The Longreads Blog

The Lie of ‘One Last Time’ with My Ex

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Ella Dawson | Longreads | May 2020 | 15 minutes (3,819 words)

Henry and I had break-up sex on at least four different occasions, maybe more. I wanted to believe it was because we loved each other that much, when really I was unwilling to read the writing on the wall. It took me years to pry my fingers from his pant-leg and let go of our relationship. In fits of pique I wondered if he was the one who got away, less of a daydream than a deep anxiety that I’d bump into him decades later and love him just as much as I did the day we decided it was the last time. And the next time we decided it was the last time. And the time after that.

We technically broke up in May of 2014 at my college graduation only to get back together six days later when we decided we could overcome the hundreds of miles between Bakersfield and Berkeley. He told me his parents offered to pay for half of the gas required to drive up to see me — it was only when the summer was over that I learned he’d lied and paid for everything himself. We were smart kids who knew long-distance was doomed, but there are some lessons you need to learn for yourself lest you spend the rest of your life wondering if you would have been the exception. We weren’t. It only took us another two months of longing and conflict avoidance to break up again in the kitchen of his parent’s home.

The breakup was not mutual. I scream-cried like someone had died. When I stalked off to sob in the guest room, I expected him to follow me and take it back. Instead he folded his hands together on the kitchen table and clenched them tight, his willpower miraculously holding firm. This turn of events was as surreal as it was humiliating: I sat on the floor and stared at the portraits of his relatives above the heavy antique bed, the extended family I assumed would be mine someday. Two months wasn’t long enough to really try, was it? Two months was summer camp. It wasn’t even a full season. How had he already decided this wasn’t possible? Was I just not good enough to fight for?

We broke up for all the same reasons college sweethearts break up: our lives were taking us in separate directions, and long-distance was as shitty as everyone warned us it would be. I was graduating. Henry, two years younger, was moving to Asia for his junior year, for an ambitious study-abroad program and didn’t want to be the guy always on his phone. I was reeling with post-grad identity issues and undiagnosed anxiety and depression, and I often called him crying while my roommate scowled outside my bedroom. Once when my laptop stopped working, I had a full tilt panic attack over FaceTime as he helplessly Googled Apple store locations near my apartment. Simply put, I was a disaster and we were young. It was too much for him to handle and too much for me to understand, and I took our generic problems personally instead of seeing our breakup as the natural progression of events. All I could believe at age 22 was that he’d given up on our future together, and it must mean I wasn’t worth it after all.
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The Lonely World of Family Life

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The longer Sarah Menkedick lived in the U.S., the more aware she became of its kid culture. Writing for Aeon, Menkedick shows Mexico’s contrasting framework: it’s not strange to bring your children to a bar or a late-night parade, where the whole community is in the fray. The U.S., on the other hand, creates designated places for children — museums, playgrounds, family restaurants. Families are supposed to frequent these even if they can’t stand the children in various stages of overload and meltdown, chucking gooey Teddy Grahams crackers from their strollers.

Although there are many benefits to a society with a distinct family-friendly culture, Menkedick argues that separating family from community life is not one of them.

Kid culture fully subscribes to the idea that children need to inhabit a world unto themselves that has been carefully organised and constructed by adults; that their childhood must be meticulously cultivated in a Petri dish of intentional experiences; that their growth into healthy and happy human beings is contingent upon the number of hours they spend navigating climbing walls or scooping trays of ice into buckets; that ‘good’ parents will rearrange their entire lives to create opportunities for their kids to sit on the grass and watch a librarian act out the story of Hansel and Gretel with finger puppets; that ‘family life’ means doing something targeted specifically or exclusively toward children. It’s the idea that to become a parent is to forfeit citizenship of a larger culture, reinforced by the sly, ubiquitous US capitalist pressure to consume and experience one’s way through a competitive childhood.

The more elaborate excesses of kid culture illuminate its basic paradox. Give a kid three light tables’ worth of coloured sand and half a dozen glowing lightsabers, and she’ll end up cross-legged on the floor studying a tuft of lint. Even the 19th-century reformers in Chicago fretted that kids ‘do not know how to play’. Teachers from Hull House – a settlement house in Chicago for newly arrived European immigrants – would go to playgrounds to instruct children in good, hearty, organised American games such as ring-around-a-rosy, but the children preferred to roughhouse, build massive improvised structures, and hurl themselves around on the swings. Some even dug holes under the fence to the playground.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Franklin Foer, Andy Greenberg, Jerry Saltz Sara Selevitch, and Kyle Buchanan.

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1. Putin Is Well On His Way to Stealing the Next Election

Franklin Foer | The Atlantic | May 11, 2020 | 30 minutes (7,634 words)

Russia wants to eradicate democracy, and they’re doing a fine job of it, by pitting people against one another, sowing discord, misinformation, chaos, and doubt about election integrity. The problem, that plays right into the hands of the Russians, is that the United States is already too divided to do much about it.

2. The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

Andy Greenberg | Wired | May 12, 2020 | 55 minutes (13,941 words)

“At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.”

3. My Appetites

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | May 12, 2020 | 35 minutes (8,500 words)

“On eating and coping mechanisms, childhood and self-control, criticism, love, cancer, and pandemics.”

4. The Un-Heroic Reality of Being an ‘Essential’ Restaurant Worker

Sara Selevitch | Eater | May 12, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,166 words)

“The imperative to thank frontline workers has not extended into material protection and solidarity, from either the government or the general public.”

5. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: The Oral History of a Modern Action Classic

Kyle Buchanan | The New York Times | May 12, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,370 words)

“I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

What I Want to Know of Kindness

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Devin Kelly | Longreads | May 2020 | 14 minutes (3,897 words)

This is the second time we’ve been lucky enough to publish Devin Kelly. Read his first Longreads essay “Running Dysmorphic.”

I remember that I was in a 6th floor classroom of the high school where I used to teach when I got the text. I read some words: Nancy…about to happen…they moved her.

I remember leaving the classroom and all those kids, finding my department head, and huffing out a rush of phrases.

My friend’s mom is about to die, I said. She’s like my aunt, I said. No, no, I said. She’s like my second mom.

I remember how bright it was outside as I walk-jogged to Grand Central to catch a northbound train out of the city. I remember the polish on the shoes of blue-suited men, and the tinny clack they made as they slapped along the sidewalk. I remember thinking how odd it was, and how much I felt alone, and how the world felt stilled and tilted on its axis, but that I was the only one who felt it, like I was leaning sideways while each other person I passed stood upright.

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The ‘Accidental Hero’ Who Saved the Internet from WannaCry

Marcus Hutchins (R) the British cyber security expert accused of creating and selling malware that steals banking passwords arrives with his lawyers Marcia Homann (L) and Brian Klein (R) at US Federal Courthouse on August 14, 2017 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. / AFP PHOTO / Joshua Lott via Getty Images)

Marcus Hutchins was only 22 years old when he discovered the Achilles heel of WannaCry, a piece of ransomware that caused $8 billion in damage in 2017 by taking down Windows computers around the world — including in banks and hospitals — and encrypting their contents for a $300 ransom. As Andy Greenberg reports in this epic piece for Wired, Hutchins learned to reverse engineer botnets in part by creating and selling his own malware as a youth in England. Hutchins’ darkhat hacking was not without its innocent victims, and the FBI eventually caught up to him. But did he deserve leniency in sentencing, considering the good work he’d done stopping WannaCry in its tracks, saving lives in the process? You be the judge.

Cybersecurity researchers named the worm WannaCry, after the .wncry extension it added to file names after encrypting them. As it paralyzed machines and demanded its bitcoin ransom, WannaCry was jumping from one machine to the next using a powerful piece of code called EternalBlue, which had been stolen from the National Security Agency by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers and leaked onto the open internet a month earlier. It instantly allowed a hacker to penetrate and run hostile code on any unpatched Windows computer—a set of potential targets that likely numbered in the millions. And now that the NSA’s highly sophisticated spy tool had been weaponized, it seemed bound to create a global ransomware pandemic within hours.

Hutchins hadn’t found the malware’s command-and-control address. He’d found its kill switch.

Hutchins says he still hasn’t been able to shake the lingering feelings of guilt and impending punishment that have hung over his life for years. It still pains him to think of his debt to all the unwitting people who helped him, who donated to his legal fund and defended him, when all he wanted to do was confess.

I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he’s cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published—and people reach the end of this article—that account will finally be out in the open. Hutchins’ fans and critics alike will see his life laid bare and, like Stadtmueller in his courtroom, they will come to a verdict. Maybe they too will judge him worthy of redemption. And maybe it will give him some closure.

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Five Longreads Stories Selected for 2020 Editions of the ‘Best American’ Series

It’s always a thrill when an essay or article we’ve published is selected for publication in one of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s annual, venerated The Best American Series anthologies.

This year Longreads is proud to announce that no fewer than five pieces we published in 2019 will be published in four of the books.

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Sharing Food to Feed A Family’s Soul

AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama

After WWII, Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s grandmother foraged and grew whatever food she could to feed her young daughter, Kazuko. Kazuko lived and learned to forage to survive, too. After she moved to the US, food forged a similar bond with her daughter, Marie Mutsuki. As Marie Mutsuki Mockett suggests in an essay for Elle, preparing food for other people nourishes bonds as well as the body, and these connections endure for generations. “Unlike so much in our lives that’s now transactional,” Mockett writes, “the making of food is elemental. It makes the cells that constitute the body and keep us clinging to life. I wonder how many problems in the world can be attributed to this lack of understanding: To make food for others from start to finish is to follow through in our commitment to each other.” Now the pandemic has shut Mockett’s mother’s facility off to visitors, and cut off her deliveries of food, she assesses how to live without shared meals and the role they have played in their lives.

When I was 19, I had pneumonia and was hospitalized for a week. While my fever raged and the antibiotics fought to clear my lungs, I refused to eat. The spaghetti and lasagna cooked up by the hospital kitchen turned my stomach. All I wanted was rice and seaweed: Japanese soul food.

After the final fever broke, my mother arrived with three plastic containers. One had rice. Another held pickled sour plums she had made with fruit grown in her garden. A third held ground beef carefully seasoned. “You’ll get better now,” she grinned as she fed me by hand. And I did. My body reconstituted itself out of her nourishment. Even now, when I am sick, I yearn for those flavors.

Back at the nursing home, before the world shut down to combat a pandemic, the social worker talked to us about how we might plan for my mother’s return home: “You’ll need to either use an assisted living facility, or hire care,” she said to my mother, “That way, you can keep your relationship with your daughter as mother and daughter.” This is what people in the medical field tell the elderly and the dying. It’s a way of suggesting that our bonds with our loved ones should remain purely emotional, as though two people can distill the most important aspects of how they interact, the way cream is spooned out from milk, and leave the rest of the work for others to do. But while it’s one thing to accept help with incontinence, bathing, and medication, I stumble over the idea of letting someone else decide what my mother will eat.

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Self Portrait With iPhone

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Pam Mandel | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,453 words)

The first thing I notice are the car selfies. So many of the profiles I see include car selfies. I overthink as I try to determine what this tells me.

I consider the following options:

I have a car. See how I have a car?

No one knows I’m doing this. My car is the only place I can get privacy in which to take a dating profile selfie.

I have no friends, no one to take my picture.

On Reddit and Quora, I learn that others have noticed this too. I find multiple threads asking my exact question. “What’s the deal with all the car selfies?”

Consensus is that the light is good inside your car — it’s even and diffused. You might be on your way to or from an important event, one that requires you to clean up, whatever that means for you. You look in the mirror, check your teeth, and think, “Hey, I look good.” Your phone is right there, in the dash-mounted bracket, perfect for a selfie.

Snap.

I consider taking “car selfie” off my list of disqualifying factors for selecting a mate. I mean date. For selecting a date.
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From Russia, With Malice

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Russia, through its Active Measures campaign, is hard at work sowing chaos in America, including misinformation campaigns on social media designed to stoke racial discord, email hacking campaigns aimed at discrediting campaign officials, and “jangling the doorknobs” at state election websites to find vulnerabilities they can use to disrupt elections. Why? So that Americans question the validity of election results and get disillusioned with the whole process. There’s even a hastag: #RIPDemocracy.

As Franklin Foer reports at The Atlantic, Russia wants to eradicate democracy, and they’re doing a fine job of it. The problem, which plays right into the hands of the Russians, is that the United States is already too divided to do much about it.

The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses, and how to exploit them. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods. Even as to disinformation, the best-known and perhaps most overrated of their tactics, they have innovated, finding new ways to manipulate Americans and to poison the nation’s politics. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.

Problems of inattention, problems of coordination, and deep concerns about November—these themes came up over and over in my interviews for this story. Indeed, at times everyone seemed to be sounding the same alarm. H. R. McMaster, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, sounded it when he proposed a new task force to focus the government’s often shambolic efforts to safeguard the election. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sounded it when he realized how poorly the bureaucracy was sharing the information it was gathering about the Russian threat.

Vladimir Putin dreams of discrediting the American democratic system, and he will never have a more reliable ally than Donald Trump. A democracy can’t defend itself if it can’t honestly describe the attacks against it. But the president hasn’t just undermined his own country’s defenses—he has actively abetted the adversary’s efforts. If Russia wants to tarnish the political process as hopelessly rigged, it has a bombastic amplifier standing behind the seal of the presidency, a man who reflexively depicts his opponents as frauds and any system that produces an outcome he doesn’t like as fixed. If Russia wants to spread disinformation, the president continually softens an audience for it, by instructing the public to disregard authoritative journalism as the prevarications of a traitorous elite and by spouting falsehoods on Twitter.

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This Week in Books: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

Theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy depicted in a Roman mosaic. (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via Getty Images)

[If you’d like to browse all the books mentioned in the newsletter this week, you can do it on our Bookshop page, because I enjoy lists, especially lists about other lists, so I spent a few hours making one. -DS]

Dear Reader,

On Mother’s Day my mom told me that, still, no one in her office is wearing a mask — not when the employees are alone together. She has a public-facing job at a cemetery; through the clientele, as well, calamity stalks her. Grieving families during an epidemic should arouse our empathy, but there is one family that has done its best to test the limits of my pity: a large family of seven, unmasked, who all at once entered the little cemetery office where my mother works, and grew belligerent when asked to leave, and spoke angrily, and spread pestilence and decay upon her, the woman helping them grieve.

Alone together, the cemetery workers don’t wear masks; they do not wear masks unless customers enter; the customers who enter are often unmasked. The masks come on and off like sock and buskin in a Greek play. When it ends, I will know for sure whether it’s been a tragedy or a comedy.

In these inconstant times, I have been thinking of giving up on all these measured scientific and sociological studies of plague times that I ordered a few weeks ago, and which rest on my desk in a talismanic pile to ward off disease, and instead reading only comedies of suffering; well, I guess all comedy derives from suffering, but I mean the very blackest humor written about the very worst of times. It seems to be the only mood that fits as the virus spreads through the White House and the states “open” and my mother masks and unmasks at the cemetery. I could reread Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, which I’ve mentioned before in the newsletter, although I didn’t mention that it’s funny. (Maybe then it didn’t seem so funny.) I could reread Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, which is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. You could read them, too, if you’re in the mood to laugh at something that isn’t funny.

Or if not comedy, then horror. A phrase from a book occurs to me when I think of my mother and the mourners at her cemetery. Or when I see anyone without a mask. In R.W. Chambers’ seminal work of cosmic horror The King in Yellow, four of the stories are interlocking; they each reference a play called The King in Yellow that, rumor has it, drives readers insane when they get to the second act. Only two brief excerpts from the play appear in the book, which makes sense: in the book, the play is banned all over the world, but spreading nonetheless.

The phrase that recurs to me is from this fragment of the play:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

I’m sure you can guess the part that strikes a nerve. But anyway that’s just me. I’m sure we all have one. Some strange little phrase that keeps coming back, again and again, to our growing horror.

1. “Cooking with Giovanni Boccaccio” by Valerie Stivers, The Paris Review

Valerie Stivers prepares a fascinating spread from The Decameron and consults The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? to find out exactly what kind of turning point one could expect a global pandemic to be. “‘The Decameron’ loathes sanctimony, tramples sacred cows, and punishes corruption. It takes elites less seriously and celebrates a cast of characters much more diverse than would previously have been allowed. By observing humanity and the world more realistically, it ushers in a new era of scholarship and reason—the Renaissance, no less.”

2. “Sleight of Hand: On Meena Kandasamy’s ‘When I Hit You’ and ‘Exquisite Cadavers’” by Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Los Angeles Review of Books

A review of two novels by Meena Kandasamy. The first, When I Hit You, “reveal[s] abusive homes as the absurdist performance sets they are: where everyday objects drift loose from their original uses …. where the players know their parts are a matter of life or death”; the second, Exquisite Cadavers, as reviewer Stephanie Sy-Quia writes, is a clever critique of how the first book was received. Reminiscent of Suki Kim’s complaint that her excellent Without You There Is No Us was labeled a memoir rather than a work of journalism, rendering it ineligible for certain journalism prizes, among other concrete consequences, Exquisite Cadavers reacts to the delegitimizing way in which When I Hit You was received as a memoir rather than a novel; “its content was valorized over its form… all too frequently, the fate of women and people of color.”

3. “When James Baldwin Wrote About the Atlanta Child Murders” by Casey Cep, The New Yorker

In light of a new HBO documentary about the Atlanta Child Murders, Casey Cep revisits James Baldwin’s writing on the case, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Cep looks at how the piece came to be (it was no small feat for a black editor at Playboy to lure Baldwin back to the American South) and how prescient, as always, Baldwin’s argument was. He did not believe that the police’s suspect, a young gay black man, was guilty; he wasn’t sure there was a serial killer at work at all. Instead “Baldwin…. used his coverage of the child murders to argue that the crimes were representative of the way that the city and the country still failed to protect black lives. In the eyes of David Leeming, Baldwin’s biographer, ‘The Evidence of Things Not Seen’ is ‘to the aftermath of the “civil rights” movement what “The Fire Next Time” had been to its heyday.’”

4. “Making a Mess of the World: On Hao Jingfang’s ‘Vagabonds’” by Virginia L. Conn, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Virginia L. Conn writes that Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds may be the first work of Chinese sci-fi marketed in the West that has incorporated the fact that “Chinese sci-fi” is now being marketed in the West (ever since the runaway success of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem) into its social commentary; the story features “an aggressively communitarian Mars” and an Earth defined by “insularity and possessive intellectual property laws,” and it revolves around the ways in which characters from each world seem to misunderstand the alien world as well as their own. Conn says this bifurcated effect makes Vagabonds a genuinely Sino-Western work of sci-fi, written with both audiences in mind.

5. “Annie Ernaux’s Object Lessons: Braiding Identity Through Time” by Mary Hawthorne, Lit Hub

Mary Hawthorne’s review of Annie Ernaux’s The Years seems a little late out of the gate, since the book was first published in translation several years ago, but I found its reflections on consumerism to be really interesting during this time. Like all of us, I’ve been shocked by the spectacle of some (mostly white seems like?) Americans claiming they have a dire need to consume remarkably trivial things (and to be served, but I think that’s a separate, particularly racialized aspect of this uniquely American madness), a need which feels so urgent to them that they think it must be a human right. Hawthrone writes that, in The Years, a novel about a family’s evolution over the course of the 20th century, consumerism is a mechanism which erases the past and the family members’ connection to one another. “….objects, especially long-held ones, contain memories, grounding us implicitly in reality; once discarded, so, too, are the memories, along with the reality. [Ernaux] writes: ‘The increasingly rapid arrival of new things drove the past away. People did not question their usefulness, they just wanted to possess them and suffered when they didn’t earn enough to buy them outright.’” Strange to think that being surrounded by their own memories for too long is driving my countrymen insane.


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6. “The Weight of Certain News” by André Naffis-Sahely, Poetry

Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour “is a page-turner,” writes André Naffis-Sahely, which is always a promising epithet for a collection of poetry. “‘One-Way Ticket,’ for instance, is prompted by the discovery of a bunch of one-way train tickets inside the speaker’s pocket. At first, the poem focuses on the lyricism inspired by this unexpected find: ‘Oh, all the one-way tickets! / I haven’t found anything / more sorrowful than you / in the pockets of the world.’ But then it concludes with this arresting image: ‘—You pound the windowpanes of this train to no avail. / In vain you hurl your voice to the other side of the window. / We / are the actors in a silent film.’”

7. “‘Unless We Make Some Place’: On Andy Croft’s ‘The Years of Anger: The Life of Randall Swingler’” by Robert Chandler, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Robert Chandler reviews Andy Croft’s The Years of Anger, a biography of Randall Swingler, a British poet who Chandler writes has long been erased from the British canon because of his commitment to communism. Swingler is best remembered for the poetry he wrote as a soldier in WWII. Shortly after the war was over, he wrote:

It is only the bone that is dead. The earth is their flesh
And every year grows green in the sloughing of grief.
All they have lost is fear and the crooked bone.

But in me only the bone is alive, must watch
The slow decay of the will, the inch by inch
Retreat of the nerves, the death by shame.

8. “The Defender of Differences” by Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

A lively review of recent books about or featuring Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology. It begins, “Franz Boas fought his first duel in 1877, when he was nineteen,” and then the reader discovers, delightfully, that the father of cultural anthropology was more or less ritually scarified all over his face. Because apparently the point of duels was to just slice the other person’s face up. Oh, also he was dueling proto-nazis! (Thought I’d try to end on a positive note this week.)

Stay safe,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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