Search Results for: DNA

Stripped: The Search for Human Rights in US Women’s Prisons

Illustration by Wenjia Tang

Adam Skolnick | Longreads | September 2018 | 36 minutes (9,904 words)

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“God’s mercies are infinite. They are new every morning.”
— Lamentations 3:23

Though its pews were packed, the courtroom was silent as a sanctuary. Most onlookers who filed into Pierce County Superior Court in Tacoma, Washington, on January 25, 2013, were residents of nearby Gig Harbor, a community shaken by a shocking crime, here for the final act: the sentencing.

In the front row, Kay Nelson watched nervously as her sister, Karen Lofgren, the defendant, prepared to make her final statement. The sisters lived two streets apart. Nelson’s children were like older siblings to Lofgren’s two daughters, who were just 6 and 9 years old. Conservative and Christian, Nelson had always been an advocate for tougher crime laws, and until her sister landed in Lady Justice’s crosshairs, she could have never fathomed praying for a judge in criminal court to show mercy on her behalf.

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Inside the Belly of the Beast: How the Burmese Python is Decimating Bird and Small Mammal Populations in Florida

HOMESTEAD, FL - FEBRUARY 20: 'The Invasives'. Scenes around the Florida Everglades on February 20, 2014 in Homestead, Florida. Captain Jeffrey Fobb of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department is in charge of the Venom Response unit. Here he handles a captured Burmese Python that he brought down from a tree. (Photo by Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)

At Audubon, Chris Sweeney reports on how large reptiles like the Nile monitor and the Argentine tegu — brought to the United States and sold via the very loosely regulated reptile pet trade — have escaped and flourished in Florida’s subtropical environment, wreaking havoc on bird species like the burrowing owl as well as “herons, egrets, ibises, and spoonbills.” The grand-daddy of all the invasive reptiles? The Burmese python, which can grow to 18 feet and is thought to have “decimated the small mammal population in the Everglades.” Burmese pythons have been known to eat “everything — rabbits, rats, bobcats, deer, even alligators.”

It’s a sweaty morning last June on the outskirts of Tampa, and droves of reptile enthusiasts are streaming into an air-conditioned expo center. Some have woken early to trek out to the Florida State Fairgrounds to get first crack at the animals of Repticon, a weekendlong extravaganza that’s similar to a baseball card convention, except instead of mint-condition Mickey Mantles and Pete Roses there are green anacondas and meat-eating lizards. One vendor’s table is covered in flimsy plastic catering trays that are filled with ball pythons. Others are selling Asian water monitors, gargoyle geckos, yellow rat snakes, and bearded dragons. A guy strolls by wearing a “Snakes Lives Matter” t-shirt. Another man, who has a three-foot-long lizard slung across his chest like a bandolier, is at a nearby booth admiring a young boa constrictor that’s twirling around his girlfriend’s fingers. Price? $100. Sold.

Roughly 60 Repticons take place each year, from Phoenix to Oklahoma City to Baltimore, attracting an estimated 200,000 visitors. These shows represent but a tiny sliver of the live-reptile trade, a loosely regulated industry that spans the globe and generates an estimated $1.2 billion in revenue annually, according to the United States Association of Reptile Keepers. In much of the continental United States, these cold-blooded creatures aren’t likely to fare well outdoors should they escape or be set free. But the sub-tropics of South Florida are different, and the best adapted have not only survived in the wild, they have thrived. To date the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, or FWC, has identified 50 types of non-native lizards, turtles, crocodilians, and snakes within state limits, more than anywhere else in the world.

For the birds of Florida, this blitz of exotic predators poses an existential-scale threat. The Burmese pythons, which stalk wading birds in the Everglades, have become so menacing that the state has hosted derby-style competitions to catch them. Farther north, Nile monitors—the largest lizard in Africa—have been terrorizing a population of Burrowing Owls in the city of Cape Coral. And on the outskirts of Florida City, just outside Everglades National Park, egg-eating Argentine tegus could soon raid the nesting grounds of one of the last remaining populations of the endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow. Each of these reptiles found their way to Florida via the pet trade—but while most people acknowledge that’s a leaky pipeline, few agree on whether and how to plug it.

Nile monitors have no business in this hemisphere. As their name implies, they should be basking along the shores of Africa’s Nile Delta, but they got popular in the pet trade and rumor has it that the owner of a now defunct pet store, scheming a source of free inventory, let some loose behind his shop so they would breed in the wild. Unsurprisingly the lizards quickly fanned out across Cape Coral’s extensive canal system. The first sighting likely dates back to before 1990, though it wasn’t until the early 2000s that they began regularly popping up in people’s backyards. If you’re not accustomed to large lizards, an adult Nile monitor dashing across your lawn might be terrifying. They can top seven feet, swim like Michael Phelps, and eat rodents, birds, rabbits, wasp nests, venomous rattlesnakes, poisonous cane toads, and, according to some residents, cats and dogs.

“Pythons are definitely eating birds,” says Brian Smith, a biologist who works for Cherokee Nation Technologies, a company contracted by the United States Geological Survey to help manage the invasive Burmese python population. A few years ago, Smith went to capture a python in Everglades National Park. The snake was in a shallow marsh and Smith noticed a bulge in its stomach. He moved in and grabbed the python near the base of its head. Suddenly two bird feet popped out of the snake’s mouth. A moment later, another two feet shot out. The snake writhed and in one fell swoop regurgitated a pair of full-grown Great Blue Herons. Smith couldn’t believe his eyes as the corpses poured out and flopped to the ground. Both birds’ heads were missing; other than that the animals were intact and easy to identify.

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Above It All: How the Court Got So Supreme

Robert Alexander / Getty

David A. Kaplan | The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court’s Assault on the Constitution | Crown | September 2018 | 19 minutes (4,985 words)

Nine mornings after Antonin Scalia died at Cíbolo Creek, the justices resumed work without their beloved, blustery colleague. The rich traditions of the Court continued unabated. After the justices all shook hands in the small robing room across the hallway from the back of the courtroom, they lined up to await the gavel of the marshal. The assembled throng grew silent, then arose. “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the marshal chanted at the stroke of 10, as always. The eight justices emerged from behind the tall crimson velvet drapes and somberly took their upholstered swivel chairs on the bench. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting,” the marshal continued. “God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”

It’s an opening worthy of “Hail to the Chief,” the introductory anthem for the leader of another branch of the federal government. It’s all carefully choreographed. The justices don’t merely walk in, and they’re not already seated when Court begins. From different curtains, they materialize in unison, in three groups based on where they sit. As institutional stagecraft goes, the Court puts on quite a show. Read more…

Having the Wrong Conversations about Hate Activity

Illustration by Greta Kotz

Anonymous | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (4,750 words)

 

An editor asked me for an essay about porches with an upbeat takeaway, and I thought about how porches let us navigate the zone between public and private life and connect. But I’d just sat on my porch in Texas and had conversations that sent me back inside, feeling scalded. My small talk had taken a dark turn, my fault. Most people can’t hear about trouble without suggesting a quick fix because they want you to feel better. I tried to write about porches and ended up writing about social life. I tried to write about social life and ended up writing about social media, where we also navigate the zone between public and private life and connect. Or don’t. On social media, our virtual porch, we converse with friends, friends of friends, the occasional somebody no one knows, and decide who to wave over and who to dodge. People to avoid weren’t easily detectable. I couldn’t tell except in meandering conversation. They seemed like people who might be companions, consolation. And they looked like me, white. My daughter is black.

***

An early inkling of trouble occurred on November 11, 2016, the first Friday night after the presidential election. She was two hours away, a college freshman in east Texas. While she was sleeping, her car was jumped on or slammed with a blunt instrument, painted with a slur (your first guess is correct), festooned with posters on which the slogan “Make America Great Again” had been altered to read “Make America White Again.”

The door to her college-owned student apartment was vandalized too. Other black students in the building woke to find their cars and doors vandalized. It seemed obvious that some white students, neighbors, had made note of black students coming and going, who lived where and drove what. Otherwise how could vandals (is that the word?) have known which cars and apartments to target? This inference might seem like overthinking it, a sin in the annals of self-help. But it was my first thought, and the first thought mothers of my daughter’s black college friends had too. Our children had been under surveillance, however inexpert, added to a list.

A friend: “But your insurance will cover it, right?”

Another: “Yes, we all feel bad the country is so misogynist it wouldn’t elect a woman.”

For months I’d watched as one candidate first descended into his campaign via an escalator, then deeper and deeper into auditoriums in small cities across America where black people were shoved and punched, sometimes at the candidate’s urging. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on February 1, 2016: “Knock the crap out of him. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” About a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 21, 2015: “He should have been roughed up.” Sometimes blacks were ejected for being black. In Valdosta, Georgia, on March 1, 2016, black college students with no plans to protest were removed as whites yelled, “Go home, nigger.”

Pundits called this “dog-whistle racism,” as in only dogs hear it and come running and so, it follows, only racists hear it and come running. But it wasn’t muted. My daughter was born in 1997, a time after name-calling and reserving spaces as white-only had diminished to the point that, as sociologist Lawrence Bobo found, a majority of white Americans believed racism was rare. By the time my daughter was 10, the term “post-racial” had gained currency. Social scientists began to study implicit, systemic inequality and those barely articulated prejudices by which, in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s research, subjects describe themselves as not racist but explain lack of contact with people of color as “natural” and use terms like “unqualified” to describe them.

Eighteen years later, I worried my daughter wasn’t safe. Her property had been damaged. I hoped her corporeal self wouldn’t be. I hoped her incorporeal self wouldn’t be either, but concern for that shifted to the backburner. I was like the Ancient Mariner, who must have been good enough company once but can’t act normal now. As more bad events befell my daughter and people I knew, and people I ended up knowing, I ran into friends and neighbors whose lives proceeded as usual except for political outrage I shared, but theoretically not viscerally, and when they said “How are you?” en route to somewhere pleasant — like wedding guests on their way into a wedding — I detained them and recounted bad news.

My brain was overfilled with it and leaking.

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A Long, Lasting Influence on Educational Equity

Damian Strohmeyer / AP, Wikimedia Commons, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Anna Katherine Clemmons | Longreads | September 2018 | 27 minutes (7,413 words)

“Chris Long gave his paychecks from the first six games of the NFL season to fund scholarships in Charlottesville, VA. He wanted to do more, so he decided to give away an entire season’s salary. That’s a story from 2017.”

Barack Obama’s tweet, from December 29, 2017, was retweeted more than 66,000 times and received 268,000-plus likes. The message was one of several tweets in which President Obama shared stories that “remind us what’s best about America.”

Long announced on October 18, 2017, that in addition to donating his first six paychecks of the 2017 season to academic scholarships in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, he would also donate his final ten paychecks (a total base salary of around $1 million) to launch Pledge 10 For Tomorrow, a campaign to promote educational equity in the three cities where he’d played professional football — St. Louis, Boston, and Philadelphia. Ever since then, the Philadelphia Eagles defensive end has garnered national headlines and social media coverage, and appeared on talk shows. A reporter from one national outlet shadowed Long on that October day, chronicling how the NFL veteran spent his hours. For Long, who established his own philanthropic foundation in 2015 and who has donated to charitable endeavors throughout his now 11-year NFL career, the day was in many ways, decidedly ordinary.

“I had toyed with the idea [of donating my salary] when I wasn’t sure how badly I wanted to play last year,” Long, 33, says. “To be clear, no one over the age of thirty is that excited about playing another year, no matter what. So I thought, to make this year meaningful, it’d be cool to do something really impactful. It’d make it easier to come to work, and it’d be a good thing to do.”


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Other pro athletes have given millions of dollars to philanthropic causes over the years; the matching funds raised by Long’s Pledge 10 campaign generated another $1.3 million in donations, bringing the total raised to $1.75 million. However, the magnitude of Long’s actions, particularly in the wake of a tumultuous year of racial and social injustices that peaked with the events and violence on August 11 and 12 in Charlottesville, resonated beyond the professional sports sphere.

“When Charlottesville happened, that lit a fire under me,” Long says. “Our hometown has taken such a hit, so I needed to do something public and positive there. This is a time for people to do something positive in general.”

As 2018 began, mentions of Long’s philanthropy resumed, particularly after he became only the fourth player in NFL history to play in and win a second consecutive Super Bowl while playing for two different teams, this one as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles (he’d won a Super Bowl in 2017 with the New England Patriots).

But what hadn’t been written was an in-depth look at who those paycheck recipients were — and more importantly, what populations they serve in working toward education for all. Each nonprofit, selected by Long and his foundation director, Nicole Woodie, after months of research, interviews, and meetings, has made a significant impact not only in their respective cities, but throughout the country.

This is the story of those organizations — and why Long’s donations will have an influence long after he retires from football.

ST. LOUIS

On a cloudy Tuesday morning this June, several volunteers from the Little Bit Foundation and Bank of America stood outside Hodgen elementary school in St. Louis. Rain had poured down a half hour earlier; now, as the humidity remained, small puddles formed on sidewalks and in the pothole-ridden streets adjacent to the school. An elderly woman slowly approached a makeshift tent, under which 5,000 pounds of food had been laid out in bins and crates, cafeteria-style.

Lucy England, Little Bit’s volunteer manager, greeted the woman with a big hug. “Hello! Come on over and get some food!” England said, ushering the woman toward the stacks. The older woman filled two bags with sweet potatoes, watermelon, bread, and chicken, before thanking the volunteers and walking away.

Minutes later, a white pickup truck pulled up and two young men stepped out. As they talked with the volunteers, they filled five bags with food, noting that they planned to deliver some offerings to their neighbors.

The Little Bit Foundation’s Mobile Food Market, in partnership with the St. Louis Area Food Bank, runs the fourth Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of each month, from 9 a.m. to around 12 p.m., in three locations around St. Louis. The free, healthy grocery initiative is just one of the many programs supported by Little Bit, one of the two St. Louis–area nonprofit recipients of Long’s Pledge 10 initiative.

“The thing that’s lovely here is no one has to show any documentation — if you find your way here, you’re meant to be here,” England says. “We say, ‘You’re here, let’s get you loaded up. What do you like? What can you use?’ That really brings out the best in people — it’s empowering to have choices.”

Empowerment and choice is central to the work of the Little Bit Foundation, which serves children in poverty throughout the St. Louis area with an all-encompassing approach designed to address the needs of each child through a focus on academic enrichment, food access, health, and self-esteem. The idea behind Little Bit is simple: If children are warm, outfitted, clean, well-fed, and treated with love and kindness, they will perform better in school. So Little Bit provides books for children to read and new school supplies, outfits them with new socks, clothing, coats, and hygiene kits, offers health and dental screenings and mental health counseling, and provides nutritious food — all for free.

The thing that’s lovely here is no one has to show any documentation — if you find your way here, you’re meant to be here,” England says. “We say, ‘You’re here, let’s get you loaded up. What do you like? What can you use?’ That really brings out the best in people — it’s empowering to have choices.

The idea for Little Bit grew out of a simple request for coats. In 2001, the son of Little Bit’s executive director and cofounder Rosemary Hanley was playing on a high school soccer team, and the team’s head coach asked several parents to gather coats to donate as a community service project. Hanley spearheaded collection along with another parent, and the two distributed the coats to those in need.

An elementary school principal heard about what Hanley had done and asked if she could gather coats for his students. Again, Hanley went to work, asking friends to donate new and gently used coats. On a winter morning a day later, Hanley stood outside the elementary school with trash bags filled with almost 200 coats, waiting for the doors to open.

As she stood in the cold, a little boy ran up. “Look — my dad let me wear his coat today!” the boy said, grinning up at Hanley as he held his arms up in the air. The leather jacket’s zipper was broken, and the coat was several sizes too big. He talked to Hanley as she waited; once the school doors opened, he said goodbye and ran off to class.

The idea behind Little Bit is simple: If children are warm, outfitted, clean, well-fed, and treated with love and kindness, they will perform better in school.

Later, as the students came through the principal’s office to be fitted for coats, the same little boy stood in front of her. As Hanley zipped him into a snug, well-fitting navy coat, she placed the hood over his head. The boy grinned at her and said, “My dad is going to be so happy that I’m warm.”

“I thought to myself, ‘I live where I have everything I could possibly need — I’m not rich, but I do,’” Hanley remembered. “How can children be ten minutes from where I live, and be cold, hungry, and not have what they need? And that thought just wouldn’t leave me.”

She began emailing friends, asking them to drop off gently used clothing, coats — anything they could spare. The operation started in her cofounder’s basement; she established the beginnings of the Little Bit Foundation later that year (they received official 501(c)(3) status in 2006). Slowly, the nonprofit grew, expanding to other initiatives in working to end the poverty cycle and allow children a better path to education.

According to the 2018 Missouri Poverty Report, 24 percent of St. Louis City residents, including children, are living in poverty. Last year, Little Bit served 9,728 children in 31 St. Louis–area schools. In selecting partner schools, Little Bit’s main criteria is that 90 to 100 percent of the student body qualifies for free and reduced lunch, meaning they are living at or below the federal poverty line. “Since, unfortunately, many schools in St. Louis fall within this category, we first consider schools with the greatest need and the fewest resources,” Stacy Lupo, Little Bit’s communications director, says. “Most importantly, the leadership of our partner schools must be aligned with our mission and committed to its success, with a dedicated school liaison who will work directly with Little Bit volunteers and staff.”

Volunteers for Little Bit worked a total of 12,480 hours in 2017 and 2018. And they have plans to serve many more; Hanley often repeated a business-like mantra during a several-hour visit: “We are not fooling around — we take this work very seriously.”

Two or three volunteers greet the students at their respective school every week, offering them a hug or a high five inside the Little Bit Boutique, which is often set up inside a large closet or extra classroom space within the school.

The boutique has both gently used “emergency” items and newly purchased “new” items, the latter of which are ordered for a particular child every week. There are books, stuffed animals, hygiene kits, and school supplies, and each boutique has a pop-up tent that serves as a makeshift dressing room. The most requested new items? Underwear and socks.

All items are purchased new. If a young boy has outgrown his old pair of shoes, a Little Bit volunteer measures his shoe size and orders him a new pair. Emergency, gently used items are given to children with an immediate need. For example, if a little girl has lost her winter coat, the Little Bit volunteer gives her an emergency coat and then sizes her for a new coat, which is delivered the following week.

Each boutique has another essential element: a full-length mirror. “One thing we’re trying to improve is student self-esteem, so no kid walks out of here without looking into that mirror and smiling at themselves,” Alex Goodfellow, Little Bit’s program director, says. “It brightens your day.”

The one-on-one interaction is also pivotal. Volunteers provide continuity in schools where teacher and staff turnover is often high; one elementary school volunteer, Al Hinch, said he’d seen three different principals come through the school where he has volunteered with Little Bit over the past six years.

One thing we’re trying to improve is student self-esteem, so no kid walks out of here without looking into that mirror and smiling at themselves,” Alex Goodfellow, Little Bit’s program director, says. “It brightens your day.

“Attendance and behavioral problems improve when we can give this kind of attention,” Maureen Bahn, a 17-year volunteer with Little Bit, says. “We pick up every time something is going on with that kid. We are another support system.”

Bahn recalled a recent school visit, when a little girl came into the boutique with her clothes soaked in urine. Little Bit also outfits each school with a washer and dryer, so the school nurse washed the young girls’ clothes while Bahn helped her pick out new underwear, shorts, socks, and shoes.

The Little Bit Foundation warehouse, which stores all of the donated and purchased items, is 33,000 square feet. Three full-time staff members (Little Bit has 20 full-time employees working out of their offices), as well as a host of volunteers, work in the warehouse each day, which Little Bit moved into last July. The entire system is extremely organized: donations and purchases are sorted and labeled by age, gender, and size; an organization-wide database system allows Little Bit to track each child that they serve. Volunteers at each school have a tablet that contains the same technology system, so they can input each item as it’s given out. During the 2017–2018 school year, Little Bit moved over 337,000 items, which averages out to about 9,300 items per week.

“The opportunity with Chris Long, we didn’t see this as ‘Oh isn’t this sweet,’ we saw it as ‘Let’s shine the light on what’s going on in our city that’s positive, so we can change the narrative,’” Hanley says. “Let’s build the momentum around what we’re doing, with his help, so that we can really move that needle and promote change.”

Colby Heckendorn, 36, is beginning his fifth year as principal at Patrick Henry Downtown Academy elementary school, which has worked in partnership with Little Bit for 13 years.

“It takes so much stress off of families, who love their kids and want to provide everything possible, but sometimes just can’t,” Heckendorn says. “Little Bit fills that void, and the kids are just blown away by the kindness. They don’t fully understand all the work that goes on behind the scenes, but they are so excited to come into school with a clean, new uniform that’s ready to go.”

Long visited Patrick Henry Downtown Academy on March 22, 2018, spending time at a boutique as the children came through. “Dignity is so important for anybody,” Long says. “Then to have that resource of Little Bit, it kind of blew me away. It was hard enough for me as a student, and I had everything I needed. I can’t imagine not having a coat, not having a toothbrush, not having basic hygiene — all that stuff you need when you’re a kid.”

* * *

“Do you remember your biggest childhood dream?” 23-year-old Tiana Glass asked the audience at College Bound’s annual spring gala. “Dreaming has always been something sacred and precious to me; I could be a black girl prodigy today, a hero tomorrow, and your president next week. Dreaming was my refuge, for the times when the world became too much for me to handle.”

College Bound was the second St. Louis–area nonprofit recipient of Long’s donations. Founded in 2006 by Lisa Orden Zarin, College Bound helps students from low-income backgrounds prepare for and apply to college through a myriad of programs. College Bound stays with each student for seven to nine years, supporting them throughout college and as they prepare to enter the workforce or apply to graduate school.

Through their four-step “To and Through” program, College Bounds assists its students in four main arenas. The first step focuses on college readiness, which develops academic, social, and emotional competencies through one-on-one tutoring, ACT prep, coaching, grade monitoring, and academic skills curriculum as well as extracurriculars such as leadership camps and community service.

In step two, which focuses on college access, students prepare to apply to a four-year college or university. College Bound helps with financial coursework, navigating the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), finding summer opportunities, and obtaining financial counseling.

College completion, or step three, starts in 12th grade and continues until the student graduates from a four-year college or university. Throughout college, CB students have regular contact and support, transportation to and from their college or university, connections to academic advisors, and individual financial counseling.

Finally, in the last step — career readiness — each student develops “soft skills” and awareness of and exposure to potential careers. To achieve this, College Bound offers job shadowing, tours, panels with working professionals, paid internships, mentoring programs, and specific career-prep programming.

Zarin founded College Bound after watching her son, a privileged student from a private school, navigate the college admissions process. She researched the St. Louis area and learned that while 75 percent of high-income students applied to and graduated from four-year colleges and universities, less than 9 percent of low-income students achieved the same results.

In 2006, the first class of 36 College Bound students applied to college. Today, College Bound serves more than 600 students in their direct-service program, another 150 through their partnership with St. Louis Community College, and 250 more students indirectly through their Get Your Prep On college preparatory curriculum, FAFSA completion, and college counselor engagement. Currently, College Bound students attend 44 St. Louis area high schools and 74 colleges nationwide.

“We are able to commit to our students for a long period of time and with a depth that other organizations normally aren’t able to,” College Bound executive director Scott Baier says. “We are with them for the next seven to nine years, not just ensuring the transactional and important things, but also that they have the academic, mental, and social skills that they can thrive once on campus.”

That empowerment manifests in many ways. Since elementary school, Hassan Owens had been an intelligent, hard-working student, but his family didn’t have the resources for him to apply to college. Owens joined College Bound during his sophomore year of high school. Almost immediately, he signed up for an ACT prep course, ultimately improving his ACT score by three points. College Bound helped him get the test fees waived, so he could take it multiple times and earn a better grade. Additionally, College Bound helped Owens set up college visits, assisting him not only in funding the visits, but also in evaluating and understanding what type of institution he might want to attend. “He is so coachable, he is so smart, but what he needed were very concrete resources: applying for the FAFSA, which we did during his senior year and every year after while he’s in college,” Baier says. “It’s a small step, but one that trips up many first-generation college students.”

After graduating as the valedictorian of his high school class, Owens earned a full scholarship to Xavier University in Louisiana.

“College Bound provided me with the knowledge and access to all of these tools,” Owens, now 22, said. “The sad part is there are many students like me, who are smart and eager to attend college, but who are prevented from doing so because they are scared by the cost of college or not completing forms (like FAFSA) on time. First-generation students are told, ‘Go to college and change your life circumstances,’ but it’s not that simple.”

Owens graduated from Xavier University this past spring in the top 10 of his class; he’ll start medical school at UCLA in the fall, on essentially a full scholarship.

First-generation students are told, ‘Go to college and change your life circumstances,’ but it’s not that simple.

For Glass, a woman who joined College Bound after her sophomore year of high school, the mental health support was just as vital as the academic support. Glass joined College Bound during her sophomore year of high school. She’d been depressed for years, after being diagnosed with a learning disability and a speech impediment. Because of this, she says that teachers often underestimated her or dismissed her ability in the classroom. By the time she found College Bound, she was borderline suicidal.

College Bound has two full-time mental health professionals on staff, both of whom are licensed clinical social workers, in addition to two practicum students, who work with many of the College Bound students, 93 percent of whom are people of color. As Glass pointed out, students at low-income schools often have minimal — if any — access to mental health professionals.

When she met one of the College Bound wellness coaches, Jenn Starks, Glass says her life turned around. Through one-on-one as well as group counseling, Glass healed from past traumas and discovered self-empowerment. “I am sincere when I say that I would not be here today had it not been for College Bound,” Glass says.

Glass graduated from the University of Missouri, Columbia, this past December. After winning an entrepreneurial contest via a business incubator with her newly developed vegan cosmetic line, Black Honey Bee Cosmetics, designed for women of color and LGBTQ women, Glass is confident in who she is and where she wants to go.

With a staff of 42, College Bound works in so many ways with a variety of populations, including helping immigrant families of College Bound students understand the process of gaining legal status. And they continue to find new ways to grow. This past year, College Bound introduced a partnership program with St. Louis Community College. Baier had learned that the school’s graduation rate was only 9.6 percent. So College Bound set up an office to carry out what Baier calls “intrusive counseling,” meeting with each student, on average, 16 times a semester, in order to help the student population work toward graduating. The specific population that College Bound worked with had an average graduation rate of between 1 and 3.1 percent, so the need was great.

“Intrusive means that our coaches are actively texting and calling and communicating with our students, to help nudge them along the way so they know what’s coming down the pipe,” Baier says. “Students enrolled in community college often don’t know the resources they need, so we ask what they need and then we help figure it out — issues like financial aid — so they’re keeping their focus on what happens in class.”

College Bound is also working on early college credit initiatives — by 2022, they hope to have 100 percent of College Bound students achieve some kind of early credit.

“Everyone thinks there’s something magic about doing this,” Baier says. “And while our students are phenomenal, it’s really about resources. Look at what kids from overprivileged backgrounds are able to do — that’s the playing field we’re trying to level. I want sixty-five percent of College Bound students to graduate within five years because that would put us on par with the highest income quintile out there — that they graduate with less than $35,000 in debt and three quarters are employed or in graduate school or in meaningful service twelve months post-college.”

“We are very interested in the social justice mission that Chris promotes and the manner in which he does it,” Baier says. “That’s one thing got me really excited; you normally don’t find people like Chris Long, who are willing to take risks in using their celebrity for good.”

BOSTON

Dhruval Thakkar moved with his family from India to Boston three and a half years ago. As a high school sophomore, Thakker had never visited the United States. He spoke almost no English, and despite his warm, friendly personality, he felt lost. “It was hard,” he says of his first days at West Roxbury High School in Boston.

His English teacher recommended that Thakkar apply for Summer Search, the Boston-area recipient of Long’s donations.

In 1990, Summer Search founder Linda Mornell was working as an adolescent counselor in private practice in the Bay Area. All three of Mornell’s children attended summer programs — first, Outward Bound, then National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) — during their high school years. Her son, an active athlete, loved Outward Bound. Her oldest daughter, however, hated the idea of the program before she’d even started. Unathletic, afraid of heights and the dark, Mornell’s daughter went on the trip “involuntarily,” Mornell says. “And she probably got the most out of it. Before, she approached everything with ‘I can’t.’ While on Outward Bound, they gave her a new nickname: Sara Can. And she came home Sara Can.’”

Later that year, Mornell’s youngest daughter was a junior at a private high school. Mornell picked her up at school one afternoon and saw a young man standing outside. He looked uncomfortable, “ill at ease,” Mornell remembered. She asked her daughter about him, and her daughter said he was on a full scholarship. “And I thought, ‘Wow, what must it feel like to come back to school every fall with kids who’ve gone to Switzerland or who’ve traveled the world. So I thought, ‘I’m going to start a program so that kid will have a story to tell when he comes home.’”

In that first summer of 1990, Summer Search sent 14 students — including the young man outside of the school — from low-income backgrounds on all-expenses-paid trips. The young man, Mornell learned, had never been outside of his neighborhood in south San Francisco. He’d never been to Oakland; he’d never traveled on a plane. He flew to Bali and spent six weeks with the group, working a community service project.

However, while the trip was successful, after the group returned Mornell sensed the students had lost the energy and excitement from their journeys. “One single intervention isn’t helpful for kids who have trauma and deprivation — you have to have a more sustained effort,” Mornell says.

So in 1992, she added a second fully funded summer experience, as well as year-round mentoring for each student, whereby the student talked with Mornell each week to discuss everything from school interests, collegiate possibilities, family issues, and personal development. The student’s second summer experience, following their junior year of high school, caters toward their individual interests. They can choose an academic experience, such as enrolling in courses at Columbia University; they can select an international learning experience, such as studying sustainable energy in Costa Rica; or they can decide to return to the wilderness for a second outdoor experience.

‘One single intervention isn’t helpful for kids who have trauma and deprivation — you have to have a more sustained effort,’ Mornell says.

“The importance of that second trip, that service experience, is that all our students understand that they have something to contribute,” Hermese Velasquez, executive director of Summer Search Boston, says.

For the next five years, Mornell was the only staff member working with the program’s 100 students. In 1996, she hired two staff members — and the program grew from there.

Now a national nonprofit for high school students based in five cities (the Bay Area, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Seattle), Summer Search has served more than 6,600 youth to date, many of whom have become the first member of their families to attend college.

“There’s a brain drain in summertime,” Sylvia McKinney, executive director of Summer Search Philadelphia, says. “Students who have a positive educational experience in the summer tend to start off well-prepared, ready, and engaged for school, whereas students who don’t have that experience take until about January to make that transition.”

Summer Search Boston, founded in 1996 as the second Summer Search location, serves roughly 1,000 students each year, in partnership with 33 area schools. The median household income for the students they serve is $24,000; a high percentage of the students are recent immigrants to the United States.

For his first summer experience, Thakker traveled to Wyoming for a 30-day outdoor adventure; he’d never spent a night away from his family before. In the woods, Thakker, learned survival skills, such as how to cook (“pasta isn’t that hard,” he said, laughing), how to be a leader, and what it means to work on a team. He also learned about adaptation. “No shower for 30 days — that was a lot,” Thakker says, smiling as he brushed his long, dark, wavy hair from his forehead.

Last summer, for his second Summer Search experience, Thakker spent 17 days in Nicaragua, teaching English to area residents.

Thakker’s mentor has proven vital to his development. “My mentor, Armani, is the coolest person I’ve ever met,” Thakker says. “He’s been such a great support in my professional and personal life, both when it comes to the college process and me being able to adapt to the community here.”

During his senior year, Thakker was repeatedly bullied by a fellow student. Thakker and the student were competing for the same scholarship, via a foundation that would provide four years of fully paid tuition at one of six select higher-education institutions. Out of 1,400 students originally selected for consideration, Thakker and the student bullying him were two of the top 20 finalists. On the day of the final interviews, a nervous Thakker met with Armani. While the conversation boosted his self-confidence, Thakker ultimately didn’t receive the scholarship. The student bullying him did.

“Honestly, that news broke me,” Thakker says. “But Armani told me how everything happens for a reason, and he taught me to always look at the positive side. He showed me how now, I could apply to any colleges, whereas the scholarship recipients are limited to six particular schools.”

Thakker felt like he’d disappointed his family, and he worried over how his parents would pay for his college education. But in talking to Armani, he learned not to see the process as a failure.

“Armani was like another parent in the times when I needed a parent but I didn’t feel right to talk to my parents about this,” Thakker says. “He helped me learn that I didn’t let anyone down, but that everyone was proud of me for getting this far. I did lose in the last rounds, but I got something out of it. There was someone who believed in me.”

Each Summer Search mentor is trained extensively, both by a master trainer out of the national office as well as in the San Francisco Summer Search headquarters. Training essentially involves working with the mentors on the skills of being a keen listener while also holding students accountable and ensuring they follow through. Some mentors have a master’s degree in social work, though it isn’t required.

“I think once kids realize you won’t interrupt them, you won’t direct them, that you will just listen, they start talking and they can’t stop,” Mornell says. “It’s an incredibly rare experience.”

“A large part of our population comes here from one country and then a large part of their identity is missing, so sometimes those foundations aren’t fully developed,” Pedro Suncar, a mentor now in his third year with Summer Search Boston, says. “Not being able to connect to cultures and see how other people do things creates a silo. So the concept of travel and being able to say you’ve been somewhere and seen that is a reason I think the program is so successful.”

Summer Search Boston executive director Hermese Velasquez is a former Summer Search student, which is where she first discovered her love of travel. During her second summer experience, teaching math to schoolchildren in Ghana, Velasquez immersed herself in the culture. She lived with a host family and rode the bus to and from the school each day.

“That taught me that regardless of where I came from, I have this really, really strong gift to contribute to the world,” Velasquez, a native of Belize, says.

Long’s donation, combined with the fundraising match initiative, brought in close to half a million dollars to support Summer Search Boston and Philadelphia. But perhaps more importantly, Velasquez says, it raised Summer Search’s public profile. “The Summer Search bus became greater. We experienced a lot of new folks in the room this year, and that to me is more important in some ways, because we’re generating new partnerships and relationships with folks in this city who didn’t know about us before,” Velasquez says.

Thakker interned at Boston Children’s Hospital this summer. He watched intense conversations between doctors and parents, and observed as surgeons broke difficult news to young children. Growing up in India, Thakker planned to become an engineer. But his experiences through Summer Search, he says, have reinforced his desire to become a surgeon. He’ll start classes at Wheaton College this fall.

“I feel like the way I’ve gotten here today was Summer Search,” Thakker says. “They have been there to help me in every aspect of my life.”

PHILADELPHIA

Thirty-four parents crowded into the Mariana Bracetti Academy classroom in northeast Philadelphia, hugging their knees as they sat on undersize chairs; others stood along the back wall, fiddling with their cell phones. One father held his baby boy in his arms, offering him a bottle, as he watched his toddler son run around the table. Another mom handed her adolescent son a tablet to play on, as she took out a pen and notebook to take notes.

“All right, all right! Are we all here? Is everyone a parent of a sophomore?”

Alex Cromer, a Summer Search program associate, stood at the front of the room, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt, her nose piercing reflecting off of the classroom’s fluorescent lights. As the assembled group nodded collectively, Cromer began outlining what the Summer Search wilderness trip would be like for the students, whose family members had gathered here for information — and reassurance.

“My son has never been in an airport before,” Trena Medford said, referring to her son, 16-year-old Tymir Hill. “I can’t come after my baby if he gets lost. How do I know he’s going to the right place? And you said to only pack three shirts? He is going to get funky!”

Several other parents murmured in agreement before another parent interjected.

“I thought my daughter was taking a bus to New York or something? When will she be at the airport?”

“All these fears are so valid,” Cromer said calmly, nodding. “First, you would know if your student is getting on a plane or a train, because I’ve talked to you, and also, your student should know.”

“Well, my son doesn’t really talk to me — he only texts!” a mom yelled out, as the other parents laughed and echoed their agreement.

“Ninety percent of you, your kids are getting on a shuttle bus,” Cromer said. “For those other ten percent, when your students are flying in somewhere, there will be someone with a big sign, greeting them. We’ve been working with all these partner organizations for years now, and we’ve established relationships with them. I can assure you, we keep doing it because it works.”

Summer Search Philadelphia is the youngest chapter of the nationwide program. Just over a decade old, the Philadelphia office has served 249 students since its inception — and it’s growing. Last year, thanks in large part to Long’s donation, they moved from serving 25 rising high school juniors to 37. Their staff of seven employees works with five area schools (they’re in conversation to add two more schools in 2019) in selecting their students.

The bond between mentor and student is evident; as the parents and students gathered in the MBA cafeteria before the breakout sessions, filling plastic plates with Boston Market chicken, green beans, and mac ’n’ cheese, excited students hugged their mentors and introduced them to family members.

Several students wore Eagles T-shirt jerseys; Philadelphia is a sports town, and the Eagles have long brought together the diverse population in a way that few other teams, organizations, or leaders have done. When Long announced that Summer Search Philadelphia would be one of his recipients, “every time he played a game, we became part of the narrative,” McKinney says. “In a city like Philadelphia, that’s just boomtown.”

Long attended the Summer Search fall celebration last October. In addition to adding more students, McKinney says that Long’s donation helped overall by increasing school, nonprofit, and organizational partnerships, while also raising Summer Search’s profile in public policy discussions. They even created an “Ed Talk” series, mirroring TED Talks, but focused on education.

Like other Summer Search offices, the need in Philly is far greater than the number of students they can serve. Over 170 students applied to the program this past fall. After the several-step application process, including multiple interviews, the final 35 were chosen.

“All of our students come with many skills, but they may not have had the access to exercise those opportunities,” Velasquez says. “We give them the opportunity to open the door slightly, and they barge in and take control of all that we’ve provided to them. They begin to grow and thrive and soar after that.”

Seventeen-year-old Maria Jiminez began Summer Search in the fall of 2017. As she sat in the cafeteria and talked about her first experience, she tapped her long, eloquently painted fingernails on the table.

“I’m the type of person who likes to go out and explore, so I felt like this was something for me,” Jiminez said. “To have an organization and a mentor that I can talk to about how I’m feeling, her always being there to give me advice — I love her so much and she is someone I can trust with anything. For me to have these type of people in my life, that’s really important.”

Raja Mitchell, 18, is the oldest of five kids. A recent graduate of Boys’ Latin Philadelphia Charter School, Mitchell first heard about Summer Search through his school. When Mitchell’s principal recommended him for Summer Search, Mitchell didn’t hesitate.

“It’s just a really good program,” Mitchell says. “My mentors helped me so much through high school. You can call them with anything, and they’re always there to answer.”

For his senior project, a mandatory 10-page paper and a 50-hour internship, Mitchell’s mentor, Program Manager and Summer Programs’ Specialist Erin Callison helped him find an internship at the Energy Co-Op in Philadelphia. There, he studied renewable and sustainable energies. The internship built on Mitchell’s second Summer Search experience, when he’d spent three weeks in Costa Rica studying sustainable energy resources. Mitchell grew coffee on green energy farms, helped to build a basketball court for local residents and took Spanish with local school children. Now, after college, he hopes to either enter the sports medicine field — or work in sustainable energy.

“He was always responsible, but this has made him grow into a man,” Mitchell’s mother, Nicole, said. “It has really changed his life.”

“Visiting with Summer Search made me smile,” Long says. “These are high schoolers, and they’ve had to grow up quick. You can tell this program … it’s created hope. And a glimpse of what life is like outside of that bubble they’ve lived in. It was great to hear stories of some of the experiences and the people they’ve met.”

‘He was always responsible, but this has made him grow into a man,’ Mitchell’s mother, Nicole, said. ‘It has really changed his life.’

Despite his mother’s travel concerns, Tymir Hill arrived in Colorado without incident. Each Summer Searcher has to pass a baseline fitness test, which includes hiking three miles in 45 minutes. While Hill had passed that test, the six-foot, 230-pound 16-year-old had never visited a location at altitude. A few days into his hiking adventure with his fellow participants, his 40-pound backpack on his back, Hill passed out. He was helicoptered to a nearby hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with dehydration.

Medford retold the story of her son’s (mis)adventures with a laugh, noting with sincerity how the staff kept her appraised of the situation throughout his brief hospital stay. Even though she wanted “her baby” to come home, Hill insisted that he wanted to stay. He loved his Colorado experience. He recently went on a six-day trip to Iceland with his school, and he is already planning his Summer Search adventure for 2019. Medford, in turn, said she has learned to relinquish control and to trust her son’s instincts.

“With single-parent households like mine, particularly of a young man living in this city, there are so many fear factors,” Medford said. “As a single mom, I can’t teach him to be a man — evidently this can. Summer Search is like the best baby daddy ever.”

At the final event of the evening informational session, a scheduled open mic time allowed for graduating seniors to offer impromptu remarks about what Summer Search has meant to them. As they stood in a single-file line near the auditorium’s stage, some opened with private jokes for their classmates and others gave a “shout out” to their group, their mentor, then the other mentors, and on and on. But many messages were impassioned and sincere.

“If I would’ve listened to fear, I wouldn’t be here,” Shay Smith, a graduating senior said. “This whole experience has really helped me find out who I am. All of this is preparing us for something great. I have done so much because of Summer Search.”

‘As a single mom, I can’t teach him to be a man — evidently this can. Summer Search is like the best baby daddy ever.’

McKinney has a loud, infectious laugh, and her intelligence and determination shines through whenever she speaks. At times, her passion for Summer Search feels part advocate, part evangelical. “Is there need for this? Absolutely!” McKinney says, her voice rising. “Would I want every student to have the opportunity to go through this process? Absolutely. We need to grow. We have no choice. Because the need is way too great and the service that we provide is way too dynamic to serve so few.”

CHARLOTTESVILLE

Chris Long’s alma mater, St. Anne’s-Belfield School (STAB), is spread out across two campuses in Charlottesville. The Upper School, serving grades 9 through 12, sits on a sloping hill just off of UVA’s campus (or Grounds, if speaking in Thomas Jefferson’s vernacular). The coeducational, independent boarding and day school for preschool through 12th grade dates back to 1910.

More recently, Long and both of his brothers (Kyle Long, an offensive guard for the Chicago Bears) and Howie Jr. (who works for the Oakland Raiders) attended STAB, which Long graduated from in 2004 before heading up the street to play football for the UVA. In 2009, one year into Long’s professional career, St. Anne’s head of school David Lourie flew to St. Louis to talk to him about supporting the school financially.

That conversation led to a scholarship established by Long and his wife, Megan, to fund one student’s education at St. Anne’s. The Longs wanted to remain anonymous donors, and they continued to fund the scholarship for the next seven years.

This past summer, when white supremacists descended on Charlottesville and violent clashes erupted, leading to the tragic death of anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer, the Longs decided they needed to do more. They also felt that they might be able to inspire others to similar action by removing the anonymity of their support. So at the start of the season, Long announced that he’d donate his first six paychecks in support of two fully-funded scholarships to St. Anne’s-Belfield, from sixth grade through high school graduation. (Lourie says that 40 percent of St. Anne’s students receive “some level” of financial assistance.)

Long also stipulated that the recipients would be members of the Boys & Girls Club of Central Virginia, a nonprofit organization that serves 2,500 area youth, and which he’s supported since his days at UVA (Long’s mother, Diane, has been a board member of the Boys & Girls Club since 2004).

When the news broke in 2017 that Long had signed a two-year contract with the Eagles — on his 32nd birthday — Long was at the Southwood Boys & Girls Club, talking with the kids and competing in footraces where he executed, according to the Boys and Girls Club of Central Virginia CEO James Pierce, “the perfect tie at the finish line.” Pierce thought Long would only stay for 10 minutes; he ended up staying for two hours. In a nod to perfect subtlety, he’d worn a non-logoed, forest-green T-shirt. A photo from that day shows a smiling Long crouched down, mobbed by kids hamming it up for the camera, with a handwritten name tag that says, simply, “Chris.”

“I was so pleased, but in no way was I surprised [by the partnership donation],” Pierce says. “The Long family is extremely generous, and if anyone was going to do it, it’s going to be Chris. He’s always been somebody who’s put the community before himself. He knows that he’s been very fortunate in his life, and he feels like it is part of his mission to enhance the world that his young family will grow up in.” (Long and his wife, Megan, had a son, Waylon, in 2016.)

* * *

As the Philadelphia Eagles open their season tonight against the Atlanta Falcons, fans will be watching what happens on the field. But for Long, the focus is on the work that remains in offering educational equity throughout the United States, whether for young children, high schoolers, or college students. Last year’s total salary donation was a start. But it certainly wasn’t the end.

“I’m an athlete. I gave money and I’ve drawn some attention to it, but when we leave or they stop taking pictures, these people go right back to work,” Long says. “The people working for Summer Search, Little Bit, College Bound, the volunteers I’ve met in Charlottesville, and people like James Pierce — they are just amazing people. And we’re really lucky to have them.”

***

Anna Katherine Clemmons is a freelance writer, reporter, and producer who was written for ESPN, Conde Nast Traveller, Hemispheres, and USA Today Sports. She is an adjunct professor who teaches teaching Sports Journalism and Sports Media Production at the University of Virginia.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Matt Giles

Vanishing Twins

Compassionate Eye Foundation / Andrew Olney / OJO Images Ltd

Leah Dieterich | Vanishing Twins | Soft Skull | September 2018 | 21 minutes (4,145 words)

One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins, the book said, but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.

Of course, I thought. I lost my twin.

This was after I’d read all the other books. The books about sexuality. The books about marriage. The books about love. None of them comforted me like this book did.

The story followed a pair of identical twins who were struggling to grow up without growing apart. My husband and I were struggling with that too.

I read it in one day, in every room of the house, on my stomach, on my back, on my bed, in the yard. I didn’t worry about the ants scaling my thigh, or the black widows living under the outdoor furniture.

One-eighth. I tell people this statistic when I tell them I’m writing about my search for the twin I never had. The number makes me seem less crazy.

“Suspicion is a philosophy of hope,” Adam Phillips says in Monogamy. “It makes us believe that there is something to know and something worth knowing. It makes us believe there is something rather than nothing.” He’s referring to the suspicion that one’s partner is having an affair, but the same holds true for the existence of my twin.

I’ve always preferred being in the company of one other person to being in a group. I’d thought this meant I was antisocial, but maybe it’s a desire to return to the relationship I had with another person in the womb. That pre-person—my little mirror ball of cells.

 

Maybe my twin would have danced ballet too. I stopped when I was eighteen. Maybe my twin would have kept going.

Because of ballet, I spent a lot of time looking at my reflection. In class, we crowded each other to dance in front of the skinny mirror, the single panel in the wall of mirrors that inexplicably elongated the images of our bodies. The teacher tried to spread us out but it was no use. Our only other option was to lose enough weight to look skinny in any mirror, and we tried that too.

Twelve years later, I sit in the dark behind a two-way mirror with my ad agency colleagues, watching a focus group eat hamburgers and talk about how they taste. It feels deceitful to watch people when they think they are alone with their reflection.

We like to believe that a mirror shows our truest self, but it rarely does. If you’re right up against it, with your nose touching the glass, you don’t see anything at all.

That was the way I pressed myself to Eric. And Elena. And Ethan. I was too close and could not focus.

In all the articles, twins separated at birth always seem to share incredible similarities and quirks, no matter how differently they were raised. They hold their beer cans with just their thumb and index finger; they have moles on the left side of their rib cages. Neither of them likes ketchup.

I thought if I met someone with disgustingly fast-growing cuticles who liked the smell of burned toast more than anything in the world, it would prove I’d been missing my mate.

If my twin was identical, it would have been a girl, but if it was fraternal, it could have been a boy or a girl. All this is to say I didn’t know what I was looking for.

 

Giselle got a boyfriend at the donut shop where she worked and quickly experienced all of her sexual firsts without me. This threw off the comforting symmetry that had always made our friendship seem predestined. Suddenly I felt as if I were a foot shorter than she was. At sixteen, her parents allowed her to finish high school via correspondence courses so she could spend more of her day at the dance studio. She was gone. Jumped off the seesaw while I was still on it, letting me drop with tailbone-breaking speed to the dirt below.

Ever since we met in third grade, no one at school had uttered our first names separately. They were always linked with an and. Now there was an empty space next to that and, a vacancy. Sometimes the weather in that space was mild, just the breeze of her being whisked away. Other times it rained for days.

I needed to sandbag it.

But instead of filling this void, I chose to build a structure around it. I got up at 6:30 a.m., was at school by 7:25, drank a Diet Coke, ate a Granny Smith apple for lunch, and finished my homework during study hall before driving myself to the city for ballet. This schedule was a scaffolding around my terror of being alone.

 

Was it her I wanted? Him? The acts themselves? It was difficult to pinpoint the object of my jealousy. It was easier to imitate, so I got myself a boyfriend—a popular boy I snagged by fooling around with his friend to prove I was sexually available. It was an odd way to show my interest in him, but he was a teenager, and it worked. Anyway, I was just spackling the hole Giselle had left.

My boyfriend was a soccer player who wasn’t interested in ballet or any arts, but it didn’t matter. At the time, our mutual interest of sexual exploration was enough. He became part of my schedule too. We’d fool around from two to four o’clock in one of our bedrooms while our parents were at work. After that, I’d drive thirty minutes to my ballet school, stopping midway at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the regional airport to get an iced coffee, adding skim milk and three packets of Equal. This low-cal, high-caffeine cocktail typically sufficed to keep me awake during the drive. Ballet class ran from five thirty to seven, and after that we’d rehearse for whatever performance we were working on until about eight thirty. I suppose I ate dinner when I got home, but I don’t recall. In my memory, that part of the day drops o like a cliff.

Prior to the boyfriend, before I started spending my after-school hours giving long and poorly executed blow jobs and getting urinary tract infections from sex, I would eat snacks. Having a boyfriend took the place of those snacks. I no longer needed them.

We like to believe that a mirror shows our truest self, but it rarely does. If you’re right up against it, with your nose touching the glass, you don’t see anything at all.

And I got thinner. Da was all my Russian ballet teacher said as she poked my side, indicating she was pleased with my weight loss. We were always praised when we became less and less of ourselves.

The desire to dwindle was strong. It felt religious, cleansing, a penance for some sin I couldn’t pinpoint. At the same time, I felt like a contest winner. But I knew I couldn’t have done it alone. As I held the ballet barre, legs working furiously below the serene upper body, my teacher’s bony finger acknowledging my concavity, I attributed my success to having a sexual partner, a playmate who made it easier to not nourish myself.

 

In the 1950s, my ballet teacher had been the prima ballerina of the Kirov Ballet. She was the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, as well as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, but her signature role was The Dying Swan. It is a self-contained piece, a four-minute solo accompanied by piano and cello, depicting the last uttering movements of a dying swan. There is a flickery film of her dancing this piece on YouTube.

We often did The Dying Swan at the end of class. She tried to teach us how to die, but we were too young and too American. We were never doing it right. Nyet! she’d scream, and clap her hands for the pianist to stop. She’d shout corrections in French, our only shared language, and I’d translate for my classmates. And when language failed she was physical. She pulled on our arms and slapped our butts. When I think of her now, drawing her gnarled finger up the side of my ribs, she reminds me of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” wanting to eat me, though she rarely ate anything.

 

Vanishing Twin Syndrome. That’s what the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology calls it when a fetus in a multiple pregnancy dies in utero and is partially or completely reabsorbed by the surviving fetus.

This phenomenon has likely existed forever, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s, when ultrasounds became sophisticated enough to detect twins as early as five weeks, that doctors began having the unnerving experience of viewing twin embryos one month, only to find a singleton the next.

The term vanishing twin was coined in 1980, the year I was born.

In Lawrence Wright’s book Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are I read this: If the less viable twin is not consumed, it “exists in a kind of limbo, compressed by the other to a flattened, parchment-like state known as fetus papyraceus.”

Papyrus, like paper.

“Somewhere in the vicinity of twelve to fifteen percent of us—and that’s a minimum estimate—are walking around thinking we’re singletons, when in fact we’re only the big half.” That’s Wright quoting a geneticist, so of course I believe it. I believe in percentages, in pieces of pie. But I don’t like his choice of words: the big half.

I don’t want to be the big half. It sounds oafish and ugly.

And while it can’t be denied that the big half is the winner, the one who makes it out, it also means that losing someone is a consequence of growth.

 

Deadline.com: “VH1 Orders Competition Series for Identical Twins.” This headline appears in my browser. It is morning, and I’m in my office at the advertising agency. My friend Alex, who works in entertainment, has sent me this link because she knows I’m writing about my suspicion that I’ve lost a twin. Lately, everyone has been sending me these kinds of links, telling me about movies to watch and books to read, tagging me in the comments sections of news articles. It seems they’re all interested in twins now that they have someone to share their discoveries with.

I am alone in what used to be my shared office. On the other side of the room, the blinds are drawn and the desk is empty. I no longer have a partner, so there is no one to see that I’m reading this press release instead of working.

“VH1 is putting the bond between identical twins to the test with Twinning (working title), a 10-episode, hour-long competition reality series set to premiere next summer. The project, created and produced by Lighthearted Entertainment (Dating Naked), will feature 12 sets of twins going through challenges that will test their twin connection. (Reports of the incredible strength of the bond between identical twins include cases of siblings dating the same people, finishing each other’s sentences and feeling each other’s physical pain.) Through the challenges, sets of twins will be eliminated until one pair is named the twinners and walk away with the grand prize of $222,222.22.”

While I appreciate the cuteness of twinners, I’m annoyed by the grammar mistake. It should be “until one pair is named the twinner and walks away with the grand prize.”

A pair, while two people, is singular. This is the grammar I feel in my heart.

The fact that it’s called vanishing twin instead of vanished twin seems to indicate that the disappearance is perpetual, not completed, possibly not completable.

When one twin comes out and the other doesn’t, it’s over, in a certain sense. But grammatically, the vanishing twin is continually fading from existence. This makes it harder to mourn, because the disappearance never really ends.

Another friend tells me about a man she once worked with who had a pain in his ribs that wouldn’t go away. It turned out he had a cyst that needed to be removed. When they did the surgery, they found that the cyst was a teratoma—composed of bits of hair, teeth, and fetal bones—the remnant of a vanished twin. “He had his twin removed,” she said, and to underscore the reality of this unbelievable thing: “He took the day off work to have his twin removed.”

A pair, while two people, is singular. This is the grammar I feel in my heart.

I asked if she could put me in touch with him. I wanted to see if he’d ever wondered about having a twin or fantasized about it. Was the cyst a shock or did it somehow make sense? Did he ask to see what they’d removed? Did he have a scar?

“I don’t think he likes talking about it,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have told you.”

 

“You have to meet Eric,” a ballet friend from high school told me over the phone. “You would love each other.” She was living in Colorado for the summer with her brother. Eric was their roommate.

“You’re exactly the same,” she said. “Artistic, smart, driven.” I was flattered. “You’re also both obsessed with your diets,” she said. I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment.

She built him up in such a way that I couldn’t imagine he’d be real. She told me he’d taught himself to write code during his last semester of college, even though he wasn’t a computer science major. She showed me his picture and said he’d done some modeling. He’d raced road bikes too, Tour de France–style. “He’s also the nicest person you’ll ever meet,” she said. It was too much. I didn’t believe one person could contain all these things.

A week after school ended, I flew to Denver, instead of home to Connecticut.

 

Would I know when I saw him? Would we finish each other’s sentences? Have moles in the same places?

Inside the apartment, the afternoon light was fading. We heard a key in the lock, and when the door opened, there was Eric, with his tan forearms and champagne-colored hair. Even the blue of his eyes was somehow golden.

He had my posture—straight-backed, as though he were being pulled by the crown of his head, skyward.

My friend and her brother got off the couch to hug him, and I stood up too. He extended his hand to shake mine, and the hem of his T-shirt sleeve hung away from his body near the tricep. I wanted to stick my finger between the fabric and the skin to see if I could do so without touching either.

 

There was still snow on the ground in Rocky Mountain National Park even though it was May, but we hiked in our sneakers because that was all we’d brought. Halfway up the mountain, I thought it would be fun to throw a snowball at my friend’s brother, whom I’d had a crush on in high school. I gathered a handful of snow, packed it into my palm, turned around, and threw it with all my might.

The snowball had barely left my fingertips when it hit Eric squarely in the face. He had been right behind me and had managed to turn his head at the last minute. His cheek was red and icy.

“That’s quite an arm you’ve got on you,” he said.

“I . . . don’t have great aim,” I said. “And I’m a lefty, so there was never a baseball glove that fit me in school, so . . .”

“I’m a lefty too,” he said.

The others were a few paces behind us. We kept hiking and when we got to the top, we all stood shoulder to shoulder looking down into the valley. I wanted to look at Eric’s face and was glad I had a reason to.

“Lemme see,” I said. He turned his face so I could see the red mark, but he kept his eyes on me.

 

We drank around the fire. Eric and I shotgunned beers, a trick I’d learned during my year in the Midwest. We both knew all the words to “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and we rapped them with awkward bravado. When it got later and colder, our friends brushed their teeth and retired to the tent, while Eric and I went to his car to listen to music. He played me things I hadn’t heard: At the Drive-In, Digable Planets. We talked about our families, and while there were differences—his father was a teacher and mine a doctor; his mother went back to work (nights at a restaurant) when he was two and mine stayed home with us—there was one striking similarity: Both our parents had been married for twenty-five years. Most of our friends’ parents were divorced.

I don’t know how long we sat in the car. I was too infatuated to be tired. I wanted to touch his hand. I wanted to kiss him. But the armrest between us felt insurmountable. Eric said we should go to bed, so we quietly opened and shut his car doors. He found my hand in the darkness to lead me. His hand was warm and soft and firm and I felt a surge of relief. Hands, like kisses, could be bad, and ruin the chemistry. This is the perfect hand, I thought as we walked through the moonless night to the outhouse.

The trickle of my pee cut through the soundless air. I pulled my pants up, knowing Eric was waiting for me. The crotch of my underwear was cold. Wet with excitement.

We only had one tent for the four of us, and Eric and I lay beside our friends, who were either sleeping or pretending to. We began kissing and we did not stop, despite the siblings beside us.

We should have turned away and tried to sleep, but a magnetic energy held our bodies together as one body.

 

We spent the rest of the trip together. The siblings went about their business. My friend had to register for summer classes, and her brother was looking for a summer job. Eric was looking for a job too. Though he’d only graduated college a week ago, he couldn’t afford not to work, now that he didn’t have student loan money to cover his expenses. Luckily, it was the beginning of the first internet boom and anyone who could make a website could get a job.

One morning, Eric and I were alone in the apartment. After breakfast, he put on a collared shirt and I helped him tie his tie and wished him luck as he went off to an interview. It felt embarrassingly retro, as if I were a housewife sending my husband off to his job. But it was novel too, and I was grateful for a new role to play, now that I no longer had ballerina.

 

I was always looking for other lefties, watching people’s hands when they signed credit card slips at restaurants, threw balls, or cut with scissors. No one else in my family was left-handed, and neither were any of my friends, although this is not that surprising, since only ten percent of the population is left-handed.

“Both kinds of twins, fraternal and identical, have a higher rate of left-handedness,” Lawrence Wright says, “and some scientists . . . have suggested that left-handed singletons may be survivors of a vanished-twin pair.”

A card arrived in the mail from Eric. I opened it in my childhood bedroom and had to slow my eyes down to take in each part of the long rectangle. There was his tiny, almost illegible handwriting, and a collection of drawings he’d done in black ink and filled in with wide architectural markers. One drawing was of the Modular Man, a gestural outline of a man’s body created by the architect Le Corbusier, for scale in designs, and another was the Golden Spiral—a spiral drawn inside a rectangle whose length and height are proportionate to each other at a 3:2 ratio, the golden ratio. The math was sexy, because I didn’t fully grasp it, but also because it was rendered in muted golds and mauves, colors I was surprised a man had chosen.

I’d already sent him a card as well. Mine had a grid of squares I’d painted in watercolor. All but two were gray. We were the two matching red squares, I was trying to say. Everything else seemed drab by comparison.

Once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?

The next month, Eric came to see me at my parents’ house in Connecticut, where I was living for the summer. Any reservations my mother had had when I told her I’d fallen in love with someone on my one-week trip to Colorado disappeared when she met him. “He never stops smiling,” she said.

Eric hadn’t been to many museums. He’d been to national parks; he’d been to Indian reservations. During the week we spent together in Colorado, he told me about the tiny loom his dad bought him as a kid, and the beadwork he’d done on it. He pointed to a sculpture in the corner of the apartment that he’d made in architecture school—a red sawhorse with a suspension bridge made of piano wire hanging below it.

Eric had never considered majoring in art even though he loved drawing and painting. Like mine, his parents had directed him toward something you can make money at.

We’d lain on the futon in his living room after the first time we’d had sex, while the siblings graciously slept in the bedroom. I told him that in eighth grade, I’d considered becoming a performance artist instead of a dancer, after seeing a piece by Janine Antoni on a museum field trip. I recalled my twelve-year-old self watching a video of her performance, which involved using her head to paint the entire floor of the gallery with black hair dye. There was a video screen at the entrance to the gallery where she’d done the performance and a velvet rope across the doorway to prevent people from walking on the piece. I leaned into the room, my waist on the rope, trying to take it all in. The white walls, the large black strokes covering the wood floor. I would have liked to touch them, to trace my finger along their semicircular arcs, to get down on my knees and bend my head to the floor, to feel how it might have felt to do the performance, hair heavy and dripping, butt in the air, dragging the bucket of hair dye alongside me.

I took Eric to New York City because he’d never been, and suggested we go to the Guggenheim, knowing he’d studied the Frank Lloyd Wright building in architecture school. We didn’t know anything about the exhibition that was going on, only that it featured the work of a video artist from the ’70s and ’80s called Nam June Paik. We walked up and up through the museum, curving ever so slightly to the left, spiraling skyward.

We’d seen paintings and photos in art history classes, and some sculpture too, but this kind of art was new to us. Large sculptures made of old TVs buzzed with an aurora of colors, lava lamp cubes with no stories.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” Eric said. “I came to see the building. I hadn’t even considered there would be something inside it.”

Years later, he told me that this was the moment he decided to become an artist.

 

He sat on the edge of my bed, the one I’d slept in since I was five years old, and I went to him, putting my hands on his knees and parting them, to fit my body into the V they created.

“I love you,” I said.

We’d only known each other a month. But this I love you was in my mouth, and if I was going to speak, it was the only thing that was going to come out.

“I love you too,” he said.

 

The ligature œ has a special sound, the “open-mid-front-rounded vowel,” which is something between an uh and an er. In French, you need it to make words like sœur and cœur. Sister and heart. It is taught to schoolchildren as o et e collés—o and e glued together.

I identify with this ligature. I see it and think that’s me, though I realize this is strange. Why not my initials? The monogram that graced my grade-school L.L.Bean backpack?

In French class I had cast myself as Odile, the doppelgänger. The O looking for her E.

I had found him.

 

It’s like we’re the same person. We finish each other’s sentences. This is what we’ve been taught to desire and expect of love. But there’s a question underneath that’s never addressed: once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?

***

Excerpted from Vanishing Twins: A Marriage, copyright © 2018 by Leah Dieterich. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.

Inauthentic Behavior

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | August 2018 | 7 minutes (1,849 words)

On July 31, Facebook executives announced that they had uncovered “coordinated inauthentic behavior” conducted by fraudulent accounts, possibly with Russian backing. After consulting with law enforcement and independent research organizations, Facebook decided to remove eight pages, seventeen profiles, and seven Instagram accounts. Many of them had been made within the past year. The culprits had endeavored to obscure their activities using virtual private networks, known as VPNs, to mask their identities and, Facebook claimed, by paying “third parties to run ads on their behalf.” The message from Facebook, in a lengthy blog post on the discovery, was stark: “We face determined, well-funded adversaries who will never give up and are constantly changing tactics. It’s an arms race and we need to constantly improve too.”

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Army of Me

CSA-Archive / Getty

Toshiki Okada| translated by Samuel Malissa | An excerpt from the novella “My Place in Plural,” which appears in the collection The End of the Moment We Had | Pushkin Press | September 2018 | 13 minutes (3,377 words)

The phone is nestled between my belly and my thighs as I lie on my side on the futon. It must look like I’m warming an egg. In my mind I keep hearing a line from a song I listen to a lot, although I’m not listening to it at the moment. I have no reason to try to block it out, so it’s been playing over and over. Today is a Friday like any other. But I decided to stay home from my part-time job. I don’t feel like doing anything at all.

At this point I’ve only made up my mind to stay home, and I haven’t called in to tell them yet. The rumpled white sheet forms a ridge around my body, an almost perfect square enclosure which I’m finding it surprisingly hard to move from.

The song in my head was recommended by Nakakido, one of my husband’s friends, and my husband listened to it but it wasn’t really his thing, so he didn’t burn a copy or play it a second time, but I liked it, and ended up listening to it all the time.

My left hand keeps running through my hair, like I’m testing its thickness.

It’s morning. The futon mattress is nearly flat and has these soy sauce stains and other discolorations. Even if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to get them out.

At around two in the morning (I could pinpoint the exact time if I checked my phone but I can’t be bothered), I got a text from somebody named Wakabayashi. I don’t know anybody by that name, so it’s probably somebody my husband knows. The text said something about the first anniversary of Nakakido’s death coming up and everyone should get together. Somehow instead of the text going to my husband, or just to my husband, I was included in the text, or maybe it only came to me. I was still awake when it came in, so I read it then. It didn’t make me sad, if anything it made me feel kind of uncomfortable, since I don’t remember my husband telling me something had happened to Nakakido. I thought he was still alive. Read more…

Losers’ Lunch

Illustrations by Paul Lacolley

Ben Rothenberg | Racquet and Longreads | August 2018 | 31 minutes (7,863 words)

This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine and appears in issue no. 7.

Losers are a fixture of my workday as a sportswriter.

Talking to a person coming off court who was just dealt a crushing defeat, and offering some vague, platitudinous comfort to assuage their raw battle wound, is a necessary task in the job. On rarer occasions, I’ve talked to those who have just suffered a defeat so harrowing and derailing that it has them visibly doubting the viability of their career. But for most losers, even in down moments, there’s the credibility and dignity of having just performed for an appreciative crowd of some size in a respected, aspirational pursuit like professional sports.

There’s nothing remotely aspirational, though, about the Applebee’s restaurant I found myself in during day 6 of the 2017 US Open. And sitting across a table bearing mozzarella sticks and glasses of tap water, these were not my normal losers.

Rainer Piirimets, a three-year veteran of the tennis tour from Estonia, was knocked out of the US Open the day before, exiting Arthur Ashe Stadium in the early afternoon. His partner, a fellow Estonian who has been on tour for 10 years, sat beside him.

Piirimets left the stadium not through the tunnel to the locker room, but out a side gate. His wrists bore no sweatbands, only handcuffs.

The request for this interview was not made, as most I do, through the tournament media desk, but rather through a Facebook message. Piirimets eagerly accepted. Meeting at Applebee’s was his suggestion, but he wasn’t hungry—just eager to set the story straight after spending 10 hours in police custody the day before.

“We’re not criminals,” Piirimets said, a phrase he and his friend would use as a refrain over the next two hours.

Piirimets had sure been treated like a criminal the day before. While watching the third-round match between Petra Kvitova and Caroline Garcia, he was spotted in his seat in the upper deck (Section 331) by tournament security officials and escorted out. He was then arrested in a small room just off the concourse by police, who then perp-walked him out of the stadium. The cops steered him through a dense crowd of staring, perplexed tennis fans and ducked him into a waiting police car outside the tournament gates.

Piirimets, a competitive high jumper in his youth, was then put in a jail cell at the 110th Precinct in Queens, which he shared with, he said, an agitated, profane homeless man. After several hours in the lockup, he was brought to a court for arraignment before a judge. He was then released and given a summons to appear in court again seven weeks later. He doesn’t plan on attending.

His friend, who I’ll call Pete, was equally animated about the treatment Piirimets had received.

“To keep him for 10 hours in prison, for doing what?” said Pete. “He made a little mistake, no big deal.”

His crime was trespassing. Piirimets had also been kicked out of the US Open the year before, and during that first ouster he was given paperwork acknowledging that he was to be banned from the tournament grounds for 20 years. He said he didn’t think that threat was serious, and that he didn’t think he was bound by the forms because he didn’t sign the line at the bottom. Nor did he understand that trespassing was a crime that could get him arrested in the United States. After all, he said, he’s been kicked out of lots of tournaments, all over the world, and nothing like this has ever happened before. Because why would it? He’s not a criminal, he said, flummoxed.

What Piirimets is, he admitted, is a member of a rogue, impish species in the tennis ecosystem: a courtsider. But with their hunters getting more and more adept, courtsiders—arguably justifiably so—have become an endangered species. Only the most stubborn of their breed persist. Even though sports betting is becoming legalized in the United States, they will still be persona non grata at this year’s US Open, which they will attempt to attend again.

Though only the second courtsider ever arrested at a Grand Slam event, Piirimets was the eighth caught in the first five days of the 2017 US Open, according to the USTA—which prides itself on “vigorously combatting” courtsiding and was quite excited to alert the media to his arrest. Twenty courtsiders—17 men and three women (none American)—had been caught during the 2016 tournament, hailing from as far away as Sri Lanka, each thinking they had the skills to beat the system. All were given notice of a 20-year ban from the tournament. Read more…

O, Small-bany! Part 2: Winter

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (5,940 words)

 

Her name was Sally. Sally-bo-bally. The Salster. Sometimes we called her Butt-Wiggle, for the way she shook it when she saw us. Or butt-wig, for short. You know how it is with nicknames, the language of love. We found her on a rescue organization’s website. Sally! She was bright-eyed and smiling. Hi! Someone had tied a bandana around her neck. I adored her on sight. She was up for adoption the following Saturday in a parking lot behind a warehouse in Schenectady.

I’d never had a dog. My mother said it was dirty to have animals in the house.

We resolved to keep open minds and meet all the dogs, let the right one find us, not force anything, but it was always going to be Sal. She stood on her hind legs and wagged her whole ass at us. She was practically dancing. Sally-Sal! Jet black, with a short, shiny coat. Pit/lab mix? Pit/lab/hound? Pit/whippet/lab? Who knew. Who cared. The chemistry was perfect. Love at first lick. Not like poor little Buddy, over in the corner with a bad case of worms, or pretty retriever Julius, who wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. It was always going to be Sal. Four months old, spayed and vaccinated. No one else showed the slightest interest in her. She was ours. We filled out the paperwork and took her home.

***

Her eyes! The way she looked at you, and didn’t look away. So present and soulful, a real lover. She was like a person, if we’re talking about the most honest loving open deep good authentic funny sort of person, and how many of those have you ever met? She’d curl herself up next to you, close as she could get. She wanted to crawl under the sheets next to you. She wasn’t satisfied unless she had her body in the sweetest possible proximity to yours. She was like one of those rare massage therapists whose touch feels psychic: exactly where you want it, exactly how you want it. Magic.

I was never into dog memoirs or whatever, never understood that mad devotion to pets. Seemed weird to be that into an animal. It seemed fairly sad to be that into an animal. Like, why don’t you find yourself some more people to love? I didn’t get it. Now I got it. People are way overrated.

How creepy it is when people talk of “completing” their families, as though a family is a construction project or a vocational course, a finite thing, a theoretical ideal. How moronic and hubristic I find that attitude. It’s like the ugliest kind of nationalism, on a microcosmic scale. And yet. And yet. Sally gave us something new to love, and in so doing gave our family a new dimension, this whole new love to share between us. I felt a weird, delicious sense of… completeness. I was past having babies, but Sal was my sweet darling beloved lil’ boo. We were in love with her and in love with each other and in love with the way she loved us back and generally high off our own abundance of love and good fortune. There was this warmth in my chest. We redrew our goofy family crest to include her. We sang ridiculous songs to and with and about her. We spoke to her in a silly dialect. Dare I say it? We were happy.
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