Search Results for: City Journal

True Roots

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Ronnie Citron-Fink | True Roots | Island Press | June 2019 | 34 minutes (5.655 words)

 

How’d You do it? Are you doing that on purpose? Are you okay? Ever since I stopped coloring my silver hair, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. One of the most common during my hair transition was Why are you letting it go gray? While my roots didn’t ask permission before they stopped growing in dark brown, it was a complex mix of fear and determination that rearranged my beauty priorities. The question of why — why, after twenty-five years of using chemical dyes, I gave them up-is something I’ve thought about a lot.

My world began to shift four years ago. I was sitting in a meeting about toxics reform in Washington, DC, when an environmental scientist began to describe the buildup of chemicals in our bodies. As she rattled off a list of ingredients in personal care products-toluene, benzophenone, stearates, triclosan — my scalp started to tingle. “We’re just beginning to understand how these chemicals compromise long-term health,” she concluded.

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Oklahoma: A Reading List

A stunning lightning bolt at sunset under a severe thunderstorm with a dirt road vanishing into the distance, taken near Magnum, Oklahoma, Tornado Alley, USA. Getty Images

A few nights ago I filled my bathtub with blankets and every pillow in my house, set a lantern and four bottles of water beside me, and took shelter. On my laptop, I watched the local news, where weathermen urged drivers to clear the roads and pointed at cloud rotations. The skies, through the screen, looked like oceans inverted: clouds rolled like tidal waves at too fast a pace and swirled like aerial eddies. Usually I love the openness of Oklahoma, the way a sunrise here can tinge the world any number of sherbet hues, but that night, from my tub, the heavens only looked ominous.

For an hour I watched the color-coded markings on the map, scanning for my small city, and only went to bed after the red and green splotched signs of danger had passed north, to Kansas. Even then, I didn’t sleep. I listened to the hail and rain pound my roof. I worried for people, animals, and houses in the storm’s path. I wondered if there would be an undetected storm moving toward me in the night, a tornado that might whip through the cover of dark as one had when I was in college, hitting my home when none of us were inside.

The morning after the storm, robins emerged from hiding and hopped across my yard with spiky hair and tussled feathers. Rain drained across the red clay in rivulets. Gray skies cleared into sun, and a soft summer breeze rustled honeysuckle, stirring the scent. This is Oklahoma in spring: mercurial, dangerous, beautiful. Here, I feel closer to the elements than I ever have before. Watching a bird prey upon a baby snake from my kitchen window, tearing the red inner meat into shreds, or witnessing the sky meld from blue to the shade of a bruise in moments, I have grown attuned to the thin line between awe and fear.

I am leaving this state very soon, and it’s filled me with the kind of ache for understanding that so often accompanies a goodbye, a sense that I can never know quite enough. Though I’ve explored great swaths of the state; learned the habits of starlings that murmur at daybreak and dusk; taught students from a variety of different towns; listened to Dear Oklahoma, a podcast where writers ruminate and examine the way in which Oklahoma is a part of their work; and tried my best to understand the histories of this place, this state still escapes my description. As a way of getting outside my own experience, I have turned to the words of others. I don’t think there’s any way to capture the vastness of this place — and this is by no means a comprehensive list — but below is a collection of stories that offer a glimpse.

1. Pawhuska or Bust: A Journey to the Heart of Pioneer Woman Country (Khushbu Shah, October 5, 2017, Thrillist)

With only oil and cattle to rely on as industries, rural Pawhuska, Oklahoma was at risk of becoming a ghost town until Ree Drummond stepped in. Also known as “The Pioneer Woman,” Drummond is a Food Network Star known for her marriage to a cattle-rancher and what fans describe as her “real” food. After Drummond opens a restaurant called “The Mercantile” in Pawhuska, Khushbu Shah flies from New York to better understand Drummond’s influence on Oklahoma’s cultural scene and economy, and why so many visitors flock to a restaurant seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Similar sentiments were later echoed by every Pioneer Woman fan I spoke to, the vast majority of whom were white and from the Midwest or the South, like the three tall and husky female friends who told me they’d driven 13 hours from Indiana because Drummond makes ‘real American food’ and ‘the stuff you actually want to eat.’

2. They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants. (Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, October 4, 2017, Reveal)

Given the option between prison and a rehab program called CAAIR (nicknamed “the Chicken Farm”), Brad McGahey chose the latter. Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, in this harrowing piece of investigative journalism, reveal that CAAIR, located in northeastern Oklahoma, relies on unpaid labor from thousands of defendants. Additionally, though marketed as a rehab program, participants receive very little medical care or treatment.

‘They came up with a hell of an idea,’ said Parker Grindstaff, who graduated earlier this year. ‘They’re making a killing off of us.’

3. A Bend in the River (Pamela Colloff, July 2002, Texas Monthly)

Newspaper accounts of the escape focused on the manhunt, paying scant attention to the original crime or the victim, invariably described as a ‘sixteen-year-old Waurika, Okla., cheerleader.’ Only along the river did people know what the crime had done to their isolated slice of the world, the illusions it had cruelly stripped away.

In this riveting, haunting longform piece, Pamela Colloff writes about the murder of Heather Rich, and the impact her death had on the community of Waurika, Oklahoma, as well as the ways in which place and landscape influenced the investigation and subsequent events.

4. Why Black People Own Guns (Julia Craven, December 26, 2017, Huffpost)

Julia Craven interviewed 11 black gun owners in order to better understand their relationships to firearms. Though each of these accounts are important in their own right, RJ Young speaks specifically about his experiences with gun ownership as a black man in Oklahoma.

If I could walk around Oklahoma and not count how many black folks were in the room, I’d probably feel better about firearms as a black man. I’d probably feel safer walking around with one. But the fact is, most people have a narrow view of who I am.

Young’s book, Let It Bang: A Young Black Man’s Reluctant Odyssey into Guns offers more thorough insight his personal experiences with guns in Oklahoma within the context of a well-researched, larger cultural framework.

5. Spiritual Affliction: A Thank You Note to Oklahoma (Kate Strum, October 1, 2018, Hippocampus)

After moving to Oklahoma for graduate school, Kate Strum becomes fervent to understand the landscape: she travels to various parts of the state, engages politically, experiences the severity of elements, and makes meaningful relationships with people who have been here longer than she. And still, Oklahoma is somewhat elusive, though this essay is a beautiful rumination on Strum’s time spent here.

I am at once furious about what is wrong here and losing patience with the opinions of outsiders. I am home. I am marching at the capitol in the morning and late night on social media I am telling my friends on the coasts that they don’t get it. I shake my head when they read articles about rural America and think they know us.

6. Grace in Broken Arrow (Kiera Feldman, May 23, 2012, This Land)

Rather than taking reports of child molestation to the police or the Department of Human Services, the leaders of Grace Church, a Christian school that featured amenities like a ball pit, soda shoppe, and an antique carousel, instead held meetings to address what they didn’t believe to be that serious of an issue. Kiera Feldman, by interviewing survivors, former employees, and conducting immense amounts of research, brings to light a sickening tale of how Aaron Thompson, a former PE teacher at the school, molested boys there for years.

Grace Church was Oklahoma’s Penn State of 2002. After such things come to light, we always wonder: how on earth did that ever happen?

Here is how it happened.

7. Landlocked Islanders (Krista Langlois, November 16, 2016, Hakai Magazine)

Marshallese citizens, granted indefinite permission to live and work in the U.S. as a result of an agreement made with the U.S. during Marshallese independence, are leaving the Marshall Islands due to factors like climate change and lack of opportunities. As Krista Langlois writes, “by the year 2100, it’s conceivable that climate change will force the entire population of the Marshall Islands to US shores.” Many Marshallese migrants are ending up in Enid, Oklahoma.

Though Enid seems like an improbable place for Pacific Islanders to settle, it is, in a way, familiar. The first Marshallese came here with missionaries about 40 years ago, and wrote home about the jobs that could be had in meat-processing factories, and the public schools their children could attend. Eventually, family joined family.

8. The Teachers’ Strike and the Democratic Revival in Oklahoma (Rivka Galchen, May 28, 2018, The New Yorker)

Oklahoma teachers, rightfully tired of working multiple jobs to provide for their families and paying large sums of money for their own school supplies, walked out of school in April 2018. Some teachers drove to the capitol, where they asked for pay raises and better funding for their schools. Others walked in protest, making their way through “snow, lightning, and an earthquake.” Rivka Galchen examines the unique political composition of Oklahoma and chronicles the events of the two-week teachers’ walkout in Oklahoma in this longform piece.

The state’s license plates once read “Native America,” though almost no tribes are native to the area; they were sent there in the Trail of Tears. And Oklahomans are proud to be called Okies, a term coined by Californians to disparage people who were fleeing the Dust Bowl.

Related read: How Oklahoma’s Low Pay Dashed My Hopes of Teaching in My Tribal Community, March 28, 2018, Education Week

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

At Transformation

Illustration by Brittany Molineux

Jane Demuth | Longreads | May 2019 | 23 minutes (5,756 words)

It’s March 13th 2017, the eve of a late season snow storm that will blanket the Northeast and shut down major cities, and I’m on the ninth floor of a high-rise hotel in downtown Philadelphia chugging bottles of laxatives on a tightly prescribed schedule and making regular trips to the toilet. I am alone. As I count down hours one by one, my mind is reluctant either to focus or to rest. I flip through the TV channels briefly, but none of the broadcasts catch my interest. I talk to my brother on the phone several times; he is also in the city, and wants to know if I need anything or would like his company. It is thoughtful and generous of him to offer, but solitude feels like the right choice for me in this moment. I do not know what moods will strike me in the coming hours, but in the past my fears have sometimes coalesced in a fiery blaze of anger, and I do not wish to subject my brother to this. For an hour or so, I listen to music on my headphones, but the songs toward which I thought I would gravitate on this day are not hitting the emotional sweet spots I’d hoped and expected they would. Mostly I nap, on and off, between bottles of laxatives, prophylactic antibiotics, and urgent visits to the washroom. This morning I awoke at home in the Hudson Valley, feeling calm and clear for the first time in months, but a lengthy run of restless nights and a mounting air of anticipation have taken their toll on me. Tomorrow I will be checking out of the hotel early, and although a pharmaceutically induced period of unconsciousness is on the agenda for later in the day, right now I am grateful for actual sleep in whatever increments it offers itself.
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The Erotic Thriller’s Little Death

TriStar Pictures / Netflix

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,585 words)

Who do I have to fuck and kill to get a good erotic thriller? One of the first publicity stills from What/If, the new Netflix series starring Renée Zellweger, had the actress in a white dress, legs crossed, smiling enigmatically, her surroundings moody. It was a transparent reference to Basic Instinct, the vulvular Verhoeven from 1992 that marked the climax of the golden age of erotic thrillers, particularly the titillating cross-examination in which femme fatale Sharon Stone sits in a white dress, no underwear, legs alternating between crossed and uncrossed, smiling enigmatically, her surroundings moody. What/If is a sex reversal of Indecent Proposal, Adrian Lyne’s naughty take on the American Dream about a rich stranger offering a struggling couple $1 million to spend one night with the wife. The series flirts heavily with its soft-core antecedents. “This whole idea was ripped right out of a bad ’90s movie,” says Jane Levy (in the husband role in What/If). “I thought that film was quite decent,” is the awkward reply from Zellweger (as the Robert Redford character).

The difference here is that the 50-year-old actress’ knees remain firmly closed, just as the erotic thriller has ever since its mainstream demise in 1995. Her show is marketed as a “neo-noir social thriller,” presumably because creator Mike Kelley (of Revenge soap) considered the gender flip feminist, but its refusal to fully embrace the genre it’s attempting to be, either sexually or thrillingly, is the latest example of the erotic thriller’s latter-day impotence.

“Erotic thrillers are noirish stories of sexual intrigue incorporating some form of criminality or duplicity, often as the flimsy framework for on-screen softcore sex,” Linda Ruth Williams writes in The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (2005). That’s the clinical description, but the most alluring aspect of these films (and, later, shows) was how clinical they weren’t. It was the “flimsy framework” around the saxophoned, vaseline-screened sex that really made them seductive. These films lingered on their characters, teasing out the personalities that were about to be pummelled, entering their layered lives of cutely chaotic homes and old friendships and workplace frustrations, not to mention the texture of the cities — New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco — in which that setup was about to unravel. The stories about these ideal homes being threatened by a sensual interloper served as a metaphor for the sociopolitical climate of the time, in which second-wave feminism and its single career women were wreaking havoc on traditional family values and, more specifically, on the power position that men had secured for so long.    

The hottest time for the mainstream erotic thriller was the 15 years from 1980 until 1995, when multiplexes were flooded with glistening, underappreciated masterpieces like The Last Seduction, starring Linda Fiorentino as the other kind of Queen B, and less successful limpets like Body of Evidence, in which Madonna proved that she can’t act when she’s naked either. Since then, per Williams, “the explicit has become implicit.” Unless you are a foreign auteur, mainstream prurience is sublimated into the supernatural and the traumatic — even the young adult — and the modern adult erotic thriller is stripped of grit to become 50 Shades of Grey, an appropriate title for the interchangeable sterile “intrigues” of the suburban set. What/If rides the trend of ’90s nostalgia, in which the culturally relevant (if not always critically acclaimed) is resurrected for the sake of kitsch, with little consideration for its original milieu. But the erotic thriller is a genre born of a cultural climate that isn’t so different from the one we are in now, so why can’t it make us come?

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You can measure the erotic thriller’s critical reputation by how little it has penetrated academia. Porn has spawned its own journal, and yet the study of titles like Wild Things appears to be relegated to only three books, including Nina K. Martin’s Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller. She has a predictable explanation for the lacuna: “It’s for women,” she tells me, “and it’s not edgy enough.” It’s true: If you were old enough to masturbate in the ’90s, not only could you watch a young David Duchovny lubing women up on cable (Red Shoe Diaries), you could also Blockbuster and chill (which we just referred to as “renting”). Between the flaming porn and the brooding thrillers at the local video store languished sultry VHS covers with titles like Savage Lust scrawled over images of half-dressed couples embracing against black backdrops. “It gave a lot of people the opportunity to have a one-handed watch that actually had a story,” says Martin, “and that you could watch with someone as a couple and kind of get off.” The last one she remembers — the last good one, I would argue — is 2003’s In the Cut, one of the rare feminist erotic thrillers, which opens with a woman watching another woman going down on a man. But these days you wouldn’t get a major Hollywood star like Meg Ryan appearing in such a film (or behind it — it was a Nicole Kidman production), nor would you get a filmmaker of Jane Campion’s caliber directing it.

The erotic thriller came out of film noir, so it makes sense that one of the earliest neo-noirs, Body Heat (1981), was inspired by Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic Double Indemnity. Kathleen Turner never really washed off the sweat of her debut, in which she plays the wife of a wealthy businessman who convinces her lover, an inept lawyer — “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” — to kill her husband. The film was so ecstatically received that it spawned the Body Heat Society, a woman-run film fan club before that was de rigueur. “It’s the perfect story of the perfect seduction,’’ founder Royelen Lee Boykie told The Chicago Tribune in 1987. But it was Fatal Attraction (1987) that really hit the collective G-spot. Producer Sherry Lansing wanted to make a feminist version of the British film Diversion, in which a married man has an affair and gets his comeuppance. “When I watched that short film, I was on the single woman’s side,” Lansing told Susan Faludi for her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). “I wanted the audience to feel great empathy for the woman.”

The men who ran Hollywood did not. To understand how the erotic thriller, which could have been a genre that celebrates women owning their sexuality, became its opposite, you have to understand the time in which it arose. This was the 1980s, the decade in which liberated women were trying to mind their own business and start a career and men were interpreting the shift as a direct shot at mankind and the murder of the nuclear family. That’s how Fatal Attraction’s single career woman becomes “the most hated woman in America.” The studio refused to keep Michael Douglas’s cheating husband unsympathetic, going against Lansing to make Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest a crazy-faced psycho killer. To protect the family man, they sacrificed the independent blond who knows what she wants, turning her into a woman-shaped threat to fundamental American values that can only be taken down by the traditional housewife’s phallus — sorry, pistol.

This was, according to Williams’s book, “the perfect erotic thriller blueprint.” And in some ways, Fatal Attraction, which dominated the box office and the cultural conversation, was perfect. Director Adrian Lyne had been chosen off the success of Flashdance, and it was his attention to detail — the authentic discussions between family and friends, the messy homes, the dizzying ambience of New York — that makes the movie a classic. “It adds the seeming irrelevancies that are most important,’’ he told The New York Times. But it was also Michael Douglas. The man who became the face of the erotic thriller — he also starred in Basic Instinct, Disclosure, and A Perfect Murder — was able to be hero and antihero at the same time, both championed and maligned. In Williams’s words, he was “the representation of flawed, crisis-ridden masculinity and the concomitant decline of male cultural and social authority.”

Only five years after Fatal Attraction, the blockbuster erotic thriller blew its load for the last time with Basic Instinct, which not only commanded record earnings, but was popular despite — because of? — the perceived anti-gay sentiment of its bisexual femme fatale. Then the genre died; it’s fitting that the man who brought the erotic thriller to climax with Basic Instinct also killed it with Showgirls. Director Paul Verhoeven had the chance to earn the NC-17 rating designed to bolster now well-established adult fare, but he failed and the erotic thriller became a studio risk. Perhaps this was enough to kill it, considering Hollywood’s increasing need to make bank, but it was buried for good by a political landscape that reinforced America’s growing puritanism, an industry saturated with cheap knockoffs like Fair Game (starring supermodel Cindy Crawford), and the rise of free online porn and graphic auteur cinema.

But it was only a little death. The specter of Beyoncé floats over a new form of mainstream erotic thriller, one which has been scrubbed for its debut. In 2009, Queen B reintroduced us to blockbuster eroticism with Obsessed, which was dubbed “the black Fatal Attraction” — a married man is terrorized by a woman at his office — but had none of its predecessor’s charm. Producer Will Packer is famous for his aspirational black rom-coms (This Christmas, Think Like a Man), and Obsessed shared the same generic aesthetic. The specificity of the best erotic thrillers was thus replaced by an all-encompassing generality — suburban-style wealth with interchangeable houses, offices, clothes, people, even storylines. Here, again, men were in charge (producing, directing, writing), so the politics remained largely the same — the man is castrated by the single woman, the mother is the reigning power who restores order — while Hollywood’s mixed feelings about black intimacy meant the erotic part was cooled way down. A stream of nonwhite erotic thrillers lifted this framework, most recently Unforgettable and When the Bough Breaks, though the genre’s biggest (white) release of the past decade did too.

“Uh, oh, uh, oh, uh, oh, oh, no, no,” sang Beyoncé over and over in 2015 leading up to the release of 50 Shades of Grey, for which she recorded a heart-pounding version of “Crazy in Love.” E.L. James’ S&M “book,” I suppose you would call it, which started out as Twilight fan fiction, was a phenomenon among housewives and the biggest mainstream erotic thriller in a decade, attracting an audience of mostly women who were so desperate for some hot sex on-screen that they were willing to pay $13 to see a movie based on a story that read like its writer had never actually had sex. 50 Shades of Grey is potentially the least foxy film of all time — wooden acting, wooden script, wooden directing, but absolutely no wood. “Are You Curious?” the marketing kept asking us. Don’t be: It basically looks exactly like Obsessed, except in a farcical display of our current conversation around consent, the heroine has to sign a contract before she can fuck. This was two years before we started talking about how men in Hollywood have abused their power, which could be why the two men who produced this cock-up thought it made sense to have Dakota Johnson play a woman who is willing to sign a paper in order to have Jamie Dornan’s rich, dead-eyed white man bore the pants off her (we can get that for free!).

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“Your pants are on fire.” “You have no idea.” Within the first five minutes of Indecent Proposal, Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson are having flaming sex — various positions, various body parts — on their kitchen floor. This is frenzied makeup fornication after a fight that resulted in his boxers landing on the boiling stove. In What/If, the analogous couple takes four episodes to get seriously steamy — like, in a shower. OK, they also have sex, but it is so pure it involves garters and is artfully shot through the slates in a banister. This is the erotic thriller now, a pale imitation of its white-hot heyday, in which romance is an afterthought and the thrill is gone. That clinical uptightness that was missing from the originals, which made them so seductive, has me wondering why they even bother anymore. But then again, it tracks that a culture steeped in nostalgia but fixated on box office performance would strip the erotic thriller, a once lucrative genre, down to its superficial parts — a gesture at sex, a glance at intrigue, the broad strokes of a vague threat to patriarchy — to sell it out to the widest audience possible. This would in part explain why the new films and shows have been denuded of their specificity — in character, in location, in aesthetic — though that also aligns with how aspiration is framed now, a time of sporadic employment in a digital (not that kind) dictatorship, as a sterile McMansion in which the comfort of wealth has replaced the comfort of relation.

Then there’s the sex. While men don’t want women to own their sexuality and are skittish in the wake of so many of their male peers screwing up, women don’t want to be objectified or reduced to their sexuality anymore either. Even if Fatal Attraction would make sense coming from a man right now, Martin thinks actresses, awakened to gender parity and intimacy standards, would be unlikely to take on the role. “It’s such a loaded grey area now,” says Martin, observing that sex is either problematized within a relationship as in Sex Education and Gypsy, or it’s associated with trauma as in Top of the Lake (another Campion) and Sharp Objects. That the rare erotic thriller comes from auteurs out of Europe (François Ozon) or Asia (Park Chan-wook) is unsurprising considering their divergent approach to sex and gender. In America, meanwhile, the spectacle has taken over the sexual — women are more concerned with saving the world than in exploring their sexuality. And, sure, I’m all for women solving the climate crisis, but we also have sex lives. And all the talk around consent suggests that it’s the perfect time for cinema to explore the nuances of sexuality (not to mention the widespread panic over millennials having less of it — I mean, would you in this economy?)

Instead, any prurience that threatens to limit the largest possible impact has been folded into the supernatural, since Twilight, which also introduced sensuality into the YA world, culminated in series like You and Riverdale. All of this is not to say that you can’t still find erotic thrillers, just that they have retreated to the margins. What was once a mainstream film — A-list actors and filmmakers — about a queer femme fatale, is now a queer erotic thriller — unknown actors and filmmakers — that only surfaces on streaming sites like Netflix for niche audiences whose algorithms call it out. You can get free porn online, you can pay for a good thriller in the cinema, but you can’t get both together. No wonder I found myself nodding along to the last two words of What/If, a scene in which Zellweger’s femme fatale orders a martini, perhaps to distract her from all the sex she’s not having. “One olive,” she says. “Very dry.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare

Getty / Black Inc. Books

Richard Cooke | Excerpt from Tired of Winning: A Chronicle of American Decline | Black Inc. Books | May 2019 | 21 minutes (5,527 words)

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Mark 16:18

One night John Stephen Toler dreamed that the Lord had placed him high on a cliff, overlooking a forest-filled valley. He had this vision while living in Man, West Virginia, where some of the townsfolk thought he was a hell-bound abomination; he countered that God works in different ways. The mountains were where he sought sanctuary, so he felt no fear; but as he watched, all the trees he could see were consumed by wildfire. It was incredible, he said, to see ‘how quick it was devoured’, and the meaning of the parable was clear. The forest was Man and the fire was drugs, and when the drugs came to Man, that was exactly how it happened – it was devoured ‘so fast, that you didn’t even see it coming’, he said. We were in Huntington, West Virginia, and by now John Stephen Toler was in recovery.

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Reimagining Harper Lee’s Lost True Crime Novel: An Interview with Casey Cep

Ben Martin / HarperCollins

Adam Morgan  | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,793 words)

 

Four years ago, when the news broke that a second Harper Lee novel had been discovered fifty years after To Kill a Mockingbird, the literary world was shocked. Some readers were thrilled by the prospect of returning to the world of Scout, Atticus Finch, and Boo Radley. Others were concerned the 88-year-old Lee might have been pressured to publish an unfinished draft. But Casey Cep, an investigative reporter for the New Yorker and the New York Times, drove down to Alabama to get to the bottom of it. And what she found wasn’t a publishing conspiracy, but another lost book Lee had attempted to write for more than a decade, but never finished.

The book was called The Reverend. It would have been a true-crime novel like In Cold Blood (a book Lee helped Truman Capote research, write, and edit, despite his failure to give her any credit). The Reverend would have told the story of Willie Maxwell, a black preacher who murdered five members of his own family in the 1970s in order to collect life insurance money. It would have touched on voodoo, racial politics in post-industrial Alabama, and a courtroom setpiece that rivaled To Kill a Mockingbird for drama. But Harper Lee never finished writing The Reverend, and now, thanks to Casey Cep, we know why.

Cep’s debut, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, is fascinating, addicting, and unbearably suspenseful. Cep actually tells three concentric stories: the crimes of Willie Maxwell, the trials of his lawyer Tom Radney, and Harper Lee’s failed attempt to write about them. When I called Cep from “a Southern phone number” on an unseasonably hot spring afternoon, she initially thought I was one of her sources calling with a “some bombshell thing they want to show me, far too late to help with the book.”

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Falling Stars: On Taking Down Our Celebrity Icons

Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 7 minutes (1, 868 words)

The shorthand iconography of the star has been the iconography of excess — furs, gold, pearls, diamonds, stacks of cash, lots of lights, lots of people. It’s luxury personified, the human being at its apex, the kind of intermediary between gods and humans that the ancient Egyptians didn’t just dress with jewels, but buried with them, transcending mortality. And who doesn’t want to be immortal? Especially these days, when we are very much the opposite: when aspiration has been replaced with desperation and extinction is the inevitable end, or maybe hell, but definitely not heaven. The old accoutrements of success, the ones that defined celebrity — wealth, power, decadence — are going extinct too. And anyone who continues to buy into them, is either performing satire (see Billy Porter in city-spanning golden wings) — or is, well, Drake.

The “God’s Plan” singer, who upon last estimation was worth around $90 million, unveiled his own private Boeing 767 cargo plane, Air Drake, in an Instagram video last week, a pair of praying hands on the tail fin speaking for us all. “No rental, no timeshare, no co-owners,” he said. No reality check either, apparently. While Drake framed it as his way of supporting a homegrown business (Ontario’s Cargojet), his very own “Heat of the Moment” lyrics — “All the niggas we don’t need anymore / And all the cops are still hangin’ out at the doughnut shops / Talkin ’bout how the weather’s changin’ / The ice is meltin’ as if the world is endin’” — caused a number of people to point out his hypocrisy. (He captioned the video, “Nothing was the same for real,” which I don’t believe is a reference to the planet’s demise, but maybe he was being meta.) It had been only seven months since Kanye and Kim Kardashian West were vilified for flying aboard a 660-seater Boeing. Basically alone. “No big deal,” Kardashian West said on Instagram. “Just like a chill room. This is, like, endless.” No, there’s an end. Their chill trip happened less than two months after the end days climate report came out.

At one point these stars were icons of the kind of success we aspired to. But having seen how the old capitalist system they symbolize has destroyed the world, the movement to destabilize it has also become a movement to destabilize them as its avatars. This includes idols of technology like Mark Zuckerberg, the once-envied wunderkind who is now someone who should be held “accountable”; business giants like Disney CEO Bob Iger, whose compensation is “insane” according to one member of the family dynasty; and political stars like Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, both of whom were called out for their campaigns’ big donors. In our culture today, the guy who makes music out of his closet has the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and the revolutionaries are schoolchildren. “The star is meant to epitomize the potential of everyone in American society,” writes P. David Marshall in Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. “The dialectical reality is that the star is part of a system of false promise in the system of capital.”

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The debate over whether success should be defined by wealth goes as far back as civilization itself. I asked my brother, a philosophy professor specializing in the ancients (I know), when it first turned up in the literature, and he told me it was “the base note” through most of Plato. Then there was Socrates, who thought knowledge, not wealth, should be the marker of success, versus Aristotle, who thought wealth was essential to the good life. Regardless of their differences, greed, my brother said, was almost always considered pathological. But then along came capitalism, which was popularized (peut-être) by French socialist Louis Blanc, who wrote Organisation du Travail, in which he defined it as “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” Within capitalism, greed became associated with productivity, which was correlated with a successful economy, and so greed was good (you try not to quote Gordon Gekko!). Along with it, those who were greedy were accepted, even admired, under certain conditions. A 2015 study had a bunch of U.K. teenagers excusing Bill Gates’s extreme wealth (more than $100 billion) as merit-based, the necessary evil of a capitalist system in which a hard-working individual can triumph the way they would like to one day.

The celebrity is the ultimate symbol of success, which, under capitalism, becomes the ultimate symbol of greed. “Celebrities reinforce the conception that there are no barriers in contemporary culture that the individual cannot overcome,” writes Marshall. And though Julius Caesar ended up on a coin, dating the monetization of fame back to ancient Rome, you can blame the French Revolution for a modern star like James Charles, who launched a YouTube channel of makeup tutorials at age 16 and within four years had more than 1.7 billion views. After the monarchy was overthrown, power and fame no longer required inheritance, which is why celebrity is sometimes (erroneously) associated with rebellion. But while the common man was ascending, so was individualism, along with mass media and the industrial revolution. The lord and serf were replaced by the businessman and employee and bourgeois culture expanded at the expense of its working-class analog. The icon of this new capitalist society, which had been weaned on the Romantic Era’s cult of personality, was the commodified individual who reinforced consumption: the celebrity. As Milly Williamson explains in Celebrity: Capitalism and the Making of Fame, “Celebrity offers images of inclusion and plenty in a society shaped by exclusion and structured in want.”

Is anyone playing the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game anymore? The object was to use anything you had access to, whether material, money, or people, to advance. It was clearly a meta-tongue-in-cheek bit of cutesy puff, but it also wasn’t. Kim Kardashian West is you in the game and you in real life. Consumerism isn’t just consumption, it’s emulation. We consume to improve ourselves as individuals — to make ourselves more like Kardashian West, who is presented as the pinnacle of success — as though our self-actualization were directly associated with our purchasing power. And the same way we have commodity selves (I am Coke, not Pepsi; Dell, not Mac) we have celebrity selves. For instance, I’m a Winona Ryder person, not a Gwyneth Paltrow person (is anyone?). So my identity could very well be solidified based on whether I can find that Tom Waits shirt she always wears. And in these days of faces of brands, shaping yourself around Kim Kardashian West can actually mean shaping yourself around a $15,000 dress. “It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds,” writes George Monbiot in The Guardian. “By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.”

So who cares, right? So what if I want to be a $5,000 Louis Vuitton bag slung over Michelle Williams’s shoulder? It’s a little limiting, I guess, but fine (maybe?) — if we can trust the world to run fairly around us. According to a 2007 study in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Brits who closely followed celebrity gossip over other types of news were half as likely to volunteer, less politically engaged, and the least likely to vote or protest. “It’s the capacity of these public figures to embody the collective in the individual,” writes Marshall, “which identifies their cultural signs as powerful.” It also identifies them as inert proxies for real community action. There is a veneer of democracy to consumerism, in that we are free to choose what we buy. But we are exercising our freedom only through buying (never mind that the options aren’t infinite); we are not defined as citizens, but as consumers. That the consumer has eclipsed the citizen explains in part why the appeals around climate change have been increasingly directed at the individual, pointing out how they will personally suffer if the world around them does — in a sea of individuals, the planet’s distress was not impetus enough. “The most important democratic achievements have been the result of working-class struggle and collective movements,” writes Williamson. “What is really extraordinary about working-class identity is not the potential celebrity in each of us, but precisely the solidarity and collectivity that is largely hidden from media representations of ordinary people.”

* * *

When Time released its list of the 100 most influential people in the world last month, I noticed that under the Icons category one of the images was a silhouette. Among all of those colourful portraits of famous faces, Mirian G. was an individual erased. I initially thought it was a power move, that this woman had chosen to trade in her identity for a larger cause. It turned out she was a Honduran asylum seeker, part of a class-action suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of families separated at the border, and that she had to be anonymous to protect herself. “In 2018, over 2,700 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border,” wrote Kumail Nanjiani. “Since that number is so unfathomably large, I think it is helpful to focus on one woman’s story.” In essence, the magazine found a way around the individual-as-icon, turning a spot for one into representation for many. It was a timely move.

It’s not that fame has become defunct — one study found that a number of millennials would literally trade their family for it — but celebrity isn’t the opiate it once was. Younger generations side-eye star endorsements, while online influencers, who affect the tone of friendly advice, have acquired monumental cache. (Though James Charles recently lost millions of YouTube subscribers following a very public fallout with fellow beauty vlogger Tati Westbrook, he still has more than 13 million.) It comes with a catch, though: Millennials will actually pay more for brands that are socially responsible. This aligns with the growing number of young activists, not to mention the U.S.’s youth voter turnout in 2018, the highest in a midterm election since 1982. As Williams concludes, “celebrity culture presents the human in commodity form, but it also consists of its opposite — the human can never be fully contained by the self-as-commodity, and the persistence of humanity is, in all circumstances, a cause for hope.”

While the citizen and consumer were once conflated, they now coexist, a separation that sometimes leads them to be at odds. The celebrity, the symbol of the latter, can in the same way clash with the former. In a context like this, Alyssa Milano’s ill-conceived sex strike, the latest case of a celebrity ham-fistedly endorsing feminist activism, is no longer simply swallowed in good faith. There is no good faith left, not even for our stars. They are symbols of an economy that consumes everything in its path, and struggling with them is part of a collective struggle with the inequitable, exploited world we live in, one in which each callout will hopefully add up to some semblance of change.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

On “Art Heroes” and Letting Your Idols Be Human

Sarah Morris / Getty, Markus Schreiber / Invision / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Alex DiFrancesco | Longreads | May 15, 2019 | 8 minutes (2,099 words)

As I type this, the blackened letters tattooed on my hand flash across the keyboard. BAD SEED is inked down my middle finger. It can be read as juvenile; I’m sure it is by many. It’s one of my homage tattoos. I got it the day I signed a contract for my second novel, a few months after I had seen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in concert for the first time, after more than a decade of fandom and made the decision that I had to, uncompromisingly, unabashedly, dedicate my life to art. Nick Cave’s sprawling career is a testament to such dedication, from his baby post-punk days in the Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party, to his decades with the Bad Seeds. Cave’s music, which vacillates between the aggressively abrupt and the mournfully introspective, has carried me through some of the most intense periods of my life. It’s the kind of music that saves you, if you happen to be the sort of person that music can save. It gives you the ability to grit your teeth and spit on your enemies, or weep while walking down the street with your headphones, as needed. You can play it at a wedding or a funeral (though it’s not a big hit at karaoke); you can lull yourself to sleep with it, or wake up fighting to it. It would be easy for me to call Nick Cave one of my heroes.

But this essay isn’t really about Cave’s music, as important as it is to me. It’s about The Red Hand Files.

In September 2018, after the tragic death of his young son Arthur, after his mournful album Skeleton Tree, Cave started a newsletter intending to answer fan questions as honestly as he could. I was elated and a little terrified. The softer, gentler Cave of modern days, any long-term fan knows, is a newer development. Many of us vividly remember Cave’s brief and doomed “ask me anything” that happened on Twitter in 2013, when he responded to every question with condescension and barely contained rage. “What would you recommend for young musicians hoping to be as great as you, Nick Cave?” one fan asked in the experiment. “Lower your expectations,” you could practically hear Cave growl through the internet. What would we learn about the inner workings of my hero through these letters? Would it be a similar (hilarious, in character, and utterly beloved) disaster?

But the Cave of 2013 has been softened by grief, loss, and mourning — he spoke extensively in many interviews around his Skeleton Tree tour of feeling connected to the world around him — and his fans — in a way that he hadn’t before then. In the first edition of The Red Hand Files, he writes, “I kind of realized that work was the key to get back to my life, but I also realized that I was not alone in my grief and that many of you were, in one way or another, suffering your own sorrows, your own griefs. I felt this in our live performances. I felt very acutely that a sense of suffering was the connective tissue that held us all together.”

Cave’s musings on grief are, as they have always been, profound. The Red Hand Files, which usually arrive early in the morning, here in Eastern Standard Time, often feel like letters about all that make being human worthwhile to me — art, love, loss, tenderness, and introspection. I read them at 5 or 6 a.m., often reveling in the gift this artist is giving us all.

Except for when he’s not.

Because there have also been times when I’ve been so disappointed with Cave and the project that I wanted to unsubscribe.

We live in a cultural moment when many fans are (often understandably) “canceling” the work of many artists. In cases like Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, I think this urge is 100 percent justified. Those who commit crimes against others and use their star status to stay free of consequence are villainous. But the cultural moment we live in also seems to expect perfection from people, lest they be canceled as well. It seems to allow little room for people to fuck up, be messy, or be flat-out distasteful. Cave, in his letters, has proven himself imperfect, often frustrating, not, perhaps, the way people wish him to be. The Red Hand Files has been a lesson, for me, in the intricacies of fighting the urge to hit the buttons that, in the digital world, cut us off from someone else, delete them, disappear them, make them virtual ghosts whose traces we have to look for to find, rather than have delivered to us.

The Red Hand Files has been a lesson, for me, in the intricacies of fighting the urge to hit the buttons that, in the digital world, cut us off from someone else, delete them, disappear them, make them virtual ghosts whose traces we have to look for to find, rather than have delivered to us.

One of the most disappointing moments for me, as a Cave fan, came when he announced that he would play Israel on a recent tour, despite being urged not to by Brian Eno and many other artists promoting a cultural boycott of Israel. Cave’s response, publicized in a press conference on the issue, showed him to be things I found repulsive — arrogant, self-centered, an artist who could appear to claim that the deaths and torment of the Palestinian people were less important than Eno and company trying to “censor” artists like him. I was disgusted that someone I held in such high regard could be that blind to the issues facing the people of Palestine.

But, I learned through an early edition of The Red Hand Files, that was not the entire case. Cave provided nuance to the discussion in his December 2018 letter when a fan asked about his stance on Israel and the Brian Eno–supported cultural boycott. The Cave in this letter (and perhaps some of it has to do with being a man more comfortable at a typewriter than a press conference?) provided context that coverage of the issue had not. Cave was not quite as he’d been painted in a few broad strokes by the media. He said, in the response to his fan’s questions, “I do not support the current government in Israel, yet do not accept that my decision to play in the country is any kind of tacit support for that government’s policies. Nor do I condone the atrocities that you have described; nor am I ignorant of them. I am aware of the injustices suffered by the Palestinian population, and wish, with all people of good conscience, that their suffering is ended via a comprehensive and just solution.” I felt my own activist rage — I am a firm and longtime supporter of the Palestinian-lead Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions [BDS] movement — soften as Cave described his nuanced feelings on the subject via the newsletter. Cave went on to express an ambivalence that had been utterly absent from the arrogant stance in press conferences: “Occasionally, I wonder if The Bad Seeds did the right thing in playing Israel. I cannot answer that question. I understand and accept the validity of many of the arguments that are presented to me.” I felt my anger lessen even more when he described Brian Eno as a force that had taught him to make music, a hero. Cave saying no to his hero, with obvious anguish and deep thought, reinforced what these letters were doing for me in terms of the allowances for our heroes not to replicate our own selves, our own ideals. In letting ourselves disagree with them, be upset with them, sometimes revile them, and still acknowledge that their place in our own patheon is enormous, regardless, is an act of understanding and allowing for nuance in a world that often feels black and white.

I certainly came close to reviling Cave when the letter about women, consent, and #MeToo appeared. “As to the recent ‘cultural sea changes’ affecting women,” Cave wrote, “I feel that they are in danger of eroding those bright edges of personhood, and grinding them down into monotonous identity politics — where some women have traded in their inherent wildness and sense of awe, for a one-size-fits-all protestation against a uniform concept of maleness which I’m not sure I recognize.”

As a lifelong feminist and a transgender person who believes that gender identity is of deep importance to understanding one another, I find it hard to explain how much this particular letter disgusted me. I felt like I was listening not to a hero who had once written a gorgeously vicious song about a woman who was gang-raped, then murdered all of her assailants, but someone’s curmudgeonly old grandfather who was holding forth about women in his day. I almost canceled my subscription to the newsletter. I seethed with rage. I talked to anyone who would listen about how disappointing it really is to see the inner workings of the people who make the art you love. But I hung on.

Ultimately, I’m glad I did. While Cave’s politics and views on gender may not be anywhere near what I wish to see coming from someone I’d consider a hero, there has frequently been reminders of the reasons I adored Cave to begin with. When he speaks of deeply human sentiments — love, loss, art, beauty — there are few who can parallel him. His own recent (and enormous) losses, have provided fodder for many of the more poignant essays. These things, as he has frequently said, are what tie humans together, and it has seemed to me from his music and now from these letters that he had somehow tapped into the epicenter of these human links.

A few months ago, my first love, who had been ill with multiple sclerosis for some time, passed away. I wasn’t quite ready for the enormity of the feelings I would experience around his passing. I kept thinking — this person I once loved, who was gone now — there were so many moments, long ago, that only the two of us had shared. I was the sole caretaker of those moments now. It seemed unfair to hoard them. I wrote a letter to his mother, attempting to share some of them. As I did, I pulled up Issue #6 of The Red Hand Files, in which a fan writes to Cave about losing many loved ones, and Cave writes back his awe-inspiring meditations on grief.

As I wrote the letter to my once-love’s mother, I added the line, from Cave’s letter, “It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is nonnegotiable.”

Becoming softer and more tender by watching that which you love show its cracks is an act of generosity and love in a world that seems to increasingly want to draw strict lines of perfection.

I come from a background staunch in its refusal to allow others slack. I came up as a militant anarchist and activist, I watched people excommunicated from social circles, artists “canceled” all through my formative years. I have gotten older since then, I have softened; I am not the proponent of the one-and-done approach to ideological difference this background might portend. Reading Cave’s series of letters has helped me soften further. I’ve developed the specific term “art-hero” to reflect my adoration of someone who’s work I can find no fault in, yet who is terrifyingly, mundanely human just the same. An “art-hero” is not the same as a hero, sweeping in, perfect, saving the day, sweeping out. An “art-hero” is human in all respects but the glorious works they create. An “art-hero” is perhaps tapped into the divine and inscrutable place that I romantically believe art comes from, but they breathe, they bleed, they are messy, and they are not all the things we wish they could be. The room I allow the creators of the works that move me has seeped into my personal life, as well, giving the people I love more room to fail, to fall, to fuck up. Becoming softer and more tender by watching that which you love show its cracks is an act of generosity and love in a world that seems to increasingly want to draw strict lines of perfection.

I’m talking about the prickly, the imperfect, the difficult. I’m talking about letting your heroes fall — and fail — and still hold the unique place in your heart where they were before they revealed themselves as all too human.

There is, in art and, I suspect, life, a richness in letting people be themselves, as flawed or different in ideology as that person may be. I’m not talking about forgiving the willfully hateful or obtuse (we must still draw lines). I’m talking about the prickly, the imperfect, the difficult. I’m talking about letting your heroes fall — and fail — and still hold the unique place in your heart where they were before they revealed themselves as all too human.

***

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their first novel, an acid western, was published in 2015, and their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press), in 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers

"Patty Ramge appears dejected as she looks at her Ford Pinto." Bettmann / Getty

Lizzie O’Shea | an excerpt adapted from Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Teach Us about Digital Technology | Verso | May 2019 | 30 minutes (8,211 words)

In the late spring of 1972, Lily Gray was driving her new Ford Pinto on a freeway in Los Angeles, and her thirteen-year-old neighbor, Richard Grimshaw, was in the passenger seat. The car stalled and was struck from behind at around 30 mph. The Pinto burst into flames, killing Gray and seriously injuring Grimshaw. He suffered permanent and disfiguring burns to his face and body, lost several fingers and required multiple surgeries.

Six years later, in Indiana, three teenaged girls died in a Ford Pinto that had been rammed from behind by a van. The body of the car reportedly collapsed “like an accordion,” trapping them inside. The fuel tank ruptured and ignited into a fireball.

Both incidents were the subject of legal proceedings, which now bookend the history of one of the greatest scandals in American consumer history. The claim, made in these cases and most famously in an exposé in Mother Jones by Mike Dowie in 1977, was that Ford had shown a callous recklessness for the lives of its customers. The weakness in the design of the Pinto — which made it susceptible to fuel leaks and hence fires — was known to the company. So too were the potential solutions to the problem. This included a number of possible design alterations, one of which was the insertion of a plastic buffer between the bumper and the fuel tank that would have cost around a dollar. For a variety of reasons, related to costs and the absence of rigorous safety regulations, Ford mass-produced the Pinto without the buffer.

Most galling, Dowie documented through internal memos how at one point the company prepared a cost-benefit analysis of the design process. Burn injuries and burn deaths were assigned a price ($67,000 and $200,000 respectively), and these prices were measured against the costs of implementing various options that could have improved the safety of the Pinto. It turned out to be a monumental miscalculation, but, that aside, the morality of this approach was what captured the public’s attention. “Ford knows the Pinto is a firetrap,” Dowie wrote, “yet it has paid out millions to settle damage suits out of court, and it is prepared to spend millions more lobbying against safety standards.” Read more…

Shelved: Tupac and MC Hammer’s Promising Collaboration

Illustration by Homestead

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (2,898 words)

 

In 1990, rapper Stanley “MC Hammer” Burrell stood at the pinnacle of popular culture. His stage show featured 32 musicians and dancers, all of whom attended a rigorous boot camp. According to an Ebony magazine article from that year, the boot camp consisted of “four miles of jogging, weight training, and at least six hours of dancing daily.” “Hammer Time” cultural saturation included demonstrations of his athletic “Hammer Dance” on Oprah and appearances in commercials for British Knights athletic shoes and Pepsi. Hammer owned 2,000 pairs of baggy “Arabian pants,” which, along with gold lamé vests, made up his distinctive stage image.

Read more…