Longreads Member Exclusive: Yellow, by Antonia Crane
This week’s Member Pick comes from Antonia Crane, the Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Rumpus has been featured on Longreads in the past. We’re excited to feature “Yellow,” a story about her relationship with her mother, about stripping, and about loss. The piece will be published in Black Clock #17, due out this summer, and it’s adapted from her forthcoming book Spent. Thanks to Antonia and Black Clock for letting us share this story with our members.
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Lives of the Moral Saints
Why do some people react so negatively to the idea of “extreme morality”? An interview with The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar, whose latest book project examines the selfless acts of others:
“If the suspicion is hypocrisy, I think we underestimate the sort of people I’m writing about—it’s entirely possible to live an extremely ethical life without being hypocritical. But besides that, I think people overvalue certain kinds of sins. For instance, many people have said to me, when they hear who I’m writing about, ‘Well, don’t they just act morally to make themselves feel better? Don’t they get all self-righteous and overly proud of themselves?’ I think that pride and self-righteousness are far less important than most people seem to think they are. I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself—that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!”
This Is What Humane Slaughter Looks Like. Is It Good Enough?
A visit to the Prather Ranch Meat Company in California, which prides itself on high standards for handling cattle. But what does that even mean?
“The phone in Prather’s modest beige office rings a lot. But when people call these days, it’s most often not to ask what the cows are fed, or if they’re on antibiotics or hormones, or how lushly and freely they range.
“It’s to confirm how peacefully they died.”
Apex Predator
The writer joins a group of scientists on a shark tagging expedition in the Bahamas:
“Hammerschlag, 34, spends nearly every weekend out on the water in South Florida, armed with hooks, lines, and tags. As a result, he is intimately acquainted with the limits of current technology; most tags, he says, are too expensive and don’t last long enough. Two years ago, he partnered with Marco Flagg, an engineer, to develop a new device. The production version of the HammerTag, he says, will last years and maybe even decades attached to a shark; it will be hundreds of dollars cheaper; and it will provide a thousand times the data.
“Data, Hammerschlag says, will lead scientists to identify nurseries and hunting grounds for the first time. It will reveal life cycles to determine when the animals are most vulnerable. And with enough of it, conservationists could influence legislators. Without effective legislation, Hammerschlag says, shark populations will surely continue to decline—and the ocean with them.”
Bloodchild
[Fiction] An unlikely symbiosis between an alien race and humans as viewed through a single multispecies family:
“T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve – why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me,’Take care of her.’And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.”
Longreads Guest Pick: Christian Lorentzen on ‘The Last White Election?’
Today’s guest pick comes from Christian Lorentzen, editor for the London Review of Books.
Afterlife
On identity, self-mythology, and Biggie Smalls:
“Hip-hop has always been a sort of test kitchen for the art of self-mythology. Maybe because execs force artists into adapting personas that play to some tired trope that consumers recognize, but there is nary a given name or suburban softy in the bunch. Every practitioner has invented an outsized, super-gritty, superhero pseudonym for themselves. And, like Australian aborigines who, during dream time, sing the world into being, rappers spend the bulk of their bars bragging about the exploits of these avatars.”
Upstairs
[Fiction] A man reaches out to the woman who lives above him:
“Peter was an agoraphobic. He couldn’t tell you what that was a year ago, but he could describe to you now what it feels like to stand by the front door and feel the heat radiate off of the knob, so sure it could burn you if you touch it. He never would have guessed when he rented this one-bedroom basement apartment that it could become his waking coffin, that he would let her death bury him alive. It was the first place he found on Craigslist, the woman who owned the house was the first landlord to return his call, and he took it without inspecting the toilet or looking closer at the cracks in the ceiling.”
Breaking the Silence
Zimbabwean activists are fighting against the violence and oppression their country has felt under president Robert Mugabe, who was named Foreign Policy’s “second worst dictator in the world,” after North Korea’s late leader Kim Jong Il:
“Mazvarira was abducted in 2000 from her home in Chivhu, a small town south of Harare, and raped by two ZANU-PF CIO officers after her 17-year-old daughter, an MDC organizer, was killed by a petrol bomb. Mazvarira contracted HIV from the assault. ‘They told me, ‘You and your daughter are Tsvangirai’s bitches.’’ When Mazvarira went to the police station to report the attack, the officer in charge refused to hear her case. ‘The police are only ZANU-PF,’ she said.
“The two women are not placid about what happened to them, but what converted them from victims into activists is that they were never able to hold their attackers to account. ‘The government won’t help us. No one can help us. It is up to us, ourselves, now. That is where we are.’ In 2009 Munengami launched Doors of Hope, a nonprofit organization that supports and speaks for victims of politically motivated rape. Doors of Hope now has 375 members from all over the country. ‘We are standing for women,’ Munengami said. ‘Those so-called war vets raped so many women during the liberation struggle, but they don’t want to talk about it. So we are going to talk about it. Whether it’s 1975, or now, we don’t want this to continue. We have had enough. We are sick and tired of being quiet. Where has silence got us?'”
Pulitzer Prize Winners, 2013
Longreads presents: A collection of stories awarded the Pulitzer, including The New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and more.
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