Search Results for: Financial Times

The World’s Tallest Dwarf

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | November 2019 | 10 minutes (2,750 words)

 
What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.
 
The question at the core of the antihero show has always been what it would take to turn the bad guy — the mobster, the drug kingpin, the Russian spy, the mad and murderous queen — into the hero of the story. And the answer is that our willingness to root for a bad person who does bad things, sometimes to good people, is dependent on a carefully constructed context. Successful antiheroes have all been portrayed in a certain way: as special — particularly skilled at something or somehow different than those around them — and as three-dimensional human beings with unmet desires. They are usually surrounded by even more unsavory antagonists and are invariably trying to survive within an oppressive system they can’t fully understand. Our empathy for them comes in large part from seeing their pain and the forces that oppress them even when they don’t, perhaps especially when they don’t. But our ability to relate to them also hinges on the possibility of redemption, if not its actualization. We see ourselves, however dimly, in antiheroes. Their potential for change is our own. We can stand to watch them do terrible things because we harbor hope that they, and we, can change.    Read more…

A View of the Bay

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Aimée Lutkin | Longreads | November 2019 | 15 minutes (3,262 words)

“Hello?” my grandmother’s cigarette-seasoned voice would always answer the phone immediately. I pictured her sitting directly beside it in her motel room, waiting to see which of her three daughters or four grandchildren was checking on her.

“Hi, grandma! Just calling to see if you and Papa are OK in the storm,” I’d say cheerfully, assuming they were basically fine, as they always were. They had evacuated their house, a flimsy four-room hut built atop cement blocks, that was set inconveniently close to the Narrow Bay, right on Mastic Beach in Long Island. All that stood between their home and a body of water that could consume it was a dirt road and a rustling wall of reeds that created a marshy barrier and the illusion of distance. That illusion was regularly washed away by storm flooding, sending them skipping backward like sandpipers.

“Well, we’re all settled in here,” she’d answer, sounding pleased to have evacuated for the night to an artless motel next to a barren parking lot. “Your father is watching the news. Looks like we’ll be back tomorrow!”

“Oh, that’s good,” I’d say, ignoring that she had confused me for my mother as she often did after passing her 80th birthday.

“Yeah, not too bad, not too bad,” she’d say, though there were a few times that did get bad. The year their cars were washed away and they were trapped in their house, years where the power went out. But they always bounced back and during the next storm I’d call to check in again, repeating the same familiar pattern.

For years, visiting my grandparents involved a two- to three-hour train ride on the LIRR from New York City; I went by myself once every summer or spring, and I visited with my mom and aunt and uncle who lived in Montauk every Thanksgiving and Christmas. Montauk is on the eastern tip of Long Island, so Mastic was where we met in the middle until my mother refused to go back. Then I’d go by myself for one winter holiday, alone on the cold, empty train, traveling back and forth on the same day. A six-hour train ride was preferable to spending the night in the drafty house, making conversation around my mother’s absence. Read more…

Learning from Perimenopause and a Kpop Idol

Illustration by Jackie Ferrentino

Wendy Gan | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (4,746 words)

If anyone had told me five years ago that I would become a Kpop fan, I would have laughed in their face. If anyone had told me I would be actually be learning life lessons from a Kpop idol, I would have been even more incredulous. I am in my mid-40s, 20 years into an academic career, a responsible mortgage-payer, and a survivor of a dysfunctional family. I am also in perimenopause, which might help explain why life has taken such a strange turn.

***

I had never heard of perimenopause before, but when a nexus of rather odd physical symptoms from arthritis to sleeplessness to abnormal spikes of anxiety began to plague me, I started to wonder if a new rhythm to my monthly cycle was to blame. Some research revealed potential connections, and the rather sobering piece of information that this shaky run-up to full-blown menopause could very well last up to eight years. If 52 is the average age when most women reach menopause, I would have, quite likely, a good seven years more of this hormonal instability and its physical repercussions to both endure and manage. While I am sure there are worse cases out there, I often do not feel quite myself, and it is disconcerting to say the least. The body that you used to take for granted begins to call attention to itself with various aches and pains, or with strange happenings, like a sudden rush of adrenalin that keeps you awake at night wondering why your heart is pumping with such fury. A work meeting that you would normally take in your stride begins to cause an unusual amount of consternation. Even meeting an old friend for a catch-up can leave you feeling nervous and on edge. Then there are the weeping fits. A sweet animal rescue video as you scroll through Twitter makes you keen in despair. A soppy ending to a television drama makes you sob as if it were the end of your life. And in the midst of the crying, something dislodges, sadness surges and sweeps over you, and it really does feel like the end of your life.

Did I say perimenopause was disconcerting? To be frank, it has been maddening. And hormone-induced depressions (thank you, perimenopause) that hit me unpredictably each month do little to help. Only Kpop keeps me sane.
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Meet Michael Gillespie, the Ransomeware Superhero of Normal, Illinois

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By day cancer survivor Michael Gillespie — an unassuming man who lives in Normal, Illinois, along with eight cats and his wife — works at a little computer repair shop called Nerds on Call. By night he’s a ransomeware-busting superhero to scores of people whose computers have been taken over by bad guys trying to exploit their precious documents, data, and photos for money.

As Renee Dudley reports at ProPublica, Gillespie — who has faced mounting financial difficulties — doesn’t charge for his work. His payment is the satisfaction of scoring one for the good guys.

To make ends meet, Gillespie supplemented his Nerds on Call salary with a 2 a.m. paper route, delivering the local newspaper on his bike. While he had enjoyed having a paper route in junior high, the job now depressed him. But the family bills were mounting, especially for health care. Morgan Gillespie struggled with diabetes and other medical issues. Over the years, Michael Gillespie noticed blood in his urine, and in the fall of 2017, his wife finally made him see a doctor. The physician removed a tumor and diagnosed bladder cancer, which rarely affects young adults. Gillespie took one day off for surgery and one to recover before returning to work. He underwent immunotherapy treatment weekly for two months, and the cancer has been in remission since. Although he was insured through Nerds on Call, the costs for his care still added up.

The couple reached a financial breaking point. They racked up credit card debt and fell behind on payments on Morgan Gillespie’s Nissan. They rotated which utility bills they would pay; one month their electricity would be turned off, and the next month it would be gas. They surrendered the car to the bank, which sold it at a loss at auction and forced them to make up the difference. Last year, around the time his wife lost her job as a nanny, they missed four mortgage payments on their house and began to receive foreclosure notices, Michael Gillespie said.

Gillespie said he’s considering charging other security researchers for the statistics he gathers on the site, but he will always keep the tools free for victims. Friends and family members nagged Gillespie to collect fees from ID Ransomware users. Even his wife’s grandmother, whom Gillespie calls “grammy,” brought it up. “I try to not interfere in that area,” Rita Blanch said. “Unless, being silly at times, when I would say to him, ‘Babe, you need to charge, you could, like, be rich.’”

Other relatives “have been like: ‘Why isn’t he charging? Why isn’t he making money off of this?’” said his wife, who recently found a part-time job as a babysitter. “They think it’s almost dumb, the fact that he does what he does. But that was just never what the deal was for us. He just doesn’t want to take advantage of people who are already being taken advantage of.”

Instead, his fellow ransomware hunters stepped in. Abrams covered the $400 cost of obtaining a certificate that lets users know they’re downloading from a trustworthy site. Wosar began donating to ID Ransomware, and his employer, Emsisoft, hired Gillespie part-time this year to create Emsisoft-branded decryptors. The money enabled the Gillespies to catch up on mortgage payments.

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A Woman’s Work: Till Death Do Us Part

All illustrations by Carolita Johnson

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | October 2019 | 26 minutes (6,450 words)

 

Death is a process I knew very little about until my life partner began dying. He and I had to learn everything while we went through the process together. I say “learn,” but at this point I’m not sure we learned anything. Sometimes I think Michael was the only one who learned anything real and true, as in Pete Townshend’s words in “The Seeker”:

I won’t get to get what I’m after, till the day I die.

He died three years ago, and this is the first time I’m writing about it in retrospect. I took notes during it all — the before, the during, the after — and I’m glad I did because I sometimes barely recognize the hand of the person who wrote them, much less remember much of what I wrote about. If there’s anything I’ve come to understand while reading these notes, it’s that dying isn’t just about the one person doing the dying. It’s an undertaking woven by and around many people, and this has a certain beauty.

In a couple, though, along with the unfathomable strengths it can prove, it also has the potential to expose deep, carefully camouflaged structural flaws in a relationship. It imposes financial considerations and logistical burdens, sometimes revealing unsuspected shabbiness; or worse, deliberate malice. For good or for bad, what a death unfurls in its wake will always surprise you.

The deaths that I’ve known so far all began with aging and illness. So, I won’t presume to understand death by any other cause, not by war, not by accident or any form of deliberate (first, second, or third party) intent. The deaths I’ve seen involve watching the body of someone I love get tired, begin to fall apart, stop working right, and finally begin to degrade, as they watch in helpless terror, into food for pathogens.

First my husband, then a couple years later, my dad.

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The Corpse Rider

Yūrei from Bakemono Zukushi (Monster Scroll), artist unknown, c. 1700. Wikimedia Commons.

Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 2019 | 14 minutes (3,729 words)

“The daimyō’s wife was dying, and knew that she was dying.” So begins Lafcadio Hearn’s uneasy and unsettling ghost story, “Ingwa-Banashi,” gathered first in his 1899 collection, In Ghostly Japan, and republished this year in a new Penguin Classics anthology edited by Paul Murray. As the daimyō explains to his wife that she is dying and preparing to leave “this burning-house of the world,” he offers her any final rites she may request. She asks him to summon one of his concubines, the nineteen year-old Yukiko, whom, she reminds him, she loves like a sister.

Yukiko arrives, and the dying woman tells her that one day she will rise in rank and be made the honored wife of the daimyō, a fortune that the low-born Yukiko cannot believe. As her last request, the daimyō’s wife asks Yukiko to carry her out to the courtyard to see a cherry tree in bloom — obligingly, Yukiko lowers her back and allows the old woman to wrap her arms around her, to carry her. Once she has grasped hold of Yukiko, though, the old woman laughs, clutches tight, and, with her dying breath tells Yukiko: “I have my wish for the cherry-bloom — but not the cherry-bloom of the garden! … I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it! — oh, what a delight!” Read more…

Records on Bone

Photo courtesy of the author

Tali Perch | Colorado Review | August 2019 | 46 minutes (9,154 words)

 

Vladimir Vysotsky, or the “Russian Bob Dylan,” has been dead for almost forty years, but were he still alive on this day, my father’s sixty-seventh birthday, we wouldn’t be playing his music anyway. We would play the music that made us American — Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Neil Diamond — the same music we play now on this television, in this living room, in this beautiful house of my parents’ immigrant dreams. My brothers and I dance uproariously with our children to “Dancing Queen” and “Born in the usa,” and tenderly with our spouses to “Human Nature” and “Heartlight.” As a child I remember dancing with my father to these songs. But back then the parties were in the cramped living room of our tenement apartment near Newark, New Jersey, or in the similar dwellings of other immigrant families we knew. We ate Russian food, for it was the only food the mothers knew how to make, and the men drank vodka, for some habits are too hard to break. But in those early post-immigration years, no one cared to play Russian music or to be otherwise reminded of a past they loathed enough to flee.

Tonight Mom and Dad watch from their separate loveseats, beaming with joy, in a rare peace that has as much to do with wine and vodka as with the frolicking of children and grandchildren. Occasionally they hold the gazes of my two younger brothers, who managed to be born in America and have no memory of the post-immigration chaos that we three endured. I am jealous of how easily they are able to look each other in the eye. For Mom, Dad, and me, eye contact is like an embrace, a tear, or perhaps, one of Vysotsky’s melodies — too intimate. Our eyes are mirrors reflecting truths more easily avoided. Read more…

I’m 72. So What?

Illustration by Emily Press

Catherine Texier | Longreads | October 2019 | 22 minutes (5,425 words)

“I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.” — Virginia Woolf

One day, around 20 years ago, towards the end of my marriage, we were walking through Central Park and sat for a moment on a knoll overlooking the lake. I don’t know what we had been talking about but I clearly remember saying: “I don’t see myself growing old in the States.” I was in my late 40s at the time. Perhaps the approach of 50 felt like a milestone, the beginning of “old.” Or perhaps what I meant was that I didn’t see myself growing old with him — which turned out to be the case, since we broke up not long after that.

Perhaps, after almost 20 years in the US, I still saw myself as just passing by — forever a green card holder, resident alien, with one foot on each continent, never really settling down, ready to flee back to France, like these expats from the old European empires who retire home after they’ve put in their time in the colonies.I only had a vague notion of what I meant by “old,” and when I would want to pack up. I figured life would send me signals when the time came.

Since then, I have stayed put — notwithstanding a few half-hearted attempts to cross the Atlantic, looking for international schools for my daughters in Paris when the divorce was final, or briefly putting my New York apartment on the market while fantasizing about quaint seven-story walk-ups near Bastille, when I had a boyfriend who lived in Europe.

Now, as the years pass, I have less and less desire to leave New York, where my roots have pushed down through the cracks of its broken sidewalks, even though, technically, at past 70, I suppose I am truly getting old. But the idea of going back to France would seem alarming, a tolling of a bell of sorts. Of course, staying in New York, the city I fell in love with at 22, might seem like waving a garlic branch in front of the grim reaper, a kind of vade retro satana, a vain attempt to stay forever young, or at least delay the inevitable.
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The Final Five Percent

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Tim Requarth| Longreads | October 2019 | 27 minutes (6,723 words)

* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

When the motorcycle accident dealt my brother’s brain an irreversible blow, he and his wife were living in their newly purchased farmhouse on the fringes of suburban Chicago. Conway* had been waiting to move out of the city’s inner-ring suburbs for years, and each morning on the forested property he woke up exuberant. Shortly after moving in, he built an extraordinary tree house some 60 feet in the air, spanning two trees, with sliding joists under the floor to accommodate sway and a hammock to lie in during sunsets. He loved riding his motorcycle, and before work he’d sometimes take his bike out for a spin on the open roads just a few miles away. His wife, Caroline, loved antiques, and the area was full of shops. They were in their 50s and living in a house they planned to grow old in together. Then, after dinner on a fall day in 2007, Conway hopped on his Harley Softail Classic to go buy ice cream and cigarettes. A drunk driver barreled into him. Conway’s left femur snapped and his skull struck the traffic-warmed asphalt, splattering blood all the way to the road’s shoulder. 

Conway’s body was battered, but the real threat, the injury warranting a helicopter ride to the closest hospital with a neurosurgeon on call, was a hemorrhage beneath the subarachnoid membrane, a thin sheath of triple-helixed collagen fibers intertwined with blood vessels that protects the brain’s private chemical harbor of cerebrospinal fluid from the open waters of the body’s blood. The sons of a doctor ourselves, my brother and I had heard stories about neurosurgeons called in at midnight, and those stories didn’t have happy endings.

In the weeks after the accident, I watched Conway wake, recognize familiar faces, and begin to walk. Some signs of progress were cause for celebration; other developments were more worrisome. He’d rarely ever raised his voice at Caroline, but now he called her a “worthless cunt” and a “bitch.” He was lewd to the nurses, exposing himself and laughing. When a speech therapist gently reminded him that she would return for another session later that afternoon, Conway retorted, “No you won’t, because I’ll be fucking you in my van outside!”

At first, the doctors assured us that this inappropriate behavior was a passing recovery phase of traumatic brain injury, or TBI. The lewd remarks eventually subsided, but his behavior took another ominous turn. “He always had a wild streak,” Caroline told me. It’s true that before the accident, Conway had loved flouting the rules. He’d cut across an empty park on his motorcycle to avoid traffic, or build a towering bonfire in his backyard for kicks. “But there was no violence,” she said. After the accident, Conway flew into rages so vicious the hospital staff put a cage over his bed to contain him. When he finally left the hospital, Conway attempted to return to his former life, but he struggled to run his business and pay the bills. He and Caroline’s marriage began to fray. Hopes for a full recovery waned, and eventually Conway’s neuropsychologist confirmed our fears that the personality change might be permanent. “He’s recovered 95 percent brain function,” she said, “But the final 5 percent, it might never return.” Read more…

You Talk Real Good

Illustration by Jovanna Tosello

Alison Stine | Longreads | October 2019 | 10 minutes (2,469 words)

This essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit organization.

Disability status?

It’s a question I am confronted with almost daily when I fill out job applications. Sometimes I skip the question or I say I am not disabled. Sometimes I answer it truthfully, writing that I am hard of hearing (HOH), born partially deaf.

I was laid off eight months ago from my full-time editing job, and in the arduous process of searching and applying for positions, I often face this voluntary disclosure form asking what I am and what my body does and does not do. Disability isn’t always included as one of the options on disclosure forms; it doesn’t always count as part of diversity.

But my status has bearing on my job search. Less than 40% of people with a hearing loss have fulltime employment, according to a study cited by NPR, in an article which profiles a woman very much like me, with hearing loss and multiple graduate degrees, who’s applied to over 1,000 jobs with no offers.

I’ve only applied to over 60, as of this writing. But I haven’t got any job offers yet.
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