The Longreads Blog

A Profile for #BachelorNation

Photo: ABC

Last January, the massively talented Taffy Brodesser-Akner profiled Chris Harrison, the longtime host of The Bachelor, for GQ. The brilliance of a Brodesser-Akner profile is in the way she treats her subjects: with steadfast humanity, even (and especially) in situations where a lesser writer might mock or ever so slightly sneer. Which is not to say that she sacrifices an ounce of humor in her refusal to condescend; the piece is often hilarious, but honestly so.  To borrow a phrase from Bachelor parlance, she’s there for the right reasons. Anyway, as The Bachelor enters its 20th season, the time seems right to revisit her profile. A brief taste:

Later, when Chris and I meet up with Gwen for salad—amicable, amicable—she tells me that he was born knowing exactly what to say and how to say it. I can’t attest to how far back this skill of his stretches, but I can confirm that he’s still got it. Chris Harrison is one of the smoothest motherfuckers I’ve ever met. On-screen he is able to do something that I believe men are generally not wired for: He can sit there and listen to a woman, allow her to emote and cry, and never interrupt, never try to shut her down or clean her up. Sure, it’s good television to let the tears flow, but still, it’s rare to find a man who can allow himself to allow it. When it’s time to ask a contestant to leave, his face is the face you want: lips mashed mournfully together, eyebrows up, big sigh.

Even off-camera, he speaks in crisp sentences. He doesn’t stumble. He doesn’t stammer. You should see my interview transcript; it came back from the transcriber as if it had already been edited. Gwen says Harrison is just as he appears on TV, “but funnier. People don’t realize how funny he is.”

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We’re Going On A Bear Hunt in New Jersey

Photo: GoToVan

As sunlight waned, Tom and I drove back to our hunt site to see if we couldn’t surprise a bear at dusk, when the animals tend to feed. But the bait pile was undisturbed. We found only the seating pads we’d left behind, and we set out to make a last pass over the trails. Tom’s mood was mellow. It had been, for the most part, a peaceful day in the woods, and it was time to consider other dinner options. Tom was thinking pizza.

Shotgun blasts, three of them, came at intervals. Echoing at a distance, they reminded me of nothing so much as what you hear in Westerns—reports from revolvers, fired at close range by unhurried men sure of their targets. “Sounds like somebody’s got a bear,” Tom said, cocking his head. “That, or else it’s a deer hunter who doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

—Ursus americanus isn’t the first animal to come to mind when you think of New Jersey, but the black bear is native to the state. Their population, once depleted by colonial Dutch immigrants, has risen into the thousands. Chris Pomorski joins avid hunter Tom Slaughter (yes, that’s his real name) on a bear hunt, visiting the woods and a check station for hunters to register their “harvests.”

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Researching Our Martian Heritage

In Nautilus, Tim Folger writes about how scientist are still debating whether organic and inorganic materials found on Martian meteorite ALH84001 contain evidence that life existed on Mars before it existed on Earth. If it did, then life could have spread to Earth from meteorites, which could make human beings ─ and other Earthly life ─ descended from Martians.

While many scientists consider liquid water to be the most essential ingredient for life, Earth may once have harbored too much water. “The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely covered by oceans,” says Kirschvink. Without some dry land, he says, it would have been difficult for the basic chemical ingredients of life to form. “The reason is very simple … if you link two amino acids together to make a protein, you have to remove water.” And that would have been impossible if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—literally a beachhead—to get started. Ancient Earth might not have had any dry land, but Mars certainly did.

“All this is controversial since we’re talking about a world 4 billion years ago,” says Kirschvink. “But it’s very clear that Mars had southern highlands, and what is looking more and more like a north polar ocean basin. If you’ve got volcanic terrain sticking up, with rainfall and streams and rivers—if life had managed to get started there, it would have thrived.” That scenario, which seems very likely to Kirshvink, has some remarkable implications: Life, after its genesis on Mars, might have spread from there to Earth, borne here by meteorites. And that would make us—and every other living thing on Earth—the descendants of spacefaring microbes from Mars. According to Kirschvink, we won’t find our first ETs on some other world—we just have to glance in a mirror. “I really think we’re Martians,” he says. For Kirschvink, life on Mars is unlikely to represent the second genesis that McKay is looking for.

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Kudzu, an Invasive Plant, Is Not Going to Devour the South

In college, I had a professor who declared that every true work of Southern literature mentioned a dead mule. He was being facetious, of course, but he was not wrong—there are certain images that pervade regional literature over and over again, serving as signifiers or metaphors. Kudzu is one of those images. If you’ve never come across kudzu before, whether through literature or geography, it’s a plant. Specifically, it’s “a quick-growing eastern Asian climbing plant with reddish-purple flowers, used as a fodder crop and for erosion control.” And: “It has become a pest in the southeastern US.” (Thanks, Google Definitions.)

At Smithsonian Magazine, botanist Bill Finch slices through the mythos surrounding this meandering vine and its political and economic roots.

I’m not sure when I first began to doubt. Perhaps it was while I watched horses and cows mowing fields of kudzu down to brown stubs. As a botanist and horticulturist, I couldn’t help but wonder why people thought kudzu was a unique threat when so many other vines grow just as fast in the warm, wet climate of the South…

Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles. Bored children traveling rural highways insist their parents wake them when they near the green kudzu monsters stalking the roadside. “If you based it on what you saw on the road, you’d say, dang, this is everywhere,” said Nancy Loewenstein, an invasive plants specialist with Auburn University. Though “not terribly worried” about the threat of kudzu, Loewenstein calls it “a good poster child” for the impact of invasive species precisely because it has been so visible to so many.

It was an invasive that grew best in the landscape modern Southerners were most familiar with—the roadsides framed in their car windows. It was conspicuous even at 65 miles per hour, reducing complex and indecipherable landscape details to one seemingly coherent mass. And because it looked as if it covered everything in sight, few people realized that the vine often fizzled out just behind that roadside screen of green.

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It’s in the Stars: A Reading List About Astrology

In 2015, I started to copy my weekly horoscopes into my journal. I didn’t do it every week, but I did it often enough that it became something like a practice. I subscribed to several astrological-themed TinyLetters, which led to three hours researching tarot, which led to…well, you get the idea. 2015 was rough, and it feels right to start off 2016 on an optimistic, mystical note.

1. “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” (The Editors, n+1, Winter 2016)

“As skeptics have long argued, part of what makes astrology appealing (and so easily proven “true”) is that each sign of the zodiac has a cluster of traits assigned to it that may be found in nearly any person. Astrology could thus be seen as a humanizing corrective to other, worse stereotypes. To consider that the shy person is sometimes wild, the considerate person sometimes duplicitous, is to practice something rather like empathy.”

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‘Do You Want to Be Matched?’

Jun Gak Han is a one-man matchmaking machine. He’s a solo operation working out of Queens, catering to single Koreans and their concerned family members. Perhaps even more fascinating than Han’s present career is his past—he and several of his brothers escaped North Korea for Seoul, then the United States, during the Korean War. At Narratively, Susan M. Lee encourages Han to tell his life story:

Han attributes his business tenacity to the harsh experiences of his early life. “When you have to survive, your mind lights up and you become bright,” he says.

As for the secret to finding love, he reveals none of his secrets—only that instinct and intuition seem to prevail. “Three seconds,” he says. “You know in three seconds.” When he met his wife, he recalls simply: “I instantly liked her. After talking to her a while, I found out that she was a good one.”

His advice for couples seeking harmony is equally straightforward: “There’s a thing that a man wants to hear from his wife. What is it? ‘You can do anything you want.’ And women want to hear ‘You’re beautiful, I love you.’”

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The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father, and His Sister

Vicente Leon Chavez, 16 // Lucio Soria // El Diario

Sandra Rodríguez Nieto | The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father, His Sister: Life and Death in Juárez | Verso Books | Nov. 2015 | 19 minutes (4,857 words)

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The following excerpt appears courtesy of Verso Books. The passage—the book’s opening chapter—details a single terrible crime, which Rodriguez Nieto uses as an inroad to discussing Juárez’s emergent culture of crime. Verso writes:

Sandra Rodríguez Nieto was an investigative reporter for the daily newspaper El Diario de Juárez for nearly a decade. Despite tremendous danger and the assassination of one of her closest colleagues, she persisted. She didn’t want the story of her city told solely by foreign reporters, because, in her words, “I know what is underneath the violence.” This book traces the rise of a national culture of murder and bloody retribution, and is a testament to the extraordinary bravery of its author. Among other things, The Story of Vicente is an account of how poverty, political corruption, failing government institutions and US meddling combined to create an explosion of violence in Juárez.

A warning: the excerpt below contains graphic violence. Read more…

The Political Past of Adult Coloring Books

Today, bestselling “adult” coloring books boast scenes of aquatic life, gardens and flowers, mandalas and cityscapes. But in the 1960s coloring books were a bit more satirical, more political cartoon than leisure activity:

Not only did coloring books show adults a childishly simple view of a corrupt world, they also showed how a child could be corrupted in the process of learning. When the child is instructed to color the executive gray, she sees the absurdity of conformism, but ultimately learns to take part in it by following the instructions. For adults, the conceit of a return to childhood offered the chance to reject the system and embrace entirely new principles; this questioning of the norms of America society would also stoke the emerging civil rights, anti-war, and women’s liberation movements.

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Sarah Helm on ISIS in Gaza

His central point, however, is incontestable. ISIS is taking root in Gaza among its disillusioned youth; he might not be able to persuade his own students “to maintain peaceful methods,” Omar Hams said. “We are dealing with individual souls. Anyone oppressed can do anything. That is why I issue a warning: to end the suffering of Palestinians, so that…we can influence our people. Otherwise there is no 100 percent guarantee of anything.”

In The New York Review of Books, Sarah Helm investigates the roots of ISIS in Gaza and how Hamas is responding.

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How Two Enemies Shaped the Future of College Sports

Jerry Tarkanian. Image via ronsports

Byers, who became the executive director of the N.C.A.A. in 1951 — a position he held for the next 37 years — transformed a toothless association into a powerful force that mirrored his own personality: secretive, despotic, stubborn and ruthless. He helped turn the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament into the financial windfall we now know as March Madness. He created the N.C.A.A.’s enforcement division, along with a culture that enforced its myriad rules (many of them absurdly petty) with a Javert-like zealotry. He even invented the phrase “student-athlete,” a propaganda stroke that helped universities avoid paying workers’ compensation to injured athletes.

In the New York Times, Joe Nocera looks back at the battle between college basketball coaching great Jerry Tarkanian and former NCAA executive director Walter Byers, who both died in 2015.

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