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

Wayne Byerly’s Redemption Through Ratting

USP Florence, whose banal exterior belies the house of horrors inside.

After a lifetime of bank robberies, Wayne Byerly ended up in U.S. Penitentiary Florence, an overcrowded high-security prison housing violent criminals with a reputation as the most dangerous prison in the United States — “In one seventeen-month period, USP Florence logged 94 inmate stabbings or beatings, roughly one for every ten inmates.” But USP Florence’s real calling card is the fate of its snitches, recounted in Alan Prendergast’s Westworld story about Byerly, his time in the pen, and his extensive work as an informant.

A few days later, drug smuggler Mirssa Araiza-Reyes got into an argument with his cellmate, Frank Melendez, whom he suspected of being a snitch. Araiza-Reyes had strong feelings about snitches, having attacked another suspected informant with a padlock and razor. He required all his roommates to sign affidavits swearing they that they weren’t snitches. Unable to come to terms with Melendez, Araiza-Reyes beat and strangled him. He kept the body in his cell for four days, a period during which staff paperwork indicates Melendez went through several counts, received meals, and was taken to showers and the exercise yard. When he could no longer stand the smell, Araiza-Reyes notified a guard that Melendez was dead.

“I took care of that snitch for you,” he said.

The incident became known as the Weekend at Bernie’s killing. But that grotesquerie was soon overshadowed by a more extravagant foray into corpse abuse. In October 1999, bank robber Joey Estrella was killed and eviscerated in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) by his two cellmates, cousins William and Rudy Sablan, after a night of drinking and playing cards. It’s not clear if the Sablans regarded Estrella as a snitch or just a nuisance, but the cousins removed portions of his liver and spleen. By the time officers arrived to videotape the aftermath, the Sablans were covered in gore, mockingly gnawing at Estrella’s excised organs and drinking his blood. While the camera rolled, they stuck a cigarette in the dead man’s mouth and used his hand to flash the finger at the guards.

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This Is the Excellent Foppery of the World

Image by Zeeveez via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Humans: we like explanations for things, and we like it when things are not our fault. To the stars! In The Baffler, Lauren Oyler writes with both great care and great wit about astrology, why we’re drawn to it, why it’s seen a resurgence in the past seven or eight years, and how we find identity (and social media content) in the skies.

It’s difficult to write about astrology—the idea was to write about astrology, to examine the nature of its trendiness right now—because the two questions the topic brings up most are “Is she serious?” and “Who cares?” A friend points out that my Gemini moon is likely to blame for my inability to settle on an argument here, but regardless: I don’t really know how to answer either question because the latter depends on the former, and because determining the seriousness (or not) of a person’s professed viewpoint requires a detailed checklist, one that takes into account author, subject, context, and micro-context (what jokes are popular on social media that day). The horoscopes women—mostly women—read today also take themselves pretty seriously; they’re much more elaborate and astronomically informative than the ostensibly personalized fortune cookies once found in the backs of newspapers and magazines, which were easy enough to justify as meaningless daily ritual. The authority of the contemporary astrologer is alternately expert (Susan Miller’s long-running Astrology Zone, Broadly’s Annabel Gat), speaking in friendly, straight-talking tones about things like Jupiter’s position and geometric aspects, or mystic-poetic (Astro Poets, The Cut’s Madame Clairevoyant), as if written by a medium in Los Angeles receiving garbled messages from Elizabeth Bishop. The popular Co–Star app—which uses your birthdate, place, and time to algorithmically generate lengthy, “hyper-personalized,” koan-like forecasts for you in each of ten (ten!) life-areas (transcendence, innovation, love & tenderness, thinking & communication, intense transformation, responsibility & limits, sex & aggression, ego & identity, emotional world, growth & progress)—combines the two. It also allows you to compare your natal chart—a diagram of the relationship of the sun, moon, and planets to your place of birth at your time of birth—with friends’ charts to assess your compatibility in all the life-areas. The daily horoscopes it produces are so long that I usually do not finish reading them, though they often contain gems like “The present moment is its own hellscape,” which it served me on my birthday when I had woken from a night of short, drunk, bad sleep in an un-air- conditioned apartment in Berlin, which was experiencing a heat wave.

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The Family Is Political

Elad Dvash-Banks, right, and his partner, Andrew, play with their twin sons, Ethan, left, and Aiden in their apartment Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

American Andrew met his future husband, Elad, in Israel. They married in Canada, and had twin boys — Aidan, and Ethan, one fathered by each man — with a surrogate. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Obergefell v. Hodges, they decided to move to California to be closer to Andrew’s family. It did not go as planned.

A few months after Ethan’s citizenship had been denied, the Dvash-Banks family landed in Los Angeles. Andrew and Aiden carried their US passports; Elad carried his Israeli passport and a green card. Ethan passed through US customs at LAX with a Canadian passport and a six-month tourist visa. What they would do next was anyone’s guess, but at the very least they were determined to live the life they had planned as an American family for as long as they could.

“Of all the hundreds and hundreds of things I worried about, this one never crossed my mind,” Andrew said of the ordeal. “How could it? They’re both my children. I’m on both birth certificates, Elad is on both birth certificates—exclusively. No one else appears on the birth certificates. I am the legal father. I am the father of both children. It never would have crossed my mind in a million years.”

Now, LGBTQ immigration rights organization Immigration Equality is bringing a lawsuit on their behalf, hoping to highlight the ways in which immigration law is not keeping up with reproductive technologies and changing definitions of family. Raj Telhan‘s story at VQR is a comprehensive, accessible dive into the history and future of U.S. immigration law, what makes a citizen, and what makes a family.

Immigration Equality also argues that the sections of the INA concerned with citizenship (as opposed to immigration), do not include specific definitions of the terms “parent,” “person,” “mother,” “father,” and “out of wedlock” that are being used by the State Department to impose a genetic threshold for parentage on married same-sex couples like Andrew and Elad. This last intriguing argument essentially amounts to a critique of the State Department’s reading of the statutory language of the INA. Tacitly, the complaint asks what we really mean by parent or mother or father. And more profoundly: What, precisely, is family? And this is where the precedent-setting power of the Dvash-Banks case stems from. Until recently, these definitions were taken for granted, their interpretations rooted in age-old understandings of hereditary bonds. With advances in assisted-reproductive technology, however, the supposedly reliable assumptions don’t always hold. The outcome of the Dvash-Banks family’s case will hinge, in part, on whether the courts acknowledge the biotechnological and social forces that have transfigured traditional definitions of family.

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This Post Was Originally 200 Words Longer But They Weren’t Sparking Joy

Photo by Luis Paulo Oliviera Paula via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Marie Kondo wants us to live surrounded by items that spark joy. Instant Hotel and Stay Here want us to turn our living spaces into personality-free, Instagram-ready tableaux that command maximum rates on Airbnb. And in The New Republic, Kyle Chayka wants us to think about what these makeover shows really say about life in a late capitalist gigtopia.

Unlike, say, HGTV’s Fixer Upper in which we see reinvented structures, there isn’t much of a satisfying reveal at the climax of these episodes. Clothes have been folded, kitchen appliances aligned, and books jettisoned, causing consternation among literary watchers. (Kondo gives a lesson relevant to the fake news era: “Books are the reflection of our thoughts and values, so by tidying books it will show you what kind of information is important to you at this moment.”) The subjects are generally enthused at their new, joy-sparked lives, but it is a minimalist process of refinement rather than renovation. Progress is abstract, which is one reason the episodes could have been half as long.

The commandment to think carefully about what you own isn’t so radical, after all. “Sparking joy” still relies on material goods to form the basis of an identity: Each object must feel like it is an ineffable part of you, as if your old T-shirts emitted a Benjaminian aura. It’s not about taking up meditation or therapy; Kondo is advocating for something as close to perfect consumption as possible. The idea that things don’t matter is anathema to KonMari.

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We’re Updating Our Privacy Policy

Image by Blue Coat Photos via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Longreads is owned by Automattic, the company that makes WordPress.com — which is what powers Longreads. As of February 1, 2019, Longreads will also be covered by the same Privacy Policy Automattic uses, one designed to maximize transparency and data privacy.

We’re retiring the separate Privacy Policy for Longreads to keep things straightforward across all of Automattic’s sites and services and wanted to let you know ahead of the switch in case you’re interested in what changes and why, or wanted to take a look at the policy.

The first words of the policy are, “Your privacy is critically important to us.” For Automattic, that means being fully transparent. Only keeping the data there’s a reason to keep. And being thoughtful about how to collect, use, and share personal information.

Here are some of the key updates you’ll see in the policy:

  • Real-world, concrete examples to give you a clearer picture of how personal information is collected and used.
  • More information about how you can limit and control the data that you provide to us when become a Longreads member.
  • Added information about your data protection and privacy rights, and how long we keep information.

Our new Privacy Policy will take effect on February 1, 2019. If you continue to use our services on or after February 1, 2019, you acknowledge that your use will be subject to our new Privacy Policy.

If you’re a Longreads member, you’ll get this information in an email as well — feel free to respond to it with any questions, and thanks for reading!

There Was Nothing We Could Have Done, Because We’re Racist and You’re Black

closeup of an adult white man's hands holding a stethescope
Photo by Alex Proimos via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Those of us who are Tressie McMillan Cottom fans — if you’re not, why not? — have been eagerly waiting for her new book, Thick: And Other Essays to arrive. It’s available now, and Time has also kindly published an excerpt. It’s a horrifying story, shared in the generous service of helping us all understand just how deeply our social and political organizations trade in stereotypes that prop up capitalist, racist systems.

After several days of labor pains that no one ever diagnosed, because the pain was in my butt and not my back, I could not hold off labor anymore. I was wheeled into a delivery operating room, where I slipped in and out of consciousness. At one point I awoke and screamed, “Motherfucker.” The nurse told me to watch my language. I begged for an epidural. After three eternities an anesthesiologist arrived. He glared at me and said that if I wasn’t quiet he would leave and I would not get any pain relief. Just as a contraction crested, the needle pierced my spine and I tried desperately to be still and quiet so he would not leave me there that way. Thirty seconds after the injection, I passed out before my head hit the pillow.

When I awoke I was pushing and then my daughter was here. She died shortly after her first breath. The nurse wheeled me out of the operating room to take me back to recovery. I held my baby the whole way, because apparently that is what is done. After making plans for how we would handle her remains, the nurse turned to me and said, “Just so you know, there was nothing we could have done, because you did not tell us you were in labor.”

(For more on Thick, take a look at Morgan Jenkins’ critical essay on the book and the ways it unpacks racist, exclusionary definitions of beauty.)

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This Heist’s for the Birds

A peregrine falcon estimated to be between three and four weeks old stares down the camera.(Andy Abeyta/ Journal Star via AP)

Wildlife criminals generate billions of dollars a year killing or smuggling protected animals. Jeffrey Lendrum took things to a whole new level, literally and figuratively: his specialty is bird eggs, which involves dangling from helicopters or rappelling down cliffs to pluck the eggs from their nests. Joshua Hammer has his story — and the story of the people who will pay a premium for an unhatched peregrine — at Outside online.

Interpol estimates that the illegal wildlife trade is worth as much as $20 billion a year, among the world’s most lucrative black markets. But that trade extends well beyond elephant ivory and rhino horn. Back in November 2009, police in Rio de Janeiro stopped a British pet-shop owner who was trying to smuggle a thousand large Amazonian spiders out of the country in his suitcases. In May 2017, police in East Java rescued about two dozen critically endangered yellow-crested cockatoos that a smuggler had stuffed inside water bottles. And multiple people have been arrested over the years for moving finches from Guyana to New York, where finch “races” in Queens pit the songbirds against each other to see which one sings fastest. One common smuggling M.O. is to dope the birds with rum and stuff them inside hair curlers.

Falcons, which encompass 39 species, are distributed on all continents except Antarctica. In some parts of the world, particularly in the UK, the threat posed by DDT gave way to a new menace: compulsive collectors who stole the eggs of protected species from their nests, blowing out the contents and mounting the shells. The thefts threatened numerous species—red-backed shrikes, ospreys, golden eagles, peregrines—before the Scottish police, in coordination with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, launched Operation Easter in 1997. Many of the perpetrators, it turned out, were middle-aged men driven by a need that even they ­struggled to understand. “Certain individuals just become obsessed with it,” McWilliam said in an interview for the 2015 documentary Poached. “It’s a self-obsessive, self-indulging crime. And why people risk going to prison for a bird’s egg, it just beats me.”

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You’re Fine, and So Is Your Baby

We all have unsettling intrusive thoughts — thoughts that just come to us, beyond our control — and these can be particularly traumatic for new parents like Emilia, who are understandably reluctant to talk about them for fear that their children will be taken from them.

Once she emerged from the haze of those first days of motherhood, the sight of knives resumed tormenting her. Images of stabbing the baby flashed through her head. She didn’t want to do it — and couldn’t fathom why these thoughts were showing up in her mind. But she felt a heavy dread that she would somehow lose control and act them out.

When she gave her son his first bath, she felt the dark force gathering again. As she leaned over the blue plastic baby tub and rinsed his little limbs, she had a vision of him sinking under the water and drowning. She quickly scooped him up and dried him off. Next time he needed washing, she took him into the shower with her instead.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow explores the phenomenon at New York magazine. Are some people more prone to these thoughts than others? (Yes.) Do they mean you might actually hurt your baby? (In most cases, no.) And do they serve a purpose? (Maybe.)

For many people, the first few months of parenthood are rather like standing on the top of the Empire State Building, or in the midst of a particularly high-priced china shop. Worst-case scenarios crowd the mind. In any given scene, the brain, as though operating some devilish Photoshop app, swiftly rearranges all of the elements into the most catastrophic possible outcome. While thoughts of deliberate harm can seem almost antithetical to fears of accidental harm, they may actually come from the same place. Fairbrother finds it plausible that both may be adaptive, alerting you to what not to do: “Even those thoughts of, ‘What if I throw the baby off the balcony?’ versus ‘What if I drop the baby off the balcony?’ is the same effect.” That is, you hold your child a little closer.

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Thank You for Not Being Afraid, Pat Maginnis

Photo by Charlotte Cooper via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

You’ve almost certainly heard of Betty Friedan, and probably also of Margaret Sanger. But what about Pat Maginnis? If you don’t know about the outspoken, angry, pioneering abortion rights activist and health educator, Lili Loofbourow’s excellent profile at Slate is a good starting point.

When Maginnis launched her leaflet campaign, she chose a location that would maximize her ability to confront a medical community she saw as at best patronizing to women and at worst exploitative and controlling. The state Board of Medical Examiners had gathered at the University of San Francisco to discuss the implementation of hospital committees that would determine whether women could receive abortions. As the mostly male board debated the circumstances under which women could be forced to give birth, Maginnis was outside handing out information on how to abort without the help of the doctors within. She was shocked at how unseriously the board took their mandate. She told the Berkeley Barb that when she’d handed some board members a leaflet titled “Are you Pregnant?” with abortion information on it, they “twittered like a bunch of schoolgirls.”

This, she felt, was the collective effect of the laws and ordinances that made even talking about abortion illegal: The entire concept had become untouchable, a boogeyman. “The word abortion was taboo,” she says. “And I thought: That’s crazy. People won’t talk about abortion! They’re afraid to. I’m going to talk about abortion! ABORTION!” she yelled. “Women weren’t talking about it. They were afraid to talk about it.”

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The Rich Man and the Sea

Four days on a boat with a bunch of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and 150 Ukrainian “hostesses”: this is what passes for real life in 2018. Luckily, Breaker magazine commissioned Laurie Penny to go on the CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise and report back, and we all owe her for taking one for the team.

A huge bitcoin price crash occurs a few hours before we set sail. As I board, I am surprised to find that nobody seems to be particularly worried. CoinsBank, the company organizing the cruise, has left little welcome gift boxes in each of the rooms. They contain painkillers, Alka-Seltzer, several condoms, the world’s flimsiest pregnancy test, and a half-bottle of Jägermeister. It’s the kind of thing you’d leave at the bottom of the chimney for Skeezy Uncle Santa, hoping he’ll stuff a new sex doll under your tree.

The women on this boat are polished and perfect; the men, by contrast, seem strangely cured—not like medicine, but like meat. They are almost all white, between the ages of 30 and 50, and are trying very hard to have the good time they paid thousands for, while remaining professional in a scene where many thought leaders have murky pasts, a tendency to talk like YouTube conspiracy preachers, and/or the habit of appearing in magazines naked and covered in strawberries. That last is 73-year-old John McAfee, who got rich with the anti-virus software McAfee Security before jumping into cryptocurrencies. He is the man most of the acolytes here are keenest to get their picture taken with and is constantly surrounded by private security who do their best to aesthetically out-thug every Armani-suited Russian skinhead on deck. Occasionally he commandeers the grand piano in the guest lounge, and the young live-streamers clamor for the best shot. John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder. I do not interview John McAfee. He interests me less than he scares the shit out of me, though his entourage seems relaxed. They’re already living in the crypto-utopia behind his strange pale-blue eyes.

The only genuinely happy person I meet on this trip is Femi, a forklift driver from Birmingham who wears a Dogecoin T-shirt and proudly shows me videos of him practicing with the samurai sword he bought with his bitcoin stash. I ask him why he’s so proud of his selfie with McAfee, given the guy’s not-unmurdery reputation.

“Well, yeah.” says Femi. Then he grins. “But he’s just a legend, isn’t he? And his wife’s really nice.”

I cannot fault this reasoning. Over the next four days I find myself drifting back to Femi and his unstoppable optimism whenever I get the urge to throw myself overboard.

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