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Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath has written essays and articles for Harper's, The New York Times, Kenyon Review, The Dublin Review, Brick, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and Saveur. He's the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz, the personal essay Everything We Don't Know, and the forthcoming book Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California. @AaronGilbreath

Could South Africa’s Drought Help Deconstruct the Divisions of Apartheid?

Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

Lately, we read a lot about the wealthy one percent building bunkers and buying land to insulate themselves from future natural disasters. But natural disasters can also level people in different socio-economic classes, because when you’re clawing your way out of rubble after an earthquake or scavenging for food, it doesn’t matter if your Bill Gates or Bill from around the way.

For the Huffpost’s Highline, Eve Fairbanks takes us to drought-stricken Cape Town, South Africa, where the white elite and residents of poor townships have taken austerity measures: washing dishes in recycled water; letting bodies go unshowered; even leaving turds in the bowl to reduce the number of flushes. Fairbanks talks with government officials, visits a spring and stays in a friend’s water-wise apartment to make sense of the drought’s effects. One surprising effect: By undermining the ability to have a pool, a long shower, a vast decorative yard, and deconstructing what Fairbanks calls the “infrastructure of privilege,” the drought has forged alliances between many white and black Cape Town residents. What remains to be seen is whether this expanded Cape Town community will last once the drought ends.

After the coming of democracy, though, both rich and middle-class South Africans did build fortresses: high, spike-topped walls went up around houses. Many of these houses don’t even have a bell, discouraging unknown visitors. Instead, they display ominous plaques depicting a skull or the name of the security company the owners have paid to answer their panic buttons with teams wielding guns.

Spend even a little time with the wealthy or white, though, and you’ll understand how aware they are that such fortresses can’t—or even shouldn’t—hold. One friend of mine near Johannesburg mused to me recently that both he and his wife know “deep down” that white people in South Africa “got away with” hundreds of years of injustice. His wife almost never admits this, or reveals any ambivalence about their four-bedroom house and self-isolating lifestyle, for fear of making herself “a target for retribution”: In other words, that ceasing to defend the goodness and justice of the white lifestyle might legitimize crime against whites or the expropriation of their land. Privately, my friend suspects “the opposite”—that keeping mum and apart is what inflames black anger. His wife’s view generally wins out, as it seems the more prudent. But what if there were a nature-made excuse to tear down those walls and try out a different kind of life? Would it really be so bad?

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Has India’s Booming IT Industry Finally Plateaued?

AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi

A company named Infosys helped build India’s booming tech industry. Although few Americans have heard of Infosys, this large company in Bangalore employs 200,000 people and codes for companies as diverse as Nordstrom and Harley-Davidson. But trouble has struck.

At The California Sunday Magazine, Rollo Romig paints an unsettling portrait of Indian life, where the middle class that Infosys helped build now fears what one newspaper called a “bloodbath” from downsizing. American protectionism is reducing the amount of offshoring that goes on in tech. Trump has made it harder for Indian tech workers to get H-1B work visas, and automation in India threatens to eliminate even more jobs.

In April of last year, Puneet Manuja, the co-founder of YourDost, a Bangalore-based online mental-health platform that offers counseling via live chat, noticed a spike in messages from IT workers who’d lost their jobs, or worried they would soon. In response, YourDost opened a temporary hotline to field employment concerns. Over three days, they were contacted by 1,100 workers. “A lot of these people did not have a plan B,” Manuja said. “More than 60 percent of people who reached out to us had less than three months of savings left.” Many who’d lost jobs, he said, were hiding it from their parents and friends. “When we asked why people do not tell their parents, they said you are considered weak. If you’ve been fired or laid off, it’s very difficult to convince people that it’s because of some structural changes.” They heard from one young woman, he said, who lived with her parents and who, for a week or two after getting fired from her IT job, got dressed and left every day as if she were going to work.

The leading IT companies all denied that they were laying off anyone. Some IT workers told me that, to avoid admitting to layoffs, the companies had increasingly been setting impossible performance targets to push out workers. One evening I met a longtime Infosys employee in his apartment in east Bangalore. The courtyard of his housing complex was a dazzling display of lights and fountains and overwhelming scale; it was the kind of residence that would have been unimaginable in the old Bangalore, before IT took over. Early last year, he said, he took two months’ leave following the death of his father, and when he returned he felt he’d come back to a different company. His new manager, he said, removed him from his projects, gave him a poor performance review, and incessantly pressured him to resign, threatening him with termination if he didn’t. After two months of this, he surrendered. He still seemed stunned and mortified by this turn of events; he said his work had always been highly commended by managers and clients alike and showed me emails to prove it. He didn’t want me to name him because he still hoped the company would take him back.

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The Mr. Memory of Jazz

AP Photo/Jean-Jacques Levy

I’m a huge fan of saxophone genius Charlie Parker, the man known as Bird. Recently I’ve been listening to live recordings instead of his studio work, most taken from scratchy acetates of ancient radio broadcasts or lo-fi private recordings made by fans like the legendary Dean Benedetti. Even in our internet era, it can be hard to find detailed, reliable information about live recordings from, say, 1947 at LA’s long-defunct Hi-De-Ho Club. In the process of researching, I found David Remnick‘s 2008 New Yorker article “Bird Watcher.”

In it, Remnick profiles jazz historian and Charlie Parker devotee Phil Schaap, who’s hosted “Bird Flight,” on Columbia University’s radio station for three decades. Although this article is a decade old, it remains relevant because Bird’s art remains relevant, or as Remnick puts it, “There is no getting to the end of Charlie Parker.” Parker died in 1955, yet new CDs keep coming out containing historic live recordings that have finally been remastered or re-sequenced. Schaap’s knowledge is so deep that when Dean Benedetti’s lost live recordings of Bird — one of jazz’s true holy grails — needed preserving and documentation, Schaap did the job, reinforcing eight miles worth of disintegrating tape by hand. A repository of information, he relishes minutia and arcana; his show’s winding, digressive style blurs, in Remnick’s words, “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.”

Schaap is not a musician, a critic, or, properly speaking, an academic, though he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Princeton, and Juilliard. And yet through “Bird Flight” and a Saturday-evening program he hosts called “Traditions in Swing,” through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, he has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is the Bill James of his field, a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé.

For decades, jazz musicians have joked about Schaap’s adhesive memory, but countless performers have known the feeling that Schaap remembered more about their musical pasts than they did and was always willing to let them in on the forgotten secrets. “Phil is a walking history book about jazz,” Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, told me. Wynton Marsalis says that Schaap is “an American classic.”

In the eyes of his critics, Schaap’s attention to detail and authenticity is irritating and extreme. He has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes and producing efforts, but his encyclopedic sensibility is a matter of taste. When Schaap was put in charge of reissuing Benny Goodman’s landmark 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall for Columbia, he not only included lost cuts and Goodman’s long-winded introductions but also provided prolonged original applause tracks, and even the sounds of the stage crew dragging chairs and music stands across the Carnegie stage to set up for the larger band. His production work on a ten-disk set of Billie Holiday for Verve was similarly inclusive. Schaap wants us to know and hear everything. He seems to believe that the singer’s in-studio musings about what key to sing “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in are as worthy of preservation as a bootleg of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Reviewing the Holiday set for the Village Voice, Gary Giddins called Schaap “that most obsessive of anal obsessives.”

When Charlie Bird died, fans painted “Bird Lives!” on buildings around New York City. Thanks to fans like Schaap, the epitaph holds true for fans like me.

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Small-Town New Hampshire’s Battle with Bears and Liberty

AP Photo/Mark Thiessen

The more removed our daily lives get from nature, the less we understand about the wild creatures who live around us. Fear grows in darkness outside our kitchen windows, extending the ancient archetype of the Big Bad Wolf to other species. In Grafton, New Hampshire, black bears have started killing domestic animals, invading personal space, even smacking one woman, creating a psychic and territorial battle between residents and the otherwise shy Ursus americanus.

For The Atavist, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling traces the origins of this tiny town’s highly independent nature and its tense relationship with wildlife. He looks at competing theories of ursine behavior, and misperceptions about black bears versus the biological reality. What he found wasn’t a simple bear problem, but “a parable of liberty, disinformation, and fear. A parable, really, of America.” Exhibit A: the so-called cat massacre.

Andrew Timmins told me that he’d never received a bear complaint involving a cat, from Grafton or anywhere else. Plus, the idea that wild bears could acquire a taste for felines seemed dubious to him. When a Grafton resident told me about a bear that drained his biodiesel supply—a five-gallon container of two-year-old French-fry grease—I was reminded that bears will devour even the most loathsome fare, so long as it adds to their winter stores of fat. They’re after calories, not cuisine. Despite local perception, the cats of Bungtown probably weren’t the bears’ preferred target; they were just there.

Perception, though, matters a great deal when people craft stories about how they overcome obstacles and cope with conflict. Once the seed of the purported bear hazard was planted, stories nourished it. Often the light of reality was refracted such that it transformed an animal into a totemic version of itself: bandit or strongman, noble savage or mythic monster, bumbling idiot or cunning predator.

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England Is a Giant Russian Money Washing Machine

Andrew Matthews/PA Wire

When the parliament’s foreign affairs committee asked British journalist Oliver Bullough about how much Russian money, both dirty and clean, gets laundered through London and parked in certain assets, he realized how little he or the government actually knew. For the Guardian, Bullough seeks answers to these important questions, separating the corrupt Russian money from the honest money, and addresses why it even matters. And why justice is elusive: Prosecution is even harder in the U.K., especially when key witnesses keep getting poisoned.

So whose money is this? How is it getting here? The bank’s analysts didn’t look into that question. However, had they wanted to, they could have walked down the hall and asked their colleagues, since it turned out that Deutsche Bank itself was a significant culprit in spiriting money out of Russia without informing the authorities. Less than two years after the report – called Dark Matter – was published, Deutsche Bank traders in Moscow were caught secretly moving $10bn (£7.5bn) of their clients’ money out of Russia by illegally exploiting the stock market. (As a result, the bank had to pay fines of $425m (£317m) in the US and £163m in the UK.)

With institutions as sophisticated as Deutsche Bank working to hide Russian money, it is unsurprising that the total amount in the UK remains vague. So there is no real answer to the foreign affairs committee’s first question, except to say that the volume of Russian money in Britain is far larger than the official statistics would have us think.

There are two reasons why we should be worried about this. The first is the low-probability but high-impact chance that Putin is hiding money here in the financial equivalent of sleeper cells, ready to slip out and buy influence when a crisis comes. The second is more significant: no one steals money if they can’t keep it. By letting Putin’s allies launder their stolen fortunes, and hide them in our country, we are drawing a line under their crimes, and rewarding them for actions we should not be condoning. Do we really want Britain to be the Kremlin’s fence?

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Farming A Warming Planet: An Interview Nathanael Johnson

AP Photo/The Fresno Bee, Craig Kohlruss

California avocados are, for the moment, one of America’s most popular foods. Yet some experts predict that climate change could cut California’s avocado production in half by 2050. New weather patterns will also affect the state’s other tree crops, including citrus, almonds, walnuts, and pistachios. But even if rising sea levels flood many coastal cities, many Golden State farmers still plan on growing food for a living.

At Grist, food writer Nathaneal Johnson shows how California farmers are planning ahead for climate change while balancing their immediate economic concerns. Farming is a matter of long-term planning: Just because there was a drought for a nearly six years doesn’t mean farmers can remove their thirsty nut trees and plant strawberries. Fortunately, scientists are studying crop varieties to find ones that could perform well under new weather patterns. California farmers are currently experimenting with cover crops to hold water and improve soil, and testing ways to recharge aquifers before the new state law bans excessive groundwater pumping. Will this all be enough to save them, and the food we rely on? Read more…

Vacating Convictions from Crooked Chicago Cops

David Mirzoeff/PA Wire

A group of corrupt police officers on Chicago’s South Side had been framing and extorting residents for years. Then they planted drugs on the wrong people: Ben Baker and his girlfriend Clarissa Glenn.

In The New Yorker, Jennifer Gonnerman describes how Glenn’s determination to exonerate her husband helped build a case against police sergeant Ronald Watts and his brazenly crooked cronies. Glenn’s campaign consumed her, and Baker’s absence left their children without a father for too many years. Not only was Baker eventually freed, the state attorney overturned many of Watts’ other tainted convictions. One difficult question remains: how many more innocent people still wallow in prison?

No one knows how many men Watts and his officers framed, in part because so many of them pleaded guilty. Watts’s officers at times planted such large quantities of drugs on Wells residents that they were charged with a Class X felony, the highest-level felony after first-degree murder. If the defendant went to trial and lost, he faced up to thirty years in prison. Phillip Thomas, who sold candy from a cart in the Wells, recalled that when he told his public defender that Watts’s officers had planted drugs on him, “she made it quite clear that she didn’t believe me and that my best bet was to plead guilty.” Ignoring her advice, he represented himself at trial. He lost, and was sentenced to six years. Shaun James told his public defender a similar story, and, he said, “She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t no judge is ever going to believe that.’ ” James and his co-defendant, Taurus Smith, both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two years’ probation.

Clarissa and Ben decided to fight the cases against them: Ben’s, from when he was arrested alone, and Ben and Clarissa’s, from when they were arrested together. They assumed that, because the state’s attorney’s office was aware of Watts’s corruption, it would eventually drop the charges against them. David Navarro, the prosecutor who met with Clarissa and Ben in the spring of 2005, told me that he believed them, and spent months investigating their claims about Watts, but he couldn’t prove the allegations. “It’s very difficult to prove a case when your only witness is the guy who has a pending case against him, and that guy has a criminal background,” he said.

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Farming a Warming Planet

AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi

California produces the bulk of America’s nuts, avocados, and citrus. Unfortunately, as the climate changes, no one’s sure how long those crops can grow. At Grist, Nathanael Johnson paints an unsettling portrait of California farmers struggling to balance their immediate need for annual income with the changing climate’s ability to support their trees in the future. California’s weather is increasingly erratic and it’s already confusing crops, ripening some fruits out of season and frying others in the sun. But as an experienced University of California extension agent put it: climate is only one of farmers’ many concerns.

“If you decide what to plant based on climate, but then can’t make the lease payment, that’s not sustainable,” Jarvis-Shean said.

If you are worried about water running out in 15 years, you might think it’s a good idea to cut down half the state’s almond groves — but if those almond trees are still putting money in your pockets, that wouldn’t make sense until the killer drought hits. That’s the crux of the matter for Sayer, and other farmers I interviewed. They’re concerned about the changing climate, but they always come up with ingenious plans to adapt to bad weather. It’s much harder for them to adapt to an overdrawn bank account.

Sayer grows mostly lemons right now, but they’re not long for this world. “You can see these lemon trees are getting a little rangy looking,” Sayer said, gesturing toward a leafless branch. “This is going to be their last harvest, then they’ve got a date with the chipper.”

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‘Choose Marriage or Education’

(Juan Pelegrín / Getty)

Madhur Anand | Brick | Fall 2017 | 18 minutes (3,526 words)

May his head burn! Your words are rocks thrown at my forehead! I will peel her skin off! Threats and insults like these do not sound that bad in their native Punjabi. Even when they are directed at loved ones. Even when they come from your own mother. The pronouns are catalysts for combustion, a quick, irreversible reaction, with only ashes for proof. However, an English word like partition can sit in an Indian’s mouth for hours, or even for a lifetime, in motion toward something shapeless, and then melted, gone. Sometimes partition represents a noun (a broken door), sometimes it is a verb (to divide into parts), but it is never clear who is at fault. An Urdu poet once called partition a birthday party for anonymous and a funeral for unanimity. A mathematician saw it in his mind as a fractal, a Koch snowflake, a continuous curve without tangents. A political scientist speaks only of before-and-after maps, the thick red Radcliffe Line. Nobody ever truly understands one another. Translation is never simple.

***

Mother makes chapattis. They are perfectly round, a circumference entirely calculable by first measuring a tangent, thanks to the discovery of constants. The first one she makes is reserved for the Brahmin, who will come later in the day to pick it up. The last one she makes is for a crow or a dog, whoever comes first. The rest are for us, but there must always be one left over at the end of the day, reserved for nobody, for nothing. That is how Mother would define abundance if she knew the word in English. How she achieves it, on the other hand, is a mystery. I am already bathed, dressed in my salwar kameez, and outside, content to throw five nameless stones onto the cement floor. I grasp them in my fist in groups of one, two, three, and then four while tossing another straight up. That one will fall either where I want it to or where it will. I hope for intersection but do not worry too much about the outcome. The five of us are here now. Mother, father, sister, brother, and me. There will come a time when I will be the only one left of us. Still up in the air. Read more…

Peter Mayer, the Fiery Sage of Publishing

Peter Mayer founded Overlook Press, an eclectic publishing house that took risks. He was passionate. He smoked off-brand cigarettes, yelled frequently and used to throw staplers. But Mayer’s operation also provided an opportunity for young up-and-comers to learn how to work in the challenging book trade.

For n+1, Mark Krotov eulogizes this beloved complex figure and recounts his own early years in American publishing, mixing a lifetime of wisdom with the bitter pill of a contentious personality. So, why all the yelling?

It’s self-serving to say so, but I don’t think his staff was the problem. The industry really was changing. Peter was a genius at seeing opportunities, at finding holes and filling them. He wasn’t clairvoyant, but he understood an essential truth: publishing was often arbitrary. It wasn’t wholly random, but it was close. You had to try new things all the time, on the assumption that most of them wouldn’t work, but a few might, sometimes spectacularly so. Overlook was never going to be a strictly literary publisher; it had no niche to exploit, no corner of the market to dominate. But that catholic business model had become much harder to pull off in the face of Amazon’s near-monopoly on e-books and its ever-growing chunk of the physical book market. Borders’ shelf space would never come back and Barnes & Noble’s was shrinking. The big publishers kept getting bigger, but their sales departments, on which Overlook depended, kept contracting. The newspapers were disappearing. Everything took more work. Overlook, Peter always said, punched above its weight. But what if the ring kept shrinking?

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