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Stories of Punctuation and Typographic Marks: A Reading List

From the now-ubiquitous hashtag (or octothorpe, hash, pound, or whatever you like to call it) to the loved, hated, and misunderstood semicolon, punctuation marks not only help us shape our stories, but also have their own origins and histories and have become part of the narratives of our lives. Here are picks about six punctuation marks, from the comma to the asterisk.

1. “Holy Writ” (Mary Norris, The New Yorker)

“The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas.” Norris describes her early days at The New Yorker, from collating to working on the copydesk — reading greats like John McPhee and Pauline Kael — and her current job, more than thirty years later, as a comma queen.

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Looking at Five Generations of a Single Dutch Family to Understand the Genetics of Violence

Photo by Pixabay

A short piece published in BBC Magazine explored the science of whether murderers are born or made. A British neurocriminologist named Adrian Raine has made a career out of studying the brains of violent criminals. Raine was the first person to conduct a brain imaging study on murderers, and has since scanned the brains of numerous homicidal individuals, looking for similarities. Raine’s brain scanning studies found two similarities in the brains of nearly all his participants: 1) reduced activity in the pre-frontal cortex, which means less emotional impulse control, and 2) over activation of the part of the brain that controls our emotions, called the amygdala. According to the BBC, Raine’s study suggests that ” that murderers have brains that make them more prone to rage and anger, while at the same time making them less able to control themselves.” Childhood abuse could be a factor because of the damage it can cause to the brain, particularly to the pre-frontal cortex. But, as the BBC put it, “only a small proportion of those who have a terrible childhood grow up to become murderers,” which brings us to the next possibility: genetics. Are there genetic factors that predispose us to crime?

A breakthrough came in 1993 with a family in the Netherlands where all the men had a history of violence. Fifteen years of painstaking research revealed that they all lacked the same gene.

This gene produces an enzyme called MAOA, which regulates the levels of neurotransmitters involved in impulse control. It turns out that if you lack the MAOA gene or have the low-activity variant you are predisposed to violence. This variant became known as the warrior gene.

About 30% of men have this so-called warrior gene, but whether the gene is triggered or not depends crucially on what happens to you in childhood.

The research in question was conducted by Han Brunner, a Dutch geneticist working out of a teaching hospital in the Netherlands’ oldest city. Brunner’s research was first published in Science in October 1993, and that same month Sarah Richardson wrote about it for Discover magazine in an article entitled “Violence in the Blood.” Richardson’s piece is fascinating, especially in its explanation of how the geneticists used different clues to determine the origin of the aggressive behavior. This is how it begins:

One day in 1978 a woman walked into University Hospital in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, with a problem: the men in her family. Many of them–including several of her brothers and a son–seemed to have some sort of mental debility. Gradually, as the clinical geneticists who counseled the woman got to know her and her family, the details of the strange behavior of the woman’s male kin emerged. One had tried to rape his sister; another had tried to run his boss down with a car; a third had forced his sisters to undress at knife point. Furthermore, the violent streak had a long history. In 1962 the woman’s granduncle had prepared a family tree that identified nine other males with the same disorder, tracing it as far back as 1870. The granduncle, who was not violent himself–he worked in an institution for the learning disabled–had apparently come to suspect that something was terribly wrong with his family.

Three decades later, and 15 years after the woman’s first office visit, geneticist Han Brunner and his colleagues at the Nijmegen hospital think they’ve figured out what that something is. Some of the men in the woman’s family, they say, suffer from a genetic defect on the X chromosome- -a defect that cripples an enzyme that may help regulate aggressive behavior. If Brunner and his colleagues are right, it would be the first time a specific gene has been linked to aggression. That means their finding cannot fail to be controversial.

See the stories:

1. “Are Murderers Born or Made?” (BBC Magazine)

2. “Violence in the Blood.” (Sarah Richardson, Discover)

 

Trauma and Joy: Four Stories About Adoption

The stories of adoptees are not open-and-shut case files—they are complex and messy. In these particular stories, you’ll meet a young woman who fought for her three brothers, a group of stridently anti-adoption adoptees, an eager couple waiting by the phone, and another couple coping with the myth of post-racism.

1. “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” (Nishta Mehra, Guernica, March 2015)

You can feel the urgency of Nishta Mehra’s words, like she’s crafted this essay in her head so many times and now, finally, has it in writing. Here is what happens over and over again, she says. Here is our family: a white woman, an Indian woman, a black toddler son. We are full of love. We face many questions. We have much to fear. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: sarah-ji

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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In Honor of National Grammar Day: What It Was Like to Copy-Edit Pauline Kael

In honor of National Grammar Day—a relatively recent addition to the holiday mix, established in 2008—we are celebrating the copy-editing of Mary Norris. Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy department, and in a recent piece for the magazine she reflected on her life in grammar:

There were competent writers on interesting subjects who were just careless enough in their spelling and punctuation to keep a girl occupied. And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse. The only thing to do was style the spelling, and even that could be fraught. Oliver Sacks turned out to be attached to the spelling of “sulphur” and “sulphuric” that he remembered from his chemistry experiments as a boy. (The New Yorker spells it less romantically: “sulfur,” “sulfuric.”)

When Pauline Kael typed “prevert” instead of “pervert,” she meant “prevert” (unless she was reviewing something by Jacques Prévert). Luckily, she was kind, and if you changed it she would just change it back and stet it without upbraiding you. Kael revised up until closing, and though we lackeys resented writers who kept changing “doughnut” to “coffee cake” then back to “doughnut” and then “coffee cake” again, because it meant more work for us, Kael’s changes were always improvements. She approached me once with a proof in her hand. She couldn’t figure out how to fix something, and I was the only one around. She knew me from chatting in the ladies’ room on the eighteenth floor. I looked at the proof and made a suggestion, and she was delighted. “You helped me!” she gasped.

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‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party

Photo: Platon

Elaine Brown | A Taste of Power, Pantheon | 1992 | 30 minutes (7,440 words)

 

Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, lecturer and singer. In 1968, she joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member. Six years later, Huey Newton appointed her to lead the Party when he went into exile in Cuba. She was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Party.  She is author of A Taste of Power (Pantheon, 1992) and The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press, 2002)She is also the Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee and CEO of the newly-formed non-profit organization Oakland & the World Enterprises, Inc.

Her 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power is a story of what it means to be a black woman in America, tracing her life from a lonely girlhood in the ghettos of North Philadelphia to the highest levels of the Black Panther Party’s hierarchy. The Los Angeles Times described the book as “a profound, funny and…heartbreaking American story,” and the New York Times called it “chilling, well written and profoundly entertaining.” Our thanks to Brown for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here. Read more…

Meet the Man Behind the First Slavery Museum in America

The Whitney Plantation, mid-restoration in 2008: Flickr, Corey Balazowich

He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper — the portly carriage, the trimmed white beard, the florid drawl — but he dresses in a rumpled manner that suggests a morning habit of mistaking the laundry hamper for the dresser. As someone who had to hitchhike to high school and remains bitter about not being able to afford his class ring, he embodies the scrappiness of the Irish Catholics who flooded New Orleans in the 19th century. But as a trial lawyer who has helped win more than $5 billion in class-action settlements and a real estate magnate whose holdings have multiplied his wealth many times over, Cummings personifies the affluence and power held by an elite and mostly white sliver of a city with a majority black population.

“I suppose it is a suspicious thing, what I’ve gone and done with the joint,” he continued, acknowledging that his decision to “spend millions I have no interest in getting back” on the museum has long been a source of local confusion. More than a few of the 670 residents of Wallace — 90 percent of whom are black, many the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers who worked the region’s land — have voiced their bewilderment over the years. So, too, have the owners of other tourist-oriented plantations, all of whom are white. Members of Cummings’s close-knit family (he has eight children by two wives) also struggle to clarify their patriarch’s motivations, resorting to the shoulder-shrugging logic of “John being John,” as if explaining a stubborn refusal to throw away old newspapers rather than a consuming, heterodox and very expensive attempt to confront the darkest period of American history. “Challenge me, fight me on it,” he said. “I’ve been asked all the questions. About white guilt this and that. About the honky trying to profit off of slavery. But here’s the thing: Don’t you think the story of slavery is important?” With that, Cummings went silent, something he does with unsettling frequency in conversation.

“Well, I checked into it, and I heard you weren’t telling it,” he finally resumed, “so I figured I might as well get started.”

David Amsden writing in the New York Times Magazine about John Cummings and Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation. Cummings has spent the past fifteen years and $8 million of his personal fortune turning the plantation into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery in America.

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Kelly Link Is Beloved, But Still Underrated: A Primer on My Favorite Living Short Story Writer

There’s that urge in adolescence when you feel like you discovered something, maybe a song, a book, or a painting, that resonates so deeply within you, to protect it, and keep it secret and close, so that you feel like you have claim of something wondrous and all your own. And if you share the secret, or if others discover the artist, you may later state that you were listening to the music first, or reading an author first, as if your personal first spark determines the authenticity of an artist. It does not end up being an attractive trait, because we should share good art, because we shouldn’t be snobs, and because artists are responsible for their talent, not the consumers of the work. Luckily, it’s an impulse most seem to grow out of, except for in extreme cases, particularly if that person continues to fly under the radar of mainstream culture for an unexplainable amount of time. Read more…

Ernest Hemingway’s Private WWII-Era Spy Network

Ernest Hemingway aboard the Pilar, 1935: Wikimedia Commons

During World War II Hemingway organized a private spy network, which he jokingly called the Crook Factory, and gathered information about Nazi sympathizers on the island. But in a secret, 124-page report on Hemingway, the FBI—which feared his personal prestige and political power—expressed resentment at his amateur but alarming intrusion into their territory, and unsuccessfully attempted to control and vilify him.

In October 1942 the local FBI agent told J. Edgar Hoover that the American ambassador had granted Hemingway’s request “to patrol certain areas where German submarine activity has been reported” and had given him scarce gasoline for this purpose. Hemingway thought that his boat, the Pilar, fully manned and heavily armed but disguised for fishing, would attract the attention of a German submarine. The sub would signal the Pilar to come alongside in order to requisition supplies of fresh water and food. As the sub approached, Hemingway’s men would machine-gun the crew on deck while a Spanish jai alai player would throw a small bomb into the conning tower. Fortunately, for both Hemingway and the Germans, he never actually encountered an enemy submarine.

Jeffrey Meyers, writing in Commonweal about Ernest Hemingway’s long involvement with Cuba, where Hemingway lived for twenty years.

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Finding Sex Traffickers: Our College Pick

There are lots of stories these days (as there should be) about sex trafficking. The bulk of these stories focus on victims: mostly women, mostly poor, who are taken away from families and familiarities and sold for sex. In the third story in his series about human trafficking, Travis Loose turned to the law enforcement officers trying to stop this scourge. Working a sex trafficking case, he found, is not like To Catch a Predator. “I love puzzles, figuring things out, solving problems,” one detective told Loose. “And there’s nothing that makes a puzzle like human interaction.”

Case Closed

Ethos Magazine | Travis Loose | January 30, 2015 | 2,837 words (11 minutes)