Search Results for: Brooklyn

Politics and Prose

Alex Milan Tracy / Sipa via AP Images

Marie Myung-Ok Lee | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,630 words)

 

“Walls are built in the mind.” — Wole Soyinka

“The whole country is outraged and outspoken and you should be too

because if you’re not, then you’re not doing your part.”

— Rachel Coye, “New Year”

As a writer, a books columnist for the literary site The Millions, the co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a literary citizen with prolific and brilliant friends whose readings and performances I could probably ink every night on my calendar, let’s say I go to a lot of book signings. Some have food, some have wine. Some have people who wander in and ask irrelevant questions with disarming earnestness.

At one reading where I acted as interlocutor, the novelist I was interviewing took out a package of Swiss chocolate she’d brought with her from Geneva, and instead of putting it on the plate with the wine, handed it to me with a sly smile. I’ve been to several readings where I have been the sole member of the audience. I was asked to do a reading that would involve live exotic animals as accompaniment. I went to one on the Lower East Side, back when it was truly gritty, where the writer was accompanied — overpowered, really — by a person blowing random high notes on a flute. Each reading offers something different, delightful, educational, new.

But I’ve never been to a reading/book signing that had protesters. Especially not for a book the Cleveland Plain Dealer called a “Beautiful, eloquent, and timely” memoir authored by a young writer with a new MFA, a Fulbright, and a Whiting Award. In the era of Trump, where there is something new to protest every day (women’s rights, the EPA, the NEA, gun control, tax cuts for the rich, healthcare…), what would cause the lovely indie bookstore, Books Are Magic to send out a warning on Facebook before the event?

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Wild At Heart

A Bureau of Land Management park ranger tries to corner a steer that escaped from a cattle trailer outside Yuma, Arizona in 2011. (Craig Fry/The Yuma Daily Sun/AP)

Tove DanovichTopic | May 2017 | 12 minutes (2,954 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

It was breaking news in New York City. News helicopters thrummed overhead, the police were called in for backup, and a crowd of rubberneckers peered through the chain-link fence at the edge of the Prospect Park soccer field. Over 3,400 viewers watched a livestream online as police exited their vehicles and walked onto the grass, nets in hand, hoping to subdue the escapee: a young chocolate-colored steer with oversize tan ears that stuck straight out from its head, like a disguise that didn’t fit right.

The Brahman steer—one of the most common cattle breeds used in meat processing—had been on the lam since the morning, when it likely escaped from one of South Brooklyn’s live slaughter markets. These aren’t the assembly-line slaughterhouses of factory farming, but rather small establishments where customers can walk up to pens of live chickens, goats, rabbits, and other animals, point to the one they want, and have it killed on the premises. Often such live markets serve immigrant communities used to eating their meat when it’s still fresh, or religious communities who want to ensure their meat was prepared kosher or halal. Apparently, the Prospect Park steer didn’t want to linger long at a place like that.

First, the steer took a breakneck tour of Flatbush and South Park Slope. As early as 8:30 a.m., Twitter lit up with people reporting sightings of the steer as it charged down the sidewalk. “I thought there was nothing new to be seen after a lifetime in NYC,” one woman wrote. Eventually, the little steer got itself into the park, and it was there that the news cameras, and the NYPD, caught up with it. The police tried to use the soccer nets to corral the animal, tipping them over and awkwardly maneuvering the enormous nets around the field. But the steer slipped out of their grasp. This went on for hours. Read more…

The Tether Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Sergio De La Pava

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | May 2018 | 18 minutes (4,881 words)

Lost Empress addresses the injustice of mass incarceration, plays with the possibility of parallel universes, and uses arena football as a metaphor for how the revolution is unforeseeable. Welcome to the world — or should I say worlds — of Sergio De La Pava, whose fiction certainly doesn’t lack for a sense of scope.

His debut, A Naked Singularity, followed a young, incredibly successful public defender through a personal and professional collapse, weaving in a heist narrative and moments of absurdist comedy, moving from harrowing scenes of inequality to suspenseful setpieces and back again. Initially self-published before being reissued by the University of Chicago Press (which also released his second novel, Personae), A Naked Singluarity would go on to win the prestigious PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize — an award also won by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Paul Harding’s Tinkers.

In De La Pava’s fiction, grand ideas and societal tragedies coexist with a brisk narrative voice and an irreverent worldview. Lost Empress alternates between two seemingly unconnected stories: Nina Gill, a genius football strategist, suddenly becomes the owner of an indoor football team in Paterson, New Jersey, during an unexpected pause in the NFL season; meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles, imprisoned at Rikers Island, ponders his earlier crimes and romantic connections, and his plans for the future. Within this sprawling narrative, De La Pava tells the secret history of a Salvador Dalí painting, discusses Cambodian politics in the late 20th century, and muses about why the NFL’s labor market is uniquely exploitative of American athletes.

Improbably in our age of hyper-specialization, De La Pava, like the hero of A Naked Singularity, is a public defender in Manhattan, where he handles 70 to 80 cases at a time. He recently wrote an impassioned op-ed calling for reform of New York’s discovery laws. His interests are obviously wide-ranging, and our conversation touched on the cultural history of Paterson, what we hate about rich people, the multiverse, and more.

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Is New York the Most Corrupt State in the Nation?

(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

In the wake of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigning amid allegations of intimate partner violence and abuse of power, Jeet Heer took the Empire State to task in a column for The New Republicarguing that the famously progressive, liberal state is, in reality, a bastion of political corruption.

Heer isn’t entirely wrong, as most New Yorkers who pay attention to state politics know. Schneiderman is far from the first AG to resign in disgrace — remember Eliot Spitzer, a.k.a. Client 9? — and he isn’t even the first state official to be disgraced this year. (That would be Brooklyn Assemblywoman Pamela Harris, indicted on fraud and corruption charges in January — though she waited three months and resigned in April, while Schneiderman stepped down after a mere three hours.)

Sexual harassment and abuse is omnipresent in Albany. Lawmakers’ efforts to address the problem have ranged from well-intentioned to outright absurd. Years ago, I asked Assemblywoman Deborah Glick about it and she said, “There are no longer issues. We’ve changed the rules: The interns are no longer allowed to be at any reception where alcohol is served; they are not allowed to travel with members [of the Legislature].” The change happened because a lawmaker from Buffalo preyed on an intern to whom he gave a ride home, but the legislature made rules circumscribing the behavior of the interns.

A young female staffer of a lawmaker once told me, in an attempt to explain how great her boss was, that he didn’t make her go up to Albany. She didn’t have to worry about being harassed, or worse. This year, the four men who effectively control the state — Governor Andrew Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan, and Sen. Jeff Klein — hammered out a new sexual harassment policy as part of the state budget.

Weeks before they started on this policy, Klein was publicly accused of assaulting a former staffer. Flanagan, who has an appointee on the state’s impotent ethics commission known as JCOPE, made public statements about what a good guy his buddy Klein is, apparently caring not at all at how that would poison any potential investigation. On top of all that, the four men studiously ignored a group of women who had left work in Albany due to harassment and assault and wanted to help shape a policy that might actually be effective — in fact, they even refused to allow their highest-ranking female colleague to join them.

But is New York, as Heer claims, the most corrupt state in the entire nation? It’s a statement, he says, that “has been fact-checked”:

Or at least it was in 2016, when PolitiFact found that the media had ‘chronicled more than 30 corruption cases in the past decade,’ more than any other state. In fact, ‘The data shows New York State has led the nation in public corruption for decades.’

A key factor Heer elides over in this is the involvement of “the media.” Judging how corrupt a state capitol is based on how much corruption is exposed is flawed in a similar way that concluding that rape has become more prevalent when there’s a spike in reported rapes. You’re not considering how much people might be getting away with when there aren’t reports coming out.

This is why having robust local news outlets is so crucial to government reform. Without well-resourced reporters digging around and rooting out wrongdoing, powerful people can get away with anything. And while New York is no exception when it comes to the general gutting of local news enterprises happening today, it does still have a number of strong publications across the state, many of whom have diligent reporters covering our statehouse. It’s worth looking at the state of local news in states that seem relatively uncorrupt.

Heer disagrees. In his piece, he lamented that “the local media is so focused on national events that it ignores what’s happening in the state (especially upstate).” This may be true of outlets based in New York City, but it’s certainly not true of all of the outlets across New York State — especially the ones upstate. It’s true, in my experience, that city-based outlets don’t think city residents are interested in news about Albany. But maybe that’s because the city’s major news sources haven’t done a good enough job getting city residents to understand just how much control Albany has over their lives, or how bad the culture up there is.

National media could also do more to hold state governments accountable. For instance, the notorious Nxivm cult was based in Albany, and several victims of the cult’s predation sought help from state authorities and other state entities, to no avail. Top headlines have focused on arrested actress Allison Mack. No one seems to be digging into why New York, a supposed haven for women’s rights, did nothing to help people who reached out in desperate need.

Heer makes a number of good points backed up by clear data. State politics is still very male-dominated all over the country, and New York is no exception: women comprise a little more than a quarter of our state lawmakers, but more than half the state population. He notes a report by POLITICO New York — an outlet with a significant presence at the state capitol — that found more than 1,000 people filed sexual harassment complaints in state government entities since 2012, and another by the Associated Press showing lawmakers have spent more than $10 million in taxpayer funds over the last nine years to settle 88 cases of sexual harassment, discrimination and related cases in state government, “almost all of which were brought by women reporting groping, come-ons and demeaning treatment.”

His claim that New York is effectively a one-party state is a little murky, considered Cuomo allowed gerrymandering years ago that gave Republicans a lot more power than they previously have, and also enabled a breakaway group of pseudo-Democrats known as the Independent Democratic Conference, who worked with Republicans instead. But he’s correct about the influence of money and the fact that the government has come to function in a way that facilitates corruption. As he wrote, “many key decisions, such as the shape of the state budget, are made in backroom deals between a few power players.” And he’s correct to be frustrated that we don’t seem to have any Bella Abzugs in state government right now — anyone willing to take a stand and force change. It’s worth considering whether the political system we’re operating within has been augmented to make those people unelectable, or unable to get re-elected if they fight with their colleagues who prefer the status quo.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A robust local media is important, but so is a well-informed and activated electorate. In New York, there are local-level committees that represent the Democratic Party and have a surprising amount of power, selecting local judicial candidates and special election nominees.

Cuomo is the de facto head of New York’s Democratic Party, and the people currently in power within these committees are about as reform-minded as he is, which is to say, not really at all, beyond paying lip-service to seduce progressives who might not be paying close enough attention. But that doesn’t have to be the case. In Brooklyn, at least half the available committee positions are left unfilled. A group of young people have been diligently working for years to gain positions within the local committee and try to push for New York’s Democrats to be more ethical, with initiatives like Rep Your Block, encouraging people who want a better system to get involved and work for it. Their progress may be slow, but it’s steady — and the more people get involved, the faster and steadier it will be. We get the government we settle for.

My Puppy, Myself

Photo by Jason Diamond

At Curbed, Jason Diamond reflects on the early, difficult days with Max, the anxious rescue dog he and his wife adopted shortly after they were married. For a while, Max and his alpha attitude toward other dogs caused trouble between his owners and their neighbors in their Brooklyn apartment building. Looking back, Diamond understands where Max’s anxieties came from and realizes how much they were, and are, alike.

Max had a hard life before we adopted him as an adult. It was clear from his constant fear and anxiety that a previous owner had neglected and abused him. At three, he had no commands or socialization. It took months for us to get him to learn “sit,” even with training classes. If I had to guess, he was rarely, if ever, walked with a leash.

And he has no idea how to interact. He cries, whimpers, and sometimes growls, making other dog owners think maybe letting my dog meet theirs isn’t the hottest idea. From Max’s perspective, he must meet every other dog. Every butt not smelled is a missed opportunity. And when I stop to talk with somebody? Max gives me maybe 30 seconds, and then unleashes a series of barks that are the loudest I’ve heard from a smaller dog that isn’t a beagle.

My dog can be terrible, but when you take a dog that somebody else didn’t want into your home, you’re offering your open heart to the baggage that comes with them. And I guess, in a lot of ways, he’s just like me. His enemies are mine. And unfortunately, we’d made more than our fair share in our neighborhood.

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A Remarkable Child

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Daniel Rafinejad | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,503 words)

My friend Sam makes experimental films I do not understand. Sam is an artist; I like Doritos.

Sam is tall, a little cross-eyed. He’s earnest but also contrarian and snobby. He acts like he’s the one person ever to have noticed the moon.

We met as freshmen at Columbia. I was flattered someone so cool would talk to me. Sam clothed and carried himself with a perfect carelessness, while I wore sweater vests and dropped things a lot.

I won Sam over by talking about weasel menstrual fluid.

“I like taxidermied animals, too,” I lied, as we rode the elevator up to the 11th floor of John Jay Hall one autumn afternoon. He was holding a stuffed rodent.

“It’s a weasel?” I mumbled.

“Yes,” he answered. He looked at me blinking, as if peering through a curtain of bangs, though his raven hair was combed and parted to the right of his clear, pale face. “His name is Portnoy.”

“Portnoy means ‘tailor’ in Russian,” I said. He looked down at me with a half-smile and studied my buzzed head. I continued with more confidence: “My great-grandmother, who, I think, was a witch in Iran, said that sleeping on a pillowcase stained with a she-weasel’s menstrual fluid chases away nightmares.”
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O, Small-bany! Part 1: Spring

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,229 words)

They poisoned the water in the lake again. It’s actually more of an enormous pond. They poison it a few times a year. I’m not listening to music, for a change. My battery’s at 10%, anyway, and I want to eavesdrop. Washington Park’s full of people. Just like the Seurat painting, minus the class status and pointillism.

There’s a black man fishing with his tiny son crouching beside him. The man’s biceps are impressively built and inked. The boy says, “Tell me when you see a fish.” There’s a middle-aged white couple with a contented aura, walking a mid-sized grey mutt. There’s a very petite brown woman in tight blue athleisure berating a man who is pushing a baby in a stroller. Not a status stroller. Athleisure woman is on this man about something. He hadn’t been on time to pick her up. He is playing it cool (“Well, I came, didn’t I?”) but she is unrelenting (“Not when you said you would! Not til after you…”) and then they are out of earshot. There’s a young white mother from the nearby cult (I’m sorry: Intentional Community), holding a toddler’s hand. The Intentional Community manufactures the kind of old-fashioned wooden toys for which my bored mom friends and I go wild. They live and work in a huge brick mansion near the park. There’s free literature about their intentionality to be had in a little kiosk at the entrance to their driveway. Books about making peace with death and living in accordance with the laws of nature. When I was a new mother, I used to loiter around that kiosk. Should I join? They wear homemade clothing and raise children communally. I yearn deeply for the latter but I have a quasi-sexual weakness for fashion, and ultimately I’m not much of a joiner. The young mother in her homemade ankle-length skirt and bonnet is talking to a black man on a bench by the boathouse. He rests one arm on yet another stroller (not status), in which sits a toddler with a delightful head of tight, ombre ringlets. The man reaches out his hand to me.

“Hello!” he says, like we know each other; I don’t think we know each other.

“How are you?” he wonders.

I smile, nod: fine, fine, thank you, and you? I do this intuitive sort of bow, and continue on my way. The cult woman slightly glares at me from under her bonnet. Her glare (real? imagined?) trips some anxiety about running into people I’m not fond of, by which I mean people not fond of me. There’s this one woman in particular, your standard bad-vibes-in-small-town situation, and my nervous system goes insane every goddamn time.

***

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. Which can make it hard to take a walk sometimes. Small-bany, some call it. Shmalbany, I prefer. Albanality, a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out. There’s not that fantastically freeing anonymity of your big exciting status places. State capitals are often kind of weird places. It’s a small goddamn town. So much chit-chat always waiting to be had. Just around that bend? Just over this hill? Just past that tree? I arrange my face in a blank mask and bland smile, practicing. I catch myself doing so, catch my thoughts circling this dumb anxiety; shake it off. You are safe, I tell myself. My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you. I used to kind of seek out people with bad energy, try to make them like me, but that only makes them like you less. I learn slowly.

You are safe, I tell myself, and it works. I am safe. Relatively speaking. More often now I seek to avoid or minimize encounters with people who don’t like me, people who bring out the ugly. This is progress, according to the meditation teacher.

Isn’t this the kind of inner drama we all share? Useless, banal. Best kept to oneself, only then how are we to take comfort in the knowledge that we’re all the same!?

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Of Breakdowns and Breakthroughs

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Jenny Aurthur | Longreads | May 2018 | 28 minutes (6,886 words)

 

On the Monday before Thanksgiving in 2004, my father went missing. I was at the Santa Monica apartment I’d been subletting to a friend while working for three months in New York City, getting ready for bed when my phone rang. It was my mother, wondering if I’d spoken to him. I had not seen or heard from my dad since he’d picked me up from the JetBlue terminal at the Long Beach Airport three days earlier. I was 30 and had returned home to L.A. from New York to spend the holiday with my family.

I’d never missed Turkey Day with my folks. Nothing about my childhood had been typical. I was raised by atheist, socialist activists who called me “Jenny Marx,” never just Jenny, after Karl Marx’s wife. They skipped religious holidays, but observed Thanksgiving, well, religiously.

Fort Green, 1974

Thanksgiving had solidified into a legendary event among our friends, and most years we had a full house. It wasn’t unusual for so many people to show up that some had to sit cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the living room wall. The food was so good, and the company even better, that no one minded not having a seat at the table. My father cooked for an army, and there was never a shortage of food. Our parties were lively and conversations were raucous, everyone talking over one another. We were an opinionated bunch. Current events were passionately discussed, and my parents were walking encyclopedias. Topics ranged from global warming to recent movies to the upcoming local and presidential elections. The musical selections were just as diverse as the crowd, from Dixieland jazz to gospel to classical to Dylan.

Everyone got quiet when the food was ready. We passed around two kinds of homemade stuffing — one for vegetarians and one with Italian sausage. Huge bowls of steaming sweet potatoes, buttery green beans, thick slices of light and dark meat my father carved from the 20-pound bird, fresh cranberry sauce with tart orange zest, loaves of freshly baked sourdough bread, green salad, and a ceramic pitcher of hot gravy barely fit on our dining room table.

***

I started having friends come over for the holiday when I was in junior high. My mother, Elinor, and my father, Jonathan, were popular with my classmates and considered the “cool parents.” During the years I was in school and well into my twenties, our house was the place to be. After Thanksgiving dinners with their own families, droves of my old pals showed up to our house. Everyone loved being around my parents. When I was in high school, one of my best friends, Leisa, was having trouble at home, and my mom took her in. Another friend, Ania, also lived with us a couple of years later.

“I wish Elinor and Jonathan were my parents,” my girlfriends would often say.

This year, though, Thanksgiving would be different. I’d been living in New York since the late summer. Preoccupied with my work, I put the holidays on the back burner. My parents and I had decided to keep it mellow for once. Eight years after my younger brother’s suicide, for the first time, it would just be the three of us.

***

Historically the kitchen was my father’s territory, and when I was growing up, my mother, my brother, Charley, and I were careful to stay out of his way. He loved being the king of his castle, but he pretended not to enjoy it. “I’ve been burning my ass over a hot stove for the last three days for you ingrates,” he complained, acting annoyed, wiping sweat from his forehead. He loved this yearly charade, and we went along with it, rolling our eyes and laughing.

The aromas coming from the forbidden room made our mouths water and stomachs growl impatiently. Under the pretense of being helpful, my mom, my brother, and I would wander into the kitchen and lurk over the stove and poke around. We were shooed out immediately. “Everyone out of the kitchen,” my dad said with mock exasperation. The table had been set for hours; that was my job. I pulled out and polished the prized Tiffany family silver that had belonged to my grandparents, for its once-a-year appearance. My mother was responsible for buying lilies and dahlias. She also designed beautiful Japanese-style flower arrangements that she’d made in her ikebana class. Charley was in charge of dusting and vacuuming. We liked a late dinner and by the time we ate at 8:00, we were famished.

“Now can I sit down?” my dad asked, drawing out the “now,” acting like an indentured servant finally getting a break. Collapsing into his chair with a dramatic sigh, he surveyed the bounty of food, enough for Henry VIII’s court. “Well,” he said, “if we don’t have enough we can always order pizza.”
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How To Be a Plain Girl

Pro-Line

 

Lolly Bowean | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,414 words)

 

Prologue

Every black woman has a hair story. This is mine.

Good hair means curls and waves
Bad hair means you look like a slave
— India.Arie, “I Am Not My Hair”

1.

I had never even met John P., but there I was, on a bus in East Knoxville, riding to meet him where he lived in a troubled public housing complex called Lonsdale.

I should have been at school, sitting in homeroom with the rest of the freshmen. But instead, at 13, I had decided to cut class and take a journey across a town I wasn’t even vaguely familiar with, to meet a man I didn’t know.

John P. was my classmate Kayla’s uncle, and in the neighborhood and at our school, he was known to have “gifted hands.”

He didn’t have the proper credentials to work in a professional salon, so instead he would accept women into his ground level apartment. It was there that he would slather their scalps with white creams that smelled like drain cleaner and lye, then cut and curl their hair for about a third of the price at a real beauty parlor.

My family had only been living in this small southern town for a few months, but in that short time I had come to vividly understand that the way I wore my hair was not only “not cool”; for many, it was unacceptable.

And so, even though I wasn’t the rebellious type of teen who would normally skip school, I broke the rules for the very first time so that I could go get my hair done.

Without permission — in fact, in direct defiance of my family’s wishes — I headed to see John P. I was determined to get a Jheri curl — a slimy hairstyle popularized by Michael Jackson and Prince.
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It’s Like This and Like That and Like What?

Death Row / Interscope Records, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,912 words)

 

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

In the entirety of 1990, exactly one hip-hop single made it to the top spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. This was “Ice Ice Baby,” and the LP whence its dope melodies came, To the Extreme, also ruled the Billboard album charts for the final eight weeks of that year — knocking off the previous number one, another rap record, Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em. (It turned out that if U were Vanilla Ice, U could, in fact, touch this.) As the nineties rush-rushed in, aching to break out of the previous decade’s noxious forcefield of Aqua Net, one thing was clear: American Top 40 radio was ready for hip hop — so long as it was squeaky clean, or, failing that, performed by a white guy with the wackest eyebrows in history.

By the end of the decade, the landscape had shifted almost beyond recognition. Synth-pop was the stuff of nostalgia nights; rock was emitting the first gurgle of its death rattle (which sounded like this); and what had heretofore been called “hardcore” hip hop was so ubiquitous in “mainstream” (read: white) culture that its ubiquity became a bit in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space.

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