The Longreads Blog

A Woman’s Search for Salvation, Love, and Family

Women reading the Holy Bible., reading a book.,reading

In a vivid personal essay for Kweli Journal, author Jodi M. Savage writes about growing up in New York City with her Pentecostal evangelist grandmother. The church gives their family a community to belong to and allows the narrator’s grandmother to build a life of leadership and influence.  But it could also be stifling and punishing for the women of its congregation. The author figures out how to honor her grandmother’s memory while bearing witness to the church’s limitations.

Granny raised me on mustard greens, hot water cornbread, and a super-sized portion of Jesus. Although I mastered the Rubik’s cube of rules for sanctified living, religion robbed me of my voice and left shame in its place. You could say that it all started with my teenage neighbor Bobby.

When I was a kid, I let Bobby paint my fingernails red. I knew it was a sin by Pentecostal standards, but my nails looked so pretty and shiny in the sunlight. A few days later, our street had our annual block party. Everyone had moved their cars off our Brooklyn street that morning; one end was blocked off with a Cutlass Supreme and the other with a Nissan Maxima. We played in the street all day until late into the night—volleyball, tag, double Dutch, hide-and-seek. Folks played spades and dominoes on the sidewalks; roamed from yard to yard sampling each other’s food; and blasted reggae, reggaeton, old school R&B, and hip hop from speakers all at the same time.

As I played across the street from my house, Bobby barreled into me on his bike. His front wheel and handlebars collided with my groin and stomach, sending me flying several feet away. I limped home to tell Granny what happened. She suddenly noticed my red fingernails for the first time. Again, we were Pentecostal, which meant we weren’t allowed to wear fingernail polish. Anything red was considered to be a special kind of sinful—carnality of the whorish variety. Instead of consoling me, Granny whipped me with an extension cord. That was the day I learned that one’s own pain is secondary to religious dogma. I learned to keep quiet when people hurt me, or else risk punishment for revealing something far worse—something sinful.

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Russian River Roulette

Canoes lined upon Johnson Beach on California's Russian River. Photo by Gerry la Londe-Berg via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

In the course of writing his Outside story on public access to beaches bordering private property along California’s Russian River, Chris Colin tried canoeing down the river and landing on contested pieces of shoreline to see what would happen. Among the more unexpected encounters with irate landowners? Violent golfing.

Two-thirds of the way into our trip, we came upon a pirate flag flapping above a small spit of sand. I hollered up a guileless hello to the two men standing nearby. In response, one disappeared into some trees. He returned with two large dogs, which he led down to us.

Clearly we were meant to be frightened away. But I wasn’t ready to leave, so I tried to de-escalate the situation with chatter: a mindless remark about dog breeds, then an explanation of what the hell we were doing there.

“I know about the goddamn high-water mark,” the man spat at us.

All this time, his friend had been holding something. I saw now that it was a golf club. He stepped up to a makeshift tee and squared his shoulders. Before I could register it, he was winding up and blasting a ball in our direction.

He missed us by a good 15 feet. But now he was teeing up again, clobbering another poor Titleist at us. This one came close enough that we heard a ffffffttt as it shot over our heads. Five minutes after pulling up on this beach, we were hauling away at top speed. Already I was thinking about the next leg of my expedition, where the locals were said to be far less friendly.

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Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Author

Original Parker Brothers Ouija Board elements from Dave Winer/Flickr CC, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Joy Lanzendorfer | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,948 words)

One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s father had died the year before, and Hutchings was hoping to contact him. While they’d had some success with earlier sessions, Curran had grown tired of the game and had to be coaxed to play. This time, a message came over the board. It said: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come — Patience Worth my name.”

This moment was the start of a national phenomenon that would turn Curran into a celebrity. Patience Worth, the ghost who’d contacted them, said she was a Puritan who immigrated to America in the late 1600s. Through Curran, she would dictate an astounding 4 million words between 1913 and 1937, including six novels, two poetry collections, several plays, and volumes of witty repartee.

The work attracted national headlines, serious reviews, and a movie deal. Patience Worth’s poetry was published in the esteemed Braithwaite’s anthologies alongside writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1918, she was named an outstanding author by the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York. Her novel, The Sorry Tale, was a bestseller with four printings. The New York Times said her poetry was a “high level of literary quality” with “flashes of genius.” Harper’s Magazine said that the “writings attributed to Patience Worth are exceptional.” The New Republic added: “That she is sensitive, witty, keenly metaphorical in her poetry and finely graphic in her drama, no one can deny.”

Literary Digest summed up the critical interest by writing: “It is difficult not to take Patience Worth seriously.” Read more…

A Frustrating Year of Reporting on Black Maternal Health

Danielle Jackson | Longreads | June 2018 |3370 words (14 minutes)

“It’s in fashion to talk about black women’s maternal care,” Bilen Berhanu, a Brooklyn-based full-spectrum birth doula told me recently. I’d asked her about the outpouring of news stories, from multiple national outlets, about infant and maternal mortality over the past twelve months.

The reporting has added flesh and aching detail to what I’ve come to think of as an embarrassing public health crisis in the United States. Among industrialized countries, our nation has the highest rate of infant deaths. We’ve had dramatic declines since 1960, but we have not kept pace with other nations we’d consider peers. New American moms face similar danger: The rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has been rising since 2000 while falling for most other nations in our subset.

Deep, persistent inequality — access to safe neighborhoods and hospitals, functioning schools, healthy food — plays a part. But across family income levels and educational attainment, the infant mortality rate for black babies is more than twice than it is for whites, according to data from 2007-2013. Black mothers are also more imperiled than white ones — they are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes leading up to or within a year after giving birth. In New York City, black mothers are 12 times more likely to die than their white counterparts. Read more…

Maybe We’ll Finally Figure It All Out in Third Life

Image by Jin Zan via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

For Digg, Joe Veix logged back in to Second Life, 15 years after its creation and a decade after its heyday. He learned that there are still 800,000 active users but they’re hard to come by, that it’s still possible to fly while on horseback, and that abandoned physical spaces and abandoned digital spaces share a common grimness.

I couldn’t find the Edwards HQ, or Laguna Beach. Nothing showed up in the game’s search engine. I tried asking around. I visited an ’80s-themed night club and asked anyone if they knew where Laguna Beach was. I was immediately warped to a dance podium, where I started dancing, against my will.

I warped to another nude beach. I was greeted by a sign explicitly stating that no erections were permitted on the beach.

There were actually a few people at the beach, but none of them seemed active and were most likely AFK. How long had computers been running, with their ghost avatars waiting in suspended silence?

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How Amazon Exploits Chinese Workers to Crank Out Its Products

Imaginechina via AP Images

Cheap disposable labor is an essential part of too many lucrative businesses, and it’s currently an integral part of Amazon’s business model. For The Guardian, Gethin Chamberlain examines the enormous physical and psychological toll that Kindle and speaker production takes on low-wage Chinese workers.

In the Foxconn factory in the city of Hengyang, Amazon and Foxconn can pay their temporary workers a minimum wage that’s lower than in other Chinese cities. Factory supervisors make workers ask for permission to use the toilet. But when they pay workers their standard $2 hourly rate for overtime, the factory is clearly violating Chinese labor law. The good news is that US-based labor rights investigator China Labor Watch sent an undercover agent inside the factory to document conditions. While this undercover worker cleaned dust from 1,400 Echo Dot speakers with a toothbrush in one day, she made careful observations about life inside Amazon’s factory, and CLW used her findings to try to pressure Amazon to improve conditions.

Another worker tells her she, too, is suffering: “While working at the same work position and doing the same motions over and over again each day, she felt exhausted and her back was sore and her neck, back and arms could barely take it any more.”

Alexa’s diary makes no happier reading the following day. A woman of about 45 tells her how she has been scolded because she is not fast enough: “It might be because she was getting older so her speed was slower and her reactions were slower. When the line leader was telling her off, she started crying. After I returned to the dorm, an older woman … said that last time the line leader told her off, she also cried.”

She describes long nights of repetitive and relentless work, with fellow workers close to falling asleep on their feet. During a break about midnight she sees that “many people were resting on the assembly line and sleeping, while others had pushed together some chairs and were sleeping on those. Some had even stacked together some foam boards and slept on top of them.”

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This Month in Books: ‘We Have Nothing to Weigh Our Hearts Against’

Imagno / Getty

Dear Reader,

When I look at this month’s Books Newsletter, all I can think about are borders, crossings, the terrible distances between people who have been separated….

Of course, that’s almost certainly because those things are already on my mind. To read the news now is to be made aware of the perils and punishments reserved for people who have their heart set on something remote, who have faith in the faraway.

Qiu Miaojin, the first openly gay woman in Chinese literature, migrated halfway around the world, from Taiwan to Paris. In her second novel she writes of a character who has done the same, in a bid for self-actualization which ultimately fails. The character invents a non-binary imaginary friend to live out an idealized version of her life after she ceases to exist. As our reviewer Ankita Chakraborty says of this narrator, “She is willing to cross boundaries that define reality from imagination, woman from man, landscape from landscape, and life from death.” A profound sense of alienation, brought on by stigmatization, lies as the heart of Qiu’s queer classics — a breach that opens up between the self and others. The narrator crosses borders in order to become her true self, but ends up feeling like nothing more than a foreigner in a foreign land.

Of course, there’s feeling like a foreigner in a foreign land, and then there’s feeling like one in your homeland. Our reviewer Brittany Allen writes about two new short story collections that explore the inner lives of black Americans. The characters in these stories, “who tremble on the faultlines, and struggle to inhabit comfortably their impossible bodies,” suffer from the lived experience of “Otherhood,” which compels them to wage endless war inside their own heads, with their own selves.

In his interview with Hope Reese, Michael Pollan advocates for ditching the self altogether. He describes the healthy and grounding experience of seeing his own self “spread over the landscape like a coat of paint.” In his experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, he discovered that:

I wasn’t necessarily identical to my ego, which I had always assumed was the case. And that, you know, your ego is this interesting character. I mean, it really is a character. It’s a projection of someone who sort of stands for you and looks out for you and patrols the borders between you and others, and the border between you and your subconscious.

In his interview with Tobias Carroll, Sergio De La Pava expresses the opposite sentiment, a niggling fear that he might ever be mistaken for someone else, even the person most nearly identical to him who could possibly exist — a “Sergio De La Pava” in another dimension:

If there’s something in another universe that looks like me, has my name, that other people call Sergio De La Pava and is doing something, that’s great, but whatever that thing is, it’s not me… Whatever you want to say my physical body or whatever you want to call it — a mind, you want to call it, a soul, whatever you want to call it — it feels indivisible.

I suppose I’ve drifted from the subject of borders and crossings to the subject of selves and others. Maybe that’s because when I think about borders, I don’t think about the gaps between places, I think about the spaces between people. Nowadays, a border isn’t a division between two pieces of land, it’s a border between two people, repeated and repeated until every small trauma of division becomes a national one. It’s a way of dictating who gets to visit whom, who gets to live with their family and who gets their family taken away. It’s a global parole system, the prisonification of the planet….. The border is everywhere. The border is between you and the pizza delivery guy, you and your high school classmate, you and your child….

Like any border — the ones between nations, the ones between ourselves and others, ourselves and the landscape — even the boundary between our bodies is not a natural phenomenon, but an imagined one. Our bodies are porous. In novelist Christie Watson’s memoir of her nearly 20 years as a nurse, she remembers her awe at the special privilege of surgeons, who can reach a hand into another person’s body and touch that person’s heart. When caring for a boy who has received a heart transplant, whose beating heart she watched be removed and replaced with another child’s, the boy tells her that now he loves a new flavor of ice cream, strawberry, because he believes the previous owner of his heart had loved it. It seems to me like he was welcoming the stranger inside of him, by trying to love with the stranger’s heart — something we all fail to do at our own peril. In the next life, we may find ourselves wanderers on the wrong side of another type of border. As Watson goes on to say:

Ancient Egyptians believed that the heart symbolized truth; after death, they would weigh the heart against a feather of truth, to be eaten by a demon if the scales did not balance, leaving the person’s soul restless for eternity. In this post-truth world, I wonder what will happen to our souls. We have nothing to weigh our hearts against.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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The Difference Between Being Broke and Being Poor

Words by Erynn Brook | Illustrations by Emily FlakeLongreads | June 2018

Erynn Brook is a feminist and freelance writer who studies media, people, communication and culture.

Emily Flake is an illustrator for The New Yorker, The Nib, MAD Magazine, and New Statesman, among other places. 

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Editor: Michelle Legro
Art director: Katie Kosma

Support for this work was provided by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The Menace and the Promise of Autonomous Vehicles

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,419 words)

In Tempe, Arizona, on the cool late-winter night of March 18, Elaine Herzberg, a 49-year-old homeless woman, stepped out onto Mill Avenue. A new moon hung in the sky, providing little illumination. Mill Avenue is a multi-lane road, and Herzberg was walking a bike across; plastic bags with some of her few possessions were dangling from the handlebars. Out of the darkness, an Uber-owned Volvo XC90 SUV, traveling northbound, approached at 39 miles per hour, and struck Herzberg. The Uber came to an unceremonious stop, an ambulance was called, and she died later in a hospital. The car had been in autonomous mode.
Read more…

Behind The NYT Investigation into Prosecuting Overdoses as Homicides

Sonya Cradle holds a poem she wrote in memory of her friend Len Bias, during a wake for Bias at a church Sunday evening on June 22, 1986 in Washington. Bias died of an apparent heart attack in his University of Maryland dormitory. (AP photo/Tom Reed)

Last year, I spoke to a former cop and a public health policy expert, both of whom told me that the major failing of the “war on drugs” was prioritizing incarceration over treatment and prevention. Part of the problem today, the former cop told me, was that in many places where opioids are currently leading to deaths, the only resource available is law enforcement. He pointed to the Midwest town of East Liverpool, Ohio, where a photo of two adults overdosing in a car with a baby in the backseat had gone viral. The East Liverpool police chief had told NPR, “We don’t have any resources, and we don’t have a place. Even if somebody comes down here to the station, knocks on the door and asks for help, where do we send them? We have nothing here in our county.”

“Opioid crisis” has become a catchphrase in the United States. The word crisis points to the panic that authorities in government and law enforcement feel about the situation — panic that seems to be spurring a fevered response to the issue.

A recent New York Times investigation looked at the fervor that has seized prosecutors around the country attempting to do their part to address the problem — by bringing homicide charges against the friends, family, and fellow users of people who die by overdose.

“I look at it in a real micro way,” Pete Orput, the chief prosecutor in Washington County outside Minneapolis, told the reporter, Rosa Goldensohn. “You owe me for that dead kid.”

Goldensohn wrote:

As overdose deaths mount, prosecutors are increasingly treating them as homicide scenes and looking to hold someone criminally accountable. Using laws devised to go after drug dealers, they are charging friends, partners and siblings. The accused include young people who shared drugs at a party and a son who gave his mother heroin after her pain medication had been cut off. Many are fellow users, themselves struggling with addiction.

Goldensohn (who goes by Rosie) spent nearly a year exploring this issue, in several states around the country. Longreads spoke to her and her editor, Shaila Dewan, about the investigation and how it came together.

How did you come up with or find this story?

RG: In 2016, I heard New York City’s now-police commissioner, then the Chief of Department, James O’Neill, allude to opening overdose investigations on Staten Island during a City Council hearing. Then last year, I learned that the city was spending a lot of their opioid plan resources on detectives and amping up that approach. I set up a Google alert, “overdose charged murder.” I wasn’t necessarily thinking of doing a national story, but I was getting so many clips from all over that I set up a spreadsheet and started tracking them. I saw a lot of local articles saying, “This is the first such charge in this county,” that kind of thing, so I knew it was an emerging trend.

Shaila, What was your reaction when Rosie first brought this story to you? Did you have any hesitations? Did you immediately know what was needed, or was there more of a process in developing what it would ultimately be?

SD: Rosie’s story pitch was ​like Athena leaping from the head of Zeus full grown. I knew immediately that even though she had not written for us before, it was worth a full-fledged New York Times takeout. It was a staggering trend that had so many implications and said something important about how the country deals with crisis.

In terms of what was needed, what we talked about early on (and what I think Rosie achieved), was giving full voice to all sides of the issue — the accused, the victims’ families, the prosecutors, etc. We didn’t want it to be a gotcha piece; we wanted it to really grapple with responsibility and guilt.

What kind of resources and support did this story require?

RG: A lot. First off, a very experienced and fantastic editor and a supportive desk and institution. Shaila spent a ton of time with me, basically taught me how to do this kind of story while I was doing it. I had never done anything on this scale before and she had the map and knew where we were in the process even when I didn’t. We projected each section on a TV screen and worked through it line by line.

Second, time. Third, money. The Times invested a lot of money in this piece, flying me around to West Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin. Fourth, a brilliant data team that audited all my numbers and analysis to make sure I was doing it right. Fifth, the lack of desire for any extracurricular activities or social engagement.

SD: We needed time and travel. Time to do way more interviews than we would ever use, to become an expert on something that no one is an expert on yet because it’s too new, and travel to find and go deep with the right examples. Rosie actually went to Hibbing, MN, twice, but I’ll let her tell that story if she wants to.

We also needed to quantify the problem as best we could​. Data is a perennial problem in criminal justice stories because there are basically more than 3,000 local justice systems and many states don’t have reliable, centralized case tracking.

Rosie, can you talk about what you learned from this project, your biggest takeaways?

RG: One of my biggest takeaways is how much of the writing of a long feature like this is done in the reporting of it, getting the kind of details that will bring it to life. As Shaila mentioned, I went to Hibbing twice. I planned to go back secretly for a weekend night with frequent flyer miles because I was looking for a word to describe this town and I felt like I needed to see it again. I had a really nice breakfast at Sportsman’s Cafe and gabbed with the dishwasher there and tried to see the taconite mine but it was blocked off. Hibbing is not only the birthplace of Bob Dylan, but of the Greyhound bus, I learned. The word I came back with was “snowy.”

What were the biggest challenges in making this story happen?

SD: It was extraordinarily difficult to count cases because they were charged under various statutes and sometimes were impossible to separate from other homicide cases. The Times‘s data people and researchers were able to help Rosie clean up her database and determine what data was reliable enough to use. Also, in legal reporting, it’s just incredibly easy to misstep because there are so many finer points.

RG: The analysis of Pennsylvania cases had a lot of logistical pieces, because I needed to get court documents from all these counties and then speak to people involved in dozens of cases, many ongoing. But for me, the biggest challenge was wrangling this massive quantity of material. I interviewed, I think, 15 prosecutors and four are in the piece. I went to a whole trial that’s not in here. What to leave in, what to leave out, in the immortal words of Bob Seger.

Shaila, what advice do you have for reporters who want to undertake a story like this?

SD: Persistence is a good quality. ​I just think that good reporters are determined reporters.