The Longreads Blog

Silence is a Lonely Country: A Prayer in Twelve Parts

Niilo Isotalo/Unsplash

Sadia Hassan | Longreads | July 2018 | 18 minutes (4,468 words)

I.

On the night of the election, I call my father from the group home I am working in as a residential advisor. Things are eerily silent. No one playing the dozens or making a milkshake way past their bedtime; no one singing at the top of their lungs or crouched behind a fridge ready to jump out and scare the ever-living mess out of me; nobody asking questions about tomorrow, because, of course, nobody believes it will arrive.

At dinner, one of my students wants to know if I voted. I remain aloof.

I watch another student’s hands clench and unclench on the kitchen table.

“Man, if I could vote …

The truth was I could, and I had not. It did not feel like a choice to me. It was a question of degrees and integrity. It was a question of belonging or estrangement; between one drone strike and another genocide. I understood this country could never belong to me, so I did not vote and that night, overcome with the sinking weight of an accumulated shame, I could not catch my breath.

The thoughts ran through my mind: the Muslim ID cards, the internment camps, the CIA black sites, the border, the drones, the undocumented. We will all be [       ].

My father’s voice on the other side of the phone steadies me. I am a river rushing around a single, steady boulder, my father’s voice a buoy. “Aabe macaan,” I begin. “Are you watching the elections?”

“Aabe,” he sighs, the phone shifting awkwardly in his hand. He was clearly in bed.  “We have our children. What can they take from us?”

Even the children, I want to say. Instead, I say nothing.

Baba returns me to my body. When we were kids, he would hold his hands before our faces, slowly folding down each finger until we held his limp-wristed fists faceup in our tiny little hands. We were each of us as vital and necessary to the body of his love as each limb was to his person. Instead of “I love you,” he would say, “You are my two front teeth.” Instead of telling us to shut up, he would ask, “Take a breath.” Perhaps, my father was a poet. For him, the body is the only language that remains after everything falls away.

I put the phone down to get a drink of water. Really, I step away so my father does not hear me cry. I want to take off running.

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The Big Unsolved Mystery of Little Marjorie West

John Swart for AP

Four-year-old Marjorie West was snatched by someone (…or something…?) from a Pennsylvania park in 1938. Her case remains one of the oldest unsolved mysteries in the U.S. and theories still abound — did a she-bear take her? A wildman? Is she still alive? Caren Lissner details the case’s history and the media frenzy it created for Narratively. The tale includes shoulder-to-shoulder searches, John Walsh’s Stranger Danger, and there’s even a mention of professional wrestler Ric Flair.

Her search was one of the largest for a child since the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping six years earlier. Residents of Western Pennsylvania and Marjorie’s surviving relatives still hold out hope she’s alive. If she is, she may yet celebrate her 85th birthday next month.

If Marjorie was snatched, it could have been for profit. During the Great Depression, child kidnappings became a popular, low-tech way to make a buck. “Kidnapping wave sweeps the nation,” blared New York Times headline on March 3, 1932, two days after the abduction of the son of aviator Charles Lindbergh. At the time, some feared that cars, still a relatively new technology, were going to cause an increase in kidnappings, and they weren’t wrong. Abductions did increase with the use of automobiles and with greater highway usage. Still, many of those who believed Marjorie was abducted thought it was not for ransom, but for a different type of moneymaking enterprise.

Harold Thomas “Bud” Beck, a writer, raconteur, and college professor with a Ph.D. in linguistics, researched the case after he heard about it in a bar he used to run. Around 1998, when internet access was becoming more widespread, he posted a $10,000 reward for information about Marjorie. He included up-to-date photos of Dorothea, figuring Marjorie would resemble her.

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‘Wild With Love’: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on the Portraits of Henry Taylor

"i'm yours," 2015 ©Henry Taylor; Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

In a story for Vulture that is excerpted from a forthcoming monograph, author Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah profiles the figurative painter Henry Taylor, who had five new paintings exhibited at last year’s Whitney Biennial. The two artists talk about Los Angeles, time’s passage, migrations and arrivals, the history of portraiture, and what it means specifically for black painters and their subjects.

Some of my favorite places in the piece are about the nature of work—how one’s vocation can be a calling, an almost holy redemption, and how work and working has evolved for black Americans throughout the generations.

…His father took him out to tag along on his painting jobs on Saturday mornings. It would seem obvious that this early education in using paint (albeit industrial- and commercial-strength paint) and paintbrushes was the firmament for Taylor’s work and his work ethic. Henry Taylor never stops working. He not only paints black labor, black labor practices (jazz gods like Miles Davis, feats of black athleticism like Alice Coachman acing the high jump), and black laborers, he works like a laborer too. From afar, his practice has come to appear antic, but when you look up close, it’s clear that Taylor has a traditionalist’s belief in habit, consistency, and keeping the hours of a man with a day job. He works like someone who has paid his bills by throwing paint on walls for more than 40 years. But what was an industrial skill for the father has become a creative act for the son.

When I remark to Taylor that although they painted different things, doesn’t it mean something that he and his father both painted? Doesn’t it matter that his paternal grandfather in Texas was alleged to have been such a strong draftsman that he was able to supplement his income by counterfeiting? So isn’t Henry, then, just the passage of time, the arrival of options that can finally intersect with the talent? Instead of answering me, Taylor started to weep. “Only recently have I started to think about that.”

The last time he spoke to his father, his father had wished Taylor well and expressed his pride that he was graduating from CalArts. The call had surprised Taylor. He was surprised that his father even knew that he was graduating. Because he had never expected his father to understand what painting meant to him.

It was his sister, Anna Laura, who, after going to his first show and seeing what her brother had been up to, seemed to best understand where the inner lives of their people and their parents’ stories had landed. Anna Laura was the one who called Randy, their older brother, and told him, “You gotta come here. Randy, Randy. You gotta come see Henry. Randy, Henry can paint. And Randy, Henry’s paintings will scare you to death.”

Taylor thinks about them, his people, often, and in Oxnard, his fears about the limitations of his body and how much time he has left to capture them pervaded our conversation. These deep emotions can often come on like a penumbral shadow and overwhelm him. They are the burdens that come with being the keeper of the flame.

As we pulled away from his aunt’s house, there was the sense of evaporation, with what is left behind being mostly the memories he tries to capture. “I can paint portraits easy. What keeps me up at night is trying to really paint this.”

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Some Like It Hot

Imaginechina via AP Images

How did the chili pepper become so entrenched in China’s Sichuan and Hunan provinces? Was it the climate? The plant’s biochemistry? Human biology? Or the Sichuanese peoples’ fiery disposition? For Nautilus, writer Andrew Leonard looks for answers in chili science and the ways the pepper may have traveled from the New World to Europe to China. Many studies have tried to understand why people willingly eat something as painful as a chili, and why some cultures embrace this heat more than others. Some theories have to do with risk-taking and “sensation-seeking” activities, which might explain the way China’s Maoist revolutionaries embraced the pepper so fervently.

Eating chili pepper is like riding a roller coaster, he notes. “In both cases, the body senses danger and behavior normally follows which would terminate the stimulus. In both cases, initial discomfort becomes pleasure after a number of exposures.”

Linguistically and anecdotally, the association of “spice” with “excitement” rings true, but proof of Rozin’s theory did not arrive until decades after he formulated his original thesis. The missing link appeared in 2013, when two Penn State researchers, John Hayes and Nadia Byrnes, published “Personality Factors Predict Spicy Food Liking and Intake” in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

Hayes is an associate professor of food science at Penn State who received an NIH grant in 2011 to investigate the genetics of the TRPV1 receptor. Nadia Byrnes was one of his graduate students. In experiments conducted on 97 test subjects, Byrnes found a significant correlation between people who scored high on a “sensation seeking” scale and people who liked the burn. (Examples of questions that determined “sensation seeking” included “I would have enjoyed being one of the first explorers of an unknown land” and “I like a movie where there are a lot of explosions and car chases.”)

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The Town That Camp Built

Vintage large letter postcard illustration, 1940s. (Photo by Found Image Holdings/Corbis via Getty Images)

At The Bitter Southerner, Michael Adno profiles renovator and land developer David Wolkowsky, age 98, whose particular brand of charm, philanthropy, joie de vivre, and camp has permanently shaped Key West, Florida’s unique allure.

Wolkowsky tells me the story of how he came to know the word: “camp.”

At a party in Philadelphia while Wolkowsky was still a student, he recognized Lucien Beebe, the bicoastal polymath who had started Nevada’s first newspaper. Beebe approached, and “I just handed him my drink,” Wolkowsky tells me. Beebe laughed and replied, “You’re such a camp.” That was the first mention, the flowering, the thread of solidarity that has stuck with Wolkowsky since.

“Michael, the most important thing is camp,” he tells me. “Very few people have it.” He assures me I have it — “but not completely.”

Pausing the movie, we parse the idea of camp — pulling up websites, laying books on their spines, running through examples to ask: What is camp? Or, more specifically, how do we articulate Wolkowsky’s idea of camp?

He agrees with some denotations we find online — theatrical mannerisms, exaggerated humor, a mingling of high and low that challenges the status quo in art. Of course, as many have tried, the word, its sensibilities, and its proxies have remained elusive and difficult to pin down. But camp is as plain as day in Wolkowsky’s home, with its faux paintings that are nearly indiscernible from the real things, the levity with which he addresses all things, his coded language.

In the town, itself, camp seems essential to Key West’s sense of place. While Susan Sontag was heavily criticized for her explication of the word as a sensibility, as a style, she put it well when she wrote in 1964, “Camp is esoteric — something of a private code. To talk about camp is therefore to betray it.” In other words, depending on where and when or with whom, the word holds different meanings, evading classification for decades, maybe deliberately. And while increasingly difficult to articulate, Key West’s brand of camp reflects Wolkowsky’s understanding — never on the nose, always sideways, a place where anonymity feels like an innate right.

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Oregon’s Racist Past

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Linda Gordon | Excerpt adapted from The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition | Liveright | October 2017 | 17 minutes (4,587 words)

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, and extending through the mid-twentieth century, Oregon was arguably the most racist place outside the southern states, possibly even of all the states. Its legislature tried to keep it all white, excluding people of color with a host of discriminatory laws. So when the Klan arrived in 1921, its agenda fit comfortably into the state’s tradition. When I tell people that Oregon was a stronghold of the Klan, they express surprise, even shock, because of the state’s current reputation as liberal. But that is because they don’t understand its history or demography. Neither did I, although I grew up there.

The Klan gained particularly formidable power in Oregon, especially in my hometown, Portland; Oregon shared with Indiana the distinction of having the highest per capita Klan membership. Moreover, the Oregon Klan’s muscle led it more actively into electoral politics than most other state Klans.

Klan recruiters probably understood Oregon’s potential. Like Indiana, its population of approximately eight hundred thousand in 1920 was overwhelmingly Protestant and white, and 87 percent native-born; of the foreign-born, half were US citizens. Its approximately 2,400 African Americans constituted 0.3 percent, its Catholics 8 percent, and its Jews 0.1 percent of the population, and this demography was both cause and effect of its history of bigotry. In 1844 the Oregon Territory banned slavery but at the same time required all African Americans to leave. In 1857, in the process of achieving statehood, it put two pieces of a future constitution to a referendum vote, and the same contradiction emerged: 75 percent of voters favored rejecting slavery, but 89 percent voted for excluding people of color. Meanwhile, the state offered 650-to 1,300-acre plots of land free — to white settlers. Prevented by federal law from expelling existing black residents, its constitution banned any further blacks from entering, living, voting, or owning property in Oregon (the only state to do this), to be enforced by lashings for violators. In 1862, forced to vacate the previous ban, it levied a $5 (worth $120 in 2016) annual tax on African Americans, Chinese, Hawaiians, and multiracial people who persisted in living there. The Chinese were specifically denied state citizenship. (In 1893 La Grande, Oregon, whites burned that city’s Chinatown to the ground.) Oregon refused to ratify the enfranchisement of black men by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; it only did so — and this may come as another surprise — in 1959 and 1973, respectively. In 1906 the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the prevalent racial segregation of public facilities was constitutional. Interracial marriage was prohibited until 1951. Read more…

Hemingway’s Last Girl

Keystone / Stringer for Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

 

Rafia Zakaria | Longreads | July 2018 | 9 minutes (2,372 words)

It all began because of a comb. Sometime after four in a dark and cold Italian morning, a young woman accompanied a band of men to a duck shoot. After it was over and the frigid hunters sat by the fire, the eighteen-year old Adriana Ivancich, the only woman in the gathering, asked for a comb for her long black hair. Nearly all the men in the party ignored her and kept up their talking. Ernest Hemingway, however, was not ever one to let a lady go unattended. After rooting around in his pockets, he produced a comb, broke it in half and gave it to her. It was a very Hemingway gesture, chivalrous and theatric and meant very much to be memorable. (63)

It would be. The Hemingway that was at the duck shoot that frigid morning may have been a rotund and aging man who presided over slightly slacking but still eminent literary career, but he remained ever amenable to the charms of women. The duck shoot was not even the first time the two had met; that had happened the night before, when Hemingway, along with Adriana’s cousin Nanuk Franchetti, the host of the duck shoot, had picked her up by the side of road.

Andrea Di Robilant’s Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse is a chronicle of sorts of this last affair. Hemingway, then very much married to Mary Welsh Hemingway, who had ostensibly “stolen” him away from Martha Gellhorn, romanced Adriana right under his wife’s nose. The story of Adriana and Hemingway was initially interposed between Mary Hemingway’s “major shopping sprees” (87), “hours of sightseeing” and yet more shopping trips. It ended with Adriana and almost her entire family installed in the Hemingway’s home, fixtures at the caviar laden, booze filled evenings that oiled Hemingway’s daily grind. Read more…

Peterson’s Complaint

CSA Images

Laurie Penny | Longreads | July 2018 | 20 minutes (5,191 words)

“Incredible! One of the worst performances of my career, and they
never doubted it for a second!”
– Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“Now that’s a scientific fact. There’s no real evidence
for it, but it is scientific fact.”
Brass Eye, “Paedogeddon” episode

“The eternal dragon is always giving our fallen down castles
a rough time.”
Jordan Peterson, “Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority”

***

“We have this tree, and we have this strange serpent. That’s a dragon-like form, there—a sphinx-like form that’s associated with the tree… And so the snake has been associated with the tree for a very, very long time. The lesson the snake tells people is, you bloody better well wake up, or something you don’t like will get you. And who’s going to be most susceptible to paying attention to the snake? That’s going to be Eve.”

That’s Professor Jordan Peterson, offering the “realistic and demanding practical wisdom” endorsed by David Brooks in the New York Times.

“The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and his authority — people worshipped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast.”

That’s the Book of Revelation.

“I could not understand why there was a half-man half-chicken statue outside. I spent the next six hours screaming. Non-stop screaming as loud as I could. I’d become convinced I was a dead body lying in a forest. I was in the afterlife, and more than that, I was in hell.”

And that’s a man from Vancouver describing a mishap with magic mushrooms in Vice. Of the three excerpts, it’s the only one that can convincingly claim to be non-fiction.

The first time I waded through the collected polemics and YouTube punditry of Professor Jordan Peterson — the unthinking man’s televangelist, inflated to the status of serious truth-seeker by respectable newspapers around the world — I was expecting to be at least slightly dazzled by his rhetoric. But no matter how long I stared at the magic-eye picture of jumbled platitudes, masturbatory nightmares about being devoured by an all-consuming mother figure, and occasional sensible tips about making your bed, it failed to resolve into a work of epoch-defining insight. Instead, it reads as if St. John the Divine of Patmos settled down and got a job selling insurance but occasionally had flashbacks to when he used to lick blue fungus off cave walls and babble about the Great Dragon. 

If every generation gets the intellectuals it deserves, we’re in serious trouble.

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Where Everybody Knows Your Pronouns

Someone holds a marshmallow stuck on the end of a wire over pile of flaming logs
Photo by Colby Stopa via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

T Cooper wrote about his experience at Camp Lost Boys, a retreat for transgender men, for Mother Jones magazine. Along with the hiking, campfires, water sports, and bonding came a new experience for some campers: the experience of being in a place where they didn’t have to make a point of specifying their pronouns.

The Colorado registration takes place in a log cabin where Rocco and Justin dispense bunk assignments, programs, backpacks, patches, and mugs emblazoned with the camp’s Park Service-­inspired logo. By the time a fifth camper lifts his Sharpie to ask whether we should put preferred gender pronouns on our nametags, Rocco looks set to explode: “No PGPs!” he yells, startling some new arrivals. “We are all men here!”

You can see the profound confusion in the eyes of the younger campers, who—unlike us older guys (many of whom transitioned more than a decade ago)—have marinated in a culture of inclusivity wherein every meeting or class begins with a roll call of names and pronouns so that everybody feels recognized. “To me, it’s not a courtesy to be asked your preferred gender pronoun,” Rocco continues, a bit more calmly now. He refers to the Lost Boys mission statement: “It’s been communicated explicitly that this camp is for self-defined men, even if being identified as a man can look different for everybody.”

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Clocking Out

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Livia Gershon | Longreads | July 2018 | 9 minutes (2,261 words)

On May 1, 1886, 80,000 workers marched through the streets of Chicago. As soldiers and private police aimed their rifles into the crowd, “no smoke curled up from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills,” the Tribune reported. “Things had assumed a Sabbath-like appearance.” Chicago, an industrial boomtown, was the center of what became that day a mass labor action; more than 300,000 workers staged a strike across the country. The participants were skilled and unskilled, immigrant and native-born, revolutionary and reformist. What drew them together was a common demand, expressed in a popular labor song that many of the marchers sang: “We want to feel the sunshine / And we want to smell the flow’rs / We are sure that God has willed it / And we mean to have eight hours.

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