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“All The Best”: Rest Easy, John Prine

John Prine performs at John Anson Ford Amphitheatre on October 01, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)

Americana legend John Prine passed away on April 7th, 2020 from complications of Coronavirus. He was 73. Before he spent 50 years as a full-time musician, he was a mailman. He wrote songs as he completed his route, songs “about certain silent things that people didn’t talk about.” In this piece at Rolling Stone by Patrick Doyle, John’s widow Fiona and his son Jody remember Prine for his love of music, performing on stage, and his way of finding joy in the smallest things in life.

Prine said his grades were “too ugly” for college. After graduating high school in 1964, he took the advice of his oldest brother, Dave, and became a mailman. The pay was good, and so were the benefits. That life was upended when Prine was drafted into the Army in late 1966, just as the Vietnam War was heating up. But instead of being sent to Vietnam, he ended up in Stuttgart, West Germany, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. Prine played down his military service, describing his contribution as “drinking beer and pretending to fix trucks.”

After the war, Prine returned to his mail route, which, it turned out, was great for writing songs. Wandering the Chicago suburbs, he wrote classics like “Donald and Lydia,” about a couple who “made love from 10 miles away,” and “Far From Me,” a ballad about the chilly, purgatory-like feeling that consumed him before his first breakup. “A lot of stuff I was writing about were things I saw and felt and didn’t hear them in songs,” he said. “It was about certain silent things that people didn’t talk about.” Prine’s most fearless song looked back on his Army days: “Sam Stone,” about a vet who came home from Vietnam and ends up with a heroin habit. “I was trying to say something about our soldiers who’d go over to Vietnam, killing people and not knowing why you were there,” Prine told Rolling Stone in 2018. “And then a lot of soldiers came home and got hooked on drugs and never could get off of it.”

While the Prine family cannot have a public funeral right now, they are finding ways to celebrate him. “I’m going to wash all of his Cadillacs, park them all in the driveway,” Fiona says. “I would never let him do that.” Jody says he’s remembering his father by celebrating “the small stuff, because that’s what he loves, like a hot dog. Or an ice cream cone. We were having ice cream last night, just thinking about how, after a show, he’d always have ice cream and pretend it was someone’s birthday and get a cake.”

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Let’s Not Talk About Estrangement

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At Guernica, Joanna Hershon considers her estranged uncle (a man she met once, but never knew) and wonders not only about how his self-imposed distance has affected his parents and siblings, but specifically about the lack of family discourse or discord over their missing member.

Researchers at Emory University in the 1990s—Dr. Marshall Duke and Dr. Robyn Fivush—discovered that the more children know about their families, the better they do in the face of life’s challenges. The kinds of stories that predict the closest families aren’t successes or failures but rather tales that incorporate life’s challenges into the family lore. It’s not my uncle’s absence that haunts me—after all, I never knew him. It’s that no one—not my grandparents, my parents, or any of my mother’s cousins we visited with over the years—told me stories about him, or about losing him. No one mused aloud about why he removed himself from the rest of us. It’s the absence of inquiry that feels disquieting, even now. How could my mother grow up in the same small house as her brother, and have nothing much to say about him? What are her questions, and where does she put them?

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Genius, Interrupted

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Lee Holloway was a brilliant coder, co-founder, and master architect of Cloudflare. He was “the resident genius, the guy who could focus for hours, code pouring from his fingertips while death metal blasted in his headphones.” But over time he became withdrawn, sleeping for days at a time, unable to engage with his family or friends. And his affect, when he did speak, was strangely flat. As Sandra Upson reports in this exceptional piece at Wired, no one knew a degenerative disease — frontotemporal dementia — lurked inside his brain, slowly killing off cells in his frontal and temporal lobes, irrevocably altering his personality in startling ways.

He was the master architect whose vision had guided what began as a literal sketch on a napkin into a tech giant with some 1,200 employees and 83,000 paying customers. He laid the groundwork for a system that now handles more than 10 percent of all internet requests and blocks billions of cyberthreats per day. Much of the architecture he dreamed up is still in place.

He was becoming erratic in other ways too. Some of his colleagues were surprised when Lee separated from his first wife and soon after paired up with a coworker. They figured his enormous success and wealth must have gone to his head. “All of us were just thinking he made a bunch of money, married his new girl,” Prince says. “He kind of reassessed his life and had just become a jerk.”

The people close to Lee felt tossed aside. They thought he’d chosen to shed his old life. In fact, it was anything but a choice. Over the next few years, Lee’s personality would warp and twist even more, until he became almost unrecognizable to the people who knew him best. Rooting out the cause took years of detective work—and forced his family to confront the trickiest questions of selfhood.

Few disorders ravage their victims’ selfhood with the intensity of the behavioral variant of FTD. It takes all the things that define a person—hobbies and interests, the desire to connect with others, everyday habits—and shreds them. Over time, the disease transforms its victims into someone unrecognizable, a person with all the same memories but an alarming new set of behaviors. Then it hollows them out and shaves away their mobility, language, and recollections.

Because it is relatively unknown and can resemble Alzheimer’s or a psychiatric disorder, FTD is often hard to diagnose. As in Lee’s case, the early stages can be misinterpreted as signs of nothing more serious than a midlife crisis. Patients can spend years shuttling to marriage counselors, human resources departments, therapists, and psychologists. By the time patients learn the name of their disorder, they are often unable to grasp the gravity of their situation.

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Photographing the Collective Experience of Self-Isolation

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At The Bitter Southerner, Jesse Davis narrates the work of photographer Jamie Harmon, who took a portable lighting kit and a telephoto lens into communities in Memphis, Tennessee, to make portraits of people living in quarantine.

The photos, despite the required space needed to abide by social distancing guidelines, are wonderfully intimate. They bypass race, gender, and economics to capture people doing their best to self-isolate for the greater good of the community.

In the Bluff City, where gatherings are a way of life, taken for granted, Harmon, camera in hand, sets out to document the new normal. With his “Quarantine Portrait” series, he peeked — always with permission — through windows and into Memphians’ lives, capturing a slice of what life looks like under lockdown. The series is understandably somber at times, but the images resonate with an undeniable sense of hope. Perhaps paradoxically, there is something inherently community-minded in these photographs of isolated individuals. Many of these photos were taken before Mayor Jim Strickland’s “Safer at Home” order went into effect on March 23 — three weeks ago now — and before the lack of leadership from the federal and, particularly in the South, state governments became as obvious as it feels today. As such, Harmon’s quarantine portraits show Memphians self-isolating in an act of solidarity — stepping up to fill the void of leadership with individual sacrifice.

“No matter what we do, this is a collective experience,” Weinberg says, articulating the truth made apparent by this health crisis and Harmon’s portraits. COVID-19 arrived in one of the most divisive moments in recent memory and attacked without regard to age, party affiliation, or other arbitrary qualifiers. In doing so, it put bright light on simple truths: A community is only as strong as its most vulnerable members, and the lines we draw to divide us often do far more harm than good. Harmon’s series makes that plain — the houses, duplexes, and apartment buildings represented are from various neighborhoods and income brackets. Harmon’s lens captures prominent members of the community alongside now-out-of-work service industry folk. Straight, LGBTQ, black, white, Latinx, Asian-American, young, and old — all members of the Memphis community, all willing to sacrifice their own desires for mobility to the greater good.

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On Dolly Parton and Being Seen

(Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

At Guernica, Chris Dennis reconciles his love of Dolly Parton despite her ironic combination of down-home folksiness, vulnerability, and painted artifice.

It is now mostly unclear why I thought it was a good idea to bring Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits to school with me. Like most children, I was still standing in the messy way-station between my own limited worldview and everyone else’s. But our bus had a radio with a tape player, and the bus driver, Mrs. Connie, would allow us to take turns bringing cassettes. It’s likely I’d really wanted to hear “9 to 5” after breakfast and there just wasn’t enough time, since I’d spent too long deliberating whether to wear the black or brown velveteen shorts that my mother had made for me by hand. I’d like to quote another country queen, Barbra Mandrell, and say, “I was country when country wasn’t cool.” But I don’t think country music was the central issue with my schoolmates that morning when the entire bus erupted in near-universal outrage. A Dolly Parton track from six years earlier was not the music of the youth in 1986. The kids demanded to know whose tape it was. I sat quietly, on fire with embarrassment, holding the cassette case in my lap. After only a few seconds Mrs. Connie turned the music off. When she handed the tape back as I exited the bus at school, she said, “I’m sorry. Maybe bring something else next time.”

I’m sure I’d heard the word “faggot” before, but this was the first instance where it gathered a tangible meaning. A brutal link was forged, and on the other side of it, a child’s version of self-awareness. The sudden shame I felt about my own joy at and adoration of a certain kind of music was confusing. It’s hard to comprehend the level of disgust or discomfort the other children had then, but it was enough that, in a matter of days, many of my classmates at Eldorado Elementary School either called me “Dolly” or “faggot.” This would be the way for years. The names would almost become synonymous. How did they know already, and how could this have been the thing, in the third grade, to make my difference visible? The uncertainty I had felt about my father knowing that I loved Dolly Parton had doubled back on me. He had just shown me it was okay to love it. I didn’t know how to tell him he’d been wrong.

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Arundhati Roy: 1.3 Billion on Lockdown on Four Hours’ Notice

A labourer wearing a facemask rests next to parked bicycles used to transport materials in a wholesale market during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Kolkata on April 6, 2020. (Photo by Dibyangshu SARKAR / AFP) (Photo by DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP via Getty Images)

At The Finanicial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy reports on India’s ill-considered and anti-humanist response to COVID-19. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, offered four hours’ notice before the country of 1.38 billion people went into lockdown, where the monied sheltered in place, displacing 460 million migrant workers. Suddenly without jobs in a country without public transportation, the workers attempted to walk hundreds of kilometers to their home villages before the country halted their movement, forcing them into perilous limbo in makeshift camps.

The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

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Greta Thunberg: “We Just Have to Care About Each Other More”

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - MARCH 06: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (C) holds a banner as she takes part in a "Youth Strike 4 Climate" protest against global warming and climate change on March 6, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

At Rolling Stone, Stephen Rodrick profiles teen climate activist Greta Thunberg. Thunberg won’t fly, for climate reasons, and her willingness to make personal sacrifices for the Earth gets Rodrick thinking about his own influence on the planet’s future. The teen’s message is not all doom and gloom, it’s about taking action, now: she’s working tirelessly to influence politicians and decision makers because we still have eight years to reduce carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic damage to Earth.

My Greta travels featured a Vancouver-Zurich round trip and then an L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I fly from Vancouver to L.A. for another story. It’s the job, but I take stock in horror and calculate that my three flights burn more carbon than the yearly usage of the average citizen of more than 200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.

“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has come to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta moment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say you understand the science, but I don’t believe you. Because if you did and then you continue to act as you do, that would mean you’re evil. And I don’t believe that.’” Gore shook his head in wonderment. “Wow.” He then gives a history lesson: “There have been other times in human history when the moment a morally-based social movement reached the tipping point was the moment when the younger generation made it their own. Here we are.”

Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the climate’s demise.

“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”

Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.

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“The Beauty of the Moments that Pass Each Day”

Autumn in the Ozarks / Getty Images

As writer and photographer Terra Fondriest notes in this stunningly beautiful photo essay over at The Bitter Southerner, her family is among the newest on their dirt road, having only lived in rural Arkansas for 11 years. In a series of intimate portraits called The Ozark Life project, she documents her neighbors and the bounty they share and preserve in land, family, livestock, hard work, and tradition.

This Ozark Life project is a lot of things for me: a way to get to know the people around us, a way to record this time and place from my perspective for the history books, and a way to pursue a personal challenge. But, perhaps the reason that motivates me the most is connecting the Ozark culture to the life I used to live in the Chicago suburbs. By seeing moments that are totally normal in the Ozarks, moments that make me smile, and realizing how quirky those would look to a person living outside this area, I can relate our mountain world to other people.

Often these are snippets in my own family’s everyday life, but lately I am spending time photographing others in my community. I am drawn to documenting people who work using their hands and ingenuity to make a living. Those who are following their passion and those who are making a living off of the land here. I love spending time with other families similar to my own, who are navigating life here, each with its own twist.

I am still the same introverted girl who grew up in the suburbs. Getting to know new people makes me more nervous photographing for this project. It’s a challenge that is daunting on most days, but the camaraderie built by pushing through that with my subjects yields the intimacy I strive for in my storytelling. Some of the folks I photograph are friends and neighbors, but others are people I meet through circumstance, whose everyday story I find interesting and a good piece for my Ozark Life story quilt. But I approach them. I might talk to them right away about my project, or I might let it simmer a bit and get to know them over days, months, even years before I bring up my project and my request to photograph them.

Time moves, everyone in their own rhythms and situations, yet it’s a cadence we all relate to. The difference between the Ozarks and the suburbs where I grew up are the ties people have to the land, which grow deeper with every generation. Will Norton can point to the soil under his feet and say his granddad’s dad farmed the same soil where he now raises both cattle and his family. There’s a respect and connection to these hills that’s hard to put into words; it’s almost like a heartbeat that the land infuses in you.

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“Leave Us to Our Peace”: A Pact Made in Love

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At Outside, Eva Holland brings us a thoughtful piece about the right — and the privilege — of getting to die on one’s own terms.

Eric and Pam Bealer were the epitome of resourcefulness. Both artists lived in a remote area of Alaska. They raised animals and vegetables on a wild landscape that was often the inspiration for the art they created. After Pam was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in the aughts, the couple enacted a plan to end their own lives at a time they chose.

Solovyov later told me that, when he saw the little boat crammed with art that March day, he should have known. For years, the couple had talked with close friends about their intention to die together when Pam’s time came. She did not wish to see her disease through; Eric did not plan to live without his wife. But it was one thing to talk about this in the abstract. It was another for Solovyov to stand in the harbor and realize that his friend had prepared his last exhibition. “He brought everything with him,” he said.

Isolated as the cabin was, they had a neighbor there, and his place had Wi-Fi, which they were able to use even when he was away. So they were generally in touch with people by e-mail. When that communication stopped, in mid-September, their friends took notice. They put the word out to folks in Pelican: If anyone was heading for Yakobi Island, could they look in on the Bealers?

On October 5, a pair of Pelican-area residents, a married couple, made the trip to the island. Leaving his wife in their boat, the husband hiked up a trail to the Bealers’ cabin. The screen door to the covered porch was open. He went in and found a plastic bin filled with packages and letters, and a note taped to the glass window of the main door, which was locked. On one side the note read: “Hello, if you are looking for the Bealers… Please read this. If you found this, please mail the attached packages. It will go to the people who will know what to do next and take care of things. Please accept the cash as a gift to pay you for your trouble, and postage for these packages and envelopes.”

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Can Sinéad O’Connor Find Peace?

Sinéad O'Connor (Photo by Don Arnold / WireImage)

Sinéad O’Connor maintains her proudest day is the one in 1992 when she tore up the pope’s photo on Saturday Night Live. Some suggest she’s been struggling ever since, but it seems the problems started much earlier, with an abusive childhood at the hands of a deeply religious mother. Nearly 30 years later, at age 53, after four marriages, four children, and a series of physical and mental health issues, she’s transposed her anger and anguish into music — headlining a series of sold-out shows on the east coast of the US (now postponed due to Coronavirus). Read Geoff Edgersexcellent profile at The Washington Post.

There are still moments when O’Connor will break down, either in fury, tears or a kind of self-loathing. But during her most recent hospital stay, which ended last May, she learned an important concept, which has become her mantra: radical acceptance. As a girl, she suffered abuse from her deeply religious mother that remains with her decades after her mother’s death. In the past, she’s tried to fight and deflect it, sometimes by lashing out at others. She’s learned that this doesn’t help.

“Because that kind of pain doesn’t go away,” O’Connor says. “You only learn to live with it. Music is where I can manage it.”

She sat there quietly. Even as O’Connor finishes a memoir aimed for the spring of 2021, starts work on her first album in years and awaits the second leg of a tour — a string of sold-out East Coast shows, including at the Birchmere, which have been postponed due to coronavirus concerns — there is a bigger project underway. How to live.

O’Connor doesn’t have a home studio or notebooks lying around filled with song drafts. She writes, she says, largely in her head. A melody will strike, the words will come and she’ll repeat the whole thing until it’s ready to be laid down as a demo.

Reynolds, her longtime producer, remembers O’Connor composing virtually all of 1994’s “Universal Mother” in a single night, simply singing into a tape recorder. She isn’t afraid to share her inspirations, whether the therapy time in “Milestones” or “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” about her relationship with former manager and onetime partner Fachtna O’Ceallaigh.

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