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How the Guardian Went Digital

Newscast Limited via AP Images

Alan Rusbridger | Breaking News | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | November 2018 | 31 minutes (6,239 words)

 

In 1993 some journalists began to be dimly aware of something clunkily referred to as “the information superhighway” but few had ever had reason to see it in action. At the start of 1995 only 491 newspapers were online worldwide: by June 1997 that had grown to some 3,600.

In the basement of the Guardian was a small team created by editor in chief Peter Preston — the Product Development Unit, or PDU. The inhabitants were young and enthusiastic. None of them were conventional journalists: I think the label might be “creatives.” Their job was to think of new things that would never occur to the largely middle-aged reporters and editors three floors up.

The team — eventually rebranding itself as the New Media Lab — started casting around for the next big thing. They decided it was the internet. The creatives had a PC actually capable of accessing the world wide web. They moved in hipper circles. And they started importing copies of a new magazine, Wired — the so-called Rolling Stone of technology — which had started publishing in San Francisco in 1993, along with the HotWired website. “Wired described the revolution,” it boasted. “HotWired was the revolution.” It was launched in the same month the Netscape team was beginning to assemble. Only 18 months later Netscape was worth billions of dollars. Things were moving that fast.

In time, the team in PDU made friends with three of the people associated with Wired. They were the founders, Louis Rossetto, and Jane Metcalfe; and the columnist Nicholas Negroponte, who was based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who wrote mindblowing columns predicting such preposterous things as wristwatches which would “migrate from a mere timepiece today to a mobile command-and-control center tomorrow . . . an all-in-one, wrist-mounted TV, computer, and telephone.”

As if.

Both Rossetto and Negroponte were, in their different ways, prophets. Rossetto was a hot booking for TV talk shows, where he would explain to baffled hosts what the information superhighway meant. He’d tell them how smart the internet was, and how ethical. Sure, it was a “dissonance amplifier.” But it was also a “driver of the discussion” towards the real. You couldn’t mask the truth in this new world, because someone out there would weigh in with equal force. Mass media was one-way communication. The guy with the antenna could broadcast to billions, with no feedback loop. He could dominate. But on the internet every voice was going to be equal to every other voice.

“Everything you know is wrong,” he liked to say. “If you have a preconceived idea of how the world works, you’d better reconsider it.”

Negroponte, 50-something, East Coast gravitas to Rossetto’s Californian drawl, was working on a book, Being Digital, and was equally passionate in his evangelism. His mantra was to explain the difference between atoms — which make up the physical artifacts of the past — and bits, which travel at the speed of light and would be the future. “We are so unprepared for the world of bits . . . We’re going to be forced to think differently about everything.”

I bought the drinks and listened.

Over dinner in a North London restaurant, Negroponte started with convergence — the melting of all boundaries between TV, newspapers, magazines, and the internet into a single media experience — and moved on to the death of copyright, possibly the nation state itself. There would be virtual reality, speech recognition, personal computers with inbuilt cameras, personalized news. The entire economic model of information was about to fall apart. The audience would pull rather than wait for old media to push things as at present. Information and entertainment would be on demand. Overly hierarchical and status-conscious societies would rapidly erode. Time as we knew it would become meaningless — five hours of music would be delivered to you in less than five seconds. Distance would become irrelevant. A UK paper would be as accessible in New York as it was in London.

Writing 15 years later in the Observer, the critic John Naughton compared the begetter of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with the seismic disruption five centuries earlier caused by the invention of movable type. Just as Gutenberg had no conception of his invention’s eventual influence on religion, science, systems of ideas, and democracy, so — in 2008 — “it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.”

The entire economic model of information was about to fall apart.

And so I decided to go to America with the leader of the PDU team, Tony Ageh, and see the internet for myself. A 33-year-old “creative,” Ageh had had exactly one year’s experience in media — as an advertising copy chaser for The Home Organist magazine — before joining the Guardian. I took with me a copy of The Internet for Dummies. Thus armed, we set off to America for a four-day, four-city tour.

In Atlanta, we found the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), which was considered a thought leader in internet matters, having joined the Prodigy Internet Service, an online service offering subscribers information over dial-up 1,200 bit/second modems. After four months the internet service had 14,000 members, paying 10 cents a minute to access online banking, messaging, full webpage hosting and live share prices.

The AJC business plan envisaged building to 35,000 or 40,000 by year three. But that time, they calculated, they would be earning $3.3 million in subscription fees and $250,000 a year in advertising. “If it all goes to plan,’ David Scott, the publisher, Electronic Information Service, told us, ‘it’ll be making good money. If it goes any faster, this is a real business.”

We also met Michael Gordon, the managing editor. “The appeal to the management is, crudely, that it is so much cheaper than publishing a newspaper,” he said.

We wrote it down.

“We know there are around 100,000 people in Atlanta with PCs. There are, we think, about one million people wealthy enough to own them. Guys see them as a toy; women see them as a tool. The goldmine is going to be the content, which is why newspapers are so strongly placed to take advantage of this revolution. We’re out to maximize our revenue by selling our content any way we can. If we can sell it on CD-ROM or TV as well, so much the better.”

“Papers? People will go on wanting to read them, though it’s obviously much better for us if we can persuade them to print them in their own homes. They might come in customized editions. Edition 14B might be for females living with a certain income.”

It was heady stuff.

From Atlanta we hopped up to New York to see the Times’s online service, @Times. We found an operation consisting of an editor plus three staffers and four freelancers. The team had two PCs, costing around $4,000 each. The operation was confident, but small.

The @Times content was weighted heavily towards arts and leisure. The opening menus offered a panel with about 15 reviews of the latest films, theatre, music, and books – plus book reviews going back two years. The site offered the top 15 stories of the day, plus some sports news and business.

There was a discussion forum about movies, with 47 different subjects being debated by 235 individual subscribers. There was no archive due to the fact that — in one of the most notorious newspaper licensing cock-ups in history — the NYT in 1983 had given away all rights to its electronic archive (for all material more than 24 hours old) in perpetuity to Mead/Lexis.

That deal alone told you how nobody had any clue what was to come.

We sat down with Henry E. Scott, the group director of @Times. “Sound and moving pictures will be next. You can get them now. I thought about it the other day, when I wondered about seeing 30 seconds of The Age of Innocence. But then I realized it would take 90 minutes to download that and I could have seen more or less the whole movie in that time. That’s going to change.”

But Scott was doubtful about the lasting value of what they were doing — at least, in terms of news. “I can’t see this replacing the news- paper,” he said confidently. “People don’t read computers unless it pays them to, or there is some other pressing reason. I don’t think anyone reads a computer for pleasure. The San Jose Mercury [News] has put the whole newspaper online. We don’t think that’s very sensible. It doesn’t make sense to offer the entire newspaper electronically.”

We wrote it all down.

“I can’t see the point of news on-screen. If I want to know about a breaking story I turn on the TV or the radio. I think we should only do what we can do better than in print. If it’s inferior than the print version there’s no point in doing it.”

Was there a business plan? Not in Scott’s mind. “There’s no way you can make money out of it if you are using someone else’s server. I think the LA Times expects to start making money in about three years’ time. We’re treating it more as an R & D project.”


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From New York we flitted over to Chicago to see what the Tribune was up to. In its 36-storey Art Deco building — a spectacular monument to institutional self-esteem — we found a team of four editorial and four marketing people working on a digital service, with the digital unit situated in the middle of the newsroom. The marketeers were beyond excited about the prospect of being able to show houses or cars for sale and arranged a demonstration. We were excited, too, even if the pictures were slow and cumbersome to download.

We met Joe Leonard, associate editor. “We’re not looking at Chicago Online as a money maker. We’ve no plans even to break even at this stage. My view is simply that I’m not yet sure where I’m going, but I’m on the boat, in the water — and I’m ahead of the guy who is still standing on the pier.”

Reach before revenue.

Finally we headed off to Boulder, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rockies, where Knight Ridder had a team working on their vision of the newspaper of tomorrow. The big idea was, essentially, what would become the iPad — only the team in Boulder hadn’t got much further than making an A4 block of wood with a “front page” stuck on it. The 50-something director of the research centre, Roger Fidler, thought the technology capable of realizing his dream of a ‘personal information appliance’ was a couple of years off.

Tony and I had filled several notebooks. We were by now beyond tired and talked little over a final meal in an Italian restaurant beneath the Rocky Mountains.

We had come. We had seen the internet. We were conquered.

* * *

Looking back from the safe distance of nearly 25 years, it’s easy to mock the fumbling, wildly wrong predictions about where this new beast was going to take the news industry. We had met navigators and pioneers. They could dimly glimpse where the future lay. Not one of them had any idea how to make a dime out of it, but at the same time they intuitively sensed that it would be more reckless not to experiment. It seemed reasonable to assume that — if they could be persuaded to take the internet seriously — their companies would dominate in this new world, as they had in the old world.

We were no different. After just four days it seemed blindingly obvious that the future of information would be mainly digital. Plain old words on paper — delivered expensively by essentially Victorian production and distribution methods — couldn’t, in the end, compete. The future would be more interactive, more image-driven, more immediate. That was clear. But how on earth could you graft a digital mindset and processes onto the stately ocean liner of print? How could you convince anyone that this should be a priority when no one had yet worked out how to make any money out of it? The change, and therefore the threat, was likely to happen rapidly and maybe violently. How quickly could we make a start? Or was this something that would be done to us?

In a note for Peter Preston on our return I wrote, “The internet is fascinating, intoxicating . . . it is also crowded out with bores, nutters, fanatics and middle managers from Minnesota who want the world to see their home page and CV. It’s a cacophony, a jungle. There’s too much information out there. We’re all overloaded. You want someone you trust to fillet it, edit it and make sense of it for you. That’s what we do. It’s an opportunity.”

Looking back from the safe distance of nearly 25 years, it’s easy to mock the fumbling, wildly wrong predictions about where this new beast was going to take the news industry.

I spent the next year trying to learn more and then the calendar clicked on to 1995 — The Year the Future Began, at least according to a recent book by the cultural historian W. Joseph Campbell, who used the phrase as his book title twenty years later. It was the year Amazon.com, eBay, Craigslist, and Match.com established their presence online. Microsoft spent $300m launching Windows 95 with weeks of marketing hype, spending millions for the rights to the Rolling Stones hit “Start Me Up,” which became the anthem for the Windows 95 launch.

Cyberspace — as the cyber dystopian Evgeny Morozov recalled, looking back on that period — felt like space itself. “The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonized by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (‘Internet Explorer,’ ‘Netscape Navigator’).”

But, as Campbell was to reflect, “no industry in 1995 was as ill-prepared for the digital age, or more inclined to pooh-pooh the disruptive potential of the Internet and World Wide Web, than the news business.” It suffered from what he called “innovation blindness” — “an inability, or a disinclination to anticipate and understand the consequences of new media technology.”

1995 was, then, the year the future began. It happened also to be the year in which I became editor of the Guardian.

* * *

I was 41 and had not, until very recently, really imagined this turn of events. My journalism career took a traditional enough path. A few years reporting; four years writing a daily diary column; a stint as a feature writer — home and abroad. In 1986 I left the Guardian to be the Observer’s television critic. When I rejoined the Guardian I was diverted towards a route of editing — launching the paper’s Saturday magazine followed by a daily tabloid features section and moving to be deputy editor in 1993. Peter Preston — unshowy, grittily obstinate, brilliantly strategic — looked as if he would carry on editing for years to come. It was a complete surprise when he took me to the basement of the resolutely unfashionable Italian restaurant in Clerkenwell he favored, to tell me he had decided to call it a day.

On most papers the proprietor or chief executive would find an editor and take him or her out to lunch to do the deal. On the Guardian — at least according to tradition dating back to the mid-70s — the Scott Trust made the decision after balloting the staff, a process that involved manifestos, pub hustings, and even, by some candidates, a little frowned-on campaigning.

I supposed I should run for the job. My mission statement said I wanted to boost investigative reporting and get serious about digital. It was, I fear, a bit Utopian. I doubt much of it impressed the would-be electorate. British journalists are programmed to skepticism about idealistic statements concerning their trade. Nevertheless, I won the popular vote and was confirmed by the Scott Trust after an interview in which I failed to impress at least one Trustee with my sketchy knowledge of European politics. We all went off for a drink in the pub round the back of the office. A month later I was editing.

“Fleet Street,” as the UK press was collectively called, was having a torrid time, not least because the biggest beast in the jungle, Rupert Murdoch, had launched a prolonged price war that was playing havoc with the economics of publishing. His pockets were so deep he could afford to slash the price of The Times almost indefinitely — especially if it forced others out of business.

Reach before revenue — as it wasn’t known then.

The newest kid on the block, the Independent, was suffering the most. To their eyes, Murdoch was behaving in a predatory way. We calculated the Independent titles were losing around £42 million (nearly £80 million in today’s money). Murdoch’s Times, by contrast, had seen its sales rocket 80 per cent by cutting its cover prices to below what it cost to print and distribute. The circulation gains had come at a cost — about £38 million in lost sales revenue. But Murdoch’s TV business, BSkyB, was making booming profits and the Sun continued to throw off huge amounts of cash. He could be patient.

But how on earth could you graft a digital mindset and processes onto the stately ocean liner of print.

The Telegraph had been hit hard — losing £45 million in circulation revenues through cutting the cover price by 18 pence. The end of the price war left it slowly clawing back lost momentum, but it was still £23 million adrift of where it had been the previous year. Murdoch — as so often — had done something bold and aggressive. Good for him, not so good for the rest of us. Everyone was tightening their belts in different ways. The Independent effectively gave up on Scotland. The Guardian saved a million a year in newsprint costs by shaving half an inch off the width of the paper.

The Guardian, by not getting into the price war, had “saved” around £37 million it would otherwise have lost. But its circulation had been dented by about 10,000 readers a day. Moreover, the average age of the Guardian reader was 43 — something that pre-occupied us rather a lot. We were in danger of having a readership too old for the job advertisements we carried.

Though the Guardian itself was profitable, the newspaper division was losing nearly £12 million (north of £21 million today). The losses were mainly due to the sister Sunday title, the Observer, which the Scott Trust had purchased as a defensive move against the Independent in 1993. The Sunday title had a distinguished history, but was hemorrhaging cash: £11 million losses.

Everything we had seen in America had to be put on hold for a while. The commercial side of the business never stopped reminding us that only three percent of households owned a PC and a modem.

* * *

But the digital germ was there. My love of gadgets had not extended to understanding how computers actually worked, so I commissioned a colleague to write a report telling me, in language I could understand, how our computers measured up against what the future would demand. The Atex system we had installed in 1987 gave everyone a dumb terminal on their desk — little more than a basic word processor. It couldn’t connect to the internet, though there was a rudimentary internal messaging system. There was no word count or spellchecker and storage space was limited. It could not be used with floppy disks or CD-ROMs. Within eight years of purchase it was already a dinosaur.

There was one internet connection in the newsroom, though most reporters were unaware of it. It was rumored that downstairs a bloke called Paul in IT had a Mac connected to the internet through a dial-up modem. Otherwise we were sealed off from the outside world.

Some of these journalist geeks began to invent Heath Robinson solutions to make the inadequate kit in Farringdon Road to do the things we wanted in order to produce a technology website online. Tom Standage — he later became deputy editor of the Economist, but then was a freelance tech writer — wrote some scripts to take articles out of Atex and format them into HTML so they could be moved onto the modest Mac web server — our first content management system, if you like. If too many people wanted to read this tech system at once the system crashed. So Standage and the site’s editor, Azeem Azhar, would take it in turns sitting in the server room in the basement of the building rebooting the machines by hand — unplugging them and physically moving the internet cables from one machine to another.

What would the future look like? We imagined personalized editions, even if we had not the faintest clue how to produce them. We guessed that readers might print off copies of the Guardian in their homes — and even toyed with the idea of buying every reader a printer. There were glimmers of financial hope. Our readers were spending £56 million a year buying the Guardian but we retained none of it: the money went on paper and distribution. In the back of our minds we ran calculations about how the economics of newspapers would change if we could save ourselves the £56 million a year “old world” cost.

By March 1996, ideas we’d hatched in the summer of 1995 to graft the paper onto an entirely different medium were already out of date. That was a harbinger of the future.

On top of editing, the legal entanglements sometimes felt like a full-time job on their own. Trying to engineer a digital future for the Guardian felt like a third job. There were somehow always more urgent issues. By March 1996, ideas we’d hatched in the summer of 1995 to graft the paper onto an entirely different medium were already out of date. That was a harbinger of the future. No plans in the new world lasted very long.

It was now apparent that we couldn’t get away with publishing selective parts of the Guardian online. Other newspapers had shot that fox by pushing out everything. We were learning about the connectedness of the web — and the IT team tentatively suggested that we might use some “offsite links” to other versions of the same story to save ourselves the need to write our own version of everything. This later became the mantra of the City University of New York (CUNY) digital guru Jeff Jarvis — “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

We began to grapple with numerous basic questions about the new waters into which we were gingerly dipping our toes.

Important question: Should we charge?

The Times and the Telegraph were both free online. A March 1996 memo from Bill Thompson, a developer who had joined the Guardian from Pipex, ruled it out:

I do not believe the UK internet community would pay to read an online edition of a UK newspaper. They may pay to look at an archive, but I would not support any attempt to make the Guardian a subscription service online . . . It would take us down a dangerous path.

In fact, I believe that the real value from an online edition will come from the increased contact it brings with our readers: online newspapers can track their readership in a way that print products never can, and the online reader can be a valuable commodity in their own right, even if they pay nothing for the privilege.

Thompson was prescient about how the overall digital economy would work — at least for players with infinitely larger scale and vastly more sophisticated technology.

What time of day should we publish?

The electronic Telegraph was published at 8 a.m. each day — mainly because of its print production methods. The Times, more automated, was available as soon as the presses started rolling. The Guardian started making some copy available from first edition through to the early hours. It would, we were advised, be fraught with difficulties to publish stories at the same time they were ready for the press.

Why were we doing it anyway?

Thompson saw the dangers of cannibalization, that readers would stop buying the paper if they could read it for free online. It could be seen as a form of marketing. His memo seemed ambivalent as to whether we should venture into this new world at all:

The Guardian excels in presenting information in an attractive easy to use and easy to navigate form. It is called a “broadsheet newspaper.” If we try to put the newspaper on-line (as the Times has done) then we will just end up using a new medium to do badly what an old medium does well. The key question is whether to make the Guardian a website, with all that entails in terms of production, links, structure, navigational aids etc. In summer 1995 we decided that we would not do this.

But was that still right a year later? By now we had the innovation team — PDU — still in the basement of one building in Farringdon Road, and another team in a Victorian loft building across the way in Ray Street. We were, at the margins, beginning to pick up some interesting fringe figures who knew something about computers, if not journalism. But none of this was yet pulling together into a coherent picture of what a digital Guardian might look like.

An 89-page business plan drawn up in October 1996 made it plain where the priorities lay: print.

We wanted to keep growing the Guardian circulation — aiming a modest increase to 415,000 by March 2000 — which would make us the ninth-biggest paper in the UK — with the Observer aiming for 560,000 with the aid of additional sections. A modest investment of £200,000 a year in digital was dwarfed by an additional £6 million cash injection into the Observer, spread over three years.

As for “on-line services” (we were still hyphenating it) we did want “a leading-edge presence” (whatever that meant), but essentially we thought we had to be there because we had to be there. By being there we would learn and innovate and — surely? — there were bound to be commercial opportunities along the road. It wasn’t clear what.

We decided we might usefully take broadcasting, rather than print, as a model — emulating its “immediacy, movement searchability and layering.”

If this sounded as if we were a bit at sea, we were. We hadn’t published much digitally to this point. We had taken half a dozen meaty issues — including parliamentary sleaze, and a feature on how we had continued to publish on the night our printing presses had been blown up by the IRA — and turned them into special reports.

It is a tribute to our commercial colleagues that they managed to pull in the thick end of half a million pounds to build these websites. Other companies’ marketing directors were presumably like ours — anxious about the youth market and keen for their brands to feel “cool.” In corporate Britain in 1996, there was nothing much cooler than the internet, even if not many people had it, knew where to find it or understood what to do with it.

* * *

The absence of a controlling owner meant we could run the Guardian in a slightly different way from some papers. Each day began with a morning conference open to anyone on the staff. In the old Farringdon Road office, it was held around two long narrow tables in the editor’s office — perhaps 30 or 40 people sitting or standing. When we moved to our new offices at Kings Place, near Kings Cross in North London, we created a room that was, at least theoretically, less hierarchical: a horseshoe of low yellow sofas with a further row of stools at the back. In this room would assemble a group of journalists, tech developers and some visitors from the commercial departments every morning at about 10 a.m. If it was a quiet news day we might expect 30 or so. On big news days, or with an invited guest, we could host anything up to 100.

A former Daily Mail journalist, attending his first morning conference, muttered to a colleague in the newsroom that it was like Start the Week — a Monday morning BBC radio discussion program. All talk and no instructions. In a way, he was right: It was difficult, in conventional financial or efficiency terms, to justify 50 to 60 employees stopping work to gather together each morning for anything between 25 and 50 minutes. No stories were written during this period, no content generated.

But something else happened at these daily gatherings. Ideas emerged and were kicked around. Commissioning editors would pounce on contributors and ask them to write the thing they’d just voiced. The editorial line of the paper was heavily influenced, and sometimes changed, by the arguments we had. The youngest member of staff would be in the same room as the oldest: They would be part of a common discussion around news. By a form of accretion and osmosis an idea of the Guardian was jointly nourished, shared, handed down, and crafted day by day.

You might love the Guardian or despise it, but it had a definite sense of what it believed in and what its journalism was.

It led to a very strong culture. You might love the Guardian or despise it, but it had a definite sense of what it believed in and what its journalism was. It could sometimes feel an intimidating meeting — even for, or especially for, the editor. The culture was intended to be one of challenge: If we’d made a wrong decision, or slipped up factually or tonally, someone would speak up and demand an answer. But challenge was different from blame: It was not a meeting for dressing downs or bollockings. If someone had made an error the previous day we’d have a post-mortem or unpleasant conversation outside the room. We’d encourage people to want to contribute to this forum, not make them fear disapproval or denunciation.

There was a downside to this. It could, and sometimes did, lead to a form of group-think. However herbivorous the culture we tried to nurture, I was conscious of some staff members who felt awkward about expressing views outside what we hoped was a  fairly broad consensus. But, more often, there would be a good discussion on two or three of the main issues of the day. We encouraged specialists or outside visitors to come in and discuss breaking stories. Leader writers could gauge the temperature of the paper before penning an editorial. And, from time to time, there would be the opposite of consensus: Individuals, factions, or groups would come and demand we change our line on Russia, bombing in Bosnia; intervention in Syria; Israel, blood sports, or the Labor leadership.

The point was this: that the Guardian was not one editor’s plaything or megaphone. It emerged from a common conversation — and was open to internal challenge when editorial staff felt uneasy about aspects of our journalism or culture.

* * *

Within two years — slightly uncomfortable at the power I had acquired as editor — I gave some away. I wanted to make correction a natural part of the journalistic process, not a bitterly contested post-publication battleground designed to be as difficult as possible.

We created a new role on the Guardian: a readers’ editor. He or she would be the first port of call for anyone wanting to complain about anything we did or wrote. The readers’ editor would have daily space in the paper — off-limits to the editor — to correct or clarify anything and would also have a weekly column to raise broader issues of concern. It was written into the job description that the editor could not interfere. And the readers’ editor was given the security that he/she could not be removed by the editor, only by the Scott Trust.

On most papers editors had sat in judgment on themselves. They commissioned pieces, edited and published them — and then were supposed neutrally to assess whether their coverage had, in fact, been truthful, fair, and accurate. An editor might ask a colleague — usually a managing editor — to handle a complaint, but he/she was in charge from beginning to end. It was an autocracy. That mattered even more in an age when some journalism was moving away from mere reportage and observation to something closer to advocacy or, in some cases, outright pursuit.

Allowing even a few inches of your own newspaper to be beyond your direct command meant that your own judgments, actions, ethical standards and editorial decisions could be held up to scrutiny beyond your control. That, over time, was bound to change your journalism. Sunlight is the best disinfectant: that was the journalist-as-hero story we told about what we do. So why wouldn’t a bit of sunlight be good for us, too?

The first readers’ editor was Ian Mayes, a former arts and obituaries editor then in his late 50s. We felt the first person in the role needed to have been a journalist — and one who would command instant respect from a newsroom which otherwise might be somewhat resistant to having their work publicly critiqued or rebutted. There were tensions and some resentment, but Ian’s experience, fairness and flashes of humor eventually won most people round.

One or two of his early corrections convinced staff and readers alike that he had a light touch about the fallibility of journalists:

In our interview with Sir Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, page 20, Sport, yesterday, we mistakenly attributed to him the following comment: “Our team was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.” Sir Jack had just declined the offer of a hot drink. What he actually said was: “Our tea was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.” Profuse apologies.

In an article about the adverse health effects of certain kinds of clothing, pages 8 and 9, G2, August 5, we omitted a decimal point when quoting a doctor on the optimum temperature of testicles. They should be 2.2 degrees Celsius below core body temperature, not 22 degrees lower.

But in his columns he was capable of asking tough questions about our editorial decisions —  often prompted by readers who had been unsettled by something we had done. Why had we used a shocking picture which included a corpse? Were we careful enough in our language around mental health or disability? Why so much bad language in the Guardian? Were we balanced in our views of the Kosovo conflict? Why were Guardian journalists so innumerate? Were we right to link to controversial websites?

In most cases Mayes didn’t come down on one side or another. He would often take readers’ concerns to the journalist involved and question them — sometimes doggedly — about their reasoning. We learned more about our readers through these interactions; and we hoped that Mayes’s writings, candidly explaining the workings of a newsroom, helped readers better understand our thinking and processes.

It was, I felt, good for us to be challenged in this way. Mayes was invaluable in helping devise systems for the “proper” way to correct the record. A world in which — to coin a phrase —  you were “never wrong for long” posed the question of whether you went in for what Mayes termed “invisible mending.” Some news organizations would quietly amend whatever it was that they had published in error, no questions asked. Mayes felt differently: The act of publication was something on the record. If you wished to correct the record, the correction should be visible.

But we had some inkling that the iron grip of centralized control that a newspaper represented was not going to last.

We were some years off the advent of social media, in which any error was likely to be pounced on in a thousand hostile tweets. But we had some inkling that the iron grip of centralized control that a newspaper represented was not going to last.

I found liberation in having created this new role. There were few things editors can enjoy less than the furious early morning phone call or email from the irate subject of their journalism. Either the complainant is wrong — in which case there is time wasted in heated self-justification; or they’re right, wholly or partially. Immediately you’re into remorseful calculations about saving face. If readers knew we honestly and rapidly — even immediately — owned up to our mistakes they should, in theory, trust us more. That was the David Broder theory, and I bought it. Readers certainly made full use of the readers’ editor’s existence. Within five years Mayes was dealing with around 10,000 calls, emails, and letters a year — leading to around 1,200 corrections, big and small. It’s not, I think, that we were any more error-prone than other papers. But if you win a reputation for openness, you’d better be ready to take it as seriously as your readers will.

Our journalism became better. If, as a journalist, you know there are a million sleuth-eyed editors out there waiting to leap on your tiniest mistake, it makes you more careful. It changes the tone of your writing. Our readers often know more than we do. That became a mantra of the new world, coined by the blogger and academic Dan Gillmor, in his 2004 book We the Media8 but it was already becoming evident in the late 1990s.

The act of creating a readers’ editor felt like a profound recognition of the changing nature of what we were engaged in. Journalism was not an infallible method guaranteed to result in something we would proclaim as The Truth — but a more flawed, tentative, iterative and interactive way of getting towards something truthful.

Admitting that felt both revolutionary and releasing.

***

Excerpted from Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger. Published Farrar, Straus and Giroux November 27, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Alan Rusbridger. All rights reserved.

Longreads Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

Girl on the Third Floor

Todd Gipstein/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

Paul Crenshaw | Mad Creek Books| May 2019 | 25 minutes (4,980 words)

 

The upper floors of the Nyberg Building are locked and deserted now, but her ghost is said to live there still. It is not hard to imagine a ghost filtering down the long hall and disappearing into the distance, although I do not know if she walks through walls or simply appears and stands looking sad and lost, perhaps trying to find someone to help her.

Read more…

A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Entirely Underground

The Catacombs, Paris, 1931. Illustration from the book "Paris" by Ernest Flammarion. (Print Collector/Getty Images)

Will Hunt  | An excerpt from Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet | Spiegel & Grau | January 2019 | 26 minutes (6,748 words)

 

And I stared through that obscurity,
I saw what seemed a cluster of great towers,
Whereat I cried, “Master, what is this city?”
Dante, Canto XXXI, The Inferno

The first person to photograph the underground of Paris was a gallant and theatrical man with a blaze of red hair, known as Nadar. Once described by Charles Baudelaire as “the most amazing example of vitality,” Nadar was among the most visible and electric personalities in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. He was a showman, a dandy, a ringleader of the bohemian art world, but he was known especially as the city’s preeminent photographer. Working out of a palatial studio in the center of the city, Nadar was a pioneer of the medium, as well as a great innovator. In 1861, Nadar invented a battery-operated light, one of the first artificial lights in the history of photography. To show off the power of his “magic lantern,” as he called it, he set out to take photographs in the darkest and most obscure spaces he could find: the sewers and catacombs beneath the city. Over the course of several months, he took hundreds of photographs in subterranean darkness, each requiring an exposure of eighteen minutes. The images were a revelation. Parisians had long known about the cat’s cradle of tunnels, crypts, and aqueducts beneath their streets, but they had always been abstract spaces, whispered about, but seldom seen. For the first time, Nadar brought the underworld into full view, opening Paris’s relationship to its subterranean landscape: a connection that, over time, grew stranger, more obsessive, and more intimate than that of perhaps any city in the world.

A century and a half after Nadar, I arrived in Paris, along with Steve Duncan and a small crew of urban explorers, with an aim to investigate the city’s relationship to its underground in a way no one had before. We planned a traverse — a walk from one edge of the city to the other, traveling exclusively by subterranean infrastructure. It was a trip Steve had dreamed up back in New York: we’d spent months planning, studying old maps of the city, consulting Parisian explorers, and tracing potential routes. The expedition, in theory, was tidy. We would descend into the catacombs just outside the southern frontier of the city, near Porte d’Orléans; if all went according to plan, we’d emerge from the sewers near Place de Clichy, beyond the northern border. As the crow flies, the route was about six miles, a stroll you could make between breakfast and lunch. But the subterranean route — as the worm inches, let’s say — would be winding and messy and roundabout, with lots of zigzagging and backtracking. We had prepared for a two- or three-day trek, with nights camping underground. Read more…

Faith and Reproductive Justice Are Not in Opposition

Illustration by Chloe Cushman

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | March 2019 | 7 minutes (1,853 words)

“The patriarchy begins at home,” acclaimed Atlanta-based novelist Tayari Jones told the Atlantic last year. “They call it ‘patriarchy’ because it’s about your father and your brothers and your family.” My brother became a conservative Republican in the late ’80s due in part to a strong moral opposition to abortion. He’s 16 years older than me, and one of few men in our family. We were raised in the same missionary Baptist church in North Memphis our family belonged to for three generations. I was baptized and went to Sunday School there; my grandmother had been a white glove-wearing, note-taking member of the Baptist Training Union 50 years before. They taught Baptist doctrine to congregants. I found pages of her meticulous notes in a closet in my auntie’s house decades after she died. Despite years of service and prominent roles in the church, women couldn’t sit in its pulpit, much less aspire to ultimate leadership. In all of my time there, I can’t even recall having a woman from another congregation speak to us as visiting pastor.

The seeds of whatever belief system my brother came to uphold must have been planted in that sanctuary. Later, when I was a teenager who’d developed her own thoughts on the matter, we spoke about the biblical underpinnings of his values. We didn’t talk about our grandmother, who may have had an abortion in the ’50s when she became pregnant for the ninth time. Or our mother, who, with me, had a troubled delivery, with preeclampsia, induction, and a caesarian section. I spent my first days in a neonatal ICU. My mother was 21 when my brother was born and 37 with me — an “advanced maternal age.” By the time my brother and I were talking about the “sanctity of life,” it was the ’90s; yet, even now, when male pundits and politicians speak about pregnancy, abortion, and God, I do not hear a concern for the lives and experiences of would-be mothers, for women, that is as strong as their concern for the unborn.

Attorney and scholar of race, gender, and the law, Dorothy Roberts, describes “maternal-fetal conflict,” as “policies that seek to protect the fetus while disregarding the humanity of the mother.” It’s a concept that helps explain how many of the same states with the most restricted access to abortion care have also refused to expand Medicaid, denying uninsured, low income people access to contraceptives and other healthcare services. It helps explain how rates of maternal mortality have increased while rates of infant mortality have fallen.

It’s likely, since Brett Kavanaugh replaced Anthony Kennedy and the Supreme Court’s ideological balance shifted, that federal protections guaranteed with Roe vs. Wade will disappear. Several cases that would prompt its annulment could make it onto the Court’s docket. Many people already effectively live in a post-Roe future. In states throughout the South and Midwest, including my home state of Tennessee, more than 90% of counties have no clinics that provide abortion services. Mississippi and six other states are down to a single one. The Hyde Amendment prohibits use of federal Medicaid funds for elective abortions; 11 states restrict abortion coverage in private insurance. Twenty-seven require waiting periods of 24 to 72 hours, meaning two visits to a provider that is possibly already a prohibitive distance away.

New York’s Reproductive Health Act passed on January 22, 2019, the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It codified the Supreme Court decision into state law, removed abortion from the criminal code, and relaxed some restrictions on abortions after 24 weeks. Last month, Virginia’s legislature considered a bill that would also expand abortion access at the state level. Since then, the phrase “late term” abortion, an imprecise, lightning rod of a term used to describe a set of complicated procedures that account for less than 2% of abortions, shot through the discourse to, it seems, reignite a moral conversation about abortion in general. New York and Virginia are part of a rash of states that rushed to pass bills clarifying their positions. On February 20, the governor of Arkansas signed the “Human Life Protection Act”; it will “abolish abortion” in the state, except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. Tennessee’s legislature introduced a similar bill in February. Both would become effective should Roe v. Wade, or its supporting decisions, be nullified. Mississippi, Louisiana, North Dakota and South Dakota already have comparable “trigger laws” in place.


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* * *

“We lose people when we center and focus on abortion,” Jalessah Jackson told me on a phone call from Atlanta. She’s the Georgia Coordinator for SisterSong, a national, membership-based network of organizers focused on reproductive rights. Founded in 1997, one of SisterSong’s main aims is organizing in support of people all along the gender spectrum who are living in the South.

A major priority for SisterSong is “culture shift” campaigns, which develop partnerships with faith organizations and leaders. “We recognize the role of the church in people’s lives,” she said, so their organizers “meet with progressive church leaders to talk about their responsibility in making sure their congregation is living and thriving. They should attend to the part of their congregation that might want to have children as well as those that might not want to.”

Jackson and team hope to “change narratives,” because many people “think faith and reproductive justice are in opposition, and they’re not.” Indeed, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), started by a coalition of ministers after the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott and led, at one point, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a policy document for the federal government’s family planning program in the mid-60s. Before that, in the ’30s, W.E.B. DuBois thought black churches should invite leaders of birth control organizations to speak to their congregations. DuBois had a progressive-era classism then, and believed in population control especially among the “least intelligent and fit.” But there’s something to his call for “a more liberal attitude” within the black church that remains salient. 

According to Loretta J. Ross, an activist and one of the pioneers of the concept, and historian Rickie Solinger, the core of reproductive justice is the right to have a child or not, and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments. Using reproductive justice as a frame for thinking about women’s health exposes the limits of the pro-life / pro-choice binary. It makes room for concerns about mass incarceration, public education, affordable housing, air pollution, and the ability to earn a living wage — all of which influence what choices people actually have, and determine whether the children they carry to term are able to thrive.

Nearly 60% of women who terminate pregnancies are already mothers. About half of patients seeking abortion care live below the poverty level. Black women in the US are almost three times more likely than white women to have abortions; Latinas have them nearly twice as often as whites. Since a growing majority of US blacks reside in the South, and poverty rates for blacks, Latinx, and indigenous people double that of whites, abortion access is a “race issue,” and a Roe annulment would disproportionately affect brown and black people. Many black pro-life organizations and church congregations have co-opted the language of progressive movements to buttress their opposition to abortion, linking reproductive rights and family planning with genocide. It’s an old but powerful strain of thinking that acknowledges medical racism and the early associations of Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood, with leading eugenicists. But it fails to note Sanger’s reliance on W.E.B. DuBois’ research, and it does not account for the lived experiences or needs of actual women.

Nikia Grayson, certified nurse midwife and director of midwifery care at Choices, a reproductive health center in downtown Memphis, told me their providers like to “talk about all of a woman’s options,” to unearth and address what kind of care she needs. They aim to provide “high quality, non-judgmental” healthcare in which they remove the stigma from abortion and serve the needs of the city’s LGBTIA population. They are one of few clinics providing the HIV preventative medications PrEP and PEP in a city that is eighth in the country for rates of new HIV diagnoses.

Choices is a model of full spectrum reproductive care, offering prenatal and postpartum care, pap smears, pelvic exams, STI screening and advice, and (through coordination with a local rape crisis center) treatment specifically for sexual assault survivors, all under one roof. It’s the midwifery model, in which women are attended to “from menarche to menopause.” Abortions are also provided at the facility. One of only two back certified nurse midwives in Memphis, Grayson said the majority of Choices’ patients pay for their services at least partially with Medicaid, and the center often raises funds to cover what the state will not. If all goes according to plan, later this year they’ll open the city’s first standalone birthing center, where women who could not otherwise afford a home birth can have an alternative to hospital delivery. Advisers to the World Health Organization and the UN Population Fund recommend “integrated comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services” like this “for women and girls to enjoy their human rights.” It decreases the likelihood of unintended pregnancies, addressing concerns about abortion closer to the root.

I asked Grayson about church groups, and she said Choices receives support from social justice oriented congregations, like Christ Missionary Baptist Church. “They understand that the work Choices does saves lives.” Christ Missionary’s senior pastor, Dr. Gina Stewart, is one of the first women to lead a Baptist congregation in the city and its surrounding areas.

If Roe is dying, it is, so far, a slow burning death, with gasps for breath and short, hopeful bouts of recovery. Several weeks ago, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the decisive vote in blocking a law in Louisiana that would have further restricted abortion access in the state; the week after, the Trump administration published a “family planning rule” that would block providers who provide or counsel on abortions (such as Planned Parenthood and Choices) from access to certain federal funds. It is is helpful to note how institutions like Planned Parenthood, Choices and SisterSong already do their work in a climate of opposition and disinformation. “I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about abortion.” Jaleesah Jackson said. The disinformation comes from everywhere, nowhere, and the top — the president falsely claimed in his latest state of the union address that later term abortions “rip babies from the mother’s womb moments from birth.” As Jackson said, “SisterSong advocates for comprehensive sex education, and comprehensive sex education would cover abortion. All genders, all folks need access to this information because they’re all charged with the responsibility of making decisions about their reproductive lives.”

But abortion is, in many ways, beside the point. “We’re autonomous human beings.” Jackson told me. “And part of having bodily autonomy is being able to make whatever reproductive health decisions we deem fit for ourselves and our lives and for our families.”

Jill the Ripper

Illustration by Lily Padula

Tori Telfer | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,226 words)

Before the Zodiac Killer named himself, before someone strangled poor JonBenét, before the Black Dahlia was sliced open, and before Tupac and Biggie were shot six months apart under eerily similar circumstances, someone was slinking through the slums of London, killing women.

This someone — a shadowy aichmomaniac, possibly wearing a bloody apron — left the women of the Whitechapel district in shocking disarray. Their intestines were thrown over their shoulders; cultish markings were carved into their cheeks. One of them was found without her heart. To most people who saw the crime scenes or read the papers, everything about this appeared to be the work of a man — the brutality, the strength, the misogyny. And so in 1888, when people started looking for the Ripper, they were looking for…well, for a Jack. Was he a mad doctor? A butcher? Queen Victoria’s weak-minded son? Everyone in Whitechapel found themselves peering nervously into the fog, wondering which normal-looking male passerby was actually a maniac.

Everyone, that is, except for a few lone voices, suggesting something totally radical: what if they should actually be looking for a Jill? Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Bill Shine in the Oval Office
White House Communications Director and Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Shine, who resigned as co-president of Fox News in 2017. (Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Jen Gann, Christine H. Lee, John Birdsall, and Anna Callaghan.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

How To Hide An Empire

Bettmann / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,528 words)

What do we think of when we think about the United States and the country’s history? This seemingly simple question rests at the heart of Northwestern University Professor Daniel Immerwahr’s new book, How To Hide An Empire. Immerwahr posits that, for the vast majority of people living in the contiguous United States, our understanding of our own country is fundamentally flawed. This is for one central reason: We omit the millions of people and large territorial holdings outside of the mainland that have, since the founding of the country, also had a claim to the flag.

In his book, Immerwahr traces US expansion from the days of Daniel Boone to our modern network of military bases, showing how the United States has always and in a variety of ways been an empire. As early as the 1830s, the United States was taking control of uninhabited islands; by 1898, the United States was having public debates about the merits of imperial power; by the end of World War II, the United States held jurisdiction over more people overseas — 135 million — than on the mainland — 132 million. While the exact overseas holdings and the standing of territories have shifted with time, what has not changed is the troubling way the mainland has ignored, obscured, or dismissed the rights of, atrocities committed against, and the humanity of the people living in these territories. When we see US history through the lens of these territories and peoples, the story looks markedly and often upsettingly different from what many people are told. Read more…

Shelved: Brian Wilson’s Adult/Child

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Tom Maxwell | Longreads | March 2019 | 18 minutes (3,519 words)

 

One day in 1976, Brian Wilson sat down at the piano in his Los Angeles home, turned on a tape recorder, and began to play. There’s a density to the introductory chords, like the air of an approaching storm. “Time for supper now,” he sings on the demo recording, the first verse so banal as to be almost exotic.

Day’s been hard and I’m so tired

I feel like eating now

Smell the kitchen now

Hear the maid whistle a tune

My thoughts are fleeting now

“Still I dream of it,” Wilson continues, his gutted voice not quite hitting the high note, “of that happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love. And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars above.”

The extraordinary chord progression, intricate melody, and anguished bridge all demonstrate “Still I Dream of It” to be a song written by a master songsmith, although one in decline. The confident tenor and soaring falsetto of Wilson’s youth are gone, and yet the song is somehow better for the ragged vulnerability. If you know about the life of the man leading up to this moment, the poignancy of this performance is almost unbearable.

“Still I Dream of It” was intended for inclusion on Adult/Child, a Beach Boys album that was immediately shelved upon recording. A bewildering mix of sublime and terrible songs, and a hodgepodge of arrangement approaches from big band to minimoog, Adult/Child is a bookend to the Beach Boys’ famously postponed 1967 opus, Smile. The first project documented a visionary at the height of his musical powers, unmoored by drugs and set adrift by overambition and a general lack of support; the second project is one of the final blows of that artist’s losing battle with his former self. What is most conspicuous about the period in between is Wilson’s absence.

Wilson showed an idiosyncratic musical genius from the start. “Brian took accordion lessons, on one of those little baby accordions, for six weeks,” his mother Audree told Rolling Stone in 1976. “And the teacher said, ‘I don’t think he’s reading. He just hears it once and plays the whole thing through perfectly.’” As a teenager, Wilson learned the complicated harmony parts of the Four Freshmen, teaching them to his younger brothers Carl and Dennis. The three formed a band called the Pendletones with cousin Mike Love and classmate Al Jardine. At Dennis’s suggestion, Wilson wrote songs about surfing and surf culture. Their first single, 1961’s “Surfin’,” and their ensuing demo, was popular enough to eventually get the band, now called the Beach Boys, a seven-year contract with Capitol Records.

Their first album, Surfin’ Safari, owed more to Chuck Berry than Dick Dale, whose reverb-soaked aggressive guitar instrumentals defined the surf music form. (“I wrote ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.,” Wilson recently said, “because of [Berry’s] ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’”) But the Beach Boys would not only go on to redefine surf music, they would fix the idea of Southern California in the national consciousness. Their music mapped this mythic place, fusing elements of early rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Much of this music originated in New York; Wilson’s early genius was to synthesize these musical elements and make a home for them on the other side of the country.

Beginning in 1963, two things happened in succession to solidify Wilson’s career path. The first was the release of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” Perhaps more than the song, Wilson was blown away by producer Phil Spector’s orchestrative approach. “That was when I started to design the experience to be a record rather than just a song,” Wilson remembered.  

The second momentous event in young Wilson’s life was the British Invasion, which pretty much killed off all other forms of popular music, including surf. To make things worse, the Beach Boys and the Beatles shared an American record label, who turned its attention from the former to the latter. Wilson wrote his last surf song in 1964, although Capitol Records continued to bill the band as “America’s Top Surfin’ Group.” By 1965, Wilson had produced and mostly composed 16 singles and nine albums for the Beach Boys.

Wilson stopped touring in 1965, concentrating on songwriting and producing. After hearing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, he was inspired to make his own “complete statement.” While the band toured, he worked for months on a project, using session musicians from collectively known as “the Wrecking Crew,” whose all-star players previously worked with Phil Spector. The resulting album, Pet Sounds, was released in 1966. Paul McCartney described one of its songs, “God Only Knows,” as the best ever written. “If you could just write maybe the bridge to ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ — that would be an accomplishment for most writers for a lifetime,” Al Jardine once reflected about another Pet Sounds track. “Just the bridge.”

Now considered a masterwork, Pet Sounds was not entirely well received by the band or their label. Mike Love, who once called it “Brian’s ego music,” found some of the lyrics “nauseating.” Capitol Records, alarmed at the $70,000 price tag — about $550,000 today — and realizing there weren’t any obvious singles on the record to help them recoup, stopped the recording and considered shelving the album. Wilson showed up at a tense record label meeting with a tape player. Instead of answering label questions, he instead played recordings of his own voice saying, “That’s a great idea,” “No, let’s not do that,” or “I think we should think about that. Rather than embracing the band’s new approach, the label put the record out in May 1966, then quickly compiled Best of the Beach Boys, releasing it less than two months later. The best-of easily outsold the new album. Brian Wilson was already in competition with nostalgia for an earlier version of his own band. He was 24.

Meanwhile, John Lennon and Paul McCartney liked Pet Sounds so much they made Beach Boy Bruce Johnston play it for them twice on a trip to London to promote the album. “I played it to John so much that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence,” McCartney said years later. “If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed [Sergeant Pepper]. And my influence was basically the Pet Sounds album. John was influenced by it, perhaps not as much as me.” (Wilson remembers Lennon calling him after hearing Pet Sounds and telling him it was “the greatest album ever made.”)

Already on a steady diet of amphetamines, marijuana, and hashish, Wilson began dropping LSD. “At first, my creativity increased more than I could believe,” he told The Guardian in 2011. “On the downside, it fucked my brain.”

Although hurt by the way Pet Sounds was treated, Wilson continued to evolve his production and recording process. Central to this approach was topping his previous effort. The result was one song recorded between February and September 1966 — a song that used more than 90 hours of tape and cost, in Wilson’s estimation, as much as the entire Pet Sounds project: “Good Vibrations.” In addition to arranging for cello, a theremin, and a bass harmonica, Wilson consciously used the recording studio as an instrument.

“‘Good Vibrations’ took six months to make,” Wilson told Rolling Stone. “We recorded the very first part of it at Gold Star Recording Studio, then we took it to a place called Western, then we went to Sunset Sound, then we went to Columbia. … Because we wanted to experiment with combining studio sounds. Every studio has its own marked sound. Using four different studios had a lot to do with the way the final record sounded.

“My mother used to tell me about vibrations,” Wilson continued. “I didn’t really understand too much of what that meant when I was just a boy. It scared me, the word ‘vibrations.’ To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed, scared me to death. But she told about dogs that would bark at people and then not bark at others, that a dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see, but you can feel. And the same existed with people. … Because we wanted to explain that concept, plus we wanted to do something that was R&B but had a taste of modern, avant-garde R&B to it. ‘Good Vibrations’ was advanced rhythm and blues music.”

The song, and the ensuing record Smile, was written in pieces. “I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called ‘feels,’” Wilson said of this time. “Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I’d felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic.”

Although “Good Vibrations” topped the charts, Smile was never finished. Even in its incomplete state (a compilation of the dozens of sessions was issued in 2011), the project is monumental. At the time, Wilson said the result was going to be “a teenage symphony to God.” Already suffering from panic attacks, and now hearing voices in his head, Wilson had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the sessions. He began self-medicating with cocaine and heroin, ultimately being diagnosed as schizoaffective with mild manic depression. An almost complete lack of support from the band completed the bleak picture; Smile was abandoned in May 1967. “I had to destroy it before it destroyed me,” Wilson later said.

What followed for Wilson was a period of increasing indulgence and withdrawal. In the coming decade, he turned production duties over to his brother Carl, contributed fewer original songs to the band, and became known as a difficult recluse. He gained weight and increased his abuse of cigarettes and alcohol. The band toured and made records without him.

Wilson became completely withdrawn after the death of his father, Murry, in 1973. Theirs was a complicated, abusive relationship: Murry beat his children (purportedly causing Brian to go deaf in one ear), initially managed the band, and sold off much of his son’s publishing rights in 1969. “The story of my dad is the big can of worms,” Wilson wrote, “because it’s connected to everything else.” Wilson sequestered himself in the chauffeur’s quarters of his mansion and commenced a two-year period of orgiastic self-destruction.

Capitol Records released Endless Summer, another Beach Boys greatest hits compilation, in 1974. It went to Number 1. The Beach Boys, or at least the earlier, sunnier version of them, remained in demand, especially in the dark days of the Watergate era.

By now, Wilson’s reputation as the band’s guiding light had caught up with him. A 1969 contract with Reprise Records stipulated his involvement in every album. Now, without access to much of their former publishing revenue, the band needed a hit. The problem was that, by this time, Wilson was almost incapable of even getting out of bed. His wife and family hired radical therapist and former record PR man Eugene Landy in 1975.

Landy’s regiment was absolute: Wilson was surrounded by bodyguards in his own home, preventing him from doing drugs or overeating. Landy would dole out hamburgers or joints if Wilson was productive.

“Brian wanted to be left alone, but there was too much at stake,” the band’s manager, and Mike Love’s brother, Stephen Love once said. “If you’ve got an oil well, you don’t want it to wander off and become someone else’s oil well.” The label conceived of a new PR campaign, called “Brian’s Back” — Love even wrote a song with this title — which brought Wilson back on the road with the band for the first time since 1964.

 15 Big Ones, the first Beach Boys album to be solely produced by Brian Wilson since Wild Honey in 1967, was comprised mostly of covers. (Wilson blamed writer’s block, but he was working on a solo project of new material, tentatively called Brian Loves You.) The band’s version of Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music” gave them their first Top 10 since “Good Vibrations.” Critics rejected it. “The Beach Boys,” wrote one, “only succeed in jumping several steps sideways and 10 years back.”

Rolling Stone featured Wilson on the cover in 1976. The first interview, which took place in June, didn’t produce any useful material. “Brian was ready to talk, all right,” wrote correspondent David Felton, “just as he was ready to walk or ready to start dressing himself; but there could be no definitive Brian Wilson interview because Brian Wilson was not yet definitively himself.”

On the Rolling Stone cover, Wilson stood in the sand on a beach, surfboard in hand. Barefoot and wearing only a blue bathrobe, he appeared for all the world like an Old Testament prophet. The feature was called “The Healing of Brother Brian.”

Photographer Annie Leibovitz took the picture on Wilson’s 34th birthday. It took place during the filming of a clip for an upcoming TV special, called The Beach Boys: It’s OK, produced by Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. In the skit, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd appear as “Surf Police” who force Wilson out of bed and onto the beach. Pounded by waves and, in one shot, using his board backwards, Wilson (who had never surfed before) was frightened by the ocean. In his bathrobe pocket was a folded piece of paper on which was written, “You will not drown. You will live. Signed, Dr. Landy.” (When Wilson made public appearances during this time, Landy would stand offstage, holding up cardboard signs reading “POSITIVE” and “SMILE” — the latter apparently written without irony.)

“He was not happy about it,” Michaels later remembered about the surfing scene. “It was almost a baptism.”

Though Wilson wrote and recorded the record mostly by himself, Brian Loves You was retitled The Beach Boys Love You and released in April 1977. Despite his desire to leave the group and go solo, Wilson realized he couldn’t. “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel like a commodity in a stock market.”

“Once you’ve established yourself as an artist, a producer — somebody who has a style to say, something to say with a definite profound effect, you feel obligated to fulfill commitments,” he awkwardly told a BBC interviewer in 1976. “In other words, it’s an artist’s obligation to continue his, uh, constructive work — you know, his work. Any artist that you find has that feeling — he feels the need to please, you know. And it’s a very personal thing and it’s something that, uh, that you work on it. It’s something that comes … it’s natural. It’s a natural thing.”

Shortly after finishing the mixes for The Beach Boys Love You, Wilson began work on what would become Adult/Child. “[That] was Dr. Landy’s title,” Wilson wrote in I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir. “He meant that there were always two parts of a personality, always an adult who wants to be in charge and a child who wants to be cared for, always an adult who things he knows the rules and a child who is learning and testing the rules. I also thought about it in terms of family. I thought about my dad and me, and all the things he did that were good and bad, all the things that I can talk about easily and all the things I can’t talk about at all.”

“Still I Dream of It” was written for Frank Sinatra. “He didn’t say yes to the song,” Wilson wrote, “and that bothered me. It was a beautiful song about loneliness and hope.”

It’s strange to hear the 34-year-old Wilson sing from a teenager’s perspective. “When I was younger, mother told me Jesus loves the world,” Wilson sings in the bridge.

And if that’s true, then

Why hasn’t he helped me to find a girl?

Or find my world?

Till then I’m just a dreamer

Though jarring, this is the viewpoint Wilson returned to, as if the previous 15 years never happened. “We’ll make sweet lovin’ when the sun goes down,” Wilson sings in “Roller Skating Child” from The Beach Boys Love You. Hey Little Tomboy,” another track slated for inclusion on Adult/Child, extends this idea further, creating something that band biographer Peter Ames Carlin described as what “may be the most unsettling moment in the entire recorded history of the Beach Boys.”

Wilson called in arranger Dick Reynolds to help with Adult/Child. Reynolds originally worked with the Four Freshmen and collaborated with Sinatra in 1964, the same year he arranged The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album. Though Wilson claimed to want “a similar feel” as those classic Sinatra albums, the big band arrangements on Adult/Child are peculiarly lifeless. “Life is for the living,” Wilson sings with strangled enthusiasm over a high kick horn arrangement on the opening track.

I thought you wanted to see

How it could be

When you’re in shape and your head plugs into

Life

His last vocalization of “life!” is a harrowing shriek. Reportedly when Mike Love heard the album in the studio, he turned to Wilson and hissed, “What the fuck are you doing?” Love and Jardine’s vocals on the album were culled exclusively from earlier sessions; Wilson did most of the work alone, or with his brothers.

Adult/Child was shelved, by nearly unanimous consent. The band was nearing the end of their record contract with Warner/Reprise — who didn’t think the album had commercial potential anyway — and might have wanted to save some of the material for a major upcoming deal with CBS. Oddly, the only track from Adult/Child to be formally issued was “Hey Little Tomboy,” on the largely despised M.I.U., released in late 1978. “That album is an embarrassment to my life,” Dennis Wilson said tartly. “It should self-destruct.”

But it was his brother Brian who self-destructed more successfully. The voices in his head would multiply in the coming years, sounding by turns like his domineering father Murry, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, and others he doesn’t recognize. What they tell him is almost universally negative. Landy was fired in December 1976, but returned in the early 1980s after Wilson, 340 pounds and hooked on cocaine, overdosed. Landy ultimately began writing lyrics and, under their shared company Brains and Genius, claimed a 50 percent take of Wilson’s earnings. He “produced” Wilson’s 1988 solo record and is widely thought to have directed his first ghost-written autobiography — one which loudly sang Landy’s praises. Landy voluntarily surrendered his license in 1989, after being accused by the family of gross negligence.

The Beach Boys broke up for two weeks in late 1977. During a September meeting at Brian’s house, a settlement was negotiated which gave Mike Love control of Brian’s vote, allowing him and Al Jardine to outvote the other two Wilson brothers. The commercial, nostalgia-driven faction of the band advanced, while the experimental, vulnerable side receded.

Dennis Wilson, deeply addicted to alcohol, drowned in 1983. His 1976 solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, outsold the contemporary Beach Boys albums. “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys,” he once said. “He is the band. We’re his fucking messengers. He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing. He’s everything.”

And this was true, at least for the few years until Brian Wilson became incapable and unwilling to fill the role. For a little while, at least, he was able to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney and Beatles’ producer George Martin at once: a gifted melodicist with a knack for hooks; an arranger of enormous sensitivities; and a producer able to employ even the studio as an instrument. It didn’t last because it couldn’t last: Every fire goes out after consuming all that sustains it. Especially those that burn brightest.

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker:  Samantha Schuyler

Home Cooking: A Reading List

Getty Images / Katie Kosma

From second grade to eighth grade, cereal was my portal to the United States. Whenever my dad flew from where we lived in Indonesia to the U.S. on business, he’d bring a near-empty suitcase so he could fill it with Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Captain Crunch, and whatever other colorful boxes caught his eye. When he came home, my brother and I would deliberate over which to open first, rationing ourselves. I treasured each bowl enough that once, when a gecko flung out of the box along with a kaleidoscopic pour of fruity pebbles, I simply brought the creature outside before dipping my spoon into the bowl.

The longer I lived in Indonesia, the less I remembered about life in the United States, even though others reminded me that the U.S. was “home.” Whenever I ate cereal, I imagined an alternate version of myself. The girl I envisioned lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a brick house like that of my cousins. She wore outfits from Limited Too, a store I’d visited once during summer vacation. She somehow didn’t have braces or wear glasses. In imagining what I might be like if I lived in the U.S., I began to construct my own version of the country based on summer visits and foggy memories of early childhood. As a result, the U.S. became more artifice than reality, a place I imagined might absolve me of my complicated feelings about identity.

But my illusions about the U.S. were as sugary and insubstantial as the cereal I associated with the country; they dissolved as soon as I moved to Texas during my freshman year of high school. Once there, I realized that even though I spoke the language and looked the part, I felt different from my peers. As much as I wanted to feel at ease in the U.S., I found myself torn between the reality of the place where I lived – all cookie-cutter homes and gleaming aisles of grocery stores – and where I’d grown up. I felt homesick for Indonesia, a place I could never truly call home, privilege making thorny my presence there.

For years, I buried the feelings of loss that came along with leaving Indonesia and instead tried to forge different lives in the states I’ve lived since then. But, like the bowls of cereal of my past that once brought me back to a country I’d left behind, I was given a piece of Kopiko after a meal a couple years ago, and the even the sight of the wrapper was enough to transport me to my old house, one shaded by a rainbow eucalyptus trees and robust flower blooms. Food can be nostalgia embodied, a means of traveling to a place you wish you could return to, a way of bringing to life a memory. Candy in hand, I remembered wandering aisles of the outdoor market, where sounds became a kind of song: vendors chattering, pans clanging, someone calling nasi goreng! nasi goreng!, live birds chirruping from a small cage, knives whisking over metal sharpeners, chickens scuttling around table legs looking for scraps, and motorcycles chortling to life before whining down the road. For sale were tables of produce – spiky round rambutan, bundles of greens, starfruit stacked in precarious piles, shrink-wrapped mango, mounds of durian – slick bodies of fish gutted and chickens plucked clean of their feathers. Nothing went to waste. Blood was boiled down until it congealed, and intestines were arranged on plates like long tendrils of spaghetti.

Perhaps food isn’t a permanent means of returning to anywhere, but a taste can be enough to bring you home. In the following essays, writers interrogate the complicated pasts of place through food, express nostalgia for long-gone homes, and find belonging by sharing meals. As for me, when I put the Kopiko on my tongue, thousands of miles away, the blend of coffee and sugar resonated bittersweet, as it always had, before melting away.

1. I Want Crab. Pure Maryland Crab. (Bill Addison, September 15, 2016, Eater)

I moved away from Maryland over 25 years ago, but if I don’t make it back to the state at least once a year for steamed crabs, I’m like a bird whose migration pattern has been disrupted. I’m unsettled in the world.

Back in Maryland after time away, Bill Addison digs into a pile of local crab while ruminating on the history, preparation techniques, best places to eat, and future of crab in Baltimore.

2. NASA is learning the best way to grow food in space (Sarah Scoles, June 6, 2018, Popular Science)

Sure, astronauts can gaze down at Earth and see its most beautiful spots—literally all of them—every 90 minutes. But those places are always out of reach, reminders of how far away sea level is. Having something nearby that photosynthesizes might cheer the crew.

A complex set of factors such as humidity, mold, and a host of other ecosystem variants makes growing plants in space a challenge. But far away from the comforts of home, astronauts have begun cultivating zinnias and lettuce on board, thanks to the work of scientist Gioia Massa and her team, who are part of an experiment called Veggie.

3. Say It with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food (Shing Yin Khor, February 27, 2018, Catapult)

In this beautiful illustrated essay, Shing Yin Khor expresses how difficult it is for her to communicate emotions verbally. She instead uses food as a means to share feelings of disappointment, love towards others and, eventually, love toward herself as well.

4. Eating to America (Naz Riahi, November 2018, Longreads)

Two years after the Iran-Iraq war ended, and six months after her father, a political prisoner, was executed, Naz Riahi and her mother, Shee Shee, move to the U.S. There, homesick and grieving, Riahi finds happiness and hope through food.

The food sat inside me, taking over spaces that had been full of worry just minutes before and making the worry go away.

5. An Adopted Obsession with Soondubu Jjigae, Korean Silken-Tofu Stew (Bryan Washington, February 20, 2019, The New Yorker)

I first tasted gochujang because of a boy. We were in a busted strip mall, just west of Houston’s I-610 loop. A lot of things were changing in my life, and I hadn’t been home—home home—in a minute, and we were too broke to go most places.

Though he ends up splitting up with his partner, Bryan Washington’s love for soondubu jjigae remains strong. Washington recounts his efforts to figure out how to make the stew on his own, and eventually brings the recipe home.

6. The Food of My Youth (Melissa Chadburn, July 9, 2018, The New York Review)

In search of a better future, Melissa Chadburn’s mother brings her family to northern California, where they “lived on saltines with peanut butter and beans from a can.” At fifteen, Chadburn is taken to a group home where her hunger is satiated, but she is treated as a case number rather than a child.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home.

7. Chop Suey Nation (Ann Hui, June 21, 2016, The Globe and Mail)

After a blogger wrote a post called “I can’t believe there’s a Chinese restaurant in Fogo,” Ann Hui, influenced by her family, for whom “food was an obsession,” sets out to drive across Canada to figure out how the restaurant owners decided to open shop in such an isolated location and why there’s a Chinese restaurant in nearly every Canadian town. Hui wrote a book, Chop Suey Nation, based on her article.

The name “chop suey” translates more or less into “assorted mix,” and refers to a repertoire of dishes mostly developed in North America in the mid-20th century. A mix of ideas both East and West and, to my eyes, frozen in time.

8. Farm to Table (Laura Reiley, April 13, 2016, Tampa Bay Times)

This is a story we are all being fed. A story about overalls, rich soil and John Deere tractors scattering broods of busy chickens. A story about healthy animals living happy lives, heirloom tomatoes hanging heavy and earnest artisans rolling wheels of cheese into aging caves nearby.

Skeptical of the chalkboard menus touting local, organic ingredients in front of nearly every restaurant in Tampa, Laura Reiley stops at farms, contacts vendors, and “for fish claims that seemed suspicious, I kept zip-top baggies in my purse and tucked away samples” in order to determine the extent to which restaurant owners lie about obtaining ingredients from sources close to home.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Even the Dogs

Tatiana Gerus / Getty, Bloomsbury Publishing

T Kira Madden | Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls | March 2019 | 8 minutes (1,940 words)

It’s four a.m. on my father’s birthday, and he’s in his red- sleep, the kind where his skin pulses the color of roast beef and his wedding ring looks ingrown. This is his don’t- wake- me- for- three- days kind of sleep, the face- down- on- the- tile kind of sleep, which is where he is now, naked, on my parents’ bathroom floor.

I said wake the fuck up, ass-blob. My mother pushes her bare foot into his back until it leaves a yellow- white imprint. A dead body color. My father moans, and the sound drools out onto the tiles. His eyes wink on like lagging televisions. My mother curses in Chinese—you fucking fat cow!— the only Chinese phrase we both still use.

Why does he sleep on the floor like this? I ask. Your bed is so nice.

One day you’ll understand how good a floor can feel, she says.

It’s true: their bed is nice. I sleep in it sometimes. Night terrors don’t leave me alone come three a.m. lately— the shadows of limbs behind my windows, visions of blown- off faces with dangling eyeballs— and my parents are always awake, up to something, alive.

He plays dead because cold tile feels good to fucking fat cows after double fisting Sambucas all night with strippers, says my mother, each word louder than the one before it.

Sometimes, mom buckles me into the car in the middle of the night to collect my father from these strippers. That’s the word she uses: collect. My father is always in need of collecting. The strippers seem sweet to me. They swing their shoes by the straps, tap their nails against my mother’s car window, saying, Come on Chinadoll, relax, it’s nothing. They call my father Big Boss, or Mad Man, depending on the night.

My mother walks over to the bedroom closet. She claws into my father’s hanging clothes and tosses each item at his body— limp, cotton skins.

Both of you, get dressed, she says. We’re going for a drive.

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