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Andrew O’Hagan on The Grenfell Tower Fire, One Year Later

Grenfell Tower on June 17th, 2017. David Mirzoeff/PA Wire URN:36546841

In an epic seven-part piece at The London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan writes on the harrowing Grenfell Tower fire that took place in London, England on June 14th, 2017. Telling dozens of individual stories of survivors and victims of the catastrophe, his essay posits that shoddy renovations and a poorly managed fire response that urged residents to “stay put” and wait for rescue — a policy only rescinded until it was too late for residents on the upper floors to evacuate — cost 72 people their lives.

Near to 12.15 a.m., a fire began in the kitchen of Flat 16 on the fourth floor. The flat was rented by an Ethiopian cab driver called Behaulu Kebede, a father of one. Some immediate neighbours heard a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 a.m.,’ she said, ‘because I was sleeping and it woke me up.’ She looked at the clock as she made her way onto the landing and looked towards Kebede’s open door. She could see into his kitchen and she thought at the time that the fire wasn’t very big.

Flames from the fridge had engulfed the kitchen and were quickly licking out of Kebede’s open window, setting fire to the insulation in the cavity beween the building and its new cladding. It wasn’t obvious at first that this had happened: when the firefighters arrived, a group of eight, they came up to Flat 16 and put out the fire in the kitchen. They didn’t notice that the flames going out of the window had allowed the fire to enter the cavity. The barriers that were supposed to seal the gaps between panels in the event of a fire were too small, or were badly fitted, which allowed the cavity to act as a chimney and draw the flames upwards.

And then, just as the firefighters from North Kensington were leaving the scene, having doused the kitchen fire, the control at Stratford started receiving further emergency calls. ‘There’s a fire in my sitting room on the tenth floor!’ ‘My bedroom window is covered in flames. I’m on the eighth floor.’

‘That’s impossible,’ the operators were saying to each other. ‘The fire on the fourth floor was just put out by firefighters!’ One fire chief told me the problem was that the people in Stratford couldn’t see what was happening and so were confused when suddenly dozens of calls were coming in at the same time. The operators told the callers to stay put in their flats. A senior operations officer eventually got a picture from social media up on his mobile phone and showed it to his superior officer.

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How to Ruin the Scripps Spelling Bee in Four Letters: E-S-P-N

Arvind Mahankali of Bayside Hills, New York, participates in the finals of the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee May 30, 2013 at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Mahankali has won the championship of the annual spelling contest after he correctly spelled the word "knaidel." (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Back in 2013, for Deadspin, Drew Magary attended the annual Scripps Spelling Bee, in which 11 million kids spell off across America in a bid to become the brainy few who land onstage for the final round, and learns how such a simple contest had been sullied (S-U-L-L-I-E-D, SULLIED) by the need to keep the event exciting for ESPN’s television audience.

• The atmosphere at the bee is very supportive. I went around looking for nutbar stage parents, but most of the parents were either A) pleasant or B) too media savvy to act like insane people in front of a reporter. These parents weren’t talking to the media for the first time. The finalists who got knocked out late were all given standing ovations (genuine ones). The kids all high-fived one another when they got words right. Whatever cutthroat elements of the competition existed only existed under the surface, or behind closed doors. With one glaring exception …

• I can’t begin to tell you how fucked-up ESPN has made this event. In addition to changing the very rules of competition, ESPN made these poor kids tape canned segment after canned segment. Some of these kids were natural extroverts, but not all of them were. I can only imagine how awkward it is for a shy 12-year-old to have to dance around in sunglasses for an ESPN producer and then watch that canned footage up on the big screen with everyone in the house watching it. There were so many canned segments in the beginning—including a sketch in which Dr. Bailly re-enacts those AT&T ads with the dude in a classroom asking kids easy questions; a shitty Tom Rinaldi piece that reminded you that “every word is the World Series”; a montage of ESPN’s 20 years covering the bee; and a moment in which a kid tells the audience the new format is a “win-win for the Bee”—that it took a full 42 minutes to get through the first round of the finals. Without all that shit, it probably would have taken six minutes. But in their quest to Olympify the competition, ESPN added shitloads of filler. This is why a computer knocks you out now, to fit in a segment in which Sam Ponder asks people around Washington to spell the president’s name right. (Ponder noted that only one person she talked to spelled Obama’s name correctly. He was from Japan.)

• And ESPN’s opening sequence to the bee was REALLY fucked up. It had a harsh female voiceover saying, “IN LIFE THERE ARE WINNERS AND THERE ARE LOSERS. YOU CAN EITHER SPELL THE WORD OR YOU CAN’T. IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT THE WORD IS YOUR FRIEND BUT THIS IS A LIE. THE WORD IS HERE TO DEFEAT YOU.” Way to ease the pressure on these kids, ESPN. Assholes. What is wrong with you people?

At the end, the last kid standing was bee veteran Arvind Mahankali, who finally won the thing on “KNAIDEL” (though it was his spelling of “DEHNSTUFE” in an earlier round that really brought the house down). When Arvind was declared the winner, two confetti cannons went off on either side of him and showered him for what seemed like 90 minutes. Arvind barely blinked the whole time, either due to shock (again, they’re still just kids) or because he probably would rather have walked off stage to be with his family than stand there and get blasted with 800 hundred pounds of shredded paper.

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How American Women’s Pro Baseball Kept Lesbians in the Closet

Elise Harney, pitcher for the Kenosha Comets, refreshes her makeup between innings as teammate Janice O'Hara and another player look on. The women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League were required to look their best whether on or off the field, and received "charm school" training to teach them how to maintain that feminine look. (Getty Images)

“A League of Their Own,” the film starring Rosie O’Donnell and Geena Davis, told the story of a women’s professional baseball team that played in an all-girl league in the 1940s and ’50s — a time when many gays were still in the closet. Partly truth, partly fiction, “the film does to the history of the league what the owners tried to do its existence — erase lesbians from the narrative.”

At Narratively, Britni de la Cretaz looks at the history of lesbianism in early pro women’s baseball and at the beautiful, lifetime love stories the film chose to ignore.

When Terry Donahue met Pat Henschel in 1947, Donahue was a 22-year-old catcher and utility infielder in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. She grew up playing ball with her younger brother, Tom, on their family’s farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. “She claimed that she was five-foot-two. She was about five-foot,” Henschel tells me over the phone from the home she shares with Donahue. “She had dark hair, blue eyes, and was very attractive, and she was wonderfully liked.”

Today, Donahue, who has Parkinson’s disease, is 92. Henschel is 89. For seven decades the two told almost everyone, aside from their inner circle, that they were best friends. The Chronicle story calls Henschel Donahue’s “cousin and roommate.” But the truth was much more than that. For 70 years theirs has been a love story, originating in a time when the only love stories we were allowed to tell were those between a man and a woman. Try to ask most former players about the issue and they clam up. “I don’t think it was really even talked about, frankly,” Henschel says.

Catcher Eunice Taylor and her partner of 45 years, Diana Walega, owned and operated a pet supply store for 40 years. Outfielder Barbara Sowers was with her “loving companion” Shirley Ann Weaver for 45 years. And there are many more, players with “longtime,” “beloved companions,” whose names I have chosen not to include here out of respect for the fact that they were likely still closeted during their lives. Their obituaries, which are historical documents, offer us glimpses into their lives and are open for us to interpret.

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An Oral History of the Muppets

Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson on set of "The Muppet Movie" in 1979. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.)

Studio 360, the public-radio show and Slate podcast, shares an oral history of the Muppets. In the early years, before Sesame Street and The Muppet Show made them famous with kids, creator Jim Henson struggled to find the right setting for his personality-packed foam-and-felt creations; their origins were in violent, adult-themed shorts, including a brief stint on Saturday Night Live.

Love the Muppets? Read an interview with the man behind Big Bird, or a story on the man who tried to keep the Muppets going after Jim Henson’s death.

Herships: Seitz says the Muppets remind us of ourselves.
Take the relationship at the show’s heart, between Kermit and Miss Piggy.

Seitz: It’s a really dysfunctional relationship. For starters, Miss Piggy, let’s be honest, here—Miss Piggy is a handful. There’s just no denying that Miss Piggy is about as high-maintenance as it gets. And also Miss Piggy is a pathological narcissist. She really is. Like, if I was going to diagnose her, that’s probably where I would start.

Herships: So what’s coming in to mind right now is, wow, they need to go to counseling. Like, marriage counseling.

Seitz: If Kermit were my friend, I would actually set some limits. I’d have to say, look Kermit, I love you man, but either you have to break up with Miss Piggy, or you need to never talk to me about your problems again. Those are your two choices. I can’t have any of this grey-scale anymore ’cause it’s killing me. But if they were actual people that you knew, it would be a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. You wouldn’t know which one of them to block first on your phone.

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Rita Dove on Creating a ‘Collage of American Consciousness’ with Poetry

American poet Rita Dove. (Photo by Emaonn McCabe/Redferns)

At Columbia Journalism Review, Brendan Fitzgerald interviews Rita Dove on how she plans to approach her upcoming one-year stint as poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine. Taking over for Terrance Hayes this summer, Dove has free rein to select a new poem that will appear in the magazine each week, along with her short introduction. Dove is the fourth poet to hold the poetry editor position.

My first feeling is not to consider what might constitute the audience’s blinders. In other words, to assume that they are going to be open—that’s for the first read. Something that moves me, I will immediately put into the pile to be considered later.

But there is something else to consider, and that’s something I’ve thought about a lot. That is to imagine what my audience’s lives might be like when they’re not reading my poem. What they bring to whatever venue or event or magazine. To imagine how much time or energy they can devote, and how to pull them in.

I would hope that what would emerge would be a kind of portrait or collage of American consciousness. Which means, there would be poets from the west as well as the east coast as well as the middle, and men and women, and that would shake out, hopefully, to some kind of parity, representative of what the population is like at large. Poems from all races and all cultural ethnicities. But there will not be bad poems because I need a woman or I need an African-American. No. There are so many amazing, beautiful poems out there that we don’t get to see. That’s going to be my goal. Bring a few of them out there.

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The New, Improved, Empathic Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman speaks onstage during Hulu Upfront 2018 at The Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden on May 2, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Hulu)

Comedian Sarah Silverman — known for racist bits and language that were a regular part of her act — is rejecting her controversial, adversarial past to embrace empathy. In this profile of Silverman at GQ, Drew Magary attempts to cleanse his own “calcified soul” with her new brand of compassion.

I am not as willing as Silverman to forgive Middle America for Trump. There are limits to my empathy. I am on the more shrill end of the liberal spectrum: the guy who bitches every time The New York Times ventures out into Trump country to talk to REAL FOLK, the way Silverman occasionally does on her own show. I fume that it’s always incumbent on blue-state America to reach out to red-state America, and not the other way around. I delight in conservatives showing their asses online. I have given up on trying to politely convince the most conservative members of my own family that they are wrong, and try to steer the conversation toward, like, clouds instead. I am, in other words, hardened, perhaps even more so than the rednecks Silverman is aiming to convert.

Silverman can see this, and what she desperately wants people to know is that finding out you’re wrong about something won’t kill you.

When I first started comedy, my male comic friends would say, ‘You have to focus on making the men laugh. The women only laugh if their date laughs.’ It’s something I actually accepted as an 18-year-old comedian. It took a while for me to say, That’s fucking insane. We’re all complicit in this fucked-up society; it’s just that men actually, truly benefited from it and women didn’t.”

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Mariah Engdahl, Age 16: The Only Gun Control Advocate in Gillette, Wyoming

Coal strip mining, Gilette, Wyoming. (Getty Images)

Gillette, Wyoming, is a place where “the high school yearbook devoted four pages to ‘Hunting: No Greater Sport,’” a local club funds “college scholarships by raffling off AR-15s,” and popular slogans include, “Welcome to Wyoming: Consider Everyone Armed.”

With accompanying photography by Jabin Botsford at the Washington Post, Eli Saslow profiles Mariah Engdahl, age 16 — a girl surrounded by gun enthusiasts in her family and in her boom-and-bust mining community. Inspired by the student protests in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, she educated herself on gun laws in Wyoming and, as a one-teen protest on gun control, delivered a speech to the Campbell County school board in a bid to avoid arming teachers in her county’s schools.

Now a week later, that sign was in his house, tucked into the closet of a bedroom where Moriah had been spending much of her time, with her door closed, since the protest. In the days since the march, the “Campbell County Ten” had become the object of profane graffiti, the inspiration for a rival Freedom March and the favorite target of a new Instagram account, “Campbell County Students for America,” which shared memes comparing gun protesters to Hitler. For his part, Alan had considered grounding Moriah for skipping school but decided against it. “I’m pretty sure the rest of Wyoming is going to punish her for me,” he said, so instead he had chosen to needle Moriah at every opportunity, including now, when she came out from her bedroom and walked into the kitchen.

“Win any popularity contests at school today?” he asked her. She rolled her eyes and ignored him, so he tried again.

“Did you manage to get everyone’s guns yet?” he said.

“How many times do I have to tell you it’s not about that?” she said. “We’re just pushing for more safety, a little more control.”

“That’s a bad word,” Alan said. “First it’s gun control, then it’s confiscation. I don’t know where you learned any different.”

She was the youngest of his four daughters, each a bit more empowered than the last, and by the time Moriah turned 12 she had begun questioning her parents’ Christianity, and then started favoring abortion rights, and then calling herself a feminist, and then refusing to eat the pigs her family sometimes slaughtered for meat. “The mouthy, hard-headed one,” Alan called her, with some pride, because that was how he saw himself, too, even if they often disagreed. She advocated for gay rights in her high school, and he thought acceptance was “part of the problem, because that stuff is better off staying hidden.” She was dating a Mexican American boy named Jon, whom Alan liked but also occasionally referred to as “Mexican Juan.” She was a journalist at the high school newspaper. He thought that journalists were partially to blame for ruining America and that “the fake news wouldn’t give Trump a slap on the back if he saved two babies from a fire.”

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Terese Marie Mailhot on the Personal Cost of Speaking Out Against Racism

Getty Images

In a compelling personal essay at Pacific Standard, Terese Marie Mailhot reflects on the systemic racism she’s experienced as a human and as a writer. She relates that speaking out against racism can come with a personal cost, but that as a natural-born liberator, she is both willing and prepared to use her voice and her stories to overcome it.

I used to will chaos into my life. It was a gift of sorts. Mother said I was born to Thunder—which is an element of chaos and liberation in my culture. I have always believed that an electric chaos ran through my blood.

“It’s a gift to be born this way,” my mother said, the first time I told her that I had a terrible dream of a large wheel spinning before me. It would not stop. “That is Thunder. This is a gift.”

She saw the world differently, and I by proxy. Her willful nature to name the world as she saw it, not how they wanted us to see it, made me believe in the power of being an indigenous woman.

There was a moment at the river with my mother long ago, when I asked her why we pray. She told me that prayer was not begging, or asking for things, but an expression of gratitude for the way things are. She looked at me, and behind her the river was not rushing. There were so many spirals in the current of the river, and many undertows.

She saw what I was staring at. “That is your power too,” she said. “The undertow can drown people.” I knew she was pointing to the chaos of what we cannot see, and that the undercurrent—the chaos and conflict beneath every surface—is necessary.

Sometimes, all I have is the power that she gave me—and the stories too. There might not be some mythological magic to me as a human being, but there is a reason I am drawn to spirals, to spinning things, to the disruptive nature of story, and to speaking out.

I am Thunder Woman, born to brutalities against me. I am Silence Breaking Woman. When I am told not to speak, by my father or anyone, there is a wielding thing turning inside of me that cannot be contained. It is a calling to be gifted with voice.

As an Indian woman, I feel a responsibility to be hard on the world, but love it as familial. I feel a responsibility to be hard on myself as well. I am both fallible and a gift. Even our perceived heroes are monstrous and imperfect sometimes. How easily Th’owxeya’s story could have been different, had she made her cave a sanctuary of safety for children who needed a home. How different would the world be without mosquitoes or men like my father. In every person there is a myth, waiting. There are many reasons to survive.

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In Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Starts with Educating Ourselves and Our Kids

Students at Blue Quills Residential School, 1940. Image from the Provincial Archives of Alberta, Canada.

At Maclean’s, Bonnie Schiedel writes on how Canadians, and parents in particular, need to first educate themselves, and then their children on Residential Schools: Canada’s cultural genocide. As a nation, we need to learn the individual stories of people like Phyllis Webstad, Gladys Chapman, and Chanie Wenjack, and about how the government partnered with the Catholic Church to remove Indigenous children from their families in a bid to “take the Indian out of the child.”

How would you feel, if this happened in your kid’s class? Last fall, a grade 6 social studies class outside of Edmonton was learning about residential schools. A student put up her hand and said, “I don’t have anything against Indigenous people, but my grandpa told me we had to put the Indians in residential schools because they were killing each other and we had to civilize them.”

Two years ago, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) issued 94 calls to action to address the legacy of residential schools and move toward reconciliation. I still can’t quite figure out what reconciliation could or should look like in everyday life; it’s one of those slippery words that can mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Maybe, then, we should pay attention to the truth part first. As Pamala Agawa, a curriculum coordinator for First Nation, Métis and Inuit education (FNMI) at York Region District School Board in Ontario, told me, we need to figure out the truth for ourselves: “What biases do we carry; what learning do we need to do to better understand the true history of the country?”

When Bearhead told me about that grade 6 student repeating her grandpa’s comment, I flinched, thinking my daughter could hear something that casually cruel in her classroom, too. The legacy of residential schools—those strained and broken threads of relationships and culture and identity—is like a widening tear in a piece of fabric. If we have any hope of patching it, we’ve got to listen, really listen, to Indigenous stories and experiences, and then talk to our kids. “The biggest measure of success for me is about how families are talking about reconciliation at the dinner table, when no one else is listening,” says Bearhead. “When we see that shift happening there, that’s when I believe we’ll be on the road to reconciliation as a country.”

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Endurance: It’s All in Your Head, Apparently

Scott Jurek applies lotion to his feet before running McAffee's Knob trail -- part of the Appalachian Trail in Catawba, Va. on Thursday, June 11, 2015. Jurek is on day 16 of his attempt to complete the 2,168.1 mile trail in 42 days. The current record is 46 days held by Jennifer Pharr Davis. Starting at Springer Mountain, Ga., Jurek has ran roughly 700 miles to date. (John Roark/The Roanoke Times via AP)

At The Atlantic, Paul Bisceglio surveys three new books that consider the brain’s role in extreme endurance sports and how a large part of high performance is in how the brain negotiates with an exhausted body.

Of all the things that could have broken Scott Jurek on a 2,189-mile run, it was a small tree root that crushed his spirit. He was 38 days into an attempt to beat the speed record for completing the full length of the Appalachian Trail, the mountainous hiking path that snakes along America’s East Coast, from northern Georgia to the top of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Jurek, one of the greatest ultramarathoners of all times, was in trouble. After battling through a succession of leg injuries, then slogging through Vermont’s wettest June in centuries, he had to make up ground over a particularly merciless stretch of the trail, New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Delirious from just two hours of sleep following 26 straight hours of hiking, he was stumbling along the trail when he encountered the root in his path.

“As I saw it coming, I didn’t know what to do,” Jurek recalls in his new memoir, North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, co-written with his wife, Jenny. “Was I supposed to step around it or over it? I just couldn’t remember.” So he hit it and toppled. “I’d forgotten how to raise my legs,” he writes. “How to run like a sane person.”

After tripping over the root in New Hampshire, he picked himself up, charged forward in his delirium for another week, and defeated Davis’s time by a slim three hours: He finished in 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes. Since then, two people have already beaten his record.

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