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Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

Southern Music’s Racial Double Standard

We believe automatically that Chris Knight is not — could never actually be — that homeless man with a gun.

Put the same lyric in Killer Mike’s mouth, though, and you think something different, don’t you? You do not assume instantly that Mike is merely inhabiting a character. No, in your mind, he is the man with the gun in his hand.

Think for a second about the history of Southern music. Our Appalachian musical heritage has a long and grand tradition of what the academics call “murder ballads” and what the musicians just call “killin’ songs.” The archetype, perhaps, is “Knoxville Girl,” in which the protagonist beats a girl with a stick “until the ground around her within her blood did flow,” then drags her by her hair into the river to drown.

Southerners have written and still sing hundreds of ballads about killings. We sing them at festivals and around campfires. Academic musicologists study them as cultural artifacts. Though they are dark indeed, no one finds them too objectionable. Johnny Cash “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” and we’re not scared. We just love Johnny more.

But when the gun in the song is in the hand of a black man, things get weird. The song becomes less cultural artifact and more an object of fear. We reflexively object. We worry about what the children will hear.

You think we have a little double-standard problem here? Yeah, me too.

Chuck Reece writing in the Bitter Southerner about the rapper Killer Mike.

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Photo: Mads Danquah, Flickr

It’s 1969 And This Is Robert Lanza’s First Time Experimenting with Embryos.

His best friend’s mom laughed when Lanza told her he wanted to become a doctor. “You’d probably make a very good carpenter,” she said. When Lanza announced his plan for the school science fair—he would alter a chicken’s genetics and turn it from white to black—his classmates giggled and his teacher said it was impossible. It’s a word he’ll hear many times.

Down in the basement, wedged between the furnace and clothes dryer, a homemade Styrofoam incubator on the table in front of him, he’s decided the chicken experiment is challenging, but not impossible. He talked his way into syringes and penicillin at local hospitals and borrowed tabletop centrifuges from a guy across town who works for the state health agency. His neighbor drove him to local farms so he could gather eggs from white chickens and black ones. Now he’s been working in the furnace room for months, trying to introduce pigmented genes into white embryos while his mom stands in the kitchen telling her friends that “Robby is downstairs trying to hatch chicken eggs.” Not quite, Mom, he thinks.

Eventually several white chicks will emerge from their eggs with brown spots. Lanza will drop by Harvard Medical School to get help repeating the results, and in a scene straight out of the movies, he’ll mistake the founder of Harvard’s neurobiology department for a janitor. Stephen Kuffler, “the father of modern neuroscience,” won’t mind a bit. He’ll introduce Lanza to a graduate student who will later become director of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science, and who will spend hours chatting with the eager teen about his chicken project.

Molly Petrilla, writing in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the early life of Dr. Robert Lanza. Dr. Lanza has racked up a slew of scientific accolades—and generated an equal amount of controversy—for his pioneering work on cloning and stem cells.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Longreads Member Pick Named Finalist for Pen Center USA 2014 Literary Awards

We are very excited to announce that Jessica Wilbanks’ essay “On The Far Side of the Fire” has been named as a finalist for the Pen Center USA 2014 Literary Awards. Wilbanks’ essay was honored in Pen Center USA’s journalism category. The piece was first published in the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of Ninth Letter and later made its online debut as a Longreads Member Pick in January 2014. You can read more Longreads Member Picks here.

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Photo: Jessica Wilbanks

An Abstract Symphony of Flavors

As much as [Hervé] This has spent his career chiselling deductions down to the molecular bone of physical chemistry, he is still entranced by the art involved in making something delicious. He talked volumes, veering between the intricacies of the chemistry of emulsions and the delights of a meal prepared with care and served with love. One moment he was frustrated at French chefs who were slow to embrace his Note By Note ideas—“In France people have to move! It is a pity I introduced molecular gastronomy and it was done in Spain; the French chefs said, we don’t need these gesticulations”—at another he described a dish by a chef friend in Paris, “a very simple dish of endive, chestnuts, rosemary and butter and it was perfect.”

With Note by Note cuisine This is attempting to jump (and to get chefs and the rest of us to jump) from the figurative to the abstract, from Rembrandt to Kandinsky. It shouldn’t matter if a flavour is unrecognisable, This argues, you only have to like it or dislike it. This told me that most people cannot differentiate more than seven chemical compounds in a mouthful. Taste is perceived as a chord. After 30 compounds, the mouthful becomes “a white taste, almost like a white noise. In fact, if you have a wine sauce, like my Wöhler sauce, it can be more pure, it is like a single flute or an orchestra. One is pure, the other is richer and harmonic. In my point of view both are beautiful.” His new continent is vast and relatively unexplored. For some time, technicians in flavour companies that create new syntheses of fruit and citrus compounds for shampoo or soft drinks have been working on “white space” flavours, flavours that did not exist before they were manufactured. This pointed out that Coca-Cola and Schweppes tonic water were probably perfect examples of Note by Note that are happily consumed by millions every day. But the food industry is conservative and their confections tend to be marketed as facsimiles of the familiar—lemon-lime, kiwi-strawberry. This believes he must convince chefs—the ultimate arbiters of taste—before the public can widely embrace Note by Note.

Wendell Steavenson, writing in Prospect Magazine about french chemist and molecular gastronomy pioneer Hervé This.

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Photo: Exploratorium, Flickr

Life and Death at SeaWorld

In a recent piece for Outside, Tim Zimmermann spoke at length with three former animal care workers about their experiences at SeaWorld. Animal care workers, who are responsible for the health of mammals at marine parks, are privy to the best and worse that goes on, with unique access and responsibilities. In the excerpt below, Zimmermann quotes from the journal of Krissy Dodge, a former employee at SeaWorld San Antonio, as she recounts the birth of a baby beluga:

Sept 17, 2006. Sunday a week ago I had whale watch from 12am–7:30am. Siku the beluga was due at any moment. An hour into it I thought I saw a small amount of blood. I didn’t see any crunching [flexing by the mother] though, and kept watching. I saw more blood and half of the tail flukes come out. I was so excited I started shaking. I immediately called my supervisor and he arrived in 10 min. After everyone was called I got into my wetsuit in case I was needed to get into the water.

When the calf was half way out, the supervisor told us to surround the pool so if the calf went around, it wouldn’t bump into walls or flop out of the pool. The calf was born and I watched it take its first breath. It seemed to be doing OK. It was very exciting for me. I almost wanted to cry. Of course I didn’t since no one shows any emotion in our dept.

I stayed watching until I was off at 7:30am. The next day I found out that the calf was not nursing and had to be tube fed. He didn’t take it well. To do it, someone had to jump in and catch it, swim it over, then a tube was shoved down its throat. A few times milk and blood was being expelled from the blowhole. It was decided on Friday to make an emergency move of Siku and calf to a back pool. Apparently when they got into the water to move the calf, it died in a trainer’s arms. I found out it died as they were bringing it back to 72 [the necropsy room] on the back of a cart.



I had to help in the necropsy. It was my first one and was indeed traumatic. To be the one to see it being born and also the one to cut it up was really difficult. When it was finished I walked to the zoological building to get a shower. I was still taking it all in and trying not to cry. A coworker was there and asked how it went. I said it was ok, but difficult being my first one. She said, “Oh don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. Soon it won’t even phase you.” To have this job, the only way to do it is to become hard and desensitized to everything. This job is so difficult. Not just physically, but emotionally. It’s made me question who I am and what I believe in. I’m ready to move on. This chapter needs to be closed.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Fantastic, Utopic Dream of Emojis

Some people use emojis sparingly, some with abandon; some are practical while others are creative; even emoji meanings are highly personal—smiley poop comforts my friend, grosses out my mom, makes my sister think of changing diapers. Emojis today are in a similar fluid state as the English language in the 16th century: Anything goes and everything is up for debate. Back then you could spell anything any which way—Smith, Smythe, Smyth. Even Shakespeare varied the spelling of his own name. Punctuation was also a mess; rules for standard use didn’t get locked down until the invention of the printing press.

Just as we eventually agreed on the rules of English, so might we eventually agree on a single, global understanding of emojis. In an interview for The Verge, original emoji designer Shigetaka Kurita admits this is a dream of his: “It would be great if we could compare, and have that lead to people starting to use things in the same way.” Though nearly everyone in the world has access to emojis we all have a slightly different understanding of the characters and phrases. It’s a fantastic, utopic dream, and not a new one: Liebniz algebra, Esperanto, and Blissymbolics are just a few of many failed global language experiments over the centuries. Emojis are an accidental member of this fraternity, and there’s no telling now whether it’s here to stay or has reached its peak.

Mary Mann writing in Matter about the “poetry and honesty” of emojis.

 

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Homecoming and Pain: On the Etymology of Nostalgia

Why do some people look back and others refuse to? What are the pleasures of  “nostalgia”? The word itself has its etymology in the Greek nostos(homecoming) + algia (pain), but the condition is more multifaceted, combined of equal parts of homesickness, self-indulgence, sentimentality, and an alertness to the genuine, confected, or nonexistent pleasures of other times, other ages, and other places. In Updike, and many others of us, the pleasure of remembering predominates, not the pain.

The word, if not the condition, is modern, coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer as a translation of the German Heimweh (homesickness) to describe the depression he witnessed among Swiss mercenaries longing to get home following service abroad. That its coinage coincides with the beginnings of the ages of Enlightenment and then Romanticism suggests that words both come out of their historical circumstances and affect subsequent conditions. They respond to cultural stimuli and then create new feelings, or new articulations of older ones. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguishes between two nostalgias, a “restorative” version, a longing for return to the favored place, and a “reflective” one, which is all about irreparable loss. But in America today, the original pain of nostalgia is often replaced by the diluted pipe-dream pleasures of self-indulgent trips down Memory Lane.

Willard Spiegelman writing for The American Scholar about memory, nostalgia, and his 50th high school reunion.

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The Daytime Dance Party As Harbinger Of Gentrification

The hundreds of people who show up each week to party at Mister Sunday are out for a good time. What the carefree fun-seekers likely do not realize is that they are also a part of a powerful real-estate developer’s plan to remake Industry City—and the Sunset Park community in which it sits—into the Next Hot Property (with rents, of course, to match).

In New York City, parties like Mister Sunday, along with upscale flea markets, artisanal food events like Smorgasburg, and art events have long signaled the coming wave of gentrification to once-crumbling industrial backwaters like Williamsburg, Bushwick, Long Island City, Gowanus, and now, Sunset Park. A hip, young set willing to push the boundaries into once-unloved neighborhoods in search of bigger spaces, creative freedom, and ultimately cheaper rent is always part of the equation of gentrification. But so are the savvy real-estate developers who follow their every move, ready to pour accelerant on the process.

Jamestown, the developer that owns a 50 percent stake in Industry City along with Belvedere Capital and Angelo Gordon, aims to create a new home base for the borough’s pickle and ice cream companies, custom denim purveyors, and other makers and modern manufacturers. And what better way to raise awareness among the very types of people it’s trying to attract than to throw a bangin’ party each week deep inside Industry City’s space, in collaboration with Industry City tenant Mister Sunday?

Erica Berger, writing for Fast Company about gentrification and Brooklyn real-estate developer Jamestown.

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Photo: A Mister Sunday party at its former location in Gowanus (Casey Holford, Flickr)

He Looked Like a Detective in the Movies

The door opened. Two men in suits walked in. The man in front was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, thin-waisted, thick-haired fellow with deep-set, dark eyes and an icy glare. The precinct detective knew this man. He’d seen him around the precinct. It was hard to miss him. He looked, colleagues often said, how a detective in a movie looks. And he played the part well. His suits were tailored. He always seemed to be chomping his trademark cigar, whether at the station, on the streets, or at the bar after hours. He had a booming voice thick with a Brooklyn accent. He had a hearty laugh and a respectable handshake. He loved to buy others drinks and trade stories. He was the friendliest and warmest man many of his peers had ever met, and he was quick to cut himself down with abundant doses of self-deprecation. It was hard not to love Detective Louis Scarcella.

Behind Scarcella stood his partner, Detective Steve Chmil, a stout man with a trim mustache, a brown comb-over, and skeptical, probing eyes. Where Scarcella seemed to seek the spotlight, Chmil was fine working in the shadows. The Robin to Scarcella’s Batman, cops around the borough joked. Scarcella and Chmil had come to assist on the precinct detective’s homicide case. He was expecting the company. Scarcella and Chmil were members of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, a roving, 40-man task force formed to relieve the borough’s murder epidemic. Precinct detectives faced dozens of robberies, burglaries, rapes, assaults, and shootings each month. The heavy caseloads made it tough to stay on top of a murder investigation for more than a few weeks. So homicide-squad detectives worked with the precinct detectives to help investigate murders. And perhaps no detective in New York City was better known for solving murder cases than Louis Scarcella.

Albert Samaha, writing for the Village Voice about the embattled career of Brooklyn detective Louis Scarcella. In recent years, many of Scarcella’s tactics have been questioned, and convictions made with his help have come under scrutiny.

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Photo: Flickr, Michael Cory

How Prop Money From a Hollywood Blockbuster Ended Up Confiscated by Secret Service

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In late 2000, the producers and crew for action flick Rush Hour 2 gathered at the now-defunct Desert Inn in Las Vegas and prepared to blow up a casino. The scene, which pitted policemen and Secret Service agents against a counterfeiter attempting to launder $100 million in superdollars, was to culminate with hundreds of thousands of fake bills floating through the air.

After several days of filming, the sequence was a success. Then, something incredibly odd happened. The bills, which had been supplied by a major Hollywood prop house, were picked up by movie extras and passersby and were attempted to be passed off as legal tender in various stores along the strip. The authorities weren’t too thrilled. Secret Service agents glided in, swiftly detained somewhere north of $100 million worth of prop money, then accused the prop maker — Independent Studio Services (ISS) — of counterfeiting, and ordered a cease and desist on all of their faux cash.

For ISS (the company who produced the money), the premise of Rush Hour 2 had become a reality — and they were penned as the bad guy. Sadly, their story is indicative of a constant dilemma faced by prop suppliers in Hollywood: the necessity to skirt the line between strict counterfeiting laws and producers’ demands for incredibly realistic money.

Zachary Crockett, writing for Priceonomics about the real business of fake Hollywood money.

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