The Longreads Blog

An Igbo Slaver’s Descendants Reckon With History

LONDON - MARCH 29: HMS Northumberland (L) escorts a replica 18th century wooden square rigger ship 'The Zong' (R) on a choppy River Thames on March 29, 2007 in London, England. Today's events form part of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade act. The Zong was at the centre of a court case in 1783, after 133 slaves were thrown overboard in an insurance scam. The resulting public outrage led to the rise of the Abolitionist movement. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

For the New Yorker, author  dives into the history of her great-grandfather, an Igbo slave trader and palm merchant who participated in the transatlantic slave trade. “African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather,” the author writes. She reveals a complex caste system that pre-dated European influence, and shows how current generations of her family are accounting for their ancestor’s relationship to the suffering of many.

On the first day of the fast, members of my family met in small groups in London, Atlanta, and Johannesburg. Some talked on the phone, and others chatted on social media. Thirty members gathered under a canopy in my parents’ yard. With tears in his eyes, my father explained that, in Nwaubani Ogogo’s day, selling and sacrificing human beings was common practice, but that now we know it to be deeply offensive to God. He thanked God for the honor and prestige bestowed on our family through my great-grandfather, and asked God’s forgiveness for the atrocities he committed. We prayed over a passage that my father texted us from the Book of Psalms:

Who can understand his errors?
Cleanse me from secret faults.
Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins;
Let them not have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless,
And I shall be innocent of great transgression.

During the ceremony, I was overwhelmed with relief. My family was finally taking a step beyond whispering and worrying. Of course, nothing can undo the harm that Nwaubani Ogogo caused. And the ohu, who are not his direct descendants, were not invited to the ceremony; their mistreatment in the region continues. Still, it felt important for my family to publicly denounce its role in the slave trade. “Our family is taking responsibility,” my cousin Chidi, who joined from London, told me. Chioma, who took part in Atlanta, said, “We were trying to make peace and atone for what our ancestors did.”

On the final day, my relatives strolled along a recently tarred stretch of road to our local Anglican church. The church was established in 1904, on land that Nwaubani Ogogo donated. Inside, a priest presided over a two-hour prayer session. At the end, he pronounced blessings on us, and proclaimed a new beginning for the Nwaubani family. After the ceremony, my family members discussed making it a yearly ritual. “This sort of thing opens up the mercy of God,” my mother, Patricia, said. “People did all these evil things but they don’t talk about it. The more people confess and renounce their evil past, the more cleansing will come to the land.”

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One Dollar a Word? That’ll Be $28,000

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 06: Carl Bernstein attends the 2017 New Yorker Festival - All The President's Reporters at SVA Theatre on October 6, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for The New Yorker)

In October 1977, Carl Bernstein — then still basking in the post-Watergate glow (though, at the time, he had recently left the Washington Post) — wrote a 25,000 word feature titled “The CIA and the Media” for Rolling Stone detailing the chummy relationship between the press in the United States and the CIA. According to Bernstein’s reporting, reporters for the Post and the New York Times, among other publications, had advanced the agenda of the CIA for years. As he wrote,

…[More] than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.

The feature should have been scathing, but its publication was instead somewhat of a dud. For starters, the story accompanied the first-ever punk cover in Rolling Stone‘s history — a feature on the Sex Pistols by Charles M. Young — and America did not react kindly to a snarling Sid Vicious and a sneering Johnny Rotten on newsstands: The magazine only sold 108,000 copies, one of the worst-selling issues in Rolling Stone‘s history. Secondly, for all of Bernstein’s revelations — one such bombshell was that the New York Times, under the direction of the late publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, knowingly secured media credentials for CIA operatives — the piece was jejune. As Joe Hagan writes in Sticky Fingers, his 2017 biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner,

…’The CIA and the Media’ was a dud (and no revelation to Wenner, who appointed a former CIA agent, Putney Westerfield, a retired publisher of Fortune, to his board of directors in 1977).

Wenner called the article his “one mistake” in publishing, and features editor Harriet Fier (who, following her tight edit of Bernstein’s draft, later became the magazine’s managing editor) told Robert Draper in the classic Rolling Stone Magazine that the piece was “really terrible.”

Still, in light Robert Mueller’s independent investigation and strained relations between President Donald Trump and the United States’ intelligence communities, Bernstein’s exposé is in the midst of a renaissance. Notably, the decades-old feature was given a boost in mid-July when Jack Shafer included it in Don Van Natta’s weekly “Sunday Long Read” newsletter as a “Classic Read.” But what’s interesting about the article viewed through today’s prism are not those connections — rather, it’s the stark contrasts between the two media climates.

Bernstein had always wanted to write for Rolling Stone, telling a Playboy interviewer that before Watergate, he felt that he had reached his ceiling at the Washington Post. He had grown bored of “covering Virginia” and editor Ben Bradlee refused to send him to Vietnam, so he thought his next move would be to join the ranks of music criticism and become a “rock critic.” Bernstein had heard whispers that Hunter S. Thompson was about to leave Rolling Stone, so he wrote to Wenner, asking (as he recounted to Playboy), “Hey, I’d really like to take Hunter’s job.” Bernstein sent the letter weeks before the Watergate break-in, but even so, “Wenner being Wenner, he took forever to make up his mind about what the hell he was doing” and Bernstein ultimately “stayed at the Washington Post, and that was the end of that.”

But, following his departure from the paper, the two reconnected, at a time in which Wenner was flush with cash: The magazine, which was about to shed San Francisco and move to New York City, was in the midst of a publishing boom, launching Outside (for $1 million) and helping reinvigorate Look magazine; its fat revenues were helping to finance prestige journalism. The year before, Wenner had paid photographer Richard Avedon $25,000 for “The Family” issue, a multi-page spread of Washington’s most influential figures. The issue had won a National Magazine Award, and Wenner believed an investigative feature by Bernstein could help snag another Ellie, so he commissioned “The CIA and the Media.” The price Bernstein quoted? An astounding $28,000 (which, accounting for inflation, would be $116,430.16 today). True, it was a little more than $1 per word, but the fee was an exorbitant boondoggle and as such, it was breathlessly reported throughout the publishing industry, which only helped to hype Rolling Stone‘s success and acclaim.

It’s challenging to imagine a media climate in which a reporter — even one as celebrated as Bernstein at that point — could earn that much for one article. Wenner’s employees certainly couldn’t understand it: Draper reported that the fee was more than what the magazine’s associate editors made in a year, and it even dwarfed Young’s salary. When compared with publishing in 2018, the halcyon fee is almost perverse. According to the Washington Post, 200,000 jobs in journalism have been eliminated since 2000, not to mention cuts to the editorial staff of the New York Daily News, half of which were let go this week in an attempt to trim $14.8 million from its coffers (a debt that was created when Tronc, the paper’s publishing company, shelled out $15 million to jettison its chairman Michael Ferro following sexual harassment allegations made against him).

There are serious conversations being had about whether journalists should write for free, and if exposure counts as payment, all the while chants of “fake news” are continuously being hurled against those in the profession. Dark times, indeed, and it is frankly astonishing to think back to a moment in publishing history in which five-figure payments were — while not the norm — at least not gobsmacking.

According to Bernstein, the CIA began to work in tandem with the Gray Lady during the Cold War:

Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger. However, there are varying interpretations of the purpose of the agreement: C.L. Sulzberger says it represented nothing more than a pledge not to disclose classified information made available to the publisher. That contention is supported by some Agency officials. Others in the Agency maintain that the agreement represented a pledge never to reveal any of the Times’ dealings with the CIA, especially those involving cover. And there are those who note that, because all cover arrangements are classified, a secrecy agreement would automatically apply to them.

Attempts to find out which individuals in the Times organization made the actual arrangements for providing credentials to CIA personnel have been unsuccessful. In a letter to reporter Stuart Loory in 1974, Turner Cadedge, managing editor of the Times from 1951 to 1964, wrote that approaches by the CIA had been rebuffed by the newspaper. “I knew nothing about any involvement with the CIA… of any of our foreign correspondents on the New York Times. I heard many times of overtures to our men by the CIA, seeking to use their privileges, contacts, immunities and, shall we say, superior intelligence in the sordid business of spying and informing. If any one of them succumbed to the blandishments or cash offers, I was not aware of it. Repeatedly, the CIA and other hush‑hush agencies sought to make arrangements for ‘cooperation’ even with Times management, especially during or soon after World War II, but we always resisted. Our motive was to protect our credibility.”

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Going the Distance: A Reading List on Running

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As the sun washes the sky pastel, my feet clip in an even rhythm down the street and my breath settles into a ragged cadence. Swallows dart out from beneath a bridge, swooping through the new morning. When my Garmin lights, notifying me of a mile, I press forward. As the time stretches on, the sear in my hamstrings heightens and my lungs seek air. Hunting down the same elusive times I do nearly every morning, I run until I hit the six-mile mark where I ease up, allowing my legs to rest.

When I return from my runs, I record the distance and splits from each individual mile. I have been doing so for 13 years. When I line my records up on the floor, a profile of my former self takes shape. When I was merely 13, for example, I recorded that I started running at 7:11 AM, and ran eight miles in 59:21, averaging a pace of 7:25. My records sometimes list complaints: “Legs felt like bricks,” “legs hurt,” “windy,” or “toe bled a lot,” and still the mileage remains consistent with my training plan, the splits even.

There is a theme in my journals — and in my daily pursuit of distance — of the identity I’ve found in running, one that thrives on equal parts pleasure and pain. Running requires diligence that often borders on obsession, and, in chasing faster times and longer distances, I perpetually push my body to the brink of what is possible, until I teeter on the precipice of harm.

I used to find community in my high school team, and, for a short time, as a Division I athlete, but now alone, I find solace in several exceptional essays that open conversations about the limits of the body, of developing an identity through running, and, mostly, why any of us run in the first place.

1. “Running Towards My Father” (Devin Kelly, LitHub, June 2017)

Devin Kelly opens his essay with a description of his father, who is out for his daily three-mile run.

When he runs, my father’s breathing hustles to a rhythmic grunt punctuated by each footfall, accompanied by the swish of his nylon jacket. I have never seen my father bend or stretch. Before he runs, he takes off the clothes he does not need and begins, simply, as if a bird did not have to flap a feather before flying.

Kelly deftly weaves together his father’s running habit with his own pursuit of long distances, exploring failure, connections between running and writing, our identity as “creatures of longing,” and accepting pain, describing the sensation of “knowing how to dance along the thin line that is where your mind meets your body, about listening and being generous to yourself, about adjusting and re-adjusting, about, like so much else, trust.”

2. “How Running Ruined my Relationship, Killed My Faith…and Saved My Life” (Allison Stockman, Narratively, April 2018)

Allison Stockman, at 15, meets her first boyfriend who, while running, “had transformed from a skinny, seemingly weak, invisible kid to a lithe, powerful athlete who ran with the joy and abandon of Pheidippides and the irresistible style and charisma of Prefontaine.” So begins their romance, one complicated by her Mormon faith.

I had to explain that, as a true believer and follower of the faith, I was 100 percent committed to: no drinking, no smoking, no coffee, no tea, church for three hours every Sunday, and, of course, no premarital sex.

Throughout this essay, one that opens with a doctor prescribing Prozac and a 20-minute daily run in an in-patient psych ward, Stockman makes clear the ways that religion, running, and identity are linked in complicated — and often heartbreaking — ways. Running becomes both a lifeline and a metaphor, a way of making sense of an arduous personal transformation.

I knew I had to find some way to will myself back out there, even if there wasn’t a heaven anymore, no finish line to cross, no reward to be won from all that self-denial and sacrifice to live a “good” life.

3. “This Man Expects to Run a 2:50 in the Boston Marathon on Monday” (Lindsay Crouse, The New York Times, April 12, 2018)

Tim Don, at 40, had spent the majority of his life pursuing excellence as a competitive athlete, which not only gave him sponsorships and a career, but also much of his identity. When he was hit by a car during a pre-race bike ride, he suffered a hangman’s fracture, breaking his C2 vertebrae. Immobile and in pain, he made it clear that “a return to competition was his only option.”

In this harrowing story, Lindsay Crouse chronicles Don’s will to not only run the Boston Marathon, but run it in under 2:50. In order to reach the starting line, Don’s doctors equip him with a halo device, one in which titanium pins are screwed directly into the skull. Don’s story is one that raises questions about how far a person can — and should — go to pursue a sport:

Is his drive to compete again — the same drive that enabled him to record the world’s fastest time in one of the world’s most grueling races — fueling an incredible comeback? Or is he risking his health in pursuit of athletic feats that may no longer be attainable?

4. Amelia Boone is Stronger Than Ever (as told to Marissa Stephenson, Runner’s World, June 19, 2018)

Amelia Boone, who won the “World’s Toughest Mudder — a 24-hour nonstop obstacle course race – in 2012, 2014, and 2015,” was known as the “Queen of Pain” in endurance running for pushing the limits of bodily discomfort, course difficulty, and distance. There seemed to be no end to what Boone could accomplish with what she describes as a vicious internal pressure to never let herself fail:

I felt so much external pressure to keep winning. You have to keep winning, Amelia. You have to keep winning. What happens when you don’t win anymore? I felt like I had to put on this persona: Amelia’s a badass. Amelia will power through. This was an image I lived in for years, and it never felt comfortable to me.

After suffering a femur fracture, Boone attempts to return to competition by cross-training with unmatched intensity. But instead of finding herself back on the starting line, she ends up with a stress fracture in the base of her spine, and is finally forced to reconcile the disparity between the voice in her head telling her to chase perfection and the limits of her body. In this candid, moving essay, she addresses the importance of dismantling her own veneer of perfection to find true, lasting strength.

5. A Marathon, a Goal Time, the Sublime, and a Wolf (Jeanne Mack, Medium, November 2017)

Jeanne Mack, in an essay chronicling her training for the New York City Marathon, articulates the way in which long distance running asks us to press against the borders of everything we believe possible.

In literature, the concept of the sublime is something equally beautiful and terrifying; it is awe-filling. It’s something so great, infinite, or obscure that it’s inconceivable. This fall, that, for me, described the marathon distance. It towered somewhere in the sky, above anything else I’d tried to accomplish before.

Mack, who trains mostly in solitude, explores the tension between the recommended splits she hits during training and the inherent knowledge of her own potential. In isolation, she proves her strength time and time again to herself, communing with her body and the world around her during runs. Always, even in light of too-quick splits or a wayward GPS, she finds a way to surge toward her goals, what she terms “the edge of the sublime.”

6. The Immortal Horizon (Leslie Jamison, The Believer, May 2011)

Set at the Barkley Marathons, a race notorious for its difficult terrain, length, and mysterious entry procedures, Leslie Jamison illuminates how myths and stories are created while asking, why do we run? Jamison explores obsession, redemption, control, willpower, and pain, circling the idea of long distance running as if she was a hawk, wheeling closer and closer to the heart of the sport as this eleven-part essay progresses.

The persistence of “why” is the point: the elusive horizon of an unanswerable question, the conceptual equivalent of an un-runnable race.

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir of running and illness.

Purple Pain

Rob Burns / AP, Getty

Matthew Miles Goodrich | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,837 words)

 

I came to inside a CAT scan machine. Not a revelation  — I didn’t spring up and bang my bruised face against the cool metal of the medical marvel  —  but a recognition, a lugubrious return to my cognizance. I surmised I was in a hospital and, broken bones considered, that was a good place to be.

At least my trauma had a sense of humor. I couldn’t remember where I had been before landing inside the CAT scan machine, but I could tell you the song that had been rattling around my concussed head. It was Prince’s “Purple Rain.”

Inside the giant X-ray assessing the damage, I became aware that I was humming along to the song’s rhythmic chug. As the fog of my brain injury lifted, cueing the sharpening of the prickly sensations upon my skull, I eked the lyrics out of my memory: “Never meant to cause you any sorrow / never meant to cause you any pain.”

***

I cried the first time I heard “Purple Rain.” (This puts Prince in a broad category of musicians that runs the gamut from Television to Miles Davis to Taylor Swift.) It’s not only, in my opinion, Prince’s best song — a tough contest, to be sure, considering “Little Red Corvette” — but also one of the best songs ever written. That’s a rare achievement for a ballad, a genre whose slow-burning schmaltz tends to yank at the heartstrings rather than soar for the stars. “Purple Rain” does both, thanks to Prince’s lilting lyrics, addressing a hurt and harmed “you,” and that teasing, probing, undulating guitar solo. Prince carries us with him along every bent note, with the ebb and flow of a prom-night sway. “Purple Rain” is sad, tender, and triumphant, the sound of the most painful part of any relationship: the letting go.

“Purple Rain” is a letting go.

Price died on April 21, 2016, the same day I turned 23. He achieved a rare ubiquity in my adolescence: His iconography was everywhere and his music was nowhere. I knew he was once the “Artist Formerly Known As Prince,” the only satisfying pronunciation of the unpronounceable symbol that he performed under for a spate in the ’90s. His stare on the cover of “Purple Rain” — which has him festooned like some courtier draped around a fanged motorcycle as mist threatens to envelop him — told me everything I needed to know. Just as his career was fraught with disputes with record labels, making for spotty access to his albums in the post-Napster era, Prince’s stare was a diva’s: pouty, churlish, provocative, longing, damaged.

My first exposure to Prince came in high school. It was around the time I started playing guitar. Looking for a hero, I found a 2004 video of him, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and others paying tribute to George Harrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, trading verses of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The version of the video I saw promised “the BEST guitar solo in music history.”

Prince’s histrionics begin after the final verse, his solo coloring the A minor chord with a chromatic descent. He takes a few bars, then a few more, barrelling over Petty’s attempts to steer the group back to the chorus. With his shirt unbuttoned to his midriff, Prince kneads the frets, thrusting the guitar into his groin and wielding its neck like a phallus. With each elongated note and ecstatic contortion of his lips, he scales a new climax, thrusting and weaving and longing. The panache with which he falls onto a cameraman only to rise again, still playing, would have been unworkable from any less of a showman, but Prince sells it with orgasmic euphoria. Harrison’s son beams at Prince from onstage. The band finishes. Prince tosses his instrument. The camera zooms out. The guitar goes up. It doesn’t come down.

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Earth to Gwyneth Paltrow

MIAMI, FL - DECEMBER 15: Gwyneth Paltrow at her book signing at Goop Pop Up at Miami Design District on December 15, 2017 in Miami, Florida. (AP Images) People: Gwyneth Paltrow/IPX

At the New York Times Magazine, Taffy Brodesser-Akner reports on Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s health and wellness empire, which started off as a newsletter where G.P. (as she’s known) simply recommended things she liked. Fast forward a few years. Now Goop is a huge brand: a clothing-and-beauty-company-slash-publishing house with a magazine, a website, and a newsletter, all estimated to be worth $250 million from flogging new-age products for eliminating wrinkles and flab while improving your sex life. But the truth is catching up to Goop; it’s been investigated by the Council of Better Business Bureaus and TruthInAdvertising.org for deceptive marketing claims, forcing Goop to attempt to embrace science and facts across the empire as a “growing pain.”

By the time she stood in that Harvard classroom, Goop was a clothing manufacturer, a beauty company, an advertising hub, a publishing house, a podcast producer and a portal of health-and-healing information, and soon it would become a TV-show producer. It was a clearinghouse of alternative health claims, sex-and-intimacy advice and probes into the mind, body and soul. There was no part of the self that Goop didn’t aim to serve.

G.P. didn’t want to go broad. She wanted you to have what she had: the $795 G. Label trench coat and the $1,505 Betony Vernon S&M chain set. Why mass-market a lifestyle that lives in definitional opposition to the mass market? Goop’s ethic was this: that having beautiful things sometimes costs money; finding beautiful things was sometimes a result of an immense privilege; but a lack of that privilege didn’t mean you shouldn’t have those things. Besides, just because some people cannot afford it doesn’t mean that no one can and that no one should want it. If this bothered anyone, well, the newsletter content was free, and so were the recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins.

The newsletter was at first kind of mainstream New Age-forward. It had some kooky stuff in it, but nothing totally outrageous. It was concerned with basic wellness causes, like detoxes and cleanses and meditation. It wasn’t until 2014 that it began to resemble the thing it is now, a wellspring of both totally legitimate wellness tips and completely bonkers magical thinking: advice from psychotherapists and advice from doctors about how much Vitamin D to take (answer: a lot! Too much!) and vitamins for sale and body brushing and dieting and the afterlife and crystals and I swear to God something called Psychic Vampire Repellent, which is a “sprayable elixir” that uses “gem healing” to something something “bad vibes.”

The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And then, of course, the more Goop was criticized: by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous — no, now it was dangerous. And elsewhere people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site — among them those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn’t find help in mainstream medicine.

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The Contradictions of Twitter’s ‘We Care’ Campaign

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | July 2018 | 8 minutes (1,917 words)

Last week, James Woods, an actor who supports Trump and delights in right-wing memes, tweeted a photo of a woman at a rally. The woman wore a yellow placard that read “My Legs Are Open For Refugees.” Woods, amused and apparently unimpressed by the woman’s appearance, wrote, “Finally, a real solution to stop illegal immigration.” The photo was fake. The words “Legs Are” were, clearly—and quite poorly—edited into the image. That didn’t stop Woods from sharing the photo, which was retweeted more than 7,400 times and picked up by Nigel Farage, a prominent member of the UK Independence Party, and popular pro-Trump accounts. For a certain faction of right-wing Twitter users, the image was another piece of evidence validating a noxious truth.

Eventually, a photographer named Lasia Kretzel saw the picture. Kretzel was disturbed; she had taken the original photograph, in which the sign read, “My Door Is Open for Refugees.” The sign also had a stamp from Amnesty International that had been removed in some edits. Kretzel had captured the image more than two years ago, at a demonstration supporting Syrian refugees in Saskatoon, Canada. In a series of tweets, she laid out how it had been altered as a piece of propaganda designed to whip up anti-refugee sentiment. Her thread was retweeted more than 6,400 times. Soon, Farage deleted his wrongful tweet. But the Woods post remained up, zooming past Kretzel’s in popularity. It’s likely that few, if any, of his followers ever noticed the correction. Besides, even if the tweet was untrue, it was still a good troll, and it showed his fans what they wanted to see.  Read more…

Leaving a Good Man Is Hard To Do

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kelli María Korducki | Excerpt adapted from Hard To Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,558 words)

Several years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the prolonged and heart-wrenching breakup that persisted in destroying my entire life over the course of many months, a friend sent me an essay she thought I should read. She was also in the middle of a breakup — a divorce — and we had met a few years earlier through the partners we were simultaneously losing. As one terrible summer faded into an even bleaker fall, we became Gchat pen pals in an ongoing correspondence of mutual despair.

I was officially single and deeply ashamed. To me, my breakup had constituted a karmic injustice that I could have stopped — against my wonderful former partner, against our respective families, and against the scores of women throughout history who’d been denied the love and respect of a Good Man. My friend told me she looked at this must-read piece from time to time, whenever she was feeling scared about the future. I still wasn’t sure that I might have one.

Go, even though you love him.
Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you.
Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his.
Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him.
Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him.
Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three.
Go, even though you once said you would stay. Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.
Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.
Go, even though there is nowhere to go.
Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.
Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough.

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A Beast for the Ages

iStock / Getty Images Plus / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Michael Engelhard | Excerpt adapted from Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon | University of Washington Press | November 2016 | 13 minutes (3,295 words)

 

Stories… can separate us from animals as easily as they can connect us. And the best stories are likely to complicate our relationships, not simplify them.
— Christopher R. Beha, Animal Attraction (2011)

These days, no animal except perhaps the wolf divides opinions as strongly as does the polar bear, top predator and sentinel species of the Arctic. But while wolf protests are largely a North American and European phenomenon, polar bears unite conservationists — and their detractors — worldwide.

In 2008, in preparation for the presidential election, the Republican Party’s vice-presidential candidate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, ventured to my then hometown, Fairbanks, to rally the troops. Outside the building in which she was scheduled to speak, a small mob of Democrats, radicals, tree-huggers, anti-lobbyists, feminists, gays and lesbians, and other “misfits” had assembled in a demonstration vastly outnumbered by the governor’s supporters. As governor, the “pro-life” vice-presidential candidate and self-styled “mama grizzly” had just announced that the state of Alaska would legally challenge the decision of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Listing it would block development and thereby endanger jobs, the worn argument went.

Regularly guiding wilderness trips in Alaska’s Arctic and feeling that my livelihood as well as my sanity depended upon the continued existence of the white bears and their home ground, I, who normally shun crowds, had shown up with a crude homemade sign: Polar Bears want babies, too. Stop our addiction to oil! I was protesting recurring attempts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the area with the highest concentration of polar bear dens in Alaska, to drilling. From the top of my sign a plush polar bear toy dangled, as if in effigy. Though wary of anthropomorphizing animals, I was not above playing that card.

As we were marching and chanting, I checked the responses of passersby. A rattletrap truck driving down Airport Way caught my eye. The driver, a stereotypical crusty Alaskan, showed me the finger. Unbeknownst to him, his passenger — a curly haired, grandmotherly Native woman, perhaps his spouse — gave me a big, cheery thumbs-up.

The incident framed opposing worldviews within a single snapshot but did not surprise me. My home state has long been contested ground, and the bear a cartoonish, incendiary character. Already in 1867, when Secretary of State William H. Seward purchased Alaska from Russia, the Republican press mocked the new territory as “[President] Johnson’s polar bear garden” — where little else grows.

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Powerful On the Beam or Off

Aly Raisman gives her victim impact statement during the fourth day of sentencing for former sports doctor Larry Nassar, who pled guilty to multiple counts of sexual assault. (Dale G. Young/Detroit News via AP, File)

Aly Raisman is a world-class gymnast with six medals from two different Olympic Games. She’s also a survivor of abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, the now-disgraced Michigan State doctor who assaulted hundreds of young athletes. In a profile for ESPN, Mina Kimes looks at Aly the athlete, and Aly the newfound activist.

When she speaks at colleges, men and women come up to her and share their stories of assault, sometimes for the first time. Afterward, she often wakes up in the middle of the night, restless and despondent. “A lot of people, a lot of survivors, come to me for advice on what to do,” she says. “I’m very honest with them, because I’m not an authority, I’m not somebody that can hold their abuser accountable. I wish I was.”

Raisman is quick to assert that while she never expected to be an activist, she’s grateful that people are listening — but admits the burden weighs on her. Often, when she speaks, she’ll stop and edit herself; at one point in our conversation, she grabs paper and starts furiously taking notes. She’s deeply fearful of getting something wrong, of committing the rhetorical equivalent of a slip off the balance beam. “There are so many people out there that are survivors, but there are few that have a voice,” she says. “I know that I’m one of the few that are being heard, so I just want to do right by people.”

When we’re done talking, I ask if I can see her notes, and she gives them to me before she leaves. Feel pressure to help everyone, she had written, but it’s so hard since I’m still processing myself.

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She’s Not Just a Girl in the World

Gwen Stefani performs during the 2017 Wal-Mart Shareholders Meeting in Fayetteville, Ark. (Jason Ivester/The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette via AP)

Anne Helen Petersen does some of today’s best pop-culture writing, and for Buzzfeed News, she digs deep into Gwen Stefani  — who’s just started her Las Vegas residency, following in the footsteps of Celine and Britney. Did you not think you needed to read 7,500 words about Gwen Stefani? It turns out: you do.

Somehow, though, we’re still surprised every time Stefani tells us who she is. When Shelton was named People’s Sexiest Man Alive last year, it was treated as a moment to reflect: How did someone like Stefani end up with someone like him? Some might see the shift in Stefani’s public image as an inevitable ideological trajectory: the social liberal who, with age and distance from school, mellows into a more conservative version of their once radical self. But Stefani was never radical. She remains a white girl who grew up in the hotbed of the conservative movement in Orange County; she has always seemed annoyed by accusations of appropriation, reticent to claim feminism or the advocacy that stems from it, and has always spoken openly about her wish for a traditional family life.

Back in the ’90s, Stefani was the antidote to the caricature of the angry feminist. And if then she insisted on having it both ways — being just like the other girls, but not like the other rock girls — it follows that over the last two decades, she’s become an original brand ambassador for “having it all.” She’s evolved into an avatar of the cool, hot, successful working mom, even as she rejects the sorts of feminist conversations that have drawn that ideal into question. And she’s still less interested in being the kind of woman or the star you want her to be than the one she’s always been.

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