VQR

How an artist named Lauren Bon is reimagining the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

For capital juries across America, race still plays a role in who gets to serve—and inevitably, who gets sentenced to death.

Roxane Gay published two books this year, and is “having a moment.” But her experience with racial inequality in America has her wondering what success actually means.

<On getting by and getting out of modern-day Cuba:

“I think I know who can find you an apartment,” Lucía said. I was on her couch picking at its fraying white vinyl. My address book lay open on my knees. I’d moved to Cuba with two suitcases, a ten- month student visa, plans to take a weekly class on popular culture, and visions of a terrace, balustrades, maybe an apartment in Vedado, the downtown heart of Havana. But after two weeks, I’d found nowhere to live. A legal resident foreigner could rent only from an authorized case particular or directly from the state— apartments that were usually bugged, priced for businesspeople and reporters on expat packages. I’d met a “real estate agent” with frosted pink lipstick who set foreigners up in long- term casas and took a cut, but she shook her head when I told her I hoped to pay less than $25 a night for a monthly rent. On a full apartment! She didn’t return my calls. Lucía, the most connected twenty- six- year- old I’d ever met in Havana or anywhere else, was my best hope to map out opportunities.

Can lessons from the tech industry help agriculture ensure the continued vitality of our food supply? On open-source seeds and protecting biodiversity:

“It’s this collective sharing of material that improves the whole crop over time,” Myers told me. “If you’re not exchanging germplasm, you’re cutting your own throat.”

If all of this seems like the concern of a specialized few, consider that plant breeders shape nearly every food we eat, whether a tomato from the backyard or the corn in the syrup in a Coke. Because of intellectual-property restrictions, their work increasingly takes place in genetic isolation and is less dynamic as a result. In the short term, that can mean fewer types of tomatoes to plant in the garden, or fewer choices for farmers and, by extension, consumers. In the long term, it could hinder the very resilience of agriculture itself. Having access to a large genetic pool is critical for breeders who are adapting crops to the challenges of climate change. Every time intellectual-property protections fence off more germplasm, that gene pool shrinks.

The writer, on his father’s pain tolerance, which eventually lead to his death:

Growing up, I thought he was unbreakable. My younger brother, Rory, and I wrestled with him on the grape-​juice-​stained shag carpet of the living room. Kick him, punch him, jump on his back, pull his hair (what little he had left)—​we could never hurt him. In the backyard, sawing old railway ties to make raised flowerbeds for Mom, he cut himself with his ripsaw, looked down impassively at his meaty, calloused hand, now torn open and bloody, as if it were a thing unconnected to him. In the kitchen, he picked up hot saucepans by their bare handles. When I tried, my hand shot back. On the coldest Wisconsin winter days, he went out gloveless and hatless, his face and fingers gone angry red in the frigid, prickling wind. Never bothered him. Freeze him, burn him, cut him, kiss him—​he wouldn’t even flinch.

The story of Harry Belafonte:

“Belafonte was first. First black man to win a Tony; one of the first to star in an all-​black Hollywood hit (Carmen Jones, 1954); first to star in a noir (Odds Against Tomorrow, 1959—​’best heist-​gone-​wrong movie ever made,’ says James Ellroy); first to turn down starring roles (To Sir, With Love ; Lilies of the Field ; Porgy and Bess ; Shaft) because, he said, he’d play no part that put a black man on his knees or made of him a cartoon. We’re here in this screening room to watch a forgotten hour of television for which he won the first Emmy awarded to a black man for production, for being in charge.

“When I found the show in the archive, I thought it would be more of what I believed I already knew about Belafonte. The albums I’d bought were labeled ‘easy listening’ or ‘folk,’ as in harmonizing trios who wore matching sweaters. Then I watched. My eyes went wide. I started shaking my head in disbelief. I think I gasped. I was wearing the archive’s cheap headphones, sitting at a monitor in a dark room. Other researchers hunched over screens, all our faces flickering blue. I laughed. I slapped the desk. My eyes watered. Goddamn. I felt like I was watching a different past, one in which the revolution had been televised. Goddamn. As if that was what TV was for. A signal. This, I thought, this.”

What happens to children who enter the U.S. illegally and alone after they’re caught by the Border Patrol:

“If you’re caught, say you’re an adult so they don’t send you back.

“Say you’re a kid so they don’t send you back. If you say you’re a kid, they won’t take you to prison.

“Practice your Mexican accent. They’ll drop you off in Mexico. It’ll be easier to get back in.

“Jordi looked young, but he insisted he was nineteen. As a result, he was transferred to an adult detention facility in Corpus Christi. ‘I couldn’t walk for two months after the accident. I got a cast and a wheelchair for two weeks. I was only in the hospital for like five hours, then I went to the prison.’ At Corpus Christi, he was given an orange uniform and locked in solitary confinement. ‘I really don’t know why,’ Jordi said, laughing. ‘Maybe because I didn’t know anyone—​but I really don’t know.’ After ten days alone, he was moved into a crowded cell, then sent to a nurse to inspect the progress of his leg. She seemed suspicious of his age, studied his face. He insisted he was nineteen. But with each visit, she asked him again, until finally, after about three weeks, Jordi confessed he was actually fifteen.”

What we can learn about the future of books from its past:

“Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not quite a proxy for the ‘business of literature.’ Current accounts of publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the presumption is that if we lose publishing, we lose good books. Yet what we have right now is a system that produces great literature in spite of itself. We have come to believe that the taste-making, genius-discerning editorial activity attached to the selection, packaging, printing, and distribution of books to retailers is central to the value of literature. We believe it protects us from the shameful indulgence of too many books by insisting on a rigorous, abstemious diet. Critiques of publishing often focus on its corporate or capitalist nature, arguing that the profit motive retards decisions that would otherwise be based on pure literary merit. But capitalism per se and the market forces that both animate and pre-suppose it aren’t the problem. They are, in fact, what brought literature and the author into being.”

Inside the life of Somali refugees in Nairobi, Kenya:

“The heartland of that exodus is the vast refugee camp complex centered around Dadaab town in Kenya’s North Eastern Province—at 450,000 people and growing at the rate of over 1,000 people a day, the camp is Kenya’s third largest city, and the biggest refugee camp in the world. But many thousands of Somalis choose not to go to the camp and head straight to Nairobi to the neighborhood of Eastleigh, which Kenyans have nicknamed ‘Little Mogadishu.’ That’s where I was headed as I walked to the corner to catch a matatu, a dirt cheap minivan so crowded I had to hang out the doors. Eastleigh, Dadaab—over the past two years, they’ve been cardinal points on the compass of what K’naan, a Somali rapper, calls ‘a violent prone, poor people zone.’

“But that’s only one part of the story: as Andy Needham, a deeply informed, canny, and humane Irish Aid press officer working with the UN, put it: ‘Journalists come to the camps because the story’s right in front of them. It makes for good photographs like, you can take one look and see the problems for yourself. But refugees in the city—and let’s be clear here, there are thousands of them, most of them undocumented, hard to trace, hard to reach out to—that’s a story that goes almost untold.’ And I could see what Andy meant: in Nairobi, there were no camps, no food distribution centers, and so the refugees disappeared into the city—for if you went to Nairobi rather than Dadaab, you had to make it on your own. There wasn’t a lot of obvious drama that would appeal to Western media, no ‘suffering chic’ to spice up your story.”