Vicissitudes, CA
[Fiction] A story about an unemployed ethnomusicologist, gray whales, and Miranda July:
“‘Garfield was my favorite president,’ said Brandon.
“‘James A. Garfield?’ said Kara. ‘President from March to July of 1881?’
“‘From Ohio?’ she said.
“‘That’s the one,’ said Brandon.
“He said: ‘I think he would have proven to be an effective leader if he’d been given the chance.’
“Charles put his hand on Kara’s knee.
“‘That’s funny,’ said Charles. ‘Garfield’s killer, Charles Guiteau, is my favorite presidential assassin, and it’s not just because we share a name.'”
Where Is Cuba Going?
A writer takes a trip to visit his wife’s family. What has changed in the country over the years, and what hasn’t:
“For obvious reasons, the actual Cuban peso is worth much less than the other, dollar-equivalent Cuban peso, something on the order of 25 to 1. But the driver said simply, ‘No, they are equal.’
“‘Really?’ my wife said. ‘No . . . that can’t be.’
“He insisted that there was no difference between the relative values of the currencies. They were the same.
“He knew that this was wrong. He probably could have told you the exchange rates from that morning. But he also knew that it had a rightness in it. For official accounting purposes, the two currencies are considered equivalent. Their respective values might fluctuate on a given day, of course, but it couldn’t be said that the CUP was worth less than the CUC That’s partly what he meant. He also meant that if you’re going to fly to Cuba from Miami and rub it in my face that our money is worth one twenty-fifth of yours, I’m gonna feed you some hilarious communist math and see how you like it. Cubans call it la doble moral. Meaning, different situations call forth different ethical codes. He wasn’t being deceptive. He was saying what my wife forced him to say.”
Going Gently Into That Good Night
What end-of-life options do the terminally ill have? Should they be offered “aid in dying?”
“When a patient in the Northeast contacts Compassion & Choices, he is referred to Schwarz, whose first order of business is to find out who the patient is and what his current medical situation entails. Then, Schwarz attempts to get a sense of what the patient is looking for. She tries to provide information to all callers, but to qualify for help, patients should be able to make their own decisions and be suffering, whether in a terminal stage of illness or not.
“‘There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what we do,’ Schwarz said. ‘What we do is provide information about end-of-life choices to help patients make informed decisions that reflect their values and wishes. We don’t provide the means. We don’t administer. We don’t encourage or coerce. We have no agenda other than to provide complete and accurate information about end-of-life options.’
“And in doing this, Schwarz’s role is to help a patient navigate the end of his life so he can maintain some control over it, instead of leaving it to doctors who are trained not only to lessen suffering but also to keep him alive and death at bay.”
Neil Young Comes Clean
Inside the secluded life of the legendary musician—still stubborn, still writing songs and now the author of a new memoir:
“We would spend a few hours creeping along — he drove slowly but joyfully, as if the automobile were a recent invention — on our way there or on our way from there, the ranch where Young lives with his wife, Pegi, and their son, Ben. His longtime producer and friend, David Briggs, who died in 1995, hated making records here, deriding the hermetic refuge as a ‘velvet cage.’
“In addition to the studio, where more than 20 records have been made, there is an entire building given over to model trains, another where vintage cars are stored and another piled with his master recordings. Llamas and cows roam under cartoonishly large trees. It seems like a made-up place, an open-air fortress of eccentricity meant to protect the artist who lives there. But what it has most of all is not a lot of people.
“‘I like people, I just don’t have to see them all the time,’ he said, laughing. David Crosby, his bandmate in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, used to describe the complicated route into his ranch as ‘my filtering system,’ Young said.
Indentured Servitude, Money Laundering, and Piles of Money: The Crazy Secrets of Internet Cam Girls (NSFW)
A look at the women who work as “Internet cam girls,” and the criminal activity that may be occurring behind some of the cam networks:
“‘Cam sites are ideal for laundering. The studios are being used to have girls online accepting a financed hand that uses ‘dirty’ money to buy the private time. The studio gets paid for the private session, the girl gets her (very small) part and so the money comes back clean,’ Mila says. As a result, ‘most Russian and Romanian studios are Mafia owned,’ a claim she extends to the wider developing world. The picture becomes clearer when you remember how scattered and obfuscated these networks’ financial structures are—it’d be easier to confusingly launder money through a company that’s somehow simultaneously based in both Hungary and Portugal.
“The Eastern Bloc countries that so many cam girls call home are repeatedly mentioned in sex trafficking reports as both sources and conduits of illicit sex work—MyFreeCams has gone as far as banning all models from the Philippines, where conditions are said to be the most brutal.
“The reasoning isn’t mentioned, but is easy to surmise. Moving the exploitation online, where girls are under ‘contract’ to stay in a room for half a day at a time with dubious legal recourse, makes criminal sense.”
Member Exclusive: When Your Therapist Drives You Crazy
Our latest exclusive comes from Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone. “When Your Therapist Drives You Crazy,” first published in 2002 for Philadelphia magazine, is about a woman who enters marriage counseling—but ends up consumed by something much bigger.
“The vibe at Genesis was equally informal and New Agey, from the burbling waterfall machine to the framed inspirational poems, including one that read ‘Feel…Feel…Feel….’ Even the practice’s logo was touchy-feely: two overlapping hearts with a butterfly perched on top. Still, Mansmann didn’t seem flaky, and Carol noted with relief that the therapist and John quickly developed a good rapport. Mansmann explained that Genesis Associates—consisting of herself and another therapist, Pat Neuhausel—was a cutting-edge practice with a uniquely holistic outlook. (Both Mansmann and Neuhausel declined to be interviewed.) Its program was so effective, Mansmann added, that clients tended to show rapid improvements.
“‘How long do you think it would take us?’ Carol inquired.
“‘About thirteen months,’ Mansmann answered immediately, according to Carol.
“She was surprised at the precision of the reply. ‘Thirteen months?’
“‘That’s how long our program is,’ she says Mansmann affirmed. ‘Unless you were to come up with something else. Like, maybe, incest.'”
The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus
Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife'”:
“What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother.
“The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, ‘Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?’
“How this small fragment figures into longstanding Christian debates about marriage and sexuality is likely to be a subject of intense debate. Because chemical tests of its ink have not yet been run, the papyrus is also apt to be challenged on the basis of authenticity; King herself emphasizes that her theories about the text’s significance are based on the assumption that the fragment is genuine, a question that has by no means been definitively settled. That her article’s publication will be seen at least in part as a provocation is clear from the title King has given the text: ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.'”
Al Sharpton’s Got a Brand New Bag
The reverend has a new primetime show, but remains a polarizing figure:
“Sharpton has a long record of involvement in civil rights cases, but there are still those who want to remember him as the guy who defended Tawana Brawley, the teenage girl who claimed to be gang raped by a group of white men before a grand jury dismissed her claims as bogus and Sharpton was successfully sued for defamation. They want to remember him as the guy who said inflammatory things—the man who railed against ‘diamond merchants’ and an ‘apartheid ambulance’—during the Crown Heights riots. Last year, he penned an apology in The New York Daily News for his language during the riots, and for failing to pay more tribute to Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian graduate student who was killed in what some Jews remember as the worst episode of anti-Semitic violence in American history. ‘I said things growing up. I used to use the ‘N’ word. I used to talk street language about a lot of things that you just can’t do,’ he says. ‘And they’ll bring it back to haunt you.’
“‘The other thing I’ve learned, when I’ve had to deal with things I’ve said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the first thing you should say is, ‘I shouldn’t have said it,” he says. ‘You don’t justify something. If you said something that’s wrong or that was stated wrongly, say that. The public can accept a mistake. What they can’t accept is you digging in and it’s an obvious mistake.'”
The Honor System
[Not single-page] The magician Teller (of Penn & Teller) discovers a copycat has taken a trick that he’s been performing since 1975:
“When Teller filed his lawsuit, it made news: ROGUE MAGICIAN IS EXPOSING OUR SECRETS!!! read the TMZ headline. Teller did not like the coverage. The publicity might have sold more tickets to the show, but it misunderstood his purpose. Most of the stories suggested that he was suing Bakardy to protect the secret of his trick, the method. ‘The method doesn’t matter,’ Teller says. He has performed Shadows over the years with three different methods, seeking perfection. The first involved a web of fishing line that took a painfully long time to set up; the second version required rigid, uncomfortable choreography; the third, today’s version, he has never revealed. Bakardy, who said that he had seen Penn & Teller’s show, almost certainly didn’t use Teller’s present method. He knew only the idea and the effect it had on the audience. He felt the crackle that runs through the otherwise silent theater when Teller wields his knife; he saw that some people start to cry, little soft sobs in the dark; he heard that some people make strange noises and other people try to make noises and fail. What Bakardy stole from Teller wasn’t a secret. Bakardy stole something that everybody who has ever seen Shadows already knows.”
The Lie Factory
The early days of the political consulting business—starting with Upton Sinclair’s failed run for California governor in the 1930s and the opposition work of Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter:
“Whitaker and Baxter weren’t just inventing new techniques; they were writing a rule book. Never lobby; woo voters instead. ‘Our conception of practical politics is that if you have a sound enough case to convince the folks back home, you don’t have to buttonhole the Senator,’ Baxter explained. Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one. Once, when fighting an attempt to recall the mayor of San Francisco, Whitaker and Baxter waged a campaign against the Faceless Man—the idea was Baxter’s—who might end up replacing him. Baxter drew a picture, on a tablecloth, of a fat man with a cigar poking out from beneath a face hidden by a hat, and then had him plastered on billboards all over the city, with the question ‘Who’s Behind the Recall?’ Pretend that you are the Voice of the People. Whitaker and Baxter bought radio ads, sponsored by ‘the Citizens Committee Against the Recall,’ in which an ominous voice said, ‘The real issue is whether the City Hall is to be turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to an unholy alliance fronting for a faceless man.’ (The recall was defeated.) Attack, attack, attack. Whitaker said, ‘You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win!'”
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