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On Asylums

Jens Büttner/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Lisa Chen | Brick | Winter 2019 | 11 minutes (2,209 words)

 

Around this time her neighbor sent an email.

The email said her cat had entered his home several times that week. The cat had sprayed his closet, clothes, shoes, rugs, and furniture. He had also sprayed the exterior door in the back of his house, the patio area, plants, etcetera.

It’s getting really bad, the neighbor wrote.

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Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me

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Kimberly Mack | Longreads | February 2019 | 28 minutes (7,118 words)

 

“Will you sing to me?”

My mom’s pain had subsided for the moment, and her voice was strangely perky. Happy even. The morphine had kicked in. She was strapped in tight, on a stretcher, at the back of the ambulette. An assortment of pillows and towels cushioned her body to protect her from the impact as the wheels slowly rolled over each pothole, each bump, each uneven patch of street.

I had been warned that the ride from Midtown Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital to the Lincoln Tunnel would be the worst of it — a minefield for my 68-year-old mother, whose stage-four uterine cancer had metastasized to her liver and lungs and, as her palliative care doctor characterized it, “filled her entire abdominal cavity.” It was the pain that finally got my mom to visit the doctor seven weeks earlier. There had been other signs, but she had refused to go to the doctor before that, only repeating to me what I’d heard her say when I was growing up: “Doctors look for problems…they make you sick.”

It was August 2015. We were now headed by an ambulette service to my new home in Toledo, Ohio, ten hours away, where I was a college professor. The plan was for her to first spend a few weeks at a skilled nursing facility, so she could relearn how to walk after her recent long hospital stay. That would give us time to order a hospital bed and other medical supplies before bringing her to our house for in-home hospice care. I had been looking forward to showing my mom our new home ever since I texted a picture of it to her after we found it in June.

“Look, Mom!” I wrote. “I can’t believe the house comes with such colorful flowers. There are dark pink rose bushes in the backyard.”

“Oh Kim, it’s so beautiful,” she texted back.

“I can’t wait for you to see it,” I replied. And that was true. Neither one of us had lived in a house before.

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A Moral Center In a Decayed Ethical Universe

Former Abu Ghraib interrogator turned playwright Joshua Casteel, left, interviews an unidentified prisoner, played by David Blum, during a dress rehearsal of his production, "Returns," in 2007. (AP Photo/The Daily Iowan, Ben Roberts)

Joshua Casteel had to decide between attending seminary and deploying to Iraq as an army interrogator. He chose Iraq, where he hoped to bring morality and humanity to interrogations. But army interrogators already had their own version of “moral order”:

For the first week Casteel sat in on interrogations. There were six booths on each side of a long hallway; down the center was a two-way mirror that didn’t always work well, and when it didn’t, the prisoners watched you watch them. The rooms held little beyond plastic chairs, cheap tables, maybe zip ties on the chair legs. Sometimes a steel hook was attached to the floor. Every now and then prisoners were led to a more comfortable room, to confuse them, make them relax. The goal was to make them slip up. Sometimes Casteel saw men kept naked. Sometimes they were handcuffed to chairs.

During lessons, Casteel’s supervisors explained how to use fabricated stories and charges of homosexuality to shame the prisoners and manipulate them. The commanders were clear about who they were dealing with, Casteel remembered.

“These men,” they said, “are the agents of Satan, gentlemen.”

Casteel kept his own moral compass in the interrogation room, where it turned out that treating people like people was more effective than treating people like animals to be broken.

It turned out he couldn’t help but feel bad for the prisoners. It didn’t matter if the prisoner was a wrongly accused farmer or a jihadist bent on Casteel’s destruction. His orders commanded that he approach prisoners as assets to manipulate, but when Casteel walked into the interrogation room and saw the prisoner, he thought, This is a man in need of redemption. “From my very first interrogation,” he wrote later, “I have simply lacked the ability to look at the person I interrogate in a way that does not demand I also think about what is best for him.” Soon Casteel was attending confession with an Army chaplain after each interrogation, because “of an overwhelming burden to atone for what I considered the sin of reducing individuals to strategic ‘objects of exploitation.’” Once, he told a prisoner “You are not a criminal, you are not a terrorist,” and the prisoner wept, because no American had ever called him anything but evil.

At the same time, Casteel was extracting more information from the prisoners than other interrogators. During interrogations, Casteel smiled a lot and tapped his foot or smoked a cigarette to give the prisoner time to think, or sometimes because he didn’t quite know what to do next. He tried to show respect. He listened more than he spoke. He paid attention to a prisoner’s words, tone of voice, body language. “Some good news came in today,” he wrote to his parents after a month in Iraq. “I was just notified that the results of my past three interrogations received special recognition from ‘higher up.’ I guess my cigarettes and smiles with the ruthless man I spoke briefly of earlier did something profitable for the commanders in the field. That was a big boost of confidence, being as the best thing I did was simply respect him.”

Casteel eventually left the military as a conscientious objector after one particularly transformative encounter with a detainee. On his return to the U.S., he struggled both with the aftermath of his experience and with his health — his time monitoring burning waste pits in Iraq left him with Iraq/Afghanistan War-Lung Injury, and the ensuing cancer killed him. For Smithsonian and Epic magazines, Jennifer Percy tells the story of his life, work, and death.

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‘The Most Versatile Criminal In History’

Getty / Penguin Random House

Jonny Auping | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,367 words)

 

Paul Le Roux is unequivocally a criminal mastermind, and if you’ve never heard his name, that only proves the point. After all, a criminal mastermind isn’t just defined by the audacity of his crimes, but the extent to which he gets away with them, and by that measure Le Roux is nothing short of brilliant.

Journalist Evan Ratliff has spent years piecing together who Le Roux is and the unbelievable nature of his crimes. In his recently released book, The Mastermind, Ratliff paints a picture of a man considered by one source to be the “most versatile criminal in history.” Throughout the mid-aughts, Le Roux, a South African computer programmer, ran an illegal online pharmaceutical scam that sold addictive painkillers to Americans at astonishing rates. Real doctors signed off on the scam. Real pharmacists sold the drugs. But it was Le Roux, usually operating from a computer in Manila, who was pulling all the strings. The painkiller scheme grossed him hundreds of millions of dollars.

That money would go on to fund a global criminal enterprise that included literal boatloads of cocaine, shipments of methamphetamine from North Korea, weapons deals with Iran, and a team of ex-military mercenaries who were ordered to kill anyone who threatened Le Roux’s bottom line.

The Mastermind is an incredible feat of reporting that takes the reader step by step into the journeys of Le Roux’s employees, accomplices and hired killers, as well as the law enforcement teams trying to take him down. Most of these parties were largely unaware of the scope of Le Roux’s enterprise. The shocking details and twists that Ratliff reveals are unrelenting; they tell a story that would be impossible to believe if Ratliff didn’t bring the reader along on the reporting upon which it all rests. Read more…

Notes on a Shipwreck

Chris McGrath / Getty

Davide Enia | translated by Antony Shuggar | an excerpt adapted from Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope | Other Press | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,334 words)

On Lampedusa, a fisherman once asked me: “You know what fish has come back? Sea bass.”

Then he’d lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing down to the butt in silence.

“And you know why sea bass have come back to this stretch of sea? You know what they eat? That’s right.”

And he’d stubbed out his cigarette and turned to go.

There was nothing more, truly, to be said.

What had stuck with me about Lampedusa were the calluses on the hands of the fishermen; the stories they told of constantly finding dead bodies when they hauled in their nets (“What do you mean, ‘constantly’?” and they’d say, “Do you know what ‘constantly’ means? Constantly”); scattered refugee boats rusting in the sunlight, perhaps nowadays the only honest form of testimony left to us — corrosion, grime, rust — of what’s happening in this period of history; the islanders’ doubts about the meaning of it all; the word “landing,” misused for years, because by now these were all genuine rescues, with the refugee boats escorted into port and the poor devils led off to the Temporary Settlement Center; and the Lampedusans who dressed them with their own clothing in a merciful response that sought neither spotlights nor publicity, but just because it was cold out and those were bodies in need of warmth. Read more…

Remembering Ken Nordine

Album art from Next! / Dot Records

Language is music. A conversational voice has its own cadence and mode. Laughter can be melodic. Poems, when sung, become lyrics. Of course we all know the difference between singing and talking, but when you think of the basic definition of music as organized sound, it increasingly becomes a distinction without a difference. Ken Nordine, who died at age 98, blurred those boundaries. He invented something he termed “word jazz” and made it a lifelong expression. He wrote, performed, and produced albums and radio shows, all featuring his extraordinarily resonant voice. “He also had such a special mind,” his son Ken Jr. remembered, “that enabled him to deconstruct the world and put it back together in the most compelling ways.”

Nordine was born in Cherokee, Iowa on April 23, 1920. He started working at WBEZ radio in 1938 before leaving Chicago to pick up radio announcing gigs in other states, eventually returning to make ads. He had a comfortable career ahead of him even then, possessing the rich, sonorous bass preferred for mid-century voiceovers—but Nordine was altogether more subversive, chafing at what he called the “banal, happy, didn’t bother anybody” commercial gigs that made up his day job.

Word jazz was a happy accident. In 1956, Nordine was appearing at a club called the Lei Aloha on the North Side of Chicago, reciting the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and T.S. Eliot while being backed up by two jazz musicians. “The same crowd came every Monday,” Nordine remembered, “so I couldn’t do the same poems over and over, so I started to ad lib.” This is something any improvisational musician would do.

I always liked music, particularly jazz,” Nordine told an interviewer, “and it became more interesting to me when they forgot the theme and they would go flying off in their imaginary and wonderful choruses, making variations on that theme, and within the structure of its harmony and the changes. So I tried to do the same thing with words.”

Much of what followed in Nordine’s career was deeply musical, with his voice as principal soloist in a room full of instrumental improvisors. “So if I’m doing something, as I was the other day, about the arachnid family, I’ll say to the musician, ‘You can be the web, and you can play the attitude of the spider waiting for some food to come by,’” Nordine told Tape Op in 2000.

So each musician brings to the fantasy whatever they feel is appropriate. Or, in another way, I’ll say, “Hey, let’s get a good groove going.” And then I’ll do something that fits with that groove metrically. Because I work with metrics pretty much. For example, the spider thing I was working on is a 6/5 rhythm. So I knew that would work with some of the things the percussionist was doing. He did a wonderful thing that sounded like the light coming off of the web. I’d say, “It’s a good year for spiders,” and he’d go, tchi-tchi-tchi … “Or so it seems. Incessantly weaving such gossamer schemes.” … ur-ah-ur “It should make one wonder what blueprint within instinctively causes the spider to spin.” … phew-shew-phew. That sort of thing. It’s really an empathic relationship between the musicians’ hearing and my hearing, so there’s room for them and there’s room for what I do. One of the beautiful things about jazz music is that when it really works each of the players allows room for the others.

His first solo album, Word Jazz, was released in 1957. It was without precedent. Other successful versions followed: Son of Word Jazz, Love Words, Next!. Fred Astaire and Barrie Chase danced to Nordine’s song “My Baby” on television. Nordine hung out with Bop trumpet player Clifford Brown and vanguard comedian Lenny Bruce. When his record label dropped him in 1960, he doubled down on the hip. He said his 1967 album Colors “was written in one day and recorded the same day. I wrote them as we were doing it…With a small group of musicians, you don’t have to have extensive charts and arrangements.” The album was inspired by a line Nordine ad-libbed for a commercial:  “The Fuller Paint Company invites you to stare with your ears at yellow.”

A few years later, Nordine was flown to Hollywood to teach 13-year-old actress Linda Blair how to speak backwards for The Exorcist. (He later sued because he said he wasn’t paid properly for his work on the movie, and then received a settlement.) “‘Bullshit’ backwards,” he noted, “is ‘tea-sloob’.” In 1971 he made a surreal television commercial for Levi’s Jeans—a kind of apocalyptic animated fable which featured plaid bell bottom pants—and did it again in 1983, this time with primitive computer animation.

Nordine was the perfect transitional figure between rapidly changing cultural norms: the buttoned-down 1950s authoritative announcer intoning counter culture free association.

The ensuing years saw collaborations with other musicians: Nordine worked with The Grateful Dead (they’re his backing band on 1991s Devout Catalyst) and Tom Waits—who described Nordine’s voice as a cross between “the guy with the pitchfork in your head saying go ahead and jump, and the ambulance driver who tells you you’re going to pull through”—as well as doing several hundred voiceover gigs a year and broadcasting his syndicated radio show.

When asked at the age of 90 what kept him going, Nordine said, “I have no stress, my ego is under control, I know there’s so much to prove I’ll never be able to prove any of it.”

Ken Nordine lives on. You can hear his inventive soundscape editing carried forward with Radiolab—strange, almost subconscious sounds playing under cut-up, conversational outtakes—and his wordy “wonder wandering” in Laurie Anderson’s works like “Language Is a Virus (From Outer Space).” Anderson first heard Nordine when she was 15. “It changed my life,” she said. “I just thought…that’s the greatest way to tell stories.”

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

Written On the Body: One Family’s History

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In sharing the story of each of her tattoos and their meaning in this piece at ProPublica, journalist Adriana Gallardo — who was once an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — recounts her family’s hard-won luck at life in America, a luck they earned by back-breaking janitorial work and sheer determination, toil that allowed Gallardo to become a journalist to “revisit difficult stories in complicated places.”

On my left arm is a garbage can with a few peonies and a calla lily tossed inside. When I shut my eyes and think about my childhood, I see my mother pushing a loud, circular, plastic, gray trash can on wheels. Our family business took on anything. From factories to the YMCA, churches to strip-mall office spaces — you name it, my parents were up for cleaning it. I grew up chasing behind my mother and that garbage can.

Owning a business was never in the plan. My parents were young immigrants raising a family in the early 1990s just outside of Chicago. When my dad’s boss was ready to move on, he offered them a chance to take over the business on a generous payment plan. They took a gamble and the janitors became business owners. I was 6 and my brother was 2.

After I returned to the border I began to ask questions. My parents’ answers were exactly what I was afraid to hear. I did not want to know that they got to the border without a plan. That it was on my mother’s insistence that we all come along. That it took them a full week of door-knocking to find anyone who could smuggle my mother with a baby and a toddler. That it was February, it was cold and we didn’t bring many clothes.

Once I started listening, once I traded the half-memory and self-constructed story, when I bothered to really look, the details seemed to arrive as if I had invited them.

Just after Christmas, I complained about a meal and mom’s memory jumped back to those days at the border. She tells me we ate the same street tacos for every meal that week because that was all they could afford. That I complained and it broke her heart, but that was all they had.

I asked about where we stayed. She said it was a dingy and dark hotel with no running hot water. There, my brother got very sick from the cold. When we talk about how cold she remembers it was, she casually mentions she was breastfeeding all along this trip. A detail I never considered given my brother was just a few months old. The image of my mother breastfeeding a sick baby in the cold, with nowhere to go, drained any last drop of romance from our story.

I became a journalist to revisit difficult stories in complicated places. To labor on stories worth telling because they carried a truth we might be ignoring. To dig, find and hopefully do justice in the re-telling.

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Maybe What We Need Is … More Politics?

Alfred Gescheidt / Getty Images

Aaron Timms | Longreads | February 2019 | 20 minutes (5,514 words)

Alpacas are native to South America, but to find the global center of alpaca spinning you’ll need to travel to Bradford, England. The man most responsible for this quirk of history is Titus Salt. Until the 1830s alpaca yarn was considered an unworkable material throughout Europe. Salt, a jobbing young entrepreneur from the north of England, commercialized a form of alpaca warp that made the animal’s fleece suitable for mass production. Within a decade alpaca, finer and softer than wool, had become the rage of England’s fashionable classes.

Already by the mid-19th century industrialization had begun to disfigure the English countryside with “machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled,” as Dickens put it in Bleak House. The immiseration of the working classes was under way. Troubled by the emerging horrors of the new industrial age, Salt built a model village to house the workers he employed in his textile mill. Saltaire, with its neat, spacious houses, running water, efficient sewerage, parks, schools and recreational facilities, became a symbol of what enlightened capitalism could look like. It was also a model in the truest sense, serving as the inspiration for workers’ villages built later in the 19th century by companies such as Cadbury’s and Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturer that eventually became Unilever.

According to economist Paul Collier, these Victorian capitalists instituted a tradition that survives, however precariously, today: the tradition of “business with purpose, business with a sense of obligation to a workforce and a community.” Among the modern successors of this model of compassionate capitalism, Collier has argued, are U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and John Lewis & Partners, the British department store. In the 1940s Johnson & Johnson set out a credo stating that the company’s first responsibility was to its customers. Thanks to this credo, Johnson & Johnson’s management led a mass recall of Tylenol off supermarket and pharmacy shelves following a contamination scare in the early 1980s. Now standard practice, this type of product recall was uncommon for its time — and allowed the company to maintain goodwill with its customers. John Lewis, for its part, has prospered through difficult decades for brick-and-mortar retail largely thanks to its unusual power structure: the company is owned by a trust run in the interests of its workforce.

The thread uniting this strain of capitalism, Collier contends in his new book The Future of Capitalism: Facing The New Anxieties, is ethics. An ethics of reciprocal responsibility and care — between owners, workers, and customers — has allowed different businesses to prosper in different eras without destroying the communities and environments around them. But very few businesses are run according to these principles today. According to Collier, it is to this model of reciprocal ethics that capitalism, having lost its way over the past four decades, now must return — and reciprocity must become the principle that guides human interaction at all levels of society, not just in the firm. “Our sense of mutual regard has to be rebuilt,” he says. “Public policy needs to be complemented by a sense of purpose among firms.” “We need to meet each other.” “A new generation needs to reset social narratives.” “Norms need to change.” Prescriptivism today, the future of capitalism tomorrow. Read more…

Class Dismissed

Illustration by Cornelia Li

Alison Stine | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,250 words)

 

This essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit organization.

I had never seen so many tennis courts in my life. I had never heard of rugby or lacrosse. I mispronounced genre in class because I had only ever read the word. I didn’t know girls my age owned pearls. I felt equally stunned by black dresses and those pearls at the dining hall on display Sunday nights, something many in sororities wore. I didn’t own pearls, or a nice black dress. I was born in Indiana, where our neighbors grew popcorn. I was raised in rural Ohio. My public high school was small, flanked by fields. The last day of senior year, a student drove up in his family’s tractor. It had taken him hours to get there, puttering along back roads. I was the first person in my family to attend an elite private college, partially on multiple scholarships, and partially, I think, on my parents’ sheer will to get me out.

I wasn’t the first person in my family to go to college — I was the second generation, after my parents — and on teachers’ and guidance counselors’ advice, I had applied to several schools, including state universities. But the private colleges were the ones that seemed to really want someone like me. They courted me. They offered me money, and I couldn’t say no to that. I couldn’t afford to.

I would soon learn that private colleges in this country have a social class problem. Each year, as spring break approaches, I think back on my time in school with particular sharpness, remembering other students going to warm islands or ski resorts. Unlike me, my classmates definitely knew how to ski. They parked their Land Rovers and BMWs on campus, and they landed coveted unpaid internships in the summer — something only rich kids can afford to do.

All of these trappings of wealth were new to me in 1996. But it appeared I was going to get an education in class privilege as well as liberal arts.

I was hardly alone in my experience of class bewilderment. Now, as then, there is no special orientation for students who identify as poor or rural, no workshops on the culture clash we might experience in college. Based on the price of required books, most professors had no idea of our financial reality. Students are reprimanded for not buying books on time, or not having money on a copy card, or for personal printers running out of pricy inks — but these are real and valid issues for those not raised in wealth. While our intellects can keep pace with our wealthy classmates, our wallets can’t.

I sometimes think it is difficult for our former professors to reconcile the academic and intellectual successes that I and my fellow scholarship kids had in college with our difficulties after graduation. A friend who works as a stay-at-home mom, raising multiple children, admitted to me she couldn’t face going to back to campus and seeing beloved teachers. Another friend, struggling to find work at the time, had a visceral, violent reaction to an annual fund request, sent on expensive, engraved paper only weeks after the Wall Street bailout in 2009. A few years after graduation, I returned to campus for a memorial service for a community member. One of my favorite professors asked me what I was doing. When I answered, “Teaching high school,” he said, “That’s a waste.”

I know he meant I was spending all my time working a very difficult job — and not the one for which I had studied — rather than writing. But for most of us, difficult, non-dream jobs are all we have, all we can hope for.
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Three Decades of Cross-Cultural Utopianism in British Music Writing

Mick Jagger and Brian Jones reading a copy of Mersey Beat magazine in 1965. Mark and Colleen Hayward / Redferns / Getty

Mark Sinker | A Hidden Landscape Once a Week Strange Attractor Press | February 2019 | 32 minutes (6,436 words)

 

It was late 1986, and I was frustrated. I’d given up my day-job to dedicate myself full-time to writing, but I wasn’t getting much work, and what I did get was paying almost nothing. Only one title was giving me the freedom to find my voice — Richard Cook’s still-small monthly The Wire, where he was building a team of new young writers — and it paid worst of all. No surprise I wasn’t getting enough paid work: Mostly I wrote about free improvised music and the more intransigent offshoots of post-punk, but I’d also seen King Sunny Ade play at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1983, and fallen in love with West African pop, its dancing brightness and the strangeness of its vocal lines. Others were writing about it, no one very well. Or so I felt. I was young, and young often means arrogant. Two things had drawn me to the music-writing of that era, the weeklies in particular: its opinionated mischief-making humor, and the sense of young people travelling by touch, learning as they went — finding out about the wider world by throwing themselves out into that world. Master both, and there’s your recipe for professional success, I thought. I had a head full of ideas about what music should and shouldn’t be, and was intensely willing to argue about them.

The LP in front of me was Coming Home, debut release of a group of South African exiles under the collective name Kintone. Its quietly melodic afrojazz — with hints of Weather Report, but far less flashy — went right over my head that aggrieved autumn. I had come to hate jazz writing which damned musicians with bland praise, leaving readers swimming unconvinced in routinized tact. But re-listening now, 30 years on, I have to say I no longer hear what apparently so riled me then, when I scorned instrumental prowess and sneered at a cartoon idea of the meaning of fusion.

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