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Small-Town New Hampshire’s Battle with Bears and Liberty

AP Photo/Mark Thiessen

The more removed our daily lives get from nature, the less we understand about the wild creatures who live around us. Fear grows in darkness outside our kitchen windows, extending the ancient archetype of the Big Bad Wolf to other species. In Grafton, New Hampshire, black bears have started killing domestic animals, invading personal space, even smacking one woman, creating a psychic and territorial battle between residents and the otherwise shy Ursus americanus.

For The Atavist, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling traces the origins of this tiny town’s highly independent nature and its tense relationship with wildlife. He looks at competing theories of ursine behavior, and misperceptions about black bears versus the biological reality. What he found wasn’t a simple bear problem, but “a parable of liberty, disinformation, and fear. A parable, really, of America.” Exhibit A: the so-called cat massacre.

Andrew Timmins told me that he’d never received a bear complaint involving a cat, from Grafton or anywhere else. Plus, the idea that wild bears could acquire a taste for felines seemed dubious to him. When a Grafton resident told me about a bear that drained his biodiesel supply—a five-gallon container of two-year-old French-fry grease—I was reminded that bears will devour even the most loathsome fare, so long as it adds to their winter stores of fat. They’re after calories, not cuisine. Despite local perception, the cats of Bungtown probably weren’t the bears’ preferred target; they were just there.

Perception, though, matters a great deal when people craft stories about how they overcome obstacles and cope with conflict. Once the seed of the purported bear hazard was planted, stories nourished it. Often the light of reality was refracted such that it transformed an animal into a totemic version of itself: bandit or strongman, noble savage or mythic monster, bumbling idiot or cunning predator.

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We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

A Vor Never Sleeps

Garrett M. Graff | Longreads | June 2018 | 20 minutes (5,086 words)

Razhden Shulaya maintained a diverse business empire, like a Warren Buffet of crime. By age 40, from his base in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he had a cigarette smuggling operation, a drug ring, a counterfeit credit card scheme, an extortion racket, an illegal gambling establishment, and teams devoted to hacking slot machines. According to prosecutors who have been building a case against him, Shulaya’s associates provided gun-running, kidnap-for-hire, and the fencing of stolen jewelry. Plans were in place for what authorities came to call the “romance scam”: use an attractive woman to lure a target down to Atlantic City, knock him out with chloroform, and steal his money. They’d take his Rolex, too.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Reckons with Fame

(Monica Schipper/WireImage)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published three novels and a short story collection; she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008, and her latest novel, Americanah won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013. Still, when Beyoncé quoted from Adichie’s TED talk “We Should All Be Feminists” for her song “Flawless,” the author ascended to a new level of fame. In a wide-ranging profile written by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker, Adichie addresses the increased scrutiny of her interviews and public statements, dives deep into the sights, sounds, and places that have inspired her work, and considers her legacy.

When she talks about feminism or gay rights in Nigeria, she knows what she’s getting into, and she does it on purpose. But her celebrity is such that even an offhand remark can set off a fracas that she did not anticipate. A few years ago, when asked by a journalist to comment on the shortlist for the Caine Prize, an English award for African fiction, she said she had no interest in the topic, although one of the nominees, she said, was “one of my boys in my workshop.” Her antipathy to the Caine Prize was long-standing, due to her dislike of a former administrator of the prize, whom she had found sexist and patronizing, and whom she venomously fictionalized in her short story “Jumping Monkey Hill.”

as though God, having created him, had slapped him flat against a wall and smeared his features all over his face

Asked where she went instead to find the best African fiction, she said, “My mailbox,” where she received her workshop students’ stories. On Nigerian Twitter, all hell broke loose. “It doesn’t take much brain juice to realize from her interviews that Ms CNA’s ego can sink an island,” wrote Manny. “So the best African fiction is in Chimamanda Adichie’s inbox?” Abubakar Ibrahim, a novelist, wrote. “I hail thee, queen-god mother. Go fuck yourself, Chimamanda.”

Earlier this year, Chimamanda commented to a reporter in France, “Post-colonial theory? I don’t know what it means. I think it’s something that professors made up because they needed to get jobs.” Nigerian academics reacted with hurt and outrage. “That’s it!” Difficult Northerner wrote. “We need to put Chimamanda in rice. How can you shit on postcolonial theory while claiming not to know what it means. The same postcolonial theorists who assign your books & videos in classes.”

She is O.K. in principle with not being liked: she thinks that the desire to be liked is something that women need to get over. A male friend of hers told her that Ifemelu, the main character of “Americanah,” was Chimamanda without her warmth, and she bristled at this, even though she thought it might be true. Why the hell are you judging her like that? she thought. If Ifemelu were a male, would you expect and want warmth? All the same, it is painful to be attacked. “Ta-Nehisi Coates said to me once that what hurt him the most, becoming successful, was how much it was black intellectuals who seemed to be out for him, and I know what that’s like. I told him that there’s a circle of Nigerians who are resentful of my international success, and it’s very hurtful, because I want my people to wish me well.”

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‘Unfettered Glamour’: The Legendary Career of André Leon Talley

NEW YORK, NY - 1979: Diana Ross and Andre Leon Talley dancing at Studio 54, c 1979 in New York City. (Photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images)

New York Times fashion director and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman profiles former Vogue creative director André Leon Talley upon the launch of “The Gospel According to André,” a feature-length documentary on Talley’s life. The film includes interviews with friends and former colleagues of Talley, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Fran Lebowitz, and Anna Wintour, and traces his love for fashion back to his early days in segregated Durham, North Carolina. It was the number one limited-release movie in box offices sales last weekend, according to Page Six.

For much of his career, Talley was the only black male editor of a top tier fashion publication. Goldberg says in the film that he was “so many things he wasn’t supposed to be,” but for most of the years of his rise, Talley did not publicly acknowledge the isolation and emotional strife that came with his influence. In a 1994 story for the New Yorker, Hilton Als described Talley, hauntingly, as “the only one.” Friedman’s profile illuminates the costs Talley paid for breaking ground.

When he tells this story in public, he often defangs it by rolling his eyes and pursing his lips, and then appending a joke about wanting to be in designers’ beds without the actual designer to see what kind of fancy sheets they had. But when he tells it in private, he doesn’t add the comic flourishes, and the muscle between his eyebrows contracts in an involuntary spasm.

For all the talk lately about the need for diversity on fashion runways, there has been much less about the fact that its executives and designers and editors in chief have been, and are still, largely white.

“Where are the black people?” Mr. Talley said. “I look around everywhere and say, ‘Where are the black people?’ I think fashion tries to skirt the issue and finds convenient ways to spin it. There are examples of evolution, but they are few and far between. The biggest leap of faith was Edward Enninful becoming editor of British Vogue — that was an extraordinary thing. Virgil Abloh getting Louis Vuitton men’s wear.”

Still, as far as progress made in the more than three decades Mr. Talley has been letting the insults bounce off his caftans, it doesn’t seem like very much. “As the world turns, it does not turn very fast,” he said.

He is hoping the film speeds it up. Mr. Enninful, for one, thinks it will. “It will mean a lot to a new generation to see that there was this man who grew up in the South and through all obstacles made it, because it will give young black kids hope and the aspiration to be in this industry,” he said.

Mr. Talley is also hoping it provides a platform to vault him to the next stage in his life.

“I could see myself being an Oscar Wilde and going on the road and sitting on stage and talking,” he said. When he said this, he was having lunch at Majorelle, a French restaurant on the Upper East Side that he loves because of its flower arrangements, its pistachio souffle and because it shares a name with Yves Saint Laurent’s garden in Marrakesh.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Handcuffs on the ground
Martyn Aim / Corbis via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jennifer Gonnerman, Evan Allen, Britni de la Cretaz, Jen Banbury, and Gordon Edgar.

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What Is the Hot Commodity, Exactly?

Wild rockweed grows on the coast of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

In Hakai magazine, Ben Goldfarb has written the most interesting article on legal tensions around seaweed harvesting in Maine you’ll read all week. Or is it about tensions around harvesting fish? It’s unclear, thanks to Maine’s hot but biologically nebulous rockweed, and that’s what makes it fascinating.

We are accustomed to thinking of seaweed as a stage, the undulant backdrop against which play the dramas of more charismatic fish and shellfish. Today, however, rockweed stars as lead actor in one of Maine’s strangest resource conflicts. Although seaweed harvesting is hardly a new industry—New England’s farmers have nourished their fields with “sea manure” for centuries—rockweed has lately become a valuable commercial product, an ingredient in everything from fertilizers to pet foods to nutritional supplements. In 2017, Maine’s rockweeders gathered nearly nine million kilograms and raked in over US $600,000, roughly four times the haul in 2001.

Inevitably, not everyone is thrilled about the boom. As rockweed’s profile has grown, the controversy over its management has escalated, ascending through Maine’s legal system all the way to the chambers of the state’s supreme court. This seaweed struggle, and the fate of A. nodosum itself, hinges on a single question, patently absurd yet bizarrely complex: is rockweed, in defiance of logic and biology, really a fish?

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The Hole in My Soul

Good Salt / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Sara Eckel | Longreads | June 2018 | 17 minutes (4,267 words)

Sometimes, while out with a friend I’ve known for 10 or 20 years, I’ll pivot on my barstool and ask, “Did I ever mention that I’m a born-again Christian?” The question rarely computes. My close friends know I grew up in an agnostic household, and they’re pretty sure the only Sunday morning activities I leave the house for are yoga and brunch. Some have even heard me casually describe myself as an atheist. Nevertheless, on a bookshelf in my parents’ house, there’s a Bible with an inscription in my loopy 10-year-old handwriting: “Today, I am a born-again Christian.” Below that, the words “Hallelujah!” in a woman’s elegant, slanted script.

***

The ceremony took place at that woman’s house — in my memory, her name is Mrs. Hannah — in the suburb of Cincinnati where my family lived during my grade school years. For my parents, southern Ohio was a six-year tour of duty — just a place where my dad got a job. For my younger brother, it’s barely a memory. But for me, it was where I first encountered the world and where I was repeatedly told I lacked something essential.

“You have a black hole in your soul,” a little boy told me on the way out of kindergarten one day. I walked home and promptly burst into tears in front of my mother.

A 21st-century reader might pause at the idea that I walked home alone from kindergarten, but in 1970s Ohio, there was nothing strange about a free-range 5-year-old. However, our neighbors were appalled that my family didn’t go to church. On the playground one day, I tried to explain it to a group of baffled classmates gathered around me in a semicircle, but it was like saying that we didn’t brush our teeth or eat dinner each night. The kids weren’t mean; they simply didn’t know how to reconcile a classmate who spent her Sunday mornings lounging in her pajamas and reading the funnies.

Once, while walking to school with my two best friends, both named Debbie, the girls had a jokey debate about what would happen after I died. I had obviously not cleared the prerequisite for heaven. On the other hand, I was their friend — eternal hellfire didn’t seem quite right, either. They imagined a fight between God and the devil, with me floating up and down through the ether.

“She’s too good for hell,” the devil would say.

“She’s too bad for heaven,” God would reply.

I think they were trying to work out how God could be so cruel as to reject their friend. On the other hand, they had to go to church. They had clocked in hundreds of Sunday mornings wearing rayon dresses in the too-warm air while I was kicked back on the couch eating cinnamon doughnuts. There should be some consequences.

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Vacating Convictions from Crooked Chicago Cops

David Mirzoeff/PA Wire

A group of corrupt police officers on Chicago’s South Side had been framing and extorting residents for years. Then they planted drugs on the wrong people: Ben Baker and his girlfriend Clarissa Glenn.

In The New Yorker, Jennifer Gonnerman describes how Glenn’s determination to exonerate her husband helped build a case against police sergeant Ronald Watts and his brazenly crooked cronies. Glenn’s campaign consumed her, and Baker’s absence left their children without a father for too many years. Not only was Baker eventually freed, the state attorney overturned many of Watts’ other tainted convictions. One difficult question remains: how many more innocent people still wallow in prison?

No one knows how many men Watts and his officers framed, in part because so many of them pleaded guilty. Watts’s officers at times planted such large quantities of drugs on Wells residents that they were charged with a Class X felony, the highest-level felony after first-degree murder. If the defendant went to trial and lost, he faced up to thirty years in prison. Phillip Thomas, who sold candy from a cart in the Wells, recalled that when he told his public defender that Watts’s officers had planted drugs on him, “she made it quite clear that she didn’t believe me and that my best bet was to plead guilty.” Ignoring her advice, he represented himself at trial. He lost, and was sentenced to six years. Shaun James told his public defender a similar story, and, he said, “She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t no judge is ever going to believe that.’ ” James and his co-defendant, Taurus Smith, both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two years’ probation.

Clarissa and Ben decided to fight the cases against them: Ben’s, from when he was arrested alone, and Ben and Clarissa’s, from when they were arrested together. They assumed that, because the state’s attorney’s office was aware of Watts’s corruption, it would eventually drop the charges against them. David Navarro, the prosecutor who met with Clarissa and Ben in the spring of 2005, told me that he believed them, and spent months investigating their claims about Watts, but he couldn’t prove the allegations. “It’s very difficult to prove a case when your only witness is the guy who has a pending case against him, and that guy has a criminal background,” he said.

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The Prosperity Plea

Poor People's Campaign

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,395 words)

On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like “Starving a Child is Violence,” and “Systemic Racism is Immoral.” People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. “We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another’s existence,” he said. “As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free.”

The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan “a new and unsettling force.” The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There’s no personal shame in being poor, the campaign’s leaders argue, what’s shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.

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