Search Results for: Dan P. Lee

“We Are Not Lost Causes”

Universal Images Group / Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Mark Obbie | Longreads | March 2020 | 45 minutes (12,427 words)

The three young men sauntering down a city sidewalk showed no signs of alarm as a thin man in a dark hoodie hopped out of the passenger side of a gold Honda minivan. They did not flinch as the man rushed toward them on foot while the van, its windows heavily tinted, continued on past.

This neighborhood on the northeast side of Rochester, New York, has ranked among one of the poorest and most violent in the United States. But it was the trio’s home. A year earlier, one of them, Lawrence Richardson, had been jumped and knifed nearby after exchanging insults with a group of guys he didn’t know. He hadn’t looked for that trouble, and the same was true today. Richardson and Cliff Gardner, his coworker at KFC, had spent the afternoon preparing to look for better jobs. On the city’s southwest side, they stopped at the Center for Teen Empowerment, a nonprofit where Richardson had worked for a year on anti-violence and community-improvement projects, and where he still volunteered now and then. After encouraging Cliff to create a résumé, Richardson suggested they catch a bus to the northeast side, where Richardson had grown up. He wanted to introduce Cliff to Kenny Mitchell, his best friend and fellow Teen Empowerment youth organizer.

The three hung out at Mitchell’s second-story apartment, then walked to a corner store for some snacks. They were just returning to Kenny’s when they encountered the van and its passenger.

Moments later, three calls hit 911 operators in quick succession. Callers described a chaotic scene with two bodies crumpled on the ground while a third, trailing blood up the stairs to Mitchell’s apartment, lay at the feet of his panicked father.

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How I Got My Shrink Back

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Susan Shapiro | Longreads | February 2020 | 28 minutes (7,036 words)

Rushing to see him that Friday evening in August, I turned the corner and was shocked to catch Haley leaving his brownstone. What the hell was she doing here? I prayed my eyes were wrong and it was another tall redhead, not my favorite student. Inching closer, I saw it definitely was her — in skinny jeans, heels and a pink blouse, her unmistakable auburn hair flapping down her back as she flounced away. I froze, so crushed I couldn’t breathe.

Darting inside, I shrieked, “I just saw Haley walk out of here. You lied to me!”

“I never lied to you,” he insisted, quickly closing his door.

“Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with her?”

“Of course not.” He looked horrified.

He wasn’t my lover, cheating with a younger woman. He was the long-term therapist who’d saved me from decades of drugs, alcohol, and self-destruction. I couldn’t believe that right before our session, Dr. Winters had met with my protégée, whom I’d loved like a daughter. For the past three years, she’d sat in my classroom, living room, beside me at literary events, and speed walking around the park. She was the only person I’d ever asked him not to see, and vice versa. I felt betrayed from both sides.

Earlier that day, Haley had emailed to see if I’d recommend my gynecologist, housekeeper and literary agency. “Want my husband too?” I’d joked. In the spring, when I’d first sensed she was ransacking my address book and life, I’d asked Dr. Winters about the eerie All About Eve aura.

“She sounds nuts,” he’d said.

“That’s your clinical assessment?” I asked, adding “Don’t be flippant. She’s important to me.”

He’d sworn he wouldn’t treat her, laughing off my paranoia.

Now I could barely speak as I realized she’d broken her vow. And he’d let her in, giving her the slot directly before mine, then ran late, as if he wanted me to catch her. Perched at the edge of his leather couch, I imagined Haley sitting right where I was, leaning on the embroidered cushions, spilling secrets she’d previously shared only with me to my confidante. His plush work space morphed from my safest haven for 15 years into the creepy crawly Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

“Then why was she here?” I couldn’t process her so out of context.

“That woman is not my patient,” he insisted.

His technical wordplay sounded like Bill denying Monica. I craved a drink, joint, and cigarette.
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If Miscarriage is So Normal, Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About It?

Corbis Historical / Photo Illustration by Longreads

Anna Lea Hand | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (6,996 words)

 

PART 1: If It’s So Normal, Why Aren’t People Talking About It?

The entire time I am pregnant, the entire three-and-a-half months, Jamie and I tell no one about it except for a couple people out of necessity. I tell no one because that’s what I’m supposed to do, and, honestly, because I didn’t want to be seen as a pregnant person and have people put their expectations on me, their joy on me, their definitions of how I must and should be feeling on me. I figure that for thousands of years people have been getting pregnant, and though this is certainly miraculous and empowering, I don’t need the Hallmark congratulations, not even from friends and family I trust and love. The entire time I am pregnant I watch and feel how my body is changing and feel normal. The entire time I am pregnant I know that a miscarriage could happen, and feel normal about that too, because I know that people have them. The trouble is that no one talks about them beyond repeating what they’ve been told, “Miscarriages are so common,” and none of this information tells me what it’s like to experience one. So here I am, pregnant, feeling how my body is transforming, and feeling equally light over the normalcy of a possible miscarriage, and heavy under the weight of what to expect.

And then it happens. Late on a Wednesday night I start to feel heavy, deep cramping and a heat and loosening near my cervix, a feeling similar to right before I get my period. Even though I’ve made it beyond the traditional 12-week-you’re-in-the-clear zone, I know something is not sitting right. I wake up at 3:00am Thursday morning and google “signs of a miscarriage,” and end up on Mayo Clinic’s website. I am bleeding a little, but I’m still unclear about what I’m experiencing. I call the obstetrics department of the hospital first thing in the morning and say, “I think I’m having a miscarriage,” and because I haven’t started my prenatal care with them, they ask me who has confirmed that I am pregnant as if I’m making things up. I am insulted that they think I don’t know my own body. They hesitantly agree to see me and tell me where to go. Already I feel like a problem. Already I feel out of place.
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25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

* * *

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

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Miami: A Beginning

William Gottlieb / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Read an introduction to the series.

Jessica Lynne | Longreads | February 2020 | 10 minutes (2,737 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

* * *

Much has been written about certain cities and their landscapes that conjure a particular sentimentality or feeling within those who live there or those who chose to visit. At times, the lore is so great that it overwhelms. New York, for instance, ignites a peculiar sense of inertia, a stagnancy that cannot be perfectly described even though when you are there, it presses itself onto you and it is hard to ignore. We have come to know Paris as a city of love; it seems impossible to escape a looming sense of romance. The poems and the essays and the paintings and the photography and even the songs have given to us this mirage. As any young, eager traveler to Paris might be inclined, I once searched, many years ago, hoping to find love in the first, sixth, or 13th arrondissement.

I did not, however, fall in love in Paris. I fell in love, instead, in Miami. 

When I tell people that I fell in love in Miami, I have noticed a reaction that first takes the form of surprise then quickly turns to intrigue. One friend responded with a smile and a curt, Sexy. I imagine, for most people unfamiliar with the vastness of  Miami-Dade County, when one hears love and Miami, one might be inclined to think of Miami Beach — a denizen of glamour, glitz, nightlife — and thus picture a scene incongruent with that which we dream up when we say love. This imagining does not include the walks I have taken throughout Opa Locka, ambling along without a plan. It does not include Adelita’s Café on NE 2nd Avenue where dear friends once took me to eat breakfast while Honduran music videos played in the background. It does not include the many concerns of climate catastrophe that hover. Perhaps, it is because I grew up in a region defined, in part, by swampland and coastline, beaches and a nebulous hurricane season — a region that in certain aspects of its topography reminds me of Miami — but I have never been surprised by what happened to me. I have always understood the water to carry forth potencies.

Time is a mysterious phenomenon because when I fell in love in Miami, I was floating through a period of depression and having difficulty communicating this to friends and loved ones. I had traveled to the city for a research residency hoping to read or write or work myself out of it. That moment in my life feels as though it was decades ago and also as though it just happened last week. It, in actuality, unfolded in the middle of a Lenten season about two years ago. As I packed my suitcase, anxious to leave a still winter New York, I texted the person with whom I would eventually fall in love a selfie of me wearing a wool winter coat, frowning in the back of a taxi, on my way to JFK airport. When I look at that photo now (I have not been able to, not wanted to delete it), I wonder if that Jessica knew what awaited her.

Miami humidity is a familiar sensation to me, comforting in fact. It reminds me to move slowly. To breathe deeply. It reminds me that water, in each of its three states, has something to teach us about how we should be in our bodies, what we should do to best care for ourselves. There are those who loathe the excess of moisture in the air. I revel in the stickiness. 

It is possible that as I texted the person with whom I would fall in love on my way from Miami International Airport to the residency home in Little Haiti where I would spend the week, I said something like this to them about the city. It is possible that they responded back to me with an affirmation of sorts, because though they did not live in Miami either, they too were from a place of humidity and hurricanes. They too understood the ways in which those forces rumble through the body. Maybe this is why, on that night, the night that feels like it occurred both decades ago and just last week, as we settled into a nervous then tranquil video chat, I knew that love was happening to us.

As I packed my suitcase, anxious to leave a still winter New York, I texted the person with whom I would eventually fall in love a selfie of me wearing a wool winter coat, frowning in the back of a taxi, on my way to JFK airport.

Isn’t love just as mysterious as time? I am not sure how to recount the beginning except to say that our beginning was cliché even if I knew it was special: We met on social media. Isn’t this how it tends to go nowadays? They think you’re cute. They follow. You think they’re cute. You comment. The dance ensues until that first encounter or touch or night spent together. That night, the person with whom I would fall in love and I laughed through our screens because we did not yet know what or when that first encounter would be and somehow that was alright for the moment. Even then, I recognized that serendipity rarely shows up in relationships of distance. So instead, we talked about other things: sargassum, the sea, salt-water, roosters, the moon. 


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This is another thing I have come to love about Miami when I visit: the moon. Though Miami is a big city and it is sometimes difficult to see the stars, the moon that night was a waning crescent. In this phase, the moon is most visible right before sunrise as it points eastward. A waning crescent moon is seen right before a new moon which is in itself, a time for clarity, rebirth, revision. During the new moon, the gravitational pulls of the sun and moon are aligned and if you are near coastline, you will notice the extremities of high and low tides. That night, we were both, quietly, preparing to receive each other, in spite of the distance — moon, water, heart in dialogue. 

En Route

On February 12, 2019, as NASA’s Mars rover, Opportunity, died, the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory effectively gave the robot a resting tribute by playing Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Opportunity first landed on Mars in 2004 as the search for water on the red planet began in earnest. Engineers last received a communication from the robot during a dust storm on the planet in the summer of 2018. According to one NASA dispatch from that June, high amounts of dust prevented Opportunity from receiving the solar power necessary for recharging: 

NASA engineers attempted to contact the Opportunity rover today but did not hear back from the nearly 15-year-old rover. The team is now operating under the assumption that the charge in Opportunity’s batteries has dipped below 24 volts and the rover has entered low power fault mode, a condition where all subsystems, except a mission clock, are turned off. The rover’s mission clock is programmed to wake the computer so it can check power levels.

If the rover’s computer determines that its batteries don’t have enough charge, it will again put itself back to sleep. Due to an extreme amount of dust over Perseverance Valley, mission engineers believe it is unlikely the rover has enough sunlight to charge back up for at least the next several days.

By February, it had become clear that Opportunity’s data transmission from the summer of 2018 would be its last. Holiday’s voice became the voice of final goodbye. 

I was in New Orleans, another coastal ecology always contending with the water, when I read this news. Away from this person I now loved as Valentine’s Day crept up, I had never considered Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” to be a song of farewell. It has always been, for me, an amorous sonic epistle, a way of saying, here, you are where my heart belongs. Away from this person I loved as Valentine’s Day approached, unable to figure out how to be in person together, separated still by an ocean and time, I played this song if only to remind myself that distance would not become a permanent impasse. By that February, we had almost perfected a system: one month here, one month there. There being, at first, the small island where the person I loved was born, a short trip from my Brooklyn home. This was our rhythm soon after Miami. Then, as the person I loved relocated for school, there became a big, gray European City. Here morphed into a series of different cities in which I took up residence after moving out of Brooklyn. I had decided I needed to travel as I figured out the terms of a book project I wanted to take on. 

And so, guided by the desire to sharpen ourselves, we leapt in different directions as we still attempted to hold onto each other, transience best understood as the context for our love.

* * *

If you have heard “I’ll Be Seeing You” at any point in your life (and chances are that you have), you have most likely listened to the version Holiday recorded in 1944 — the version played for Opportunity, in fact — though it was not originally her song. Composer Sammy Fain and songwriter Irvin Kahal wrote the song in 1938 and as WWII began, it gradually personified the ache and hope of a generation that watched their loved ones leave without an assurance of return. Fain and Kahal’s tune was a hit; Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra each recorded their own renditions. Yet, it took a Black woman to lend the song its gravitas. 

If Aretha Franklin is the singer who first taught me how to see God, it has been Holiday who has taught me how to name a kind of romantic love. 

I was a few months shy of 14 when I first heard Holiday’s version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” It was summer 2004 and the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Notebook had just been released in the U.S. The film tells the story of an unlikely pairing of two white South Carolinians — Allie and Noah — in the 1940s who, in spite of their class differences, fall in love one summer against the backdrop of the Second World War. We learn of the drama of their romance via flashbacks of an older couple eventually revealed to be the elder Allie and Noah. 

That night, we were both, quietly, preparing to receive each other, in spite of the distance — moon, water, heart in dialogue.

In the scene I found most striking, the scene that defines the film for me, Noah and Allie are on their first date and begin to dance in the middle of the street. Slowly, they move as Holiday starts to croon. I did not know anything profound about romance then as a teenager, but I knew that I had never heard a love song like that before. I’d heard few voices that hummed through me like Holiday’s did that afternoon. 

Kahal’s lyrics embody the familiar longing that occurs between lovers separated. As Holiday’s voice eases into that opening horn melody, steady and deliberate, each lyric pronounced and clear, she carries those words into a significant emotional, poetic plane.  Holiday’s lento performance stands in for all of us who have just as slowly and tenderly opened that anticipated letter with “I love you,” or “I am always thinking of you,” awaiting. And in the distinctive fortitude that defined a hallmark era of jazz and the blues as musical genres, it was Holiday who offered an unmatched vocal rhythm and inventiveness. Perhaps she has taught us all how to love: her 1956 rendition of Vernon Duke’s “April in Paris,” evoking sentiments I once hoped to find in that very city but could not quite grasp at the time. Her version of Duke’s similarly classic standard, “Autumn in New York,” conjuring the lurking beauty of the fall season in a city that can be hard to embrace in moments. To listen to Holiday is to listen to a woman who has lived and loved, and that acute transmission of heartache, of a resolute knowing, is her potency, like the water. 

“I’ll Be Seeing You” is not about one city. It is about the moon; it is about everywhere. It is about all the locations in which we have yearned. When I think of the person I loved, I fold myself inside of Holiday’s transmission. 

* * *

There is so much about a long-distance relationship that can seem fleeting, and because the moments of physical togetherness and intimacy become planned in a meticulous manner, it always feels as if you are chasing time. Trying to get it to not just slow down, but to stop. Trying to extend a day into a week, a week into a month. In a long-distance relationship you are constantly grappling with the tension between aloneness and loneliness because the threat of being overwhelmed by nostalgia feels palpable. That night in Miami, under the waning crescent moon, when I knew that I would indeed love the person who I loved, in spite of a distance that I could not yet see reconciled, I thought to myself, Billie will steady us. 

I carried that song with me everywhere. On the New York City subway, at the Acropolis in Athens, in a quiet bar in Bonn, at the Souk of Marrakech. I learned how to find the person I loved in the poetry section of a New Orleans bookstore, that vintage shop in Baltimore, a Lisbon pastelaria. Each new place, Lady Day in my head, on my heart, reminding me to look at the moon before sleep, that I would always find a reflection of the person I loved there, too, until the next visit. 

An Ending

I keep coming back to three lines in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

When you travel everything goes with you, even the things you do not know.
They travel; they take up space; they remain the things you do not know;
they become the things you will never know.

I tell myself that when you are in a long-distance relationship, especially one that requires crossing water as commute, travel can become burdensome and exhausting and the last thing you want is to carry excess. Brand does not speak of romantic love, I know, but recently, I cannot read these words without thinking about the unknown excesses that traveled with me as love took me back and forth across an ocean. I only knew, instead, how to name what was becoming my loneliness. I am sure the person I loved was unraveling in this way too. 

Here are some items that I would regularly pack: a raincoat, two books, a comfortable pair of sneakers, a laptop, a purple caftan, five T-shirts, a few sweaters, three pairs of jeans, multiple love notes. 

Even now, I am worried that I have exposed too much. 

I didn’t know what to do with myself after the person I loved and I decided that it had become too heavy to carry the distance anymore, so I went back to Miami. 

Greeted by friends at the airport, I temporarily swallowed the lump in my throat that had swelled as I stepped off the plane that August morning. Even in my delusional attempts to not think about my last visit — the visit when I fell in love — my body remembered the humidity which meant it wouldn’t let me forget what this city held for me. I wasn’t ready to divulge the details of the breakup, so I smiled my widest smile and let my friends take me to Jimmy’s Diner for breakfast. The entire conversation, an exercise of restraint for me. When you travel, heartbreak travels with you, whether you want it to or not.  

I didn’t unpack my suitcase when I arrived at my hotel later that day. A storm was lurking, I knew, but I wanted to wander about Little Havana for a moment, even if it meant getting caught in the rain. I grabbed my clutch, my phone, my headphones. I greeted the older women having lunch in the lobby before exiting and turning left on SW 9th Street. I pressed play and let Billie wash over me, and I walked and walked and walked.

* * *

Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, BOMB Magazine, The Nation and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about love, faith, and the American South.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Fact checker: Matt Giles

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

 

House of the Century

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (3,903 words)

“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”

I. Security

I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.

My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.

She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.

The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.

I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes.
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Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music

Michael Tullberg / Getty

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | February 2020 | 12 minutes (3,333 words)

 

Every now and then, in one of her music videos or during a heady, live performance, singer Carly Rae Jepsen will close her eyes, raise her hands above her head, and sway her hips. It’s not choreographed, or at least it doesn’t appear to be. Instead of crisp synchronicity, Jepsen opts for fluid, extemporaneous groove. She is singing to us and moving with us — until those fleeting moments between verses or at song’s end, when she seems to have retreated, not out of reach, but rather into a full-bodied state of emotive receptivity. In this brimful pause, she is both steward and beneficiary, theorist and pupil, basking in the superabundant, prismatic feelings her music elicits.

It might not seem especially illuminating to say that Jepsen’s pop repertoire lays bare the complexity of human emotions. All music does this, although with varying degrees of nuance and success, and one could say the same about every other art form, too. But over the course of Jepsen’s 12-year career, her evocation of big tricky feelings has shifted into something of an intentional artistic inquiry. She is fascinated by the vast, labyrinthine topic of human sentiment, so much so that she organized her 2015 album — the aptly titled Emotion — around it, although her exploration is by no means circumscribed to that particular release. From the time she released her first album, the oft-forgotten Tug of War, in 2008, Jepsen’s music has thrummed with idiosyncrasies. She expresses the extraordinary and the tragic within the day-to-day, whether her premise is unrequited love for someone she knew would never be interested in her (“Your Type”), toying with an illicit sexual fling (“This Kiss”), or solicitude about her emotional intensity and its impact on her relationship (“Too Much”). Any event, especially a romantic one, holds the possibility for maximalist sentiment: Jepsen roams these vistas of the heart, shepherding those of us whose thick, cumbersome emotions render us lonely and overwhelmed.

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Postcard from the (Literal) Edge

Getty / Park Row Books

Erin Khar | Longreads | February 2020 | excerpted from Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me, Park Row Books | 9 minutes (2,436 words)

 

Valentine’s Day 2001

Her mother just looks at her for a long minute, then removes a jade pendant from around her neck and hands it to her daughter. “June, since your baby time, I wear this next to my heart. Now you wear next to yours. It will help you know: I see you. I see you.”

—The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

My mom and I both read The Joy Luck Club when I was seventeen and saw the movie together a few years later. The stories reveal the intricate relationships between mothers and daughters. There was one scene that resonated with us both — one of the mothers finally tells her daughter, “I see you.” Through unspoken words, we understood how this reflected our relationship, or more accurately the hope we had for our relationship. Like the mother in the book, my mother had a jade pendant. It had belonged to her mother. But she didn’t give it to me. Now it was in the pawn shop. She didn’t know it was missing.

What my mom did give me for my twenty-first birthday was a white gold Tiffany ID bracelet that was engraved. It read, I see you. She welled up with tears when she gave it to me and hugged me tighter than she had in years. I loved it but could never bring myself to wear it. I knew she couldn’t see me.

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Searching For Mackie

A portrait of Immaculate, "Mackie" Basil in Peter and Vivian Basil's home in Tache, British Columbia. All photos by Andrew Lichtenstein.

Annie Hylton | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (8,310 words)

This story was produced in collaboration with The Walrus.

As Peter Basil remembers it, the week leading up to Father’s Day, in June 2013, began like any other; he’s since replayed the events in his mind like a recurring bad dream. Peter recalls standing in the kitchen of his modest split-level home in Tache, a First Nations village that lies deep in the wilderness of northern interior British Columbia. His younger sister Mackie, then in her late 20s, followed him around as he made a pot of coffee.

“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie asked Peter, referring to her 5-year-old son.

“Yup,” he replied.

Mackie trailed Peter to the living room and sat next to him on the L-shaped couch, under high school graduation photos of herself and her sisters.

“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie repeated to Peter.

“Yeah, geez,” he responded. “Should I be worried? Are you coming back?”

“I’ll be back,” Mackie promised.

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“The Ugliness of Greatness”: A Kobe Bryant Reading List

OAKLAND, CA - JANUARY 14: Kobe Bryant #24 of the Los Angeles Lakers waves to the crowd after being taken out of the game in the fourth quarter against the Golden State Warriors at ORACLE Arena on January 14, 2016 in Oakland, California. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

On the final Sunday in January, Kobe Bryant — a legendary and complex figure within not only basketball and sports but culture writ large — was killed in a helicopter crash on the hills surrounding Calabasas, California. More than three years into his retirement, the ex-Los Angeles Laker was traveling to the Mamba rec center with his teenage daughter, Gianna, for a basketball tournament (seven other individuals were killed as well).

Much has been written about Bryant’s loss, comparing his death to those of Thurman Munson or Roberto Clemente, but with Bryant, the impact — like a fog— is omnipresent. He was drafted by the NBA out of high school, and for certain generational demographics, like millenials and Gen Z, it feels as if there was never a time in which Bryant wasn’t a part of our everyday discourse.

Below is a reading list of articles published in the week-and-a-half since Bryant’s death that address both his sui generis athletic skillset, but also how to talk about a celebrity whose death is more than several paragraphs of any obituary:

1. It Is a Terrible Irony That Kobe Bryant Should Fall From the Sky (Charles P. Pierce, Esquire)

Kobe was the bridge from Michael Jordan to the present generation of NBA superstars, and Pierce explains the brilliance of the Lakers guard, who continually evolved on and off the court.

2. This Is Why Mothers Don’t Sleep (Henry Abbott, True Hoop)

Abbott’s True Hoop was essentially the first true NBA blog, a site you visited at least once a day (and — at maximum — kept open in a tab to continuously refresh), and he ruminates on the toll of Kobe’s death as a father, but also the emotional weight that his wife, Vanessa, must now carry.

3. Two Things Can Be True, But One Is Always Mentioned First (Jeremy Gordon, The Outline)

In 2003, Kobe was accused of raping a 19-year old employee of the Colorado hotel where he was staying. “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me,” she told police. The case was litigated in public for the next year-and-a-half, a period in which the victim’s name was leaked, and ultimately, she chose not to testify at trial. (The Laker settled with his accuser out of court.) Gordon deep-dives into the case, and why it remains relevant — not only in the era of #MeToo, but also in Kobe’s death.

4. How To Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy (Ashley Reese, Jezebel)

More than a decade after the settlement, the accusations became a blip in the life of Kobe Bryant, but the decisions made that night in 2003 need to be remembered, which is why the Washington Post‘s suspension of journalist Felicia Sonmez was so troubling. All Sonmez did was tweet a link to a comprehensive longread about the rape accusation and subsequent media and legal circus, and for that, she was dragged not only on social media but by WaPo’s editorial masthead. Reese manages to weave separate threads — on Kobe, his death, his legacy, and why it’s important to discuss troubling truths — in this compendium on the Lakers star.

5. Kobe Bryant Was Basketball’s Great Storyteller (Louisa Thomas, the New Yorker)

“The ugliness of greatness.” Kobe once mentioned that phrase to Ben McGrath in a 2014 profile for the magazine, and Thomas evaluates Kobe’s life within that context — how the basketball player evolved into the Black Mamba, and how that shift continued into his retirement and, for a moment, looked to alter the rest of his life.

6. What Made Kobe Different (Jonathan Abrams, B/R Mag)

Abrams, who has written extensively about the NBA (and covered Kobe as a cub reporter at the Los Angeles Times), reflects on what the star meant to a generation of not only admirers but also sports writers.

7. More than a number: College players tell their stories about Kobe Bryant inspiring them to wear No. 24 (Matt Norlander, CBS Sports)

During the 2019-2020 men’s college basketball season, there are 181 players who wear a No. 24 jersey. Norlander spoke with dozens of those players to ask how Kobe influenced not only their jersey number and playing styles, but also their lives. According to Vanderbilt’s Aaron Nesmith, a highly-recruited freshman who has worn No. 24 ever since he was in grade school, “One thing I read after Kobe’s passing was that he read the entire NBA rulebook. All of it, like he knew where the refs had to stand and look, so if he needed to get away with a cheap foul, he’d know how to do it. That stuff is admirable. He lived the game because he knew it.”