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‘The Very Top Guy in the Stasi was Personally Involved in Figuring Out How to Destroy Punk.’

"Punkers and policemen face each other during a demonstration against the census on the 9th of May in 1987." Chris Hoffmann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images, Algonquin Books

Will Hermes | Longreads | September 2018 | 14 minutes (3,534 words)

Punk rock was revolution-minded from the get-go, at least about aesthetics. Its political consciousness bloomed later –- most vividly in the U.K., then in scenes around the world. Yet for all the anti-Thatcher, anti-Reagan bluster, punk can lay direct claim to just one full regime change. That’s the takeaway from Tim Mohr’s revelatory new book Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. It chronicles the rise of the scene — essentially seeded, Mohr writes, by a 15-year-old girl whose moniker became Major — in the Soviet Bloc German Democratic Republic in the ’80s. As its numbers swelled, it attracted the attention of the famously ruthless Stasi intelligence and security force (basically the KGB of the GDR), whose mandate included crushing any murmurs of rebelliousness or dissent, and who employed a psychological warfare strategy known as Zersetzung, or decomposition, towards those ends. Kids were picked up and interrogated, for hours and even days, for their haircuts, or clothing, or scraps of paper with song lyrics. For even minor transgressions, they lost college placements, government-controlled apartments, and jobs, their parents and relatives often punished in a similar manner. Kids were arrested and beaten, spent months in prison, threatened with expatriation.

Yet the scene kept growing. Bands like Namenlos and Schleim-Keim formed, playing gigs in church compounds — pretty much the only places alternative culture could exist, since church “open work” spaces were theoretically off-limits to the Stasi, at least initially. There, communities grew; punks connected with environmental activists and others working for change, sharing strategies and collaborating. They staged concerts and festivals, which the Stasi tried to suppress. When street protests began in force, swelling from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989, it was a culmination of the civil unrest that began in significant part, Mohr suggests, with a handful of strong-willed teenage punks hanging out at a park in Plänterwald.

Mohr encountered this history during his years in East Berlin, where he deejayed in clubs that had sprouted in the free-for-all communities of post-reunification Germany — clubs often created, staffed and attended by the same culture warriors that came up in the ’80s punk scene. Mohr spoke with us from his current home in Brooklyn, NY.

Listen to an audio version of this interview on the Longreads Podcast:

Longreads: So how did you first wind up in Berlin? This was after the wall fell, right?

Tim Mohr: Yeah, it was ‘92, so two years after unification. I was just determined to live abroad for a while, and I didn’t really have much of a clue about Germany. I guess I’d say I was a stupid American at the time. I thought Oktoberfest and Germany were the same thing, and I expected to get off the plane in Berlin and see everyone running around in lederhosen.

Chugging beer…

Yeah, out of giant mugs. And of course, it wasn’t the case. I ended up in a typical Eastern Bloc high rise, far in the East. This was somewhat disappointing. But pretty quickly I discovered the scene that was happening in crumbling old buildings in the central part of town, where people were squatting and the first generation of clubs and bars were up and running.

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Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People

Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zachary Siegel | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (5,459 words)

After breakfast each Sunday we had the option to attend a spiritual group. The facility’s spiritual counselor was a tall woman with greying frizzy hair who collected vaguely heart-shaped rocks, and always had several on her desk that she’d gift to patients who stopped by her office.

She wouldn’t give you just any old rock; no, the rock she’d choose for you had a story: its color, unique dents and chips resembled resilience, an ability to withstand harsh elements while retaining your heart’s shape. She insisted the Sunday group wasn’t religious. “Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell,” the popular saying around Alcoholics Anonymous goes. “Spirituality is for people who have already been there.” So we sang along to “Let it Be” by The Beatles.

We had mostly blamed ourselves for what landed us inside an addiction treatment facility. But we were young, so we also blamed our parents (thanks Obamacare!). The reason why we were all in treatment and not quarantined in jail is because we were mostly white and upper-middle class. It was the summer of 2012 and young people like me all over the country were developing opioid addictions. The difference between us and the vast majority of others was our family’s resources, namely insurance that covered the $1,000 per day cost for a residential stint at a spiritually tinged hospital-meets-lake-house just outside the Twin Cities (the land of 10,000 treatment centers). The campus edged Medicine Lake, which I always found cruel because the facility didn’t much like to use medicine at the time, medicine that would’ve eased my withdrawal and given me the best chance at kicking for good. “We don’t do that here,” I recall a nice Minnesota doctor saying.

Addiction experienced in the first-person feels like watching a movie shot entirely in extreme close-ups. No matter how hard you try, you can’t see the world beyond the frame. A tolerance builds after a while and you grow used to the shaky, nauseating ride. We couldn’t have possibly known it at the time, that we weren’t the stars in our very own drama. The content of our stories differed in the details, but the tone was uncannily similar: how prescription painkillers first took hold; after pharmaceuticals became scarce and expensive, how we, as a generation in unison, playing a fucked up game of Red Rover, beelined toward heroin. Another thing we had in common was a lot of dead friends. Read more…

Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes

Associated Press

Maxwell King | An excerpt adapted from The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers | Abrams | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,033 words)

It all came together in Hawaii, of all places.

In the late 1970s, David Newell and Fred Rogers were traveling together to Honolulu, where Fred was scheduled to make a speech. David Newell handled public relations for Fred Rogers and his production company, Family Communications, Inc. (FCI), as well as playing Mr. McFeely, the “speedy delivery” mailman character on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers hated traveling by himself — in fact, he hated traveling at all, just as he hated giving speeches. But he was often called on to speak at colleges and universities, as well as to early childhood education groups and broadcasting organizations, and most often it was Newell who traveled with him.

In a taxi to the speaking engagement, Rogers was lost in thought about his upcoming speech. Newell recalls: “In the newspaper, I came across this little blurb that a child had jumped off a roof with a towel — the Superman thing.”

Newell interrupted Rogers’s reverie to tell him the shocking news that a little boy who’d watched Superman on television had decided he would try to fly, and was terribly injured falling from a rooftop. One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was willfully misleading innocent, impressionable children. To him, it was immoral and completely unacceptable. Read more…

Age Appropriate

igorr1 / Getty, James Woodson / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jen Doll | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (4941 words)

In the summer of 2017, when I was 41 years old, I temporarily lost my parents. This is both less and more dramatic than it sounds. On August 1st, the start of the Long Island beach house rental I’d arranged for the month, I got into a car with my mom and dad, who’d helpfully flown up from Florida to join me for the initial stage of this retreat after I realized I hadn’t driven since I was a teenager, and I wasn’t going to start trying again on the Long Island Expressway.

After we loaded the rental car and I dutifully fastened my seatbelt in the backseat, assuming the position of so many family road trips past, I realized I hadn’t mailed my maintenance for my Brooklyn apartment. “Hang on — I’ll be right back!” I yelled, grabbing the envelope with the check in it and dashing across the street toward a mailbox. My dad waited at the side of the road, but then came a surge of traffic, and then a cop, and he had to drive on. “Noooooooo!” I yelled, chasing after the rental car (what kind was it anyway? I had no idea!) in the heat, knowing even as I did my perfunctory sad jog that there was no way I’d catch up.

I had no phone, no purse, no keys, no way to communicate with them other than to send mental signals: I will be right here waiting for you, a Richard Marx song on repeat. When you lose someone, stay put!, I remembered, a lesson imparted at various times during my childhood. So I waited. And waited. Finally, I saw the rental car heading back in my direction. No need to know the make or model when Mom was leaning out of the passenger side window, waving in the wind, shouting my name at the top of her lungs. They’d found me.

It was not the most auspicious beginning to our trip, and I felt relief and embarrassment in equal measures. I was, by all accounts, an adult. Yet I was never really a grown-up, particularly not when my parents were around.
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A Long, Lasting Influence on Educational Equity

Damian Strohmeyer / AP, Wikimedia Commons, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Anna Katherine Clemmons | Longreads | September 2018 | 27 minutes (7,413 words)

“Chris Long gave his paychecks from the first six games of the NFL season to fund scholarships in Charlottesville, VA. He wanted to do more, so he decided to give away an entire season’s salary. That’s a story from 2017.”

Barack Obama’s tweet, from December 29, 2017, was retweeted more than 66,000 times and received 268,000-plus likes. The message was one of several tweets in which President Obama shared stories that “remind us what’s best about America.”

Long announced on October 18, 2017, that in addition to donating his first six paychecks of the 2017 season to academic scholarships in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, he would also donate his final ten paychecks (a total base salary of around $1 million) to launch Pledge 10 For Tomorrow, a campaign to promote educational equity in the three cities where he’d played professional football — St. Louis, Boston, and Philadelphia. Ever since then, the Philadelphia Eagles defensive end has garnered national headlines and social media coverage, and appeared on talk shows. A reporter from one national outlet shadowed Long on that October day, chronicling how the NFL veteran spent his hours. For Long, who established his own philanthropic foundation in 2015 and who has donated to charitable endeavors throughout his now 11-year NFL career, the day was in many ways, decidedly ordinary.

“I had toyed with the idea [of donating my salary] when I wasn’t sure how badly I wanted to play last year,” Long, 33, says. “To be clear, no one over the age of thirty is that excited about playing another year, no matter what. So I thought, to make this year meaningful, it’d be cool to do something really impactful. It’d make it easier to come to work, and it’d be a good thing to do.”


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Other pro athletes have given millions of dollars to philanthropic causes over the years; the matching funds raised by Long’s Pledge 10 campaign generated another $1.3 million in donations, bringing the total raised to $1.75 million. However, the magnitude of Long’s actions, particularly in the wake of a tumultuous year of racial and social injustices that peaked with the events and violence on August 11 and 12 in Charlottesville, resonated beyond the professional sports sphere.

“When Charlottesville happened, that lit a fire under me,” Long says. “Our hometown has taken such a hit, so I needed to do something public and positive there. This is a time for people to do something positive in general.”

As 2018 began, mentions of Long’s philanthropy resumed, particularly after he became only the fourth player in NFL history to play in and win a second consecutive Super Bowl while playing for two different teams, this one as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles (he’d won a Super Bowl in 2017 with the New England Patriots).

But what hadn’t been written was an in-depth look at who those paycheck recipients were — and more importantly, what populations they serve in working toward education for all. Each nonprofit, selected by Long and his foundation director, Nicole Woodie, after months of research, interviews, and meetings, has made a significant impact not only in their respective cities, but throughout the country.

This is the story of those organizations — and why Long’s donations will have an influence long after he retires from football.

ST. LOUIS

On a cloudy Tuesday morning this June, several volunteers from the Little Bit Foundation and Bank of America stood outside Hodgen elementary school in St. Louis. Rain had poured down a half hour earlier; now, as the humidity remained, small puddles formed on sidewalks and in the pothole-ridden streets adjacent to the school. An elderly woman slowly approached a makeshift tent, under which 5,000 pounds of food had been laid out in bins and crates, cafeteria-style.

Lucy England, Little Bit’s volunteer manager, greeted the woman with a big hug. “Hello! Come on over and get some food!” England said, ushering the woman toward the stacks. The older woman filled two bags with sweet potatoes, watermelon, bread, and chicken, before thanking the volunteers and walking away.

Minutes later, a white pickup truck pulled up and two young men stepped out. As they talked with the volunteers, they filled five bags with food, noting that they planned to deliver some offerings to their neighbors.

The Little Bit Foundation’s Mobile Food Market, in partnership with the St. Louis Area Food Bank, runs the fourth Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of each month, from 9 a.m. to around 12 p.m., in three locations around St. Louis. The free, healthy grocery initiative is just one of the many programs supported by Little Bit, one of the two St. Louis–area nonprofit recipients of Long’s Pledge 10 initiative.

“The thing that’s lovely here is no one has to show any documentation — if you find your way here, you’re meant to be here,” England says. “We say, ‘You’re here, let’s get you loaded up. What do you like? What can you use?’ That really brings out the best in people — it’s empowering to have choices.”

Empowerment and choice is central to the work of the Little Bit Foundation, which serves children in poverty throughout the St. Louis area with an all-encompassing approach designed to address the needs of each child through a focus on academic enrichment, food access, health, and self-esteem. The idea behind Little Bit is simple: If children are warm, outfitted, clean, well-fed, and treated with love and kindness, they will perform better in school. So Little Bit provides books for children to read and new school supplies, outfits them with new socks, clothing, coats, and hygiene kits, offers health and dental screenings and mental health counseling, and provides nutritious food — all for free.

The thing that’s lovely here is no one has to show any documentation — if you find your way here, you’re meant to be here,” England says. “We say, ‘You’re here, let’s get you loaded up. What do you like? What can you use?’ That really brings out the best in people — it’s empowering to have choices.

The idea for Little Bit grew out of a simple request for coats. In 2001, the son of Little Bit’s executive director and cofounder Rosemary Hanley was playing on a high school soccer team, and the team’s head coach asked several parents to gather coats to donate as a community service project. Hanley spearheaded collection along with another parent, and the two distributed the coats to those in need.

An elementary school principal heard about what Hanley had done and asked if she could gather coats for his students. Again, Hanley went to work, asking friends to donate new and gently used coats. On a winter morning a day later, Hanley stood outside the elementary school with trash bags filled with almost 200 coats, waiting for the doors to open.

As she stood in the cold, a little boy ran up. “Look — my dad let me wear his coat today!” the boy said, grinning up at Hanley as he held his arms up in the air. The leather jacket’s zipper was broken, and the coat was several sizes too big. He talked to Hanley as she waited; once the school doors opened, he said goodbye and ran off to class.

The idea behind Little Bit is simple: If children are warm, outfitted, clean, well-fed, and treated with love and kindness, they will perform better in school.

Later, as the students came through the principal’s office to be fitted for coats, the same little boy stood in front of her. As Hanley zipped him into a snug, well-fitting navy coat, she placed the hood over his head. The boy grinned at her and said, “My dad is going to be so happy that I’m warm.”

“I thought to myself, ‘I live where I have everything I could possibly need — I’m not rich, but I do,’” Hanley remembered. “How can children be ten minutes from where I live, and be cold, hungry, and not have what they need? And that thought just wouldn’t leave me.”

She began emailing friends, asking them to drop off gently used clothing, coats — anything they could spare. The operation started in her cofounder’s basement; she established the beginnings of the Little Bit Foundation later that year (they received official 501(c)(3) status in 2006). Slowly, the nonprofit grew, expanding to other initiatives in working to end the poverty cycle and allow children a better path to education.

According to the 2018 Missouri Poverty Report, 24 percent of St. Louis City residents, including children, are living in poverty. Last year, Little Bit served 9,728 children in 31 St. Louis–area schools. In selecting partner schools, Little Bit’s main criteria is that 90 to 100 percent of the student body qualifies for free and reduced lunch, meaning they are living at or below the federal poverty line. “Since, unfortunately, many schools in St. Louis fall within this category, we first consider schools with the greatest need and the fewest resources,” Stacy Lupo, Little Bit’s communications director, says. “Most importantly, the leadership of our partner schools must be aligned with our mission and committed to its success, with a dedicated school liaison who will work directly with Little Bit volunteers and staff.”

Volunteers for Little Bit worked a total of 12,480 hours in 2017 and 2018. And they have plans to serve many more; Hanley often repeated a business-like mantra during a several-hour visit: “We are not fooling around — we take this work very seriously.”

Two or three volunteers greet the students at their respective school every week, offering them a hug or a high five inside the Little Bit Boutique, which is often set up inside a large closet or extra classroom space within the school.

The boutique has both gently used “emergency” items and newly purchased “new” items, the latter of which are ordered for a particular child every week. There are books, stuffed animals, hygiene kits, and school supplies, and each boutique has a pop-up tent that serves as a makeshift dressing room. The most requested new items? Underwear and socks.

All items are purchased new. If a young boy has outgrown his old pair of shoes, a Little Bit volunteer measures his shoe size and orders him a new pair. Emergency, gently used items are given to children with an immediate need. For example, if a little girl has lost her winter coat, the Little Bit volunteer gives her an emergency coat and then sizes her for a new coat, which is delivered the following week.

Each boutique has another essential element: a full-length mirror. “One thing we’re trying to improve is student self-esteem, so no kid walks out of here without looking into that mirror and smiling at themselves,” Alex Goodfellow, Little Bit’s program director, says. “It brightens your day.”

The one-on-one interaction is also pivotal. Volunteers provide continuity in schools where teacher and staff turnover is often high; one elementary school volunteer, Al Hinch, said he’d seen three different principals come through the school where he has volunteered with Little Bit over the past six years.

One thing we’re trying to improve is student self-esteem, so no kid walks out of here without looking into that mirror and smiling at themselves,” Alex Goodfellow, Little Bit’s program director, says. “It brightens your day.

“Attendance and behavioral problems improve when we can give this kind of attention,” Maureen Bahn, a 17-year volunteer with Little Bit, says. “We pick up every time something is going on with that kid. We are another support system.”

Bahn recalled a recent school visit, when a little girl came into the boutique with her clothes soaked in urine. Little Bit also outfits each school with a washer and dryer, so the school nurse washed the young girls’ clothes while Bahn helped her pick out new underwear, shorts, socks, and shoes.

The Little Bit Foundation warehouse, which stores all of the donated and purchased items, is 33,000 square feet. Three full-time staff members (Little Bit has 20 full-time employees working out of their offices), as well as a host of volunteers, work in the warehouse each day, which Little Bit moved into last July. The entire system is extremely organized: donations and purchases are sorted and labeled by age, gender, and size; an organization-wide database system allows Little Bit to track each child that they serve. Volunteers at each school have a tablet that contains the same technology system, so they can input each item as it’s given out. During the 2017–2018 school year, Little Bit moved over 337,000 items, which averages out to about 9,300 items per week.

“The opportunity with Chris Long, we didn’t see this as ‘Oh isn’t this sweet,’ we saw it as ‘Let’s shine the light on what’s going on in our city that’s positive, so we can change the narrative,’” Hanley says. “Let’s build the momentum around what we’re doing, with his help, so that we can really move that needle and promote change.”

Colby Heckendorn, 36, is beginning his fifth year as principal at Patrick Henry Downtown Academy elementary school, which has worked in partnership with Little Bit for 13 years.

“It takes so much stress off of families, who love their kids and want to provide everything possible, but sometimes just can’t,” Heckendorn says. “Little Bit fills that void, and the kids are just blown away by the kindness. They don’t fully understand all the work that goes on behind the scenes, but they are so excited to come into school with a clean, new uniform that’s ready to go.”

Long visited Patrick Henry Downtown Academy on March 22, 2018, spending time at a boutique as the children came through. “Dignity is so important for anybody,” Long says. “Then to have that resource of Little Bit, it kind of blew me away. It was hard enough for me as a student, and I had everything I needed. I can’t imagine not having a coat, not having a toothbrush, not having basic hygiene — all that stuff you need when you’re a kid.”

* * *

“Do you remember your biggest childhood dream?” 23-year-old Tiana Glass asked the audience at College Bound’s annual spring gala. “Dreaming has always been something sacred and precious to me; I could be a black girl prodigy today, a hero tomorrow, and your president next week. Dreaming was my refuge, for the times when the world became too much for me to handle.”

College Bound was the second St. Louis–area nonprofit recipient of Long’s donations. Founded in 2006 by Lisa Orden Zarin, College Bound helps students from low-income backgrounds prepare for and apply to college through a myriad of programs. College Bound stays with each student for seven to nine years, supporting them throughout college and as they prepare to enter the workforce or apply to graduate school.

Through their four-step “To and Through” program, College Bounds assists its students in four main arenas. The first step focuses on college readiness, which develops academic, social, and emotional competencies through one-on-one tutoring, ACT prep, coaching, grade monitoring, and academic skills curriculum as well as extracurriculars such as leadership camps and community service.

In step two, which focuses on college access, students prepare to apply to a four-year college or university. College Bound helps with financial coursework, navigating the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), finding summer opportunities, and obtaining financial counseling.

College completion, or step three, starts in 12th grade and continues until the student graduates from a four-year college or university. Throughout college, CB students have regular contact and support, transportation to and from their college or university, connections to academic advisors, and individual financial counseling.

Finally, in the last step — career readiness — each student develops “soft skills” and awareness of and exposure to potential careers. To achieve this, College Bound offers job shadowing, tours, panels with working professionals, paid internships, mentoring programs, and specific career-prep programming.

Zarin founded College Bound after watching her son, a privileged student from a private school, navigate the college admissions process. She researched the St. Louis area and learned that while 75 percent of high-income students applied to and graduated from four-year colleges and universities, less than 9 percent of low-income students achieved the same results.

In 2006, the first class of 36 College Bound students applied to college. Today, College Bound serves more than 600 students in their direct-service program, another 150 through their partnership with St. Louis Community College, and 250 more students indirectly through their Get Your Prep On college preparatory curriculum, FAFSA completion, and college counselor engagement. Currently, College Bound students attend 44 St. Louis area high schools and 74 colleges nationwide.

“We are able to commit to our students for a long period of time and with a depth that other organizations normally aren’t able to,” College Bound executive director Scott Baier says. “We are with them for the next seven to nine years, not just ensuring the transactional and important things, but also that they have the academic, mental, and social skills that they can thrive once on campus.”

That empowerment manifests in many ways. Since elementary school, Hassan Owens had been an intelligent, hard-working student, but his family didn’t have the resources for him to apply to college. Owens joined College Bound during his sophomore year of high school. Almost immediately, he signed up for an ACT prep course, ultimately improving his ACT score by three points. College Bound helped him get the test fees waived, so he could take it multiple times and earn a better grade. Additionally, College Bound helped Owens set up college visits, assisting him not only in funding the visits, but also in evaluating and understanding what type of institution he might want to attend. “He is so coachable, he is so smart, but what he needed were very concrete resources: applying for the FAFSA, which we did during his senior year and every year after while he’s in college,” Baier says. “It’s a small step, but one that trips up many first-generation college students.”

After graduating as the valedictorian of his high school class, Owens earned a full scholarship to Xavier University in Louisiana.

“College Bound provided me with the knowledge and access to all of these tools,” Owens, now 22, said. “The sad part is there are many students like me, who are smart and eager to attend college, but who are prevented from doing so because they are scared by the cost of college or not completing forms (like FAFSA) on time. First-generation students are told, ‘Go to college and change your life circumstances,’ but it’s not that simple.”

Owens graduated from Xavier University this past spring in the top 10 of his class; he’ll start medical school at UCLA in the fall, on essentially a full scholarship.

First-generation students are told, ‘Go to college and change your life circumstances,’ but it’s not that simple.

For Glass, a woman who joined College Bound after her sophomore year of high school, the mental health support was just as vital as the academic support. Glass joined College Bound during her sophomore year of high school. She’d been depressed for years, after being diagnosed with a learning disability and a speech impediment. Because of this, she says that teachers often underestimated her or dismissed her ability in the classroom. By the time she found College Bound, she was borderline suicidal.

College Bound has two full-time mental health professionals on staff, both of whom are licensed clinical social workers, in addition to two practicum students, who work with many of the College Bound students, 93 percent of whom are people of color. As Glass pointed out, students at low-income schools often have minimal — if any — access to mental health professionals.

When she met one of the College Bound wellness coaches, Jenn Starks, Glass says her life turned around. Through one-on-one as well as group counseling, Glass healed from past traumas and discovered self-empowerment. “I am sincere when I say that I would not be here today had it not been for College Bound,” Glass says.

Glass graduated from the University of Missouri, Columbia, this past December. After winning an entrepreneurial contest via a business incubator with her newly developed vegan cosmetic line, Black Honey Bee Cosmetics, designed for women of color and LGBTQ women, Glass is confident in who she is and where she wants to go.

With a staff of 42, College Bound works in so many ways with a variety of populations, including helping immigrant families of College Bound students understand the process of gaining legal status. And they continue to find new ways to grow. This past year, College Bound introduced a partnership program with St. Louis Community College. Baier had learned that the school’s graduation rate was only 9.6 percent. So College Bound set up an office to carry out what Baier calls “intrusive counseling,” meeting with each student, on average, 16 times a semester, in order to help the student population work toward graduating. The specific population that College Bound worked with had an average graduation rate of between 1 and 3.1 percent, so the need was great.

“Intrusive means that our coaches are actively texting and calling and communicating with our students, to help nudge them along the way so they know what’s coming down the pipe,” Baier says. “Students enrolled in community college often don’t know the resources they need, so we ask what they need and then we help figure it out — issues like financial aid — so they’re keeping their focus on what happens in class.”

College Bound is also working on early college credit initiatives — by 2022, they hope to have 100 percent of College Bound students achieve some kind of early credit.

“Everyone thinks there’s something magic about doing this,” Baier says. “And while our students are phenomenal, it’s really about resources. Look at what kids from overprivileged backgrounds are able to do — that’s the playing field we’re trying to level. I want sixty-five percent of College Bound students to graduate within five years because that would put us on par with the highest income quintile out there — that they graduate with less than $35,000 in debt and three quarters are employed or in graduate school or in meaningful service twelve months post-college.”

“We are very interested in the social justice mission that Chris promotes and the manner in which he does it,” Baier says. “That’s one thing got me really excited; you normally don’t find people like Chris Long, who are willing to take risks in using their celebrity for good.”

BOSTON

Dhruval Thakkar moved with his family from India to Boston three and a half years ago. As a high school sophomore, Thakker had never visited the United States. He spoke almost no English, and despite his warm, friendly personality, he felt lost. “It was hard,” he says of his first days at West Roxbury High School in Boston.

His English teacher recommended that Thakkar apply for Summer Search, the Boston-area recipient of Long’s donations.

In 1990, Summer Search founder Linda Mornell was working as an adolescent counselor in private practice in the Bay Area. All three of Mornell’s children attended summer programs — first, Outward Bound, then National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) — during their high school years. Her son, an active athlete, loved Outward Bound. Her oldest daughter, however, hated the idea of the program before she’d even started. Unathletic, afraid of heights and the dark, Mornell’s daughter went on the trip “involuntarily,” Mornell says. “And she probably got the most out of it. Before, she approached everything with ‘I can’t.’ While on Outward Bound, they gave her a new nickname: Sara Can. And she came home Sara Can.’”

Later that year, Mornell’s youngest daughter was a junior at a private high school. Mornell picked her up at school one afternoon and saw a young man standing outside. He looked uncomfortable, “ill at ease,” Mornell remembered. She asked her daughter about him, and her daughter said he was on a full scholarship. “And I thought, ‘Wow, what must it feel like to come back to school every fall with kids who’ve gone to Switzerland or who’ve traveled the world. So I thought, ‘I’m going to start a program so that kid will have a story to tell when he comes home.’”

In that first summer of 1990, Summer Search sent 14 students — including the young man outside of the school — from low-income backgrounds on all-expenses-paid trips. The young man, Mornell learned, had never been outside of his neighborhood in south San Francisco. He’d never been to Oakland; he’d never traveled on a plane. He flew to Bali and spent six weeks with the group, working a community service project.

However, while the trip was successful, after the group returned Mornell sensed the students had lost the energy and excitement from their journeys. “One single intervention isn’t helpful for kids who have trauma and deprivation — you have to have a more sustained effort,” Mornell says.

So in 1992, she added a second fully funded summer experience, as well as year-round mentoring for each student, whereby the student talked with Mornell each week to discuss everything from school interests, collegiate possibilities, family issues, and personal development. The student’s second summer experience, following their junior year of high school, caters toward their individual interests. They can choose an academic experience, such as enrolling in courses at Columbia University; they can select an international learning experience, such as studying sustainable energy in Costa Rica; or they can decide to return to the wilderness for a second outdoor experience.

‘One single intervention isn’t helpful for kids who have trauma and deprivation — you have to have a more sustained effort,’ Mornell says.

“The importance of that second trip, that service experience, is that all our students understand that they have something to contribute,” Hermese Velasquez, executive director of Summer Search Boston, says.

For the next five years, Mornell was the only staff member working with the program’s 100 students. In 1996, she hired two staff members — and the program grew from there.

Now a national nonprofit for high school students based in five cities (the Bay Area, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Seattle), Summer Search has served more than 6,600 youth to date, many of whom have become the first member of their families to attend college.

“There’s a brain drain in summertime,” Sylvia McKinney, executive director of Summer Search Philadelphia, says. “Students who have a positive educational experience in the summer tend to start off well-prepared, ready, and engaged for school, whereas students who don’t have that experience take until about January to make that transition.”

Summer Search Boston, founded in 1996 as the second Summer Search location, serves roughly 1,000 students each year, in partnership with 33 area schools. The median household income for the students they serve is $24,000; a high percentage of the students are recent immigrants to the United States.

For his first summer experience, Thakker traveled to Wyoming for a 30-day outdoor adventure; he’d never spent a night away from his family before. In the woods, Thakker, learned survival skills, such as how to cook (“pasta isn’t that hard,” he said, laughing), how to be a leader, and what it means to work on a team. He also learned about adaptation. “No shower for 30 days — that was a lot,” Thakker says, smiling as he brushed his long, dark, wavy hair from his forehead.

Last summer, for his second Summer Search experience, Thakker spent 17 days in Nicaragua, teaching English to area residents.

Thakker’s mentor has proven vital to his development. “My mentor, Armani, is the coolest person I’ve ever met,” Thakker says. “He’s been such a great support in my professional and personal life, both when it comes to the college process and me being able to adapt to the community here.”

During his senior year, Thakker was repeatedly bullied by a fellow student. Thakker and the student were competing for the same scholarship, via a foundation that would provide four years of fully paid tuition at one of six select higher-education institutions. Out of 1,400 students originally selected for consideration, Thakker and the student bullying him were two of the top 20 finalists. On the day of the final interviews, a nervous Thakker met with Armani. While the conversation boosted his self-confidence, Thakker ultimately didn’t receive the scholarship. The student bullying him did.

“Honestly, that news broke me,” Thakker says. “But Armani told me how everything happens for a reason, and he taught me to always look at the positive side. He showed me how now, I could apply to any colleges, whereas the scholarship recipients are limited to six particular schools.”

Thakker felt like he’d disappointed his family, and he worried over how his parents would pay for his college education. But in talking to Armani, he learned not to see the process as a failure.

“Armani was like another parent in the times when I needed a parent but I didn’t feel right to talk to my parents about this,” Thakker says. “He helped me learn that I didn’t let anyone down, but that everyone was proud of me for getting this far. I did lose in the last rounds, but I got something out of it. There was someone who believed in me.”

Each Summer Search mentor is trained extensively, both by a master trainer out of the national office as well as in the San Francisco Summer Search headquarters. Training essentially involves working with the mentors on the skills of being a keen listener while also holding students accountable and ensuring they follow through. Some mentors have a master’s degree in social work, though it isn’t required.

“I think once kids realize you won’t interrupt them, you won’t direct them, that you will just listen, they start talking and they can’t stop,” Mornell says. “It’s an incredibly rare experience.”

“A large part of our population comes here from one country and then a large part of their identity is missing, so sometimes those foundations aren’t fully developed,” Pedro Suncar, a mentor now in his third year with Summer Search Boston, says. “Not being able to connect to cultures and see how other people do things creates a silo. So the concept of travel and being able to say you’ve been somewhere and seen that is a reason I think the program is so successful.”

Summer Search Boston executive director Hermese Velasquez is a former Summer Search student, which is where she first discovered her love of travel. During her second summer experience, teaching math to schoolchildren in Ghana, Velasquez immersed herself in the culture. She lived with a host family and rode the bus to and from the school each day.

“That taught me that regardless of where I came from, I have this really, really strong gift to contribute to the world,” Velasquez, a native of Belize, says.

Long’s donation, combined with the fundraising match initiative, brought in close to half a million dollars to support Summer Search Boston and Philadelphia. But perhaps more importantly, Velasquez says, it raised Summer Search’s public profile. “The Summer Search bus became greater. We experienced a lot of new folks in the room this year, and that to me is more important in some ways, because we’re generating new partnerships and relationships with folks in this city who didn’t know about us before,” Velasquez says.

Thakker interned at Boston Children’s Hospital this summer. He watched intense conversations between doctors and parents, and observed as surgeons broke difficult news to young children. Growing up in India, Thakker planned to become an engineer. But his experiences through Summer Search, he says, have reinforced his desire to become a surgeon. He’ll start classes at Wheaton College this fall.

“I feel like the way I’ve gotten here today was Summer Search,” Thakker says. “They have been there to help me in every aspect of my life.”

PHILADELPHIA

Thirty-four parents crowded into the Mariana Bracetti Academy classroom in northeast Philadelphia, hugging their knees as they sat on undersize chairs; others stood along the back wall, fiddling with their cell phones. One father held his baby boy in his arms, offering him a bottle, as he watched his toddler son run around the table. Another mom handed her adolescent son a tablet to play on, as she took out a pen and notebook to take notes.

“All right, all right! Are we all here? Is everyone a parent of a sophomore?”

Alex Cromer, a Summer Search program associate, stood at the front of the room, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt, her nose piercing reflecting off of the classroom’s fluorescent lights. As the assembled group nodded collectively, Cromer began outlining what the Summer Search wilderness trip would be like for the students, whose family members had gathered here for information — and reassurance.

“My son has never been in an airport before,” Trena Medford said, referring to her son, 16-year-old Tymir Hill. “I can’t come after my baby if he gets lost. How do I know he’s going to the right place? And you said to only pack three shirts? He is going to get funky!”

Several other parents murmured in agreement before another parent interjected.

“I thought my daughter was taking a bus to New York or something? When will she be at the airport?”

“All these fears are so valid,” Cromer said calmly, nodding. “First, you would know if your student is getting on a plane or a train, because I’ve talked to you, and also, your student should know.”

“Well, my son doesn’t really talk to me — he only texts!” a mom yelled out, as the other parents laughed and echoed their agreement.

“Ninety percent of you, your kids are getting on a shuttle bus,” Cromer said. “For those other ten percent, when your students are flying in somewhere, there will be someone with a big sign, greeting them. We’ve been working with all these partner organizations for years now, and we’ve established relationships with them. I can assure you, we keep doing it because it works.”

Summer Search Philadelphia is the youngest chapter of the nationwide program. Just over a decade old, the Philadelphia office has served 249 students since its inception — and it’s growing. Last year, thanks in large part to Long’s donation, they moved from serving 25 rising high school juniors to 37. Their staff of seven employees works with five area schools (they’re in conversation to add two more schools in 2019) in selecting their students.

The bond between mentor and student is evident; as the parents and students gathered in the MBA cafeteria before the breakout sessions, filling plastic plates with Boston Market chicken, green beans, and mac ’n’ cheese, excited students hugged their mentors and introduced them to family members.

Several students wore Eagles T-shirt jerseys; Philadelphia is a sports town, and the Eagles have long brought together the diverse population in a way that few other teams, organizations, or leaders have done. When Long announced that Summer Search Philadelphia would be one of his recipients, “every time he played a game, we became part of the narrative,” McKinney says. “In a city like Philadelphia, that’s just boomtown.”

Long attended the Summer Search fall celebration last October. In addition to adding more students, McKinney says that Long’s donation helped overall by increasing school, nonprofit, and organizational partnerships, while also raising Summer Search’s profile in public policy discussions. They even created an “Ed Talk” series, mirroring TED Talks, but focused on education.

Like other Summer Search offices, the need in Philly is far greater than the number of students they can serve. Over 170 students applied to the program this past fall. After the several-step application process, including multiple interviews, the final 35 were chosen.

“All of our students come with many skills, but they may not have had the access to exercise those opportunities,” Velasquez says. “We give them the opportunity to open the door slightly, and they barge in and take control of all that we’ve provided to them. They begin to grow and thrive and soar after that.”

Seventeen-year-old Maria Jiminez began Summer Search in the fall of 2017. As she sat in the cafeteria and talked about her first experience, she tapped her long, eloquently painted fingernails on the table.

“I’m the type of person who likes to go out and explore, so I felt like this was something for me,” Jiminez said. “To have an organization and a mentor that I can talk to about how I’m feeling, her always being there to give me advice — I love her so much and she is someone I can trust with anything. For me to have these type of people in my life, that’s really important.”

Raja Mitchell, 18, is the oldest of five kids. A recent graduate of Boys’ Latin Philadelphia Charter School, Mitchell first heard about Summer Search through his school. When Mitchell’s principal recommended him for Summer Search, Mitchell didn’t hesitate.

“It’s just a really good program,” Mitchell says. “My mentors helped me so much through high school. You can call them with anything, and they’re always there to answer.”

For his senior project, a mandatory 10-page paper and a 50-hour internship, Mitchell’s mentor, Program Manager and Summer Programs’ Specialist Erin Callison helped him find an internship at the Energy Co-Op in Philadelphia. There, he studied renewable and sustainable energies. The internship built on Mitchell’s second Summer Search experience, when he’d spent three weeks in Costa Rica studying sustainable energy resources. Mitchell grew coffee on green energy farms, helped to build a basketball court for local residents and took Spanish with local school children. Now, after college, he hopes to either enter the sports medicine field — or work in sustainable energy.

“He was always responsible, but this has made him grow into a man,” Mitchell’s mother, Nicole, said. “It has really changed his life.”

“Visiting with Summer Search made me smile,” Long says. “These are high schoolers, and they’ve had to grow up quick. You can tell this program … it’s created hope. And a glimpse of what life is like outside of that bubble they’ve lived in. It was great to hear stories of some of the experiences and the people they’ve met.”

‘He was always responsible, but this has made him grow into a man,’ Mitchell’s mother, Nicole, said. ‘It has really changed his life.’

Despite his mother’s travel concerns, Tymir Hill arrived in Colorado without incident. Each Summer Searcher has to pass a baseline fitness test, which includes hiking three miles in 45 minutes. While Hill had passed that test, the six-foot, 230-pound 16-year-old had never visited a location at altitude. A few days into his hiking adventure with his fellow participants, his 40-pound backpack on his back, Hill passed out. He was helicoptered to a nearby hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with dehydration.

Medford retold the story of her son’s (mis)adventures with a laugh, noting with sincerity how the staff kept her appraised of the situation throughout his brief hospital stay. Even though she wanted “her baby” to come home, Hill insisted that he wanted to stay. He loved his Colorado experience. He recently went on a six-day trip to Iceland with his school, and he is already planning his Summer Search adventure for 2019. Medford, in turn, said she has learned to relinquish control and to trust her son’s instincts.

“With single-parent households like mine, particularly of a young man living in this city, there are so many fear factors,” Medford said. “As a single mom, I can’t teach him to be a man — evidently this can. Summer Search is like the best baby daddy ever.”

At the final event of the evening informational session, a scheduled open mic time allowed for graduating seniors to offer impromptu remarks about what Summer Search has meant to them. As they stood in a single-file line near the auditorium’s stage, some opened with private jokes for their classmates and others gave a “shout out” to their group, their mentor, then the other mentors, and on and on. But many messages were impassioned and sincere.

“If I would’ve listened to fear, I wouldn’t be here,” Shay Smith, a graduating senior said. “This whole experience has really helped me find out who I am. All of this is preparing us for something great. I have done so much because of Summer Search.”

‘As a single mom, I can’t teach him to be a man — evidently this can. Summer Search is like the best baby daddy ever.’

McKinney has a loud, infectious laugh, and her intelligence and determination shines through whenever she speaks. At times, her passion for Summer Search feels part advocate, part evangelical. “Is there need for this? Absolutely!” McKinney says, her voice rising. “Would I want every student to have the opportunity to go through this process? Absolutely. We need to grow. We have no choice. Because the need is way too great and the service that we provide is way too dynamic to serve so few.”

CHARLOTTESVILLE

Chris Long’s alma mater, St. Anne’s-Belfield School (STAB), is spread out across two campuses in Charlottesville. The Upper School, serving grades 9 through 12, sits on a sloping hill just off of UVA’s campus (or Grounds, if speaking in Thomas Jefferson’s vernacular). The coeducational, independent boarding and day school for preschool through 12th grade dates back to 1910.

More recently, Long and both of his brothers (Kyle Long, an offensive guard for the Chicago Bears) and Howie Jr. (who works for the Oakland Raiders) attended STAB, which Long graduated from in 2004 before heading up the street to play football for the UVA. In 2009, one year into Long’s professional career, St. Anne’s head of school David Lourie flew to St. Louis to talk to him about supporting the school financially.

That conversation led to a scholarship established by Long and his wife, Megan, to fund one student’s education at St. Anne’s. The Longs wanted to remain anonymous donors, and they continued to fund the scholarship for the next seven years.

This past summer, when white supremacists descended on Charlottesville and violent clashes erupted, leading to the tragic death of anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer, the Longs decided they needed to do more. They also felt that they might be able to inspire others to similar action by removing the anonymity of their support. So at the start of the season, Long announced that he’d donate his first six paychecks in support of two fully-funded scholarships to St. Anne’s-Belfield, from sixth grade through high school graduation. (Lourie says that 40 percent of St. Anne’s students receive “some level” of financial assistance.)

Long also stipulated that the recipients would be members of the Boys & Girls Club of Central Virginia, a nonprofit organization that serves 2,500 area youth, and which he’s supported since his days at UVA (Long’s mother, Diane, has been a board member of the Boys & Girls Club since 2004).

When the news broke in 2017 that Long had signed a two-year contract with the Eagles — on his 32nd birthday — Long was at the Southwood Boys & Girls Club, talking with the kids and competing in footraces where he executed, according to the Boys and Girls Club of Central Virginia CEO James Pierce, “the perfect tie at the finish line.” Pierce thought Long would only stay for 10 minutes; he ended up staying for two hours. In a nod to perfect subtlety, he’d worn a non-logoed, forest-green T-shirt. A photo from that day shows a smiling Long crouched down, mobbed by kids hamming it up for the camera, with a handwritten name tag that says, simply, “Chris.”

“I was so pleased, but in no way was I surprised [by the partnership donation],” Pierce says. “The Long family is extremely generous, and if anyone was going to do it, it’s going to be Chris. He’s always been somebody who’s put the community before himself. He knows that he’s been very fortunate in his life, and he feels like it is part of his mission to enhance the world that his young family will grow up in.” (Long and his wife, Megan, had a son, Waylon, in 2016.)

* * *

As the Philadelphia Eagles open their season tonight against the Atlanta Falcons, fans will be watching what happens on the field. But for Long, the focus is on the work that remains in offering educational equity throughout the United States, whether for young children, high schoolers, or college students. Last year’s total salary donation was a start. But it certainly wasn’t the end.

“I’m an athlete. I gave money and I’ve drawn some attention to it, but when we leave or they stop taking pictures, these people go right back to work,” Long says. “The people working for Summer Search, Little Bit, College Bound, the volunteers I’ve met in Charlottesville, and people like James Pierce — they are just amazing people. And we’re really lucky to have them.”

***

Anna Katherine Clemmons is a freelance writer, reporter, and producer who was written for ESPN, Conde Nast Traveller, Hemispheres, and USA Today Sports. She is an adjunct professor who teaches teaching Sports Journalism and Sports Media Production at the University of Virginia.

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Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Matt Giles

Lyrical Ladies, Writing Women, and the Legend of Lauryn Hill

Paul Warner / AP

 Michael Gonzales | Longreads | August 2018 | 21 minutes (5,551 words)

Back in the early 1980s, rap was primarily a boys club, but a few girls still managed to sneak in and do their thing. Although uptown girls Sha-Rock from the Funky Four + 1 and the Mercedes Ladies were pioneers of the genre, it was a teenager from Queens named Roxanne Shante who gets credit for laying down a verbal foundation for other fem rhyme slayers to follow for decades. As seen in the gritty Netflix biopic Roxanne Roxanne, which details the rapper’s humble beginnings and hard knock life, Shante was just another around-the-way girl with an attitude living in Queensbridge Projects when she was discovered by record producer Marley Marl, who lived and worked in the same public housing sprawl. Marley’s rap posse the Juice Crew featuring Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie and MC Shan were some of the best rappers in the city and being down with them meant something special.

Going by her government name Lolita Shanté Gooden, she began rapping at ten years old and was known within those brick buildings to be the best at freestyling and battling alongside the boys. Unlike a decade later when the scantily clad Foxy Brown and Lil’ Kim became the most popular female rappers, in the ‘80s it wasn’t about sex appeal (often “lady rappers,” with the exception of The Sequence, dressed like the boys), but simply skills. “Shante was a gem,” Marley told me in 2008. “All her songs were made up on the the spot. All you had to do was give her a subject and she would run with it.”

Recruited to bring her dis-heavy rhymes to a record designed to answer back to U.T.F.O.’s popular 1984 jam “Roxanne Roxanne,” a somewhat sexist song featuring Brooklyn rappers Kangol Kid, Educated Rapper and Doctor Ice (Mix Master Ice was their DJ) that steadily insults a “stuck up” young woman who was new to their block, Shante adopted a new first name and brought the pain. “Roxanne Roxanne” might’ve been a sensation and a best-seller for U.T.F.O., but when Shante’s squeaky yet powerful response “Roxanne’s Revenge” was released a few months later, U.T.F.O., as well as the rest of the world, were caught off-guard. Rox called them out individually, verbally taking down the entire crew as she delivered the goods and changed hip-hop history.

The rap sisterhood soon included Sparky D, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, LA Star, Monie Love, Lauryn Hill, Lil Kim, Foxy Brown, Nicki Minaj and countless others. For many of the women rappers who’ve succeeded throughout the years, as former Def Jam artist Nikki D says in the 2010 documentary My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth About Women And Hip Hop directed by Ava DuVernay, “They were doing double of what a dude could do.”

While Roxanne was an obvious inspiration to her fellow female MCs for decades to come, her voice and lyrics also inspired many young women who never touched a mic to pursue their path regardless of any barriers the boys might put in their way.

‘She Begat This’ is a celebration of the Bad Boy boom bap Wu Tang neo-soul Missy Elliott roaring 1990s, an end-of-the-century era that was an important period in black popular culture.

Like hip-hop itself, writing about rap music was mostly the beat of male (the main quartet being Nelson George, Greg Tate, Barry Michael Cooper and Harry Allen) music journalists in the the early years, but by the mid-’80s, that too would change. There were the Village Voice scribes Carol Cooper and Lisa Jones, though neither wrote that much about the genre. Additionally, there were also the often overlooked women from the glossy teen zines: Cynthia Horner (Right On!), Gerrie Summers (Word Up), Kate Ferguson, Yvette Noel-Schure (who today is Beyonce’s publicist), Marcia Cole and Belinda Trotter. However, progressing into the ‘90s, the textual landscape began to change as women who came of age within the culture — whether hanging at park jams, clubbing with the b-boys or simply enthralled by the booming beat underground sounds that were slowly becoming mainstream — decided that they too had something to say about the scene. The shortlist of then young scribes includes future powerhouse writers/editors Kierna Mayo, dream hampton, Mimi Valdes, who produced the movie Roxanne Roxanne, and Danyel Smith, but it was the writings of Joan Morgan, author of the recently released She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, that I remember reading first.

For me, Joan was the hip-hop writer version of Roxanne Shante. Certainly, she wasn’t the first woman hip-hop writer on the scene, but from jump she was one of the best. While She Begat This, which includes a forward by Mayo, is a tribute to Hill’s masterful album that was released 20 years ago this past weekend, on August 25th, 1998, it’s also a celebration of the Bad Boy boom bap Wu Tang neo-soul Missy Elliott roaring 1990s, an end-of-the-century era that was an important period in black popular culture as well as in the professional and personal lives of those who were there as participants and witnesses, writing from the frontlines with Afro abandon. Back then, besides our personal stereos and radios, The Miseducation could be heard blaring from house parties, spoken word readings, cool clothing stores, restaurants, cars parked on the street and bubbling brown sugar bars everywhere.

These days Joan Morgan, between raising her son as a single mother, teaching at various universities and working on her Ph.D. dissertation, hardly ever writes about hip-hop culture, but when the publisher 37 INK offered her the project to riff on Hill’s landmark disc she felt it was her responsibility to do the right thing. Still, anyone anticipating a 33 1/3-type book filled with nerdy details describing recording sessions, Hill’s writing process, a close reading analysis of the lyrics or an interview with the featured artist, or at least with some of the musicians and collaborators, will be sorely disappointed. Morgan, whose book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999) is as influential a text amongst a certain sector of the literary hip-hop audience as Hill’s music, chose instead to write “a cultural history of the album.”

In addition to her personal observations and opinions of Lauryn as seen (heard) through a womanist lens, Morgan also interviews her girlfriends, fellow writers and thinkers who were also a part of the New York City (and Brooklyn) scene when Miseducation was first released. Serving as an intellectual Greek chorus throughout the book, they share their thoughts on Hill in relation to colorism, mental health, style, relationships and black genius.

However, considering all the interviews Hill did when the album was released, it’s striking that not one was quoted in She Begat This. Morgan talks about the beauty of the Harper’s Bazaar cover Lauryn appeared on, as well as the “lily-whiteness” of that magazine, which usually kept black faces regulated to the interior pages, but never once mentions what Hill said inside that issue . The only person Morgan spoke with who was actually connected to The Miseducation was Lauryn’s former personal manager Jayson Jackson, who gave the writer some juicy tidbits, including the fact that the record company was unhappy with the project when it was first presented to them.

“Truthfully, when I thought about it I knew that no one would be able to write the book the way I would,” says Morgan via cellphone from an Amtrak train leaving Martha’s Vineyard back to New York City. “But, I only had four months to complete the book and I didn’t have time to chase Lauryn down for an interview, so I interviewed other people (including dream hampton, Michaela Angela Davis, Dr. Yaba Blay, Karen Goode Marable, Akiba Solomon and former Honey magazine editor Joicelyn Dingle) to get their take on what made the project iconic.”

*

Twenty years later The Miseducation is still relevant and winning honors; most recently it was voted #2 on NPR’s list of The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women, sandwiched between #1 Joni Mitchell (Blue) and Lauryn’s spiritual godmother Nina Simone (I Put a Spell On You) at #3. As writer Paula Mejia stated in her essay on The Miseducation, “The album, rife with Hill’s biting rhymes and sharp turns of phrase, is a wonder from start to finish.” With lyrics that were as piercing and probing as an Alice Walker novel (“…blessed with a broad literary arsenal that… reflected her dexterity as a wordsmith,” Morgan writes) and as musically lush as a seventies Ann Peebles song produced by Willie Mitchell, the album was obviously brilliant, but for Lauryn Hill it would be both a gift and a curse.

The curse came later that year when the production team New-Ark, who helped Hill with producing and songwriting but never signed any contracts, sued for more money (they were originally paid $100,000) and for writing credits. Hill eventually settled with the musicians, and it’s hard for observers not to speculate that the suit embarrassed Lauryn or even scarred her emotionally — a narrative passively reinforced not least by her inability to create a follow-up studio album.

Morgan’s writings helped many rap-loving women navigate through the gray areas of the music that they might’ve loved dearly, but didn’t always love them back.

Hill’s strange behavior both onstage and off has been documented heavily, including in a recent interview with respected jazz pianist Robert Glasper detailing his bad experiences working with her in 2008. Appearing on Houston, Texas, radio station 97.9 The Box, Glasper told tales: from being instructed to address her as Ms. Hill (something that everyone is supposed to do) to never looking her in the eye to her habit of firing her touring bands no matter how good they might be. Addressing Hill directly on the show, Glasper said, “You haven’t done enough to be the way you are…the one thing you did that was great, you didn’t do…” In a recent Medium essay, “Addressing Robert Glasper and other common misconceptions about me (in no particular order)” Ms. Hill responded to the criticism.

Film producer/director Lisa Cortes (Precious), who is currently directing the documentary The Remix: Hip Hop x. Fashion, says, “I don’t think that [sharing credits with New-Ark] should’ve made people look at her negatively.” As a former record executive, Cortes worked closely with R&B and hip-hop producers in the late ’80s/early ’90s. “Plenty of music men have used ghostwriters or other producers to help them finish tracks, but they’ve never been dragged the way Lauryn was. The writing and producing she has done with others (Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Whitney Houston) speaks for her talents and The Miseducation remains a remarkable achievement.”

The controversy of creation never deterred me from listening to The Miseducation and continually embracing its brilliance, but I’ve always been upset that Hill never released another full-length project. With the exception of the much maligned MTV Unplugged project (Village Voice critic Miles Marshall Lewis was the only writer I know who liked that album, calling the 2002 project “the most powerful artistic document to emerge from hip-hop America post-9/11”) and a single with the Fugees (“Take It Easy”), there has been nothing. “From what I understand, Lauryn never stopped recording,” says Morgan, “she just hasn’t put anything out. Who knows, maybe she’ll put out some new music in time for the anniversary.”

Though Lauryn still tours, often showing up hours late and performing her songs in a variety of different arrangements that sometimes angers the audience, The Miseducation remains Hill’s only solo album. After announcing an anniversary tour in April, by July most of the dates were postponed or canceled. “This album chronicled an intimate piece of my young existence,” Hill said in a statement released when the tour was announced. “It was the summation of most, if not all, of my most hopeful and positive emotions experienced to that date.”

*

Interviewing Morgan on her book’s publication date, we reminisce about those early days when she was a young writer at the Village Voice, hanging out in the lounge where she befriended writers and editors including Joe Levy, who suggested she cover the Mike Tyson rap trial in 1992. “I was completely untrained,” she says. “People were telling me that they liked my voice (in print), but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t breaking the rules, I just didn’t know what they were.” My introduction to Morgan’s work was her 1990 review of former N.W.A. member Ice Cube’s solo debut AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (Priority), which was also published in the Village Voice.

Living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn with my buddy Havelock Nelson while we worked on our book Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture, I sat in the CD-cluttered kitchen and read the piece twice, loving every word of it. Morgan’s writing was powerful, poetic and bold, with the review itself written in the style of a short story involving her girlfriends in Martha’s Vineyard and the Cube cassette. Balancing Cube’s angry Black man stance (his post-Panther arguments with the government and the police) and his sexism, Morgan was split between loving the album and throwing the record into a bonfire. “I think of that review as the first in hip-hop feminism,” she says.

Filmmaker Syreeta Gates, who is currently working on Write On! The Legend of Hip-Hop’s Ink Slingers, a documentary about hip-hop writers from the ‘90s, says, “Straight out the gate her Ice Cube piece had us reimagine our relationships not only with the culture but with the artists in relation to their lyrics…For me, she gave space to play in the grays that I never thought was possible in the realm of hip-hop culture. Her ideology around hip-hop feminism gave a generation of young women a [language for] something that I think for the most part we made a distinct choice to participate in.”

A self-proclaimed “cultural chameleon,” Morgan was a Bronx-bred homegirl who was part prep school (she’d attended the prestigious Fieldston School), part Phillies blunt; an Ivy League graduate who was reared by strict Jamaican parents, but still managed to get her party on. “I can still remember lying to my mother about what block I was on, so I could go with my friends to the park jams,” Morgan laughs. “I listened to what my peers listened to with curiosity and fascination, but I never thought of it as a career.” Still, just because she could recite the raunchiest rap stanzas didn’t mean she wasn’t going to challenge sexism, classism and stereotypes. Her writings helped many rap-loving women navigate through the gray areas of the music that they might’ve loved dearly, but didn’t always love them back.

Regina R. Robertson, west coast editor of Essence and editor of the essay collection He Never Come Home says, “I recently pulled When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost from my bookshelf and started flipping through it again. That book had such an impact on me. I was struck by Joan’s honesty. That book also made me take a step back and reexamine the roles that we all play. Although it’s almost twenty years since it came out, it has stood the test of time.”

Joan Morgan never planned on becoming a music critic, let alone a “hip-hop writer.” In 2006 she explained to interviewer Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “When I started writing, there was no such thing as ‘hip-hop journalism.’ I am part of that generation of writers that, for better or worse, created that as a genre and it really was a term that other people applied to our writings.” Within months of the Cube review, I began seeing her name regularly in the Voice and Spin, and began looking forward to her take on a culture that she obviously cherished.

This was another golden era of black writing, and Morgan’s work at ‘Vibe’ was at the forefront of a literary movement that would inspire a generation.

During that early ‘90s period, Joan was a teacher at the Fieldston School, but that was simply a stopover until the universe expanded and so-called “urban” magazines (most noticeably The Source, Vibe and RapPages) exploded on the scene. “Funny enough, I had very little respect for music journalism,” Morgan tells me, “because I didn’t really understand it. My thinking was, ‘Who needs a review to figure out what they wanted to hear.’ My real dream was to become an actor.”

In 1993, although The Source was already a heavy newsstand presence in the hip-hop mag department, the Time Inc./Quincy Jones-owned Vibe was promoted as bigger and deffer, as though it was the Esquire of urban magazines. With its larger size, better graphics, more experienced editorial direction and a writing staff that included Kevin Powell, Scott Poulson-Bryant and Joan Morgan, the magazine was an instant success. Coming at a time when most mainstream music/lifestyle publications, namely Rolling Stone, had no “writers of color” composing funky fresh features or reviews, The Source and Vibe was where more than a few African-American writers honed their craft, sharpened their skills and were allowed to have their words read by thousands of readers across the world.

This was, as writer Dean Van Nguyen recently documented in the Pitchfork piece “How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement,” another golden era of black (Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement) writing, and Morgan’s work at Vibe was at the forefront of a literary movement that would inspire a generation. Teenagers read the rap mags on the subway and buses, college students studied them in their dorms, with some hanging favorite articles pin-up style on the wall, and the mostly white world of New York City magazine journalism was forced to pay attention to the new kids in town. Morgan would go on to write several wonderful stories for Vibe including a controversial one on alleged homophobic Jamaican singer Buju Banton and, in 1994, a memorable cover story on TLC (The Fire This Time) that centered on the group’s rebellious rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who had, several months before, accidentally burned down her professional football player boyfriend’s Atlanta mansion after setting his sneakers on fire.

West coast entertainment journalist Ronke Reeves was an editorial assistant at Vibe during those formative years, and remembers well Morgan’s contributions. “In that male dominated world, Joan had a bold, prominent voice that broke new ground and inspired a generation of young writers. Even after she left Vibe and went to work at Essence and ultimately finish her book, I still followed her work, because, from a female perspective, there was nobody writing like that.”


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A few months before the house burning in Atlanta, writers from the hip-hop magazines were introduced to a new rap trio calling themselves the Fugees. The music on their debut Blunted on Reality was a fusion of streetwise rap and soul mixed with swaggering dancehall riddims. Assigned by RapPages editor-in-chief Sheena Lester, the first woman editor of a national hip-hop publication, I went to the midtown Manhattan offices of their label Sony Music and was introduced to the group, which consisted of Wyclef Jean, a rapper and multi-instrumentalist, his cousin and group founder Pras Michel, and Lauryn Hill, a singer and rapper who was as beautiful as she was talented.

With the exception of a rapper/singer named Smooth, whose album You’ve Been Played was released the year before, no other artists were displaying those dual talents on disc. Lauryn, then all of 19 years old, was an English major at Columbia University who, the year before, had appeared alongside Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2. It wasn’t uncommon for Hill to be seen doing homework in the conference room between interviews or in the dressing room when the group did shows. Tonya Pendleton, a former editor at the BET-owned YSB magazine, remembers being impressed. “Lauryn was so incredibly talented as an equally dope singer and rapper,” she says. “Although she had an incredible singing voice, Lauryn is, in my view, the greatest female rap artist of our time, if only because she’s a beast lyrically. The only thing making that arguable is that there are less albums to debate with.”

Hailing from Northern New Jersey, the guys lived in the Newark area while Hill came from South Orange. In author Brian Coleman’s essential text Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (2007), Pras explained, “Our strength was in being three individuals who blended together perfectly. Clef brought the musicality, Lauryn brought the soulfulness and I brought the roughness and flash.” From the first time I’d listened to an advance cassette, hearing Hill’s dope lyrics on “Some Seek Stardom,” a track she recorded alone, I remember I could tell there was something special about her. Lauryn was a teenager who could hold her own as a rapper, but she also threw in a little jazzy soul singing to keep us on our toes. In a New York Times piece penned by Amy Linden, Hill described the Fugees’ sound as “a little rice and peas mixed with a little collard greens, a little mango with watermelon.”

While Blunted on Reality had followers, the sales were low and The Fugees were almost dropped from the label because of it. According to Jayson Jackson, a former Sony Music Group product manager who later became Hill’s manager, it would have happened if it wasn’t for him conning the publicity department for a few grand to get Caribbean-American producer Salaam Remi to do a remix of their singles “Nappy Heads” and “Vocabs.” In She Begat This, the producer tells Morgan, “They sent me the Fugees because they were Haitian, and they needed that bridge to get them to the mainstream. They had talent. They just haven’t figured out how to channel it.”

The Fugees’ careers were up in the air for awhile until they were given another chance by Sony that led to their critically acclaimed sophomore album The Score in 1996. “It (Blunted on Reality) wasn’t successful,” Pras told writer Brian Coleman, “but it was part of us feeling our way, figuring ourselves out as artists. It had to be what it was in order for us to evolve into The Score.” With their advance money, the group bought equipment and instruments, and constructed their own studio which they dubbed the Booga Basement. Alongside bassist Jerry “Wonda” Duplessis, another of Clef’s cousins, the Fugees recorded their follow-up in a mere six months.

With Clef and Lauryn also contributing to the production, the trio tightened up their style and raised the bar for themselves and rap records in general. The Score’s first single “Fu-Gee-La” was cool, but it was their second joint, a hip-hop remake of Roberta Flack’s classic “Killing Me Softly” sung by Lauryn, that became an unexpected hit and helped them cross over. The third single “Ready or Not” became known as the first time Hill revealed her love for singer Nina Simone and, by merely mentioning the legend’s name, introduced a generation of rap listeners to the activist blues singer. “As far as I know, no one in hip-hop had ever tossed out a Nina Simone reference before, so that was a big deal,” poet LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs says. “Nina represented so much to Lauryn, but later she seemed to also adapt Simone’s radicalness, rage and unpredictability.”

Years later, in light of the shift that Lauryn’s life took, I’d think back to that afternoon we spent together and Lauryn’s pre-release giddiness. Truthfully, after the release of ‘The Miseducation’ and shame of the lawsuit, her public persona would never be so joyful again.

At the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, when Simone was posthumously inducted, Hill performed “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair,” and “Feeling Good” as part of a tribute to the late artist. In her lifetime, Nina with her smooth dark skin represented blackness, as in Black is beautiful, which was also a message that Lauryn was communicating. Indeed, in She Begat This there is much conversation (with Yaba Blay and Tarana Burke) about Lauryn’s “deep chocolate brown skin” inspiring other dark girls who felt rejected by both hip-hop culture and their own communities.

“Witnessing Lauryn and her dark skin and natural hair shine brightly on magazine covers was affirming for Black girls to see,” says Newark-based arts writer fayemi shakur. “But, there was something deeper underneath her beauty to celebrate. She embodied a unique blend of style, Black cultural and political consciousness, with serious divine feminine energy. Any Black girl beginning to loc their hair back then could smile with pride in the mirror because Lauryn’s beauty reflected our own. It wasn’t always a popular thing to have natural hair.”

By the end of ‘96, The Score had sold six million units and won two Grammys including one (Best R&B Performance) for “Killing Him Softly.” Writer/filmmaker (Fresh Dressed) Sacha Jenkins, who in 1996 wrote a cover story on the group for Vibe, says, “As someone with Haitian blood dancing through his veins, that Fugees record meant a lot. They made Haitians cool — or rather, they helped a broad range of folks to better appreciate our talents, and recognize the uniqueness of our identity… That record also helped to expand what was acceptable in hip hop, as in, you don’t always have to spit the bars that you ripped out of your Rikers Island prison cell. You can sing, play guitar — scat even. Hip-hop had a lot of rules and the Fugees pissed on all of them. Hip-hop finally had a leading lady. Lauryn isn’t Haitian but, on that album, she’s honorary for sure.”

Of course, Hill too was a cultural chameleon, adopting a bit of Haitian music, jazzy vibes, southern soul and Jamaican yardie in her music. In 1996, the new and improved Lauryn was full of confidence and moxy, but, unknown to the general public, she and Wyclef had become lovers although he was already married. Their relationship became quite messy a year later when Lauryn had a baby, her pop-song-celebrated son Zion, with Rohan Marley, himself the son of reggae legend Bob Marley. Wyclef, whose own solo album The Carnival was a critical and sales success , kept telling the press that he would be producing and writing Lauryn’s album. “You would think after co-producing an album that sold millions that I’d be able to produce and write my own project, but it was a battle,” Lauryn told me the day I spent with her in June of 1998, two months before the albums release. And then she laughed.

On that afternoon I had set out to South Orange, New Jersey to interview Hill for a Source magazine cover story. Forty-five minutes away from Manhattan, the Lincoln Town Car pulled in front of the house where Hill was raised. Having moved a few years before to a different dwelling a few miles away, the old home had since been transformed into a recording studio, one of the many where The Miseducation was made. Earlier in the day, I’d met her mom and young son Zion and learned that she was also pregnant with her second child Selah Louise Marley, who would be born in November. Even at her then young age, motherhood was important to Lauryn.

“What bugs me is the fact that men never have to defend having children,” she’d tell me later. “Women are the ones who are asked, ‘How is this going to affect your career?’ If anything, having a growing family will make me even more motivated to create good music. My grandmother had 13 children and 32 grandchildren. Looking at her life has made me realize what a blessing it is to have family around.” Today Lauryn has six children.

We’d hung out together most of the day and I had gone with her into New York to meet with director Joel Schumacher about starring in the film version of Dreamgirls that he was supposed to make. After lunch at the Tribeca Grill, we returned to Jersey so Lauryn could play the complete album for me. An hour later, I made no secret to her that I was blown away, but also surprised by how much soul music, including wondrous collaborations with D’Angelo (“Nothing Even Matters”) and Mary J. Blige (“I Used to Love Him”), was the bedrock of the project. “What does it say about hip-hop when one of the better hip-hop records of the year contains little actual rapping?” Amy Linden wrote in a review.

Of course there were brilliant rap tracks including the opening song “Lost Ones” and the awesome “Doo Wop (That Thing),” whose split screen/time travel video was one of the most innovative of 1998, but the majority of the album had more in common with the then new neo-soul (D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell) than it did with hardrock hip-hop. “When I was six-years-old, I found boxes of old school 45s in the basement,” Lauryn told me, explaining the origins of her soul music love. “The first record I discovered was ‘If I Should Lose You’ by the Dream Ups. Next, I found a bunch of boxes and there were about 500 to 600 records from ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ to Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Super Fly.’ The boxes were overflowing with Motown, Stax, Philadelphia International and a bunch of others. While other kids in the neighborhood were rapping about New Edition, I was trying to school them on Roberta Flack and Marvin Gaye. Those old records had become a significant part of my life.”

In She Begat This writer/filmmaker dream hampton argues that The Miseducation, which she hated, sounded under-produced, but for me the music took me back to coming of age in the days of Soul Train on television, slow grindin’ at basement parties and live bands with real instruments jamming in smoke-filled venues. As Lester Bangs once said of Patti Smith, “her sound is (was) new-old.” Songs like “Ex-Factor” and “When It Hurts So Bad” were reminiscent of Willie Mitchell’s golden touch on Ann Pebble’s tracks, especially “Trouble Heartaches & Sadness,” or channeling Etta James at her most heartbroken. “I feel like the blueprint of this record has been in my head for years,” Hill said. “Although I rarely discussed my ideas with anyone before I started working, it was all in my mind.”

At the time I didn’t know that the label had originally rejected her masterwork, but perhaps I should’ve picked up on that when she said, “When Marvin Gaye created What’s Going On, even Berry Gordy thought he was crazy and trying to ruin his own career. It’s that kind of risk-taking that is sorely missing in music, be it rap or rhythm & blues.” Of course, the label turned out to be wrong; The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sold millions, topped year-end best-of charts and propelled the then 23-year-old to superstar status. No one could’ve predicted that the album would’ve been as successful as it was.

Years later, in light of the shift that Lauryn’s life took, I’d think back to that afternoon we spent together and Lauryn’s pre-release giddiness. Truthfully, after the release of The Miseducation and shame of the lawsuit, her public persona would never be so joyful again.

“That album is a tour de force from a Black woman’s specific view with lyrics that speak to personal heartbreak as well as public, cultural issues,” Tonya Pendleton explains. “Whether she’s wondering why a lover can’t give more or why an artist can’t say more, she’s using her distinct voice and point of view to serve the music. There is so much richness to this album that’s it’s hard to believe it’s as old as it is. It seems as though she presciently covered all of the hot-button issues to come, from fuckbois to cold corporate rap to both the fear and anticipatory joy of becoming a working mother captured so beautifully on ‘Zion.’ It would difficult for me to chose a favorite song, but the opening track ‘Lost Ones’ may be one of the most lyrically potent fuck-you songs ever created.”

Within months of its release, Lauryn had become an even bigger star than she was during the Fugees reign, appearing on numerous magazine covers, including the beautiful Jonty Davis pic that graced the September, 1998 issue of The Source where my interview appeared. “That same year, a few months after The Miseducation came out, I saw her perform at my school at the University of Virginia,” journalist Tomika Anderson remembers. “Afterward, a few of us met her and shook her hand. She was so accessible and classy and beautiful, we were just blown away by her. She was just such a wonderful role model.”

Twenty years later, we’re still talking and writing about The Miseducation, but, as Hill would discover, with great genius often comes great consequences. Her post-millennium breakdown (or crack-up, in the Fitzgeraldian sense of the word) hasn’t always been easy to watch, especially for those who believed that she was a goddess hovering over us mere mortals. “[Hill] became a figurehead and touchstone and it was easy to forget how young she was,” Amy Linden says. “Being the Voice of a Generation has to be difficult, especially when you are dealing with personal drama that her fans and label might not have been privy to.”

Although She Begat This isn’t the music geek examination of that classic album that I was expecting, Joan Morgan succeeds at revealing other layers of our Lauryn love, while also humanizing a woman who many tried to transform into a deity two decades ago. As Roxanne Shante, never one to dish out compliments, said in 2010, “Lauryn Hill is in a category of her own.”

* * *

Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales writes The Blacklist book column for Catapult. He has written for The Paris Review, The Village Voice, Pitchfork, New York magazine and the upcoming Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop edited by Vikki Tobak. A former hip-hop journalist, his articles, essays and reviews have appeared in The Source, RapPages, Vibe, Ego Trip, XXL, Complex and Mass Appeal. In addition, he is the co-author of Bring The Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (1991). Currently he is working on a hip-hop novel.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Shooting For Truth

The phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work sets you free) appears at the entrance to Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps. Automatik, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sven Hoppe / AP. Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Adam Skolnick | Longreads | August 2018 | 9 minutes (2,415 words)

“Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,” said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso. We were on set of Operation Finale, huddled under a tent next to acclaimed Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, and the specific lie up for debate was whether to turn a sunset scene into sunrise. That switch triggered some hand-wringing because moviemaking is an attempt to capture a scramble of moments, and if the look of one is altered, because, say, Oscar Isaac is still being primped in wardrobe as precious light fades from the sky, there are ripple effects, which can torpedo narrative flow and make even a true story feel false.

Whether or not the man Isaac was playing, Peter Malkin, actually landed at Ezeiza International Airport at dawn or dusk when he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1960 to help hunt down fugitive Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann, is beside the point. What matters is that Malkin’s arrival and all the moments thereafter feel real because this is a true story, one with urgent modern relevance. Plus, for Weitz this project is personal.

Chris Weitz, director of Operation Finale (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

If he missed an opportunity to shoot the scene as planned, the production schedule would be shredded, money wasted from an already stretched budget, and that matters because this is not the kind of movie studios like to make anymore. The 48-year-old director credits MGM for investing in an entertaining movie about a serious topic (read: there are no flying robots), but he’d declined to shoot in Budapest, which would have saved cash, preferring the authenticity of Buenos Aires — and now this.

¿Qué estamos esperando?” Aguirresarobe asked nobody in particular. Weitz was wondering the same thing. It was 6:42 p.m. and the sky was darkening, but despite the pressure and his caffeine load, Weitz projected an aura of calm on his bustling bilingual set.


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“Every day you’re making a movie it sort of gravitates toward a clusterfuck,” Weitz reasoned as he rolled up the sleeves of his pin-striped button down. “You just have to surf it.” Scattered all around us were a range of cherry vintage vehicles (a Citroën, two DeSotos, and a few Di Tellas, Argentina’s endemic automotive brand) and more than 50 extras dressed in mid-century period attire. All of it — the dusky light, the location, the costumes, the stakes — produced a magical quality as if we were in the eye of a Fellini or Kurosawa dream sequence.

We’d met up earlier that morning at Weitz’s rented house in Buenos Aires’ hip Palermo district, with its trendy restaurants, corner cafés, and cobbled streets, hopped in his chauffeured Camry, and drove an hour out of town to set, during which time I peppered him with questions about his 20-year career. Weitz has imagined almost every movie genre starting with the iconic coming-of-age sex comedy, American Pie, which he produced and directed with his brother Paul. Their follow-up, About A Boy (they cowrote and codirected), placed them among the best screenwriters of their generation and garnered an Oscar nomination. Since then he’s directed fantasy popcorn (New Moon) and channeled his inner Star Wars geek to cowrite a smash hit franchise spin-off in Rogue One. In between he published three young-adult novels in a post-apocalyptic trilogy, and contemplated ditching Hollywood “to do something a bit more useful,” he said. Makes sense for a man who sits on the board of Homeboy Industries and is a sucker for the radical inclusiveness of Burning Man, where he met his wife, Mercedes Martinez. This was his first turn at the helm of a major studio movie in six years.

As soon as we arrived on the Argentine air force base doubling as Ezeiza, he was whisked away by production designer David Brisbin (Drugstore Cowboy, New Moon) and prop master Ellen Freund (Mad Men) to approve the throwback terminal and control tower. A bit later he was greeted by the base’s real-life commandant, distinguished in his flight suit, who invited him to a pig roast the following evening. His invitation sounded more like an order, but in each instance Weitz was gracious and unflappable, because, when it comes to making movies, he has seen it all.

‘Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,’ said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso.

Weitz was raised around the business. His grandfather Paul Kohner was a prominent agent and producer who married Mexican-born actress Lupita Tovar. Their daughter, Susan, Weitz’s mother, also became an actress, who won two Golden Globes and was nominated for an Oscar for the 1959 film Imitation of Life. The brothers Weitz grew up in New York City, but visited their grandparents in L.A. often. That meant attending sprawling Bel Air dinners with scions of Old Hollywood, John Huston and Ingmar Bergman among them, but the reason MGM’s Jonathan Glickman hired Weitz for Operation Finale was because of his father’s history.

John Weitz was 10 when Adolf Hitler was declared Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Part of a wealthy Jewish family, he was sent from Berlin to St. Paul’s School in London, where he would stay until 1938 when the rest of his family finally fled Nazi Germany. Together they made their way to the United States. Weitz joined the army in 1943, and as a well-educated native German speaker, matriculated into the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor to the CIA. In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. He shared what he witnessed with a few close friends in a series of letters, but he never told his grisly war stories to his sons.

“When I think about it now,” Weitz said of his father, “it’s quite likely that he had some kind of PTSD. He never slept very well. He was tightly wrapped.”

After retiring from a successful career in New York fashion, John Weitz began writing biographies of Nazis, including one of the Minister of Economics under Hitler, Hjalmar Schacht, as if Nazism was a riddle he was still trying to solve. When Chris returned home for the summers while earning his degree at Cambridge, he was dispatched to the main branch of the New York Public Library to help with research. That meant poring over giant leather-bound catalogs in search of obscure German diplomatic histories. He’d frequently return to his father’s study with photocopies of entire books in hand.

In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand.

“He was fascinated with how the upper classes in Germany made accommodations and kind of allowed or justified Nazis to themselves,” Weitz said, “having first mocked everything about it.” Still, his father never showed his scars from Dachau. It wasn’t until 2014, 12 years after his death, that Weitz received a copy of a letter signed by his father, dated May 5, 1945. It details a descent into an unfathomable waking nightmare.

Prisoners are milling around everywhere, the way they looked cannot be described … starved, beaten, scarred … They showed me the horrors… The gas chamber… the label over the door says in bitter irony “Brausebad”… cement walls and floors, little barred windows knee high… and eighteen nozzles in the ceiling… and next door the “control room” … where the SS men used to turn on the hot water then turn off the hot water and turn on the gas… and then the hundred or so… would choke to death, scraping their hands bloody on the cruel cement walls… tens of thousands died here… it can be smelled from hundreds of yards away… the stink of death …

Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann. He planned the logistics first for the mass deportation of Jews, then their herding into urban ghettos across Europe, and finally transporting them like abused livestock by train to concentration camps. Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.

Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann…Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.

Within weeks of reading his father’s letters for the first time, Weitz received the Operation Finale script from Glickman, who calls the movie “a riveting thriller” about Israel’s daring operation to capture Eichmann in 1960. Weitz knew the history. In the chaos that followed allied victory, some of the worst war criminals slipped free, including Eichmann, who escaped from a POW camp before he could be identified. Penniless and on the run, he worked as a lumberjack then a chicken farmer before connecting to an underground railroad for war criminals run by Nazi sympathizers within the Catholic Church. It was a cabal of priests that wrangled him a Red Cross passport — the same document Holocaust survivors depended upon — and, with the help of former SS-affiliated Argentinians, facilitated his escape from Italy to Argentina, where he built a life as Ricardo Klement and eventually sent for his family. It wasn’t until the daughter of a Holocaust survivor started dating his son, who still carried the Eichmann name, that his presence would register on the radar of Israel’s national intelligence agency, Mossad.

The original script, a debut written by 28-year-old Brit Matthew Orton, was terrific, and Weitz guided rewrites that would make it even better. Eichmann could have had an inner Hannibal Lecter quality, but Orton and Weitz resisted this interpretation. “That’s very juicy stuff, but I wanted him to be less of a villain so that he could end up more of a threat,” Weitz said. “Humanize him, and he becomes even worse.” That tracks historically, too. By the time Mossad agents found him, Eichmann was living the ordinary life of a factory foreman on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, hidden in plain sight.

In a fascinating bit of casting, Weitz tapped Sir Ben Kingsley to play Eichmann, which offers the Oscar winner, who brought Itzhak Stern to life in Schindler’s List, a chance to explore the Holocaust from the wrong side of history. Soon after, Oscar Isaac came on board as a Mossad agent who is haunted by his family’s death at the hands of Nazis. One week into shooting, Weitz shared the Dachau letter with his cast.

Originally slated for production in 2016, the schedule shifted to 2017 to accommodate Isaac, and an old story found modern relevance thanks to Brexit, Trump’s election, and a widening acceptance of racist, authoritarian thought. There was Charlottesville, of course, and Trump’s reaction to the tiki torch bearers who managed to be shocking, yet easy to dismiss in their buffoonery, making them even more dangerous. After all, how many steps is it from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Warsaw, Poland, where 60,000 angry people, including thousands of skinheads and Nazis took over the streets last November. And how different is the Trump administration — which championed a horrifying and brutal family separation policy for illegal immigrants that was widely condemned as child abuse (at least 528 children remain separated from their deported parents, and one toddler who was taken into ICE custody on the border has died) — from the coalition government in Austria, which includes leaders of their radical right Freedom Party, or Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary, which has consolidated power by demonizing Muslim immigrants and refugees. Are we just as bad? Are we worse? How much worse might we soon become?

I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents. A similar Nazi resurgence swept Europe, particularly Germany, in 1960, when Israel sent Mossad agents to Buenos Aires to kidnap Eichmann to put him on trial in the promised land. Back then, Germany hadn’t yet tuned their education system toward truth and reconciliation. Cleansed of blood, denial was comforting. The thrill of nationalism, nourishing. If Eichmann was offered a fair trial, the theory went, with the opportunity to defend himself, hard evidence could be displayed, witnesses would testify, and the entire truth about the Holocaust could be laid bare before a worldwide televised audience.

I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents.

“There is a line in the movie when Eichmann says, ‘Your lawyers and your lying press will frame me,’” Weitz said. “That very phrase is propped up in ‘alt-right’ circles today because if you attack the sources of information you attack the notion of truth itself, and if you destroy those sources you have the right to impose your will.”

Weitz has no illusions that his film, which includes a depiction of that trial, will influence policy or stem the tide of nationalism, as if it’s 1960 all over again. His focus has always been to tell an entertaining and suspenseful tale. “What’s cool about this story,” Weitz said, “is the [good guys] don’t have guns. Their job was to get him out alive.”

Of course, first they had to find him, and that meant a sunset — or perhaps sunrise — arrival at an exotic airport for Peter Malkin. Just before 7 p.m., Isaac appeared on set looking every bit the movie star, and the cameras rolled. By 7:10 p.m., after a couple of hiccups there was just enough light for one more take, and Isaac delivered. Though the scene was utilitarian — he’s getting picked up curbside — and is more an orchestration of extras and camera movements, he found the tension in his rival agent in the driver’s seat. “Avi sent you?” Isaac asked, annoyed. The camera held for a long beat, and the entire set exhaled.

“OK, OK, OK,” Weitz said, “We live.”

***

Adam Skolnick is an author and journalist living in Los Angeles.

Operation Finale stars Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, and Mélanie Laurent, and is in theaters on August 29, 2018.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler

Working Through the Apocalypse: An Interview with Ling Ma

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Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2018 | 12 minutes (3,139 words)

The end of the world in Ling Ma’s novel Severance comes not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but a stream of misinformation, social media hysteria, and plenty of willful denial. If this sounds familiar, it’s far from dreary. Ma injects comic levity into a world ravaged by “Shen Fever,” whose victims perform habitual tasks in a mute, somnambulant state until they waste away. Candace Chen, a New York-based, Chinese-American millennial, is immune to the disease, and joins a small group of survivors led by a former I.T. specialist.

Although this post-apocalyptic remnant waves a typical number of red flags — micro-authoritarianism, liberal use of euthanasia — Candace makes do as they scavenge for food and mercy kill the “fevered.” Ma depicts the end times with alternating chapters on Candace’s pre-apocalyptic life: dating in Brooklyn, navigating adulthood, and working at a book production company. She specializes in Bibles and takes occasional business trips to printing facilities in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Ma has fun with the end of the world: Severance reads like The Walking Dead infected with the anarchic spirit of Office Space. Candace’s coworkers sport designer flu masks, idly wonder about the colleague who didn’t return on Monday, and debate whether to take the spot bonus for staying on when everyone else has the good sense to get the hell out of NYC.

Candace doesn’t have good sense. She maintains her routines and eventually moves into her office. She updates a photo blog called NY Ghost with images of the empty city. And we learn Candace is guarding a secret which may imperil her chances with her newfound “friends.” Read more…

Why Do Men Fight?: An Interview with Thomas Page McBee

Corbett Sullivan Wrestling, January 1, 1892 / Associated Press

Cooper Lee Bombardier | Longreads | August 2018 | 15 minutes (4,084 words)

In his new book Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man, journalist and memoirist Thomas Page McBee trains for a charity fight. The book interweaves his immersion in the world of boxing — McBee became the first transgender man to box at Madison Square Garden — with research, interviews and stories that explore how we’ve arrived at a moment of collective reckoning with the toxic masculinity in American culture.

Amateur is an ambitious project, questioning not only what it means to be a man in our current culture, but what it means to be a trans man, interrogating the opportunities and privileges arrived at through a shift in socialization and lived awareness. The change in how others treat him as a man — at times better and worse in equally disturbing measure — as well as reports of masculinity’s demise, like the 2010 Atlantic cover story “The End of Men” which declared America to be in the throes of a “masculinity crisis,” spur McBee to search for a healthier idea of what it means to be a man. Read more…

Giving Up the Ghost

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Emily Urquhart | Longreads | August 2018 | 19 minutes (4,759 words)

 
After he died, I began to see my brother with surprising frequency. These appearances were not ghostlike apparitions, nor were they dreams. Instead, I saw him in the bodies of strangers. He was waiting for the traffic light to turn so he could cross a busy intersection. A man tipped his hat skyward to read a street sign and my brother’s face hovered beneath the brim. He was the token collector at the entrance to the subway, and he was the lone soup-eater in the basement food court of a downtown shopping mall.

I couldn’t anticipate these visitations. They happened at random and unexpectedly. The people I’d imprinted with my brother’s image were only shades of him — dark hair, a downward slope to their shoulders, a bushy mustache, thick-rimmed glasses. This was fitting because, even in life, I didn’t know him well. My brother was 11 years old when I was born, and we had different mothers. As a child he’d visited on weekends with my other brother. We’d overlapped in adulthood only briefly, so my memories of him are from childhood. They are fleeting and jumbled. It was only after my brother died that I discovered his first name had been Joseph. A name chosen by his mother, but secreted away after birth in favor of his middle name. I learned this from my father when I was tasked with writing my brother’s obituary. I remember feeling awed and somewhat ashamed that I could have spent 24 years in my brother’s orbit but not know his given name. This was just one of the ways I didn’t understand who he was. This unknowing compounded the loss, which was tragic and grim, and I think this is why I bumped into him so often after he died. When he was alive, I never ran into my brother in the city where we both lived.

I was young then, my footing in the world unsure and sometimes timid. When my brother died, I was a few weeks into my second year of a graduate program in journalism. I believed I would never return to school and that I would never write again. I felt suspended among wilted funeral flowers and well-intentioned casseroles with a grief that would last indefinitely. But after two weeks I left my parents’ country home and returned to the city, resumed my studies, and re-entered my life. My upstairs neighbor serenaded me when I arrived at my apartment, assuming all the cards and flowers that had collected at my front door were birthday greetings. I thanked him, gathered the well-wishes, and stepped back into my old life, which was physically and structurally the same, but emotionally rearranged.

I don’t remember the first time I saw my brother in a passing stranger, but I do know that it went on for years. I didn’t investigate why these sightings happened, or if they happened to anyone else. It would take another 17 years for me to do this. Approaching middle age and now a mother, I’m a more confident version of my earlier self. I’m a journalist rather than a trainee, and I’m a folklore scholar. I interview people about their supernatural experiences, respecting their beliefs, no matter how far they stray into otherworldly terrain. In this way, I am now uniquely positioned to turn my gaze inward and question myself.
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