Search Results for: death penalty

With a Rent-Stabilized Lease, Finding the Line Between Luck and a Life Sentence

East 13th Street in New York (AP Photo/Ed Bailey)

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (3,988 words)

 

The whole reason I had the rent-stabilized apartment on East 13th Street was because my aunt lived in it before me. Leslie first rented the place in 1981, when she was 23, for $345 a month. In the early ’90s she left and moved to Seattle, but kept the lease in her name. When I was looking for a place to land after college, she was quick to kick out a random subletter and turn the place over to me. The subletter, a tiny Japanese woman who was running an illicit hair salon out of the kitchen, had staple-gunned bed sheets up throughout the place as makeshift room dividers. The effect, when I first came to check out the place and negotiate her exit, was a kind of diaphanous claustrophobia.

The apartment was a dingy, naturally repellent kind of place that set me on edge even as it sucked me in. But it didn’t even occur to me not to seize on it: Here was a place in New York that could be mine, alone. All of a sudden I was one of those lucky people who inherit something that’s otherwise impossible to get, and have an easier life because of it. (That last part, though, didn’t strike me at the time.) I was 22 when I lugged my boxes in on a stormy-sticky July day in 2004. The rent by then was $775.

It was a railroad apartment, somewhere around 300 square feet — a long, awkward space, cave-like and crooked, in a deep funk of cracking and peeling and generally breaking down. Horizontal surfaces sloped dramatically; all the furniture on the west wall had to be propped on blocks to keep it from toppling over. The light fixture in the tiny, sink-less bathroom was half-detached from the ceiling in a way that might have seemed dangerous if I thought about it seriously. Early on I chipped some paint off the bathroom door, exposing cross-sections of something like a dozen layers of paint beneath the most recent coat: turquoises and taupes alternating with the layers of white that signaled periodic fresh starts.

The kitchen floor — cloudy, black, sticky linoleum tiles Leslie told me she had laid over plywood some 20 years ago — was coming up in patches, ragged chunks of it breaking off and clinging to my bare feet. The only sink was in the kitchen, and so it was the site not only of always overdue dishwashing but also of twice daily toothbrushing. I paced as I brushed, returning to the wobbly sink cabinet to spit mouthfuls of spent paste without regard for any plates and utensils blocking the way of the drain. A heel-sized hole formed in a spot right in front of the sink, exposing an archaeology of the floor: layers of wood and particle board and laminate laid down and covered over and then covered over again.

The whole building was like that, a place of pilings on, of covering up, of semi-smoothing over, of barely acceptable surfaces coming undone. Five stories that were safe in the ways that mattered, and sketchy enough to confer some cred. Along the narrow stairways the walls were covered with proof of comings and goings, arced scuffs and deep abrasions from thousands of oversized objects being dragged up and down, in and out.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Anti-death penalty activists march with a sign to free Jeff Wood
Family and friends of Jeff Wood and anti-death penalty activists march to deliver a petition with over 10,000 signatures asking the governor and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute Wood's sentence. (Tamir Kalifa / AFP / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sabine Heinlein, Leslie Jamison, Ijeoma Oluo, Eric Newcomer with Brad Stone, and Jill Lepore.

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Uncovering Hidden History on the Road to Clanton

Photo by Lance Warren. In Brighton, Alabama, a rare marker — installed by the Equal Justice Initiative — notes a lynching that took place in 1908. Of the more than 4,000 lynchings on record, only about a dozen have been memorialized with public markers.

Lance Warren | Longreads | October 2017 | 10 minutes (2,650 words)

 

We turned left at Maplesville and headed for Clanton, drawn by word of a Confederate flag and rumor of a lynching. Ida B. Wells wrote about the killing 125 years earlier. Now, we’d read in the paper, stars and bars flew nearby, well in view of drivers on Interstate 65 near the geographic center of Alabama. The flag adorns the Confederate Memorial Park and Museum in nearby Marbury. The lynching is all but forgotten.

One month earlier, the park grounds had seen cannon fire. Re-enactors presented a “skirmish” displaying military maneuvers that never took place in Marbury, the site of no battles. The park’s director, a man named Rambo, explained that the event offered the public an opportunity to see how Confederate forces engaged the enemy. “All of the people are trained living historians,” he beamed, reflecting on the re-enactors, “and they love to spread the knowledge. Unfortunately, a lot of people learn of history through Hollywood.”

We were there to make a film — An Outrage — a documentary about the history of lynching in the American South, and the legacy of this orphaned past. Good people in Clanton, Marbury, and beyond hadn’t learned about history that wasn’t taught. Others had succeeded in muffling open secrets that had fallen out of fashion. My wife, Hannah Ayers, and I had driven 723 miles from our home in Richmond, Virginia, to find killing fields across the region. We wanted to see how these places looked today. We wanted to explore memory, interrogate history, and ask what happens when the two do not agree.

Hard rain darkened the sky. It squeezed the spindly Route 22 to Clanton. The trees were tall, lining the way on both sides. They formed a silent swaying wall. We knew they held secrets, secrets herded into shadows, secrets long hushed.

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Reflections of an Accidental Florist

Althea FannCrazyhorse | August 2017 | 19 minutes (5,375 words)

But something always went out from me when I dug loose those carpets
Of green, or plunged my elbows into the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes

─Theodore Roethke, “Moss-Gathering”

The memory of one of my favorite floral arrangements still comes to me sometimes, when afternoon sunlight starts to take on that funny gold color signaling the end of summer. I made it in a romantic, September-y mood the week after I met the man I would later marry. Black-eyed Susans spilled from a crackled glass vase, their papery yellow petals arrayed from darkest brown centers (the name being a bit of a misnomer). I didn’t notice the ants crawling over each yellow plane until it was too late. The flowers had already settled, each into its own place. I still think of those stolen blooms as one of the few real arrangements in my floral portfolio.

My first flower shop job was supposed to be what my dad would call a “Joe job,” one last stint that required a name tag before I finished my art degree and became a legitimate painter, whatever that might have meant. I didn’t plan on a floral career, or even consciously care much about flowers at first. I was hired by chance. On a whim I took a class in flower arranging with my mom at Trident Tech, our local community college, and the teacher stopped me a few weeks in to ask if I wanted to work at her shop. Arranging flowers seemed way better than my previous position, assembling sundaes at a kosher ice cream parlor, so I started right away. I intended to quit as soon as my art career took off somehow. This felt less naïve than it probably was at the time. Being an artist ran in my family, and I felt it had always been assumed I would wind up in the arts. My mom is a writer, specializing in lyric essays recently, and my grandmother is a watercolorist at whatever the semi-pro level would be called for watercolorists. The flower stuff would just be a stop along the way for me, until I found my own artistic path.

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Who I Became at the Running of the Bulls

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Ella Alexander | Longreads | July 2017 | 16 minutes (3,919 words)

 

I wanted danger. My identity as a liberated woman, or at least an adventurous girl, was inextricably linked to placing myself in the way of unnecessary bodily harm and, though I’d never have admitted to it, my blue U.S. passport seemed like a strong enough shield to stop anything truly bad from happening. So, although I was a demographic outlier — a 19-year-old American girl travelling alone —
my presence in Pamplona made sense, at least in my mind. The running of the bulls presented itself to me as the ideal prepackaged brush with death, with the bonus of a possible existential realization. Knowledge of life and death, the value of every breath, etcetera.

Pamplona was just one in a series of strange places I’d found myself after neglecting to map out my trip any more definitively than a plane ticket from Jerusalem, where I had family, to Rome and another one home from Berlin two months later. I had been making strategically bad decisions all summer, using money my grandfather set aside for education to bankroll a solo-backpacking trip through Europe. Before I left, all my friends were gearing up for art gallery internships or ice cream shop jobs, and a flutter of joy ran through me every time somebody heard my summer plans and asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?” or, “Haven’t you seen Taken?”

I’d reply, “I can’t spend my life worrying about things like that,” or sometimes, “If I die then you’ll have a great story for parties. You can say, ‘I knew this girl who got murdered in Europe.’”

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The Shaming of the Cherry Sisters

The Cherry Sisters
The Cherry Sisters. All photos courtesy the Cedar Rapids Gazette archives.

Jack El-Hai | Longreads | October 2016 | 15 minutes (3,795 words)

 

In her late middle age, Effie Cherry felt troubled as she thought back on her life in the theater with her sisters. From the 1890s into the 1930s, the Cherry Sisters had sung, danced, acted, and recited from the stages of countless vaudeville houses. Of this experience Effie churned up mainly bitter memories. “All of the wicked, false and malicious articles written in the newspapers throughout the country concerning the Cherry Sisters,” she set down in an unpublished memoir, “were written by unscrupulous editors and reporters devoid of all honor, morals or even respectability…. After twenty-five or thirty years of persecution and slander by the press, one would think there would be an end, but the serpent’s tongue is always ready to strike in the dark, and still the slimy, venomous reptile is creeping on.” Read more…

On the Right to Die: John Hofsess’ Secret Assisted Suicide Service

Photo by Alexander Boden -- CCBY 2.0 SA

At Toronto Life, John Hofsess posthumously reveals the secret assisted suicide service he offered to eight Canadians — among them the poet Al Purdy — on the day of his own assisted death.

The maximum penalty for assisted suicide was 14 years in prison. I was raising the stakes: by giving Al a pre-death sedative, my actions could be construed not as assisted suicide but as premeditated, first-degree murder, with a mandatory life sentence. Looking into his eyes, respecting his intellect, hearing his wishes repeated over time, knowing him to be an independent person and thinker, I needed no further assurance that he, in a rational state, had authorized me to be his agent and partner in ending his life. All he would have to do was sip his wine and say farewell to the love of his life, while his favourite music played quietly in the background. I felt honoured that he delegated the technical details to me.

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The Rise of Joan of Arc: How a Visionary Peasant Girl Defied a Dress Code and Challenged the Patriarchy

Albert Lynch, "Jeanne d'Arc"

Kathryn Harrison | Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured | Doubleday | October 2014 | 29 minutes (7,119 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, by Kathryn Harrison, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

The Unlikely Roots of Solitary Confinement

In a perverse tribute to human endeavor, solitary confinement began as a reform. Thinkers in Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries imagined that it might be possible to induce criminals to change from within, especially if they could be kept isolated from one another and from the corruptions of the outside world. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s famous design for a Panopticon—a circular prison with a central “inspection house” that allowed authorities to look into any cell at any time—was predicated on the idea that the prisoner under constant surveillance would internalize authority’s gaze, and cease misbehaving.

The Panopticon itself was never built, but Bentham’s ideas of solitary confinement and penitent reflection appealed to Pennsylvania Quakers, who incorporated them into an idea for a new kind of prison that was built. Philadelphia’s huge Eastern State Penitentiary, completed in 1829 and still standing, deviated from the Panopticon by making no cell visible to any other; rather, cells were located in corridors that radiated like spokes on a wheel from a central hall. Each cell had a Bible, and each prisoner was given piecework jobs. Cultivators of silence, the Quakers believed that isolation would help criminals mend their ways. The Pennsylvania system was copied all over the world, and the word “penitentiary” became universal.

One reason for the rapid spread is that the new penitentiaries appeared to be an advance over capital and corporal punishment, which had been the main penalties up to that time. As Michel Foucault observed, the locus of punishment shifted from a criminal’s body to a criminal’s mind. Reformers in England believed they had found in solitary confinement the “most terrible penalty” short of death that a society could inflict—and yet, in their view, the penalty was also “the most humane.” It turned out that the therapeutic value of isolation was negligible; in fact, solitary confinement made prisoners worse, to the point of driving many of them mad. The penitentiaries were successful, however, in inflicting punishment and keeping prisoners away from society—which, people felt, was on the whole a bargain.

Ted Conover, writing in Vanity Fair about the psychological horrors of solitary confinement.

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Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats

Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words)

 

1st

Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training.

Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the coming season. Each year it is another variation on the same theme: “This is Our Year” or “Is This Our Year?” or “Can the Royals Win it All?” or “Our Time” or “How Good are these Royals?” or “How Good are these Royals” or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No. Read more…