The Longreads Blog

Can Japan Break Its Addiction to Disposable Packaging?

The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images

Japan is infamous for its excessive, often elaborate, plastic packaging. Want a single slice of cake? At a department store, it will likely come in a box graced with an ice pack and plastic utensil, wrapped in a bag which is wrapped in another bag that gets taped shut, even if you want to eat it a few feet from the point of purchase, even if you request, “No bag, please.” With the system stacked against ecologically minded consumers, how can people opt out of all this and reduce the waste they generate from supermarkets, restaurants, and convenience stores? For The Japan Times, journalist Andrew McKirdy collected all the disposable waste he generated in a week, from straws to bottles to shopping bags, then tried to spend a week without using single-use plastic. Experts warned him it would be tough. It was.

I then beat a hasty retreat from a bakery whose products are all pre-wrapped, then buy a tomato, five potatoes, a carrot, an onion, a jar of jam and a can of tomatoes at a supermarket. The cashier is unconcerned when I say I don’t want a bag, but she looks at me like I’m some kind of eccentric when I say I don’t want my potatoes placed in a smaller plastic bag either.

I am beginning to feel slightly embarrassed, and that only increases when I buy three slices of ham at a different supermarket’s delicatessen counter. The clerk agrees to wrap them in paper, but he tells me they might fall out if he doesn’t then put the package in a plastic bag. When I ask him not to, he looks at me like I’m a full-blown lunatic.

There is another awkward moment when I buy a baguette and a smaller piece of bread at a bakery. The clerk puts the baguette in a paper bag but puts the other piece of bread in a plastic bag. My request to put both in paper is met with confusion, and as I’ve had enough of making a fuss in shops that I often visit, I smile, accept defeat and take my plastic-wrapped bread back home.

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At Mrs. Balbir’s

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jillian Dunham | Longreads | January 2020 | 12 minutes (3,036 words)

I sat on the edge of the bed in my hotel room in Bangkok and dialed. Below me, longboats and water taxis bounced across the Chao Phraya like motorized toys. As much as I wanted for someone to answer the phone, for something to happen, I also hoped that it would go on ringing forever. I was nervous about contact.

The voice that answered startled me with its warmth. “This is Mrs. Balbir,” she answered. I explained that my aunt and I were interested in the Thai cooking classes she taught, listed in my Lonely Planet. “I teach out of my home,” she explained, and proceeded to give me directions. “Tell the taxi to go towards the end of Sukhumvit Soi 15,” she explained. She described the courtyard in which she lived and the tiny sign outside that identified her building. “Come a little early, we’ll have tea and talk,” she said, her voice sweet but a little unnerving, like a blurry bird’s. It was as if we were already acquainted. I didn’t wait for her to hang up first.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Michael Barajas, Evan Ratliff, Andrew Mckirdy, Raffi Khatchadourian, and Agnes Callard.

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1. The Prison Inside Prison

Michael Barajas | Texas Observer | January 21, 2020 | 25 minutes (6,335 words)

Decades with no personal contact, no way back into the general prison population, cut off from the possibility of parole — solitary confinement is an ongoing experiment in cruelty on human subjects.

2. The Mysterious Lawyer X

Evan Ratliff | The California Sunday Magazine | January 16, 2020 | 48 minutes (12,100 words)

Nicola Gobbo defended Melbourne’s most notorious criminals at the height of a gangland war. They didn’t know she had a secret.

3. Throwaway Society: Rejecting a Life Consumed by Plastic

Andrew McMirdy | The Japan Times | January 10, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,465 words)

Japan is the second-biggest producer of plastic waste per capita, after the US. One journalist tries to spend a week without using single-use plastic and discovers how dependent Japan’s food system has become on disposable plastic.

4. N.K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds

Raffi Khatchadourian | The New Yorker | January 20, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,746 words)

In Raffi Khatchadourian’s New Yorker profile, N.K. Jemisin recounts the racism she witnessed as a child in Alabama in the ’80s, as well as racism — editorial and otherwise — that she has lived through in her career.

5. Who Wants to Play the Status Game?

Agnes Callard | The Point | January 16, 2020 | 6 minutes (1,549 words)

Hi, nice to meet you, are we playing the Importance Game or the Leveling Game? With a skilled player, it’s hard to tell one from the other.

The Early Years of Elif Batuman’s Interest in Russian Authors

AP Photo/Charles Krupa

What if author Leo Tolstoy was murdered? Consider the evidence: late in life, the great Russian author started ending his daily journal entries with the phrase “If I am alive.” He and his wife, Countess Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya, fought so much he wrote his novella The Kreutzer Sonata about a husband who murdered his wife. (Granted, Tolstoy did give her his diaries, which detailed his sexual escapades, including the fact that he’d a child with a serf who lived on their property.) He had an associate who was trying to get control of the copyrights to his early manuscripts. Tolstoy’s wife made a strange statement on her deathbed. These are the puzzle pieces that a young Stanford student named Elif Batuman used to investigate the circumstances of Tolstoy’s death.

Before Batuman started writing for The New Yorker, she harbored a profound interest in the famed Russian author. At Granta, Batuman recounts her wild academic goose chase and how it led her to the ranks of other Tolstoyans at the International Tolstoy Conference in Russia. The four days she spent wearing sweatpants and flip-flops after her luggage got lost en route to Russia is the tip of the iceberg. This piece is a comic examination of both a subculture and of the depths of her own youthful imagination, which became her first book, The Possessed, about the people obsessed with Russia’s great authors.

The morning panel was devoted to comparisons of Tolstoy and Rousseau. I tried to pay attention, but I couldn’t stop thinking about snakes. Perhaps Tolstoy had been killed by some kind of venom?

‘The French critic Roland Barthes has said that the least productive subject in literary criticism is the dialogue between authors,’ began the second speaker. ‘Nonetheless, today I am going to talk about Tolstoy and Rousseau.’

I remembered a Sherlock Holmes story in which an heiress in Surrey is found in the throes of a fatal conniption, gasping, ‘It was the band! The speckled band!’ Dr. Watson assumes that she was killed by a band of Gypsies who were camping on the property, and who wore polka-dotted kerchiefs. But Watson is wrong. The heiress’s words actually referred to the rare spotted Indian adder introduced into her bedroom through a ventilation shaft by her wicked stepfather.

The heiress’s dying words, ‘the speckled band,’ represent one of the early instances of the ‘clue’ in detective fiction. Often, a clue is a signifier with multiple significations: a band of Gypsies, a handkerchief, an adder. But if the ‘speckled band’ is a clue, I wondered drowsily, what is the snake? There was a loud noise and I jerked upright. The Tolstoy scholars were applauding. The second speaker had finished her talk and was pushing the microphone along the conference table to her neighbor.

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Inking Against Invisibility

Christopher Malcolm / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Talia Hibbert | Longreads | January 2020 | 8 minutes (2102 words)

When people see my tattoos, they ask me, “Did it hurt?”

My mind says, “That depends. Do you know what hurt is?” because my mind has a bad attitude and a flare for the dramatic.

My mouth mumbles, “Not really,” because my mouth is shy.

Honestly, I’m never sure what people mean when they say “hurt.” Most of the world is visited by pain; I’m handcuffed to it. I’ll describe it to you on the day you tell me what it’s like to breathe.

Another favored question is, “What do your tattoos mean?”

Most people are astonished and appalled when I say, “Nothing.” They can’t believe I don’t know what kind of flowers are inked on my right shoulder, or the species of the bird on my shoulder blade. They’re horrified to hear I have no particular fondness for octopuses, as if the one living on my left thigh might take offense. I rarely explain that the word ICON is tattooed onto my ribs because one day, while in an especially good mood, I heard Jaden Smith’s Icon and was delighted by the unapologetic rap-god arrogance. Aside from anything else, society generally disapproves of arrogance — but I needed it. My body needed it.

Some days, we still do.

The complicated truth is that the story behind each tattoo’s design means far less to me than my decision to get tattoos in the first place. Yes, they hurt. They stung and scratched and burned, some places worse than others, but I barely noticed. And if you read that sentence in a grim, rage-y, action hero voice — good, because that’s how I said it. I’m Judge Dredd the Barbarian Warrior Princess, also known as a sufferer of chronic pain. Ink marks the sites of my major physical trauma, because for years, people tried to tell me that trauma wasn’t there.
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Why the 9/11 Families May Never Get Closure

OSAKA, JAPAN - JUNE 29: U.S. President, Donald Trump (L) meets Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud (L) on the sidelines of the second day of the G20 Summit at INTEX Osaka Exhibition Center in Osaka, Japan on June 29, 2019. (Photo by Bandar Algaloud / Saudi Kingdom Council / Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks, 15 were Saudis, but what role (if any) did the Saudi government play in the scheme? While a small team of FBI agents has been trying to uncover the truth, other parts of the FBI are determined to keep possible Saudi connections secret. Why? As Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella report in a joint investigation by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, President Trump’s not keen on something that might imperil “good relations with Saudi Arabia.”‘ Will the families of those who died as a result of the attacks ever get closure?

On the morning of Sept. 11 last year, about two dozen family members of those killed in the terror attacks filed into the White House to visit with President Trump. It was a choreographed, somewhat stiff encounter, in which each family walked to the center of the Blue Room to share a moment of conversation with Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, before having a photograph taken with the first couple. Still, it was an opportunity the visitors were determined not to squander.

One after another, the families asked Trump to release documents from the F.B.I.’s investigation into the 9/11 plot, documents that the Justice Department has long fought to keep secret. After so many years they needed closure, they said. They needed to know the truth. Some of the relatives reminded Trump that Presidents Bush and Obama blocked them from seeing the files, as did some of the F.B.I. bureaucrats the president so reviled. The visitors didn’t mention that they hoped to use the documents in a current federal lawsuit that accuses the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — an American ally that has only grown closer under Trump — of complicity in the attacks.

The president promised to help. “It’s done,” he said, reassuring several visitors. Later, the families were told that Trump ordered the attorney general, William P. Barr, to release the name of a Saudi diplomat who was linked to the 9/11 plot in an F.B.I. report years earlier. Justice Department lawyers handed over the Saudi official’s name in a protected court filing that could be read only by lawyers for the plaintiffs. But Barr dashed the families’ hopes. In a statement to the court on Sept. 12, he insisted that other documents that might be relevant to the case had to be protected as state secrets. Their disclosure, he wrote, risked “significant harm to the national security.”

Washington’s efforts to keep secrets about possible Saudi connections to 9/11 have also intensified. Former F.B.I. agents who have made court statements in support of the 9/11 families have been warned by the bureau that they risk violating secrecy laws. Kenneth Williams — a retired agent who wrote a prescient memo before 9/11 about radical Arab students taking flying lessons in possible preparation for hijackings — said in a sworn declaration for the plaintiffs that an F.B.I. lawyer told him that the Trump administration did not want him to help them because it could imperil “good relations with Saudi Arabia.” (The F.B.I. declined to comment.)

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Eating To Save My Mind

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Claire Fitzsimmons | Longreads | January 2020 | 18 minutes (3,796 words)

I’m at my neighbor’s house for a Super Bowl party. Taylor is a wonderful cook and a generous host. We’ve had Thanksgiving and Christmas with her family, and there’s an abundance of other Pinterest-worthy spreads we’ve indulged in. 

The girl can cook, and today she’s excelling in her field. There are loaded potato skins with chili and all the toppings. Bursting filled jalapeños and chip ‘n’ dips. Coffee tables, side tables, table tables groan under food. Feet are up, eyes forward, mouths open, as our American friends fulfill their patriotic duty by stuffing themselves in front of a sporting event.

I’m way out of my depth and ill at ease. I’m trying not to look at The Food. And I am definitely trying not to catch Taylor’s eye as I avoid everything on offer. But she is noticing, and she’s got me: “You’re not eating.” 

 “Oh,” I say. “Oh.”

 Then I offer, apologetically, “I’m on Whole30.” 
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Making Something Out of Nothing With a Scratch and a Hope: The Ballad of Shovels and Rope

Shovels and Rope at the Wildwood Revival in September, 2019. Photo by Krista Stevens.

This is no mere profile of the hardest-working duo in music. David Ramsey‘s notes on Shovels and Rope at Oxford American are a poetic testament to the passing of time, to commitment, to raising a family yet carving out the time you need to be creative, to “how to build a life,” to how music lifts us and helps us to cope.

“Partnership for survival in the world—that is romantic to me,” Cary Ann said. “We’re going to get down here in this ditch and we’re going to shovel together until we get to the other side. I’m digging on this side and you dig on that side. Hopefully we get to the other side intact.”

When interviewers like me ask them how they do it, a touring rock band with two kids, they say they’re still figuring it out. That sounds like something you just say, but actually this is precisely what parenting is like, at least for me. You have a problem, you solve the problem, you feel right proud, your solution is rendered laughably irrelevant one day later because your child changes altogether. You are as plucky and as hopeless as a medical researcher hunting a cure for a bug that evolves faster than every breakthrough.

17. The infant’s state of existential bafflement—Who am I? Why am I here?—seems basically correct, if inefficient, and I always feel a little guilty as a parent training it away.

What is the correct answer if your toddler hears the rain outside and asks, is it music?

When Marigold first started talking, I remember taking her to the playground and she approached a lizard and said “hi.” Then she got on her knees and said “hi” to each and every ant that crawled by, one by one, and I had a feeling in my belly: Pride.

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Menace Too Society

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  10 minutes (2,378 words)

It’s taken two years for #MeToo to wake up France, but at least it did. The country appears to finally see the men it has created, which is more than can be said of North America, trapped in the cancel culture stage, calling out everyone except itself. That lack of self-awareness is easy to miss, though. There’s a lot of wokeness floating around these parts — we even have a “woke” princess, although Meghan Markle’s self-appointed royal defection alone could never really loosen the monarchy’s grip on Britain. And for all the hand-wringing by Hollywood stars over diversity, there is once again an established structure above them that resists the change they represent, one that inevitably rears its head in heavily white male awards seasons. France appears to know this now, but only because it was told so by a woman it nearly destroyed.

“I’m really angry, but the issue isn’t so much me, how I survive this or not,” French actress Adèle Haenel told Mediapart in November. “I want to talk about an abuse which is unfortunately commonplace, and attack the system of silence and collusion behind it which makes it possible.” The 31-year-old Portrait of a Lady on Fire star was talking about her alleged abuse from the ages of 12 to 15 at the hands of her first film director, Christophe Ruggia, who was in his 30s at the time. In a follow-up sit-down interview with the same site, Haenel emphasized that she wasn’t canceling anyone; this wasn’t about censoring individuals, but about calling attention to an entrenched society-wide ill and the culture that upholds it. It was this depersonalization that seemed to free up France to reflect, something still largely missing from U.S. conversations — from #MeToo to inclusivity in entertainment to royal affairs — that are all rooted in a foundational hierarchy the entire population is complicit in preserving. “When we come up against the control of the patriarchy,” explained Haenel, “we talk about it as though it were from the outside, whereas it’s from the inside.”

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Barely a week into the new year, two of the most celebrated members of the most prestigious institution in the U.K. turned their backs on it. On January 8, the Sussex Instagram account dropped a shot of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with 195 words that defied centuries of British tradition. “After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution,” it read. “We intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent.” The announcement, which also stated the couple plans to split its time between the U.K. and North America, came not long after the airing of an emotional ITV documentary in which Markle admitted, “I never thought that this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair.” Anyone who watched her say that, who saw the same defeat in her face that they saw in Princess Diana’s decades prior, who saw Harry’s frustration at the thought that it could all happen again, who saw the royal family barely ripple in response to Prince Andrew’s association with a registered sex offender, would not only understand this separation, but expect nothing less. How else to exercise your opposition to a patriarchal empire than to forsake its number one emblem?

But the media took it personally — it was a door slammed and shut tight in the face of their badgering, which had become as much of a presence as the royals themselves, a constant reminder of British society’s supplication at the feet of an outdated overlord. Piers Morgan expressed his preference for the old prince, the fratty drunk who cosplayed a Nazi, amid reports that Madame Tussaud’s had swiftly relocated the royal couple’s wax figures from its esteemed collection. The local response reeked of personal injury, as though the duo had turned its nose up at the greatest gift the country had to offer, rather than what they actually did: kicked off a long-awaited internal confrontation with the colonial inheritance of a populace that insists on running on its fumes. As Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, told NPR, “Instead of taking this as an opportunity for introspection as to what is it about the upper strata of British society that is hostile for a person of color like Meghan Markle, what we’re seeing now is the British media just lashing out again and blaming everyone except themselves.” “Everyone” being “non-aristocratic, non-white interlopers,” which is to say, the people who actually populate Britain. 

If Prince Harry is the future, Prince William is the past, and it’s fitting that he not only presides over the kingdom (or will, one day) but its version of the Oscars. The day before his brother’s adios, the BAFTAs announced that for the seventh year in a row, no women were nominated for best director, and in addition, all 20 of the acting nominees were white. In an internal letter, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ chief executive Amanda Berry and film committee chair Marc Samuelson called the lack of diversity “frustrating and deeply disappointing,” as though it were entirely out of their hands. Yet the 8,000-member committee is chaired by Pippa Harris, who cofounded a production company with Sam Mendes nearly two decades ago, which may explain why 1917, the war epic Mendes directed and coproduced with Harris, was the only nominee for both best film and best British film. This sort of insularity may be unspoken but it is not inactive, it has repercussions for which films are funded and how they are marketed and ultimately rewarded. 

“BAFTA can’t tell the studios and the production companies who they should hire and whose stories should get told,” Samuelson told Variety, deflecting the blame. But the academy’s site claims it discovers and nurtures new talent and has a mission that includes diversity and inclusion, so why does its most recent Breakthrough Brits list appear to be three quarters white? As former BAFTA winner Steve McQueen observed, there were plenty of British women and people of color who did exceptional work in film this year — in movies like In Fabric, The Souvenir, Queen & Slim, and Us — and were nonetheless overlooked, implying a more deeply ingrained exclusion, the sort that permeates British society beyond its film industry and keeps the country from actually perceiving non-white, non-male stories as legitimate art. Snubbed Harriet star Cynthia Erivo confessed to Extra TV that she actually turned down an invitation to sing at the BAFTAs, evoking Markle’s absences from a growing number of royal engagements. “It felt like it was calling on me as an entertainer,” Erivo said, “as opposed to a person who was a part of the world of film.”

Awards as a whole are representative of industry-wide limitations, which, as ever, are tied to the dominance of a particular group in the larger society. The Oscars, dating back to the ’20s and established to garner positive publicity for Hollywood (while extinguishing its unions), seem to persist in the belief that that is tied to white male supremacy. I probably don’t have to tell you the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just elected another middle-aged white man as its head (David Rubin) and has a member base that is 84 percent white and 68 percent male. And that’s an improvement after April Reign’s viral 2016 #OscarsSoWhite outcry. “It’s not about saying who is snubbed and who should have been nominated,” Reign told The Huffington Post at the time, “it’s about opening the discussion more on how the decisions were made, who was cast and who tells the story behind the camera.” And yet the response, as always, has been tokenism — one black nominee here, an Asian one there, a one-for-one reaction to cancel culture which provides momentary relief but no real evolution. The individual successes of Moonlight and Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman and even Parasite, not to mention Spike Lee being named the first ever black Cannes jury head, can’t ultimately undo more than 100 years of white male paternalism. The Oscar nominations this year, dominated by four movies that are very pale and very violent — Joker, 1917, The Irishman, and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood — encapsulate the real soul of Hollywood and the society in which it was forged. It is no mistake that, as The Atlantic outlined, the ceremony neglects “domestic narratives, and stories told by women and people of color.” Harvey Weinstein, who turned awards campaigning into a brutalist art form while allegedly brutalizing women behind the scenes, may no longer be the Oscars’ figurehead, but his imprint endures.

À propos, Les Misérables, a gritty drama about a bunch of men facing off with a bunch of other men (oh, and some boys too) in a poor neighborhood in Paris, was the French submission to this year’s Oscars instead of Haenel’s critically preferred film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a lush period romance about two women in love. It was that film’s director, Céline Sciamma, for whom Haenel returned to acting in 2007 with White Lilies (and with whom she had a romance off-camera) years after her experience with Ruggia drove her from the industry. Though she opened up to Sciamma about being sexually abused, Haenel didn’t go public until she was firmly established with two Césars (the French Academy Award equivalent) to bolster her legitimacy — she knew that otherwise society, French and otherwise, sides with men. “Even if it is difficult to fight against the balance of power set out from early adolescence, and against the man-woman relationship of dominance, the social balance of power has been inversed,” Haenel told Mediapart in November. “I am today socially powerful, whereas [Ruggia] has simply become diminished.” This was a crucial but deemphasised aspect of the shift in America which took place after a slew of A-list white actresses — women who were held up by society and thus listened to — accused Weinstein of abuse, a shift which did not take place after a slew of lesser known women, many of them women of color, accused Bill Cosby. (That the latter is black no doubt also played into the country’s lingering racist belief that all black men are latent criminals, so obviously he was a predator, right?) With none of these longstanding prejudices addressed, however, they risk being repeated, as the system which permitted these men to abuse their power prevails.

“What do we all have as collective responsibility for that to happen. That’s what we’re talking about,” Haenel said in her sit-down interview. “Monsters don’t exist. It’s our society, it’s us, it’s our friends, it’s our fathers. We’re not here to eliminate them, we’re here to change them.” This approach is in direct opposition to how #MeToo has been unraveling in the U.S., where names of accused men — Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Matt Lauer, R. Kelly, Louis C.K., Weinstein — loom so large on the marquees that they conveniently block out reality: that they were shaped by America, a place that gives golden handshakes to abusers, barely takes them to trial for their alleged actions, and sometimes even cheers them on. It’s not that women here have not been saying the same thing as Haenel, it just seems to be that their message is lost in the cacophony of proliferating high-profile cases themselves. Haenel’s resonance sources from not only the relative anomaly of a French woman of her stature making such claims, but also the fact that she is so much more famous than her alleged perpetrator and that her age at the time makes it a clear instance of abuse. Perhaps it also has to do with her disclosure coming amidst the ongoing yellow vests movement, which has primed France’s citizens to call for all manner of accountability.  

Haenel’s alleged abuser has since been charged with sexual aggression against a minor, though she initially refused to go through the justice system, which she saw as part of a deeper systemic bias that resulted in her abuse. UniFrance, which promotes French films internationally, has openly backed the actress and is in the process of creating a charter to protect actors, and, in a historic move, the French Society of Film Directors dropped Ruggia, its former copresident. Meanwhile, Gabriel Matzneff is also being investigated following the publication of a memoir by Vanessa Springora in which the publishing head describes her teen sexual encounters with the then-50-something-year-old French writer who has always been open about his affinity for underage girls and boys. And the same country that supported Roman Polanski in the aftermath of child sexual assault allegations several years ago is now protesting him in the wake of Haenel’s disclosure. As she said when asked about the Oscar-winning filmmaker on Mediapart, “the debate around Polanski is not limited to Polanski and his monstrosity, but implicates the whole of society.” The French media calls Haenel’s #MeToo story a turning point, one which highlights not the individual — even she expressed regret that it fell on one man — but on a society which believes victimization is in any way excusable. 

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“It’s possible for society to act differently,” Haenel said. “It’s better for everyone, firstly for the victims but even for the torturers to look themselves in the face. That’s what being human is. It’s not about crushing people and trying to gain power, it’s about questioning yourself and accepting the multi-dimensional side of what a human being is. That’s how we build high society.” Up until this point we have been primarily concerned with identifying the bad seeds and having them punished and even removed, without really wrestling with the environment in which they have grown — doing that means facing ourselves as well. We name names and call out institutions — like Hollywood awards and the British royal family — and then what? What remains is the same system that produced these individuals, these same individuals simply establishing new institutions with the same foundations. Identifying what’s wrong doesn’t tell us what’s right. It wasn’t until Haenel was introduced to a filmmaking crew that was entirely female, that listened to her and supported her, that she could identify not just what shouldn’t be, but what should. “What society do we want?” she asked. “It’s about that too.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

China’s Communist Government Has a Strong Hold on Chinese Corporations

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JD.com is the largest e-commerce company in China. In Communist China, it’s not enough for large companies like JD.com to be profitable — they must serve the goals of the Communist Party and benefit the country as a whole. For The New Yorker, details the clever ways that the company uses rural villages’ existing social networks to recruit new customers and employees, which has allowed it to improve Chinese life and possibly help slow the exodus to cities by giving villagers an incentive to remain in the countryside.

For the country’s leading tycoons, keeping in the government’s good graces is a well-established habit. During our conversation, Liu repeatedly spoke of company strategy in terms of deeper ambitions for the country as a whole, framing economic advancement as a civic virtue. A thirty-year economic miracle was not enough in itself, he said; one also had to “lead society in the right direction and bring in positive energy.” “Positive energy” is a phrase much used by President Xi Jinping, and my conversation with Liu took place less than two weeks after the Chinese Communist Party’s Nineteenth National Congress, which had signaled a tightening of Xi’s grip on the country. It has become evident that, compared with his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, Xi demands more direct and explicit fealty from corporate titans. Recently, he stipulated that all publicly listed companies must establish a Party branch in the workplace.

Ryan Manuel, a political scientist at the University of Hong Kong, told me that, until recently, there was a cautious symbiosis between the government and Chinese tech giants, an outgrowth of forms of Internet supervision dating back to the early nineties, when the Web first came to China. But Xi, Manuel said, is now “putting the onus of censorship on the companies themselves, and dealing with them the way he managed his anti-corruption campaign.” The message is clear: as long as executives follow the Party line and police their own organizations, companies will be given permission to thrive, and championed as evidence of China’s soft power. But if there are transgressions the Party will target company leaders, even people as famous as Liu or Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma—or Wu Xiaohui, the billionaire C.E.O. of Anbang, one of the largest insurers in the country, who, in May, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison after being convicted of fraud and embezzlement. Manuel said that, in such cases, the charges are frequently opaque—“corruption,” “ideological failings”—but the fates of the company and of its top executives are sealed.

As a result, the recent public utterances of business leaders have displayed a new caution, coupled with an extravagant eagerness to demonstrate loyalty to the Party. A couple of weeks after I met Liu, he was named the head of a poor village south of Beijing, and he quickly unveiled a five-year plan to increase its wealth tenfold. Last year, he made a remarkable announcement on TV. “Our country can realize the dream of Communism in our generation,” he said. “All companies will belong to the state.”

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