The Longreads Blog

Some Inland California History Begins with an Orange

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

For Riverside native and author Susan Straight, citrus and camaraderie were once the ties that bound people in the part of southern California called the Inland Empire. This area includes the many cities east of greater Los Angeles, and west of Palm Springs, in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. New arrivals used to plant lemons, tangerines, and oranges in their yards, as well as figs, persimmons, avocados, and loquats, and they shared their bounty with friends and neighbors. For California’s public broadcasting service KCET, Straight writes an evocative essay that mixes regional history with personal history, and celebrates the way these imported fruits have shaped the social fabric and local economy. She has an 80 year old apricot tree growing on her property. Even though this arid region isn’t known for its timber, Straight calls its planted gardens “non-native woods” and sees them as paradise, because they helped provide many people what was truly a piece of the good life. “The groves are nearly gone now,” Straight writes, “housing tracts named for what they’ve erased.” But locals don’t give up these traditions.

Eliza Tibbets started the first two seedling navel orange trees. A statue of her was recently unveiled in downtown Riverside, and it seems a fitting time to remind ourselves of the woman who transformed California’s landscape, not just with daring but with generosity. (I still drive past the Parent Navel Orange Trees, at the corner of Arlington and Magnolia Avenues, every week.)

She was married three times, an abolitionist (her third husband, Mr. Tibbets, campaigned as a “Radical Republican” who tried integration in Virginia), a suffragist who tried to vote in 1871, a spiritualist who led séances in Riverside when she got here. But in 1873, she sent to Washington’s new Bureau of Agriculture for the first two seedling trees of a new variety of seedless oranges from Bahia, Brazil, and planted them in her yard in Riverside. She kept them alive with dishwater, shared the fruit and more cuttings, and changed the economy and the very look of Southern California. (Neither she, born in Cincinnati, or the seedlings, were natives.)

By 1886, entire towns like Rialto, Bloomington, Corona and Redlands were laid out around groves of Washington navel orange trees. Packing houses for Sunkist Growers and other cooperatives were built, the Santa Fe Railroad took boxcars full of fruit all over the nation, and oranges were shipped around the world. By 1895, Riverside had the highest per capita income in America, thanks to the citrus industry.

The faces of Southern California changed with citrus, too.  Chinese laborers, Italians and Mexicans and Japanese and African-American southerners, Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma and Texas and Colorado — all picked and packed and trucked oranges.  I grew up with their kids.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Alexander Demianchuk/TASS (Photo by Alexander DemianchukTASS via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Malcolm Harris, Tom Lamont, Melissa Jeltsen, Moe Tkacik, and Lavinia Spalding.

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First, some great news! Your support has helped us to publish moving, incisive personal essays. Our essays editor Sari Botton learned this week that two of our pieces, “Vacation Memories Marred by the Indelible Stain of Racism,” by Shanna B. Tiayon and “Revisiting My Grandfather’s Garden,” by Mojgan Ghazirad have been selected to appear in Best American Travel Writing 2020. We’re thrilled! We couldn’t have published these essays without your support and we’re grateful for it!  

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1. Shell Is Looking Forward

Malcolm Harris | New York Magazine | March 3, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,271 words)

The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.

2. The Invisible City: How a Homeless Man Built a Life Underground

Tom Lamont | The Guardian | March 5, 2020 | 24 minutes (6,244 words)

“After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious.”

3. The Traveling Salesman Bringing Abortion Bans to a Texas Town Near You

Melissa Jeltsen | HuffPost | March 2, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,228 words)

Mark Lee Dickson came up with a plan. If cities could ban plastic straws, he asked, why not abortion?

4. Rebekah Neumann’s Search For Enlightenment Fueled WeWork’s Collapse

Moe Tkacik | Bustle | March 3, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,940 words)

Moe Tkacik takes a close look at the ways in which wealthy, new-agey Rebekah Paltrow Neumann — Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin, Adam Neumann’s wife — helped fuel WeWork’s rise and spectacular fall.

5. Meet the Revolutionary Women Strumming Their Way Into the World of Flamenco Guitar

Lavinia Spalding | AFAR| June 4, 2019 | 13 minutes (3,284 words)

“A former child prodigy travels to Spain to revisit the instrument of her youth—and to learn flamenco guitar from the tocaoras playing to the top of the male-dominated world.”

Behind One of the Sketchiest Men, a Sketchy Woman

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 24: Adam Neumann and Rebekah Neumann attend the 2018 Time 100 Gala at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 24, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic)

For Bustle, Moe Tkacik takes a close look at the ways in which wealthy, new-agey Rebekah Paltrow Neumann — Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin, Adam Neumann’s wife — helped fuel WeWork’s rise and spectacular fall.

Not surprisingly in late-stage capitalism, many WeWork-adjacent faux-virtuous institutions came tumbling down right around the same time the co-working behemoth failed.

The Kabbalah Centre preaches that you can get what you want by willing or “manifesting” it to be. According to the former WeWork staffer, Adam believed that by the time the music stopped, so much important real estate would be annexed by WeWork that they’d be Too Big to Fail. Lofty marketing and lush amenities nearly got them there. “You can use the language of spirituality to revive a discredited idea,” [Rebekah’s yoga instructor and Uma Thurman’s brother Dechen] Thurman says. “And so, the yoga business is old-fashioned labor exploitation, and maybe WeWork was a Ponzi scheme.”

By the middle of the decade, Rebekah’s spiritual stomping grounds had come under fire for taking advantage of congregants. The Jivamukti yoga studio was sued for sexual harassment in 2016 and later settled; it closed its doors in New York City in December 2019. The Kabbalah Centre has faced multiple lawsuits from former members over misappropriated donations and sexual assault, and is currently being sued by seven former staffers who accuse the group of forcing them to sign “vows of poverty” and work essentially for free.

The junk mail company that had bankrolled Rebekah’s lavish childhood began to collapse, too, a few months before WeWork’s botched IPO. In March 2019, roughly 700 employees of a company factory in Ciudad Juárez were told to take a three-day weekend, only to return to an empty warehouse; in interviews, employees said the machinery had been driven back across the border. No one bothered leaving their last paychecks, so employees resorted to hanging “Wanted” posters outside the plant with photos of Rebekah’s brother-in-law, Nick Robinson, who had been running the company during Bob Paltrow’s tax evasion case and is accused in one lawsuit of looting its coffers.

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Is the Weekly Shop Good For You?

Courtesy of Getty Images

Grocery stores around the world are in a race to bring food shopping into the digital era — the Food Marketing Institute predicts that 70 percent of US consumers will be getting at least some of their groceries online within the next four years. As Corey Mintz writes for The Walrus, what is less clear is what ripple effects this will have on “our daily lives, our communities, our health, and our workforces.” 

My local grocer, Potsothy “Pots” Sallapa, upon hearing of my engagement, insisted that we hold the wedding in his shop. My fiancée thought it sounded crazy at first—I remember her saying something about not wanting our photos to feature a stack of ­cereal boxes. But the store was a cozy place and near the apartment we shared at the time, and she agreed to at least give it a look with fresh eyes. As we toured the high-ceilinged, wood-beamed store, among Saturday-morning crowds stocking up on grapes and granola, I could see on her face that this wasn’t just a place people went to acquire toilet paper: it was a community hub. A few months later, we walked down the store’s central aisle and got married between the cash register, the root-vegetable table, a group of our friends and family, and a display of maple syrup.

There is something fundamentally important about analog shopping — getting out of the house, choosing what you want to purchase, finding new things to buy and “even the game of choosing the right checkout aisle, the one with the fastest cashier.”

One problem with all this progress is that, while other human beings can be annoying—clipping our nails on the subway, calling instead of texting, disrespecting the unwritten rule that the middle seat on a plane gets armrest preference—we need one another. Research suggests that even low-level social interactions—the kinds we have with our neighbours and mail carriers and local storeowners—form bonds known as “weak ties.” These connections have been shown to improve physical and mental health and to help reduce loneliness. “Even social interactions with the more peripheral members of our social networks contribute to our well-being,” concludes one 2014 study of weak ties—an important finding as rates of self-reported loneliness grow. More than a third of Americans over forty-five feel lonely, a 2018 study found. While some of this has been attributed to changing family dynamics (we get married later and less often than we used to, and we have fewer children), casual opportunities for social interaction, like those found when buying food, are a part of preventing isolation as well.

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The Man Who Lived in a Hole in Hampstead Heath

A man walks across snow-covered Hampstead Heath, London, United Kingdom (Photo by Tim Graham/Getty Images)

He was a local handyman with a bone disease which ended his work as a stage hand. He was a regular at The Garden Gate pub who enjoyed an ale in the evenings. At the end of those pub evenings Dominic Van Allen went home — to a bunker he’d dug and fortified, well hidden in the brambly section of Hampstead Heath. It was warm, safe place to sleep and enjoy a bowl of soup re-heated on his stove.

As Tom Lamont reports in this fascinating piece at The Guardian, Van Allen wasn’t destitute. He earned a little money doing odd jobs, but there was no way he could earn enough to pay notoriously high rents in London. He wasn’t an addict or mentally ill, and because so many Londoners are far worse off, Van Allen ‘”never quite reached the top of anybody’s list, and was eventually told: “It’s unlikely you’ll get housed.”'”

Still: it came as a surprise, one ranger told me, when they came across a patch where steam was rising out of what ought to have been solid ground.

He would never plausibly make London rent. Social housing was just out of reach. A mortgage purest fantasy. Van Allen had taught himself, instead, how to borrow a piece of this expensive city, night by night, on unarranged loan.

Halfway along the footpath, he turned off again, this time stepping directly into dense bramble. He found a narrow gulley that had been cut between the thorns and followed it through a zigzag turn to a small clearing, where he bent in the dark and patted the earthy floor. There – a concealed hatch. Van Allen tugged it open with his fingers and descended into the ground, closing the hatch behind. Below, he flicked on lights at a switch. He hung up his coat.

There was space in the bunker for two camp beds, pushed against opposite walls. In the 4ft gulley between the beds, Van Allen could stand, comfortably enough, without his head scraping the trussed timber roof. The floor underneath him was poured concrete. He’d put up hooks for his coat, his bag and his cooking utensils, and there were shelves by the bed for odds and ends. Push-button LED lights were stuck to the walls using tape. There was a portable gas stove down here, and now that Van Allen was in for the night, he lit it and emptied a can of soup into a pan. After eating, he washed up with wet wipes. Litter was tied inside plastic bags, to be spirited away to a distant bin, early tomorrow, before the heath’s park rangers came on duty.

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“Follow Along,” or How to Learn Flamenco Guitar with a Tocaora

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For more from Lavinia Spalding, read her Longreads essay, The Cabin.

I’ve been studying guitar for three years now and electric bass for nine months. There’s something special about the happy hours of focus I spend to earn any proficiency, whether it’s to learn a new concept or chord voicing, improvise a jazz phrase, or glean a bass line from an old blues tune.

As a child guitar prodigy, Lavinia Spalding knows this love, devotion, and satisfaction well. She studied with her father — one of the few students of the greatest flamenco guitarist of all time, Paco de Lucía — until she became a teen and the need for friendship overshadowed her love of guitar. Spalding’s father had infused her not only with musical acumen but also possibility; he had wanted her to become the rarest of flamenco musicians, a tocaora — a female flamenco guitarist.

In this beautiful essay at AFAR about family, relationships, commitment, and above all, the love of studying and playing music, Spalding recounts how she travelled to Spain to study flamenco in person with three of the country’s most celebrated tocaoras.

Tell people in the United States that your dad studied with Paco de Lucía, and they’ll smile. Here in Andalusia, they’ll gasp. Their eyes will bug out. They’ll want to hug you. Pilar is no exception. When I show her my dad’s transcription, I might as well have unveiled a sacred relic. “It’s glorious,” she says, poring over it. “Magnífico.”

Leafing through my folder of sheet music, however, she acts like I’ve thrust rotten chicken under her nose. She’ll happily instruct me in the ways of soleares, but this?! No. When she demonstrates a compás, the rhythm she intends to teach me, her hands become birds—darting and fluttering, dipping and swooping, graceful, furious.

“OK,” she says. “Now follow along.”

To be clear, there is no chance I can do this.

And as I struggle, regret creeps in. How could I have quit—twice—such an important part of my life?

But during our second lesson, something happens. While showing me how to connect a compás to a falseta, Pilar suddenly begins playing a melody my father taught me 15 years ago. A delicate, lively string of single notes, it’s as familiar as a lullaby. “That!” I shout. Tears blur my eyes, and then my fingers are plucking along as fast as hers. It’s as if a spirit has been summoned to return me to guitar. It’s as if a missing piece of me is back.

But I do remember, finally, what it means to be musical. To concentrate deeply, practicing until something beautiful emerges. To live for the moment when it all connects and you are elevated. And mostly, to share that magic with someone else.

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8 Longreads by Will Storr on the Science of Storytelling

Author Will Storr (Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Getty Images)

“People change, don’t they?” journalist and author Will Storr asks at the beginning of an Aeon essay called “Plot Twist.” That question has been at the heart of Storr’s writing for years now, a question he carries with him throughout so many of his investigations into science, belief, and the human impulse to tell stories.

Storr has a knack for starting with a simple statement that anyone can intuitively understand, then revealing how deceptive both simplicity and intuition can be. Storr’s willingness to challenge even his most basic assumptions appears most often in his stories as curiosity, which he brings anew to all of his conversations with sometimes desperate story subjects who find themselves facing some of life’s most serious consequences.

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“We Are Not Lost Causes”

Universal Images Group / Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Mark Obbie | Longreads | March 2020 | 45 minutes (12,427 words)

The three young men sauntering down a city sidewalk showed no signs of alarm as a thin man in a dark hoodie hopped out of the passenger side of a gold Honda minivan. They did not flinch as the man rushed toward them on foot while the van, its windows heavily tinted, continued on past.

This neighborhood on the northeast side of Rochester, New York, has ranked among one of the poorest and most violent in the United States. But it was the trio’s home. A year earlier, one of them, Lawrence Richardson, had been jumped and knifed nearby after exchanging insults with a group of guys he didn’t know. He hadn’t looked for that trouble, and the same was true today. Richardson and Cliff Gardner, his coworker at KFC, had spent the afternoon preparing to look for better jobs. On the city’s southwest side, they stopped at the Center for Teen Empowerment, a nonprofit where Richardson had worked for a year on anti-violence and community-improvement projects, and where he still volunteered now and then. After encouraging Cliff to create a résumé, Richardson suggested they catch a bus to the northeast side, where Richardson had grown up. He wanted to introduce Cliff to Kenny Mitchell, his best friend and fellow Teen Empowerment youth organizer.

The three hung out at Mitchell’s second-story apartment, then walked to a corner store for some snacks. They were just returning to Kenny’s when they encountered the van and its passenger.

Moments later, three calls hit 911 operators in quick succession. Callers described a chaotic scene with two bodies crumpled on the ground while a third, trailing blood up the stairs to Mitchell’s apartment, lay at the feet of his panicked father.

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With Your Support, We Can Continue to Be a Space for First-Person Storytelling

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I’ve felt very grateful over the past six years to be able to work with such a varied mix of writers at Longreads, from seasoned journalists to previously unpublished writers to artists who have expanded into longform storytelling.

Many of my favorite pieces published here are personal essays — stories chronicling moments of discovery, unanticipated journeys, inner explorations made accessible, and more. Essays editor Sari Botton has built a rich archive, and I’m not even sure where to begin to highlight the breadth of this work and the diversity of voices. Among these stories, you’ll find the Fine Lines series — a collection of writing about age, like Laura Lippman’s “The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People” — and other recent popular essays, like Michael Musto’s “The Danger of Befriending Celebrities.”

I’m particularly drawn to unexpected and beautifully braided essays: I think of Kimi Eisele’s “Duet for a Small Porpoise’s Extinction,” a lyrical essay on nature, dance, language, and a world of disappearing things; and also Alison Kinney’s “The Man in the Mirror,” which begins by examining one of my favorite paintings — The Arnolfini Portrait — and then explores trust, vulnerability, intimacy, and the aftermath of rape. An essay published last fall on the anniversary of Northern California’s Camp Fire, “California Burning” by Tessa Love, also comes to mind, as it weaves meditations on California and fire, Berlin and foxes, and destruction and regrowth.

Above all, it’s important to give writers the space to explore and go in unique directions, telling stories only they can, and Longreads has been able to provide that wide, blank canvas for them to do so.

As an editor, I’ve also loved bringing illustrated personal narratives to life. In the delightful “Cut From the Same Cloth,” Myfanwy Tristram explores aging, maternal envy, and the extreme fashions of her teenage daughter. In “Home Is a Cup of Tea,” sketch artist Candace Rose Rardon combines watercolor sketches and travel writing in a piece exploring her evolving definition of home. And in “Unleashed in Paris,” Kate Gavino shares how she became comfortable speaking French while walking Parisian dogs in a longform comic that, at its heart, is about belonging. The ability to explore different approaches to first-person stories, like these, is made possible through Longreads member support.

Whatever the format, contributors are given the space to experiment, which is what has kept me excited about working at Longreads to this day. With your contribution during our Winter Member Drive, you can help us publish more stories and expand the roster of writers and artists we’d love to work with.

Please consider donating during our Winter Member Drive — every dollar helps, and every recurring contribution helps even more. Click the button below if you’re ready to become a member and support writers, journalists, and illustrators who have unique and resonant stories to tell.

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How I Got My Shrink Back

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Susan Shapiro | Longreads | February 2020 | 28 minutes (7,036 words)

Rushing to see him that Friday evening in August, I turned the corner and was shocked to catch Haley leaving his brownstone. What the hell was she doing here? I prayed my eyes were wrong and it was another tall redhead, not my favorite student. Inching closer, I saw it definitely was her — in skinny jeans, heels and a pink blouse, her unmistakable auburn hair flapping down her back as she flounced away. I froze, so crushed I couldn’t breathe.

Darting inside, I shrieked, “I just saw Haley walk out of here. You lied to me!”

“I never lied to you,” he insisted, quickly closing his door.

“Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with her?”

“Of course not.” He looked horrified.

He wasn’t my lover, cheating with a younger woman. He was the long-term therapist who’d saved me from decades of drugs, alcohol, and self-destruction. I couldn’t believe that right before our session, Dr. Winters had met with my protégée, whom I’d loved like a daughter. For the past three years, she’d sat in my classroom, living room, beside me at literary events, and speed walking around the park. She was the only person I’d ever asked him not to see, and vice versa. I felt betrayed from both sides.

Earlier that day, Haley had emailed to see if I’d recommend my gynecologist, housekeeper and literary agency. “Want my husband too?” I’d joked. In the spring, when I’d first sensed she was ransacking my address book and life, I’d asked Dr. Winters about the eerie All About Eve aura.

“She sounds nuts,” he’d said.

“That’s your clinical assessment?” I asked, adding “Don’t be flippant. She’s important to me.”

He’d sworn he wouldn’t treat her, laughing off my paranoia.

Now I could barely speak as I realized she’d broken her vow. And he’d let her in, giving her the slot directly before mine, then ran late, as if he wanted me to catch her. Perched at the edge of his leather couch, I imagined Haley sitting right where I was, leaning on the embroidered cushions, spilling secrets she’d previously shared only with me to my confidante. His plush work space morphed from my safest haven for 15 years into the creepy crawly Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

“Then why was she here?” I couldn’t process her so out of context.

“That woman is not my patient,” he insisted.

His technical wordplay sounded like Bill denying Monica. I craved a drink, joint, and cigarette.
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