One of McGuire’s early accomplishments in the field of hippo research was consulting for the Colombian government on what to do about their feral hippo problem.
His ingenious approach centered around what McGuire dubbed the “least feasted beast paradox.” By manipulating their food supply, he was able to coax the behemoth creatures out of their watery fortresses and into the enclosures of the Colombian government. In just under two years, their hippo problem was turned around and McGuire was heralded as a hero. This crowning achievement won him the prestigious Masseter award, the top prize in hippo research. He was 32 years old when he won it. It also informed his best-selling book about Colombian hippo research: Into Satan’s Jacuzzi: A rogue scientist’s tale of deception, drug kingpins, and hungry hungry hippos. Netflix is currently adapting this book into a six part docu-series scheduled for release next fall. McGuire also hosts a science podcast called Hippo-critical, which is among the most downloaded podcasts on Apple podcasts and Spotify.
“Becoming a famous hippo researcher was never on my radar growing up. I didn’t even think it was possible. Now I understand that fame attracts attention, both from humans and semi-aquatic mammals,” McGuire said.
Fred Kroll started working in the toy industry in 1938. His first employer was his father, who was well established in New York’s toy district. Mr. Kroll sold toys to Playthings magazine as well as toy wholesalers and board game makers. As the world was on the cusp of war, Kroll was unknowingly on the cusp of board game stardom.
After serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, stationed in Hawaii, Kroll returned to to a postwar world that had changed. The toy industry had shifted, too. Wooden toys were becoming less popular as plastic slowly became cheaper and more widely available. Reading the landscape, Kroll left his father’s business and formed his own and began to focus on board games. His first hit was called Trouble. Despite popular belief, the 2012 Taylor Swift song “I Knew You Were Trouble” isn’t about the game. It’s rumored to be about John Mayer. (When contacted, a representative for John Mayer clarified that while he did enjoy the board game Trouble as a youth, he did not enjoy dating Taylor Swift. He had no comment on hippos, however).
By the late 60s, Kroll had moved on from inventing games and had started licensing games made by Japanese toy manufacturers like Agatsuma. While scouting out Japanese games to adapt for the American market, he found a peculiar one where 2-4 players control plastic hippos and use them to “eat” as many marbles as possible before their competitors do. He published the concept in 1967. Milton Bradley introduced it to the American market in 1978. As catchy as the simple and frenetic gameplay, was its title. They had cleverly christened it: “Hungry Hungry Hippos.”
The research trip to Tanzania started off well. Upon arriving in Ruaha National Park, McGuire set up camp with his cohort of researchers. They chose a site they’d visited before, located a safe distance away from an unassuming stretch of the Great Ruaha river where hippos were known to congregate.
Male hippos regularly duel in a form of maw-first jaw jousting that’s spectacular and terrifying to witness. During these contests their jaws open to almost 180 degrees, showcasing their huge tusks and cavernous mouths. The winners of these duels get dominion over the surrounding waters and shoreline. They’re given the name “beach masters.” McGuire was camped was near a section of the Ruaha known locally as beach master alley due to the unusually high number of aggressive males known to frequent its muddy banks. This particularly year, the mud was drier than normal and the river had noticeably receded due to a sustained drought.
On one humid morning, McGuire was aboard his inflatable Zodiac research vessel when he noticed something was off. Migratory birds that normally stopped there for a drink were no where to be found. The water was especially murky. His phone was out of batteries.
According to the onlookers on the shore, what happened next wasn’t so much a splash as an explosion of white water. Before anyone could react, a three thousand pound bull hippo emerged from the water, charged the boat, and dragged McGuire under by his right shoulder.
When he reëmerged from the water close to thirty seconds later, he was bleeding profusely. His colleagues radio’d for help. They fashioned an improvised tourniquet to stop the bleeding. As they waited, they prayed that the hippo wouldn’t come back.
Sebastian McGuire was born in Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1978. He grew up on a manatee farm outside of the city. His parents were avid Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans, even though the team was awful at the time. His mother, Rhonda, recalls him falling in love with hippos for the first time after she gave him a copy of the board game “Hungry Hungry Hippos” for his sixth birthday. She can still remember the look on his face when she informed him that hippos were real animals that he could one day observe just like like the manatees swimming by their dock. She compared it to a child being informed that Santa was real.
Tampa Bay was established on the shores of Florida’s largest natural estuary, which forms a conveniently-shaped natural harbor. The Spanish, however, had little interest in sticking around after they had no luck looking for gold or converting the indigenous inhabitants to Christianity. While they had christened the area Espiritu Santo, once the United States took over in 1824 and established a fort at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, they began calling it Tampa Bay. The city would go without an NFL team for another 150 years until the Buccaneers joined as an expansion team in 1976, two years before McGuire was born.
Florida is a state in the Southeastern United States. The origins of the name are disputed. One theory claims that Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon landed on Floridian shores on Eastern Sunday in 1513, and named the land after the Pascua de Flores, meaning "Feast of Flowers.” Another maintains that “Florida” merely referred to the abundant flowers and vegetation early Spanish explorers saw there. After the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1821 they stuck with the Spanish name, despite the fact that they spoke English. Tom Brady, now retired Super Bowl winning quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers has not publicly commented as to which theory about Florida’s name he believes, nor what he thinks about McGuire’s hippo research.
The United States was founded in 1776. Two centuries after its founding, the NFL decided to bring an expansion team to Tampa Bay. They named the team the Buccaneers, an antiquated term for a pirate. The term buccaneer comes from the Spanish bucanero which in turn originates in the Caribbean Arawak word buccan, a wooden frame on which indigenous Tainos and Caribs slowly roasted or smoked meat, commonly manatee, but sometimes feral pigs and cattle. After a quarter century of mediocrity, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers finally won two Super Bowls. The first came against the Oakland Raiders in 2003 and the most recent against the Kansas City Chiefs in 2021. McGuire watched both via satellite phone while on hippo research trips in Central Africa.
Hippos kill considerably more people every year than sharks do. While shark attacks claim just 10 lives per year, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), hippos kill 500-800 people each year in Africa alone. They’ve also been attacking people for all of recorded history. According to Manetho, a Ptolemaic historian, it was a rogue hippopotamus that resulted in the untimely regicide of the Pharaoh Menes.
I mentioned these statistics to McGuire when we first met and he responded with his trademark grin.
“I’ve always thought that was funny. They’re such deadly animals, but you know, there’s no Jaws about a killer hippo, yet.”
A hippo charging and attacking a boat is not out of the ordinary. They’re very territorial animals. What makes them so dangerous is both their size and unpredictability. Hippos are the third largest land mammal behind elephants and rhinos. With large males weighing in between two and three thousand pounds, they can easily capsize a small boat. On land, they can run up to 19 miles per hour in short bursts. They’ve even been known to raid farms for crops if presented with an opportunity. While they are technically herbivores and may look like chunky pigs to the untrained eye, McGuire is quick to point out that their tusks and muscular bulk make them quite dangerous. He would know.
All scientists agree that the name hippopotamus comes from the Greek word for water horse. What the Ancient Greeks couldn’t have known was that hippos are actually more closely related to whales than to pigs or horses. Today, the scientific community agrees that hippos are very aggressive but doesn’t always agree as to why.
The conventional understanding is that territoriality drives most hippo human conflict. Hippos are protective of their favorite watering holes and will attack humans in an attempt to drive them off. Like bears, hippos can also get very violent if they believe that the presence of humans threatens their young. Hippos tend to be most aggressive during mating season, when bull hippos will charge rival males and humans at the slightest perceived insult. Yet McGuire maintains there’s an overlooked theory that’s just as important and is only going to become more vital to understand in the century ahead.
In 2008, McGuire was one of the first scientists to popularize the explanation that has now gone mainstream, which is that climate change is fueling both the frequency and severity of hippo attacks. During droughts, hippos can become extra territorial as their watery domain shrinks. This competition for already scarce water resources brings thirsty humans into closer contact with hippos and makes it more likely that the hippos will lash out at these bipedal riparian rivals.
Threatened by dwindling rivers as well as habitat loss and poaching, Africa’s hippos are rapidly running out of room to be hippos. Since riverside communities are as tied to the future of their water supply as the hippos are, humans are now becoming threatened by hippos, hippos by humans, and both by our changing climate. Witnessing these trends accelerate each year on his research trips, McGuire became convinced that hippo human conflict was now a mathematical certainty.
After the attack, the hippo community struggled to come to terms with why McGuire had nearly died in the river that day. McGuire blamed himself. His research partner blamed a particularly dry year and one very hangry hippo. Tucker Carlson blamed minorities.
Some dismissed the event as a freak accident. A vocal minority claimed that McGuire must have in some way provoked the male hippo. After studying abroad in New Zealand in his 20s, he’d been known to perform the Haka on the beach after a few beers. (When contacted, the news outlet that originally printed this claim, Hippo Spectator, did not reply with further comment. No footage exists of McGuire performing any such Haka, so this theory remains, for now, in the realm of conjecture.)
I met up with McGuire in Watermelon Heights, an affluent suburb outside of downtown. He’d suggested we grab lunch at The Caterpillar’s Uncle, a hip new fusion restaurant run by the same group behind Torpedo & Loofa and Bar Ennui. Over plates of pickled bittermelon and deconstructed cucumbers, he relayed a saying his father Greg was fond of before dying of heart disease:
“A slinky can only go down the stairs once.”
He looked pensive, the hippo bite scar clearly visible beneath his chambray shirt, unbuttoned nearly to his navel, which was odd given how heavily air conditioned the restaurant was.
I asked McGuire if he was hot, to which he responded:
“My temperature is irrelevant. It certainly didn’t matter to the hippo that looked at me like one of this restaurant’s overpriced and hard-to-share small plates.”
I tried to change the subject but McGuire made motions to leave, claiming that he had a Freshman biology class to teach.
I reminded him that it was summer so there were no classes to teach at the moment.
“I guess I’ll order another cocktail then,” he said, looking abjectly down at his half-finished cucumbers.
Kroll died from cancer in 2003 after dedicating six decades of his life to the toy and games industry. In a statement, Hasbro chairman Alan Hassenfeld said, “All of us at Hasbro are saddened by the passing of Fred Kroll. Two of his greatest creations (sic), Hungry Hungry Hippos and the Trouble game, will continue to entertain children for many years to come.”
This board game eulogy wasn’t just platitudes; Hungry Hungry Hippos endured and even took on a new life after Kroll’s death. Milton Bradley had been acquired by the toy giant Hasbro in 1984. Hasbro treated Hungry Hungry Hippos as the cash cow that it was destined to be, at one point creating an ad featuring animated hippos in a conga line singing this catchy tune:
"It's a race, it's a chase, hurry up and feed their face!
Who will win? No one knows! Feed the hungry hip-ip-pos!
Hungry hungry hippos! (open up and there it goes!)"
In recent years, after reading the tea leaves, Hasbro has begun to slowly but methodically adapt their game properties to blockbuster movies. Some, like 2007’s Transformers, an explosions-as-plot Michael Bay orgy of wonton vehicle destruction were runaway hits. The first film grossed over 700 million dollars worldwide and made stars of Shia LaBouef and Megan Fox. While the quality began to decline in later installments, many of which had impossible to follow plot threads, chaotic “Bayhem” action scenes, and sections that pandered openly to China’s communist regime, this didn’t slow them down at all. Quite the opposite. The critically panned third and fourth films in the franchise each grossed over $1 billion worldwide.
Hasbro’s subsequent attempts to conquer Hollywood haven’t fared as well. Battleship and Ouija were both box office bombs. Reviewing 2012’s Battleship, Meghan Lehman of the Hollywood Reporter said: “Impressive visual effects and director Peter Berg's epic set pieces fight against an armada of cinematic clichés and some truly awful dialogue." On Rotten Tomatoes, where Ouija commands a dismal 5% of critical acclaim, the critics consensus reads "Slowly, steadily, although no one seems to be moving it in that direction, the Ouija planchette points to NO."
While more recent outings haven’t matched Transformers, the G.I. Joe franchise performed well enough to get two films as well as a Snakeyes prequel into theaters. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson even starred in the second Joe film, though even his ample pectorals couldn’t bench press the sequel above mediocrity. Yet Hasbro still has dozens of other game properties to adapt. It’s clear they have the money and the patience to persist, so the question remains: is a Hungry Hungry Hippo movie on the horizon?
I asked McGuire about this when we met up again, this time at an escape room inside of a converted torture chamber in downtown Tampa.
“It seems like a long shot. But given what Disney is doing with all these live action remakes, maybe they’ll feel peer pressured to put something out” he offered.
I asked him how he felt about all the live action depictions of animals as a scientist, to which he responded: “As a biologist I never thought a photo-realistic crab would disturb me so much, but that “Scuttlebutt song” from The Little Mermaid haunts my dreams. I was also disappointed the didn’t include any speaking lines for the hippos in The Lion King. Honestly, I wouldn’t put a Hungry Hungry Hippo movie past Hasbro. It would certainly be better than that Battleship movie. Even Rihanna and Liam Neeson combined couldn’t save that one.”
Both the Biden and Trump campaigns have pledged to increase funding of hippo research, though they have very different plans for where this money should go and what it ought to accomplish. Biden has claimed multiple times that hippo human conflict is just a misunderstanding and that if he could only take Amtrak to get some ice cream with these rogue hippos, they’d understand his point of view. Trump has claimed, without merit, that hippos are responsible for misplacing all those classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The politics of hippos remain fractious and unresolved. Congressional liberals have proposed banning hippos outright, but have faced criticism from hippo lobbyists about the devastating economic impacts of such a wide reaching decision. Increasingly Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis, Trump’s presumptive Republican challenger, won’t even acknowledge that hippos exist for fear of upsetting their base.
McGuire’s wife, the rapper Lil’ Penchant, is adamant that it’s just a matter of time until future historians rechristen the phrase “the elephant in the room” for “the hippo in the room.” Elephants are on the way out, she claims. Hippos are megafauna of the future so we’d better find a way to deal with them. Her latest single, a diss track titled “Blood & Tusks” is widely believed to be about McGuire’s attack.
After a lumbering start, McGuire’s cinematic prophecy is finally coming true. Emmet/Furla Films announced that they were looking to adopt several Hasbro properties, including Monopoly and Hungry Hungry Hippos to a movie. The plot remained a carefully guarded secret for years. While production was supposed to start in early 2016, it remained in development purgatory for almost a decade for reasons that are murkier than the waters of the Ruaha. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is rumored to be starring, though it’s unclear if that will be as one of the titular hippos or as a more muscular facsimile of McGuire. When Hungry Hungry Hippos finally entered pre-production this past spring, McGuire’s childhood dream came true when he was called in to consult as a hippo expert. Patrolling the bustling set on crutches, he reportedly had a lot to say about the finer details of hippo feeding and jousting behaviors.
Hippo research is no game; it’s life or death business. Yet McGuire returned to Tanzania earlier this year, almost three years to the day after the attack. This time he stayed on the shore, letting his graduate assistants venture out in the rubber Zodiac to look at the one-ton beach masters, submerged coyly in the water like influencers at an infinity pool in Dubai.
“Seeing them like this, you’d almost forget how deadly they are,” he mused.
Yet even from the safety of the shore he was still intimately involved in the machinations of this year’s hippo studies. Like the amphibious behemoths he catalogs, McGuire is bullish, stubborn, and voracious. Despite his brush with death at the hands of a two ton bull hippopotamus, he’s still possessed with a childlike enthusiasm for his work. He doesn’t blame the hippo that tried to gobble him up any more than Kroll blamed Hasbro for gobbling up Milton Bradley and his beloved hippo game along with it. He shows no signs of slowing down. His appetite for hippo knowledge has become insatiable. He is visibly hungry for more. However, at this stage of his career, having tasted his mortality once, gobbling mere marbles simply isn’t enough.
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