Search Results for: The Nation

Is the Internet Changing Time?

Photo: AP Images

Laurence Scott The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World | W. W. Norton & Company | August 2016 | 20 minutes (5,296 words) 

 

Below is an excerpt from The Four-Dimensional Human, by Laurence Scott. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Power has been wielded through the pendulum.

‘Now all the petrol has stopped and we are immobilised, at least immobilised until we get new ideas about time.’ This was how the author Elizabeth Bowen described wartime life in Ireland to Virginia Woolf, in a letter from 1941. Bowen explored some of these new ideas in her London war fiction, which is full of stopped clocks and allusions to timelessness, the petrifaction of civilian life in a bombed city. Across the literary Channel, Jean-Paul Sartre’s war trilogy, The Paths to Freedom, is, like Bowen’s Blitz work, in part a study on how time itself becomes a casualty of war. In one scene Sartre describes German troops ordering a division of captured French soldiers to adjust their watches to their captors’ hour, setting them ticking to ‘true conquerors’ time, the same time as ticked away in Danzig and Berlin. Historically power has been wielded through the pendulum, and revolutionary change has been keenly felt through murmurs in the tick and the tock of one’s inner life. King Pompilius adjusted the haywire calendar of Romulus, which had only ten months and no fidelity to season, by adding January and February. Centuries later, the Roman Senate renamed the erstwhile fifth and sixth months of the Romulan calendar to honour Julius Caesar and Augustus, thus sparing them the derangement still suffered today by those once-diligent months September–December. For twelve years, French Revolutionaries claimed time for the Republic with their own calendar of pastorally themed months, such as misty Brumaire and blooming Floréal.

The digital revolution likewise inspired a raid on the temporal status quo. In 1998, the Swatch company launched its ill-fated ‘Internet Time’, a decimalised system in which a day consists of a thousand beats. In Swatch Time, the company’s Swiss home of Biel usurps Greenwich as the meridian marker, exchanging GMT for BMT. This is a purely ceremonial conceit, however, since in this system watches are globally synchronised to eradicate time zones. A main selling point of BMT was that it would make coordinating meetings in a networked world more efficient. This ethos severs time from space, giving dawn in London the same hour as dusk in Auckland, and binding every place on earth to the cycle of the same pallid blue sun. As it turns out, we didn’t have the stomach to abandon the old minutes and hours for beats, and the Swatch Time setting that persists on some networked devices is the vestige of a botched coup. Although this particular campaign was a failure, digitisation is nonetheless demanding that we find our own ‘new ideas about time’. For as the digital’s prodigious memory allows our personal histories to be more retrievable, if not more replicable, we are finding in the civic sphere a move towards remembrance that shadows the capacity of the network to retain the past. But while time is not lost in the ways it used to be, the tendency of digital technologies to incubate and circulate a doomsday mood is making the durability of the future less certain. As a result, the four-dimensional human is developing new strategies to navigate a timeline that seems to thicken behind us and evaporate before us. Read more…

Keeping Black Farm Families Connected to the Land in Michigan

AP Photo / Gosia Wozniacka

Owning land provides families with a legacy and, hopefully, some stability, but how do farmers keep their family farming their land? At BuzzFeed, Bim Adewunmi talks with blueberry farmers around tiny Covert, Michigan, to see what life is like for farmers of color. Only 1.46% of America’s farmers are black. Many Covert growers inherited their profession and have enjoyed a rewarding rural life, steady income and something to give to their children, and land, as one farmer tells Adewunmi, is power. But they still struggle to interest their kids and grandchildren in the job.

Farming is physically demanding, financially risky, costly and tenuous, and the market, like the weather, is constantly shifting. When parents raise their kids to go to college, save money and have more opportunities at their disposal, it isn’t surprising that younger generations leave home to work instead of stay on the family farm. As one farmer said, “We worked hard to show our kids what we considered a better life, and they’re taking advantage of those opportunities. They’re doing exactly what we told them to do.”

“He worked on the Hawkins farm for a time,” she says of her husband. “He always loved blueberries, so when we bought this place, he put his own blueberries out there. They’ve been here since 2001, I believe.” Harold died of cancer a few years back, and Carol assumed responsibility for the business. It is safe to say, however, that she never wanted to be a farmer. “If this wasn’t right here at the house,” she says, gesturing out of her kitchen windows, “I would’ve sold it a long time ago, is all I can say. It was my husband’s thing. I was just… I didn’t wanna be a farmer.” She giggles, but it’s a laugh filled with resignation. When I press her about the potential significance of holding on to her late husband’s legacy, she holds firm. “Uh-uh. I keep it because it’s here at the house. You see, it’s a ‘U,’ right here. And I just don’t want anybody else out there. So that’s why I keep it. And it does pay for my son’s college, the berries. So…” This time when she trails off, her laugh is knowing.

Unsolicited family legacy aside, Carol Baber’s most pressing headache is labor. All her berries are handpicked. Blueberries are graded — the handpicked ones generally get the best price at market, but they are also the most labor-intensive to produce, and picking conditions must be dry (“Nobody wants a wet berry,” Steven tells me, sagely, when I ask), which means picking during the hottest, most arid hours of the day. And that’s before the other maintenance issues that concern a blueberry farmer: weeding, pruning, fertilizing, spraying, and so on. “It’s hard for me because I don’t have any equipment,” Carol says. The Hawkinses help out with spraying (she buys the materials), but “it’s really hard to keep the grass down. So I’m working on trying to get a tractor.”

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Roast Duck Soup for the Chinese-American Daughter’s Soul

Ck Chiam/Getty

Su-Jit Lin | Longreads | October 2017 | 10 minutes (2,431 words)

 

No matter the culture, no matter the upbringing, certain foods will always bring back certain memories. Whether those recollections are good or bad, the strength of the association is such that time stands still. For that one big moment, as you inhale the aroma, settle your teeth down, and let the flavors fill your mouth, you are again who you once were.

For me, that one dish was Hong Kong-style roast duck soup from Chinatown in New York City. To this day its heat and fragrant spices remain strong enough to permeate my sinuses and make their way into my subconsciousness.

***

Imagine this: chopped duck, dark and gamey; marrow unobtrusively seeping out of brittle, splintered bone. Rich meat covered in crackling skins, shining with fat rendered out, and glistening with that which remains. A complex broth gleaming golden, tasting faintly of toasted shallots and green onions. From this, steam rising to coat your nasal passages with delectable, moist warmth as the scent travels down to your mouth. Al dente egg noodles, floating like dense bundles of seaweed in a virtual seascape, with plump ground pork-and-shrimp wontons wrapped in translucent skins, the excess dough fluttering in the soup like the tails of fat jellyfish.

Atop it all, tender baby bok choy, Chinese broccoli, or crisp mung bean sprouts add a splash of color and a refreshing, vegetative foundation to the heavy flavors. Despite how much my tastes evolve or my standards rise, this will forever be the dish that transforms me again and again, back into a buck-toothed child eagerly grinning at a bowl bigger than her head.

Coming from an underprivileged family in the restaurant industry, I learned early on in life that although cash may change hands, food is the ultimate currency. Greens hold more value than greenbacks, and bringing home the bacon wasn’t a figure of speech — it’s what my parents literally did. Although we were disadvantaged, because of my parents’ profession, food was always plentiful. In our house, money wasn’t used to coerce us to do the right thing, but tasty treats were always fair game.

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The Genius of the Playboy Interview

Germaine Greer gave an interview to Playboy in 1973 in which she skewered the magazine: "I'm against showing girls as if they were pork chops." (The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

Hugh Hefner was a complicated individual whose notions of sexuality and human relationships were at once woke and predatory, who stumbled upon a brilliant idea at a time when American culture was milquetoast. A loss of identity in the 1950s, particularly among men, was palpable for a generation who no longer had a war to fight. It took a magazine that paired the mind and the body, high culture and naked women, to shake the male from his slumber. Read more…

Take Me Home

Photo of the Victory Monument (Patuxai) by Dan Lundberg (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Kathryn Kefauver Goldberg | Longreads | September 2017 | 16 minutes (4,596 words)

 

I.

When I moved to Laos in 1998, there was almost no violent crime. The landlocked country had five million people, 57 languages, and 90 million unexploded bombs in the ground. In the 10th-poorest nation in the world, Lao people focused on food, festivals, and family. Buddhism thrived. In my house in Vientiane, the salty scent of the Mekong River drifted through my screens. I was 25, and my first six months there, I rarely thought of the killings that had launched me overseas.

I lived between a temple and a beer shop, the two great traditions of solace: the monks and the drunks. My excessive sleep, a portable artifact of PTSD, blended well in Laos. All around the partially paved capital, people napped in hammocks strung on half-built buildings, on tables of stacked silk at the market, and in tuk-tuks parked in the shade of banyans. My Lao colleagues at our United Nations outpost snoozed right at their desks. I did, too.

So the morning my boss, Patrick, sauntered into my office, he found me cheek to notebook. The monsoon clattered beyond the window. I’d passed out pondering the prospect of turning 26 in two weeks’ time. Birthdays, like rain, stirred up the muck. I was alive. Others were not. Read more…

The Dangers of Being a Tiny Island

AP Photo / Louisa Buller
To those of us who cringe over the price of organic versus conventional butter, the idea of buying an island seems as indulgent as buying a separate house for your poodle. Or even having a poodle. But for the ultra rich, property has always been the thing, and small islands have appealed to a particular subset of rich men drawn to superfluous investments and narcissistic nation building. Why just start a company when you can start your own country? We’ll see how rising sea levels treat that investment.

In The Guardian, natural history writer Patrick Barkham tells how the Scottish Hebridean island of Eigg got passed around between owners until residents had enough and bought the place themselves. Eigg has one road, 100 occupants, and had multiple overlords. Some call island-lovers islophiles. After the locals ousted theirs, the islanders experimented with the rewards of community ownership.

In contrast, community ownership enables Eigg to run its own housing association and provide cheap rents – currently about half the market level of “affordable housing” in this region of Scotland. Low-rent societies where residents are liberated from the grind of earning a lot to pay for a house are likely to be more radical, creative places: people have the freedom, and time, to pursue less money-oriented goals.

McIntosh echoes an earlier writer of the Highlands, Hugh MacDiarmid, by raising the question of what a small island might bring to a bigger one. His great hope 20 years ago was that Eigg would be “a pattern and an example unto one another”, to quote George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. The centre needs the periphery as a source of inspiration and renewal, just as the periphery relies on the centre. Eigg may be able to give the larger island at its side some practical lessons in affordable housing, renewable energy and land reform. A small-island manifesto for the “mainland” might begin with the realisation that we need to treat other people more carefully. Be open to outsiders and to the world. Live as generalists, not as sclerosed super-specialists. Spend more time outside. Reduce our consumption. Make our own energy or, at worst, buy it by the sack, and then we will use less. Consider animals and plants as well as people. Live more intimately with our place, for it is a complex living organism, too.

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On American Identity, the Election, and Family Members Who Support Trump

Nicole Chung | “All American,” from Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America | September 2017 | 16 minutes (4,037 words)

There were so many disturbing moments in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election that it’s difficult to identify any particular one as the worst. Up there at the top of the list: Donald Trump narrowing his eyes and shaking his head as he called Hillary Clinton “such a nasty woman,” during the final debate. He probably didn’t count on feminists laying claim to the words he’d used to level an insult. At the post-Inauguration Women’s March on Washington, many women bore signs proudly emblazoned with those words. And on October 3rd, Picador will release Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America, an essay anthology edited by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding, featuring essays by 23 women including Cheryl Strayed, Rebecca Solnit, Jessica Valenti, Katha Pollitt, and Samantha Irby, among others. The following essay from the collection, by writer and Catapult editor Nicole Chung, captures the frustrations of dealing with Trump supporters, including one’s own family members.  

Sari Botton, Longreads Essays Editor

***

When I made an appointment to get my hair cut two weeks after the election, it was with a new stylist, a white woman in her 30s with a streak of purple in her hair. She commented on the loose, rumpled waves that show up whenever my hair gets damp, and I explained that the slight curl appeared only after I had children. She welcomed the avenue for small talk: How many kids did I have; how old were they; did I have a photo? I pulled out my phone and showed her the picture on my home screen, my two girls at the beach.

Oh,” she said, visibly surprised. “Is their dad American?” Yes, I told her. So am I. She went on to ask “what” my children were, and whether I thought their coloring was “more olive, or more yellowish like yours?” Later, as she snipped away, she revealed that she and her father and her boyfriend had all voted for Donald Trump.

Though her comments about my kids were the most offensive, it’s her assumption about my nationality that has stuck with me in the weeks since. She identified my husband as “American” when what she meant was “white,” isolating and othering me in the process. There is nothing out of the ordinary about being taken for a foreigner when you’re Asian American; by itself, without years of similar accumulated remarks, her slip might not have bothered me. But in the same month that Donald Trump was elected to our nation’s highest office, this white woman’s unthinking words served as a stinging reminder of just how many people in this country look at me and see not an American, not someone like them, but an outsider, intrinsically different.

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Gloria Allred’s Personal Crusade

(Frederick M. Brown/Getty)

In her first print feature for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino profiles iconic anti-discrimination lawyer Gloria Allred, who is currently litigating major cases against Bill Cosby and President Donald Trump and has played a key role in changing attitudes and legislation regarding rape and sexual assault. Allred came by her conviction for that work very personally, after being raped in the early 1970s.

During her first year in California, she went to Acapulco for a vacation. One night, a local physician asked her out to dinner. He had to make a few house calls first, he said, and they stopped by a motel. He took her to an empty room, pulled out a gun, and raped her. She didn’t report the crime to the police, fearing that she wouldn’t be believed. Soon after returning home, she discovered that she was pregnant.

It was seven years before Roe v. Wade, and abortion was illegal in California. She made an appointment for one and went alone, as instructed. She began hemorrhaging after she got home, and the man who had performed the procedure declined to offer guidance. Allred was afraid to go to the hospital. She sat at home, feverish and bleeding; eventually, her roommate called an ambulance, which took her to a hospital ward filled with other women who had had illegal abortions. She didn’t realize until later that patients around her had died. A nurse told her, as she was recovering, “This will teach you a lesson.”

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The Minnesota Lynx are an Ignored Basketball Dynasty

Minnesota Lynx forward Maya Moore from left, forward Rebekkah Brunson and Renee Montgomery (21) celebrate against the Indiana Fever in the second half of Game 5 of the WNBA basketball finals, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Stacy Bengs)

In early September, the Minnesota Lynx won its 27th game of the 2017 WNBA season, a 14-point thrashing of the Washington Mystics. The win secured the Lynx the top spot in the league’s playoffs—the sixth time the team had grabbed the number one seed in the past seven years—and put the squad in the best position to win its fourth WNBA title.

Fast-forward to the finals, and the Lynx, facing the Los Angeles Sparks (a familiar bete-noire, as the western conference squad defeated the Lynx in the finals last season on a last-second shot), evened the series to one game apiece with a 70-68 win. Since Cheryl Reeve became head coach before the 2010 season, the Lynx has been the most dominant force in women’s hoops, a team that could steam roll opponents even if it was an off game.

But the most interesting about the squad, led by Maya Moore, Lindsay Whalen, and a supremely dominant Sylvia Fowles (the WNBA’s MVP who grabbed 17 rebounds in Tuesday’s night win), is that no one seems to care. Read more…

Harnessing His Superpowers for Peace in the Middle East

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, Yarmulke via Ze'ev Barkan (Flickr)

Howard Lovy | Longreads | September 2017 | 17 minutes (4,225 words)

 

It was raining the morning of October 6, 1973 — the day before my 8th birthday, and the day of the Yom Kippur War — so they put a very long awning in front of Adas Yeshurun, the Orthodox synagogue in Augusta, Georgia. The canopy ran along the sidewalk so worshipers coming to Yom Kippur services could avoid getting their good shul clothes wet. I looked up at the awning and read, with some puzzlement, the one word on the front: “Elliot.”

Elliot? Very confusing. Elliot was also my baby brother’s name. I gazed up at the letters at the front of the rain canopy as water dripped off the sides. “Elliot.” Huh.

Decades later, when I remembered this day because of its significance in Jewish history, it would dawn on me that Elliot must have been the name of the company that made the awning, or perhaps the family that sponsored the awning (as everything in the synagogue had a sponsor), not the name of the object, itself. But, for years, whenever I would see a rain canopy, I’d call it an “Elliot.”

I contemplated every part of the “Elliot” for a long time as we shuffled behind older congregants on our way into services. I counted the number of poles holding it up, the canopy sections, and the number of people keeping dry beneath it. I did not mind the slow shuffle. I was hoping it would mask my odd gait. It was the latest of what my family would call “Howie’s habits.” This particular ritual involved the need to place both feet even with one another every six steps. It’s not that it felt right to perform the ritual. It’s that it simply felt wrong if I did not perform it, like a phantom limb that needed to be scratched. I’d count six steps, then stop in stride and make my feet even. If there was a person behind me, he might slam into me. If I walked too fast, I might topple when I had to halt. My father, a Vietnam veteran, had mistaken it for “standing at attention,” military style. Later, this particular habit would be embellished by my father into “Howie would stand at attention and salute.” But, I never saluted. A couple of years later, on a hike near the Grand Canyon, I’d be sent back to our motor home in tears because I’d slowed down my two older brothers and Dad with this “standing at attention and saluting” habit. My dad would later amend it to, “And then Howie would stop so suddenly, he’d fall from the momentum and roll down a hill.” Ridiculous. Every third or even sixth step, I’d bring my feet together. That’s it.

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