Search Results for: D Magazine

The Manhandling of Rock ‘N’ Roll History

The Runaways backstage in Ohio, January 1, 1977. From left to right: Cherie Currie, Jackie Fox, Lita Ford, Sandy West, and Joan Jett. Photo by Waring Abbott/Getty Images

Evelyn McDonnell | Longreads | March 2019 | 11 minutes (2,166 words)

 

When Janelle Monae inducts Janet Jackson into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on March 29, it will be a beautiful moment: a young, gifted, and black woman acknowledging the formative influence — on herself and millions of others — of a woman who seized Control of her own career 33 years ago. It will also be an anomaly.

Jackson is one of only two women being inducted into the hall this year, out of 37 inductees, including the members of the five all-male bands being inducted. The other woman is Stevie Nicks. During the 34 years since the hall was founded by Jann Wenner and Ahmet Ertegun, 888 people have been inducted; 69 have been women. That’s 7.7 percent. The problem is spreading.

Read more…

‘Intelligent Education’ and China’s Grand AI Experiment

Imagine a world where cameras capture bird’s-eye-view footage of thousands of classrooms, in which every student is recognized, recorded, and assigned scores simply based on their positions and facial expressions. While it sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, this type of surveillance is happening now in China, in pilot programs at seven schools serving a total of 28,000 students. At The Disconnect, an offline-only magazine, Yujie Xue takes a look at the facial recognition technology and “intelligent education” initiative that China’s government hopes will boost the country’s education system.

Zhang takes out his phone and logs into a user account on CCS’s mobile app. The account belongs to a teacher at Chifeng No. 4 Middle School in the city of Chifeng in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The interface allows teachers to view scores for every student in class. A green down arrow appears next to the student’s score when it decreases, and a red up arrow when it increases. A bar graph shows how many minutes the student spent concentrating, sleeping, or talking in class.

“The parents can see it, too,” Zhang says, tapping on a student’s name. “For example, this student’s report shows that he rarely volunteers to answer the teacher’s questions in class. So his participation in English class is marked as low. Number of questions answered: one,” Zhang reads from the AI-generated report. “This week, the student spent 94.08 percent of class time focusing. His grade average is 84.64 percent. He spent 4.65 percent of the time writing, which was 10.57 percent lower than the grade average.”

Hangzhou No. 11 uses the “smart classroom behavioral management system” developed by Hangzhou-based Hikvision, the world’s largest manufacturer of video surveillance equipment. Like CCS, Hikvision’s facial recognition technology also monitors students using cameras installed above each classroom’s blackboard. In addition to in-class behaviors, which are divided into six categories—reading, writing, listening, standing up, raising hands, and lying on the desk—Hikvision also identifies seven different facial expressions: neutral, happy, sad, disappointed, angry, scared, and surprised. The data is used to generate a student’s score, which is displayed on a screen installed on the wall of each classroom. Each class’s overall attention level also displays on a huge screen in the hallway for the whole school to compare and rank.

One anonymous Hangzhou No. 11 student I found on the internet tells me she felt shocked and scared when the teacher demonstrated the system in front of the whole class. “The camera can magnify 25 times of what it captures,” she says, adding “It can see not only your face, but the characters on your notebook. After all, it’s from Hikvision.” Another student tells me his classmates were totally “crushed” after the installation of the system. Because the system gives students a public score, he and his classmates don’t dare nap or even yawn in class for fear of being penalized, an incentive that doesn’t necessarily increase focus on learning. In fact, the students spend their time focusing on staying awake until class ends. “Nobody leaves the classroom during the class break,” he says. “We all collapse on the desks, sleeping.”

Read the story

On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness

A 37-meter-long floating sculpture by U.S. artist Kaws in Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong, March 2019. (Imaginechina via AP Images)

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 7 minutes (2,006 words)

In 1995, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. In 1996, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. In 1997, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. That is: Two cop shows set in New York, two medical shows set in Chicago, and some aliens, spread across four networks, represented the height and breadth of the art form for three years running.

I literally just copied that entire first paragraph from a Deadspin article written by Sean T. Collins. It appeared last week, when every site seemed to be writing about Netflix. His was the best piece. Somehow, within that flood of Netflix content, everyone found that article — it has almost 300,000 page views. I may as well have copied it for all the traffic my actual column — which was not about Netflix — got.

There was definitely a twang of why bother? while I was writing last week, just as there is every week. Why bother, and Jesus Christ, why am I not faster? The web once made something of a biblical promise to give all of us a voice, but in the ensuing flood — and the ensuing floods after that — only a few bobbed to the top. With increased diversity, this hasn’t changed — there are more diverse voices, but the same ones float up each time. There remains a tension that critics, and the larger media, must balance, reflecting what’s in the culture in all its repetitive glory while also nudging it toward the future. But we are repeatedly failing at this by repeatedly drowning ourselves in the first part. This is flooding (a term I just coined, so I would know): the practice of unleashing a mass torrent of the same stories by the same storytellers at the same time, making it almost impossible for anyone but the same select few to rise to the surface.
Read more…

The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | March 2019 | 11 minutes (3,057 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
The antihero shows of the early aughts relied on wives as antagonists. A wife became another hurdle to leap in her husband’s quest to run a criminal organization/become an undisputed drug king/sleep with whomever he wanted in an attempt to outrun his past. More recently, however, there have been shows that seem to push back on the impulse to pit husbands and wives against each other. What if, they asked, an antihero and his wife were partners instead of rivals? But in giving their wives a promotion of sorts, shows like Ozark and House of Cards also open the door to female ambition, which can become as problematic for fictional women as it has been for their real-life counterparts.

The first post in this series, “The Blaming of the Shrew,” discusses Breaking Bad’s Skyler White, among other TV wives.

The first episode of Netflix’s Ozark follows the antihero script to a T. It’s all there: a talented main character, a sad backstory to which we slowly become privy, and foils more villainous by several degrees designed to make our main guy look good in comparison. That guy is Marty Byrde, a financial planner who launders money for the second largest drug cartel in Mexico. His wife Wendy is initially set up as the Skyler to Marty’s Walt: her days are all Costco, Zumba, and cheating on her husband with a man she calls “Sugarwood.” Soon after we meet Marty, he fantasizes about an encounter with a prostitute that gets oddly specific about his life: “Let me guess, your wife won’t do what you want her to do. If you were my man, working all day so I could stay at home — which, uh, let’s face it, it was a bitch when they were little but now they’re both teens and in school all day … not only would I not cheat on you, I’d let you do anything you wanted.” This is the kind of interiority, indispensable to the antihero genre, that lets us know that Marty is doing everything right despite Wendy’s worst efforts.

But when Marty is forced to move his family to southern Missouri and launder $8 million to save them from the cartel, Wendy shifts from antagonist to helpmate. She isn’t excited about the plan but, unlike antihero wives of yore, she hasn’t been kept in the dark about Marty’s criminality and she willingly presents a united front to their children and the FBI. The important thing, Wendy and Marty agree, is that the family stays together and safe, and they’re prepared to do anything to keep it that way. Family as sacrosanct, as the highest good, is a theme of this show. Versions of “I did it for our family” are repeated like a mantra throughout the series. Marty and Wendy both use it as a rhetorical justification and also as a kind of mystical prayer meant to insulate them from their own internal critics.

Ozark offers us an antihero team but finds a different way to humanize a flawed man, with a wife so helpful that she eclipses the antihero himself.

By season two, however, the family becomes a battleground, with Marty and Wendy developing a low-grade rivalry. They operate less as a team than as dueling pianos, each taking turns making decisions “for the good of the family” without consulting the other. It turns out that Wendy has her own expertise to contribute from her years working in Chicago politics, which makes their partnership more equal but also more fraught, and the show’s almost pathological focus on the family becomes yet another way to make an antagonist out of a wife. Ozark’s initial bait and switch turns Wendy from an antagonist into a helpmate who recognizes the necessity of her husband’s infelicities but a more cunning reversal has Marty become the one to stand in opposition to the show’s plotline. The final episodes of season two see him preparing an escape plan for his family only to be thwarted by his wife, who makes the unilateral decision that they will stay. It’s not clear when Wendy makes the decision because she doesn’t get the kind of interiority that Marty does — only long, meaningful looks out onto the horizon. Naturally, she frames the decision as the best thing for their family. But the show’s writers have already given Marty the insight that this kind of rationalization, the very premise of the show, has been undermined: “We’re not fit to be parents. It’s not even a family, it’s a goddamn group of criminals.”

Explaining her decision to stay in the Ozarks, in danger, in criminality, Wendy says: “This is who I am, and this is who I want to be.” Marty was only ever portrayed as a reluctant criminal, a serf in service to his family. Wendy’s first-person declaration is ambition, which we should know by now isn’t usually a good look on a woman. Ozark offers us an antihero team but finds a different way to humanize a flawed man, with a wife so helpful that she eclipses the antihero himself. It turns Marty into the hero who wants to save his family, if only his wife would let him.

* * *

Wendy Byrde isn’t the first wife of an antihero to have higher aspirations. House of Cards was always a show about two people with naked ambition. Frank and Claire Underwood didn’t have any children so their nefarious deeds were never in the service of providing for, or saving, anyone other than themselves. They wanted power and they were going to get it as a team. Until they weren’t. Things start to unravel at the end of season three. Frank walks into the Oval Office to find Claire sitting behind the desk: “Look at us, Francis, we used to make each other stronger, or at least I thought so, but that was a lie. We were making you strong and now I’m just weak and small and I can’t stand that feeling any longer.” House of Cards could be extremely woke about power and gender. More than any other antihero show, it seemed to be aware of the conventions of its genre and what those conventions meant for women. What family is for Ozark, power was for House of Cards, and it recognized what it meant to want power as a man and as a woman, that there was a difference between the two. The show could also be extremely meta, especially the final season, in which lines like “Are you telling me she knew nothing of what he was up to?” and “Are you even capable of defining her on her own terms?” could be talking about the characters, the actors who play them, or the tropes they were called on to embody for six seasons.

If nothing else, the power struggles between the two Underwoods over the course of the series can help us see how the roles of antihero’s wife and politician’s wife overlap. Both kinds of wives are at once essential to their husbands’ stories and outside of them. They are tasked with humanizing the men with whom they partner, but it is understood that the partnership is premised on a withholding of their own humanity; their story must remain the B plot. So when House of Cards suddenly found itself an antihero show without an antihero, you would think the solution would have been simple since, as it turned out, Claire’s ambition was to become a main character.

And an antihero marriage, like a political campaign, does not easily accommodate a woman at the top of the ticket.

Claire’s struggle to move beyond the helpmate/antagonist paradigm of her foremothers and become the antihero of her show is a major plot point of the show’s later seasons. The season four finale has Claire and Frank look at the camera together, her first fourth wall break. This is Frank’s signature move so there is reason to believe that Claire is finally gaining the strength she craves. And, indeed, season five in many ways seemed to be about setting the stage for Claire to eclipse her husband. This is signified, in the show’s mallet-to-the-head way, by Frank’s fascination with the app that turns his face into Claire’s and back again. But there continues to be friction: “We have one rule Francis,” Claire rails, “I cannot be your ally if I don’t know what you’re thinking … You should have talked to me instead of making a last-minute decision like this.” Frank has just let her in on his plan to resign the presidency and make Claire the leader of the free world. You would think Claire would be pleased with this turn of events but she knows, as we do from Ozark, that where you are matters less than who made the decision to put you there.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Just as concepts like “leader” and “free world” don’t mean quite what they used to, so too Frank has emptied out the presidency of its power before handing it over to Claire. “Where does the real power lie? The power behind the power?” he asks. The answer is the private sector, the existence of which the supposedly brilliant politician Frank Underwood is apparently just learning. Exaggerated eyerolls aside, this show is one in which a woman finally gets her hands on some agency, only to discover that the rules have changed and she’s not holding anything at all. “It’s no longer about who lives in the White House,” Frank’s civic lesson continues, “it’s about who owns the White House … the real power isn’t here.” And when he says, “I wanted you to be the president, I’ve made you the president,” Claire realizes that for an antihero and his wife, there is no such thing as equal partnership. And an antihero marriage, like a political campaign, does not easily accommodate a woman at the top of the ticket. While wives may humanize presidents and antiheroes alike, for this wife at least, a husband is only a liability.

So season five ends with Claire ignoring Frank’s calls about a presidential pardon and turning to the camera to declare: “my turn.” This could have become more true than anyone had planned once the allegations against Kevin Spacey became public and Netflix cut ties with him when the show was already into production on season six. But the show wasn’t prepared to become a female antihero show. Frank had already told us that “If she doesn’t pardon me, I’ll kill her,” and season six was supposed to be a showdown between the two Underwoods. Instead of coming up with a new story line, we get Frank by proxy. Unable to use his face or his voice, the show’s writers turn Frank into a series of human horcruxes, transposing his malintent onto several new characters we are supposed to care about but don’t. Oh, and Doug. Poor loyal, murderous Doug, who is like if the legion of antihero fans sticking with Tony, Walt, and Don to the bitter end became one person with a weakness for sad brunettes. While the final season can identify the predicament of the antihero’s wife who yearns to break free — it begins with a reading of threatening tweets and other online content, including a contest for the most creative way to kill Claire — it never comes close to resolving it. Instead it centers on Frank’s absence. Claire spends most of her time as commander-in-chief trying to figure out how to distance herself from Frank’s crimes and escape Frank’s shadowy posthumous vendetta against her. She never gets a chance to be a president, or an antihero, on her own terms.

Even when Claire makes it to the Oval Office, she is only, as Frank tells her in their very last conversation, ‘the most powerful woman in the world.’

It wasn’t just the writers who couldn’t seem to let Frank go. In December of last year, Kevin Spacey, who had no qualms about using Frank’s face or voice, released a video in which he blurred the line between himself and the character he played for five seasons. Looking straight into the camera, he attempted to recreate the camaraderie with the audience that made his House of Cards character so unique and effective:

I know what you want. Oh sure, they may have tried to separate us but what we have is too strong, it’s too powerful. I mean after all, we shared everything, you and I. I told you my deepest darkest secrets. I showed you exactly what people are capable of. I shocked you with my honesty, but mostly I challenged you and made you think. And you trusted me even though you knew you shouldn’t.

This is Frank’s shtick of making us feel like we’re in on a secret while also implicating us in the violence necessary to keep it. Spacey’s inhabiting of his character as a response to the real-life allegations against him shines an unflattering light on the cultural power of the antihero, particularly our complicity in enabling bad behavior if the person is good enough at what they do. In taking his case to the public this way, Spacey was betting on the magnetism of the fictional Frank Underwood to insulate the real-life Kevin Spacey from the bad things he did, kind of like what must have happened during the first season of House of Cards, when he had only to participate in a “training process” after allegedly harassing someone on set, a training that does not seem to have had its desired effect. The sheer brazenness of the video, that it ends with a play for a Spacey-led House of Cards revival (“wait a minute, now that I think of it, you never actually saw me die, did you? Conclusions can be so deceiving”) and hit the internet on the very day that it was announced that he would be charged with indecent assault and battery, suggests that Spacey must have really believed that his character could save his career. The video has almost 250,000 likes, which isn’t enough to bring Frank Underwood back from the dead, but is yet another testament to the power of the male antihero — in this case the character and the man who plays him — to command adoration in spite of the destruction he leaves in his wake.

The Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood mash-up video can’t help but point out that “all this presumption made for such an unsatisfying ending,” an opinion held by mostly everyone. But what was it that made the final season so anticlimactic? Was it, as Kevin/Frank implied, the absence of its antihero? Was it because, as FX network president John Landgraf argued back in 2013, a female antihero just isn’t the same? Is the antihero genre, ultimately, a male one? Kind of. Like presidential politics, antihero shows have been built for men. Claire never got a clean break and she spent the final season fighting off the ghost of Frank. But even if she had, the show was never calibrated to make her its centerpiece. In an interview with the magazine Capitol File, Robin Wright recounts that the only note David Fincher gave her when she started on the show was to be still:

People were suggesting to base the character on Hillary Clinton or other strong women personas, and I didn’t want to do that. When we shot the first couple of scenes, David would come over to me and say, “Don’t move. Don’t move. Claire is a bust.”

Statues are memories of heroes, not the heroes themselves. House of Cards was built around Frank’s dynamism; Claire’s steely mystery could stoke or temper that dynamism but was meant to always exist alongside it. The show was about seeing Frank work and he kept us close, bringing us in and making us complicit. Even after Claire promises us that it’s going to be different (“I’m going to tell you the truth”), she keeps us at a distance. This is partially because the show wants to preserve the mystery of who killed Frank until the very end, but it’s also because that’s who Claire has always been: a stoic and a secret keeper. Instead of finding the right formula that would allow her to become the antihero she’s always wanted to be, the show shoehorns her into Frank’s.

* * *

In writing wives who don’t fit neatly into the antagonist/enabler binary of shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, Ozark and House of Cards allow them to operate in the gray alongside their husbands. By bringing their wives into the fold instead of shutting them out, these shows get us thinking about what would have to be true for a woman to step into the role of an antihero herself. But while both give their wives more to do and the ability to exercise their own ambition, they ultimately handicap that ambition. Even when Claire makes it to the Oval Office, she is only, as Frank tells her in their very last conversation, “the most powerful woman in the world.” For the wife of an antihero, the glass ceiling is her husband. Perhaps Ozark will surprise us and turn Wendy into the show’s new antihero rather than an antagonist standing in the way of her family’s well-being, but season two hinted at the way a wife in control might go. Local drug lords Jacob and Darlene Snell are two of the more villainy foils who serve to humanize Marty and Wendy in season one. They initially operate as a well-oiled machine: when he asks for more lemonade, she knows it’s time to murder the man who launders their money through a strip club. But eventually, caught in a standoff with the cartel, the fissures appear. Darlene wants to keep fighting while Jacob wants to live in peace. “What do you do, Martin,” Jacob asks, “when the bride who took your breath away becomes the wife who makes you hold your breath in terror?” The show has already emphasized the parallels between the two couples: “What deals did you just make behind my back?” Darlene asks Jacob; “You made these plans without me?” Wendy demands of Marty. Darlene out-villains her husband, killing him before he can kill her, and the Snells’ storyline influences how we see Wendy’s season two arc. The lesson is that your helpmate can eventually become your killer and what is exciting and intoxicating in a man — quick thinking and smart, strategic maneuvering — is off-putting and unsettling in his wife.

Is there any hope for the wife of an antihero? Will we ever see a female antihero we can actually root for? Does having a family make a female antihero more effective, or less? Does Soviet Russia hold the key to one or all of these questions? Maybe! Tune in to the next installment on The Americans.
 

The first installment in this series: The Blaming of the Shrew

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in LongreadsThe RumpusTablet, and Lilith.

 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

‘Imagine Us, Because We’re Here’: An Interview with Mira Jacob

Mira Jacob / One World

Naomi Elias | Longreads | March 2019 | 18 minutes (4,793 words)

Nearly five years after the release of her award-winning debut novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, Mira Jacob returns with a graphic memoir, Good Talk: A Memoir In Conversations (One World, 2019). Jacob tells the story of her life in a series of conversations between illustrated figures of the author and her constant companion, her son, who is six-years-old at the beginning of the book and is referred to as Z throughout. Z’s hyper-observant nature leads him to ask complicated questions about race and politics the likes of which Jacob first illustrated for BuzzFeed in a 2015 graphic article entitled “37 Difficult Questions From My Mixed Race Son” that quickly went viral. The resulting memoir is a stunning achievement — it’s already being developed into a TV series — that offers a look at America through the eyes of three generations of Jacob’s family: herself, her Syrian Christian immigrant parents, and her mixed race son whom she is raising in Brooklyn with her husband Jed Rothstein, a white Jewish documentary filmmaker.

Jacob’s tracing of her family’s history in this country — from the start of her parents’ immigration story, to meeting and falling for her husband, to the present day where she is raising a brown son in Trump’s America — is a resonant testimony to how difficult but necessary it is to find and fight for your place in the world. In a heartfelt address delivered to her son in Good Talk, Jacob neatly condenses the existential dilemma that is the crux of the memoir: “I can’t protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one.”

While framed by Jacob’s conversations with her son, the book spans several different pivotal periods in the Indian-American author’s life. Jacob takes us time-traveling through her early years growing up in New Mexico as the daughter of immigrant parents, invites us to relive her dating foibles, walks us through the highs and lows of her early career as a writer in New York, and lets us overhear intimate conversations she’s had with her husband about how to nurture and protect their interracial family. Each period we revisit is filled with revealing snapshots — sometimes literally when Jacob shares actual family photos — of the type of life she lived and the people and experiences that shaped who she has become. Like any good conversation, the book is generously punctuated by humor, has an effortless flow, and is more concerned with thoughtfully exploring questions than in arriving at definitive answers. Read more…

And They Do Not Stop Until Dusk

"Rats" (Ildikó Regényi / the György Román Estate)

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | March 2019 | 14 minutes (3,722 words)


“I beheld thee rich in sorrow,
Graceful in the bloom of youth,
Where, like gold within the mountain
In the heart lies faith and truth,
On the Danube,
On the Danube, bright and blue.”
—Karl Isidor Beck, “On the Danube”

“At last I penetrate into the distance, into the soundproof blue of nostalgias.” —Jean Arp

*

I have an adolescent memory of walking along a lake near my Massachusetts home and finding a child’s blackened shoe caught in the murky inch of water at the shore. I knew that not long ago a pilot had died crashing a single-seat Cessna into this same lake, and I had lately been looking at piles of shoes as part of the school’s Holocaust curriculum. The combination of these two facts — totally unrelated — filled me with deep dread, and I turned around and hurried back to my family.

Artist György Román’s childhood was characterized by such dread. The painter was born in Budapest in 1903 and suffered a bout of meningitis in 1905 which left him deaf and temporarily paralyzed in both legs. As a result, “his mind was swamped in the chaos of meanings around visual images,” writes Marianna Kolozsváry in her monograph of the artist. (Kolozsváry’s father was one of Román’s first collectors.) Although Román regained use of his legs, he was deaf for the rest of his life.

Out of vivid dreams and passive observation of the surrounding world, Román formed his own vernacular of symbols and omens. Cats, monkeys, carnivals, and men in mustaches were imbued with evil intentions and disease. The glowing red signage of shops and brothels were both indistinguishable and sinister. Toy soldiers were the protagonists of this world.

The Hungarian actor Miklós Gábor wrote of Román’s work, “He paints dreams, but he is not a surrealist. He paints naively, but he is not a naive painter. He is a clever man, but not intellectual. He sees nightmares, but he is no expressionist.” Read more…

Memoirs of a Used Car Salesman’s Daughter

Chris Ison/PA Wire

Nancy A. Nichols | True Story | January 2018 | 35 minutes (7,098 words)

 

Back in the 1920s, my father’s brother, Donny, was killed at the age of seven in an accident of some kind. Exactly what happened has never been clear.

My father told many versions of this story. He used to say that an older boy had been playing with his little brother, and there was a rope around Donny’s waist. Donny was playing the part of the pony, and the older boy was riding him. In one version of the story, the older boy pulled the rope, and the little boy crashed into the curb and died almost instantaneously. In another version, Donny broke free and ran into the street, where he was hit and killed. Sometimes the older boy was my father; sometimes it wasn’t.

Read more…

The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On the Hudson

A demonstration near the German ocean liner SS Bremen in New York, after Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador to Germany was recalled in the wake of Kristallnacht, 1938. (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Peter Duffy | An excerpt adapted from The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising Against Nazism | PublicAffairs | March 2019 | 20 minutes (5,458 words)


Hear it, boys, hear it? Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA!
—Clifford Odets, Waiting For Lefty

Seven million New Yorkers, few of them in possession of the luxury item known as an electric fan, woke up to the best news in three weeks on Friday, July 26, 1935. During the overnight hours, the humidity plunged by 33 points. By sunrise, the temperate air from Canada had completed its work. The heat wave was over.

“Humidity Goes Into Tailspin,” the New York Post exulted. “Rain Ushers in Cool Spell,” declared the Brooklyn Eagle.

The New York Times and Herald Tribune didn’t make much of a fuss that morning over Varian Fry’s revelations about his conversation with Ernst Hanfstaengl. “Reich Divided on Way to Treat Jews, Says Fry,” was the cautious headline on page eleven of the Tribune. One faction of the Nazi Party, the paper went on in summary of Hanfstaengl’s comments to Fry, “were the radicals, who wanted to settle the matter by blood.” The other, “the self-styled moderate group,” wanted to “segregate the Jews and settle the question by legal methods.” The Times ran its version on page eight and devoted most of the article to Fry’s retelling of the Berlin Riots. “There were literally hundreds of policemen standing around but I did not see them do anything but protect certain cafés which I was told were owned by Nazis,” Fry was quoted as saying. The paper saved its preview of the Holocaust for the ninth of eleven paragraphs. The nation’s newspaper of record didn’t see the value in highlighting the disclosure that “the radical section” of Hitler’s regime “desired to solve the Jewish question with bloodshed.”

Reached for comment in Berlin, Hanfstaengl called Fry’s account “fictions and lies from start to finish.” Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Kurt Hutton / Picture Post / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Angella d’Avignon, Katie Englehart, Caitlin Dewey, Eric Benson, Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom. 

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

The Makeover Scene Gets a Makeover

Natalie Seery / Netflix, Allyson Riggs / Hulu, Richard Shotwell / Invision / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,283 words)

There’s a thing my psychiatrist likes to say in response to anyone who hints at the idea that they might one day be cured of whatever it is that makes them who they are: Weave your parachute every day; don’t wait until you need to jump out of the plane. It’s a paraphrased quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn, widely recognized as the father of mindfulness in the clinical sphere (this involves the secular meditation you get in a hospital as opposed to a yoga studio, though it is originally adapted from Buddhism). The program he developed in the ’70s, mindfulness-based stress reduction, is used for everything from pain and depression to what I have, which is severe anxiety. It’s kind of hard to explain what the program looks like practically, but basically, it’s rooted in meditation that cultivates awareness of your thoughts and your body, which ultimately allows you to choose your actions more deliberately. To an extent. Mindfulness doesn’t exactly alter how you think — a lot of shitty thoughts are just kind of automatic — and it doesn’t modify your fundamental personality. But it gives you a modicum of choice.

I’ve been doing this for five years and I will have to keep doing it until I’m dead. I’m not jazzed about it either. The point — and the point of that parachute quote — is that this is an ongoing, lifelong thing. It does not take three hours, it does not take a week. Those units of time may sound arbitrary but they refer to three recent examples of self-actualization presented as a switch, as something you can virtually just decide. Most notably, Shrill, the Hulu series adapted from Lindy West’s Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, in which Aidy Bryant plays a fat pushover who in six 30-minute episodes learns to stand up for herself. But also After Life, Ricky Gervais’s Netflix series — also made up of six 30-minute episodes — in which a grieving widower with no filter learns how to be happy again. And Queer Eye, the reboot that just returned to Netflix for a third season, which follows eight people learning how to love themselves … inside of a week. Read more…