The Longreads Blog

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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At the Very Least We Know the End of the World Will Have a Bright Side

DigitalVision / Getty

Adam Boffa | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,324 words)

The oil industry in the U.S. has had a busy few years. In North Dakota alone, barrel production increased more than tenfold between 2005 and 2015. The state’s daily oil barrel output surged from a low of 90,000, and within a decade it was consistently producing over one million barrels of oil per day. A majority of this oil was extracted via fracking, a controversial practice linked to a litany of harmful health and environmental effects. But if there were to be a public reckoning with fracking’s dangers in North Dakota, it would have to overcome steep challenges. A recent collection of research on the oil boom includes Sebastian Braun’s account of how pro-fracking sentiment, propped up by corporate lobbyists (like the American Legislative Exchange Council) and others who stand to gain, is so strong in the state that, during a speech at an energy conference, the audience didn’t bat an eye when a presenter likened EPA regulation to terrorism. Braun, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of American Indian Studies at Iowa State University, alleges that this lobbyist-generated atmosphere of consensus is hostile to local researchers investigating topics including air and water quality. Another study in the collection by Ann Reed, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at ISU, points to the oil industry’s spending on “community outreach initiatives” within the state, funds which it disperses in order to establish a positive reputation for itself (and, as a side effect, make some citizens feel pressured to stay quiet about their apprehensions regarding the industry’s practices). As of 2018, the state continues to set daily oil production records.

It’s not just North Dakota, of course. Similar efforts helped silence debates around fracking, pollution, and renewable resources in the lead-up to this year’s elections in Colorado, Washington, and Arizona, eventually helping defeat reform initiatives in those states. But these are only regional instances of the broader, global trend of the suppression of research and stifling of public discussion on the impacts of fossil fuel extraction. The most significant example probably involves Shell and ExxonMobil, who studied and documented the catastrophic effects of climate change decades ago but kept their findings confidential and, in ExxonMobil’s case, funded denialist campaigns and anti-regulatory efforts based on false information. While the public spent years fruitlessly debating the legitimacy of climate science, oil giants obscured evidence, promoted research amenable to their interests, and kept drilling, happy to make hay while the warming sun shone. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2018: Essays

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.

Aram Mrjoian
A writer, editor, instructor, and PhD student at Florida State University.

I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye (Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Atlantic)

This fall, I taught my freshman composition classes through a pop culture lens. Many of my students had been indoctrinated with the false promises of the five-paragraph essay and began the year with the certainty first-person point of view had no place in professional or academic writing. After I assigned this personal essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates during week one, most, if not all, of them changed their minds. Coates dissects the celebrity of Kanye West by interweaving personal narrative, meticulous research, and deft cultural and political commentary. It’s a remarkable model for what the personal essay can accomplish. How Coates ties the personal to the societal to the universal is hard to match. Coates’s ease in presenting West’s cross-generational relevance also presented an important point of connection between my students and me. Regardless of the age gap, we had all grown up on Kanye’s music. Our mutual familiarity opened up an important conversation about the divide between art and the artist, as well as the sticky social, cultural, and political complexities of fame. Throughout the semester, I found my students returning to this piece. It became a common point of reference. Certainly this essay was a pleasure to teach, but it also had much to teach me, and for that I am grateful.
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Sea Lion Herschel: Steelhead Salmon Scapegoat

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

It wasn’t necessarily Herschel the sea lion outside the locks with a very hungry tummy; the decline of steelhead salmon in Puget Sound in the last couple of decades could be due to many factors including whales, hake, pollock, and sculpins, though as Katharine Gammon reports at Hakai, humans needed someone to blame for depleting fish stocks.

The sea lions kept on coming and kept on eating. In 1986, the Seattle Times trumpeted, “It’s the return of ‘Herschel’ and the good old boys—those wandering California sea lions that are arriving earlier, staying later, and dining out more frequently. Pass the salmon and steelhead, please.” In 1982, 2,575 steelhead, Washington’s state fish, had swum through the locks; in the fall of 1988, only 686 were counted.

It’s undeniable that sea lions impacted the steelhead population by capitalizing on the advantage afforded by the locks. Wildlife managers estimate the animals consumed between 42 and 65 percent of the total steelhead run between 1986 and 1992. Yet steelhead had been in decline in parts of Puget Sound long before Herschel boldly poked his whiskered snout up to the foreign structure and discovered nirvana. Models suggest that the historical steelhead run in Puget Sound maxed out somewhere between 409,000 and 930,000 fish. The fishery likely peaked in 1895 with 204,600 steelhead caught, but such a heavy harvest was unsustainable. Just three years later, the Washington State Fish Commission estimated that the run had dropped by half.

When predatory animals go from being a rarity to a commonplace, people struggle to adjust—and it’s especially hard if we watch them compete for depleting resources. Sea lions often consume their meals on the surface, which is unfortunate for their public image. “We tend to want to blame things on the surface, but would anyone think to start blaming hake, pollock, sculpins?” says Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. Those are all species that may be feeding on juvenile fish. “We tend to come up with simple narratives: when salmon are down, it must be the fault of something we see.”

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You Have to Make Money to Make Money

A clerk reaches to a shelf to pick an item for a customer order at an Amazon Prime warehouse in New York, 2017. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

So: Amazon is opening in Long Island City, New York. But it was probably a really hard decision, what with the many strong applications from cities bending over backwards give themselves a shot at economic transformation, right? Sure.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s now clear that few of the 238 communities that applied for HQ2—including many of the 20 finalists—ever really stood a chance. On November 13, the online retailer announced that HQ2 will not be an HQ2 at all; instead, the company will open two smaller sites in Long Island City, a Queens neighborhood in New York, and Crystal City, a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Those cities already house Amazon’s two biggest offices away from the West Coast. They’re nexuses of financial and governmental power. And they’re just a few miles from two of Bezos’s lavish homes. Amazon broke the rules of its own game, then picked the most obvious candidates.

At The Ringer, Victor Luckerson takes a closer look at the HQ2 competition and what it tells us about the landscape of American cities — a landscape where cities’ fortunes are ever more disparate, and tech wealth begets tech wealth.

Today, the five tech giants that lord over the U.S. economy—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company—all are based in either the Bay Area or Seattle. The next crop of mega-corps, such as Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix, are headquartered there as well. With fewer places earning the spoils of the digital economy, cities have taken to competing aggressively for whatever scraps these companies might offer: a warehouse here, a data center there. Government officials increasingly resort to offering tax breaks to lure firms that promise to bring jobs. The number of megadeals per year valued at $50 million or more in incentives has doubled since the 2008 recession, according to Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that tracks government subsidies.

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Queens of Infamy: Zenobia

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | December 2018 | 18 minutes (4,570 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

* * *

Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

When one thinks about Roman triumvirates, insofar as one ever thinks about Roman triumvirates, there are two that spring immediately to mind: the First Triumvirate and the Second Triumvirate. The former involved a would-be emperor (Julius Caesar), a man with a beautiful head of hair (Pompey), and a guy whose name no one can ever remember (Crassus); the latter included an actual emperor (Augustus), a noted piss artist who also happened to have great hair (Mark Antony), and another guy whose name no one can ever remember (Lepidus). But I propose we add another Ancient Roman triumvirate and turn this list into a triumvirate of triumvirates. This last (and, frankly, greatest) of the triumvirates consists of the three queens who led revolts against the Roman occupation of their lands: Cleopatra, Boudicca, and Zenobia.

Do I understand that the term “triumvirate” means “three people who operate together as a governing coalition”? Yes. Since vir is Latin for “man,” wouldn’t the term refer specifically to men? Sure, whatever. Given that Cleopatra, Boudicca, and Zenobia were women whose lives were separated by the vagaries of time and geography, doesn’t that suggest that I’m applying “triumvirate” incorrectly here? Probably. Do I care about your petty and pedantic opinions on this matter? Not especially.

Cleopatra and Boudicca’s stories are both fairly well-known in the West, if somewhat distorted in their retellings (the Egyptian queen wanted her legacy to be tax reform and a stable, drought-resistant economy, but instead we mostly remember her as being sexily embroiled in Roman politics). Zenobia is a popular historical figure in the Arab world, especially in her native Syria, where her image appears on banknotes and where her story featured heavily in the 1997 historical soap opera Al-Ababeed (The Anarchy). Outside of the Middle East, though, she seems to be half-forgotten aside from a few works produced during the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, all of which employ extreme artistic license. Part of the problem is that when it comes to Zenobia, hard facts are few and far between. This is almost certainly related to gender; while historians were studiously chronicling the frequency and texture of royal men’s bowel movements, the most basic details of women’s lives are lost to time. The Romans were particularly reluctant to include women in their accounts, so it’s unsurprising that they didn’t leave much information behind about the queen who conquered a solid chunk of their empire.

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You Don’t Own Me

Billy Joe Armstrong playing the Black Cat, 2018. Photo by Joe Bonomo

Joe Bonomo | The Normal School | November 2018 | 27 minutes (5,476 words)

 

Did you hear the news? John Bonham used a mud shark as a sex toy! Rod the Mod had to have his stomach pumped! Paul is Dead! But when a band gets too famous, literally too big for the room, I resist them, because I’m a fameist.

I saw the Rolling Stones and the Who at Washington D.C.’s Capitol Centre arena in the early 1980s, and both shows were highly memorable but occurred on the cusp of my exploding love for indie and punk, for bands, many of which were local, whose gigs take place in small, sweaty joints—and I was truly baptized as a rock ‘n’ roll fan in those places. Until very recently, I hadn’t seen a stadium-size show, though in retrospect I wish I’d put my bias aside and gone to see Prince, the Kinks, David Lee Roth-era Van Halen, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and a few others. I’m irrational. I know that fans of enormously successful artists and bands happily spend big bucks to see their favorites in arenas or at sprawling festivals; for many of them, the experience is spiritually gratifying, emotionally rich, exciting. Dwarfed by a huge crowd, one of tens of thousands, spending as much time watching a band on a JumboTron as on the stage: to me this feels like the equivalent of a hundred-person banquet dinner, versus an intimate supper for five, of praying with hundreds in a megachurch versus sitting in a back pew with a dozen spiritually hungry folk in a ramshackle wooden church somewhere. I see that I’m getting carried away here. As with any doctrinaire, you can easily poke holes in my argument, call me hipster, pretentious, roll your eyes at my piousness while pointing to the sweatily anointed kid emerging blissful from an arena, pyrotechnics still dancing in her eyes.

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Guy Gunaratne on the ‘Push-Pull of Ancestry and Meaning’ in London

Pedestrian crossings in London are painted with bold letters telling you exactly in which direction to look for cars before stepping out in the street. (Photo by Athanasios Gioumpasis/Getty Images)

Hope Reese | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (3,036 words)

 

“We were London’s scowling youth,” is how narrator Yusuf, whose family came to the city from Pakistan, introduces himself and his peers in Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel In Our Mad and Furious City. Depicting the struggle of city life from the perspectives of three young second-generation immigrants from the Caribbean, Pakistan, and Ireland — Selvon, Yusuf, and Ardan — and two of their parents, the novel investigates precisely what those “scowling youth” experience in London — a complicated and sometimes hostile place.

The fictional work, which takes place over a 48-hour period, was inspired by the 2013 murder of Lee Rigby, a soldier, by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, Islamic extremists. Gunarate tells me he was struck by his “perverse identification” with the killer, and set out on a journey to explore the way violence and extremism can develop in a multicultural city.

Gunaratne tells the story as an insider. As the son of a Sri Lankan immigrant, he grew up in northwest London and has seen firsthand how the city can be viewed from the perspective of the two generations. And in his work as a documentary filmmaker and journalist, he has also become interested in exploring human rights issues, which he says have taught him the habit of “zeroing in on the parts of… stories that most disturb you and provoke a response within you.” Read more…

Longreads Best of 2018: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2018. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

The Secrets We Keep Amid All the Sweets

Ken Ross/VWPics via AP Images

Like so many American boys, Alex McElroy grew up thinking that only women worried openly about being thin. And yet, as an overweight kid, he also learned to use his obesity as a comic prop to charm people, control who and why people laughed at him, and he learned to secretly purge his food.

For Tin House, McElroy writes about his experience with dieting, bulimia, gender norms, and fat-shaming as a young man. During his teens, he worked at a Dairy Queen, which exacerbated his struggles but also helped him see them more clearly. Surrounded by sweets in what he called the “Zone of Hazardous Cravings,” his need to control his cravings was endless. Fortunately, he found a kindred spirit in a self-described meathead coworker with whom he could commiserate and compete, and speak candidly about his issues. Still, their candor only went so far.

Boots washed down two pills with a long swallow of Red Bull. “I don’t even need to work out. Just sitting here, Al, I’m burning fat. Take one,” he said. He patted the pooch on my tummy.

Again I declined. I was terrified that the pills would work. Taking one would become taking them regularly, then obsessively, until they snuffed my heart like fingers pinching a flame. But I couldn’t confess this to Boots. Perhaps we weren’t, as I’d liked to believe, enacting some vulnerable version of masculinity but applying its worst expectations—sacrificing our bodies, refusing to care for ourselves—to a traditionally feminine project: becoming thinner. Because as open as we were with each other, we nevertheless refused to acknowledge the damage we caused to ourselves. We couldn’t. We lacked the language to see our sickness as sickness. He could not be “anorexic,” just as I could not be “bulimic.” For men, those words were locked houses.

After taking the pills, Boots loaded a spoon with vanilla, then threw it away. “Stasia doesn’t like me taking them, but I gotta. My girl needs me hot. I don’t have enough to keep her around if I’m fat.” Like me, he defined himself exclusively in terms of his body. He couldn’t fathom his girlfriend liking anything about him but his thinness.

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