Search Results for: D Magazine

Born to Be Eaten

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Eva Holland | Longreads | May 30, 2019 | 26 minutes (7,122 words)

Calving

The caribou cow gives birth on her feet. She stands with legs wide apart, or turns on the spot, shuffling in slow circles, craning her long neck to watch as her calf emerges inch by inch from below her tail, between her hips. It’s oddly calm, this process — a strange thing to witness for us two-legged mammals, more accustomed to the stirrups and the struggle and the white-knuckled screaming of a Hollywood birth scene.

The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first. He climbs into the world fully extended, like a diver stretching toward the water. Out come the front pair of hooves, capping spindly legs, then the long narrow head, the lean, wet-furred body, and finally, another set of bony legs and sharp little hooves. His divergence from his mother leaves behind nothing but some strings of sticky fluid and a small patch of bloody fur. He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.

The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first…He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.

Still slick with mucus, the calf takes his first steps within minutes, stumbling awkwardly to his feet as his mother licks him clean. Within 24 hours, he is able to walk a mile or more. Soon, if he survives long enough, he will be capable of swimming white-water rivers, outrunning wolves, and trotting overland for miles upon miles every day. His life will offer myriad dangers and only the rarest respite; for the caribou, staying alive means staying on the move.

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To Protect Children from Sexual Abuse, the Catholic Church Must Eliminate the Clergy

Vadim Pacajev/Sipa USA via AP Images

In a gripping and contentious cover story for the Atlantic, journalist and ex-Catholic priest James Carroll argues that it’s time for Catholicism to dismantle the priesthood. The fundamental problem, Carroll writes, is that “clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction.” The clergy were not created by God or the bible, he explains, but are political units of the Roman empire, and it has corrupted the Church in a way that has made the systematic abuse of children around the world possible.

The Church’s maleness and misogyny became inseparable from its structure. The conceptual underpinnings of clericalism can be laid out simply: Women were subservient to men. Laypeople were subservient to priests, who were defined as having been made “ontologically” superior by the sacrament of holy orders. Removed by celibacy from competing bonds of family and obligation, priests were slotted into a clerical hierarchy that replicated the medieval feudal order. When I became a priest, I placed my hands between the hands of the bishop ordaining me—a feudal gesture derived from the homage of a vassal to his lord. In my case, the bishop was Terence Cooke, the archbishop of New York. Following this rubric of the sacrament, I gave my loyalty to him, not to a set of principles or ideals, or even to the Church. Should we be surprised that men invited to think of themselves on such a scale of power—even as an alter Christus, “another Christ”—might get lost in a wilderness of self-centeredness? Or that they might find it hard to break from the feudal order that provides community and preferment, not to mention an elevated status the unordained will never enjoy? Or that Church law provides for the excommunication of any woman who attempts to say the Mass, but mandates no such penalty for a pedophile priest? Clericalism is self-fulfilling and self-sustaining. It thrives on secrecy, and it looks after itself.

While Carroll still extols the many benefits of Catholicism’s vast, global, care-giving network of hospitals and schools, he sees the Church’s hierarchy and exclusionary structures as harming, not serving, its 1 billion believers.

In the Americas and Africa; in Europe, Asia, and Australia—wherever there were Catholic priests, there were children being preyed upon and tossed aside. Were it not for crusading journalists and lawyers, the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests would still be hidden, and rampant. A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end up abusing the powerless. According to one victim, Cardinal Law, of Boston, before being forced to resign because of his support for predator priests, attempted to silence the man by invoking the sacred seal: “I bind you by the power of the confessional,” Law said, his hands pressing on the man’s head, “not to speak to anyone else about this.”

A priest did this. That is the decisive recognition. The abuse of minors occurs in many settings, yes, but such violation by a priest exists in a different order, and not simply because of its global magnitude. For Catholics, priests are the living sacrament of Christ’s presence, delegated above all to consecrate the bread and wine that define the soul of the faith. This symbol of Christ has come to stand for something profoundly wicked. Even as I write that sentence, I think of the good men on whom I have depended for priestly ministry over the years, and how they may well regard my conclusion as a friend’s betrayal. But the institutional corruption of clericalism transcends that concern, and anguish should be reserved for the victims of priests. Their suffering must be the permanent measure of our responses.

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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.

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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Editors Roundtable: 170 Million Pieces of Trash Orbiting the Earth and No One Knows How to Use an Apostrophe (Podcast)

David McNew / Stringer / Getty Images

On our May 17, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Essays Editor Sari Botton, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, and Senior Editor Krista Stevens share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Outside Magazine, Wired’s Backchannel, The New York Times Styles, and Longreads.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


00:20 “This Gen X Mess” (May 14, 2019, The New York Times

“We were in the digital stone age.” – Krista Stevens

This week’s New York Times Styles package on Generation X in 1994 inspired a wave of nostalgia.

Our editors discuss Alex Williams‘ piece on the impossibility of summing up an entire generation’s experiences in one label. (Caity Weaver‘s attempt at spending a week living with technology available in 1994 sends Sari down a memory lane of modems, payphones, and calling in her notes to the New York Times tape room.) They laugh at “The Rules,”a dating guide that looks to your grandma for advice, and discuss two more sections in the Gen X Styles package on John Singleton and Evan Dando.

12:30 “He Trots the Air” (Pam Houston, May 13, 2019, Outside Magazine)

“The first thing that I would caution about this piece is that you should not read it in a public space.” – Krista Stevens

The team discusses Pam Houston’s beautiful style in this personal essay about Houston’s 39-year-old horse, Roany, their quarter-century long bond, and having to say goodbye. We think we know family animals well — and that we have the power to delay when their time will come — but life makes its own decisions.

15:51The Curious History of Crap—From Space Junk to Actual Poop” (Ziya Tong, May 14, 2019, Wired)

This excerpt from Tong’s book The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions That Shape Our World, examines what, despite our propensity to record everything, we still don’t see: where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste is going.

The team discusses some of the excerpt’s truth bombs, like how one person’s poop is enough to fertilize 200 kilograms of cereals per year, and how orbiting space garbage as small as a lens cap can hit a spacecraft like a grenade. Luckily, the piece also explores how we can repurpose some of humanity’s trash to our advantage.

22:24The Omen of the Wasps’ Nest” (Marlene Adelstein, May 2019, Longreads)

A collector of nests, Adelstein becomes fixated on a wasp nest as an omen, while her relationship and family nests deteriorate around her. 

24:10 Editor Q&A: Are you a reader or an editor first?

“If my internal editor doesn’t pipe in, is that a sign that something is good?”- Sari Botton

A behind-the-scenes look at whether the editor brain ever turns off, how editorial sensibilities are forever evolving, and a recommendation for Jenny Zhang’s Annotations newsletter, which deconstructs what works in popular articles.

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

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.”

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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.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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.

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Editors Roundtable: Violence of Men, Money, and Space (Podcast)

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On our May 10, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Fact-checker Ethan Chiel, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New Yorker.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


00:26 My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
(Wil S. Hylton, May 8, 2019, The New York Times Magazine

“These are often snapshots or frames in the film of your life, and they don’t often take into account the frames that come after…something like this that is both personal and societal, you certainly should get applause for stepping forward and saying I did these things, I am responsible in this way, but the work continues forever and I agree that the applause can sound like absolution and it should not be.” –Aaron Gilbreath

In his essay, Hylton recounts being physically beaten by his cousin in an unprovoked attack. The piece also weaves in the deterioration, over a decade, of Hilton’s marriage, and examines how masculinity and the ideas around masculinity were a factor in both events.

The team discusses why these types of intimate family violence stories elicit a different reaction when written by women versus men and the tension surrounding the question of whom toxic masculinity hurts more: men or women?

11:06 “Going Under at the Playboy Club
(Josephine Livingstone, May 8, 2019, The New Republic)

“I think the thing we’re struggling over is intentional. Whether it was in 1963 or now, the idea that these women, these waiters, might sleep with you, is a big part of the business that is being sold.” –Kelly Stout

A follow-up to Gloria Steinem’s “A Bunny’s Tale” written in 1963, Livingstone’s piece is in explicit conversation with Steinem’s while grappling with gender performance at a place like The Playboy Club. The piece looks at how both writers examine how the playboy culture and the public conversation around it have changed in the ensuing years.

The team touches on the economic dynamics at play in the piece and “the strange thorny mix of labor and gender representation issues.” They talk about performances of gender and interrogating our reactions to these performances. Finally they look at Livingstone’s and Steinem’s roles as both participants and observers and the inherent reductionist problem of journalism’s assumption that a particular glimpse into a world is more full than it is.

23:20How America’s Oldest Gun Maker Went Bankrupt: A Financial Engineering Mystery”
(Jesse Barron, May 1, 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

“A story nominally about guns that really isn’t about guns at all.” –Ethan Chiel

Gun manufacturer Remington was bought by a private equity firm who moved manufacturing to Alabama and, in the process, pushed the company to bankruptcy. It’s a story about debt and finance and municipal government that looks at how when debt transfer is dressed up as job creation, responsibility is lost.

The team discusses the complex machinations of American finance and how the actual functioning of a company doesn’t always have to do with whether they live or die. Meanwhile, people’s belief that these things are happening in the free market, that meritocracy and supply and demand are the only things dictating whether companies survive, obscures what is really happening while allowing us to feel protected.

33:10The Race to Develop the Moon
(Rivka Galchen, April 29, 2019, The New Yorker)

“For fresh starts we used to have California, go west. Now we go up to the moon.” –Aaron Gilbreath

Galchen explores a renewed interest in the moon by China, Japan, Isreal, India, the EU, and the US. Not as a place to stake a claim for political reasons, as it was in the 60s and 70s, but as a place to exploit and monetize resources and start businesses.

The team discusses what might happen if we take our capitalist, resource-exploiting culture beyond our planet and whether we can bring our ability to observe and reflect on the human experience with us as well.

* * *

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Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun

Henry Griffin / AP

Sean Howe | Longreads | May 2019 |  15 minutes (3,853 words)

In November 2018, after the Secret Service seized the security credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, the White House Press Secretary stated the reason for the revocation was that the administration would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Within hours, attorney Ted Boutrous responded on Twitter:
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