Search Results for: The Nation

How Thailand’s Rich Escape Prosecution

AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn

As many Thai residents say, “Thai jails are only for the poor.” Exhibit A: the 27-year-old socialite named Vorayuth “Boss” Yoovidhya, part of the billionaire family who owns the Red Bull beverage empire. In 2012, he mortally wounded police officer Wichean Glanprasert while driving, then he fled the scene. Boss remains free. Glanprasert’s family mourn while wrestling with this accepted double standard. For The Walrus, Martha Mendoza follows the Red Bull family’s trail of shell companies, and Boss’ social media posts, to find how they not only protect their assets, but how Boss and other Thai elites evade prosecution while protestors and journalists routinely end up in prison for minor offenses.

Within weeks of the incident, Boss was back to enjoying his family’s jet-set lifestyle: he flew around the world on private Red Bull jets, cheered the company’s Formula One racing team from Red Bull’s VIP seats, and kept a shiny black Porsche Carrera in London with custom licence plates—B055 RBR, or Boss Red Bull racing.

An Interpol arrest notice was issued five years after the accident, but so far, it has effectively been useless. Boss is reported to have at least two passports and a complex network of offshore accounts, and with these tools, he’s able to travel the world with impunity. More than 120 photos posted on Facebook and Instagram, as well as some racing blogs, show Boss visiting at least nine countries since Glanprasert’s death. Stops include the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Osaka, Japan, where he posed, grinning and wearing robes from Hogwarts’s darkest dorm, Slytherin house. He’s cruised Monaco’s harbour, snowboarded Japan’s fresh powder, and celebrated his birthday at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London. This means that while authorities say they’ve had no idea where Boss was, his friends, family, and all of their followers seem to have had no doubt about his whereabouts and the good times he’s been having. One summer, in Japan, he posted a ten-second video of sausage and eggs decorated with seaweed eyes, tagging a young relative. His parents responded with a thumbs up.

In Thailand, many say that the justice system has two tracks: one for the elite and one for everybody else. This is seen not just through brazen killings, like that of Glanprasert, but also through financial schemes used by the country’s wealthy. During the time Boss hid in plain sight, an Associated Press (AP) investigation into his whereabouts simultaneously exposed how the Yoovidhya family has spent decades hiding its assets in offshore accounts. As Brooke Harrington, professor of sociology at Dartmouth, said in a 2018 interview with NPR: “The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it’s almost literally unimaginable….National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”

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Communiqué from an Exurban Satellite Clinic of a Cancer Pavilion Named after a Financier

Mannequins modeling a wig and a cooling accessory to be worn under a wig by someone undergoing chemotherapy. (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)

Anne Boyer | an excerpt adapted from The Undying| Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,665 words)

 

Pull your hair out by the handfuls in socially distressing locations: Sephora, family court, Bank of America, in whatever location where you do your paid work, while in conversation with the landlord, at Leavenworth prison, however in the gaze of men. Negotiate for what you need because you will need it now more than ever. If these negotiations fail, yank your hair out of your head in front of who would deny you, leave clumps of your hair in the woods, on the prairies, in QuikTrip parking lots, in front of every bar at which your conventionally feminine appearance earned you and your friends pitchers of domestic beer.

Put your head out the window of the car and let the wind blow the hair off your head. Let your friends harvest locks of your hair to give to other friends to leave in socially distressing locations: to scatter at ports, at national monuments, inside the architecture built to make ordinary people feel small and stupid, to throw against harassers on the streets.

Pull your pubic hair out in clumps from the root and send it in unmarked envelopes to technocrats. Leave your armpit hair at the Superfund site you once lived near, your nose hairs for any human resources officer who denies you leave. Read more…

Did the Heir to the Red Bull Empire Get Away with Murder?

Longreads Pick

Thailand’s justice system has a track for the rich and a track for everyone else, and this corrupt double standard extends to tax laws, international national borders, and murder.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Sep 4, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,558 words)

McDreamy, McSteamy, and McConnell

Illustration by Jason Raish

Samuel Ashworth| Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,389 words)

 

Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) are nestled in one another’s arms, sweat glistening on their muscled chests. They kiss softly and tenderly. It’s the middle of the night in a hotel somewhere on the campaign trail, and they are in love.

“So, if you were an animal, which would you be?” asks Ted.

“Let me think,” says Marco. “A manatee.”

Welcome, friends, to the glorious world of congressional fan fiction. If you’ve always associated fan fiction with the kind of people who hand-sew their own Star Trek jumpsuits, think again. Since going online in the late ’90s, fan fiction — a fan-created spinoff (sometimes way, way off) of an already-existing pop culture presence — has exploded. Its protagonists range from fictional, like Han Solo, to real, like Ariana Grande or members of the British Parliament. Published stories, which can range from a few hundred words to a few hundred thousand, number in the tens of millions, and boast an immense readership. The genre also remains one of the few resolutely not-for-profit corners of the internet: Since the work often involves trademarked intellectual property, fair use rules forbid fanfic authors from making money off their writing, unless they change all recognizable details, as E.L. James did with her BDSM Twilight fanfic story, Fifty Shades of Grey. Stories about congress fall under the penumbra of “Real-person fiction,” which isn’t bound by copyright laws in the same way.
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It Comes in Waves

Illustration by Matt Huhnh

Lilly Dancyger | Longreads | September 2019 | 11 minutes (2,790 words)

I never met Swedish journalist Kim Wall, but a few months after her mutilated torso was found in 2017, I dreamt that I’d been the last person to see her alive. The torso, riddled with stab wounds, washed up 11 days after she’d boarded a submarine belonging to Danish inventor Peter Madsen, to interview him for a story. In part of the dream, I saw myself on security footage, running, frantic, trying to find someone to tell what I knew about where she was in those 11 days she was missing, before she was officially one more murdered woman in the news. I woke up like coming up from an ice bath, gasping, eyes watering, still feeling a crushing guilt for letting her get on the submarine in the first place; for not somehow knowing what was going to happen, and stopping it.

When my cousin Sabina was murdered in 2010, I called the detectives handling the case to tell them about the dramatic break-up she’d recently been through, to say I didn’t know anything for sure but they might want to talk to her ex. She was popular in the club scene in Philadelphia, a budding model whose gigantic smile and fluttering eyelashes surely inspired some jealousy. I didn’t know all of the social dynamics of her world, but I told the detectives everything I could think of that she’d told me. I ran through possible scenarios of advances rebuffed, territories infringed upon, of elaborate grudges and plots. I terrified myself with thoughts of what petty trifle someone had decided was worth such a glowing 20-year-old’s life. People have murdered for the most insignificant things, and I wondered if I’d spend the rest of my life saying “over a guy” or “over a modeling job.”

I couldn’t face the idea that I would never see her again, so instead I focused on what I could do to help catch whoever did this; and what I maybe could have done, should have done, to prevent it from happening in the first place.

I was in another state when she was killed, but I wanted so badly to go back and walk Sabina home that night. The guilt of the inability to time-travel. Six months before she died, she posted a photo on Facebook from when she was about 2 and I was about 3, of me hugging her protectively while she leaned into me. She captioned it “you may have had a big sis, to protect you, but I had my big cus, and that was all I needed!” I pull it up periodically to torture myself.
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Truly Seeing the River: An Interview with Writer Boyce Upholt

Photo of the campsite on the Mississippi River Rory Doyle.

The Mississippi Delta is the name of the vast swampy bottomland that runs for 200 miles between Memphis, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Mississippi, North America’s second-longest river, mostly created this alluvial landscape. Dense forests covered it. White money, forced Black labor, and government engineering seized, farmed, and tried to control it. For many people, the name evokes images of Tom Sawyer or the Blues or roadside barbecue joints. Author James C. Cobb’s book described the Delta as “The Most Southern Place on Earth.” Even though populous Memphis sits on its northeastern edge, and many Blues festivals take place there, for its size, the Delta is not a region many outsiders visit. It contains some of the US’s most searing poverty, some of its greatest natural beauty, the origins of Blues and rock ‘n’ roll, and some America’s most violent, racist history. Writer Boyce Upholt has made it his beat.

A Connecticut native who found himself in Mississippi, Upholt has written about the Delta’s groundwater for The Atlantic, about the Delta’s Indigenous cultures for Roads & Kingdoms, profiled Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, the Delta’s last rural juke joint, for The Believer, and has explored one Delta island for the Oxford American. Once home to a murderous, moonshining frontiersman name Perry Martin, the legends associated with Martin cloak Big Island as much as its thick woods. This mix of wildness, lore, and neglect drew Upholt back for many trips, where he camped and brewed his morning coffee with Mississippi River water. His resulting travel dispatch “Beyond the Levee” brings this far corner of the nearby world to life, partly through Martin, a character who embodies the land itself. In a few brief pages, the piece explores two huge topics ─ America’s most iconic river, and the idea of wildness ─ and satisfies itself with providing not a volume but a window, a tantalizing glimpse, just big and deep enough. Upholt took the time to speak with me about this story, his work, and the Delta he loves.

***

I grew up in Arizona, and first learned about the Delta on a visit to an ex-girlfriend’s family farm in the floodplain in eastern Arkansas. It was pure chance I traveled there, but that vast land’s lush, tarnished beauty immediately gripped me. You grew up in Connecticut. How’d you get interested in the Delta?

It was chance, for me, too. After college, I wasn’t sure how to become a writer, so I joined Teach for America and took a job as a math teacher on a Native American reservation in South Dakota. Then, after an unsatisfying yearlong stint in journalism, I decided to go work for TFA coaching teachers. I wanted to get somewhere “new” ─ to me at least ─ so when they offered me a job in the Delta I jumped. I wound up staying  for nine years, and I credit the place with getting me writing for real. There is such a rich history of storytelling and literature. I began writing a blog, then local magazines. Eventually I got an MFA and managed to find a way to write full-time.

In this Oxford American story, one person, Perry Martin, embodies this regrown patch of Delta, and then you become a new character in that story of development and environmental degradation, because you rewrite how we view the Delta’s character: wild or tame? Ugly or magical? How’d you first hear about Perry Martin and Big Island?

As someone who grew up hiking and camping, I found the Delta’s farmland beautiful but orderly: it’s a giant garden, nature contained and restrained. Then, in 2015, I wrote a profile of John Ruskey, a Mississippi River guide who is based in the Delta. We went out on the river, and I became obsessed.

The Mississippi sits amid a vast, wild landscape that almost no one knows is there; the river is at once a national icon and something we have completely forgotten. I kept writing about the river, kept exploring. In 2016, I did a weekend canoe trip with three friends down the backchannel along the west side of Big Island, which is one of the wildest, quietest stretches on the river. As a guide, I used Rivergator, an online text that John compiled. He offhandedly mentions a history of moonshiners on the island, and eventually, though conversations with locals, I began to fill in the details.

Back to that 2015 profile you wrote: What about the River fueled your initial obsession?

I will always remember that first campsite: we were on this wide sandbar that was covered with coyote and bird tracks. All night, I could hear the sound of trucks driving on the levee, which was just a stone’s throw away; I could see a glow on the horizon that was Angola Prison. And yet I felt completely remote and isolated, surrounded by the water, in this un-human space. I wanted more of that. But I also just kept finding interesting little tidbits: abandoned steamboats sitting along the riverside; attempts to catch and process invasive carp; a rapidly changing ecosystem. It still blows my mind that no one has written the book I’m working on: a look at what we’ve done to this river and the effects we’re seeing now.

There’s no real process besides paying attention: paying attention to what sparks my own curiosity; paying attention to what small dramas connect with bigger issues and questions.

Let me ask you about that book you’re working on: Why haven’t other people written it yet? Would it fit into the distinctive literary nonfiction cannon that includes Eddy L. Harris’ memoir Mississippi Solo, Mary Morris’s memoir The River Queen, or more like John M. Barry’s Rising Tide, and John McPhee’s River chapter in Control of Nature

The latter books, definitely. I’m not a huge fan of the adventure memoir. The landscape has so much to tell us, so why focus so narrowly on ourselves? There’s a difference, in my mind, between a trip ─ a paddle downriver, a hike along a trail ─ and a ramble. In the latter, your path is unclear; you make unexpected detours; you return to the same places, sometimes, looking at them in new ways. This, in my mind, makes for a much more interesting book. Great Plains has been a huge inspiration: Ian Frazier spent a few seasons driving around the middle of the country, often seemingly at random, and from that mess he pulls out this compelling history of a forgotten place. Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is another great example; he sees this wide swath of the Arctic on various scientific expeditions.

As for why that book hasn’t been written, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe because people don’t think of the river as a place, just a line of water. But there is a whole valley around it, that was a part of it, and was regarded as the country’s first Wild West. That valley was cut off by the levees; now even people who live just a few miles away rarely see it. It’s easy to overlook the environmental problems there, until they well up into floods, like this year.

Your Twitter bio says “i wander around and write stuff.” People often wonder how writers find their stories. So you found the Big Island story by writing another story. But as a wanderer, do you find many stories by chance, or do you have some process that lets wandering lead to discovery?

There’s no real process besides paying attention: paying attention to what sparks my own curiosity; paying attention to what small dramas connect with bigger issues and questions. I have a lot of Google Alerts. I read blogs and newsletters. I flip through newspapers and listen for what people are saying when I’m on the road. (Latif Nassar’s ideas on where to find stories are spot-on, by the way.) Honestly, the hardest part can be deciding which of many ideas deserve my commitment. Lately, I’ve been spending more time reporting before I even decide to pitch, to make sure stories have depth.

You describe your interest as a writer as “how we shape place, how place shapes us.” Lots of writers have beats or themes they fixate on: music; sexual politics; war. What does your interest in place say about your nature or worldview? Or your approach to writing and reporting?  

Really, I wish I had a clearer beat. I’ve always been fascinated by landscapes, both human-made and “wild” (though that’s a problematic word). Scratch the surface of a landscape and you find all kinds of history. Paying attention to the history of places often reveals connections: we are connected to the land itself, to a larger ecosystem, and to a long chain of people who, through the generations, have crisscrossed the world. In terms of how I write and report, these sorts of stories often demand that I get out and be on the ground, so I can be a tour-guide through strange, misunderstood corners of the world. It also means I have to find a way to include myself in the story without becoming too solipsistic. I’m not sure I always succeed.

Travel writing used to be a very popular genre, filling many magazines’ pages. That’s changed a lot. But some of my favorite kinds of travel stories are the kind you just described: where a bit of the author’s personal narrative leads readers to unfamiliar parts of our world and reveal larger connections. What are your thoughts on travel writing and the travel dispatch as a form, one not pegged to any news or event, but that has something to say?

It’s among my favorites, too, though when done poorly it’s awful. There are many pitfalls. I  try to stay particularly aware of my privilege: as a middle-class, cis-gendered, heterosexual white guy, I have so many legs up in terms of getting a publication to pay me to write about a place. Often, we’d all be better served to hear from someone from that place. The river, as a place, poses less of this conundrum, though I try to honor indigenous traditions that existed along the Mississippi ─ and in many cases persist ─ as well as the way Black laborers, often enslaved, did so much of the physical remaking of this place.

Yes, the Black labor that cleared the dense Delta hardwoods also drove America’s lucrative cotton economy: the legacy of their forced labor and dehumanization remains. Poverty still plagues so many people of color here. Is it difficult to explore nature apart from humanity in this region?

In any region. I don’t really believe there is such a thing as “nature” apart from humanity. Humans are animals, after all. And human beings have been living on this continent for tens of thousands of years. They cleared forests, built monumental structures, actively manipulated the environment. The idea of an empty wildness came later. (John Muir argued that the Native and Hispano migrants should be kept out of his beloved Yosemite by soldiers; they spoiled the view, he thought.) I always come back to a quote from the critic Raymond Williams, from the “Ideas of Nature”: “[T]he conquest of nature . . . will always include the conquest, the domination or the exploitation of some men by others. If we alienate the living processes of which we are a part, we end, though unequally, by alienating ourselves.”

Also, have you seen the photo of the lush old-growth bottomland forests in Lucy Braun’s canonical 1950 book The Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America? A towering canopy with vines trailing down the stout sweet gum trees. Makes me wish I could tramp through just a few acres of woods like that, though just a few. It’d be exhausting.

I haven’t, but it’s gorgeous. You can do it, though! It’s not old-growth, but there are plenty of acres that look much like this inside the levees, along the river. I wish there were more of them, and what we’ve got left is at risk. The only way we’ll get there is if more folks go out and explore and appreciate them!

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Bwilking / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sandra Sidi, Lena Solow, Aubrey Hirsch, Noelle Mateer, and Amanda Hess.

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Welcome to the Military-Educational Complex

AP Photo/The Flint Journal, Ryan Garza

By installing protections against mass shootings, school administrators are establishing the way America’s public schools will look for the next few decades, but taxpayers don’t get much say in the important questions underlying these decisions: Do we want our schools to be places of learning, socializing, and constructive imagination, as well as safe? Or are we okay creating safe, prison-like places where kids do not want to be, and do not thrive? For Slate, Henry Grabar writes about public schools’ redesigns in the era of mass shootings, and how fear and the security industry are often leading decision-making, rather than a more patient, reasoned, intentional path. Living with the threat of a school shooting is already anxiety-inducing, but we don’t know the longterm psychological and educational consequences of all these architectural modifications, from metal detectors to barricades, drills to imposing doors. As the architect of the redesigned Sandy Hook Elementary School told Grabar, a school’s “first concern in school design should always be education”.

“There is this industry that is monetizing off of fear,” said Jenine Kotob, a D.C.-based school architect, when I spoke to her earlier this month. “The school security industry is now a $2.7 billion industry in the United States, and those numbers keep rising. Thinking about the building and the site in a holistic way, and not necessarily focusing on the bells and whistles that come after the fact, would probably be a better investment.”

Kotob is one of the estimated 225,000 Americans who have lived through a school shooting. One of her best friends was killed at Virginia Tech. Later, she studied in Israel and Palestine, and saw schools built for war, with features like perimeter walls designed to withstand explosives. “If America continues along a trajectory of fear, we will end up in a situation where the building and the infrastructure we’re investing in are not places we want to be. We’re talking about a building that will be standing for 20, 30, 40 years. And how we react today says a lot about who we are as a society and what our beliefs are.”

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‘To Be Polite By Ignoring the Obvious’: Jess Row on Unpacking Whiteness in Literature

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Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,662 words)

Despite the recurring cycle of conversations on topics such as the need for fully-funded MFA programs, the financial challenges of sustaining oneself as a writer, and the lack of diversity in all levels of media, the issue of whiteness in publishing — and the privileges that come with being white in publishing — continues to justify our scrutiny. We are aware that white people hold much of the power in the literary world, but how do we assess this fact critically, understanding that whiteness is not just a factor in the economics of writing, but in the writing itself? Novelist Jess Row investigates this question in his latest book, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. In his own words, “American culture has evolved a theory of the white psyche that rarely, if ever, considers racism as a direct or even proximate cause of its disorder and distress.” Read more…

My Love Affair with Chairs

Willian Justen de Vasconcellos, Getty

Keah Brown | An excerpt adapted from The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me | Atria Books | 2019 | 17 minutes (4,556 words)

 

My longest relationship has been with chairs. We are very happy together, committed and strong, in sickness and health till death do us part, etc. There are arguments and disagreements as in any other relationship, but we apologize and make up before nightfall so we don’t go to bed angry. The notion of love at first sight is a little cheesy but true. Chairs and I have traveled around the world and back again. We cuddled on the beach in Puerto Rico, shared stolen glances in the Virgin Islands, danced the night away in Grand Turk, and gave some major PDA in the Bahamas. My chairs are loyal, with vastly different personalities but an equal amount of appreciation for the butt of mine that sits in them. A few of them like to play it cool: they don’t want me to think that they care as much as they do, and I let them believe that it’s working. After all, sometimes you have to let your partner think they have the upper hand, to work toward the long game of the bigger thing you want later. However, you and I, dear reader, we know the truth. The chairs in my life love me, and I honestly can’t blame them. Read more…