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Lean On

Getty / Bloomsbury Publishing

Briallen Hopper | excerpted from Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions | February 2019 | 25 minutes (6,215 words)

I like to lean. Too much of the time I have to hold myself up, so if an opportunity to swoon presents itself, I take it. When I’m getting a haircut and the lady asks me to lean back into the basin for a shampoo, I let myself melt. My muscles go slack, my eyes fall shut, and there is nothing holding me except gravity and the chair and the water and her hands on my head. I feel my tears of bliss slide into the suds.

In photos I am often leaning. When I’m not resting my head on someone’s shoulder, I am hugging a column in a haunted castle in Great Barrington or bracing myself against a big block of basalt on a pedestal in a Barcelona park. At home alone, I improvise with bookshelves and doorjambs, but sometimes I need to lean on something alive. Seeking support on a stormy night, I run out into the rain and lean against the dogwood tree in front of my house until the wet bark soaks through my coat. The world is my trellis.

Ten years ago, I bought a Gordon Parks print of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward leaning against each other by lamplight on a big brass bed. They are sitting side by side, eyes closed, serene. He is leaning more heavily, his body slanted into hers, his head on her shoulder. She is resting more gently, her cheek against the top of his head. Her face is half-illuminated, half-eclipsed. They seem solemn and private and young. He is quiet in her shadow.

I hung the photograph over my bed. Next to it I tacked another 1950s Paul and Joanne picture I tore out of a book. They are leaning on a bed again, and he is still slumped against her shoulder, but this time the lean seems more in league with an audience. They are both meeting the photographer’s gaze and smiling small smiles. Her eyebrows are slightly raised; she might be sly or smug. She is holding a cup of tea in one hand, and his head, proprietarily, with the other. He is supine and sated and holding a glass of wine.

Paul and Joanne liked to lean for the camera. For their 1968 LIFE cover promoting Rachel, Rachel (she starred, he directed), they are layered on wall-to-wall carpet; she is reclining in the foreground, and he is her blue-eyed backrest. In yet another famous photo from an earlier era (Joanne is still in gingham, not yet in Pucci), they are leaning back to back with their shoulders against each other, their mutual pressure holding each other up, with an isosceles triangle of space between them, and a sturdy baseline of brick patio beneath them.

I like to fall asleep under images of leaning every night and wake up beneath them every day.

I like to believe that leaning is love.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Bryan Singer. (Photo by J. Vespa/WireImage)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alex French and Maximillian Potter, Wesley Morris, Ruxandra Guidi, Robert Caro, and Mark Abley.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

The Weather and the Wall

iStock / Getty Images Plus, Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Meyer | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,073 words)

“At the museum steps
Didn’t we establish
That all this blood is not a dream
This is progress
And we are not that high
We could almost be redeemed”

 — unreleased song by The Lentils

*

For years, changes in butterfly populations and migrations have been considered an “early warning indicator” of global warming. In 2006, a British butterfly specialist told The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert that of 10 species living in Southern England at the time, “Every single one has moved northward since 1982.”

Now, several years and many missed early warning indicators later, the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has received a letter from Customs and Border Protection announcing the government’s intent to build a border wall through critical habitat for 240 species of butterflies and 300 types of birds. The letter explains that the wall will be 36-feet tall and 20-feet wide, and that an additional 150 feet south of the border will be cleared of all vegetation to create an “enforcement zone.” Comparing the wall’s construction with a calamitous weather event, the National American Butterfly Association president told the San-Antonio Express News that: “For us to financially survive and weather this storm, we’re trying to create a fund that will be kind of like an endowment.” As of this writing, a GoFundMe created to protect the Center has raised just over $24,000.

Meanwhile, given that Mexico hasn’t “paid for it” and won’t, a GoFundMe to finance the wall’s construction raised $20.5 million dollars before GoFundMe decided to offer refunds. That’s nowhere near enough money to actually build the thing, but enough to make you pretty sure the butterflies don’t stand a chance. Indeed, the president and the Republican-controlled Senate have shut down large swaths of the government for over a month, demanding that the Democrats in the House vote to pay for the wall before the government can be reopened. Still, it’s hard to believe the wall is really going up.
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Sam Lipsyte on ‘Mental Archery,’ the Quest for Certainty, and Where All the Money Went

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina, 1930. (George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images)

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,079 words)

There’s an old Calvin & Hobbes comic strip where Calvin says, “Remember when ‘access’ was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed… Verbing weirds language.” With Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s sixth book and first novel in nine years, he has once again weirded language into an inimitable comic brio, capturing the roiling mess of late-capitalist/early-apocalypse America, and making us laugh while he pulls it off.

Here’s Lipsyte on Dieter Delgado, a titan of industry with a deep misreading of Naomi Klein: “Dieter hails from the throw-it-all-at-the-wall school. One war, one earthquake, one tsunami, one pandemic, one dating app and, assuming you are well positioned, you can cover your losses and get mega-rich all over again, ad mega-infinitum. Deets read a book about this that inspired him to seek out more catastrophe. The next hemoclysm may make him the world’s first trillionaire.” Read more…

Of Blackness and ‘Beauty’

Young Woman with Peonies by Frédéric Bazille, 1870 / The New Press

Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | January 2019 | 12 minutes (2,731 words)

Back in 2013, Miley Cyrus was in the hip-hop phase of her career, during which she consorted with rappers and attempted to twerk for more notoriety. The hit pieces calling out her cultural appropriation were ubiquitous. Everyone had an opinion on her new gimmick, including sociologist Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, who wrote an essay for Slate on the dangers of Miley’s now infamous MTV performance and inserted herself into the narrative by calling herself unattractive. The comments, some of which she included in her collection Thick: And Other Essays were “brutal.” White women were upset with her for believing that she was unattractive when in their eyes, she was the opposite, and black women were upset with her for what they assumed was self-hatred on display. Both groups, as far as McMillan Cottom was concerned, were wrong. Both were aghast that she would call the devil by its name in broad daylight. What she explains in one of the most compelling sections of Thick is that beauty is about capital and power. Predominant standards of beauty center the white female body, and as a dark-skinned black woman, she exists outside that kind of beauty. That’s not to say that she did not find herself beautiful by black standards, in the circles in which she travels — at the historically black institution of which she is an alumna, or Rudean’s, a legendary joint for black North Carolinians. However, beauty as we know it in Western civilization is exclusionary. It is not meant for everyone.

As a culture we have a tremendously difficult time with black women who are overwhelmingly honest about what the world has done to them. One of the first examples McMillan Cottom refers to is the SNL Weekend Update bit where Leslie Jones speaks of her desirability on a plantation vis-à-vis in the modern age:

“The way we view black beauty has changed,” Jones said. “See, I’m single right now, but back in the slave days, I would have never been single. I’m six feet tall and I’m strong, Colin. Strong! I mean, look at me, I’m a mandingo … I’m just saying that back in the slave days, my love life would have been way better. Massah would have hooked me up with the best brotha on the plantation. … I would be the No. 1 slave draft pick. Now, I can’t even get a brotha to take me out for a cheap dinner. I mean, damn. Can a b—– get a beef bowl?”

As McMillan Cottom points out, “It is full of personal pain that results from a structural reality that a woman like Jones — almost six feet tall, dark-complexioned, short-haired, black American — embodies.” Like McMillan Cottom, Jones was vilified by the public. People missed the point entirely. No one in white American culture enjoys it when a black woman lays bare her injuries. This entire section of the book gave me new language for a terrible, old feeling. While I am not dark-skinned, I have felt the pressure, like many other black girls and women, to adhere to a white female standard of beauty. Sure, I can look at my mother’s brown skin, or watch the black film canon for solace, but white female beauty is all-encompassing and terroristic. No one can walk can peruse the magazine aisle at a grocery store or flip through the options on a TV subscription service without being reminded that white women are at the center. Macmillan Cottom writes, “Beauty has an aesthetic, but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by powerful interests, and when it can be commodified.” What better way to set the standard than through visual art?
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The Thrill (and the Heavy Emotional Burden) of Blazing a Trail for Black Women Journalists

Dorothy Butler Gilliam at her desk in the fall of 1961 or early in 1962, soon after she arrived at The Washington Post. (©1962, Harry Naltchayan, Washington Post)

Dorothy Butler Gilliam | an excerpt from Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America | Center Street | January 2019 | 17 minutes (4,927 words)

When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, the city, the entire country, and the African continent were all on the threshold of change. The dashing, young John F. Kennedy had just begun his presidency promising “a new frontier.” The Civil Rights Movement was kicking into high gear with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now urging young people like me to pursue professions we’d been excluded from and to excel. It was thrilling to be in the nation’s capital to begin my career as a daily newspaper journalist in the white press.

I brought a pretty placid nature to that career. When I later looked back, I surprised myself. I was so conservative politically! For example, only six years earlier, when I wrote about school integration in the student newspaper while attending Lincoln University from 1955 to 1957 (the Negro college in Missouri that provided higher education for colored students, allowing the state to keep all its other colleges and universities white), I indicated reasons we should go slowly with integration. But reporting for The Tri-State Defender in Memphis as the Civil Rights Movement dawned had begun to change me. The bus boycott victories had begun to liberate my thinking. And added confidence came from my faith, strengthened my spirit, and pushed me to do things that other people in my family didn’t do. Read more…

Where Have All the Music Magazines Gone?

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Aaron Gilbreath| Longreads | December 2018 | 25 minutes (6,357 words)

When other writers and I get together, we sometimes mourn the state of music writing. Not its quality — the music section of any good indie bookstore offers proof of its vigor — but what seems like the reduced number of publications running longer music stories. Read more…

Take Script, Add Snow

Still from Christmas in Evergreen. Front Street Pictures / The Hallmark Channel / Getty Images / Composite by Katie Kosma

Jane Borden | Longreads | December 2018 | 12 minutes (3,211 words)

In a big city, a woman lives a fast-paced life until something forces her to visit a small town, just before Christmas. Shortly after arriving, she connects with a charming small-town man. Commence ice-skating, hot chocolate, a tree lot, tree decorating, caroling, gift giving, charity work, big family meals, snow, snowmen, snowballs, snowball fights, red scarves, cookie decorating, a grand old house or country inn, sleigh bells, giddy children, and the soft plucking of stringed instruments whenever a character delivers a joke.

Every made-for-TV Christmas movie tracks the above plot. And yet, the uniformity does not prevent proliferation: This year alone, Hallmark made 38 holiday films across its two channels. Lifetime made 14. “The word is insatiable,” says Meghan Hooper, senior vice president at Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network. “We don’t seem to be able to do enough to make the audience happy.”

“Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure,“ says writer-director Ron Oliver, who has made 13 Christmas movies for TV since 2004, mostly for Hallmark, which has become synonymous with heartfelt, holiday romantic comedies (it’s the Xerox of them, or, if you will, the Kleenex). “I have not seen this happen until this year. Everybody jumped on board.“

In 2017, 83 million people watched at least one Hallmark Christmas movie during their Countdown to Christmas and Miracle of Christmas events. The Hallmark Channel was last year’s number one cable network among women 25 to 54 in quarter four, and is shaping up to remain in that spot for 2018. Both Hallmark and Lifetime boast double-digit ratings increases during December. And the field is getting crowded: UPtv produced seven original holiday movies this year, Netflix made four, and Freeform made three.

How did America become obsessed with sappy, predictable, low-budget Christmas movies? Before we delve into history and psychology, let’s finish the plot:

Our protagonist falls in love, of course. She also rights an ethical wrong, always something from the past awaiting resolution and absolution. “It all goes back to Dickens,” Oliver says, referencing Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol. Like Scrooge, our modern-day heroine receives help, her three ghosts being her new love interest, the small-town community, and a stranger who slightly resembles Santa (what Hooper calls “a Santa-like”). At the film’s end, she and the love interest kiss, usually for the first time (these are family films), and she either moves to the small town or is forever changed by it. No one asks why the moms and aunts look only 10 years older than the protagonist. Roll credits, start the next one, begin to confuse which characters are in what.

It’s easy to assume that viewers enjoy these movies in spite of the repetitive plotlines, as if the networks greedily scam us. But Hallmark and Lifetime both do extensive focus grouping and ratings analysis. They know what works — we watch these movies because the plots are the same. In fact, Oliver calls the plots peripheral: “The real elements of these movies that make people love them is this sense of returning to your own past, your own childhood and sense of innocence from that era.” The slightly varying setups and environs must be similar to deliver us. These films are not art or even entertainment — they serve a function. They are ritual, a ritual as pagan as Christmas’s origins. And their key piece of iconography is the kind of American small town that’s quickly disappearing.

***

IMAGINARY AMERICA

“Small towns have always been the iconic image for human relationships,” says Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, whose work specializes in nostalgia. “The older woman lives here and the nice young family lives here. When you present the imagery of the small town, it’s portraying how we can get along in peaceful ways and help one another.”

Oliver grew up in one of these towns. He recalls, “It was this absolute Norman Rockwell Christmas town.” However, he adds, “I went back, maybe 20 years ago, and it is now strip malls. There is nothing to hold onto from there, so you hold the memories and recreate them in stories.”

He uses his hometown as a template when designing scenes and sets, but admits a challenge: “A few places exist, but they are getting harder and harder to find. We have to make them. We use every trick in the book.” Christmas Everlasting, one of this year’s Hallmark films, is partially shot in Covington, Georgia, because Oliver was drawn to its charming town square. “But when you go two blocks from there, it’s Walmart and CVS,” he says. Ultimately, the setting of the film is an amalgamation of three different small towns, plus a healthy dose of CGI.

Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure.

So these movies deliver a fantasy of a memory — except, for most of us, it’s a false memory we internalized through Norman Rockwell art, and Rockwell was also delivering the fantasy of a memory. You can trace the line of American Christmas imagery all the way to Queen Victoria: In 1848, The Illustrated London News published an etching of Victoria and Prince Albert standing around a Christmas tree with their family. It was published two years later in the States, and had a lasting impact of popularizing the tradition. “Christmas was not always a family-centered celebration,” explains Bruce Forbes, professor emeritus of Religious Studies at Morningside College, and author of Christmas: A Candid History. It became a family holiday in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the wild popularity of Queen Victoria, and to Charles Dickens, who published A Christmas Carol in 1843. “Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet,” says Forbes. “When we talk about the ‘spirit of Christmas’ now, we talk about generosity. That’s a Dickens creation.“

What did exist prior? In England, not much. As a result of the lasting effects of the Puritan revolution in the 1600s, the English hardly celebrated Christmas at all. The Puritans’ beef was twofold: Christmas was not celebrated by early Christians (the holiday didn’t appear until the 300s) and those who did celebrate Christmas, Forbes says, “went to midnight mass and then to the tavern and got drunk.” So Puritans wiped it from the English consciousness.

The Illustrated London News (1848)

Taking the baton from the Victorian image was Currier and Ives. The phenomenal success of this New York City lithography firm in the mid- and late-19th century put affordable prints of snowy landscapes into the hands of a nation. Then in the 20th century, Norman Rockwell paired nostalgia for 19th-century Christmas with images of our mid-century obsessions: the nuclear family and suburban life. It was a powder keg. Today, pulp-like TV Christmas movies recreate these images again — in their own way as prolifically as Currier and Ives — but this time they’re more reflective of our modern world. Additions include both the mundane (texting) and the imperative (finally, after years of criticism, we see characters of color). Nostalgia is meta by nature.

***

ART IMITATES ART

A few years ago, Hallmark Cards, Inc., the parent company of the two Hallmark networks (aka Crown Media), tapped one of its senior illustrators, Geoff Greenleaf, to create a series of images about a fictional town called Evergreen. The series of snowy scenes in a small town, featuring quaint shops and an iconic vintage red truck, became a bestseller. In response, Crown Media turned the cards into a 2017 film titled Christmas in Evergreen. The movie, and its 2018 sequel, Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa, were shot at Burnaby Village Museum in British Columbia, itself a fictional setting designed to preserve and romanticize small towns of yore.

Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet.

Oliver believes the mid-century American imagery that these films capitalize on is so effective because it speaks to a time “when America was truly powerful and firing with all six cylinders: making great cars and great music, going to the moon, for crying out loud.” But, of course, Rockwell and his ilk rarely painted the whole picture. “It’s sanitized,” says Forbes. “It ignores all kinds of things: race, teenage pregnancy, poverty. But it was the image that white Americans had of themselves.”

TV Christmas movies have certainly perpetuated this brand of whitewashed nostalgia. As the films’ popularity rose, networks received ample criticism. Still, just five of Hallmark’s 38 holiday films this year feature leads of color. This includes Christmas Everlasting, starring Tatyana Ali, who also stars in this year’s Jingle Belle on Lifetime. “It speaks to a shift in our culture, that suddenly there is a move afoot to have more and more of our real world look like our television world,” says Oliver. Still missing in the genre are LGBTQ love stories; no lead to date has been gay. 

As American as a proclivity towards heteronormative whitewashing, so too is the tendency towards consumerism — some of the imagery within the films is for sale. Christmas in Evergreen has an adjacent product line: a keepsake ornament of the red truck, a magic snow globe, a mystery key, Santa’s mailbox. “We worked in partnership to look at a couple of the products they had that we could weave into the overall storyline,” says Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and network publicity for Crown Media Family Networks, which owns the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. And of course they did: Hallmark was a retailer long before it got into content creation. “Not all brands evoke emotional connections,” Vicary says, “but that is at the top of what this brand promises and it has been since the beginning.”

***

CAPTIVE ON THE CAROUSEL OF TIME

These films are not merely delivering the past; the stories achieve a delicate balance between familiarity and novelty. In them, we see a “constant struggle between wanting to hold onto certain things from the past but wanting a new beginning,” says Batcho. That new beginning is provided primarily by the love interest — TV Christmas movies are never not romantic comedies. Hooper says her team at Lifetime learned the importance of adding a romance element, after trying other versions of holiday films without it.

This makes sense to Batcho. “Like nostalgia, romantic stories focus on relationships and the sense of the ideal,” she says, adding that early brain imaging studies suggest that romance and nostalgia produce similar hormonal releases in the brain, “the loving, feel-good, pro-social feelings.” Plus, of course, as important as it is for us to protect the village, we need new relationships to strengthen the gene pool. But Batcho also says novelty is intrinsically linked to nostalgia. She likens cyclical markings of time, such as holiday celebrations, to a carousel: Each time it goes around, the horses look the same, but different people may be sitting in different places. “By being different and new, [novelty] allows you to escape so you’re not trapped in the past,” Batcho says. “Nostalgic people tend to be more optimistic, forward-looking people.”


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Although nostalgia was originally defined as homesickness and categorized as a disease, scientists now understand its healthy and profound psychological function. Studies suggest that exercising nostalgia enhances mood, reduces stress, and increases both social connectedness and self-regard. “Nostalgia helps us rediscover aspects of our authentic self, by going into our past,” says Batcho. Studies even suggest it helps us ascertain a meaning or purpose to our lives. Batcho also describes nostalgia as a social experience, since we identify ourselves in terms of relationships. “Nostalgia actually helps diminish loneliness by reminding people that, even if you are not physically with those who have loved you, you were once loved,” she says. Further, the process isn’t random. We specifically seek past memories that will help our current state.

“Every time you turn the television on,” Oliver says, “you’re seeing news about another betrayal of an ideal that America held close for a long time. I think the country is trying to find its moral center again. There’s a consistency to these stories that people hold onto like a life raft in the middle of a cultural storm.” Perhaps, as viewers, we also try to right a wrong.

The makers of TV Christmas movies wisely trigger nostalgia in several ways. “We certainly have gone after a certain type of talent, in terms of recognizable faces we grew up with from ’80s and ’90s shows,” says Lifetime exec Hooper. Nostalgia serves us. A 2018 survey by Cigna reports that most adults are lonely — as in, the average score, on a scale from one to lonely, was at least lonely. Other studies have shown loneliness to be a major predictor of poor physical health, leading some researchers to declare loneliness both a health crisis and an epidemic.

Further, cohorts aged 18 to 22 and 23 to 37 reported more loneliness than older generations. “That’s new,“ Batcho says. A press representative for Hallmark identifies the network’s demographic as women 25 to 54, but says that during the fourth quarter – our holiday season – “our women and adults 18 to 34 are through the roof,” suggesting a potential link between loneliness and viewership. 

***

WE ARE ALL JUST PAGANS BY A FIRE

Nostalgia TV has been booming for a few years now, and the seemingly endless reboots and remakes premiere all year long. So why this huge surge in viewers around Christmas? Even otherwise prestige-TV-obsessed viewers, who turn up their noses at predictable schmaltz, now indulge in made-for-TV Christmas movies. “I don’t know if the season causes it as much as the season gives you permission,” opines Oliver. “From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.”

“It’s something about the holidays that is just built in: indulgence. Drink the hot chocolate, eat the food, lay on the couch, enjoy your family,” says Hooper.

And when Batcho is asked why people insatiably consume this kind of content during the holidays, she says, “Winter represents nature dying and taking a pause. It makes you feel very sad and hoping to look forward to a rebirth in the spring, which tells us that it is very fundamental and natural for people to like cycles. Bears hibernate. Even human beings need to take a pause.”

In one way or another, they are all saying the same thing, which is that we watch Hallmark around Christmas for the same reason Christmas happens at Christmas: the solstice. In the 300s, when the church designated the holiday, it likely chose December 25th for a litany of savvy reasons: some political and some for convenience, some building off already established pagan rituals. “You could guess them even if you didn’t study the cultures,“ says Forbes. “If it’s a midwinter festival, it would be a festival of lights to push back the darkness. It would feature evergreens because they look alive when everything else has died. To get past the isolation of winter, you would have feasts. And you would have dancing, singing, and drinking.“

From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.

Part of why we’ve celebrated midwinter festivals since before recorded time is because, as Batcho said, we like cycles. They help us predict regular change: It’s cold and dark now, but abundant spring will come again, and we know it. They also help us deal with the constancy of change, with whatever on the carousel is new. “We can’t stop change. What do we do instead? Build cycles,” Batcho says. These cycles come in the form of temporal landmarks, which trigger nostalgia: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays … holiday movies. “We anchor ourselves. It is important for psychological well-being to have a sense that we are not out of control.”

The consistency of plot and its predictable ending therefore serve an important purpose: we need the films to be predictable because they are another icon of the midwinter festival. We see one and our brains not only know what to expect, but also what to do. If we seek this iconography now more than ever, then we must feel especially out of control.

***

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

It would be easy to attribute the popularity of these films to a kind of escapism resulting from the current division in our country, from the fear and hatred that many feel on both sides. But the rise of both Lifetime and Hallmark TV holiday movies started ramping up around 2012 (see graph). Perhaps the division in our country and the popularity of holiday films (and nostalgia programming in general) are effects of the same cause: an almost unfathomable acceleration of rates of cultural change.

In the 1980s, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller (he of Dymaxion House and Geodesic Dome fame) posited a theory known as the knowledge-doubling curve. This sort of stuff isn’t 100 percent measurable, but the basic idea is: The amount of information we know, as a species, doubled about every 1500 years back when we were cavemen, and every 100 years in the modern era, up until World War I, at which point, it started doubling at an ever increasing rate. In the ‘90s, Artificial Intelligence researchers estimated the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months. Today, varying estimates suggest that the amount of information in the world doubles every 10 to 13 months, and that, in our lifetimes, it could begin to double every 11 hours.

Change is coming at a furiously accelerating rate, providing us with greater and greater dominion. However, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, evolution did not equip us to handle this kind of rapidly increasing power. For millions of years, Genus Homo was positioned in the middle of the food chain. Only in the past 100,000 years did we jump to the top. “Humankind ascended … so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence.” Our genus, by contrast, stumbles along with far less than a majestic prowess: “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this overhasty jump.”

We need help adapting to cataclysmic change. Nostalgia provides aid, and so does story. Researchers discovered that character-driven narratives cause the brain to release oxytocin, which can enhance empathy, thereby motivating cooperation and leading us to trust strangers. The study, led by Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate University, also found that we continue to mimic the actions and feelings of characters after the story ends. If a protagonist accepts shifts in her life and finds optimism for the future, then so may we.

We know that loneliness is on the rise. We know that both nostalgia and story help us create and sustain relationships. And we know that more than 83 million of us are turning to nostalgic stories during the annual month when humans anchor themselves against change, all during a time in history when the pace of change threatens to destroy us. Maybe we’re obsessed with schmaltzy TV Christmas movies because humans understand, deep down, that the real savior, this season and every season, is each other. Come on, you knew this article would have a Hallmark ending.

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Jane Borden is a freelance culture writer based in Los Angeles.

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Editor: Katie Kosma

Fact checker: Sam Schulyer

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Longreads Best of 2018: Business Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business writing.

Max Abelson
A reporter on Wall Street for Bloomberg News, where his work often goes in Businessweek. His stories were included in Columbia University Press’ Best Business Writing anthologies in 2015 and 2013.

Sign Here to Lose Everything (Zeke Faux and Zach Mider, Bloomberg News and Businessweek)

Good investigative journalism can leave you with that curdled taste of outrage in your mouth, but only great journalism can introduce the world to a whole new kind of loan sharking. And it takes something really splendid to jump from a millionaire city marshal to a gangster named Jimmy Dimps, a Maltese Shih Tzu named Coco, a town called Canandaigua, a drug smuggler named Braun, actual piles of cash, bloody vomit, and 30,000 court cases. Faux and Mider’s work is the best I’ve ever read on predatory lending.

A Business With No End (Jenny Odell, The New York Times)

My favorite story on commerce of the year has more in common with the dreaminess of the nuclear sequences from Twin Peaks: The Return than the everyday stock charts on CNBC. In one sense it’s a story about absolutely nothing, if you consider that the news peg is basically some packages that started arriving at someone’s house one day. But it’s also a story about everything — Christianity, con artists, bookstores, the Internet, real estate, obsession, startups, copyrights, maps, and moisturizer. I was very sorry when it was over.

Read more…

Earth to Congress

Getty

Livia Gershon | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,149 words)

In recent weeks, protesters have swept across France, burning cars, evading tear gas-wielding riot police, and spraying graffiti across the Arc de Triomphe. Called the “yellow vest” protesters for the safety gear that French law requires drivers to carry, they have drawn much of their support from the countryside. They first mobilized in mid-November, in response to a gas tax hike equivalent to 25-cents-per gallon, which was scheduled to go into effect in January to combat climate change. After not very long, they succeeded in cancelling the tax increase. Since that victory, they have continued to stage rallies, taking on President Emmanuel Macron’s overall economic program, which includes shrinking social programs and rolling back labor protections.

In the United States, conservatives were quick to describe the protests as a repudiation of any and all efforts to address climate change. “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris,” President Trump tweeted on December 8. “Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting ‘We Want Trump!’ Love France.”

There is, in reality, no reason to believe that anyone in France has chanted Trump’s name as part of the yellow vest movement. And protesters have not expressed opposition to the Paris Agreement as a whole—their official demands include adopting substantive ecological policy rather than “a few piecemeal fiscal measures,” as they wrote in a November 23 communiqué. Still, the protests point to a real danger for the most common approaches to environmental policy, which tend to involve tweaking private economic activity through taxes or regulations. Carbon taxes can be devastating to working-class people, especially outside big cities, if there’s no affordable alternative to gas-fueled cars. Rules limiting coal mining and oil drilling can wreak havoc on communities built on those industries if there are no other local sources of good jobs.

In the U.S., however, there is a chance to drastically cut carbon emissions and help the world transition to an ecologically stable path that accounts for labor interests: the Green New Deal, championed by incoming Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement. The official proposal—really a plan to make a plan, by creating a select committee—won the support of 40 House members. Democratic leadership has watered down the committee’s mandate and rules, but high-profile support from senators like Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders suggest that the Green New Deal is likely to remain politically relevant in 2019 and beyond. The idea represents a rare bid to take on climate change with urgency and determination, reminiscent of the U.S. mobilization for World War II. Already, it has taken comprehensive climate policy—one that factors in working class people—out of the realm of fantasy (or street protest) and into the halls of Congress.

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The Green New Deal is, at this theoretical stage, full of promises: to completely replace power production with renewable energy; to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation; and to retrofit every residential and industrial building in the country for energy efficiency—all within ten years. Ocasio-Cortez’s outline proposed the virtual elimination of poverty by creating good jobs for all Americans, with a particular focus on workers left behind in the shift away from fossil fuels and people who have been harmed by racial, regional, and gender-based inequality. For good measure, it suggested that the committee might “include additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others.”

That’s an awful lot. The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas, many of them far less radical than Ocasio-Cortez’s. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, first popularized the phrase “Green New Deal” in 2007. He used it to describe a package of research, loan guarantees, carbon taxes, incentives, and regulations that he hoped would spur environmentally friendly entrepreneurship. President Obama adopted the idea as part of his electoral platform and the 2009 stimulus package, which expanded environmentally friendly infrastructure and entrepreneurship. Ultimately, though, the policy fell far short of putting the country on the road to zero emissions.

Since then, conversations about fighting global warming have typically focused on market-driven solutions, including incentives, subsidies, and, most common of all, some kind of carbon tax. The Democratic Party officially supported such a tax in its 2016 platform, and so do the minority of Republicans who are willing to acknowledge climate change as a threat. Some fossil fuel companies, like ExxonMobil, now say that they support one, too. “To me it’s a kind of smoke screen,” Matt Huber, a geography scholar at Syracuse University who has written about the potential for a Green New Deal, said. “It sort of suggests that this problem can be solved through market pricing, and I’m just not convinced that that’s the case.”

Ocasio-Cortez took up the cause as part of her primary campaign to defeat Joe Crowley, a moderate, from the left. The ambition of her Green New Deal proposal came in line with a report on global warming released in October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations. The report states that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade—the level necessary to reduce the risk of droughts, floods, and other disasters that would affect hundreds of millions of people—“would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

To reach that goal through a carbon tax, the IPCC suggests, the tax would need to be between $135 and $5,500 per ton by 2035. By comparison, the proposed hike that triggered the yellow vest protests would have brought the total carbon tax, at maximum, to the equivalent of about $100 per ton. It’s hard to imagine a tax even at the low end of the IPCC’s range proving politically palatable in most countries.

The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas.

Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped craft the green energy investment portion of Obama’s stimulus plan and has created green jobs plans for a number of states and countries, told me that a Green New Deal for the U.S. that aims to reduce the country’s emissions 50 percent by 2035 would probably cost 1.5 to two percent of GDP per year (though delaying investment could increase that cost). His approach would create 4.2 million jobs, he said, doing everything from building solar and wind installations to retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. It would also shrink the fossil fuel industry with a carbon tax and regulation, but workers in those fields would be able to find new, well-paid positions that are carbon neutral. “We need to incorporate the transition side, and it has to be serious,” he said. “We have to take care of the people who are going to be harmed.”

The Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal proposal promised to go further, including a job guarantee that would pay workers a living wage. It also made an overture to “deeply involve” labor unions in training and deploying workers. When Data for Progress, a left-wing think tank, modeled a plan with a similar scope, it projected the creation of ten million jobs over ten years.

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Given the scale of a progressive vision for a Green New Deal, it’s worth looking at one of the most ambitious U.S. government projects ever: the mobilization for World War II. Federal spending jumped from under ten percent of GDP in 1939 to more than 40 percent in 1944. That’s a much bigger shift than any Green New Deal would bring, but active U.S. involvement in the war lasted only four years. Imagine the 2020s and 2030s as a less intense, more protracted battle against an existential climate threat.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that the U.S. would take up arms against the Nazis. But in 1939, that wasn’t at all clear. After Germany invaded Poland that year, prompting Great Britain and France to declare war, nearly half of Americans said the U.S. shouldn’t get involved, even if the Allied Powers were losing. Even after France fell, 79 percent wanted to stay out of the war.

Like climate change deniers today, many opponents of World War II doubted the scope of the problem. Charles Lindbergh, celebrity pilot and spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee, argued that a German victory was inevitable and that the Nazis really weren’t so bad anyway. (A 1938 survey found that 65 percent of Americans believed that the Nazi persecution of Jews was at least partly the fault of the Jews themselves.)

And, like the yellow vest protesters in France and the residents of U.S. towns facing the threat of economic disaster if coal and oil industries suddenly disappear, many Americans in 1939 worried about the economic cost of entering, at an unprecedented scale, a foreign fight. In July 1941, most Americans believed that the war would be followed by another great depression. Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara has written that, when President Franklin Roosevelt ramped up military production to aid the Allies, the heads of large manufacturing corporations were hesitant to take on the contracts, as they worried about the increased taxes and federal power that would come with military programs. Some were also sympathetic to America First, or at least hesitant to pick a fight with the isolationists; many were reluctant to bet on the unstable demand from the war effort. “I don’t believe that manufacturers are anxious for war business,” Harvey Campbell, of the Detroit Board of Commerce, said in 1940. “They would rather see a steady line of production and employment.”

Labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal.

 

Labor leaders like Walter Reuther, of the United Auto Workers, seized the moment to push for curbs on laissez faire capitalism, helping yoke private industry to a centralized economic plan. Most unions tied their fate to Roosevelt’s agenda, agreeing to no-strike pledges and putting their backs into the war effort. They were rewarded with perhaps the most labor-friendly economy in U.S. history. Unions went from representing fifteen percent of U.S. workers in 1937 to twenty-seven percent in 1945. The government capped corporate profits. Full employment, combined with government and union anti-discrimination programs, brought new opportunities for black and female workers. Employers eager to retain workers in the face of wartime wage freezes began offering pensions and health insurance.

We can’t go back to 1947, and most of us wouldn’t want to. The era brought segregated suburbs, anti-communist witch hunts against labor and civil rights organizers, and an environmentally disastrous dependence on cars. But the war, in combination with the New Deal that preceded it, established a stable economic order and, crucially, widespread faith in the federal government.

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Today, labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal. Much of Pollin’s research, for example, has been commissioned by unions and their supporters. But the unions of 2018 are much smaller and less powerful than their counterparts of 1939, and no Democratic leader has anything like FDR’s popularity. Enacting a comprehensive plan to fight climate change, poverty, and inequality will require strong alliances. Such an effort must bring together environmental activists, communities that have long depended on fossil fuel industries, and economic justice campaigns like the Fight for $15 and the teachers who mobilized across red states in 2017. It will also take collective action, like the sit-ins, which the Sunrise Movement has been holding at Democratic leadership offices.

It will also require more people to vote, in order to persuade the Democratic Party that this level of investment in economically responsible climate policy is a winning strategy. A minority of Americans voted in the 2018 midterms; working-class people and the young are particularly likely to sit out elections. But, Huber said, an agenda with the ambition of a Green New Deal might help bring more of the to the polls. “I’m a big believer that Democrats could do better just by turning out more working-class and poor people,” he told me. “As the Republicans know, the more people vote, the more they lose.”

The good news is, despite decades of anti-green rhetoric from fossil fuel companies and conservative politicians, environmental action is far more popular now than military action was in 1939. Nearly 70 percent of Americans—including 64 percent of Republicans—say that the U.S. should work with other nations to curb climate change, and 55 percent support the idea of a green jobs guarantee.

A Green New Deal—something on the scale of the Ocasio-Cortez outline, with systemic economic changes beyond subsidies and incentives—could utterly transform what comes after it, much as World War II did. It remains to be see what kind of change Congress can usher in.

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Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston GlobeHuffPostAeon and other places.

Editor: Betsy Morais

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel