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This Month in Podcasts: Innocent Until Proven Grifty

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Let’s start right off the bat with a correction:

When our team introduced the Longreads Podcast last month, I opened the series by saying that on April 17, 2009, Mark Armstrong tweeted the tweet that launched a decade of #longreads, noting (for the comedy!) that this auspicious announcement had only been retweeted twice.

But now that I’ve listened to our first roundtable episode on fact-checking — and Mark has since helpfully reminded me that, in the spring of 2009, Twitter hadn’t formally rolled out native retweets yet — I would like to redress my cavalier lack of rigor by issuing a belated correction. Because lo and behold, he was right: retweets weren’t formally introduced as a native feature on Twitter until November 2009.

So more than two people retweeted that first tweet! It was more like four.

More importantly, the first attempted retweet appears to have graced Twitter on April 17, 2007. So not only does this first monthly podcast newsletter give me a chance to set the record straight, the checking process has given me the additional gift of discovering that retweets and @Longreads have the same birthday! (Is running an account according to its zodiac sign the next frontier in social? Should I be reading @Longreads‘ horoscope? Are you an Aries? Talk to me at catherine@longreads.com.)

So to celebrate Longreads’ tenth birthday in two months, we’ve decided to follow up Bundyville — just nominated for a National Magazine Award in Podcasting! — with a twice-weekly podcast in 2019. Every Tuesday, we run a narrative feature or recent interview as an audio companion to Longreads’ original reporting, essays, and criticism. Every Friday, we host an editors’ roundtable, where Longreads editors discuss what we’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Top 5 Longreads of the Week.

In this first month of roundtables, we’ve covered antidotes to hot takes, rethinking what you “know,” revisiting overlooked and underreported stories, investigating even the more innocent-seeming grifters, and processing discomfort in the face of climate denial. Here are links to all five of our first feature episodes:

Living With Dolly Parton

In Conversation with Doree Shafrir: Dress You Up in My Love

Checking Facts in 2019: Fact-Checker Roundtable

Every Day I Write the Book

Poached Eggs: An American Caviar Crime Caper

I’d recommend starting with our most recent true crime feature on counterfeit caviar from David Gauvey Herbert, the aforementioned fact-checking episode, and our editors’ roundtable on the latest in long cons.

If you’d like to receive new episodes as they air, you can subscribe here on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Tune in tomorrow morning to hear Lily Burana read from her recent Longreads original essay, “Elegy in Times Square,” and Friday morning to hear what Longreads editors have been reading in the run-up to this week’s Top 5.

Just 59 days until Longreads turns 10! Count down with us at longreads.com/podcast.

Thanks for listening!

Audience Editor
Catherine Cusick (@CusickCatherine)

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‘What Would Social Media Be Like As the World Is Ending?’

Hulton Archive / Getty, Greywolf Press

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | February 2019 | 22 minutes (6,069 words)

 

Mark Doten is a deranged seer, a mad scribe mapping the end of the world. In The Infernal, his wonderfully strange first novel, he tackled a host of twenty-first century horrors: Osama Bin Laden and his followers, the moral disaster of the War on Terror, the gravitational pull of the networked world on our minds, and a seemingly inevitable post-human future in which one of the few survivors is Mark Zuckerberg. Now, in Trump Sky Alpha, Doten’s produced a fierce, unexpectedly moving, and surprisingly quickly conceived book about the Trump presidency. The new novel begins with a nuclear conflagration that wipes out 90 percent of the global population. The protagonist, Rachel, a journalist steeped in the folkways of the internet, is one of the few survivors. In an effort to reboot American journalism, the New York Times Magazine, risen from the ashes, assigns her to write an article about internet humor at the end of the world. What were people tweeting as the bombs fell?

It may sound like a deliberately obscure assignment, but it soon takes Rachel into some of the darkest corners of the post-apocalyptic American landscape. Mourning her dead wife and child, Rachel is also searching for their final resting place; along the way she finds a new lover, encounters an American security state that seems just as malevolent as its pre-apocalyptic forebears, tangles with a frightful hacktivist-turned-cyber-villain, and meets a novelist dying of radiation exposure who may be the key to it all. Trump Sky Alpha begins as an elaborate farce and ends as something much more grim and compelling, covering issues of politics, resistance, identity, and what, after all these years of mindless info-consumption, the internet actually means to our society. Read more…

‘I Saw My Countrymen Marched Out of Tacoma’

Illustration by Mark Wang

Joy Lanzendorfer| Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,300 words)

On February 6, 1885, David Kendall, a city councilman in Eureka, California, was shot. Two Chinese men, possibly from rival gangs, were firing at each other from across the street when a bullet hit Kendall and killed him. Within 20 minutes of his death, a mob of 600 white men marched into Chinatown, intending to burn it to the ground.

Disturbingly, this wasn’t unusual. Violence against Chinese people and Chinese-Americans was a regular occurrence on the West Coast. However, this event was different because of what happened next. Instead of destroying Chinatown, the city decided to order the Chinese to leave. Within 48 hours, most of the Chinese residents were forced onto boats bound for San Francisco. This “peaceful” method of expelling them from their homes was quickly imitated. Towns up and down America’s West Coast, but also as far north as Vancouver, Canada, and as far east as Augusta, Georgia, began forcing out their Chinese populations. Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans, considers it ethnic cleansing.

“The intention … was to round up all the Chinese people in over 200 towns across the Pacific Northwest and drive them out so they would never come back,” she says. Read more…

Alternative Reality: ‘Howard Buffett’s Border War’

Howard Buffett, laughs at his swearing-in ceremony as Macon County Sheriff, Friday, Sept. 15, 2017 at the Scovill Golf Course Banquet Facility in Decatur, Ill. Buffett will fill out the remaining term of retiring Sheriff Thomas Schneider, who confirmed earlier Friday he would step down. (Clay Jackson/Herald & Review via AP)

It’s been a rough month or so for news publications around the country, with recent layoffs at BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Gannett, along with impending cuts at Vice and McClatchy. In mid-January, too, almost the entire editorial staff of The East Bay Express, Oakland’s alt-weekly, was laid off.

Despite the carnage, though, alternative weeklies continue to publish ambitious, informative work, performing a vital service at a moment when local newspapers are disappearing at an alarming rate. The Phoenix New Times, for instance, published an aggressively reported two-part series on Warren Buffett’s son, Howard, who has earned a reputation as something of a border cowboy.

Seven Days, Burlington’s alt-weekly, profiled Charlie Morrow, the innovative musician and composer who is pioneering a new kind of immersive sound technology. Spokane’s Inlander published an in-depth story about grizzly bears, always an intriguing topic. Alex Woodward, in the New Orleans Gambit, documented the history of redlining in the Crescent City.

In Madison’s Isthmus, Howard Hardee took a look at a new effort to house the city’s homeless population. Nicholas Dolan wrote about the abolitionist John Brown for Iowa City’s Little Village. And Gabrielle Gopinath, in Humboldt County’s North Coast Journal, wrote an engaging piece on a recently restored church mural that had been hidden from view for a century.

1. “Howard Buffett’s Border War: A Billionaire’s Son Is Spending Millions in Cochise County” (Beau Hodai, January 13, 2019, Phoenix New Times)

Warren Buffett’s sexagenarian son, Howard, is cast in the first part of this jarring exposé as an aspiring border warrior who has purchased influence along the Mexico-Arizona dividing line, where he owns land, in order to act out what seems to be a dangerous, puerile fantasy as a desert vigilante.

Buffett describes his activities on the border using the language of humanitarianism and concern for the “rule of law.” But closer inspection shows he is using the same dog-eared playbook, and walking in the same well-worn circles, as infamous border warriors and vigilantes who have preceded him along southeastern Arizona’s border with Mexico. Setting Buffett aside from some of his more notorious predecessors is his extreme wealth, and not much more.

Read the second part here.

2. “Charlie Morrow Creates Soundscapes That Mimic How We Hear” (Dan Bolles, January 23, 2019, Seven Days)

Charlie Morrow, the musician, composer, and sound artist, has always straddled the mainstream and the avant-garde. In college, he played trumpet alongside the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and later worked in the advertising industry, perhaps most famously penning the jingle for Hefty trash bags.

Now, Morrow is knee-deep in developing his own 3D sound design technology through MorrowSound, the company he founded, creating immersive sound installations in seemingly random places such as the Kaiser Permanante health hub in Santa Monica, California. Dan Bolles, of Burlington’s Seven Days, paints a vivid portrait of this amusingly eccentric polymath.

When wearing the signature black bowler hat that often tops his round face, Morrow almost looks like a René Magritte painting come to life. And there’s a certain surrealism to what he does. Where the Belgian painter famously juxtaposed ordinary objects with extraordinary settings, Morrow uses ordinary sounds to create extraordinary environments—often, as in the case of the Santa Monica waiting room, in places where you’d least expect them.

3. “A WSU researcher lived with grizzly bears in Alaska. She came away convinced humans and grizzlies can coexist” (Wilson Criscione, January 17, 2019, Inlander)

If you know how Werner Herzog’s grim documentary Grizzly Man ends, then you might furrow your brow at this story about Joy Erlenbach, a bear biologist at Washington State University who has spent 300 days over the past four years living with grizzly bears in the remote Alaskan wilderness. She believes that, in the right environment, humans can live peacefully alongside grizzlies.

Erlenbach says she knows how to read bears’ body language. They are not much different than dogs in the way they express discomfort. She remembers once walking on a path through tall grass when she surprised a mama bear, whom Erlenbach called “Nina,” and two large cubs. Nina was almost within arm’s reach. Erlenbach took a step back, but that upset Nina. So instead, Erlenbach froze, and Nina decided to simply walk past Erlenbach.

Wilson Criscione’s profile for the Spokane Inlander doubles as an expansive look at the ways in which people are interacting with grizzlies in the lower 48 states — often violently.

4. “How ‘redlining’ shaped New Orleans neighborhoods — is it too late to be fixed?” (Alex Woodward, January 21, 2019, The Gambit)

Alex Woodward investigates the racist legacy of redlining in this vital piece, examining how the widespread practice of denying credit to African-Americans still shapes today’s housing market in New Orleans.

A 2016 report from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that people of color still are denied mortgages at higher rates than white homebuyers in 61 U.S. metro areas. And a 2018 report from National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that nearly 75 percent of redlined neighborhoods in the U.S. remain low- to moderate-income areas, and people of color live in nearly 64 percent of those neighborhoods.

Though redlining was eliminated with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, its damage was never undone.

5. “Housing Madison’s homeless” (Howard Hardee, January 10, 2019, Isthmus)

In Madison, Wisconsin’s alt-weekly, Isthmus, Howard Hardee writes about a couple of new supportive housing facilities, built to help the city’s homeless, that have been managed — somewhat shakily, it seems — by a Chicago-based company named Heartland Housing. There’s a lot riding on how well Heartland does its job, as the facilities are the first two projects in a larger plan, known as Housing First, to address homelessness in Madison.

The failure of Housing First in Madison would be, first and foremost, a tragedy for people living on the razor’s edge of poverty. It’s hard to overstate how much it means for formerly homeless people such as Melisa, 52, to have a roof and four walls after spending countless nights under bridges, on riverbanks and in the woods.

Melisa grew up on Jenifer Street, played soccer for East High School, and studied graphic design in college. Either she doesn’t understand how she became homeless or doesn’t want to talk about it. “I went through some situations,” she says vaguely. But she knows the streets were harsh. She made and lost friends. Some died. And she was highly vulnerable herself: One night, she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. “We just survived,” she says.

6. “‘Bright Radical Star’: When John Brown came to Iowa” (Nicholas Dolan, January 15, 2019, Little Village)

Before his failed raid on Harpers Ferry, the rugged revolutionary John Brown passed through Iowa, which Nicholas Dolan describes as a “bastion of the abolitionist movement” in his informative historical essay for Little Village, the publication serving Iowa City and Cedar Rapids.

Leading up to 1859 and that ill-fated scheme, Brown and his fellow insurgents spent several months preparing in a modest Iowa community, even recruiting some soldiers from its ranks. It’s a story that speaks to America’s complicated relationship with religion and violence, and Iowa’s unsung radical history.

7. “The Hidden Palace” (Gabrielle Gopinath, January 31, 2019, North Coast Journal)

Humboldt County’s North Coast Journal published this fascinating article about a recently restored mural in Ferndale’s Church of the Assumption, painted in 1896 by the little-known artist Franz Bernau. The mural had been hidden from sight under whitewash for about a century, but now churchgoers are treated to a vibrant display that, in Gabrielle Gopinath’s telling, recalls a painting by M.C. Escher.

When you enter the Church of the Assumption today, the effect is dazzling. It can be hard to tell where architecture ends and painting begins. This impression intensifies as you approach the rear of the church, where floor-to-ceiling murals frame the altar, reaching some 50 feet above the ground. Below the chancel window, the mural depicts a sanctuary curtain hanging along four bays separated by painted columns and topped by fan ornaments, all rendered in starchy trompe l’oeil.

Gopinath’s vivid descriptions leave you with a strong desire to see the mural in person.

8. “Ilhan Omar’s improbable journey from refugee camp to Minnesota Legislature” (Cory Zurowski, November 7, 2016, City Pages)

Ilhan Omar, the newly elected Minnesota congresswoman — and, along with Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, one of the first Muslim women in the House of Representatives — has been the subject of a lot of intense scrutiny since she took office at the beginning of the year.

But that’s nothing new for the 37-year-old Somali-American, who got her start in politics in 2016, when she was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. That same year, the writer Cory Zurowski documented Omar’s somewhat tumultuous entry into politics, along with her circuitous route from Mogadishu to a refugee camp in Kenya to Arlington, Virginia, where her family first moved when they got to the United States — and where a young Omar struggled to fit in.

Classmates stuck gum to her headscarf when they weren’t trying to yank it off. None of her peers bothered to communicate, even to say hi. They stared instead. The new kid sat solo at lunch, a loner during recess as well. Omar’s English improved.

Then came her classmates’ questions: Does it feel good to wear shoes for the first time? Do you really have hair? Do you have a pet monkey? “I’d say the kids were curiously brutal,” says Omar, “but the lunch ladies were kind to me.”

Soon after her arrival in Virginia, Omar moved with to Minneapolis, and so marked the beginning of her rapid political ascent.

***

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.

Preparing for a Post-Roe America

Ralph Grunewald / Getty

Laura Barcella | Longreads | February 2019 | 13 minutes (3,517 words)

The 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade just occurred on January 22 — but the days of relatively uncomplicated American abortion access are, most likely, numbered. In fact, author Robin Marty believes it’s not a matter of if Roe will be overturned, it’s a matter of when.

For more than ten years, the Minneapolis-based freelance reporter and author of the new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America has been diligently chronicling the twists and turns of both the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements. Ever since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, Marty — like many other pro-choice Americans — has been waiting for the proverbial pro-life shoe to drop. Losing Kennedy, the swing voter on a number of major abortion rulings, and gaining Brett Kavanaugh — a long-time pro-life ally — seems to all but ensure the end of Roe, as well as the downfall of abortion being considered a constitutional right.

Indeed, several weeks after Marty and I spoke in late January, Kavanaugh voted with a minority of Justices to overturn recent Court precedent in favor of a law that sought to impose a new form of undue burden on abortion-seekers in Louisiana. The Cut called Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion something verging on gaslighting. In it, he postulates that perhaps the undue burden — abortion providers being required to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals — could simply be met, when of course providers have already been trying to gain admitting privileges for years. The Court ultimately blocked the implementation of the law, but only because the conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, voted with the liberals. The margin of safety has grown vanishingly thin.

Let’s consider what that means. If Roe were overturned, it wouldn’t necessarily make it impossible for a pregnant person to obtain an abortion, but it would potentially make an already challenging process even more daunting. As it stands, obtaining an abortion is already far from affordable or convenient for many women, even in blue states with a plethora of clinics. Despite Roe’s current status, and despite the fact that statistically, most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose, abortion care is still often portrayed as a privilege instead of a right — or as a miserable “worst-case” scenario rather than a straightforward medical procedure. Read more…

Magen David and Me

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Marya Zilberberg | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (3,886 words)

​I don’t think my father ever took off his Star of David necklace from the day he put it on in the infancy of the Carter administration. It was always there, resting in a copse of chest hair, a silver target in the V of his open shirt collar. I never asked, when he was alive, what it meant to him, but I imagined he had started to wear it simply because he could, having just escaped more than four decades of oppression in the U.S.S.R., where he couldn’t. Or, perhaps, wouldn’t. ​

The necklace had first belonged to me; my parents bought it for me when I was 14, when we were in Rome awaiting our entry visas to the United States. I had only recently learned of such a thing and its significance when my mother’s cousin Zhenya came to visit us in Odessa from Moscow just before we emigrated in August 1976. I had never before met this cousin, and when I first saw her what jumped out at me was her weird hair, a brown helmet of large immobile waves with a dullness I’d associated with dolls. Thankfully I had by then acquired some tact and didn’t blurt out my first impression. Zhenya wore a necklace, a darkly patinated metal circle, smaller and thinner than a penny, about the size of the old Soviet kopek. Into it was etched a shiny six-pointed star. When I asked my dad what it was, he said, “A Magen David,” the shield of King David, a symbol of the Jewish people. Although his matter-of-factness surprised me, I didn’t press him, thinking I must be missing something.

By the time we were readying to leave, I had spent almost half my lifetime with the awareness of being a Jew, though with no clue as to its larger meaning. At 7, I took a ballroom dance class at the Palace of the Pioneers because my mother thought it might instill some grace into my otherwise clumsy build. At the end of the first lesson, our teacher lined us up against a bleached wall, boys in white shirts and brown pants sagging from their scrawny frames like laundry on a line, girls with pigtails tied in exuberant white bows the size of parachutes, all performing a silent ritual of respectful attention. She instructed us to bring to the next class information about our nationalities. When I asked my parents about it that evening over dinner, my dad, staring into his bowl of soup, said, “We are Jews.”
Read more…

Teen Girls Finally Get to Touch Themselves

Netflix / Netflix / Hulu

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,569 words)

There was a time when people believed masturbating would leave them blind, hairy-palmed, and STD-riddled (okay, the last one was me — I was a kid in the nineties). The ancient Sumerians were down with it — for both men and women — but two centuries of moralists ruined masturbation for everyone. Even now, the act isn’t especially celebrated, particularly if you’re a girl. It’s hard not to think of boys specifically when studies show that kids learn to jerk off from their friends and the media, rather than from their parents or schools. And while I can’t think of one teen movie where a boy isn’t caught with their hands full (of semen), I can barely think of one where a girl is. I read Deenie like everyone else — apparently Judy Blume’s balls-out approach to female masturbation is still rare in YA 46 years later — but there was a dearth of girls getting themselves off in pop culture and, perhaps accordingly, a dearth of girls talking about it in my actual life. This made me feel all those things that have since become stereotypical themes when it comes to women and masturbation: shame, guilt, like there was something wrong with me.

Read more…

It’s a Lovely Day for a Bike Ride

Photo by Mack Male via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Tom Justice was an Olympic cycling hopeful. Tom Justice’s life didn’t work out quite the way he’d hoped. Tom Justice found an unlikely escape hatch: bank robbery, but just for the thrills — not the cash. In October 1999, he robbed his second bank, the Lake Forest, Illinois, branch of Northern Trust, escaping by bike with over $3,000. He put the cash in paper bags and left them in spots where homeless people would find them.

He eventually robbed 26 banks of nearly $130,000 before descending into drug addiction. Steven Leckart‘s story in Chicago Magazine is as engaging and cinematic as one could want for this sad, twisted Robin Hood of a tale.

But before he could flash his lights, the cyclist pulled over and hopped off his bike. When Thompson pulled up, the guy was fidgeting with his back wheel. It started to drizzle again.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Thompson asked through the open window of his patrol car.

“Hey, yeah, sorry, it’s gonna take me a second,” Tom said, continuing to tinker.

Thompson parked a few feet ahead, turned on his flashing red and blue lights, and walked back to the cyclist.

“I live in San Ramon. I’m riding home,” said Tom, pretending to adjust his brakes before climbing onto the bike and clicking his left foot into the pedal.

“Do you mind if I take a look in your bag?” Thompson asked the cyclist.

“Yeah, no problem. I just have to unclip,” replied Tom. “These pedals are actually counterbalanced, so I need to click into both in order to get out at the same time.”

There’s no such thing as counterbalanced pedals. But Thompson didn’t know that. He watched as the cyclist lifted his right foot, clicked down into the pedal, and — whoosh! — bolted into the street in a dead start as hellacious as any Tom had ever mustered on a velodrome.

“I knew it!” cried Thompson. He desperately grabbed his radio, but another officer was talking on the channel. The cyclist shot down Main Street and out of sight.

Read the story

Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Here’s a List of Longreads about Love for You

Getty Images

Valentine’s Day always brings me back to the halls of my high school, which, on February 14th each year, teemed with roses by the dozen, glittery cards taped to lockers, oversized teddy bears, and prolonged goodbyes between couples before every class. As a shy high school student, I was more interested in the characters in the novels I read than pursuing my peers, but the holiday always brought an intense anxiety. Even when I told myself I didn’t want a cache of hot pink roses from the Kroger down the street, and even when I convinced myself that the holiday was a celebration of consumerism, I still felt like I was missing out in some way.

When I look back, I’m able to realize that my sense of loneliness didn’t come from any true sense of isolation, but rather the fact that I only recognized one type of relationship being celebrated, a kind I didn’t fully believe in, romances that relied on public gestures as proof. The essays I curated for this reading list are intended to be inclusive of all kinds of love. These writers explore what the landscape of relationships might look like in the age of robots, how one community of queer and trans women healed after Hurricane Harvey, and what pigeons might teach us about our own capacity for love, just for starters.

1. The Love Story That Upended the Texas Prison System (Ethan Watters, October 11, 2018, Texas Monthly)

Fred Cruz, imprisoned for 15 years for a robbery in Texas in the 1960s, was known for his calm manner, his study of law, and his practice of Buddhism. When Frances Jalet, a lawyer who moved to Texas because she was told it was a place where she could best fight for civil rights, met Cruz, the two hit it off. Jalet and Cruz, through years visitation and discussions of law in their letters to one another, fought for prisoners’ rights in Texas.

‘I know how deeply you love your son,’ Jalet wrote to Cruz’s mother that spring. ‘I have grown to love him also.’ Just what kind of love she was professing was unclear, perhaps even to her.

2. Love in the Time of Robots (Alex Mar, October 17, 2017, Wired)

What are the differences between humans and androids, and can the differences be “solved” through research? Can a relationship with an android stave off loneliness? What are the ethical considerations of trying to create an android so close to a human that the differences are difficult to perceive?

Alex Mar, in this riveting piece, addresses these questions, and also writes about the motives of Hiroshi Ishiguro, a man in Japan who regularly produces androids.

3. They Found Love, Then They Found Gender (Francesca Mari, October 21, 2015, Medium)

‘Gender identity typically develops between the ages of two and four, and sexuality emerges between ages eight and 10. ‘But if you’re not allowed to explore gender and sexuality and yours happens to be different than what’s culturally expected,’ Dr. Colt Keo-Meier, a trans man clinical psychologist practicing in Houston told me, ‘yours will be delayed, which is why you see people transitioning at 30, at 55.’ In Texas, he said, this is particularly true, thanks to the state’s stifling religious, cultural, and conservative forces.”

Settled into married life with her husband, with two children between them, Jeannot Jonte realized over time that she needed more. She asked her husband to open their marriage, and subsequently met Ashley Boucher at Sue Ellen’s, a famous lesbian bar in Dallas. The two connected. Their romance led to Jeannot divorcing her husband and allowed space for Jeannot — now Johnny — to explore gender identity in a safe space for the first time in their life.

4. After Divorce and Postpartum Depression, Work (and Bees) Brought Me Back to Life (Christine H. Lee, January 8, 2019, Catapult)

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s husband was allergic to bees but, after he left, Lee ordered her own nucleus and began tending to them. In this poignant essay — one that’s part of a series called Backyard Politics — Lee uses bees as a metaphor for the ways in which she learned to build the kind of life she wanted after postpartum depression and the dissolution of her marriage.

“It is no wonder that I am so in love with my bees. They live by structure and routine, but they are also resilient. They fight for their lives.”

5. India’s Golden Chance (Meera Subramanian, January 6, 2014, Virginia Quarterly Review)

Meera Subramanian visits Bihar, India to “find out what it means to be a girl turning into a woman in today’s India.” She is met with startling statistics.

“For every 100,000 mothers who give birth, 261 die—​more than ten times the US figure. Though it is an illegal act, nearly 70 percent of Bihari girls are married before their eighteenth birthday, and well over half of newlyweds have their first child by nineteen. The average woman in Bihar bears 3.7 children over the course of her lifetime. Of those, nearly 5 percent die within the first year.”

Subramanian writes about the efforts of a woman named Pinki Kumari, who’s involved with a program called Pathfinder International, which seeks to educate people about reproductive health. The training also seeks to empower women to make choices that might lead to a brighter future, such as resisting arranged marriage, birth control options, achieving economic stability on their own, continuing education, and speaking out against pervasive issues such as sexual violence.

6. How Queer and Trans Women Are Healing Each Other After Hurricane Harvey (Yvonne S. Marquez, October 25, 2017, Autostraddle)

After Hurricane Harvey ravaged Houston, many LGBT and undocumented Houstonians struggled to heal, and were left without access to resources to do so. In this longform piece, one that is a testament to the power of love that exists within community, Yvonne S. Marquez shares the efforts of people like poet Tiffany Scales, who is part of the T.R.U.T.H. Project, a project that organizes uplifting and educational performance art events for LGBTQ communities and their allies; Ana Andrea Molina, founder of Organización Latina de Trans en Texas (OLTT), who used her resources and connections to open a nonprofit where undocumented queer and trans people receive support; and Jessica Alvarenga, a queer Salvadoran photographer who hopes to “capture a truer narrative of her community to counter anti-immigrant narratives spewed by conservative politicians who depict all Central American immigrants as members of the dangerous MS-13 gang.”

7. Politics as a Defense Against Heartbreak (Minda Honey, February 2018, Longreads)

A decade away from her last long-term relationship, Minda Honey arrives to a party celebrating her 33rd birthday without a date. After a friend gives her a tarot reading and suggests Honey will find a man, Honey reflects on the way she has evolved throughout various encounters with men, and discusses the way she now uses “politics as a barometer for the caliber of person” she dates.

“But I wish there were space in our culture for single women who are unhappy with their status to say so without being pitied, and without the pressure to break out into the Independent Woman song and dance. I can have a happy, fulfilling life and still long for romantic love. Two things can simultaneously be true.” 

8. What Pigeons Teach Us About Love (Brandon Keim, February 11, 2016, Nautilus)

After observing a pair of pigeons for a spring — birds he names Harold and Maude — Brandon Keim ruminates on what we know about how animals conceive of love, and how their interactions as couples reflect on how we as humans engage in relationships.

“Part of the reluctance to talk of bird love, I suspect, is rooted in our misgivings about our own love’s biological underpinnings: Is it just chemicals? A set of hormonal and cognitive patterns shaped by evolution to reward behaviors that result in optimal mating strategies? Perhaps love is not what defines us as human but is something we happen to share with other species, including the humble pigeon.”

***

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

You’re Just Too Good to Be True

Hulton Archive / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kavita Das | Longreads | February 2019 | 27 minutes (6688 words)

New York City, 1980

Mommy and I had a deal. On our twice-a-week, 45-minute drive to speech therapy, I practiced singing South Indian Carnatic songs, the ones she grew up playing on the violin, and on the way back I was allowed to listen to anything I wanted. So, as soon as we hit the road from our house, she prompted me to begin with sa-pa-sa. Sa is the equivalent of do, the starting note in Western classical solfege, and pa the equivalent of sol, the fifth note above do. Singing these fifth intervals helped ground me in my pitch before I began any song.

Once that was done, Mommy picked from songs she had already taught me during previous car trips, or began a new one. She quizzed me on which raga, or key, it was in, and then we sang the scale of that raga together. Unlike Western keys, ragas might have different ascending and descending scales, which struck me as hazardous. Even if I knew my way up the mountain, taking the same path down might send me careening into a ravine of shame. Then, she began tapping out the talam, or the time signature, on the steering wheel of her deep blue Chevy Horizon hatchback, while navigating through traffic, and I followed along, tapping it out on my thigh or on the vinyl seat next to me. I began to sing. When I forgot a lyric or the melody, she piped up and sang alongside me, and then chided, “Start again and this time concentrate, and sing it correctly.”

We went from one song to the next as we made our way from our home in Bayside, Queens to Albert Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx, driving over highways, crossing bridges, stopping at lights, paying tolls. Sometimes we arrived at speech therapy mid-song, and then afterwards, when we got back in the car, instead of switching to my choice, per our deal, Mommy made me finish the song first, which meant I only got to my music when we were halfway home. So, I learned to gauge how close we were to the medical center and speed up my singing so that the end of the Carnatic song coincided with our arrival. This way, the whole car ride back was just for my music.

As soon as we were back in the car, our seat belts fastened, I popped in my favorite tape. It was “The Ultimate Engelbert Humperdinck,” one of the only non-Indian music albums my parents owned, by the first Western musician I was allowed to listen to. I loved everything about him and his music. He spoke to me, an almost-5-year-old who felt she already knew a thing or two about the world — having visited India, Japan, Hawaii, and New Jersey; not to mention endured the pain of multiple surgeries and the monotony of speech therapy for a cleft palate, and the loneliness of being an only child, who was not so much misunderstood as not understood, receiving quizzical looks whenever I spoke. He knew me and cared deeply for me — it was all there in the beautiful lyrics of his songs, and in the way he crooned them just to me. His voice oozed with feeling. It was as smooth and sweet as the caramel squares my grandfather loved so much that he asked me to climb a chair and sneak up to the candy box and fetch him some more.

My absolute favorite song off the tape was Killing Me Softly. Listening to it, I felt as if I was all grown up, sitting in the audience at a small café. I was the person he sang about, who comes undone by the lovelorn songs of a soulful troubadour. I sang out with abandon, the windows down, drowning out city noises. Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with his song, killing me softly. My mother continued to drive as I sang my little girl heart out all the way back to Queens.

I had named my dearest possession after him — my nubby pale blue woven blankie, which stayed steadfastly at my side as I played, before I carried it to bed each night, and which in turn carried me to my dreams. And when my 5th birthday rolled around, and preparations were being made for my party, I instructed my mother to invite Engelbert Humperdinck. My mother assured me that an invitation had been sent to him in England, where he lived and where my parents used to live before they migrated to the U.S. I was so excited, I ran around our basement swinging from the foundation poles, which usually served as the villains I lassoed as Wonder Woman. I could barely believe that in just a few days, Engelbert Humperdinck — I always called him by his full name — would be here in our basement. I wondered what to wear. None of my Indian stuff. Perhaps my powder blue shift and jacket, trimmed with white faux fur. It made me look like a lady, just like the long silk gowns my mother had gotten stitched for me in India. My powder blue number was a hit when I wore it in Japan — while we were snapping photos of the sights and surroundings, Japanese young women were asking my parents if they could snap photos of me in the photo-finish outfits Mommy bought, hand-stitched, or had tailored for me.

I decide that when he arrived, I would give him the frosted flowers from atop my Carvel ice cream cake, a token of my selfless love and admiration. I hoped he would sing Close to You — my second most favorite song, with perfect lyrics for celebrating me as the birthday girl. On the day that you were born the angels got together, And decided to create a dream come true, So they sprinkled moondust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue. Well, hair of black and eyes of brown, but I still believed he meant me since Engelbert Humperdinck himself was no blonde-haired blue-eyed being.

I had taken out the album liner notes from the plastic cassette case so often to stare at the two jacket photos of him that the case had broken. He had a head of shiny blue-black hair that cascaded in waves over his smiling face, culminating in two sturdy pillars of sideburns. It reminded me of Daddy’s hair. Unlike Daddy, though, he didn’t have a mustache, which meant he wouldn’t scratch me when he kissed me on the cheek. His nose was pointy, but not too pointy, and his honey brown eyes seemed to twinkle at me like stars from the nursery rhymes I’d learned seemingly so long ago. Now that I was a 5-year-old, I had graduated from nursery school to kindergarten, from nursery rhymes to love ballads, and from imaginary play friends to real-life music idols. I imagined us holding hands, going to the park, and, of course, singing duets together. And sheepishly I wondered if maybe, when I grew up, we could get married. When Mommy and Daddy weren’t around, I pressed my lips against his in the jacket photo, the way I had seen grownups do in TV shows. I never saw any of the Indian uncles and aunties do it, but I knew it was something other grownups — white and Black — did when they loved someone. When I closed my eyes to make a wish, I sometimes focused on a Barbie doll, but other times I hoped for the chance to kiss Engelbert Humperdinck for real.
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