Yearly Archives: 2019

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Stumo, was killed in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, holds a picture of Boeing 737 Max jet crash victims, during the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing examining the “design, development, and marketing,” of the Boeing 737 Max, on Wednesday, October 30, 2019. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Melissa Brown, Brendan I. Koerner, Christopher Mathias, and Yiyun Li.

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The Alabama “Corrections” System: An American Horror Story

Inmates sit in a treatment dorm at Staton Correctional Facility in Elmore, Ala., Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2019. The Department of Justice has threatened to sue Alabama over excessive violence and other problems in state prisons for male inmates. (AP Photo/Kim Chandler)

The Montgomery Advertiser interviewed more than two dozen men in the Alabama correction system, all of whom report extreme routine violence and “unhinged” drug-induced behavior among those incarcerated — often against elderly and vulnerable members of the prison population. As Melissa Brown reports, rehabilitation is impossible with little access to programs, while guards remain indifferent at best, refusing to enforce prison rules, or at worst, helping to perpetrate heinous acts.

The consistency of experiences — from prison to prison, from lifers to the newly incarcerated, from young and old, from black and white — paint a chilling portrait of corruption, violence and the disintegration of state institutions purported to correct and rehabilitate.

Alabama prison administrators openly flout the department’s stated rules and regulations in an attempt to exert control and discipline prisoners, the Montgomery Advertiser has found after months of reporting and interviews with dozens of men incarcerated across the state.

In the seven months since the Department of Justice released a scathing report on the Alabama Department of Corrections, prison officials have withheld food from men, micromanaging minor disciplinary infractions while violence and unexpected deaths continue unabated, including nine which occurred during the reporting of this story in September and October.

Ma’am, I’ve seen old, elderly people in wheelchairs get jumped on and robbed and get beat real bad. There’s nothing you can do about it. Officers don’t do nothing. I’ve seen a man get beat so bad in here, and the officers dragged him back in and put him in the same dorm.

This place is like a killing ground. It’s like a killing field, and nobody is doing anything about it. When people do get murdered, they say ‘died from natural causes.’

[There’s an older man who] is homeless in prison. He has no mattress, no clothes. He sleeps on the floor. Every time he gets something, they take it from him.

I’ve watched the very ones who are trusted to keep us in custody, safe and prepared for returning home beat, extort and even rape. My experience is one I’d never wish upon my worst enemy.

The humanity of us in here is stripped.

One asks why should the average citizen care about the living conditions in prison? It’s imperative to answer that question in the simplest way. First the taxpayer (average citizen) is the investor of prison life. Next, the investor now becomes a party in the creation of what exits these walls. My question has always been and remains, “What kind of individual would you want me to be once I’m released? A man or a monster? Rehabilitated or an animal?” If one was to really think about the creation of what I am to become along the same lines as the investment of their own personal safety, wouldn’t you want the best assurance money could buy?

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Every One of Us Is Other: Looking Back on Representation in “Heavenly Creatures” 25 Years Later

WingNut Films

Alex DiFrancesco | Longreads | November 15, 2019 | 9 minutes (2,578 words)

In 1994, years before showing us the wonders and terrors of Middle Earth, Peter Jackson released a film that some still consider his finest work to date. The film was Heavenly Creatures, the real-life story of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murders in Christchurch, New Zealand. It won awards all over the festival circuit before receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

To provide a brief background to the history of the case and the film: Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme met as teeangers and went on to form a loving and obsessive friendship built around a mythical world that they created and escaped to frequently when the real world proved too much for them. When the girls’ parents began to fear they were developing an “unnatural,” queer bond, they decided to separate the young women. The girls, in retaliation and hopes they would be together forever, decided to murder Parker’s mother. They committed the act on June 22, 1954, bludgeoning the mother to death with a brick in a stocking.

Peter Jackson’s fourth film (after low-budget splatter-fests Bad Taste and Dead Alive and a Muppet-Show-gone-perverse venture called Meet the Feebles) was a departure for him. Jackson’s partner Fran Walsh had been passionate about the real-life Parker-Hulme murders for many years, and Jackson joined in the obsession. The film would take Jackson out of the realm of camp and cult, and catapult him into the playing field that made all of his later blockbusters possible. Attempts had been made to tell the salacious murder story before, including Michelanne Forster’s play Daughters of Heaven, but one reason that those attempts may have fallen flat was that no one before Jackson had had quite his empathy and dedication to the girls portrayed in the film. New Zealand filmmaker Costa Botes, a friend and one-time collaborator of Jackson’s, in a lengthy 2002 piece for NZ Edge, told a story that he believed exemplifies Jackson’s dedication:

He had already found black and white photographs of the Hulme family’s Port Levy summer house, but had no idea what colour it was painted in the 1950s. Anyone else would have built a recreation and settled for a best guess.

Jackson flew to Christchurch, drove two hours to the site, and then proceeded to dig in a grown over rubbish pile he found in the back. He emerged with a wooden shingle. Comparing it to his photographs, he realised he was holding a name plate that used to be screwed above the front door at the time of the Hulmes occupancy. Traces of original green paint still clung to the plate.

Thus, the colour the Port Levy house ended up being painted in the film was … exactly the right colour.

This dedication would be admirable for any director to undertake, but why exactly Jackson was so dedicated to this story is another matter.

In a 1994 Los Angeles Times article, Jackson himself said that the story had been around for decades. “But in all this time … the story has never been told sympathetically.”

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme. Or, perhaps, it could be something closer to empathy. Surely, Jackson’s early feature films, the splatter-fests like Bad Taste, which was made on weekends, (movies that were made around life events like a cast member marrying a devout Christian, being unable to work on the Sundays the films were shot (in the case of Bad Taste), being written out of the script, then written back in after his divorce), were not far off from the fantasy world that Parker and Hulme created to escape to, portrayed with gruesome life-sized plasticine figures in the film. Both were obsessive and thought out to the smallest detail. Both were ongoing projects that Jackson and the girls spent years on, relentlessly refusing to give them up despite any attempts by nature or man to interrupt them. And though the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the girls’ connection verging into homosexuality, Jackson doesn’t flinch away from it or sensationalize it, either. The sex scenes in the film juxtapose a disintersted, disconnected Parker having sex with a male boarder in her parents’ guest room against a scene in which Parker and Hulme experiment sexually with each other, acting out the roles of matinée stars to gently disguise their fascination with and passion for each other.


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While I wouldn’t suggest that Jackson or Walsh could intimately know any of what these girls went through in their repressed time, when they were further repressed by their gender and their obsessive love for each other, the pair seem to have been able to take their own experiences and morphed them into care and even understanding for these murderous young women. Particularly, Jackson seems to view the girls’ make-believe world as a creative outlet not dissimilar from his own acts of creativity — a world both the filmmaker and the girls went to great pains to portray in full and vibrant reality. While the girls made painstaking figurines of the characters who inhabited “the fourth world,” as they called it, Jackson’s work in recreating it went above and beyond much of the CGI work of the time, including claymation battle scenes and orgies, in what would later become the studios that made orcs and elves for Lord of the Rings. This empathy with these girls so unlike himself, created through the bridges he was able to build to them in the understanding of their lives and fantasies, becomes particularly relevant in our time, which no longer allows many examples of sloppy representation by those outside a demographic being represented to slide by unnoticed. Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme.

I am not playing devil’s advocate here. I firmly agree that some representation of marginalized people in art is better left undone. For example, Ariel Schrag’s Adam, a book in which a young cisgender man is mistaken for a trans man and becomes part of the queer community so he can make friends and find dates, was written by a cisgender lesbian and used transgender people as a foil for the lives of cis people. The television show Transparent notoriously chose a cisgender actor, Jeffrey Tambor, to play a transgender lead.

Though the topic is thornier in the example above, poor or sloppy representation typically happens when we view those outside our purview as “other.” There have been countless classes and panel discussions in the arts about “writing the other.” But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering. Essayist and editor Janice Lee, in a presentation at the Thinking Its Presence conference in 2017, likened the distance between any two humans as the same between a human and a badger.

What I’m going to propose though is that the impossible distance between a human and a badger, that daunting and difficult and impossible divide, all of the differences between a human and a badger, is the same impossible distance between any two humans. But that the similarities between two humans, that which makes us alive and living, that closeness that can be intimated, is the same possible closeness between a human and a badger.

I’m also going to propose that attempting to occupy the point of view of a badger is just as important as the attempt and willingness to occupy the point of view of a different human being other than yourself. If we can consider the similarities between humans and badgers in a way that unites us, both as creatures of this planet, both as creatures that want to live and find intimacy differently but similarly, then we might be able to understand the differences and similarities between humans too.

It would be presumptuous to assume Jackson felt the same way when portraying these girls so outside his own purview. But Jackson took several steps toward making sure the girls themselves were represented in ways that humanized them. For one, he poured obsessively over the diaries left behind by Pauline Parker, making the voiceover of the film the girls’ own words. He dug through court records and diaries to find and interview living friends and family, including former classmates of the girls, to round out his understanding of the girls, their love for each other, and their final, horrific act. The film, through camerawork and the voiceover of words directly from Parker’s diary, stays remarkably close to the girls, their sensitiblities, and their actions, until the very end, when the murder is committed, and the camera and the viewer are made to pull away. Up until this point, Jackson sticks to the facts of the girls’ lives and friendship as the girls would have told them themselves. The murder itself, while factual, reels away and lacks the steady gaze that Jackson has cast on these facts throughout. (“I can understand everything but their motivation for the murder, everything until the leap they made from the fantasy of killing to its reality,” Jackson said in the Los Angeles Times interview.) And perhaps, in a world where we are so removed from one another that it is suggested most of us could never understand one another, this documentary-ish approach is a necessary one. Perhaps it is not just good filmmaking to dig through the rubble of a demolished house to find the color scheme, to obsess over the history left behind by people themselves in their first-person accounts, but perhaps it is a living example of the empathy necessary to cross the divide between any one human and another.

But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering.

Whether or not the girls were actually homosexual is still a piece of conjecture. While Jackson’s film portrays the girls engaging in sexual acts with each other and shows a scene in which a psychologist labels the girls “depraved homosexuals” (it was the ’50s when homosexuality was still firmly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an unquestionable mental illness), it’s never been “proven,” if such a thing can be “proven.” What seems important is that Jackson never used the piece of potential information to sensationalize the way others had in the past, nor the way that someone who is decidedly not homosexual might be tempted to. Accounts from newspapers and tabloids of the time the murder was committed were relentless in their othering of the lesbian schoolgirl murderers. In the digital newspaper collection of the Christchurch city libraries, one article recounts a psychiatrist’s view of the girls as homosexual and insane. “Their association, I consider, proved tragic for them. There is evidence that their friendship became a homosexual one. There is no proof there was a physical relationship, although there is a lot of suggestive evidence from the diary that this occurred. There is evidence that they had baths together and had frequent talks on sexual matters. That is not a healthy relationship in itself, but more important, it prevents the development of adult sexual relationships. I don’t mean by that physical relationships, but attachment to people of the opposite sex. Homosexuality is frequently related to paranoia.” Jackson, according to the interview in the Los Angeles Times, found little use in these accounts.

A Film Quarterly review of Heavenly Creatures suggests that Jackson veered away from the connection between homosexuality and insanity that even the girls hid behind in their trial by considering it a “red herring” in light of the rest of their powerful, intimate feminine relationship. Simply put, Jackson didn’t seem to care whether the girls were in love with each other because he knew they were in love with each other, and that bond of love and obsession carried enough weight to transcend categories of easy and dismissive identification. While their potential homosexuality wasn’t irrelevant (it was portrayed in a scene as inventive and intimate as the rest of their relationship, mentioned earlier, in which the girls’ sexual ecounters were informed partly by their fantasy world and partly by their love for each other), it also wasn’t an easy out, a way of othering that allowed Jackson the explanation for the unthinkable that so many sought in the story.

Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. There was little self-representation in those times. Visibility in the realm of popular culture was almost nonexistent for queer and trans people, not as anything other than a punchline or a sideshow dweller, a flippant one-liner on The Simpsons about Homer’s mistreated uncle Frank who transitioned because of childhood trauma, or a “bearded lady” in the circus. When I first came across Heavenly Creatures in the early 2000s, years after its release, I would find something like understanding there. I was a nascent queer, just beginning to identify as bisexual, living briefly back in my small hometown, working at a video store, and understanding the repression that Parker and Hulme may have felt in ways that I wouldn’t have expected someone like Jackson to. In those days, we took what we could get, and when what we got was something as shining as this film, it didn’t really matter as much where it had come from, just that someone had appropriately seen. Years later, after I had cut off ties with my own family (its own sort of murder, I suppose) in order to live my life as an out trans person, I rewatched the film and marveled again at how little judgement Jackson lorded over these girls, and how much care and sympathy he afforded them. How dedicated he was to telling their story in their words, how his sympathies, throughout the film, are firmly with the girls — not with the parents terrorized by a diagnosis of homosexuality, or a world outside Parker and Hulme’s deeply imagined one. I wonder about the generation of ’90s queers who felt the same, in some little way. Being seen is a powerful thing — sometimes being seen by someone nothing like you is powerful in ways that can’t be replicated by someone who hasn’t had to make the leap between potential consciousnesses.

We live in a time when “own voices” is becoming the norm — rightfully and happily so in most cases. It seems that many, to paraphrase Janice Lee, are not ready to do the work of leaping over the divide that is between one living being and another in a sensitive and caring way, not, in many cases, in a way that we might consider artful. Yet those of us who see ourselves portrayed poorly or with little sensitivity in the media are also, often, aware that this trend will never stop. And, in some ways, it should not. We should never stop trying to bridge the space between us, doing the work that art insists we do to understand one another. However, there are prototypes for understanding and sensitivity all around us. I believe Heavenly Creatures is one of the finest examples of an artist finding one of the multitudes of self and using it to show the lives of people who, for all reasonable purposes, are utterly unlike him.

***

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their first novel, an acid western, was published in 2015, and their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press), in 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Jason Stavers
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Burning Out

Illustration by Brian Britigan

Sarah Trent | Longreads | November 2019 | 22 minutes (4,920 words)

Jack Thomas was home in time for dinner, but he wasn’t really home. His head was still in the fire, gnawing on the details of what his strike team had accomplished, hazards they’d found, a care facility they’d partially saved from the flames. For 19 hours of their nine-day deployment, his team had fought to save those 25 senior apartments, which had somehow been spared when the wildfire tore through town. Thomas knew that if they could stop the fire at the building’s central atrium, these homes would stay standing. And they did.

Walking through his front door, in a suburban Santa Rosa, California, neighborhood the weekend before Thanksgiving, Thomas still smelled of smoke.

He had dinner with his wife, shared photos from the fire, and talked through their holiday plans. Afterward, he unfurled parcel maps across the table while his bags waited, packed, on the couch. After more than a week fighting the most destructive wildfire in California history, the Santa Rosa fire captain had just a few hours to study the maps and get some rest: His deployment on a fire crew was over, but hundreds of people were missing, and FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Task Force #4 needed someone to help manage the search.

Thomas set his alarm for 3 a.m. He was going back to Paradise.

That night, the next morning, and for many days after, trained search and rescue professionals and volunteers from across California and beyond drove into the smoldering heart of catastrophe. The Camp fire, which started the morning of November 8, 2018, and within hours had overtaken the town of Paradise, was unprecedented: in size, pattern, intensity, damage, and number of people missing, which climbed as high as 1,300. It required the largest search in state history — in conditions few of the searchers were trained for. But to leaders like Thomas, it seemed a portent of things to come: Wildfires are becoming more common and worse. And other disasters are, too.

Rachel Allen got to Paradise two days before Thomas, after dark on Friday, November 16, joining the first wave of volunteer searchers responding to the call for mutual aid. It was the earliest she could arrive, leaving her postdoc research behind for the weekend. A member of the Bay Area Mountain Rescue (BAMRU) team since 2012, she has deployed to dozens of searches across the state, usually for one person missing in the wilderness: a snowshoer lost in a storm, a hiker injured and stuck off-trail, or a person with Alzheimer’s who wandered away from home.

She and her team spend hundreds of unpaid hours each year practicing specialized search and rescue skills. But in Paradise, little of their training in snow conditions, rope systems, or tracking was relevant. Allen wore a white Tyvek suit over her hiking boots and learned how to identify what was typically the only trace of people who hadn’t escaped the blaze: small fragments of bone.

When Thomas arrived Sunday morning, just in time for the morning briefing, searchers in a rainbow of red, orange, and hi-viz agency-branded jackets filled the Tall Pines Entertainment Center parking lot: county search teams, mountain rescue teams, law enforcement, the National Guard, all ready for the day’s assignments.

Thomas joined the fray with USAR Task Force #4 — one of 28 teams in the nation equipped for large-scale disaster relief. Most USAR members, like Thomas, are professional firefighters. On top of a grueling season fighting record-setting wildfires, this was his team’s third urban search deployment in as many months. They’d been to the sites where Hurricane Florence made landfall that September. Where Michael had hit in October. And now this. 

New kinds of disasters require new response plans and training, and bigger ones need more people who know what to do.

All weekend, the air was thick with smoke and a pervasive otherworldliness. “If you had told me I was on Mars, I’d be like, ‘OK, right,’” Allen told me. She searched for two days, mostly in silence, wearing a mask she had to remove to speak. Her hiking boots sank with every step into ash up to eight inches deep. The sky was a murky orange. Trees were still green. Everything else was gray. It was a town like any other. But everything had changed.

In 2018, wildfires swept not only California, Australia, and Greece, but also the colder, wetter landscapes of England, Ireland, and Sweden. Kerala, India, was hit by one of the worst floods ever recorded, killing more than 500 people; a heat wave hospitalized 22,000 in Japan; and a series of tropical storms and typhoons affected more than 10 million across the Philippines. A bomb cyclone slammed the U.S. Northeast. Avalanches crushed Colorado. Mudslides buried Montecito, California. Record-breaking hurricanes battered the Southeast. As of this writing, what has come to be known as “fire season” is well underway in California, and fires blaze in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia. 

To climate scientists, the pattern of increasing extremes comes as no surprise — it’s in line with projections for life on a warming planet. And at 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit above average, according to NASA, 2018 was one of the hottest years on record. 2019 is on track to be hotter.

When disaster strikes, rescuers like Thomas and Allen drive toward the danger the rest of us are desperate to escape. They’re trained to find us when we’re stuck somewhere — lost, injured, or worse. But a changing planet has raised the stakes: Avalanches, tornadoes, fires, and floods fill news cycles with counts of the missing and cell phone footage of neighborhoods turned to wilderness. The U.N. warns that climate catastrophes are now happening once a week across the globe. And unpredictable shoulder seasons — the busiest months for search and rescue calls — are getting longer. New kinds of disasters require new response plans and training, and bigger ones need more people who know what to do.

Search and rescue teams train for the worst conditions. But the worst conditions are getting worse. Search teams are stretched. Rescuers are burning out. We are all less safe.

***

On a May 2013 day in Naujaat, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut — an Inuit hamlet known at the time as Repulse Bay — the local search and rescue team was called after a nearby traveler activated an emergency GPS beacon. It was a day with almost 18 hours of sunlight, but blizzard conditions postponed the search.

The call itself was unremarkable — Nunavut search and rescue records are full of similar reports: emergency signals turned on in harsh weather, hunters who’ve run out of gas, a group trapped by moving ice. Nearly everyone is brought home safe. But one trend is nonetheless alarming: In 2016, researchers showed that search and rescue calls in the province had doubled over a decade.

The reasons were complex. More powerful boats and snowmobiles carried hunters, fishers, and travelers farther from safety; people’s preparedness for harsh conditions had not kept pace with their ability to travel so far; high costs to maintain equipment led to makeshift repairs and more frequent breakdowns. But one factor stood out: As the Arctic warms — and it’s warming faster than anywhere else on earth — weather and ice conditions have become less and less predictable. 

“It’s the perfect storm” for accidents and the ensuing calls for rescue, researcher Dylan Clark told a Canadian Senate committee in 2018. And this storm is anything but localized.

In Iceland, where tourism is booming and glacier driving tours are popular, the ice is melting, opening crevasses that threaten vehicles and people. A woman died in 2010 after falling into one with her 7-year-old son just a short distance from a tour jeep. 

In the Alps, retreating glaciers have changed popular climbing routes, increasing exposure and difficulty on nearly all alpine climbs. Where there once was snow, there’s now ice. Where there once was permafrost, there’s now unstable rock. One catastrophic rockfall in Bondo, Switzerland, killed eight hikers in 2017. Their bodies were never found.

Search and rescue teams train for the worst conditions. But the worst conditions are getting worse.

Eddy Cartaya, a Portland Mountain Rescue volunteer and expert on glacier cave exploration and rescue, says that across the Pacific Northwest, more and more people are exploring the backcountry. Outdoor equipment is better and less expensive than ever, cultural interest in the outdoors is surging, and longer summers mean more access to beautiful, wild places. 

Normally, “deep snow-pack insulates some of these locations from inexperienced people,” Cartaya said. But that’s changing. Hiking into areas with now-melting glaciers — in which ice caves are prone to sudden collapse, volcanic gas-filled fumaroles are becoming exposed, and flash floods of glacial melt can occur on the bluest of bluebird days — even an expert outdoorsperson is more likely to run into trouble.

Many of these hazards are new to rescuers, too, making operations riskier for everyone. Now, Cartaya said, his team trains in glacier caves — areas most mountaineers spend their entire careers trying to avoid. After two rescues in noxious fumaroles, the team has purchased new equipment to measure crevasses for hydrogen sulfide. And with a higher volume of calls than ever before — to a group of volunteers in an industry where burnout is already high (few last more than a couple of years) — they’ve increased their recruitment efforts, tripling their most recent cohort of trainees.

But you don’t need to be a backpacker, hunter, or mountaineer heading deep into the wilderness to require rescue from a disaster compounded by climate change. Increasingly, that disaster is coming to us.

In Switzerland, rockslides have buried villages and stranded residents. In Alabama, devastating tornadoes have cut swaths through towns and neighborhoods. Across the Midwest, floods have done the same. In Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean, residents have evacuated from record hurricane after record hurricane. And all of this, according to climate scientists, is at least partially attributable to a warming planet, in which ice is melting at record speed and rising levels of atmospheric water are strengthening storms and producing unprecedented rainfall. 

While the Eastern U.S. is inundated with water, the Western states suffer without it: As temperatures rise, the snowpack melts faster and forests dry out. By late summer, much of California is a tinderbox. Any spark — lightning, a barbecue, a faulting power line — can set the whole thing off.

***

Ten of the 20 most destructive wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2015. They include the two most destructive (2018 Camp and 2017 Tubbs fires), the two largest (2018 Mendocino Complex and 2017 Thomas fires), and the deadliest by far: In Paradise, searchers found 85 people dead. Two remain missing. This is more than the previous three deadliest fires combined.

For Thomas and his team, the Camp fire set another kind of record and, leaders believe, a precedent: It was the first time FEMA USAR teams had ever been called to a fire. Thomas and others doubt it will be the last. The federal program, which launched in 1991, was designed primarily to respond to catastrophic earthquakes. But as the nature of disasters has evolved, USAR task forces have too. In 1994, teams deployed to the Northridge quake in Los Angeles. A year later, to the Oklahoma City bombing, and in 2001, to downtown Manhattan after the World Trade Center attack. 

In 2005, all 28 teams went to Hurricane Katrina, and as the size and severity of hurricanes have increased since, so have the calls to USAR: Sandy in 2012. Matthew in 2015. Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017; Florence and Michael a year later; Dorian this fall.

Thomas went to most of them. “We’re in the water business now,” he said. And the fires? “I totally think that’s going to be in our scope now.”

As a firefighter of more than 30 years who fought the 2017 Tubbs Fire in his own city and countless more around the state, Thomas knows firsthand the ways wildland fires have changed. “It never used to be like this,” he said. When he first started, he’d go to one, maybe two “mutual aid” calls (that is, requests to help other agencies) per season, fighting wildland fires to the scale of around 10,000 acres. “Since 2015 it’s just been non-stop with these major fires,” he said. 


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In 2018, between USAR calls and wildland fire response, Thomas spent 75 days working outside Santa Rosa County, including 21 days in a row at the Mendocino Complex fire. When he came home from that blaze — which burned nearly 460,000 acres before it was finally contained — he had just enough time to move his daughter to college before he was deployed again.

“It pulls on your heartstrings to go help,” he said. But every time he arrives at base camp for another wildland fire, he sees the same guys, grim with fatigue.

“You can see it in guy’s eyes,” he told me. “It seems like it’s more and more and more and more.” Between fighting fires around the state, flying east for hurricane missions, and expecting that USAR’s scope will grow, the effort is not sustainable, he said. “But you know the thing is, who are you going to call? With the amount of missing residents, the amount of destroyed homes — who’s going to do that work?”

Headquarters for Thomas’s team — one of eight in California — is tucked between I-880 and the train tracks in East Oakland, behind a city vehicle maintenance facility. On a cold March morning, a dozen men and women in dark shirts and caps emblazoned with their agency logos — Pittsburg Fire, Sonoma Fire, Contra Costa Fire — ambled from room to room, catching up and collecting signatures for their annual reorientation exercise. 

Each member checked the fit of their issued full-face air mask, re-upped their baseline EKG test, and verified, essentially, that they knew the drill: Every checkpoint is a step they’ll repeat in the hours before an actual deployment. In the garage, Thomas signed off on helmet fits and asked each member if their go-bag was ready. 

“97 you said?” He searched for Tracey Chin’s duffel among the hundreds of numbered red bags on the shelves surrounding the garage. He found it and pulled it down, and she unzipped the pockets to inspect what was inside. She checked the size of the clothing, in case it had changed, and the toothpaste’s expiration date. The team has just four hours to deploy when a call for mutual aid comes in, and they must be prepared for 72 hours of self-sufficiency. The “creature comforts,” as Chin calls these basic necessities, are nearly as important as a tightly sealed air mask.

She zipped the bag closed over carefully folded T-shirts, and Thomas snapped a red plastic lock seal through the zipper pull. Her mask fit. Her photo had been taken. Her sign-off sheet was full. Chin was ready to deploy.

And this team fully expects to — though until recently, that was far from their norm.

“We went eight years without deploying,” said Oakland Battalion Chief Robert Lipp, who leads the task force. But since 2017, they’ve fielded six calls. Now, come autumn, when hurricane and wildland fire seasons are both in full swing, he said he’s “more surprised if we don’t go somewhere than if we do.” 

To climate scientists, the pattern of increasing extremes comes as no surprise — it’s in line with projections for life on a warming planet.

As the need for rescuers goes up, the whole response system is stretched thin. Two Southern California USAR teams, which largely pull on members from one fire department each, were undeployable for USAR calls last fall while wildfires raged in Riverside and Orange counties. The Oakland team is more insulated from that pressure: Its 230 members — enough for three full rescue units — come from 15 different departments. The team has never had to turn down a call for mutual aid, Lipp said. “But we’ve been awful close.”

“When there’s a disaster, we all want to go.” But, he added, “anyone who says it’s not worsening is not paying attention.”

***

On the first day of SAR-Basic — required for anyone who hopes to join Bay Area Mountain Rescue — 15 recruits listened and took notes as veteran members explained the weekend training. Wearing an array of technical fleeces and down coats, it was obvious that they were the newbies: Every sworn-in member wore a red jacket — BAMRU patch on one shoulder and the San Mateo County Sheriff star on the chest — to insulate against the early morning chill.

The first lesson in every emergency response training — from first aid through wilderness paramedicine — is the same, though every teacher has their own way to phrase it: The most important person at the scene is you; don’t let someone else’s emergency become your own; your safety comes first. Adrenaline and the powerful urge to help someone in need can be difficult to overcome — and dangerous to everyone. 

Under the county park picnic shelter, Nathan Fischer sat atop a long wooden table, his gray waffle fleece and close-cropped beard blending into this year’s cohort of mostly twentysomething men. With one leg casually folded, he absorbed the morning lectures. He, like everyone seated around him, was there in part to fulfill that urge to help. “Other people adopt kittens or mentor kids,” he told me. “I’m awful with kids, but maybe I can stop the bleeding.”

An instructor addressed the group. “The first rule of search and rescue,” he said, “is don’t create more subjects.”

This year’s safety talk was unusually personal for the team. Just months earlier, a Ventura County mountain rescuer was killed and two teammates were injured in a storm while trying to help the victims of a rollover crash. The team was en route to a training exercise. The roads were slick. Another vehicle lost control.

At every training station at SAR-Basic, the safety talk was reinforced. Fischer and the other recruits learned to perform a fine grid search, crawling shoulder to shoulder looking for shell casings in the dirt and leaves — while also scanning for poison oak. They learned how to load and carry a person in a titanium-frame litter — along with effective communication to spread the load, and to lift and move as one. Navigation skills, radio skills, tracking skills. And then, finally, a mock search.

Fischer, leading a team of three, talked his group through the details of the briefing. Two trail runners were missing. Their team had been assigned a trail to search. They grabbed a radio and a map and set out for the trail, flanked by mentors.

’It’s the perfect storm’ for accidents and the ensuing calls for rescue.

The mock search is an audition of sorts, at which members and the soon-to-be can feel out their future colleagues. Trust, teamwork, and leadership are as important as technical skill and search savvy. Those who are accepted to train with BAMRU will start deploying on calls as soon as they wish: Trainees join searches while they work through a long list of skill sign-offs and training exercises that typically take a year to complete. The best lessons — and the hardest — will come in the field.

After a morning of searching for the “missing” runners, Fischer’s team broke for lunch. Mentor Eric Chow — just a year into his own tenure on the team — knew that the action would soon pick up. He pulled Fischer aside. “What do you have for PPE?” Chow asked, using shorthand for personal protective equipment — namely, in this case, nitrile gloves. Fischer had none. Chow found a pair in his radio chest harness and handed them over. 

Then the radio blared, cutting into the quiet on the trail. Another team had found the last missing subject. Fischer looked at the map. They were close. When they arrived on scene, his wilderness medical training kicked in. He went straight toward the subject — a woman who had fallen off-trail and injured her leg — and joined another rescuer assessing her injuries. He removed her shoe and checked the circulation in her foot.

Uphill, proctors were watching. One of them whispered: “Where are his gloves?”

Blood is a hazard. Smoke is a hazard. Needles, nails, cornices, rocks, hypoxic subjects, moving vehicles. The powerful urge to help someone can come at profound personal cost. Forgetting safety precautions in an exercise merely means failure. Being without them in the field can mean creating more subjects. 

Physical safety is paramount, but psychological preparation is important as well: The emotional costs can be just as high.

This team typically deploys to difficult, far-away searches — ones that have already gone on for days without success. Stopping the bleeding (or rescue at all) is not usually involved: Often, they recover bodies.

Veteran team member Alice Ng is haunted by the search for a young mountaineer crushed by an avalanche. The recovery of a body brings closure to everyone, but this one hit her hard. The traumatic stop of this boy’s life, while doing something she might have done too; his family, walking in circles around the airfield, with nothing to do but wait. The day after finding him, while chopping vegetables for dinner, she suddenly broke down in tears. The task was so normal, she told me: “That can be taken away from you so quickly.”

For Eric Chow, one of the mentors who took part in the mock rescue, one search near Lake Tahoe was especially memorable. “We were in our element there,” he remembered. It was high angle, high altitude, in avalanche conditions, a search for one missing person. It was everything this team trains for. The Paradise fire, on the other hand, felt like the opposite. There were scores of bodies reduced to bone fragments, cesspits hidden under the ash, and “widowmakers” — the precarious branches of burned trees — that could fall at any moment. “We don’t know any of those hazards,” he said.

***

It’s difficult to plan or train for what’s never been experienced before, and in climate-influenced disasters, nothing is as it was. The Camp fire was apocalyptic. Michael St. John, long-time leader of Marin Search and Rescue and newly retired from the Mill Valley Fire Department, deployed to Paradise on day five of the blaze to help Butte County search coordinators and state search and rescue leaders wrap their collective heads around organizing such a massive search.

“What’s your PPE plan?” he recalled asking the leaders at search command. He knew they’d need air masks. Tyvek. Steel-shanked boots if they could find them fast enough. And decontamination facilities. When a forest burns, the smoke is dangerous. When a city burns — with all its plastics, paints, chemicals, and more — it’s deadly. If not today, then perhaps years from now when the cancers start growing, St. John said. And while many teams like BAMRU and Marin SAR have limited county insurance for in-field accidents, volunteers don’t get workers’ compensation. They just get sick.

You don’t need to be a backpacker, hunter, or mountaineer heading deep into the wilderness to require rescue from a disaster compounded by climate change. Increasingly, that disaster is coming to us.

From search headquarters at the Tall Pines bowling alley, where cots were set up in the bar and a rec room was converted to mission command, St. John searched Amazon for boots. A dozen deputies raided every Home Depot in the Central Valley for supplies. The National Guard was called to set up mass decontamination tents. 

On the first day of the search, central command ran out of P-100 masks, which offer more protection than the N-95 masks the public was encouraged to wear. Some rescuers who couldn’t get masks in the first days of the search, before donations poured in, turned around and went home. The air was so thick with smoke and particulate matter that it choked out even the sun. Just a few hours in Paradise was too much for some: The personal risk was just too great.

Over the week, St. John and search leaders troubleshot challenges. They had state, county, and federal resources at their disposal, and while every one of them was trained in the same incident command structure — a logistics and hierarchy system built to scale to any emergency — each group had its own culture, communications, and even GIS mapping systems. 

Leaders struggled to manage the growing list of missing people — and to commit enough resources to sort all 1,300 reports, winnow out redundancies, and narrow the search. As best they could under pressure, they integrated lessons from failures along the way, improving the system a little bit more every day.

And every day, the massive search continued across 240 square miles, where homes, stores, schools, and retirement homes — more than 18,000 structures in all — were now gone. Just the grid of streets remained, along with stone, metal, and randomly spared objects. Chimneys stood like sentries. So did radiators. Mailboxes. The intricate metalwork of a headboard. Cars had melted by the roadside, their metal shells resolidified as river-flows on pavement.  Read more…

The Soundtrack to Hell

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It was one man against the noise of multiplying faceless machines near his Arizona home — until his neighbors eventually noticed the pervasive hum emanating from CyrusOne, a data center that used massive, thrumming chillers to cool its servers. As Bianca Bosker reports at the Atlantic, when residents banded together to demand peace in the neighborhood, at first CyrusOne went silent, but only metaphorically speaking.

Desperate ears call for desperate measures, and the noise-afflicted go to elaborate lengths to lower the volume. Kanuri taught himself to code so he could analyze New York City’s 311 data and correlate noise complaints with elective districts; he hoped he could hold politicians accountable. Having tried moving bedrooms and also apartments, Ashley is now moving across the country, to a suburb in the Southwest. I spoke with a New Yorker who, unable to afford a move, has been sleeping in her closet—armed with earplugs, headphones, an AC unit, a fan, and two white-noise machines. A Wisconsin man who’d re-insulated, re-drywalled, and re-windowed his home was ultimately offered sleeping medication and antidepressants. An apartment dweller in Beijing, fed up with the calisthenics of the kids upstairs, got revenge by attaching a vibrating motor to his ceiling that rattled the family’s floor. The gadget is available for purchase online, where you can also find Coat of Silence paint, AlphaSorb Bass Traps, the Noise Eater Isolation Foot, the Sound Soother Headband, and the Sonic Nausea Electronic Disruption Device, which promises, irresistibly, “inventive payback.”

Scientists have yet to agree on a definition for noise sensitivity, much less determine why some individuals seem more prone to it, though there have been cases linking sensitivity to hearing loss. What is clear, however, is that sound, once noticed, becomes impossible to ignore. “Once you are bothered by a sound, you unconsciously train your brain to hear that sound,” Pigeon said. “That phenomenon just feeds itself into a diabolic loop.” Research suggests habituation, the idea that we’ll just “get used to it,” is a myth. And there is no known cure. Even for sufferers of tinnitus—an auditory affliction researchers understand far better than noise sensitivity—the most effective treatment that specialists can offer is a regimen of “standard audiological niceness”: listening to them complain and reassuring them the noise won’t kill them. Or, as one expert put it, “lending a nice ear.”

We were silent again and listened to the data center moaning. Which was also, in a sense, the sound of us living: the sound of furniture being purchased, of insurance policies compared, of shipments dispatched and deliveries confirmed, of security systems activated, of cable bills paid. In Forest City, North Carolina, where some Facebook servers have moved in, the whine is the sound of people liking, commenting, streaming a video of five creative ways to make eggs, uploading bachelorette-party photos. It’s perhaps the sound of Thallikar’s neighbor posting “Has anyone else noticed how loud it’s been this week?” to the Dobson Noise Coalition’s Facebook group. It’s the sound of us searching for pink-eye cures, or streaming porn, or checking the lyrics to “Old Town Road.” The sound is the exhaust of our activity. Modern life—EHHNNNNNNNN—humming along.

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This Month In Books: The Book Is an Escape Tool

Book tunnel in Prague library. Mirrors are used to create this effect.(vladj55/iStock/Getty)

Dear Reader,

“I had to write this book. I think any writer that finishes a book would say the same thing: they didn’t have a choice,” says Mark Haber to Adam Morgan in an interview about his slim novella Reinhardt’s Garden. Steph Cha, in her interview with Victoria Namkung, likewise talks about a compulsion to write, though not regarding her latest novel, Your House Will Pay, but rather her prolific output of Yelp reviews:

First and foremost, it is just a compulsion. I actually have a lot of these stupid compulsions. It’s like a completeness thing. I basically started writing Yelp reviews in 2009, and because of the way Yelp works, I feel like I have to do it until I die. I think now it probably doesn’t help with the book writing, but I do think writing Yelp reviews helped me figure out my voice in a way that blogging helps people figure out their voices because I’ve written millions of words on Yelp and I started around the same time as my first novel. It’s a low pressure, low stakes way for me to be writing almost every day.

In his review of Lafcadio Hearn’s newly reissued short story collection Japanese Ghost Stories, Colin Dickey writes about Hearn’s lifelong obsession with the supernatural, which began in childhood:

Alone at night in his bedroom he would become convinced ghosts were reaching out for him in the dark. He would scream ferociously until an adult would come to check on him, a disturbance that inevitably resulted in being whipped. But, as Hearn would later recall, “the fear of ghosts was greater than the fear of whippings — because I could see the ghosts.”

This obsession dictated the course of his writing career. As Dickey tells it, Hearn’s ghost stories are of a piece with his journalism in the U.S. and Martinique before his late-life move to Japan — “stories of murder and mayhem” and “interviews with undertakers and butchers.”  Taken as a whole, his full body of work is “a corpus around that thin line between life and death.”


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The compulsion to a narrative can be dangerous — it can twist the teller to conform to unexpected contours. In an interview with Jane Ratcliffe about her book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession, Cameron Dezen Hamon says that she was drawn powerfully toward religion from an early age:

It felt like there was a missing piece, not just in my spirit, but in my community. I was always drawn to the mystery, drawn to spirituality. I wish I had a better word for it. I was trying to hypnotize my friends when I was nine and was always talking about ghosts. I felt this thing within me that was different from other people and it sought community, it sought to be around like-minded people. It felt like this question mark, that was driving me toward an answer.

But in adult life, within her chosen spiritual home, she realized that something was still missing — something different but still vital. Her church’s sexism, it’s denial of the part of her that was female, left her fractured in a new way:

I began to see that also my voice was being used. I thought all of me was needed for this goal of bringing God’s kingdom to Earth. That’s the evangelical goal, right? That’s what we say broadly, in that community. But it was really that I was being used in slivers and slices, and I wasn’t unified in my being. I wasn’t able to bring my whole self to the table.

Dezen Hammon’s memoir becomes a means for her to reconstruct herself:

I started to put myself piece by piece back together with writing. I started writing again in earnest in my late thirties and realized that the person I had left behind at twenty-seven was someone worth reclaiming. So I’m in a new golden era, where my voice and my body and my spirit, there’s no compromise going on here. I’m not tamping down parts of myself that are inconvenient.

The kind of narrative power, to deconstruct or reconstruct the teller of the tale, is something Dickey touches on when discussing Hearn. Trying to pinpoint the specific quality of Hearn’s ghost stories that make them so ineffable, Dickey writes that

What gives Hearn’s yūrei their strange aura, their sense of discomfort is his own uncertainty about the stories he’s telling. In Hearn’s tales, the eerie landscape is the voice of the storyteller itself — it moves under its own power, guided by some unknown and unseen motivation.

Indulging in his lifelong obsession with the divide between life and death, Hearn the narrator reaches a sort of sublime state of powerless, adrift in realms of fear beyond the point of his understanding: the book as immersion therapy.

Speaking to Hope Reese about her new memoir In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado describes how the story she tells in her book, that of the domestic abuse she survived at the hands of her partner, also has a certain power over the teller inherent in it. During the abusive relationship, Machado’s potential ability to tell the story was itself an avenue of her partner’s abuse: she would instruct Machado not to write about certain incidents.

She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of exposure. Of the narrative that I possess.

By telling the story, Machado is breaking free of it: the book as an escape tool.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Under the Influence: Deeper Than Beauty

courtesy of Jakiya N. Brown / courtesy of Mina Gerges

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  8 minutes (2,145 words)

Part two in a three-part series on the influencer economy. Read part one, “White Lies.”

* * *

It’s hard to find an influencer who doesn’t fit the profile. I could’ve spoken to a blond female beauty Instagrammer easily. Or a blond male gamer, even. Everything else was a nightmare. Try coming up with a tech influencer who is not a man. Or a man of color who is anywhere near grooming but not drag. In order to find the Travelingfro, Jakiya Brown, an African American woman Instagramming the globe, I had to go to a series of black culture sites. I might have discovered Mina Gerges, who lives in Toronto like me, if I ever walked rather than ran through a Sephora (he’s in the new Canadian campaign), but it was a Twitter callout that eventually brought us together. Surprise: “gay, genderqueer Egyptian beauty influencer” isn’t much of an archetype. Now I’m actually questioning whether being an influencer is a real thing either.

“You don’t do influencing,” Brown explains. “That, to me, that’s not a job.” She sees influencing as a side effect of admirable skill in one area (or, in the famous cases — from Kim Kardashian to Gigi Hadid — of having a name already), a way of selling brands on the attention you already have. She remembers working in beauty marketing several years ago and getting a flood of barely legible, text-style emails from beauty bloggers demanding free products. It was an easy no every time. Speaking of easy nos, I slogged through a sea of influencer-speak — I am now immunized from ever using the word “journey” again — to parse how Brown and Gerges slogged their way through a sea of sameness to get the influencing industry to say yes to them. Here’s how they got past the filters by appealing to reality.

* * *

You may already know Gerges for his “celebrity recreations,” a series prompted by a break up. Some guy ditched him in 2014, but not before mocking Gerges for being effeminate, and the first thing he thought of was that image of Beyoncé with mascara running down her face from her “Why Don’t You Love Me” video. “So I did that,” he says. The response was polarized. Social media stars were big with The Youth at the time, but they weren’t as pervasive in the mainstream as they are now. Gerges had some people thinking he was hilarious, others thinking he was weird: “When I saw peoples’ reactions, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m on to something.’” So he went nuts, producing scrappy imitations of everything from Kim Kardashian’s intricate Cavalli at the 2015 Met Gala (beige curtain, paint) to Beyonce’s twinkling Givenchy (garbage bag, rhinestones). In January 2015, Buzzfeed’s David Mack picked up his site — “Bow down, Instagram bitches” — and that was it. Gerges’s discount replicas were everywhere from Time magazine to Kim Kardashian’s fingertips, and people even started to copy them (that part was annoying, he says). He began to think he could make a living from this thing.

At the same time, Gerges was in recovery, having started his account while struggling with anorexia. “It became so amplified by the culture around Instagram,” he tells me. “Thin, muscular, white men having hundreds of thousands of followers.” He was proof that looking right could make you popular. As if to double down on this cliché, as he got well and gained weight, commenters stopped praising his work and started criticizing his body. It got to the point that he couldn’t look at his own reflection without comments like “What the fuck happened to you?” running through his head. He searched online for other men who might be struggling like him — nothing. “I realized there were no men talking about it,” Gerges says. “We’re conditioned to just take it and be quiet because men shouldn’t be vulnerable.”

He tried to figure out a way to work with Instagram so he didn’t have to hate both the platform and himself. After five months, on February 19, 2018, he had it: Gerges posted a series of images of himself shirtless and disclosed his eating disorder to his followers. He explained how he got sick at the age of 20, how he would starve himself, how he would spend hours at the gym, how he never felt satisfied. The post was covered in Teen Vogue and Paper and has since received almost 11,000 likes. “It took a very long time, because I was horrified to do it,” Gerges explains. But it wasn’t a fairytale ending. A year later he was considering deleting his Instagram account entirely. His work had turned increasingly vulnerable and he was increasingly bullied. And he would later find it impossible to make a living off his site, having sent out media kits and getting rejected left and right. He had a bad experience with an agent (he jokes that he’s now both Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian in one). On top of all that, he felt discouraged watching all these white cis influencers constantly being hired. “There was not a single brand that wanted to work with me,” Gerges says, “not a single one.”

Then the brands got a kick in the ass. As the media awoke to representation, it confronted various industries, including the fashion and beauty machines, on their lack of diversity. Up-and-coming designers of color were more inclusive in their campaigns and on the runway, and old-school companies were shamed into progress. Fashion magazines started approaching Gerges; he landed the gig with Sephora and, more recently, an underwear campaign with Calvin Klein. That which had isolated him then — his gender, his sexuality, his race, his body type — now made him indispensable. In the aftermath of the Sephora campaign, Gerges told me he was researching Egyptian culture through history in order to come up with ways to queer traditionally straight historical narratives. He plans to get a friend to photograph him on film — “I don’t edit any of my photos,” he says, “I think that’s another way for me to introduce an element of vulnerability and honesty” — which he hopes to unveil as an Instagram series, probably at a scientifically suboptimal time for maxing out the likes. Because aside from not Facetuning his images, he doesn’t rely on apps to tell him when to post or how to hashtag. “My value is not that I have, like, a, fucking whatever percent engagement rate,” he says. “My value is my story, my value is who I am.”

* * *

Before Jakiya Browne started @travelingfro, she had a lucrative marketing career in New York with L’Oréal and Coty, for which she scouted talent online. “I would stay on YouTube, like, all day watching these bloggers,” she tells me. But even back in 2014, finding influencers who weren’t interchangeable was a bit of a chore. “The ‘I just got out of college, I fell into YouTubing, now I’m a millionaire’ — we didn’t really want those types of girls,” Brown explains. On one of the influencer trips she hosted, however, she met the kind of woman she realized she herself wanted to be, the kind of woman who creates and sustains a brand outside the confines of an office. “It wasn’t like, ‘I want to become an influencer,’” she clarifies (she will repeat this a few times during our interview), but she was tired of the corporate grind and wanted to travel.

Brown quit her job in 2016. She roamed the world for a year, which sounds impossible, but she supported herself with the “substantial” savings she had amassed over her career and supplemented that with consulting gigs for smaller beauty brands. Still, she had a strict budget: $1,000 a month. In places with a lower cost of living, like Mexico and Eastern Europe, it wasn’t hard to stick to that. Otherwise, she stayed with people she had met during her marketing career. “I just started getting scrappy,” she says, “which is like: creative on how not to spend money.” Once Brown grew a following, her room, board, and transit were covered by sponsored posts. “People were always like, ‘How did you get these brand partnerships when you had like 3,000 followers?’” she says. “I know how to convince them that it’s more than just numbers.” That she was a black female traveler was “low hanging fruit” — there weren’t that many women of color in the travel space — but her high engagement helped too. She only had a few thousand followers but got hundreds of comments per post, which means that a brand could appeal to a market that wasn’t entirely white, and this market would bring sustained attention. Brown thinks she earned her audience’s loyalty by being honest not only about the good, but also about the bad, like whether or not she had the stamina to keep traveling indefinitely. That, and she was good on camera (Brown was an early Instagram Stories adopter), which many influencers weren’t: “If you couldn’t talk to your audience like your friend, and you were super awkward, people disconnected.”

The Travelingfro is now a brand that has had more than 100 clients, offering courses, consulting, and workshops to help “tired nine-to-fivers” find the freedom to “do the things they love, like travel the world.” Last fall, Brown took some time to refine her brand, which included researching literature on digital marketing. In that time, she realized she could marry her marketing and social media experience in order to teach influencers the business side of things. As she wrote in a recent post sponsored by Numi Organic Tea, “Keep building. Show up even when no one shows up. Keep going when everyone thinks you should stop. Keep following whatever it is inside that keeps you from giving up. Watch what happens.” Why a tea company? Because tea is part of her morning routine. Brown only works with brands as long as they work with hers. “If you’re working with, like, detergent one day, and then like plant food the next day, and then like these boots the next day, and then AmEx cards the next day, you’re a walking billboard,” she says. “I’m not about that.” She’s about keeping expenses down, rolling contracts, spacing out your earnings to account for dry spells — in short, being practical. “No exchanges,” she adds. “Like a backpack? I can’t eat that.”

As a marketing veteran, Brown used to know the industry standards, such as they were — companies apparently have piles of cash for influencing that they divvy out arbitrarily — but she doesn’t care anymore. She prices according to how much time and work goes into her posts. “If I feel like I am worth $2,000 for two Instagram stories, that’s what I feel,” she says, to which I say: Jesus. But that’s not even on the high side: at one point, Brown revealed that within a recent quarter she made $50,000, which happens to be my annual income. “You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, things are great, I’m rich,’” she says. “Then something happens and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m broke.” (Usually I’m just broke.) Apparently influencers serially undervalue their worth, particularly influencers of color who see an overrepresentation of white faces. Brown thinks the opposite should be true — in any other industry, the rarer something is, the more valuable it tends to be.

* * *

Neither Brown nor Gerges set out to be influencers, which is probably why they are so good at it. Instead of conforming to the industry standard, they exploded it. Gerges injects the beauty field, which has been largely marketed as white and female, with Middle Eastern queerness. Brown, a black woman traveling the world, also dominates a space that has been overrepresented by white bodies. Which makes her all the more savvy about how precarious it all is. “Instagram can pack up and go any day,” she says. “You do not own that space. You don’t even own the content on there.” I hate to use this term (especially since she didn’t), but Brown diversified in order not to stake her entire livelihood on one platform. Most influencers, however, in her experience don’t have a plan B — a book or a workshop or some other source of income. “They’re all kind of riding this wave,” she says. “Until there is no more wave.” Gerges is doing everything he can to ensure that he is not one of those people. For him, the work goes way beyond appearances. “It’s not just an aesthetic or a filter that you toss on every photo,” he says. “It’s about a larger idea.” Whether or not anyone else can see that is out of his control. But influencing on its own is definitely precarious considering the dilution of the industry by superficial infiltrators who pose as something more. “I hope that people can get to a point where they can differentiate between what’s actually authentic,” Gerges says. “And what is just fabricated to look authentic.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Boeing 737 MAX: “Fatally Flawed”

UNITED STATES - OCTOBER 29: Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Stumo, was killed in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, holds a sign of crash victims behind Dennis Muilenburg, foreground, CEO of Boeing, during the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing in Hart Building on aviation safety and the future of the Boeing 737 MAX on Tuesday, October 29, 2019. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

In designing the 737 MAX, Boeing altered the plane’s automatic response in the event of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor, failed to include the change in the airplane’s operating manual, and then promptly blamed foreign pilots when two separate crashes involving the model took 347 lives. At ProPublica, Alec MacGillis follows the Stumo family — the first family in America to sue Boeing in the wake of the 737 MAX disasters — as they try to seek justice for their daughter Samya, who was killed when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed into the earth at a speed of 575 miles per hour.

I talked with Gregory Travis, a software engineer and pilot who has written extensively about the crashes. “Every past crash that I can think of was an accident, in that there was something that wasn’t really reasonably foreseeable,” Travis told me. “This was entirely different, and I don’t think anyone understands that. This was a collision of deregulation and Wall Street, and the tragic thing is that it was tragic. It was inevitable.”

Taken together, the reports ­suggested that Boeing had put all the risk on the pilot, who would be expected to know what to do within seconds if a system he didn’t know existed set off a welter of cockpit alerts and forced the plane downward. “An airplane shouldn’t put itself in a position where the pilots have to act heroically to save the plane,” the veteran U.S. commercial airline pilot told me. “Pilots shouldn’t have to be superhuman. Planes are built to be flown by normal people.” ­Gregory Travis, the pilot and software engineer, said: “MCAS sealed their fate. Everything that comes after that is noise.”

Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who, in 2009, saved a plane by crash-landing it in the Hudson River, testified at a House hearing in June. “Boeing has said that they did not categorize a failure of MCAS as more critical because they assumed that pilot action would be the safeguard,” he said. This was a mistake. “I can tell you first hand that the startle factor is real and it’s huge — it absolutely interferes with one’s ability to quickly analyze the crisis and take effective action.” He said that he, too, had struggled in a 737 MAX simulator after the crashes. “Even knowing what was going to happen, I could see how crews could have run out of time before they could have solved the problems,” he said. MCAS, he concluded, “was fatally flawed and should never have been approved.”

The Indonesian government’s final report on the Lion Air crash cited, among other factors, Boeing’s failure to mention MCAS in the 737 MAX manual — the cockpit recorder captured the sound of the pilots riffling through pages in vain.

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A Town Split By a Play About the 1980s AIDS Epidemic

Chelsea Purgahn/The Press via AP

In 1999, theater director Raymond Caldwell staged Angels in America at Kilgore College. Kilgore is small town in east Texas’ piney woods, and this play about the 1980s AIDS epidemic created a huge schism in this conservative, religious community. Writer Wes Ferguson grew up in Kilgore. Twenty years after the performance, Ferguson’s Texas Monthly article examines the effects this Pulitzer Prize-winning play had on the Kilgore residents through its brief performance. Angels in America has enormous artistic merit, but “artistic merit carried only so much weight in Kilgore,” writes Fergesun.

Ferguson edited Kilgore College’s student paper, and he published a story about the play and its potential controversy. Unfortunately, some people blamed Ferguson’s catchy headline for igniting the trouble that followed, but Kilgore was already a town divided. It was a town where two of Ferguson’s high school classmates murdered an innocent man because of his sexual orientation, a town where one of the parents of the play’s lead actor insisited he not perform the role because they feared for his life and for their reputation, and a town where many Kilgore College professors supported their students who acted on their values, no matter how much they differed from their parents’ or their peers’ values.

While chatting with old friends recently, I have discovered that my world-view wasn’t the only one transformed by the arrival of Angels in America in the Piney Woods twenty years ago. Danea Males, then a photojournalist for the Flare, whose father had not allowed her to see the play, says that photographing the protests was the first time she stepped away from the fundamentalist church she’d grown up in. “It was a defining moment,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to question things. I was supposed to have faith that guided my path. But the petitions and the protests—they were so ugly and mean-spirited.” Today, Males is an art professor at a university in South Carolina.

Last spring, I was visiting family in Kilgore when Adams, through sheer coincidence, also happened to arrive in town. A longtime New York resident, he’d just completed the twelve-week run of a play in Florida called Straight White Men, and he’d come to East Texas to see family too and to talk with a local film producer who was interested in a movie script he’d written about Kilgore’s brush with Angels. We met at a pool hall in Longview. Through the haze of cigarette smoke and the crack of billiard balls, he could still recite his favorite line from the play: “From such a strong desire to be good, they feel very far from goodness when they fail.” It was a sentiment that strongly resonated with Adams, who, long before he took on the role of the spiritually tormented Joe Pitt, had twice asked God to save him. “My grandfather baptized me, and I didn’t think it was good enough, so I got baptized again,” he said. “I didn’t resonate with being gay, necessarily, but I resonated with trying to fit into something you don’t fit into”—namely, for him, fundamentalist theology and stifling small-town culture.

Four months after Adams appeared in Angels, his uncle Jason killed himself. Adams had no idea his uncle was gay, nor that he had AIDS. “When that happened,” he said, “I was galvanized.” Upon leaving Kilgore, he was accepted into London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 2003. “Angels in America defined who I am,” Adams said. “All my career, I’ve tried to be a torch for marginalized people.” In 2012, Adams wrote and directed an off-Broadway play titled The Man-Made Rock, about repressed East Texans. Joseph Magee, who over the years had made his peace with Caldwell and everyone involved with Angels, was the major backer of Adams’s production.

Adams’s mother was changed by the experience too. “It opened my eyes up,” she said recently. “Justin’s an actor, he’s around all sorts of people, and I have really become fond of them—it’s not my business if they’re gay. I like them as a person, and I’m not gonna judge them. There was a time I did. I was worried what other people would think.”

Adams’s activism has long outlasted that of the protesters, who abandoned their cause before the end of the four-night, sold-out run. The Gregg County Commissioners Court did make good on its threat to yank financial support from the Shakespeare Festival, though. “What comes to my mind when I think of Shakespeare are folks with some spears,” Commissioner Danny Craig told the Houston Press, admitting that he’d never seen a Shakespeare play. Donations from theater supporters around the country more than made up the difference, as did a check presented to Holda when he received a PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for his refusal to cancel the play.

“I would not want to go through it again, but I don’t regret having taken a stand,” Holda says now. “Without the confrontation that occurred, Kilgore might not have awakened as quickly to the realities of its own community. The world was changing.”

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The Podcast That Explains Why We’re All Wrong 

You're Wrong About Podcast

Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes are journalists who specialize in re-examining the stories, people, and ideas that we were sure we already knew about. Their podcast, “You’re Wrong About…” deconstructs events and scandals of the past to reveal a truth that’s more complicated than what we remembered—or even the complete opposite. On this week’s Longreads Podcast, I spoke with them about why our brains (and the media) are so easily misled. 

Marshall wrote the definitive story of Tonya Harding for The Believer and is currently working on a book about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Hobbes is a reporter for HuffPost who breaks down the nuance around issues such as homelessness and obesity. They tackle those same subjects for the podcast, including many other events we thought we remembered correctly—Amy Fisher, Anna Nicole Smith, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, the “Ebonics” debate. In many cases, tabloid news coverage gave us a distorted perspective on heroes and villains in a scandal, and Marshall and Hobbes shatter the idea that such labels even exist. Read more…