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Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

The Roots of the Insanity Defense

For centuries, courts have struggled to protect the mentally ill while also trying to distinguish between sanity and insanity. In the 1700s, the British courts relied on the “wild beast” test as their barometer for the latter: if the defendant’s understanding of his crime was no better than that of a infant or beast, he couldn’t be found guilty. From there, the insanity defense began its tortuous evolution.

In 1843, a Scottish woodcutter named Daniel M’Naghten attempted to assassinate British Prime Minister Robert Peel, shooting and killing his secretary instead. M’Naghten believed that Peel and the British government had singled him out for persecution and were responsible for all his personal and financial woes. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and acquitted, leading to public outrage over the verdict.

In response, the House of Lords and a panel of the Queen’s judges put together the M’Naghten Rules, a specific, multifaceted bar the defense was required to clear in order to prove not just plain old madness, but exculpatory insanity. They established a presumption of sanity, shifting the burden of proof solely to the defense.

Mike Mariani, writing for Hazlitt about how the law defines madness.

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Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is’ Was Inspired by a Thomas Mann Story

Peggy Lee’s haunting 1969 hit “Is That All There Is”—if you watch Mad Men, you’d recognize it from both the opening and closing of the midseason premiere—was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller during the 1960s, but its roots date back to an 1896 Thomas Mann novella. In a 2011 Los Angeles Times story on Jerry Leiber, Randall Roberts expanded on the song’s history:

As you’re delighting in Stoller’s landmark instrumentation and structural genius, listen to the lyrics, which as Leiber evolved as a songwriter started drawing ideas from other, unexpected sources. Wonderfully transparent about his inspirations, he didn’t hide the fact, for example, that the words to Peggy Lee’s 1969 hit “Is That All There Is?” were taken from a prose meditation by German writer Thomas Mann called “Disillusionment.”

In Mann’s story, after recounting the numbness of his life experiences, the narrator awaits the ultimate disappointment: “So I dream and wait for death. Ah, how well I know it already, death, that last disappointment! At my last moment I shall be saying to myself: ‘So this is the great experience — well, and what of it? What is it after all?'”

Leiber used Mann’s words nearly verbatim, but with one major difference. Mann dwells on futility until the very end. Leiber though gave it an ironic twist that will echo long after his departure. If that’s it, she sings, “Then let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze and have a ball / If that’s all there is.”

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How Halston’s Death Galvanized the Fashion Industry to Take Action Against AIDS

But not all AIDS deaths were hushed up; indeed, there was a backlash against the conspiracy of silence. Before Way Bandy—one of the industry’s top makeup artists—died on August 13, 1986, he directed his executors to announce his death as AIDS-related. And Halston acknowledged the cause of his own death on March 26, 1990, in the classiest possible way, leaving instructions for his prized Rolls-Royce to be auctioned off and the proceeds donated to AIDS research.

In Halston, fashion found its Rock Hudson: a superstar who could put a familiar face to the dreaded disease. Both Time and People addressed AIDS and fashion in their next issues; People put a smiling Halston on its cover, flanked by Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor. “He put American fashion on the map,” the cover line read. “He died last week of AIDS, a broken man.” Halston’s death finally galvanized the industry to take real action against the disease; later that year, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) staged its first Seventh on Sale fundraiser, inspiring similar events in Paris and Milan. But no one fooled themselves into thinking that it couldn’t get any worse. As CFDA president Carolyne Roehm told People: “I shudder to think how many more we may lose.”

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell writing in The Atlantic about how the fashion industry grappled with the AIDS crisis, and Chester Weinberg, the first fashion designer to succumb to the disease. Weinberg died in April 1985.

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Recalling Life in Liberia

Yes, I remember: boiling leaves to eat; rubbing leaves on your skin because you have no soap; crushing leaves under your arms so that you don’t smell bad. Leaves and dirt, sticks and rocks: these are the only things a refugee can count on. Even if the exiles go home, the average wage in Liberia is about $1.25 a day. Many people have no clean water or flush toilets. Their lives are hard every day. There is no route to riches. To get money from America is like a blessing from God—bread falling from the sky.

Louise Troh, writing in Vanity Fair about the death of her longtime love Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man who died of Ebola in Dallas. Troh came to America from Liberia in 1998 as a political refugee.

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The Two Purposes of History

Underlying the entire conversation was a tension between the two purposes of history, the philosophical or scientific, and the civic. The philosophical or scientific perspective considers the pursuit of historical truth to be of highest value. Like any organized scientific activity, historical research is corrupted when oriented to immediate public ends. Its public value ultimately depends on its autonomy.

The civic purpose of history, on the other hand, is to help a community—a nation, a religious or ethnic group—understand the present in ways that orient that group to the future. The questions asked, and the answers offered, will be ones relevant to the community at large rather than a scholarly community of inquiry.

We need both; in fact the civic depends on the scientific if history is to avoid becoming propaganda or having the preferences of the reading public drive the discipline’s priorities. Before historians can engage the public, they need good knowledge, and thus basic research.

Johann N. Neem, writing for the American Historical Association’s AHA Today blog about a panel discussion on The History Manifesto that was held in D.C. last week.

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Fair Hours Have Once Again Become a Basic Concern In Worker Organizing

Laundry Workers Union of New York, 1914. Photo by Library of Congress, Flickr

Along with wages and conditions, hours used to be a basic concern in worker organizing. During the heyday of the struggle over hours, in the century before World War II, the demand was always for fewer of them. The “Lowell Mill Girls” agitated for a 10-hour day, and the Haymarket strikers wanted to get down to eight. But since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 enshrined the 40-hour week, hours have tended to be taken for granted. Time was regularized, and thus depoliticized. This is changing only because, in recent years, employers have entered a devastating new race to the bottom: Involuntary part-time is becoming the new norm for low-wage workers, together with schedules so unpredictable and varying that one can’t easily get another job, or go to school, or be a reliable parent.

Now, as a new national movement about work hours gets going, it has focused on more rather than fewer, and at more regular intervals. University of Chicago professor Susan J. Lambert, a collaborator of Gleason’s, is the leading authority on the numbers behind the crisis. Her research has found that 41 percent of early-career hourly workers—people in their mid-20s and early 30s—learn about their schedules a week or less in advance; for African-Americans, it’s 49 percent. Only one in five of these workers has a significant say in when their shifts will be. The hours worked by part-timers in a given week fluctuate, on average, as much as 87 percent. The ingredients of economic crisis, corporate competition, and technology have created “a perfect storm,” Lambert says.

Nathan Schneider writing in The Nation about how unpredictable schedules and “involuntary part-time” positions for low-wage workers have put fair hours at the forefront of the fight for employee rights.

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The Very First Blood Transfusion

The world’s first experiments with blood transfusion occurred in the mid-1660s in England. The procedure, which was first carried out between dogs, was gruesome: the dogs were tied down, the arteries and veins in their necks opened, and blood transferred from one to another through quills (most likely made from goose feathers) inserted into the blood vessels. The experimentalist started and stopped the flow of blood by loosening and tightening threads tied with running knots around the dogs’ blood vessels. The blood of the “emittent” dog flowed from its carotid artery into a vein in the recipient’s neck while the recipient’s own blood ran out its carotid artery. According to physician Richard Lower, who described the operation in an essay published in 1666 in Philosophical Transactions, the world’s oldest scientific journal, the transfusion came to an end when the emittent dog began “to cry, and faint, and fall into Convulsions, and at last dye [sic].”

Elizabeth Yale writing in JSTOR Daily about the early history of blood transfusions.

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The Brothers Behind the California Bungalow

Charles Greene (left) and Henry Greene. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Although they had no way of knowing it, the Hartwigs had bought a remnant of the Cora C. Hollister House, a Craftsman-style bungalow built in 1904 by Charles and Henry Greene, two of Southern California’s most admired and transformational residential architects. “In their 20 years of practice,” wrote the late Greene & Greene historian Randell L. Makinson, “they established an American architecture so fresh that it spread from Pasadena to all of Southern California and then over the entire country as the ‘California Bungalow’ style.” Artists in the truest sense of the word, the brothers created whole environments—livable spaces that harmonized with their surroundings. In the early 20th century, Greene & Greene had a thriving practice in Southern California, designing landmark Arts & Crafts residences like the Gamble and Blacker houses in Pasadena, the town in which their firm was based.

Steve Vaught writing in Los Angeles Magazine. Vaught’s piece follows the the unlikely journey of Greene & Greene’s Cora C. Hollister House, which was erected on Hollywood soil in 1904 and later made its way to the ranchlands of western Canada.

The California bungalow—a residential architectural style that took the country by storm in the early years of the twentieth century and remained popular until 1939—was simple in design. Form followed function, structural elements were exposed, and outdoor living was emphasized.  “Greene & Greene more or less invented the California Bungalow as a distinctive style,” according to Leon Whiteson of the Los Angeles Times

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‘I Started to Think About the Prospect of Documenting a Culture That I Understood.’

Photo by Amazon

After my internship, my first assignment for National Geographic was a story about the Zinacenteco Indians in the highlands of Chiapas. The subject was interesting but very challenging. As a woman, my access was mostly limited to other women who only spoke the Maya language I was struggling to learn. Once I traversed the language barrier, it was still very difficult to gain permission to photograph because it was a culture that traditionally believed that taking one’s pictures meant taking one’s soul. Each photograph was the result of a protracted pre-negotiation. While I was struggling to make pictures there, I started dreaming of photographing in a place where people actually liked being photographed. I started to think about the prospect of documenting a culture that I understood, where my perspective and understanding could actually make a difference in my seeing.

I found an old copy of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, a groundbreaking novel about the jaded alienation of the young and rich in Los Angeles, on the bookshelf of our rented house in Chiapas. As I reread it, I thought about how people around the world were fascinated by the depiction of Los Angeles kids in the popular TV show Beverly Hills 90210. I realized that the world I grew up in, Los Angeles, was worthy of the same kind of sociological and anthropological study, that as photographers, anthropologists and documentarians, we customarily turn on the other rather than on ourselves.

So I came back to my hometown and started documenting kids in Los Angeles, the place that fabricates the popular culture that is exported around the world.

Photographer and documentarian Lauren Greenfield writing in Time. Greenfield studied film and anthropology in college and had initially planned to spend her career “documenting the exotic [and] the other”; instead she returned home to Los Angeles and turned the lens on the world she’d grown up in. Those photographs ended up becoming Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywoodher acclaimed first book. That was nearly two decades ago. Since then, Greenfield has become a renowned chronicler of youth culture, gender and consumerism, and is perhaps best known for her 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles.

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How Christy Plott Redd Became the ‘Queen of Gator’

The title is self-appointed. Several years ago, Redd heard about an alligator buyer from Italy working in Florida and calling himself the King. This was annoying. For one thing, there are no alligators in Italy. Live ones, anyway. More importantly, royalty is demonstrated by blood line, and nobody in the world can lay claim to one more established than Redd’s, whose great-grand­father founded the family business almost a century ago in Blairsville, whose grandfather served time in prison for illegally selling alligator skins in the 1970s, and whose father did too, for that matter. American Tanning is the oldest and largest alligator tannery in the country—and one of the only major ones in the world. Alligator mississippiensis, the American alligator, has been establishing its foothold in what is now the southern United States—its sole habitat—for 180 million years. The Plotts’ regional lineage may stretch back a mere 200 or so, but in any case, what family’s fortune has been entwined with the alligator’s for longer than theirs? Certainly no Italian arriviste’s.

Mary Logan Bikoff profiling Christy Plott Redd for Atlanta Magazine. Redd is co-owner and creative director of America’s largest alligator leather tannery.

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