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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

Reconnecting with Nature, and with Wi-Fi

Mikel Bilbao / VWPics via AP Images

When Henry David Thoreau wrote about living in a small cabin in the woods with intention, did he not imagine that readers would find out he went to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house for dinner? Never mind that he had a support system, the truths that Thoreau articulated in his cabin in the woods across the tracks from Emerson’s house are no less true. As famous naturalist and author Bernd Heinrich says in this profile, you can’t “put a fence around nature” if you intend to be a part of it, just as you can’t shut out the modern world as you try to reconnect with nature.

For Outside, journalist Bill Donahue spends time in the snowy woods with the 77-year old Heinrich, to see what a naturalist does at the end of their career, and what it means to connect with nature in the 21st century. Even in retirement, while living in a cabin in the backwoods of Maine, Heinrich’s biological research and observational work hasn’t ended, and he’s slowed down enough to appreciate the small beauties of nature.

A special place can contain all stories—all of the past and all of the future, all the beginnings and endings. In 2016, the summer before my mom died, I drove her up to New Hampshire for a final visit. By then she was heavily medicated, but when we crested the final hilltop, with its stunning view of the local pond, her eyes glimmered with delight.

Her reaction was rooted in long memory, and also in nature. She was a naturalist. So many of us are, in our way, and as Bernd sees it, this is a fine thing. Indeed, it could save us. “A naturalist,” he e-mailed me, “is one who still has the habit of trying to see the connections of how the world works. She does not go by say-so, by faith, or by theory. So we don’t get lost in harebrained dreams or computer programs taken for reality. We all want to be associated with something greater and more beautiful than ourselves, and nature is the ultimate. I just think it is the one thing we can all agree on.”

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Wallace Shawn’s Late Night

Wallace Shawn in 1988. (AP)

Troy Jollimore | Zyzzyva | Winter 2017 | 30 minutes (8,142 words)

More than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn wrote:

A few months ago, the American public, who in political theory and to some extent even in reality are “sovereign” in the United States, were given a group of pictures showing American soldiers tormenting desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains — degrading them, mocking them, and physically torturing them. And so the question arose, How would the American public react to that? And the answer was that in their capacity as individuals, certain people definitely suffered or were shocked when they saw those pictures. But in their capacity as the sovereign public, they did not react. A cry of lamentation and outrage did not rise up across the land. The president and his highest officials were not compelled to abase themselves publicly, apologize, and resign, nor did they find themselves thrown out of office, nor did the political candidates from the party out of power grow hoarse with denouncing the astounding crimes which were witnessed by practically everyone throughout the entire world. As far as one could tell, over a period of weeks, the atrocities shown in the pictures had been assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept. And so now one has to ask, well, what does that portend?

Thirteen years later, we have a quite good idea of what such a thing portends. Thirteen years later we know much more than Shawn, or anyone, could have known at the time about just how much could be “assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept.” We know so much about this now that it is rather a wonder any of us can sleep at night. And in fact, some people tell me that they aren’t sleeping, that they have not been sleeping well for a while. Not since November. That’s what I keep hearing. Of course, there are those who lost the ability to enjoy an untroubled night’s sleep long before that. Read more…

Possessed by Music

AP Photo/Peter Kemp

You might have known a music obsessive in your youth, the kind of person who went to all the shows, tore off their shirt, and danced with enviable abandon; you might have been that obsessive yourself. In the late 1960s, a shirtless, longhaired man started appearing at rock shows around England. He danced on stage, held cryptic signs, and believed he was Jesus Christ. His name was William Jellett, and at Medium, writer J.P Robinson assembles a vivid portrait of this one of music’s most mysterious, passionate, messianic fans. He danced to Captain Beefheart, to Led Zeppelin, at punk shows, at reggae shows — seemingly at more places than a person could physically be at one time. He would disappear only to reappear again. He was the guy you saw at shows and wondered What’s his story? Robinson examines the way spirituality and music connected for Jellett, how this pained man found a home, and the darker side of his guru identity.

Throughout this time, Jellett was increasingly visible at gigs. Watching the Incredible String Band, he danced on his seat, as the audience shouted “Jesus, we love you.” Sometimes, people would throw beer cans at him. He was “an easy target, in more ways than one,” one gig goer remembers. He talked to women about cats, or walked down an aisle, handing out fruit and nuts, or exchanging grapes for front row tickets. At a pub in Ealing, someone recalled, he “jumped on stage and started singing ‘I know it’s only rock and roll but I like it,’ before the Stones released song of said title.”

At a Slade gig, in 1971, he banged his tambourine as they played “Know Who You Are.” When the recording of the gig was released, as “Slade Alive,” he was credited as “unknown member of the audience.” He watched New York Dolls in 1972, with the fashionable set, who disliked his robes. At a Frank Zappa gig in 1972, he stood to proclaim that “if you want to know the truth, listen to Jimi Hendrix.” At another gig, “as I started singing,” one musician remembers “everyone began cheering and I thought it was because of me. Then I realized it was because ‘Jesus’ had arrived in the audience.”

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Native Americans’ Persecution Continues; Only the Uniforms Have Changed

Peter Byrne/PA Wire

When an Ashland County Sheriff deputy lethally shot 14-year-old Ojibwe boy Jason Pero, many residents of the Bad River Reservation demanded answers for what appeared an unjustified use of force. But to members of the Bad River Band of the Ojibwe nation, Pero’s death was one horrific incident in a long history of police depredations by an police force that harms instead of protects them.

For BuzzFeedJohn Stanton reports from Ashland, Wisconsin, one of many towns whose law enforcement agency has jurisdiction over a neighboring Native American reservation and has fostered tensions. In Ashland, a correctional officer allegedly preyed on female Native American inmates before committing suicide, a deputy shot another young Ojibwe man, and instead of trying to offer answers or consolation to Jason Pero’s family, the Sheriff tried to control the media narrative around Pero’s death. Tribes overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs often hold that Federal agency in equally low standing. Poor police relationships are themselves shaped by the cultural divides between residents of reservations and adjacent white communities, who frequently know little about tribal culture other than broad brush strokes or inherited stereotypes.

Like many groups, the Ojibwe learn to avoid the police. So when the police are breaking the law, who are they supposed to go to, and why would they ever believe things will improve? As one tribe member put it, “This has been going on for 300 years…”

On a per-capita basis, Native Americans are 12% more likely to be killed by law enforcement officers than black Americans — and three times more likely than white Americans.

If you live on one of the dozens of reservations across the country in which local, white police forces from nearby border towns have jurisdiction, the chances that you’ll end up in jail are high. In Ashland County, for instance, Native Americans make up 11% of the population but account for 44% of the inmates in the county jail, according to data collected by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice research and reform group.

For tribal leaders here and across the country, that leads to one conclusion. “That becomes a disproportionality that speaks to some sort of institutionalized injustice going on,” says Bad River Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins.

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It’s Hard to See Seafood As a Healthy Choice After Reading This

Rex Features via AP Images

Canadian aquatic physiology researcher Laura McDonnell quit eating fish, but not for the usual environmental reason like protecting endangered stock or because of the taste. She’s too aware of fraud and plastic pollution to put herself at risk.

At The Walrus, McDonnell explains how mislabeled fish makes it onto our dinner plates, and how mislabeling a mackerel for a tuna, say, can have health consequences. She doesn’t dislike fish or want to quit it, but there are just too many players in the supply chain to identify the culprits in frauds. Worse yet are the pollutants: with the staggering amount of microplastic now floating in the Earth’s aquatic systems, she doesn’t believe there is any natural body of water pure enough to produce a safe, edible fish, so she quit. Even to a diehard fish-eater like me, who eats canned saury for breakfast and sardines for lunch, she makes a convincing case.

As much as I love fish, I can’t pretend that they’re wise animals with refined palates. Researchers have found that when given the choice between natural and microplastic food items, fish tend to choose the plastic. For most aquatic animals, finding food while avoiding predators is a struggle, so being picky or discerning is not evolutionarily beneficial; most species grab their desired snack quickly and head right back to their hiding place. As a result, aquatic animals often ingest floating bits of plastic, either by confusing colourful microplastics for something else, or by ingesting plastic-contaminated prey. Filter-feeding animals such as clams, oysters, and mussels obtain their nutrients by sucking in water, trapping small floating particles within in it, and then spitting the water back out. Mussels are so efficient at this process that they’ve been used to clear up polluted waterways. Unfortunately, much of what they trap these days is plastic: a recent study estimated that the average European could ingest about 11,000 microplastics per year just by including mussels and oysters in their diet.

Due to bioaccumulation (when a substance’s concentration increases in an animal over time) and biomagnification (when a substance’s concentration increases as it moves up the food chain), the concentration of microplastics in larger, older, and predatory fish such as tuna is likely to be higher than in smaller species or younger individuals. So what happens to other top predators—humans—who eat a seafood-rich diet during their lifetime? Even though current research shows we do not absorb most plastics, it’s possible that a small amount (about 1 percent) can still accumulate in our bodies over time.

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Homelessness and Colorado’s Public Lands

AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

Between insufficient budgets and rolled back protections, America’s public lands are under constant threat. Now long-term illegal campers are littering land in Colorado with piles of refuse, including human feces and spent syringes, and endangering other users.

At 5280, Tracy Ross examines how Colorado’s rising cost of living and the outlawing of public camping inside certain cities have led many homeless people to pitch tents in the state’s vast forests. The US Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Region deals with some of the most severe problems associated with non-recreational camping in the entire National Forest system. America’ opioid epidemic has exacerbated these issues, with people heading to the forests not to hike but to take advantage of their privacy. One local man founded a watchdog group to deal with the effects of non-recreational campers. He told the reporter there were a hundred more illegal camps just like the first one they found. “And on top of the hundred we can see,” he said, “there are probably 150 to 200 we can’t, because they’re too deep in the woods or on private property within the forest.”

We headed back onto CO 72, passed Nederland, and stopped at the West Magnolia campground. After inspecting several camps and finding no issues, we pulled up alongside a red Honda sedan stopped on a dirt road leading back to the highway. The driver was slumped over in his seat. “Is he dead?” Johns asked. When he knocked on the window, the driver jumped. He had been loading a syringe with heroin.

The rawness of the moment was shocking. We were on an isolated road between a cluster of private homes and a picturesque campground frequented by families with young children. From behind us, a former cross-country teammate of my 16-year-old son jogged up, pacing her father. I looked from her to this guy, who had driven out here to stick a needle in his arm, and imagined the what-ifs. What if he’d injected the opiate and simply passed out? What if he’d overdosed and died? What if he’d, in his impaired state, hit the gas pedal and plowed into a teenage girl and her dad out for an afternoon run? It hit me then, viscerally, that our forests have become places where people come not only for quiet and tranquility, but also to do potentially harmful, often illegal things that are easier to get away with under the forest’s cover. I’ve recreated in national forests for four decades, and I’ve never encountered as many needles as I have in the past year.

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How the American Meat Industry Exploits Undocumented Laborers

AP Photo/Nati Harnik

Industrial meat processing is a messy, smelly, unsavory business, which is why it’s highly regulated. Once animals are slaughtered for processing, a team of sanitation workers come into facilities after hours to clean up. But where 30% of America’s meat production workers are foreign-born, the majority of sanitation workers are immigrants. The reason is economic: to keep costs low, profits high, and legal responsibility minimal for producers like Tyson, contractors do the dirty work — some of most dangerous industrial work in America — without workers’ comp insurance.

At Bloomberg Businessweek, Kartikay Mehrotra and Peter Waldman expose the dangerous conditions sanitation workers labor under. In addition to low pay and frequent amputations,  many sanitation companies do their best to deny compensation to injured workers and dodge Federal safety inspectors. American meat is cheap for a reason, Workers’ lives are treated cheaply because employers know that the undocumented want to stay as low profile as possible.

Gilberto Gonzalez, a 47-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who has been cleaning poultry plants in Alabama for 11 years, says smaller plants and sanitation contractors ask few questions of undocumented hires and accept virtually any supposed proof of employment eligibility. “They have a way of working it out to get people on,” he says. (“Gonzalez” is a pseudonym he provided for this article in order to speak openly about his experiences as an undocumented sanitation worker.)

He lives with three of his sons in a decaying mobile home just outside Albertville on northeastern Alabama’s Sand Mountain, famous for its snake-handling preachers. He sent for each son separately in recent years. Just teenagers when they came, the boys paid smugglers $10,000 apiece to spirit them along the 2,300-mile trek from Guatemala through Mexico, across the Rio Grande, and on to Alabama, the last leg in the back of 18-wheel trucks. They’re still mostly invisible. They work at night, stay inside during the day, use back roads to avoid police, and never open the door for anyone they don’t know. Once, the family huddled inside as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents snooped around the trailer park and knocked on their door for several minutes. “We just prayed to God, and they finally left,” Gonzalez says.

He works now at a Tyson plant, an employee of a large cleaning contractor called QSI, owned by the Vincit Group of Chattanooga, Tenn. (QSI and Packers say they use the federal E-Verify system to confirm employment authorization.) The work is good, as these things go. He’s still haunted, though, by his previous job. For about 15 months, he and his oldest son, who is 22 and identifies himself as Miguel, worked sanitation at a small processing plant called Farm Fresh Foods LLC in Guntersville, Ala. The facility is typical of the makeshift warehouses that dot the back roads of chicken country, picking up deboning work and other butchering jobs from the big poultry producers. Most operate on thin margins—bad news for workers, particularly the undocumented, who are always the most vulnerable to abuse.

Farm Fresh’s sanitation supervisor rode the cleaning crew without mercy, according to the Gonzalezes and other former colleagues, who filed a complaint with OSHA in 2016. They were forced to work at punishing speeds in ankle-deep water with floating fat and chicken guts. They were enclosed in poorly ventilated rooms with chlorinated cleaning products wafting in the air, severely limited in bathroom and water breaks. The chemical vapor caused heart-pounding insomnia, Miguel says. Several workers had to seek medical help. Workers who didn’t keep up the pace were moved to an extremely cold area of the plant as punishment.

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Steve Bannon’s New Scheme

AP Photo/Brynn Anderson

What has Steven Bannon been doing since he left the White House in August? Newsweek senior editor Alexander Nazaryan followed the controversial figure town to town, listening to his fiscal sermons and calculated outreach to the black working class, as he wages his never-ending ideological battle for political influence.

Bannon is trying to build a network of supporters whose allegiance does not directly depend on his affiliation with Trump, and that requires convincing the American public that despite the direct quotes they’ve heard in the media, he isn’t a racist anti-Semite. He still sees himself as an outsider, a rebel, but now also fancies himself as a uniter capable of pulling conservative factions together to dethrone establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and reaching across the aisle to show how he and the left share some fiscal ideology. His unifying principle: something he calls “economic nationalism.” It involves impenetrable borders, intellectual and economic protectionism, and less expensive foreign policy, and it supposedly aims to strengthen the American economy and benefit the working class. Will conservative voters get behind Bannon’s #MAGA vision? Two things are certain: Bannon is always scheming, and anyone who aligned himself so closely with Trump cannot be trusted.

Bannon’s understanding that class discontent would eclipse party affiliation in the 2016 election was prescient, and even his harshest critics concede that. Steve Schmidt, a top adviser on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, credits Bannon with seeing the shift to populism before many others did. But he calls Bannon’s economic nationalism movement “an absurdity” that will ruin the Republican Party unless McConnell and Ryan beat him down before the 2018 midterms. “The revolution he speaks of is a freak show,” Schmidt says of Bannon’s movement. “The only thing missing is someone in a Chewbacca costume next to him on a stage.”

Kuttner, too, is skeptical that Bannon can win converts from the left. “Hitler had a terrific interstate highway system,” he says. “Hitler also had a terrific welfare state. But that doesn’t mean progressives have anything in common with Hitler.” He says this not to compare Bannon to Hitler but to caution that “incidental overlap” shouldn’t be exaggerated into a bigger political confluence. Kuttner notes, like many others I spoke to, that Bannon has thus far failed to field a candidate who embraces his eclectic set of ideas. “Unless he’s planning to run for office himself, he’s mostly blowing smoke,” Kuttner says.

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How Angry Racists Plotted to Kill Somali Refugees in Kansas

AP Photo/Orlin Wagner

So many Trump supporters fear that our country is allegedly being overrun with Muslims who are recruiting terrorists intent on killing Americans, and that the U.S. government doesn’t care, yet some of these white working class men who fear Islamic radicalization have become radicalized themselves.

In Garden City, Kansas, a group of self-described crusaders got fed up with the way their town and country was seemingly being infiltrated with Muslims, who they disparagingly called “cockroaches.” These men decided they needed to draw the proverbial line somewhere, so they formed a group and a plan: to blow up a place of worship and kill the peaceful Somali refugees who’d taken up residence in this small rural town and worked at the local meat-processing facilities. For New York magazine, Jessica Pressler spent time in Kansas piecing together these criminals’ stories, their rage, their plan of attack, and arrest.

Now Stein was paying attention. Back in his trailer, he developed a new addiction: content produced by right-wing media outlets, whose outrage matched his own. Stein was a fan of Fox News, and when this corporate entity failed to provide the high of extreme indignation, there were news sites like Breitbart, Infowars, and Reddit, plus Veterans Today, JewsNews, et. al, which Stein, whose mind was already addled by the information he’d mainlined elsewhere, took to be purveyors of the “real” truth. Among the things he came to believe: that the U.N. had built secret tunnels underneath all of the country’s Walmarts that linked to underground military bases. That there were Chinese troops lined up at the Mexican border readying to launch a communist invasion. That Cuba was going to invade Florida. “Been telling people for years it was all a hoax,” he wrote above a headline he posted on Facebook: “Sandy Hook Redux: Obama Officials Confirm That It Was A Drill and No Children Died.”

The nucleus of Stein’s rage was, of course, Barack Obama. “We are literally being run by a terrorist organization at the highest level, being the Oval Office,” Stein told people in the militia he joined during the president’s second term. “He is their leader. Their organization is called the Muslim Brotherhood, and of course it filters down through every other department and branch of the federal government.”

The Southwest Kansas Three Percent was a part of the Three Percenter movement, founded after Obama’s election by Chris Hill, a Georgia-based former Marine who goes by the name General Bloodagent. The group is named for what he claims is the actual percentage of Colonists said to have taken up arms against the British in the Revolutionary War (this figure is disputed by historians). Of its members’ many and varied fears, in early 2016, it was “radical Islam,” as Donald Trump was calling it, that perhaps loomed the largest. Down in Georgia, Hill’s Three Percenters had led an armed protest of a planned mosque, and a Kansas branch threatened to do the same thing when the Islamic Society of Wichita invited the sheikh Monzer Taleb to speak. They hadn’t had to — the event was canceled after then–U. S. representative Mike Pompeo warned the Society’s leaders that if they went ahead with the event, “they will be responsible for the damage.” Still, many of the militia’s members didn’t feel like their government was doing enough to protect them from the rising tide of fundamentalism. “Hell, it’s even getting down into the local governments now,” Stein pointed out. “It’s at the point where it’s got to be stopped or there is going to be no stopping it.”

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Who Benefits from Homeless Relocation Programs?

AP Photo/David Goldman

Sending our problems elsewhere is an American tradition. We sell our recyclables to China. We try to bury our nuclear waste in the Nevada desert. For thirty years, American cities have run “homeless relocation programs,” where taxpayers provide homeless people bus and airplane tickets to move somewhere else.

For The Guardian, a team of researchers named Outside in America spent 18 months examining where exactly these homeless people go, and what happens after they arrive. This 16-city analysis is the first comprehensive investigation into these expensive, contentious programs, intended to see who, if anyone, benefits and how. At the heart of this analysis are the stories of some of the people who took a ticket.

The underlying assumption of the relocation programs, which have names such as “Homeward Bound” and “Family Reunification,” is that returning to a hometown or relative will lead to a process of rehabilitation. But for some, homelessness is driven by domestic conflicts and broken relationships, issues that may be rooted in the places they are returning to.

Last year Fort Lauderdale sent Fran Luciano, 49, back to her native New York to stay with her ex-husband, according to program records. A home health aide who cared for patients with cancer before she ended up homeless, Luciano had been sleeping in bus shelters and at the airport in the Florida city and desperately wanted to leave.

When Fort Lauderdale offered her a bus ticket back to New York, she said her instant reaction was: “Yeah, of course I want to go home.” The city asked for a contact there, and Luciano could only think to provide her ex-husband’s details, although she said she stressed she could not stay with him given their divorce was acrimonious.

When she arrived at the Greyhound station in New York, Luciano sat on her luggage and wondered where to go. For around six months she shuttled between shelters, eventually ending up in the small town of Nanuet, where she spent nights in McDonald’s and was assaulted. She is now back in Fort Lauderdale.

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