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Professional writer, editor, napper, and dog-snorgler. Knows you are, but what is she?

You’ll Dream What We Tell You To Dream and You’ll Like It

a close-up image of red, orange, blue, green, and yellow balls
Somehow, fun and unfettered imagination always equals "ball pit." Photo by Julie Kertesz via Wikimedia Common (CC BY 2.0)

The Dream Machine is the latest must-visit location for the Instagram-addicted influencer who’s already taken a selfie at the Museum of Ice Cream. But are you really dreaming when you’re in a space designed by someone else — and when you’re waiting in line with 100 other InstaFans? At The Baffler, Zach Webb looks behind the Dream Machine’s whimsical facade to pick apart its seamy underbelly. (Spoiler! It’s capitalism.)

But herein lurks an irony: by immersing yourself in a temporary reality of populated meme-crap, you are purchasing a reprieve from the Bad News World. “Dreams are an escape,” claims founder Johnson in an interview with amNewYork, and “with the world we’re living in and the feeds that inundate us with bad news, we don’t really [get a break]. We wanted to have a space that is a respite.” In practice, however, the Machine both assaults and abets this idea of the apparatus as a break—a relief from life and labor. It is, for one, just as overcrowded and saturated with sweat-air as the city outside—perhaps more so. Further, the user is not absolved from labor by any means—its evidence merely eludes the frame. They work diligently and without shame in the staging of themselves and their companions for photographs. (Almost no one travels to the Dream Machine alone). On the other hand, a frolic through these vistas requires not an ounce of critical engagement from the user, which is all to say that the Machine is exactly like the “real world”—only worse.

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Tangled in the Infinite War

With the cinematic Marvel Universe expanding at a seemingly exponential rate, historian Daniel Immerwahr‘s essay in n+1 takes a step back to look at the evolution of superheroes: they used to stick up for the underdog and actively work for justice, and there was a lot of Nazi-punching. Now, they fight villains who look a whole heck of a lot like themselves, and their main function is protection (at least, for the dudely superheroes; Wonder Woman remains an exception). And looking at this shift teaches us a lot about U.S. attitudes toward war and peace.

What these heroes are fighting, in the end, is themselves. And in doing so, they’re channeling a cultural ambivalence regarding the weapons of today’s wars. Iron Man intervening in global affairs is good, but Iron Monger (the villain of the first film) doing so is bad. The world needs SHIELD but fears HYDRA. It’s as if the films can’t put forth a hero to protect society without immediately imagining how he might threaten it.

Often, the lines blur. “Hey Cap, how do we know the good guys from the bad guys?” one of the Avengers asks, as he tries to sort HYDRA from SHIELD. “If they’re shooting at you, they’re bad,” is Captain America’s less-than-conclusive answer. It’s a quick joke but a meaningful one, because it gets at the central, uncomfortable truth about life in the United States that these movies dance around. The good guys—surveilling everyone’s communications, calling down air strikes, fortifying themselves against the world—look an awful lot like bad guys.

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“This Is Our Regional Refugee Crisis”

Marchers in Minnesota protest Trump's immigration policies and call for TPS (Temporary Protected Status) for countries like El Salvador and Haiti. (Photo by Fibonacci Blue via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))

Rosi fled El Salvador after being threatened by members of the Barrio 18 gang and came to the U.S., eventually having a daughter here. Immigration-rights activist Allegra Love took on her asylum case — it was a weak case, but prosecutorial discretion gave locals officials to close it out and Love was hopeful. Then Trump’s administration changed the rules, and Love withdrew as Rosi’s attorney; since she isn’t fleeing persecution based on her identity and immigration prosecutors no longer have the same leeway, her situation puts her in a no-woman’s-land of U.S. immigration law. Justine van der Leun, writing in VQR, reports Rosi’s story.

At the same time, people who exist in between categories—needing help but not qualifying for asylum—are left in limbo, and are eventually forced to disappear or are caught and deported. Among them, anyone who fears for his or her child’s life, or has nothing to eat, or wishes to reunite with his family, may well return, repeatedly, crossing a national border no matter the danger, no matter the agents, no matter the fence.

“This is our regional refugee crisis,” David Baluarte, Associate Clinical Professor of Law at Washington and Lee School of Law, told me. “But we would rather view it in terms of a security crisis. That’s politically useful, and it plays into concerns Americans have about shifting demographics, and what we are doing with public resources.”

This is how Rosi and many thousands like her found themselves in an impossible bind. And while Love appreciated how punishing Rosi’s circumstances were, she also knew that Rosi didn’t have a winnable case. Love couldn’t take on such a loss. It was particularly hard for her to come to this conclusion because, as she explained, “I can’t say no. And I love, like, everyone.” But she already had too much on her plate.

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Goodness, How Delicious, Eating Goober Peas

A bowl of boiled peanuts
A bowl of boiled peanuts (AP Photo / Dave Martin)

Boiled goober peas and an ice-cold Nehi — or peanuts and a soda, to those of us not from the American South — are a beloved snack below the Mason-Dixon. In The Bitter Southerner, James Beard-award winning writer Shane Mitchell offers a history of and paean to this most versatile and nutritional of ground nuts and to the region where it’s grown, correcting a few peanut myths along the way.

George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. That’s one of those conflated facts taught in grade school, much like everyone still believing the earth was flat in the 15th century when Columbus discovered America. Actual first honors go to a Canadian, Marcellus Gilmore Edson, who was issued U.S. Patent No. 306727 for his “flavoring paste” to be used in the manufacture of “peanut-candy” on October 21, 1894. (Pre-Columbian Aztecs also pounded peanuts into a paste, so nothing is really new in the New World.) But Carver’s botanical research at the Tuskegee Institute contributed greatly to peanut butter’s rise in popularity. In 1916, he published a bulletin titled “How to Grow the Peanut & 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption,” which included his recipes for soup, cookies, fudge, and mock chicken. He also recommended peanuts for shampoo, mayonnaise, paint, massage oil, and flour. The Carvoline cosmetics company of Birmingham manufactured peanut hair pomade with his endorsement.

But wait! The humble peanut is even more multi-functional than that.

It is unlikely Carver would have imagined the use devised more recently by 12 inmates at Walker County Jail in Jasper, Alabama, on a Sunday evening last July. They saved peanut butter from their sandwiches and molded it like clay to alter a number above a door leading outside, then tricked a rookie guard into opening it. (The employee thought he was letting them back into the cells.) The prisoners ditched their orange jumpsuits, flung blankets over the razor wire fence, and busted out. Most didn’t get far—two were captured at the Flying J truck stop in town. At a news conference the next day, county Sheriff James E. Underwood said:

“Changing some numbers on the door with peanut butter — that may sound crazy, but these people are crazy like a fox.”

When I reached Jasper Mayor Paul Liollio for comment, he wrote back: “This wasn’t Jasper’s finest hour.”

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It Turns Out No One’s in Kansas Anymore

Farmer Robert Bacon empties wheat into a grain cart outside of Hutchinson, Kansas. (AP Photo/The Hutchinson News, Cavin Mattheis)

No one lives in rural Kansas any more — many counties have fewer than 10 people per square mile — and the state ranks first for 25- to 29-year-olds who leave. Why? Wheat. For The New Food Economy, Kansan Corie Brown drove across Kansas, all 1,800 miles of it, to see how Kansas has become a victim of its own farming success.

Everywhere, I felt the absence—of people, of commerce, even of sound. The silence was broken only by a vintage pickup truck pulling up to the Downs grain elevator, huge mounds of excess grain piled high on the ground all around it.

That image—abundance at the center of a depopulated landscape—sums up the reality of rural Kansas. Yes, the harvest continues to be bounteous. But it masks a harder truth: Kansas’s plentiful grain crop has come at the expense of nearly everything else.

Why? The costs of growth.

Since 1980, the average Kansas farm has expanded in size from 640 to 770 acres—and yield increased, too, thanks to investments in machinery and chemicals. Between 2003 and 2016, Kansas’s farmers improved their wheat yields from 48 bushels/acre to 57 bushels/acre and enjoyed some record harvests, according to Mykel Taylor, a K-State agricultural economist.

But those extra bushels per acre likely required exorbitant financial investment. During those same years, Kansas’s average annual expenses per farm more than doubled, rising from $130,000 in 2003 to a whopping $300,000 in 2016, according to Taylor. And now, commodity crop prices have fallen off a cliff. Commodity wheat, for instance, fell to $3.37 per bushel in 2016 after averaging $6.50 per bushel across the previous eight years.

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This Essay is the Very Pineapple of Writing

a pineapple between two hamsters, against an orange background
Photo by Scott Webb, in the public domain.

At The Paris ReviewNina-Sophia Miralles gives us the history of pineapples we never knew we needed to read — but we really, really do, especially to learn this:

As the Enlightenment period made the rich richer, the landed aristocracy began to engage in a frenzy of new hobbies, including gambling, boozing, and time-consuming, expensive pineapple cultivation. Pineries needed care around the clock, custom-built greenhouses, and mountains of coal to keep the temperatures high. The fruit took three to four years to bloom. The cost of rearing each one was equivalent to eight thousand dollars in today’s money. The sheer expense meant it was considered wasteful to eat them, and they remained, as during Charles II’s reign, dinnertime ornaments. A pineapple would be passed from party to party until it began to rot, and the maids who transported the pineapples placed themselves in mortal danger should they be accosted by thieves. For those who did not have the funds to grow their own, a bevy of pineapple-rental shops sprung up.

…wait for it…

By the 1770s, it had entered the lexicon as a commendation. “A pineapple of the finest flavour” was a phrase used for anything that was the best of the best. (For instance: “My birthday party was a pineapple of the finest flavour.”) In Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, a character compliments another by pronouncing, “He is the very pineapple of politeness.”

“A pineapple of the finest flavour!” Please join me helping usher this phrase — this most pineapple of phrases, if I may — back into general usage.

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When Staying Clean Isn’t an Option

Lance Armstrong, right, follows teammate Floyd Landis, up the La Croix pass during the 2004 Tour de France. (Bernard Papon/L'Equipe via AP Pool, File)

Patrick Redford‘s in-depth look at Lance Armstrong in Deadspin is a blow-by-blow look at the history of doping in professional cycling generally, and at Armstrong’s not-insignificant role in spreading it. Through interviews and court filings, he shows us just how necessary doping felt to cyclists — and how heartbreaking Armstrong’s insistence on doping was for some of the athletes who were drawn into his ambit in search of professional success:

Dave Zabriskie joined USPS in 2001, and he later wrote in his USADA affidavit that he began to ride bikes competitively as a refuge from a “difficult home life” resulting in part from his father struggling with addiction. He vowed “never to take drugs” after his father died. In 2003, Bruyneel and del Moral called Zabriskie and Michael Barry for a meeting at a Girona cafe, where they brought him EPO and made it clear that the two would have to join the rest of the team on the program. Zabriskie said he felt cornered, but eventually he acceded to keep his cycling career alive. It caused him to have a breakdown.

Armstrong’s program wasn’t just a highly-organized system of doping and training, it was also a highly-organized system of evading detection:

Armstrong’s performance was scrutinized and investigated by anti-doping authorities and the European press, but no matter how loudly he was accused of cheating, Armstrong never technically failed a drug test in his career. According to USADA’s groundbreaking 2012 investigation, that was due in large part to a coordinated effort to dodge drug testers. Hincapie says he warned Armstrong at a race in Spain that drug officials were coming to test him right after Armstrong had just taken testosterone, and Armstrong evaded them by dropping out of the race. Hamilton also notes that the UCI simply didn’t have an effective whereabouts program, and USPS riders regularly hid from testers or refused to appear. When testers did show up, riders would usually be tipped off beforehand and would take a saline injection to normalize their blood values.

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The Stories We Don’t Tell

Illustration by Lucy Grove-Jones

Lucy Grove-Jones has suffered multiple miscarriages, and she draws and writes about them in an illustrated essay for her site, Silence Killed the Dinosaurs. It’s a deeply compelling, moving read, but not an easy one — and that’s kind of the point.

I could have told this story differently. I could have cut out the jokes about apps and fertility-friendly lube. I could have mentally prepared you from the first line, signaled sooner this was a tragedy and half the cast would be dead (would have never existed) by the final curtain.

But no one warned me.

After the first miscarriage all the doctors and nurses and sonnogrammers told me this was common. I heard different statistics. Sometimes it was one in six pregnancies end in miscarriage, sometimes one in four. The pamphlet the hospital gave me said one in three. Whatever the exact number, it means that there are a lot of not-quite-parents out there.

And yet when I went into that first final ultrasound, I had never had a conversation with someone who I knew had wanted a pregnancy and lost it.

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You Can’t Cut Out the Pain

Photo by Incase via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

As part of the Unruly Bodies project she spearheads, Roxane Gay wrote an essay telling the world about the weight-less surgery she underwent in January of this year. Unsurprisingly, especially for anyone who’s read Hunger, the essay is almost punishingly candid in how it forces us to reckon with how the world treats fat bodies — with pity at best, but usually with disgust and scorn — and the options offered to fat people looking to avoid that pain.

The dominant narrative around weight-loss surgery is that it changes your life and makes everything better. It’s a lovely fantasy that, by cutting yourself open and having parts of yourself removed, everything that weighed you down will be lifted. But it is only a fantasy.

People who have weight-loss surgery are more likely to commit suicide. Many married people get divorced after the surgery because their spouses cannot cope with the changes, so much so that “bariatric divorce” is a thing. The psychologist I saw for my presurgical evaluation warned that the first year is really difficult, and many patients end up suffering from depression and regretting the surgery. The second year is better, she said, trying to reassure me after my face fell. And she was right: I am depressed and miserable. I am cold all the time and exhausted because I’m only eating between 1,200 and 1,500 calories. I am filled with regrets because everything has changed, but everything is exactly the same.

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Everyone’s Gotta Make a Living

Philip Glass performs at the Archa Theatre in Prague, Czech Republic, November 9, 2016. Photo/Michal Krumphanzl (CTK via AP Images)

Lolade Fadulu’s Atlantic interview with composer Philip Glass is open, lighthearted, and generally delightful. Before making his living entirely through music, Glass worked as a plumber, a mover, a taxi driver — and as a child, as a clerk in his father’s record store, where he learned a lesson that’s stuck with him.

Fadulu: Did you work in your dad’s record store at all?

Glass: Oh, yes. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. From the age of 12. It wasn’t considered child labor. It was a family business. At the beginning, all my brother and I did were the inventories, and we moved the records around. But we eventually got to know the business pretty well.

To this day, among my earliest memories was someone would give my father $5 and he’d hand them a record. So the exchange of money for art, I thought that was normal. I thought that’s what everybody did. I never thought there was anything wrong about making money.

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