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A Rare Toy Heist, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Original Star Wars action figures at the Monroe County Local History Room in Sparta, Wis. (Peter Thomson/La Crosse Tribune via AP)

In the world of Star Wars memorabilia and toy collecting, one of the rarest collectibles is said to be a 1979 prototype action figure: a Boba “Rockett” Fett that came with a spring-loaded backpack that fired a plastic missile. But it was never released. After a child choked on another toy with a similar missile, toy company Kenner scrapped the design — but not before several of these original figures had already been made.

Today, an enthusiastic Star Wars fan community buys, sells, and collects “Lucasian memorabilia,” often going to great lengths to track down rare items. When Zach Tann got a text in 2017 from a fellow collector, Carl Cunningham, about purchasing this coveted Rocket Fett, things began to get fishy.

At Popular Mechanics, Alexander Huls recounts one of the biggest scandals in Star Wars collecting history.

Tann was one purchase away from a unicorn. The offer was too good to pass up, and Tann paid Cunningham the asking price. “I’d been working my butt off for four years, and I felt like, finally, I found my guy that’s going to hook me up with a lot of great stuff,” Tann says. “This is what every collector dreams of.”

Cunningham was away in California at the time but promised he’d get Tann his collectible once he returned home. But a little over a week later, Tann’s phone vibrated with another notification, this time a Facebook message from a friend.

The message contained a screenshot of a post on the forum Rebelscum.com, a popular Star Wars collector website. Titled “My Proto Rocket Fett was Stolen,” the post received over 26,000 views and shocked the community. “Man this is horrible. I could just imagine the gut wrenching feeling, the pitfall in your stomach. Wow. That is messed up,” said one typical reply.

The Rebelscum post was written by prominent Star Wars collector Philip Wise, whose 20,000-item collection is a place of pilgrimage for many Star Wars collectors. Wise detailed how his Rocket Fett prototype had been taken sometime in the last two weeks from his private Star Wars museum, where it was prominently on display. He made a plea: “If anybody should hear anything about a Fett like this floating around, please contact me.”

Wise’s words punched Tann in the stomach. Cunningham couldn’t be the thief, right? It wasn’t his Rocket Fett, was it?

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Freddie Gray mural, Baltimore, Maryland
A mural of Freddie Gray near the location where he was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Chloe Cooper Jones, Adam Serwer, Emma Marris, and Mik Awake.

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

Alternative Reality: ‘Three Wrongfully Convicted Men, 40 Years, and a City That Still Refuses to be Honest With Itself’

Wiley Bridgeman, left, of Cleveland, embraces his brother Ronnie, now known as Kwame Ajamu, as they walk from the Justice Center in Cleveland following Bridgeman's release from a life sentence for a 1975 murder. The two brothers, who were exonerated after spending decades in prison for a 1975 slaying, have sued the city of Cleveland and the detectives who investigated the case. The federal lawsuit suit, filed Thursday, July 2, 2015, names three Cleveland police detectives and a sergeant and the estates of a sergeant and three other detectives who have since died. (AP Photo/Phil Long, File)

Kyle Swenson was a young reporter at the Scene, Cleveland’s alt-weekly, when he started investigating the wrongful conviction of three black men who were imprisoned in the 1970s for a murder they didn’t commit. The men — Kwame Ajamu, Wiley Bridgeman, and Rickey Jackson, who served a combined 106 years behind bars — were exonerated in 2014, thanks in part to Swenson’s reporting, which informs his new book on the subject, Good Kids, Bad City. Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post, recently returned to the pages of the Scene with a long essay, included in the list below, that looks back at the conviction and indicts the city he once called home.

Swenson’s reporting is a testament to the value of local newspapers, as Alec MacGillis, who covers politics and government for ProPublica, points out in his largely positive Times review of Good Kids, Bad City. “One can’t help wondering what life-shattering injustices might go unaddressed in the future,” he writes, “for lack of a curious reporter to take a call or open an envelope.”

MacGillis, who lives in Baltimore, knows about the contraction of the local news industry firsthand. Two years ago, Baltimore’s City Paper, founded in 1977, was shuttered by the Baltimore Sun Media Group. Weeks after its closure, a pair of enterprising editors founded the Baltimore Beat, a print alt-weekly. But the paper couldn’t support itself through advertising revenue and it closed four months later. Now, however, the Beat is back, resurrected as an online-only operation in early March. (One of the outlet’s first new feature stories is listed below.) It is being run as a non-profit, and its editors — Lisa Snowden-McCray and Brandon Soderberg — say they hope, eventually, to revive the print publication.

It’s an audacious act, starting a print publication in 2019 — and recent attempts haven’t boded well for the industry. The Knoxville Mercury, for instance — founded after the city’s longstanding alt-weekly, Metro Pulse, was shut down — closed in 2017 after just two years in print. But there is something about paper, it seems, that lends gravitas and legitimacy to a media outlet.

At the beginning of March, Indianapolis’ alt-weekly, Nuvo, announced that it would no longer be publishing a print edition, and a number of editorial employees were laid off, including Nuvo’s editor, Laura McPhee. Fortunately, the publication will live on as a website, and it will refashion itself as a member-supported non-profit, which sounds promising, despite the staff cuts. 

Still, I get anxious when newspapers trade in paper for pixels. That’s not because I’m a print nostalgist; it’s because these decisions can portend disaster. I think, for example, of The Village Voicethe ur-alt-weekly, which stopped publishing its print edition in September 2017. Though the Voice continued to do good work online, it seemed to me that, without an accompanying print product, it was like a neutered beast. A year later, the Voice went out of business, thanks to the brilliant business mind of retail heir Peter Barbey, whose name I curse every time I pass a New York street corner only to find Time Out and AM New York. 

It’s depressing to me that the city I live in no longer has an alternative newspaper, though I take comfort in the fact that a number of alt-weeklies around the country are still publishing good stuff, including the The Stranger, the Metro TimesOrlando WeeklyTriad City Beat, and Monterey County Weekly — all featured in this reading list.

 
1. “Out For Justice is Out For Change” (Lisa Snowden-McCray, March 8, 2019, Baltimore Beat)

Lisa Snowden-McCray, the editor of the newly revived Baltimore Beat, profiles an organization that advocates for the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated, who often have trouble transitioning from jail. Out for Justice is led by Nicole Hanson-Mundell, who spent a year in jail. This legislative session, in Annapolis, the organization is advocating for “two bills urging state lawmakers to support pre-release centers for women,” Snowden-McCray writes.

It’s tireless, often thankless work. But Hanson-Mundell recognizes how important it is. That’s why it’s so important that the pre-release legislation gets passed.

“How can I deny a woman who just came home and she needs housing? I can’t say ‘Miss, I don’t provide direct services, you have to go somewhere else,’” she said. “I have to tap into my resources and find out who offers housing to newly released women with children. I have to use my connections and advocate for her.”

2. “This Is the Final Thing You’ll Ever Need to Read About Howard Schultz” (Rich Smith, February 27, 2019, The Stranger)

The Stranger has no kind words for Howard Schultz, who, as you probably know, is entertaining a bid for the presidency, much to the chagrin of, well, pretty much everybody. Rich Smith describes the former Starbucks CEO as “Seattle’s most successful bean juice salesman” in this deft takedown.

He has no idea who we are as a country now, no idea how Trump became president, and so much palpable fear that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to tax his Frappuccino dividends at a reasonable rate that he’s willing to hold the country hostage unless a moderate wins the Democratic nomination.

So much for hometown pride.

3. “Defiling the temple” (Jordan Green, February 21, 2019, Triad City Beat)

Triad City Beat, which covers North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad — including the cities of Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem — has a long story on Kenneth Fairbanks, a pastor and community leader who was also involved with charitable work in Nairobi. “But four criminal indictments allege that for much of the time Fairbanks was operating his ministry, he was also sexually abusing children,” including his own daughter, Jordan Green writes.

While Kenneth Fairbanks’ supporters cast him as a victim of familial treachery, his daughter, Christa, alleges that he sexually abused her for years, along with other girls, while isolating her to exert control and extorting her silence by admonishing her against ruining God’s plan for their family.

4. “Speed Trap” (Xander Peters, February 20, 2019, Orlando Weekly)

Orlando’s alt-weekly takes a sobering look at meth abuse in Florida, particularly among gay men. Xander Peters’ piece centers on a 29-year-old meth addict named Matt, who declines to give his last name. He got into the drug through Grindr, the dating app.

Matt’s genesis story isn’t uncommon in the community of men who have sex with men, or MSM. LGBTQ-focused dating apps have tried to suppress drug abuse in recent years, even banning certain terms such as “PNP” (“party and play”) and the capitalization of certain letters in members’ bios, such as the capital letter T (“Tina.”)

The depressing kicker to this story leaves little hope that Matt will ever overcome his addiction.

5. “Three Wrongfully Convicted Men, 40 Years, and a City That Still Refuses to be Honest With Itself” (Kyle Swenson, February 20, 2019, Cleveland Scene)

Kyle Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post, reckons with the lessons from his new book, Good Kids, Bad City, which examines the story of three black teenagers in 1970s Cleveland who were wrongfully convicted of murder, imprisoned for decades, and then exonerated.

“Good kids, bad city.” I am defensive about the title. The title implies values—the kids are good, the city is bad. I know Cleveland is a proud town but touchy, easy to injure; as I wrote, I had an invisible Clevelander in my head, belligerently asking why I had the temerity to slap the label “bad city” on the town. Was that fair? What makes a place bad, or good? I spent many an hour not writing, arguing with this invisible but touchy Clevelander, justifying the title.

Swenson more than justifies the title in this engaging and thought-provoking essay.

6. “How adult nights at Detroit’s roller rinks are keeping black skating culture alive” (Imani Mixon, February 20, 2019, Metro Times)

As a recreational activity, roller skating is a vital part of black social life in Detroit, according to Imani Mixon’s illuminating piece for Metro Times. I particularly enjoyed Mixon’s description of “Detroit-style skating,” which I knew nothing about.

Detroit-style skating is characterized by its smooth rolling motion that is heavily influenced by the Motown sound that was gaining traction around the same time that skating became a popular pastime. According to skaters who have been on the scene for decades, Detroit skaters don’t ever really stop rolling and if they do, they use the rubber toe stops on their skates, another signature marker of a Detroit skater. The basic move that every Detroit skater has to learn, whether solo or in groups, is the half-turn, which involves turning a smooth 180 degrees for a few beats then turning back in place to continue on the original skating path.

7. “Monterey Bay fishermen catch salmon as far away as Alaska. A proposed copper mine there poses a local threat” (Matt Koller, February 21, 2019, Monterey County Weekly)

Matt Koller does a good job laying out how a proposed copper mine site known as the Pebble Deposit could very well imperil the livelihoods of Monterey fisherman who spend their summers in Alaska’s Bristol Bay angling for sockeye salmon. The mine, if approved, risks contaminating the bay with discarded waste rock.

Fishermen have always accepted a certain degree of risk. But the salmon are certain. A renewable resource, they will keep returning to spawn. Yet Bristol Bay fishermen, including those from Monterey Bay, see the presence of the Pebble Mine—which seeks to extract a non-renewable resource—as a threat to their industry because it has the potential to alter these natural cycles in a fundamental way that will not balance out in the end.

The mine, Koller writes, threatens “the last great sockeye salmon run in the world” as well as “an entire way of life.”

8. “The Story of Chaney Lively” (Laura McPhee, February 21, 2019, Nuvo)

For one of its final print cover stories, Laura McPhee — until recently the editor of Nuvo — pieces together what little information there is about Chaney Lively, the first free woman of color in Indianapolis. She arrived in 1821, in what was then a frontier town, with Alexander Ralston, a Scottish surveyor “tasked with laying out the new city.” Chaney, 21, was Ralston’s housekeeper, though she had originally been his slave, most likely purchased in Louisville. Ralston died six years later, at which time Chaney inherited land.

When Chaney moved into her own home in 1827, there were less than 60 people of color—men, women, and children—living in Indianapolis out of a population of a little more than 1,000. She was the only Black female head of household in the 1830 census, and the first woman of color to own property in the city, most likely the first person of color, male or female, to do so.

In the process of excavating details about Chaney’s life, McPhee also paints a stark portrait of African-American life in Indianapolis before and after the Civil War.

***

Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Columbia Journalism Review.

How the Shock Jock Became the Outrage Jock

Ben Hider / Invision / AP, Jeff Chiu / AP, Charles Dharapak / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,111 words)

In the past, the bow tie seemed to hold him together, kind of. Tucker Carlson had always been as red-faced and obstreperous as so many other conservative pundits, but he had never been known to be “cunty” or “faggot”-level offensive. Still, it wasn’t much of a shock earlier this week when progressive watchdog Media Matters unearthed him spouting slurs like that — a couple of racist remarks rounded out the misogyny and homophobia — during a series of appearances on Bubba the Love Sponge Clem’s radio show between 2006 and 2011. From Monday to Tuesday, after the first recordings surfaced, Tucker Carlson Tonight hemorrhaged almost half its advertisers.

That bow tie had been a flourish of propriety: a strip of cloth separating him from a loudmouth like Howard Stern, the “shock jock” who looks and acts like a dollar store rock star, grabbing his crotch for whoever will listen. But he dropped it the year he appeared on that radio show. It was Stern who hired Bubba the Love Sponge Clem (yes, that’s his legal name) in the mid-2000s to host a show on his second satellite radio channel, and it was on that show that Carlson crossed the line. That was where the shock jock and the political commentator proved that they were one and the same — the former played off conservatism, the latter played it up, but both relied on its foundation. “Well, you’re talking about God and illegals,” Carlson told Clem. “I thought we were just going to be talking about blow jobs.”

But what’s the difference, really? Blow jobs were once used for shock value. Now it’s “illegals.” The punch line being that neither one of them is transgressive in the end.

* * *

No one used the words shock jock for Joe Pyne, the host of It’s Your Nickel (that’s a reference to pay phones, kids, and I’m including myself here) who pioneered in-your-face talk radio in the ’50s and went on to create TV’s The Joe Pyne Show, which sometimes devolved into actual physical altercations between him and guest. No one really knew what to make of him. His unconventional style — dressed-up to dress down “pinkos” and “women’s libbers” and riff on, rather than read, reports — was neither news nor entertainment. It seemed to be best described (well, The New York Times and Time both did anyway) as an “electronic peepshow.” The personality-free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest, but Pyne, with his syndicated show on more than 200 radio outlets, was the most Machiavellian. “When it comes to manipulating media,” Icons of Talk author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine, “he was the father of them all.”

Pyne briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid-’60s — for a week’s “vacation” — after bringing a gun to his show during the Watts riots, suggesting the world wasn’t quite yet ready for his kind of conservative appeal. It took until the mid-’80s, when the FCC was no longer so hard-assed and political correctness was all the rage, for Howard Stern to turn the shock jock into a thing. The idea was that PC America was muting real America, and personalities like his were there to liberate our ids … usually on the way to work. “They were pushing the limits of what you could hear on the public airwaves,” TALKERS Magazine publisher Michael Harrison told Thrillist of mavericks like Pyne and Don Imus, who set the stage for Stern. “That was the key to the whole thing: that it was on the ‘sacred public airwaves.’”

Full disclosure: I have always hated Howard Stern. His banality offends me: “The closest I came to making love to a black woman was I masturbated to a picture of Aunt Jemima on a pancake box” — that’s the kind of joke he makes. It’s the sort of quip that leaves a dumb bro stuck in 1992 in stitches. To be offensive your words have to have power, and his … don’t. He swears a lot and cajoles his guests into talking about fucking and snorting and it’s all very Free Speech, Motherfuckers! He can be sexist and racist and classist, because, hey! He’s sexist about men too! He’s racist to everyone! He drags every class!

Sorry, I just fell asleep.

The rebellion is a pose, because at the heart of Stern and all the other shock jocks is conservatism — 2.1 kids, strong moral fiber. They can joke about fucking and inhaling, because they ostensibly aren’t doing either. So what positions itself against PC America, in fact, at its core, feeds into it — the conservatism is the rebellion. Knowing that, you can see how Don Imus calling the members of Rutgers’ women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” can happen as late as 2007 on his radio show Imus in the Morning (he was fired by CBS and NBC, then hired by ABC). As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker 10 years before Imus’s offense, personalities like Stern and Mancow Muller and Opie and Anthony appeal to the “audience that feels put upon by a new set of rules — sexual harassment guidelines, the taboo against certain kinds of speech — and wants release, if only in the privacy of the drive to work.”

The audience meaning white heterosexual men. The shock jock industry itself is predominantly white men (Stern’s foil, Robin Quivers, is a black woman, but she has never been the star attraction). Which is not to say that women can’t be as “offensive,” it’s just that the people in charge of hiring them would prefer them to be barefoot and pregnant. There are shockingly few exceptions. Wendy Williams, who rode the wave of ’90s hip-hop and shamelessly confronted celebrities like Whitney Houston with tabloid gossip (she also had a bad habit of trying to out rappers) was christened by New York magazine in 2005 as the “shock jockette.” She was “the black Howard Stern” right down to the middle-class moralism. Other than Williams, the female media personalities who cause offense — Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham — tend toward conservative commentary, presumably because the men on the top floor think they will be less likely to break a nail in those environs. “The complaints of Western feminists look like petty self-absorption when you line them up against human rights abuses in Third World military dictatorships,” is a thing Ingraham came up with — a misogynistic comment cloaked in doublespeak.

This genre of radio personality was dubbed by my colleague Ethan Chiel as the “outrage jock,” the political version of a culture and entertainment-aligned predecessor, who arose in the late 1980s after the FCC regulations on political talk became less clear. This is where a bow tie comes in handy. The outrage jocks market themselves as transgressive, but instead of fighting conservative America, they uphold it, a stance they brand subversive in a sea of progressive liberal media. Rush Limbaugh, who has the most popular talk radio show in America — 15.5 million listeners, according to Talk Magazine — was dubbed by National Review as the “Leader of the Opposition” back in the ’90s. “Rush took radio at a time when the norm was basically NPR. He comes into that church and blows it up,” radio host John Ziegler told The Washington Post in 2015. “Our presidential politics have become a kind of church. The media says, ‘You’re not allowed to say this, or this, or that, because we’re in church.’ People are sick of that.”

So: Stern 2.0, except instead of shouting about pussy, Limbaugh — not to mention Glenn Beck and Michael Savage — shouts about policy. You may remember him calling women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” in 2012 for advocating for contraceptive insurance coverage. “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception,” said the man who has been married four times. “She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”

Limbaugh needs a brushup on his sex work nomenclature, among other things. But if you want to talk about pimp: Janet Jackson’s nipple ultimately killed the shock jock. In case you aren’t old, it happened during a performance of “Rock Your Body” at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in 2004, when Justin Timberlake tore off the right cup of Jackson’s bustier, exposing her breast. (Per Jackson, the red bra underneath the rubber was supposed to stay behind, but came away accidentally.) In response, more than 500,000 complaints, all of them from people presumably with nipples of their own, were reportedly lodged with the FCC. President Bush responded two years later by signing the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which raised the penalty for broadcasting “indecency” tenfold. With that, Howard Stern fucked off to satellite radio and the rest of the shock jocks kind of followed suit. Tucker Carlson was what was left behind.

* * *

“Does she have a good body? No. Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely.” Tucker Carlson did not say that. That was Donald Trump in 2013 talking to Howard Stern about a pregnant Kim Kardashian in a radio show appearance that reemerged during his election campaign. On the same show, across almost two decades, the future president also agreed that his daughter was “a piece of ass” and dismissed flat-chested women and women over 35 (thank God). For all his work to divide the nation, Trump had a big hand in bringing shock and outrage jocks together, dissolving any sort of wall (!) between them. “If the political class is appalled by the notion that anything from the morass of ’90s shock-jock radio could become part of a presidential race,” wrote Virginia Heffernan in Politico in 2016, “it may be just as surprising to Stern’s fans, who proudly embraced the outsider-ness of a guy who couldn’t seem further from inside-the-Beltway political chatter.” TALKERS’s Harrison has called Trump “the first shock-politician.”

By the time Trump entered politics, shock jocks were no longer defining the culture and conservative commentators were filling the vacuum. They entered the mainstream on networks like Fox and the intellectual dark web via Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin. “The shock jocks weren’t defeated,” wrote Dan Jackson at Thrillist. “They went viral.” This is where Tucker Carlson fits in. He called his resurfaced xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic comments from Bubba the Love Sponge’s show (he described women as “extremely primitive,” supported child rapist Warren Jeffs, and compared the behavior of Muslims to animals) “naughty,” then equated contrition with betrayal. “We’ve always apologized when we’re wrong and will continue to do that,” he said on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday. “That’s what decent people do; they apologize. But we will never bow to the mob.”

Almost 70 years after the first shock jock hit the air, Carlson was toeing the same party line as his predecessors. “They claim that they’re just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes,” Rory O’Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio, told The Guardian in 2009. “It’s all bound together so when it’s convenient for them to be entertainers they say, hey, it’s all just a joke. But when it’s not, they say they’re giving you information that you need.” Carlson’s comments were only shocking because they veered so sharply away from Beltway politics; with his regressive approach no longer couched in policy, they revealed him for the person he is. And even though advertisers have pulled out of his program, the notion that he could disappear like Stern is one from another time — conservatism is the status quo and there’s always room for it now, particularly when it masquerades as information rather than entertainment.

After Megyn Kelly left Fox, Tucker Carlson took her spot, and if Carlson were removed, a new version of him would sprout in his place. This whack-a-mole quality to outrage jocks extends, more troublingly, to their politics — if they are not outraged about one thing, they will immediately find another. They are as adaptive as comedians like Stern, use facts as props to play journalists like Cronkite, and influence voting and policy just as seriously. As Jon Stewart scolded Carlson and his cohost in 2004 on the CNN show Crossfire: “You’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate.” And without the FCC to shut them down for good, or at least out them as entertainers, the only hope is that their audience will realize that the most transgressive thing to do is to stop listening.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Revisiting My Grandfather’s Garden

Dusty Pixel / Getty, Greg Hill / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Mojgan Ghazirad| Longreads | March 2019 | 17 minutes (4,133 words)

In a cul-de-sac, I hear the purring of a gas stove and the popping of boiling tomato juice bubbles on the surface of a cauldron. The tomato paste aroma saturates the air. It’s August and it’s high time for making pastes and jams in Tehran. My grandmother kept us busy this time of the year. “Let’s put those little feet into work,” she used to say to my sister and me as she emptied buckets of Vine tomatoes into deep basins. We removed our socks, rubbed the bathing brush on our feet, and rinsed until the last cluster of soap bubbles vanished into the drain. She watched our brushing ceremony and inspected our feet for any specks of dirt. When she was satisfied with the whiteness of our soles, she hoisted us into the basins. We jumped up and down and stamped the tomatoes to extract the juice. Vine tomatoes squished and screamed under our feet. Their plum, tender and succulent, painted our legs. She boiled the juice and the ambrosial aroma of the boiling tomatoes wafted in the garden. The thickening tomato juice boiled over the sides of the hot cauldron, smearing the tiles of the terrace. When my grandmother removed the gas stove, a striking corona of fiery red drops of paste remained on the tiles. I thought those red coronas were the reason they named my grandparents’ street “the Sun Street”

How I wish I could enter that garden one more time to see those fiery rings. In 2018 I plan a return trip. But my mother tells me — before I go back — that the Sun Street is closed to the public. Nobody knows what has happened to that house since the Islamic government took it from us.
Read more…

Girl on the Third Floor

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Paul Crenshaw | Mad Creek Books| May 2019 | 25 minutes (4,980 words)

 

The upper floors of the Nyberg Building are locked and deserted now, but her ghost is said to live there still. It is not hard to imagine a ghost filtering down the long hall and disappearing into the distance, although I do not know if she walks through walls or simply appears and stands looking sad and lost, perhaps trying to find someone to help her.

Read more…

Women and Pain: A Reading List

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“But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted — beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.”

–Virginia Woolf, The Waves

In a recent NPR piece, “Invisibilia: For Some Teens With Debilitating Pain, The Treatment Is More Pain,” readers are introduced to Devyn, a 14-year-old who develops intense bodily pain, seemingly out of nowhere. In search of the source of the pain or a cure, Devyn’s mother Sheila takes her to doctor after doctor. Each time, medical professionals tell Devyn, “‘You are healthy. Nothing is wrong,’” until, eight months later, when Sheila finds Dr. Sherry, a man responsible for a highly controversial treatment for pain: inflicting more pain.

As reported in the NPR piece, patients of Dr. Sherry’s “do physical workouts five to six hours a day.” All medicine, “even medication for apparently unrelated problems” is taken from patients. When Devyn experiences an asthma attack on the first day of practice, she is “directed…to simply walk around the gym” rather than take her inhaler.

At the end of the piece, Devyn claims to have been cured by Dr. Sherry’s program — she “even went back to dancing.” But for many readers, the essay was infuriating, unethical even. Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, called the piece “irresponsible” and generated a list of 12 questions that journalists should have asked experts, including “An asthma attack and a nosebleed are not pain complaints. What possible justification was there to ignore these problems in Devyn?”

Abby Norman, author of Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain, tweeted that while she hadn’t been a patient of Dr. Sherry, she had tried swapping “one pain for another more intentional pain” and “just ended up with twice as much pain and a deep feeling of failure and shame that I couldn’t get ‘better’ and ‘beat it’ and ‘be normal.’” Norman is not alone in the ways she tried to ignore pain rather than accepting and learning to live with high levels of physical discomfort. Women’s symptoms — particularly pain, which is invisible — are often dismissed, disbelieved or diminished by doctors. Even when women do voice what’s happening with their bodies, they often do not receive treatment or even an acknowledgment of what’s ailing them.

Norman, in response to a series of questions I asked her about pain, wrote that she received pressure from “everywhere — doctors, friends and family, society” that “if you aren’t actively trying to get better, you’re wrong. If you aren’t making strides at getting well, you’re wrong. If you’re failing, if you stay sick, if your pain is still there, not only have you failed but you must want to be this way. Maybe you’re even faking it. Or making it worse than it really is.”

Women, in particular, are subject to this type of blame from doctors and others. As Norman notes, “on a sociocultural level, there are a lot of messages specifically undermining a woman’s interpretation of her own mind, body, and experiences. Not just in terms of physical pain, either. Where it becomes difficult (and in some cases life-threatening) is that the overarching patriarchal structures under which healthcare systems of the world operate, the very long history of misogyny in the medical profession and in our culture at large, vigorously and consistently reinforces these messages.”

Knowing this, how do we begin to change the narrative of how women’s pain is perceived, understood, and treated? How might we validate the experiences of women who have been repeatedly and systematically ignored, dismissed, and blamed by medical professionals and society at large? How do we treat pain without inflicting further physical and emotional harm?

I don’t think there are easy answers, but we can work to support initiatives dedicated to create lasting change to correct data that demonstrates the pain of women — affected even further by factors such as race, class, and weight — is routinely disbelieved by medical professionals. We can examine the language used to express and treat women’s pain, and work to find a vocabulary that allows us to rewrite the current narrative. We can listen carefully to women with histories of pain who write or speak about their experiences and heed their calls to action.

1. The Long History of Discrimination in Pain Medicine (Sarah Zhang, February 28, 2017, The Atlantic)

“The emergence of objectivity influenced the stigma around patients who suffered from pain without visible injury—and this stigma ends up overlapping with stigma that already exist along race, gender, and class lines.”

According to bioethicist Daniel Goldberg, author of a recent paper, “Pain, objectivity and history: understanding pain stigma,” the 19th century brought new instruments like the X-ray, which allowed for an “objective” means of understanding previously unseen pain, and these developments forced a reckoning with the way doctors had previously understood patients and the body. Sandra Zhang interviews Goldberg in order to learn more about how histories of racism, sexism, and classism have influenced the way doctors treat patients today.

2. I’m a fat Black femme searching for a doctor who believes my pain (Dominique Norman, January 24, 2019, Hello Giggles)

“I’m Black, fat, and femme, living with a chronic physical illness and mental illnesses. I can tell you that self-advocacy in doctor’s offices is incredibly difficult when no one will listen to you.”

Histories of racist practices in medicine such as the Tuskegee experiment or cells taken from Henrietta Lacks without her consent have left lasting negative impacts on the way black women are treated by medical professionals today, as Dominique Norman explains in her personal essay about being disbelieved and dismissed by a variety of doctors for years on end.

3. Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain (Leslie Jamison, Spring 2014, Virginia Quarterly Review)

“The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.”

How can we talk about women’s pain in a way that is true to their experience? What kind of pain is perceived as “real” and what kind is seen as a cry for attention? How can women write about their pain without adding to a history of narratives that have glamorized “wounded women”? By analyzing representations of women’s pain in art and literature, Leslie Jamison asks — and seeks to answer — these questions and more.

(Related: read “Writing Women’s Pain: Part Two of a Round Table, a conversation with Alethea Black, Abby Norman, Esme Weijun Wang, and more,” November 2018, 2018, Lit Hub)

4. Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth (Nina Martin, ProPublica, and Renee Montagne, December 7, 2017, ProPublica and NPR)

Shalon Irving, who earned a dual-subject Ph.D. and worked to “eradicate disparities in health access and outcomes,” passed away at the age of 36, just three weeks after giving birth to her first child. As Nina Martin and Renee Montagne report, Irving’s death is representative of a much larger issue: black women are “243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes.”

“Black expectant and new mothers frequently told us that doctors and nurses didn’t take their pain seriously — a phenomenon borne out by numerous studies that show pain is often undertreated in black patients for conditions from appendicitis to cancer.”

5. Pain bias: The health inequality rarely discussed (Jennifer Billock, May 22, 2018, BBC)

As happens to many women who have valid symptoms, Jennifer Billock was told by her doctor that she was “paying too much attention” to her body — he recommended she go home and relax.

“I still left his office thinking it was perhaps anxiety. And so, listening to the advice, I tried to ignore the pain.”

Billock explores the numerous ways in which women’s pain is dismissed and discredited throughout this piece, and also why.

6. It’s All In Your Head: The Dangers of Disbelieving Female Pain (Caroline Reilly, July 6, 2016, Bitch Magazine)

Caroline Reilly feels a sense of relief when she wakes from surgery and a medical professional tells her they “found a lot” of endometriosis within her. Her pain, previously disbelieved, was now validated by a name. Reilly, through research studies and personal experience, advocates for women’s pain to be legitimized.

“The disbelief of female pain is well documented. “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” a 2001 study in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, documents how women are given less pain medications than men for the same procedures. On the other hand, the study notes that women are more likely to be given sedatives—as women are more often perceived as anxious than in pain. Women also wait longer than men in emergency rooms.”

7. Black Health Matters (Jenna Wortham, August 27, 2016, The New York Times)

“In April, a study by researchers at the University of Virginia found that African-American patients were routinely undertreated for their pain, compared with white patients. Ultimately, black patients were conditioned to underestimate their own pain.”

Plagued by a mysterious rash and other health concerns, Jenna Wortham visits several doctors and an emergency room before her acupuncturist asks if her condition might be related to stress. Upon reflecting on the overwhelming trauma she encounters daily in her newsfeed, Wortham discovers Simone Leigh, “a renowned artist with a history of examining social movements and black subjectivities, with a focus on women,” and works to “deal with the psychological toll of racism” through practices such as yoga and acupuncture.

8. Treating Migraines: How Women are Harmed by Gendered Medical Language (Rachel Mabe, February 6, 2018, Catapult)

“So the question is: Does the stigma of migraines as a women’s disease, and the stereotypically feminine language still used to talk about them, affect patient treatment? Does it affect how much time and money are spent on studying migraines?”

Rachel Mabe seeks to answer these questions by sharing the story of Patty, a woman who experiences “twenty-two headache days a month,” analyzing words such as “oversensitive” used to describe women’s migraines, writing about her own experience with incapacitating headaches, and examining how the gender biases present within the history of language related to migraines has contributed to the way migraines remain understudied.

***

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

America’s Post-Frontier Hangover

'American Progress' (1872), by John Gast, depicts settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like figure and aided by technology (railways, telegraphs), driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. (Fotosearch / Stringer/Getty)

Will Meyer | Longreads | March 2019 | 17 minutes (4,498 words)

In the small New England town where I live, Hadley, Massachusetts, the common lies a few miles from the mishmash of corporate chains that make up the town’s economic center. A quiet residential neighborhood surrounds the common. It is a grassy patch, left vacant most of the year, save for occasional festivals and craft fairs; open space to be utilized as needed, hardly disturbed otherwise. Adjacent to the college towns of Northampton and Amherst, not much happens in Hadley. I go for walks around my neighborhood most days and seldom run into many people. The common feels like an oasis, a fleeting yet contained sliver of vastness.

In 1995, the Hadley Historical Commission installed a plaque on the side of a rock, near the end of the common, between where it meets the main road and a paved rail trail. The plaque commemorates the “17th Century Palisade,” a wall that was “3 fingers thick and 8 feet high” in 1676, 100 years before the American revolution. The “fortification,” the plaque states, “was one mile long by 40 rods wide.” Most saliently, however, “Hadley was then a frontier outpost which felt threatened by Native American attack.” In other words, the settlers built a wall (around the corner from where I live now) both to assert their settlement and ward off perceived threats — namely the brown-skinned Other the United States was founded, at least partially, to pacify and remove. Read more…

Everything is Fine

Illustration by Brittany Molineux

Sara Fredman | Longreads | March 2019 | 10 minutes (2,523 words)

Everyone is screaming.

It is 4 p.m. and we are in the car. The 6-year-old and the 3-year-old are cranky from a long day at school, the baby indignant at having spent too long strapped in a car seat. Still, when my phone rings over the cacophony, I answer because it is my father and because he has dementia.

“Hi Daddy, is everything OK?”

“Yes, yes, everything’s fine,” he whispers, with unusual loquacity.

“Then why are you whispering?” I yell over the din.

***

We are sleep training the baby. She is our third so I am no longer surprised by the uncomfortable feeling that I have somehow become pitted against my own child in a fight for survival. This does not make the feeling more comfortable. Every night before bed, I jam Amazon’s top-rated earplugs into my ears in the hopes that I can sleep through her crying and her father can perform the prescribed rituals. It rarely works. Apparently, a baby’s cries are like a “sledgehammer” to its mother’s brain. The next person who tells me that the days are long but the years are short is going to get a sledgehammer to the brain. It is always an older person who says it, their soft words offered up as comfort. But what they no doubt intend as knowing reassurance I hear as a warning of still more different sorrows yet to come; their nostalgia seems deployed to shame me into recognizing my blessings before it is too late.

How long do I have before it is too late?

I do, of course, recognize my blessings, and I know, with a certainty I rarely possess, that someday I will look back on this tired person and I will want to be her. But it’s not just the sleep-challenged baby, it is also the auditory assault that begins before dawn. There are so many voices. More voices, it sometimes seems, than there are bodies from which they supposedly emanate. I move through my day to a soundtrack of temper tantrums and raucous laughter, endless questions and knock-knock jokes with nonsensical punchlines. Almost every sentence begins with the words “And, Mom.” They have so much to say and they want to say every bit of it to me, all at the exact same time.

When the real voices have quieted for the night, the imagined ones take over. Earplugs are powerless against the phantom baby cries and other voices, similarly faithful to their waking life counterparts, that live in my head. One dream has me caught in a loop, over and over again, hearing the baby from another room and grabbing her right before she is about to fall down the stairs; in another I am once again living in my childhood home, caring for my father as he loses his memory and his ability to speak. On a good night, these dreams can provide a solace: In real life, I don’t always catch the baby, and neither my father nor I have lived in that house for more than a decade. In my dreams I can sometimes be in two places at once, both called home.
Read more…

“The Glitter-scurfed Frappuccinos” Is Totally the Name of My New Band

Mmm, scurfy. (A Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino, 2017. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

John Birdsall’s essay for Topic on crimes against taste deserves kudos for bringing us the beautifully evocative words “glitter-scurfed,” but also for being a fun and funny way of getting us all to realize when we’re being judgy assholes about peoples’s food (#ChideReads?). Is the line between “good taste” and “food crime” completely relative? Maybe. But even if it’s not, it’s a lot fuzzier than most of us think.

Some days my Instagram serves up a scroll of atrocities: cake-topped #freakshakes, Bloody Marys bristling with bacon swizzles and sliders on skewers, Luther Burgers with glazed doughnuts stunting for the bun, brownie-batter “hummus,” glitter-scurfed pink-and-blue unicorn Frappuccinos, and activated charcoal soft-serve so black and glossy it resembles roof-patch polymer. Social media is a major enabler of crimes against taste (their visual representations anyway; see the new popularity of “dark cuisine,” or hei an liao li—fantastical, thrillingly transgressive dishes trending on Chinese social media), but it is, after all, only food porn.

Let’s pause to consider the definition of “crime,” or at least to say what it is not. There are plenty of dishes that appear brutal, bizarre, or disgusting through the lens of culture. My introduction to Filipino food was the murky bowl of dinuguan (a stew of mixed pork innards in a sauce of vinegar and blood) my future mother-in-law served me for breakfast one morning nearly 30 years ago. As I slurped politely, I gazed longingly at the box of Cheerios on top of the fridge. If I’d stopped there, rejected a cuisine I didn’t understand and that seemed intent on assault (especially so early in the morning), my brush with the food of the Philippines might have gone down in dinner-party stories as a tale of staring down evil in a bowl and living to talk about it, or at least of shuddering in the face of grossness. Thanks to love for my husband-to-be, I suppose, I persisted. I came to see beauty in a bowl of blood and offal stew—the way a handful of economical cuts from a butcher’s market stall can transcend utility, honor an animal gone to slaughter by elevating its twistiest parts, and express an immigrant’s longing for a place on the other side of the world. A dish that looks, smells, and tastes like a crime can merely be misunderstood, evidence of an accusing prosecutor’s failure at grasping meaning or context.

Read the essay