The Longreads Blog

The Little Franchise That Couldn’t

Photo by Julie Sweeney via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

In The Bitter Southerner, Keith Pandolfi introduces us to Miami trolley-based sandwich magnate Ollie Gleichenhaus, who worked for years to perfect the 36 herbs and spices that flavored his eponymous Ollieburger

Three decades later, to goose sales at his fledgling McDonald’s franchise in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a former Bob’s Big Boy employee named Jim Delligatti… piled two beef patties, some “special sauce,” lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame-seed bun. He christened the burger “The Aristocrat,” but when he realized how difficult a time his customers had pronouncing the name, he came up with a new one — the Big Mac.

But those origin stories pale in comparison to the grandiose ambitions of Ollie Gleichenhaus, who professed an almost erotic connection to the burger he created.

“I started out to make the best hamburger,” he once told the Palm Beach Post. “It satisfies me … it turns me on.”

Eventually the same person responsible for turning KFC into a nationwide chain tried to do the same with the Ollieburger, working with Gleichenhaus to bring Ollie’s Trolley to every American. As you know if you’re traveled in the U.S., which is decidedly not dotted with Ollie’s Trolleys, it didn’t take off. Maybe that’s because America rejected the highly-spiced burger — or maybe it’s because the real secret sauce was Ollie himself, and there was no way to franchise him.

Most of the old newspaper reports about the Sandwich Shop make it clear that what drew those celebrities wasn’t just the burgers, but Ollie himself, whose caustic demeanor both entertained and, if what Gleichenhaus says is true, inspired them.

“Rodney Dangerfield used to write material in my place,” Ollie told the Post.

“He got all his material from me,” Ollie said of Rickles.

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The Good Guys Aren’t Always the Good Guys

Sadly, this issue is not a new one. Here, survivors of sexual violence, women’s rights advocates, students, jail reform advocates, transgender and gender non-conforming advocates, abolitionist organizers, and other community members and leaders rally on the steps of City Hall in New York on July 26, 2016 to call attention to the crisis of rape on Rikers Island. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press)

At the women’s jail on Rikers Island, nicknamed “Rosie’s,” the lines separating criminals from victims from protectors are fungible: as John H. Tucker points out in his New York Magazine investigation into rape at Rikers, “about 50 of the 800 women housed at Rosie’s at any one time are being sexually victimized by staff,” leaving the women to try and look out for one another as best they can.

Any sex between an inmate and a guard, including so-called willing contact, is classified as victimization under federal rules, and under New York State law, it’s statutory rape. Darcell Marshall — who is for the first time telling her story, after anonymously suing the city and the guard she says assaulted her — had both consensual and nonconsensual experiences in the jail. Which in some ways isn’t a surprise: She arrived at Rikers having already spent years being sexually abused and bartering her body to get by. In the words of Dori Lewis, a supervising attorney for the Prisoner’s Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, she was among the many Rosie’s inmates who “suffer an extraordinarily high incidence of trauma before entering jail” only to get locked up “and once again be subject to men taking advantage of their positions of power.”

This is precisely how Darcell Marshall’s abuse at the hands of Corrections Officer Santiago started: a woman who’d spent her teen years being pimped out, and an officer who knew that full well, and knew he had leverage.

“Your hair is so long and pretty. Your skin is smooth like chocolate — I love chocolate.” He told her he liked her lips. Then he said, “I’d like to see how they look wrapped around my dick,” according to Marshall’s deposition.

She was startled. Is he serious? Is this a setup by the prosecutor?

“What can you do for me?” she asked coyly, noting she needed commissary money for soap and deodorant.

“I’ll let you know,” Santiago replied.

Even if she were somehow being framed, Marshall wasn’t going to pass up the chance to get some things she needed. She’d gotten the standard-issue kit — a toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap with lye, which “burns your private parts up,” as one former Rosie’s inmate described it — but she had to depend on her commissary account for anything else. (That can include sanitary pads or tampons, access to which is controlled by guards who’ve reportedly rationed the supplies as a form of intimidation or punishment.) Inmates who don’t have friends or relatives to fund their commissary accounts, never mind to visit them, “have to hustle,” Marshall says, “like you’re on the street.”

Later that week, with most of the jail sound asleep, Marshall awoke to the pop of her cell door. Standing there was Santiago.

“You ready?” she remembers him saying. “I got the money.”

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White Men On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Marchers at Portland, Oregon's Women's March, Jan. 20, 2018 (Dave Killen for The Oregonian / AP)

The rights and priorities of white men have always overshadowed those of people of color and women in the United States. They are, however, a ruling minority — white men comprise only a third of our national population.  at The Cut credits shifting demographics and destabilizing movements like #metoo with making white men itchy enough that they’re trying to minimize and invalidate their disruptors.  

White men are at the center, our normative citizen, despite being only around a third of the nation’s population. Their outsize power is measurable by the fact that they still — nearly 140 years after the passage of the 15th Amendment, not quite 100 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, and more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts — hold roughly two-thirds of elected offices in federal, state, and local legislatures. We have had 92 presidents and vice-presidents. One-hundred percent of them have been men, and more than 99 percent white men.

The suffocating power of our minority rule is evidenced by the fact that we’re always busy worrying about the humanity — the comfort and the dignity — of white men, at the same time discouraging disruptive challenge to their authority.

And yes, some of the upholders of minority power are themselves women — women working in service of a brutal white patriarch and the brutal white patriarchal party he leads. Similarly, a majority of white women voted for Trump, and always vote for his party, because they benefit from white supremacy even as they are subjugated by patriarchy. This same dynamic explains why higher percentages of men in every racial category voted for Trump and his party: They gain through the patriarchy even as they are oppressed by white supremacy. This is how minority rule persists.

To publicly rebuke a black woman’s support for protest and not the powerful white patriarch’s thinly veiled call to violence against her is to play on the very same impulses that Trump himself plays on: racist and sexist anxiety about noncompliant women and nonwhites, and the drive to punish them.

These people had nice dinners in restaurants interrupted. They did not have their children pulled from their arms, perhaps forever; they were not refused refuge based on their country of origin or their religion or the color of their skin; they were not denied due process; nor were they denied a full range of health-care options, forced to carry a baby against their will, separated from their families via the criminal justice system, or shot in the back by police for the mere act of being young and black.

One reason that the fury of women is regularly dismissed as theatrical and marginal and unserious is precisely because, on some level, the powerful must sense that it is the opposite of all of those things. That, in fact, it presents a very real threat.

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A Person Alone: Leaning Out with Ottessa Moshfegh

DigitalVision for Getty

Hope Reese | Longreads | July 2018 | 9 minutes (2,416 words)

The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a 24-year-old New Yorker, wants to shut the world out — by sedating herself into a near-constant slumber made possible by a cornucopia of prescription drugs. In various states of semi-consciousness, she begins “Sleepwalking, sleeptalking, sleep-online-chatting, sleepeating… sleepshopping on the computer and sleepordered Chinese delivery. I’d sleepsmoked. I’d sleeptexted and sleeptelephoned.” Her daily life revolves around sleeping as much as possible, and when she’s not sleeping, she’s pretty much obsessed with strategizing how to knock herself out for even longer the next time, constantly counting out her supply of pills.

Her behavior is so extreme — at one point, she seals her cell phone into a tupperware container, which she discovers floating in a pool of water in the tub the following morning — that a New York Times reviewer dubbed Moshfegh’s work an “antisocial” novel. Moshfegh, the author of Homesick for Another World and Eileen, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, has a knack for creating offbeat characters who don’t fit into neat categories. Like other women in Moshfegh’s stories, the heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation is unsettling. She is beautiful, thin, privileged — and deeply troubled. Read more…

Letters from Trenton

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Thomas Swick | Longreads | July 2018 | 19 minutes (4,829 words)

 

In the fall of 1976 I returned home to New Jersey after a year in France. I had been pursuing my dream of becoming a travel writer by studying French in Aix-en-Provence and working on a farm in Kutzenhausen, Alsace. Now I needed a byline, preferably a steady one. Making the rounds of newspaper offices, I stopped one day at the two-story brick building of the Trenton Times. I wasn’t allowed to see anyone. This was the state capital’s leading newspaper, after all, and I was simply handed a job application. There seemed little reason to play it straight.

What was your last employment?

“Working on a farm.”

What were your duties?

“Picking cherries, baling hay, milking cows.”

Why did you leave your last employment?

“I got tired of stepping in cow shit.”

May we contact your last employer?

“Sure, if you speak Alsatian.”

A few days later I got a call from the features editor asking me to come in for an interview — my reward for being original, and knowing my audience, or at least guessing at it correctly.

I drove the river road south from Phillipsburg, where I was then living with my parents, back to Trenton. The features editor looked like a young Virginia Woolf in tortoiseshell glasses. She told me the paper was owned by the Washington Post and that one of her writers, a young man by the name of Blaine Harden, was exceptionally talented. The gist of the interview was that the editor — who, I later learned, had posted my job application on a wall in the newsroom — could not hire someone with no experience, as everyone else had come to the Times from other newspapers. But they would give me a three-month trial writing feature stories.

This suited me fine for, without a place in the newsroom, I was able to conceal the fact that I still wrote in longhand. I was possibly the last American journalist to do so. I knew how to type, but the typewriter was not a friend to the undecided. It was good for deletions — a quick, brash row of superimposed x’s — but for additions, I had to scribble with my pencil between immovable lines and on virgin margins.

In the evening, back home in Phillipsburg, I would write my stories. Then in the morning I’d get in my mother’s car and drive the river road through Milford and Frenchtown (whose bridges I’d worked on during summers in college), Stockton and Lambertville, the docile Delaware often visible through the leafless trees. The scenery was not as dramatic as in Provence, and the towns were not as picturesque as in Alsace, but there was a quiet, unassuming beauty to the place that suited my temperament, no doubt because it had helped shape it.

Once in the newsroom, I’d borrow a desk and type from my half-hidden handwritten pages.

After I was hired full-time, I bought my first car, a sea-green Datsun, and rented a studio apartment in Trenton. Most of the people at the paper lived in the more attractive surrounding towns like Yardley, Lawrenceville, and Princeton. Daisy Fitch, a fellow feature writer, had grown up next door to Albert Einstein. She was one of a dwindling minority of locals at the paper, as it was increasingly being written by out-of-staters who swooped in for a spell, then left to careers at the Post or someplace equally grand. Many were Ivy Leaguers — this was a few years after Woodward and Bernstein made journalism as sexy as it was ever going to get — and some, like Daisy, had interesting backstories. Celestine Bohlen, a young reporter, was the daughter of Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who had served as the American ambassador to the Soviet Union in the ’50s. Mark Jaffe, a former fencer at Columbia, was living with the daughter of Lyle Stuart, the publisher made rich and famous for putting out the 1969 handbook for women’s sexual pleasure The Sensuous Woman. David Maraniss, who exuded a kind of drowsy gravitas, and for whom everyone predicted glory, was the product of a marriage of editors: mother, books; father, newspaper. I was told that I had just missed the Mercer County careers of John Katzenbach, soon-to-be crime novelist and son of the former U.S. Attorney General, and his wife, Madeleine Blais, both of whose auras still flickered in the brick building on Perry Street.

It was astonishing to find this assembly of near and future luminaries in Trenton, a city I had associated mainly with Champale, whose brewery we used to pass on family drives to the shore. Add the fact that everyone had previous newspaper experience and you can understand if I say I felt a bit out of place. All I brought to the party was an irreverent job application.

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A Reading List for Reconsidering the Fourth of July

MEMPHIS, TN - MARCH 31: Lindon Demery carries the flag into the arena before the start of competition at the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo on March 31, 2017 in Memphis, Tennessee. The Bill Pickett Rodeo is the nation's only touring black rodeo competition. The rodeo celebrates western heritage and the contributions that black cowboys and cowgirls have made to the sport of rodeo. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Growing up, I thought the Fourth of July was a sweet, soulful holiday. My memories of it are mostly fond. With my mother, I’d shop for a matching red, white, and blue top-and-bottom set and new jelly sandals. There was a barbecue every year a few streets over from our home in Memphis, at my uncle’s baby blue-shuttered house. It started in the afternoon and went on until late into the night, when the lightning bugs came out. While my cousins and I played with gold sparklers, I could hear my mother’s laughter grow higher pitched and louder as the music changed to slower cuts, the kind that dragged.

The first year I got to see the city’s official fireworks show, in a park overlooking the Mississippi River, my older sister and brother must have been on break from college. The three of us headed there around dusk. My new jelly sandals were yellow and let my big toes stick out.

We walked across a wide lawn down on Mud Island, a man-made peninsula between the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers that had opened for public recreation in 1982. Three miles north of Mud Island is another site for public recreation, Tom Lee Park, named for the African American riverboat worker who saved the lives of 32 white passengers in 1925 when the M.E. Norman steamboat capsized. He’d witnessed the accident in his small boat and dove into the water, making 5 trips. The town erected a statue in his honor that called him “a worthy Negro,” and as payment, he was given a sanitation worker job and a house in the Klondike neighborhood of North Memphis.

My mother grew up in North Memphis, close to Klondike, in the 1950s and 1960s. She remembers the city’s amenities as contested space — its colored-only days at the zoo, the public library, the public pool.

That summer I was with my siblings — walking across a lawn to Mud Island in those yellow jellys, watching the fireflies, anticipation and balmy sweat on my skin — we found ourselves behind a dusty blue pickup truck. Three shirtless white men sat on back of it. One had blond curls and a bottle of what I thought to be beer in his hand. “Hey niggers,” he said to us with a smile, waving, so casually. The truck then picked up speed, and they were gone. My siblings and I continued our walk towards the river.

As long as I’ve been alive, being American has felt just like this. Tense, sweet, fraught and confused. I’ve known in my bones from a young age that our country was held together by a string that could at any moment break. That hate was always around the corner, always bubbling up under the sweetest of our days.

At Broadly, in “How to Celebrate the 4th of July When America Is a Constant Disappointment,” Leila Ettachfini says “racism, sexism, homophobia, the institutionalized manifestations of each of these” have been ’emboldened’ over the last few years, making it more difficult for wider swaths of Americans to ignore. How should we celebrate a holiday that demands a patriotic response given the current circumstances? Ettachfini provides a list of great suggestions, such as writing letters to children still separated from their families at the border, subscribing to an independent press outlet, bringing petitions to gatherings, or collecting donations for “a cause that our government and/or other American institutions have abandoned or actively worked against, like the Flint, Michigan water crisis or abortion access.”

I’d add that reading the words of people who have made it their life’s work to understand the American conundrum, who clarify and re-inscribe citizenship, democracy, and freedom, can also be a balm in these times.

1. “A Radically Woke and Deeply Conservative Commencement Address.” (Conor Friedersdorf, Atlantic, June 2018)

Friedersdorf writes up the commencement address American classicist Danielle Allen gave at Pomona College last month, in which she offered a close reading of the Declaration of Independence. Allen is careful to note the action encoded in its sentences. “It’s not just about individual rights — about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it moves from those rights to the notion that government is something that we build together to secure our safety and happiness.”

2. “When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday.” (Ethan J. Kytle & Blain Roberts, Atlantic, July 2018)

After emancipation, many African Americans celebrated Independence Day without ambiguity.

From Washington, D.C., to Mobile, Alabama, they gathered together to watch fireworks and listen to orators recite the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery when it was ratified in late 1865.

…The most extraordinary festivities were held in Charleston, South Carolina, the majority-black city where Southern secession and the Civil War had begun. At the 1865 commemoration in Charleston, one speaker noted the altered meaning of the holiday for black Americans, who could at last “bask in the sunshine of liberty.”

The martial displays at this and subsequent celebrations underscored his point. Each year, thousands of black South Carolinians lined up early to watch African American militia companies march through city streets. Led by mounted officers, some of whom were ex-slaves, these black companies were often named for abolitionists and other black heroes. The 1876 Fourth of July parade included the Lincoln Rifle Guard, the Attucks Light Infantry, the Douglass Light Infantry, and the Garrison Light Infantry.

3. “A Great Escape, A Dwindling Legacy.” (Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times, February 1998)

Isabel Wilkerson’s travel piece on Bronzeville, the historic neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that she calls “ground zero” of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, is a reminder that the movement of migrants has made much of what we hold dear possible.

In South Side blues joints in the 1940’s, the height of the exodus, migrants like Muddy Waters churned out gut-bucket blues from Mississippi, down-home folk music that grew worldlier in the big city. A row of recording studios, perhaps the most famous of which was Chess Records, sprang up along Michigan Avenue to capture the music and send it across the world.Newsletter Sign Up

The former nightclub owners Phil and Leonard Chess sent their right-hand man, Willie Dixon, a blues bassist from Mississippi who wrote most of the label’s hits, to scout talent in the streets of Bronzeville. Bo Diddley was one of the blues men Dixon found. During the glory days of the 1950’s and 1960’s, he and Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Etta James and many others passed through the studio, belting out the blues with nightclub realism in an echo chamber in the basement. Eventually young musicians like Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton heard the music and drew inspiration. The Rolling Stones, who took their name from a Muddy Waters song, made their first American recording at Chess in 1964.

4. “The Border and the American Imagination.” (Michelle García, The BafflerJuly 2018)

García traces a history of the current “immigration crisis,” including how we talk about it.

The horror on the border is described as an “immigration crisis,” the violence seemingly the consequence of migrants’ presence. “Immigration crisis” frames the violent reaction—the armed troops sent to the border, the unarmed Guatemalan woman shot in the head by a U.S. Border Patrol agent, the psychological torture of children. But “immigration crisis” ignores the fact that fighting Mexicans (or their easy substitutes, such as Central Americans) was essential to the construction of the United States, its identity the culture of violence it celebrates.

5. “Your Patriotism isn’t Love. It’s Blindness.” (Abraham A. Joven, The Rumpus, July 2017)

Joven encourages us to not look away.

Love, you see, looks unflinchingly into the morass and calls on hope. It does not disavow the wreckage or avoid it. True love is a wise change agent that leans on the better angels without naivety.

Our Future Success Depends on Rocks from the Sky

A geologist with the Division of Meteorites at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum holds a slice of a meteorite. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Steve Curry’s meteor-hunting hobby turned into a business, then an obsession, then a connection with the same “sovereignty” movement as Cliven Bundy, and eventually landed him in jail after an armed standoff with law enforcement. But before all of that he was a mentally ill man who was really excited by meteors. In The Verge, Brendan Borrell walks us through the entire strange and sad story.

“He was extremely knowledgeable,” says Robert Stollsteimer, who became what he calls “a groupie.” An elderly woman in Olathe, the next town over, became convinced her yard was jam-packed with meteorites, and she donated $15,000 to Curry so he could buy meteorite-testing gear. Channel 8 news in nearby Grand Junction ran a story about Curry discovering the first moon rocks in North America. It was startling, to say the least. “He’s found outlines of crustaceans, snails and sea worms inside his meteors,” the report said. “Proof of alien life.”

Though Curry had yet to make any considerable proceeds off of meteorite sales, he began to picture himself as a captain of industry, a railroad tycoon of yore who could give back to his frontier town. He established the Osirius Foundation with plans to funnel proceeds from his meteorites to charity. He handed out meteorites to people he met like they were party favors. He also donated five specimens to the Montrose County Historical Society, which, according to the receipt he scribbled out, were worth $58,994,500.

During a meeting of the Montrose City Council, Curry gave a presentation about his vision for the town’s future. “I would like to present to the Council, an economic stimulus proposal involving an abundance of natural resources found here,” he wrote in a handout he distributed that day. He spoke of building a meteorite museum in town and creating a fenced-in park atop Sunset Mesa, where visitors could observe meteorites in situ. “With your assistance, support, and cooperation,” he declared, “I would like to market Montrose, and Montrose County, as the new ‘Meteorite Capital of the World.’”

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Waiting for Mental Health Care

Waiting room
(Anthony Asael / Art in All of Us / Getty Images)

Do you need help? Ask for help. Do you need help now? Get in line.

In The Guardian, journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson responds to the many empty refrains encouraging mentally ill patients to just ask for help — a beyond-frustrating suggestion “when you’ve been asking for help and not getting it.”

There is a poster in my local pharmacy that exclaims, “Mental health can be complex – getting help doesn’t have to be!” Each time I see it, I want to scream.

I used to blame the system. Mostly it is the system: those never-ending cuts and closures; the bureaucracy; the constant snafus of communication; the government’s contempt for staff.

But sometimes, that system gets inside the staff, too. It is there when you are asked the same questions by 20 professionals, in a time of great distress, and then reprimanded for anger when you snap the 21st time. It is there when you are asked to fill out a form to assess a service, after being told you won’t receive that service until two birthdays in the future.

The waiting. The offers of therapies that aren’t suitable because there is nothing else. (Throwing a ball of wool to one another in a circle might be helpful for some people, but it absolutely wasn’t for me. I knew it wouldn’t be. But I gave it a go.) The being matched with a therapist who, through no fault of her own, is unsuitable (you have friends in common) but who you don’t ask to change because you know there isn’t another. The 10-minute GP slots that take weeks to secure.

After the sectioning and the 22-hour wait, there was a hospitalisation out of borough. Upon leaving the inpatient ward, there was a two-week stay at a crisis house (which helped), then that was it. I was ill enough to be sectioned, but well enough to have therapy discontinued. I was put on an 18-month waiting list for therapy. I called iCope, an NHS digital therapy service, but because I was on a waiting list, I was ineligible.

It took me about 16 weeks to get back to work – much longer than it should have done – because I had to clamber from a well without ropes. I would run into GP surgeries, suicidal; the receptionist said he would “pass the message on”. I sat in the consulting room, sweater over my head and howling.

Since I was sectioned, I have been hospitalised twice, once after a suicide attempt. I am still on a waiting list, a different one: this one is two years long. My friends and family simply do not understand the delay, cannot believe it when I tell them about the system. So, clearly, the Conversation isn’t as illuminating as it thinks it is.

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Nothing But Time and Tides and Salt and Mud and Warren Ellis

The Red Sands Maunsell sea fort in the Thames estuary, off the north coast of Kent. Photo by Russss via Flickr (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Graphic novelist Warren Ellis, of Transmetropolitan and Planetary fame, has a chapter in the new book Spirits of Place dedicated to the place where he lives: the Thames Estuary. It’s home to the Maunsell Sea Forts and the S.S. Richard Montgomery, a ship that sank in 1944 with cargo of thousands of pounds of undetonated ordinance; home to areas with Harry Potter-esque names like “Mucking Marshes” and “Foulness”; home to Viking settlements and pirate radio stations. Once described by 8th century Mercian King Offa as “a terrible place,” it’s an odd, out-of-the-way part of the world.

Even in the Eighties, R&B bands ruled Southend. I’d go some nights to an underground space between a bar, which would be rammed with bodies dancing to standards – this was the decadent point in the period, where a lot of bands were just playing stuff you knew from the Blues Brothers soundtrack album. And I’d stagger outside at some point for air or a cigarette or whatever, and the side door to the steps would open, and a plume of steam would belch out and rise up into the night, and I could pretend that I was in a real place, a real city with real history and culture where that happened a thousand times a night, every night.

Some nights, people would just stand around and watch that pillar of air and heat and sweat and kisses rise into the sky.

For a space that’s been close to a blank slate for as long as it’s been here – nothing but forest, settlements stuck to coasts and creeks – even an appropriated identity is an improvement. And not unsuitable for an island that’s barely even there and a delta that probably isn’t.

It’s his part of the world, though.

I live out here on the Thames Delta, still, a ten-minute walk from the shore. It’s a placeless place that tells stories about itself because it’s rarely existed in a dense enough form to generate its own history. It’s nothing but time and tides and salt and mud, and sometimes the mud reflects the sky and you just can’t see anything.

I tell stories for a living. I sit by the rivers and creeks with the ghosts of my ancestors, the Viking priests and dead writers and cunning folk, and I see the water run by and count the tides. We launch futures from here, but here we stay, as time flows by and the sea becomes the sky and a ship full of bombs ticks away.

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Private Telegram, Public Strife

Telegram App, Wikimedia Commons

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | July 2018 | 10 minutes (2,418 words)

Telegram, a messaging app with more than 200 million users, is a company known for its rakish independence. Pavel Durov, who created the app with his brother, Nikolai, is a 33-year old from St. Petersburg, Russia, with a taste for dark suits and tax-free municipalities. In 2006, he founded VKontakte (VK), Russia’s answer to Facebook, which quickly became the country’s largest social network and a target of its security services. Durov, who identifies as a “part-time troll” in his Twitter bio, earned a reputation as a sort of maverick entrepreneur, a persona that has come with both free-speech absolutism and immature antics. His most notorious stunt took place in May 2012, when he stood at his office window and tossed paper airplanes made of rubles down onto the street below. He later explained that he had been talking to a vice president at his company who had been awarded a large bonus, and when the VP said that he didn’t care about money, the two decided to throw cash out the window—until bystanders started fighting over the windfall.

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