Search Results for: Dan P. Lee

I’m Not Queer to Make Friends

Illustration by Eric Chow

Logan Scherer | Longreads | May 2019 | 12 minutes (3,274 words)

On a Sunday morning at a Chicago bowling alley, I soothed five strangers almost as desperate to manipulate people on TV as I was. Then I eviscerated them. After years of being too embarrassed to try out for Big Brother, I’d finally brought myself to attend an open-call audition. I was determined to play the social strategy game I’d followed religiously since 2005.

“I’ve only seen a few episodes here and there,” I said to the tall, gorgeous man and two normcore women standing next to me in line. “I saw an ad for this a few days ago and randomly decided to come. I have no idea what they’re going to ask us to do.”

I didn’t want them to know I had an encyclopedic knowledge of Big Brother and had done extensive research into how to manage reality TV casting call dynamics as an introvert, and that I’d been practicing this for six years. I wanted to seem harmless, to make them feel comfortable to tell me things about themselves.

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Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers

"Patty Ramge appears dejected as she looks at her Ford Pinto." Bettmann / Getty

Lizzie O’Shea | an excerpt adapted from Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Teach Us about Digital Technology | Verso | May 2019 | 30 minutes (8,211 words)

In the late spring of 1972, Lily Gray was driving her new Ford Pinto on a freeway in Los Angeles, and her thirteen-year-old neighbor, Richard Grimshaw, was in the passenger seat. The car stalled and was struck from behind at around 30 mph. The Pinto burst into flames, killing Gray and seriously injuring Grimshaw. He suffered permanent and disfiguring burns to his face and body, lost several fingers and required multiple surgeries.

Six years later, in Indiana, three teenaged girls died in a Ford Pinto that had been rammed from behind by a van. The body of the car reportedly collapsed “like an accordion,” trapping them inside. The fuel tank ruptured and ignited into a fireball.

Both incidents were the subject of legal proceedings, which now bookend the history of one of the greatest scandals in American consumer history. The claim, made in these cases and most famously in an exposé in Mother Jones by Mike Dowie in 1977, was that Ford had shown a callous recklessness for the lives of its customers. The weakness in the design of the Pinto — which made it susceptible to fuel leaks and hence fires — was known to the company. So too were the potential solutions to the problem. This included a number of possible design alterations, one of which was the insertion of a plastic buffer between the bumper and the fuel tank that would have cost around a dollar. For a variety of reasons, related to costs and the absence of rigorous safety regulations, Ford mass-produced the Pinto without the buffer.

Most galling, Dowie documented through internal memos how at one point the company prepared a cost-benefit analysis of the design process. Burn injuries and burn deaths were assigned a price ($67,000 and $200,000 respectively), and these prices were measured against the costs of implementing various options that could have improved the safety of the Pinto. It turned out to be a monumental miscalculation, but, that aside, the morality of this approach was what captured the public’s attention. “Ford knows the Pinto is a firetrap,” Dowie wrote, “yet it has paid out millions to settle damage suits out of court, and it is prepared to spend millions more lobbying against safety standards.” Read more…

Shelved: Tupac and MC Hammer’s Promising Collaboration

Illustration by Homestead

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (2,898 words)

 

In 1990, rapper Stanley “MC Hammer” Burrell stood at the pinnacle of popular culture. His stage show featured 32 musicians and dancers, all of whom attended a rigorous boot camp. According to an Ebony magazine article from that year, the boot camp consisted of “four miles of jogging, weight training, and at least six hours of dancing daily.” “Hammer Time” cultural saturation included demonstrations of his athletic “Hammer Dance” on Oprah and appearances in commercials for British Knights athletic shoes and Pepsi. Hammer owned 2,000 pairs of baggy “Arabian pants,” which, along with gold lamé vests, made up his distinctive stage image.

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Mother/Russia

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,965 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
Something happens to a person trying to watch six seasons of The Americans in just four weeks. First, the math: It’s about 60 hours of television, which is a realistic goal for someone without any significant responsibilities or sleep requirements.

But suppose you’re not that kind of someone.

You might find yourself, every so often, watching with the sound off and the captions on while your toddler feeds herself noodles. You know you should be stimulating her mind and promoting the development of her language, but there is work to be done. A mission, you might call it, though only to yourself. You may also realize that you’ve been wasting perfectly good time in the car and begin to listen to the show while driving, as if it is a poorly executed narrative podcast. This gets tricky when it comes to the Russian dialogue but also lends a new layer of intrigue to the prosaic tasks of suburban living. Against a soundtrack of what closed captioning calls “suspenseful music,” a seemingly innocent Target run could be anything, especially if you happen to be wearing a baseball cap. Later, when your 7-year-old refuses to clear her dinner plate, you might find yourself muttering about how when you were her age your mother was sick with diphtheria and you wished there was a dinner to clear. In short, you begin to have a secret life, which is watching The Americans.

* * *

The spy genre relies on a precise interplay between secrecy and authenticity. We enjoy stories about spies because we get to experience the thrills of skilled artifice while being privy to the comfort of the authentic; the fun comes from watching a person pretend to be someone else while knowing who they really are. The Americans, a show about Soviet spies living in a D.C. suburb in the ’80s, offers this kind of entertainment. We relish seeing Philip and Elizabeth Jennings execute their missions while sporting a dizzying array of wigs, but that pleasure would be incomplete if we didn’t also see them return home, in their natural hair, to help the kids with their homework.

The homework-type scenes are important because we assume that, for Philip and Elizabeth, the authentic part is their family. Like David Chase recognizing the impact that the domestic could have on the mob genre, The Americans brings the spy thriller into the home. And family serves somewhat of the same function for Philip and Elizabeth as it did for Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper, humanizing them by showcasing their ability to exhibit tenderness and care toward their children. To this The Americans adds another layer. In making the Jennings’ spy HQ the home where they raise their children, the show turns a story about enemy agents raising a family into a relatable metaphor for the way parenting works, the way it has to work: the dining room versus the secret basement passport cache of it all. It becomes a story about the secrets one must keep as a parent, and also about the way feelings and beliefs and habits that have become unremarkable, or perhaps simply the way things are done, become troubling — perhaps even monstrous — when seen through the eyes of one’s children.

And so, it turns out that what we initially identify as the Jennings’ authenticity reveals itself to be just another locus of secrets. Until the end of season three, neither of their children have any idea that their parents are Russian spies; poor Henry doesn’t find out until the series finale that they have already fled the country without him. Every family moment is true and a lie at the same time, and The Americans uses the Jennings family to blur the boundary separating those concepts from each other. Family itself is multiplied on this show, with Philip and Elizabeth constantly making deep connections with other people. They’re always knocking on doors, entering lives and families, gaining trust and playing house. Philip marries Martha, who wants to have a child with him. Elizabeth cooks with Young-Hee and babysits her children. In the fifth season they both play family with Tuan, a Vietnamese agent who later reports them for jeopardizing the mission by indulging “certain petty bourgeois concerns.” When we see them slip seamlessly into these other familial tableaus, it destabilizes our own ideas about what is real and what is pretend. When they return to their children amid and in the aftermath of those missions, the domestic ministrations we once thought of as real can’t help but take on the patina of performance. Which, after all, is the real family? None of these homes is free of secrets.

Of course, we are able to tell which family truly matters to our protagonists based on how much anxiety they express over it. Philip and Elizabeth spend a lot of time worrying about the threats to their family, from the FBI and the KGB alike. This dedication to their children, the precarity of their family, humanizes them. But the show tempers that humanizing effect by presenting it alongside their role in the dissolution of other families. Together and separately, Philip and Elizabeth spend a lot of time threatening other people’s families, exploiting their particular weaknesses to destroy them. They leave those families worse than they found them, a trail of broken homes and irreparably altered futures in their wake. In the end, their own family is no exception. Their separation at the end of the series is not the work of any of their adversaries but instead the inexorable result of an authentic life built on secrets. They choose to leave Henry behind in the only life he’s ever known and, in a scene that guts me every time I watch it, Paige makes a last-minute decision to stay in the U.S. Her parents learn of this decision when it’s too late, seeing her standing on the platform as their train pulls away toward Canada. Philip and Elizabeth will finally be able to live a truly authentic, albeit slightly less comfortable, life in Russia. Henry will continue to live his American life in spite of his parents’ betrayal. Paige is the show’s true victim, most likely doomed to live off the grid. She is stranded forever between worlds, between what is real and what is pretend: a citizen of no country relegated to the purgatory of drinking vodka in a D.C. safe house.

It is this refusal to deal in binaries that facilitates the astounding accomplishment of The Americans: the refusal of the show to turn on its wife.

Read the first post in this series on Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.

Blurring this line between inside and outside, between real and pretend, between work and family, is representative of The Americans’ goal of weakening our belief in the very notion of lines. The antihero genre, dedicated as it is to selling us on characters who are neither wholly good nor irredeemably evil, is the perfect vehicle for this project, and The Americans hews closely to the antihero script. Philip and Elizabeth are special because they are highly trained Soviet operatives. They are really good at what they do; they get away with things. And we want them to get away with those things because they also have interiority. We’re privy to several flashbacks and reminiscences aimed at illustrating their difficult childhoods, the sacrifices they’ve made in their lives, and the misgivings they have about their line of work. They’re humanized not only by their children but also by the remorse they feel when they kill anyone whose death does not serve their mission.

But what about the other important element of the antihero formula? Who are the easier-to-hate characters who make our murderous protagonists more likable? Here is where The Americans diverges from the genre as we know it and takes it to even grayer pastures. We would expect a show about the Cold War to present an abundance of options for antagonists and there are certainly a handful of stock villains who crop up throughout the show’s six seasons. But more often than not, The Americans surrounds Philip and Elizabeth with individuals who are, like them, neither wholly good nor irredeemably evil. Almost everyone on this show with more than a few minutes of screen time gets nuance, from Nina, who survives by making herself a helpmate to every man she meets but who ultimately risks her life for something greater than herself, to Martha, who starts off as a naïve mark but becomes one of the show’s most sympathetic and respected characters. Claudia, Philip and Elizabeth’s KGB handler, is introduced as an antagonist but by the end gains our respect and some sympathy. FBI agent Stan Beeman is the Jennings’ most proximate adversary but he is also Philip’s best friend. Characters who on any other show would have been the unsavory antagonists meant to make Philip and Elizabeth look better instead serve a more noble purpose, testifying to the ways in which people ultimately defy the categories into which we want to sort them.

It is this refusal to deal in binaries that facilitates the astounding accomplishment of The Americans: the refusal of the show to turn on its wife. When even the American-Soviet binary is called into question, it is easier to imagine a world in which an antihero husband does not need a nagging wife to win viewers’ allegiance. But this feat is still remarkable given that Elizabeth mostly refuses to traffic in what Kate Manne calls feminine-coded goods. In her monogamous American life, she bakes brownies and asks her husband if he’ll be home for dinner, but in her secret spy life she kicks serious — usually male — ass, sleeps with multiple men to gain information, and often leaves her husband and children to order takeout. That we as viewers did not turn on her is especially surprising given that she is not the kind of mother our culture respects and rewards. Flashbacks reveal that she had reservations about having kids and it’s clear that Philip is the more natural parent. The show not only gives us a wife who is smart, strategic, and quick-thinking, but it also allows that wife to be a stubborn and somewhat-absentee parent who is sometimes very, very wrong without losing her humanity and with it our empathy. The result is that we root for a wife and a marriage in a genre that has made a pastime of destroying them.

If their roles were reversed, would we have turned against Elizabeth the way we turned against Skyler? I’m not sure.

Read the second post on the wives of Ozark and House of Cards.

This is not to say that The Americans is free from the marital friction characteristic of other antihero shows. In fact, the show’s dramatic stakes depend as much on the fault line between Philip and Elizabeth as it does on whether they will be caught by the FBI. This was my second time watching the show and I had forgotten how much the pilot relied on the traditional formula for an antihero and his wife, presenting them at odds rather than as allies. Philip wants to defect and live as wealthy Americans while Elizabeth is a loyal KGB agent for whom the mission always comes first. They argue like Marty and Wendy Byrde (“So you’re just deciding for both of us?”) and Elizabeth rejects Philip’s sexual advances. The moment for defection passes by the end of the first episode but the tension between Philip and Elizabeth persists throughout the series, sometimes simmering and other times boiling over. As the one who yearns to stop spying and live a normal American life, Philip is in the position usually occupied by the antihero’s wife, standing in the way of the show’s plot and threatening to undermine its entire premise. We don’t turn on him either, though I wonder whether that’s a function of his gender. If their roles were reversed, would we have turned against Elizabeth the way we turned against Skyler? I’m not sure.


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But in crafting the Jennings’ relationship the way it did, with doubting Philip and committed Elizabeth, The Americans ends up doing something far more interesting than pitting a wife against her husband. As much as the pilot played with the elements familiar from other antihero shows, its conclusion throws the normal trajectory of such shows into reverse. First episodes of antihero shows have to work incredibly hard, establishing what its main character does wrong while making the case that we should root for him anyway. The Americans pilot does that for two different characters at once and the sum of its hard work is greater than its parts. By the closing credits the show has bound us to Philip and Elizabeth individually, and, perhaps more importantly to their relationship.

Most husband-wife pairs in antihero shows share a history of love. We imagine, or are given flashbacks to, a time when they were in a state of uncomplicated adoration and devotion. A Breaking Bad season three flashback gave us a young and upwardly mobile Walt and Skyler; Ozark’s second season offered a similar look back at the happier and non-money laundering Byrdes. Usually, by the time we get to them, most of that love is gone and only conflict remains. The Americans works in the opposite direction, both in the first episode and in the series as a whole. The pilot reveals that Philip and Elizabeth are essentially strangers sharing a home and a family, having been instructed to never divulge anything of their past lives. Their entire relationship is a lie by omission and they don’t fully trust each other. Elizabeth has even reported on Philip’s weaknesses to their KGB higher-ups in the past. But something happens over the course of the first episode. Elizabeth shares an experience from before they met and by the end of the episode has told Philip her real name; there is a moment of real affection between them. Other antihero shows begin with authenticity and devolve into secrets and lies. The Americans takes a relationship built on lies and guides it toward authenticity. It builds a marriage rather than destroying one.

We cling to this marriage like Jack Dawson to a floating doorframe in the vast and icy sea of pain and destruction that Philip and Elizabeth perpetrate throughout the six seasons of the show. We want them to keep getting away with things but we also want them to continue to love and trust each other. The final season unsettles us as the chasm between Philip’s and Elizabeth’s worldviews widens and threatens their family and their mission, if those can be said to be two different things. Philip, a devotee of EST, the personal transformation seminars popular in the ’70s and early ’80s, wants to trust his gut. A convert to the American cult of the individual, he wants to be free to live his life without destroying the lives of others. Elizabeth has put her trust in an institution and, though she is beginning to see that her loyalty may have been misplaced and abused, she still believes in the cause and the collective that she signed up for. Philip ends up spying on her, trying to figure out whether she is part of a plan to overthrow the Soviet government and derail peace talks. But just when it appears that we’ll finally get our showdown between this particular husband and wife, Philip comes out of retirement to fly to Chicago and help Elizabeth with a dangerous mission. He doesn’t want her to do what she’s doing, and he really doesn’t want to be doing what she’s doing, but when he thinks she’s in danger, he goes to help. When he said, “Sit tight, I’m on my way,” I cheered silently. The final season shows Elizabeth at her worst. Not only is she chain smoking and snapping at Philip, but she is also not getting away with things. Her missions are getting sloppier and less successful and it would be easy for us to shift our loyalty entirely toward Philip. What keeps us from turning on her?

The result is that we root for a wife and a marriage in a genre that has made a pastime of destroying them.

In the penultimate episode of the series, Philip talks about Elizabeth with fellow Soviet operative Father Andrei. This is just moments before he will realize that his cover has most likely been blown but at that moment his biggest problem is Elizabeth’s anger toward him. He admits that he has broken some of his vows — “I haven’t been as honest with her as I should have been” — but Father Andrei thinks the marriage can be saved: “There must be something between you she thinks is worth staying for.” The thing is, Philip replies, Elizabeth “thinks bigger than that … she cares about the whole world.” I think this is key to Elizabeth’s success as an antihero: her commitment to a cause outside of herself and her family, and Philip’s commitment to her. Where personal and familial ambition failed to rally us to the causes of wives like Claire Underwood and Wendy Byrde, selfless dedication to saving the world, no matter how misguided, allows us to feel empathy for Elizabeth. Perhaps more importantly, Elizabeth has what other wives do not: her husband’s love and his trust. They may not always be on the same page, but they aren’t rivals. Philip cares about her. He roots for her, so we do, too.

This is not necessarily where we need to be; wives shouldn’t have to want to save the world to gain our support, and I’m not convinced that Philip and Elizabeth could have switched roles without altering our allegiances. I suspect that a line-dancing, responsibility-shirking Elizabeth would have garnered a different audience response. Her success as an antihero is still in many ways contingent on her proximity to heteronormative marriage, and it remains to be seen whether we can root for a woman who doesn’t have a man vouching for her. But it is progress. In compelling us to root for a marriage — no small feat in an antihero show — The Americans tricks us into rooting for a wife.

Next, we’ll take a detour to the Seven Kingdoms, and consider whether Cersei Lannister could be the antihero we’ve all been waiting for.

 

Previous installments in this series:
The Blaming of the Shrew
The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

‘Little Grandpa’ and The List

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | May 2019 | 17 minutes (4,208 words)

It’s a long plane ride, so I puke in midair, grunting and coughing up the last remnants of breakfast. My mother holds the paper bag open for me, an encouraging look on her face. When I am done, she closes it up, wipes my face with a tissue from her purse, and carries the slosh to the bathroom. Down the row, a bald man in a suit looks away in disgust.

I am 10, it is May, 1988, and we are on our way to my grandfather’s funeral in Los Angeles. In the locker room at school the day before leaving, in the loudest fourth grade voice she could muster, my friend Laura announced that it was my fault that he had died. I suspect this can’t really be possible — I live in Montreal, which is in a different country, after all — but it still worries me. On the plane, lying my head across my mother’s lap, I tell her about Laura and the locker room. She glares down at me from behind the thick frames of her oversized oval glasses, then looks up and starts fiddling with the tray table. “Sweetheart,” she says. “I think it’s time for some new friends.”

My grandfather is being cremated, and I am spellbound by the word — I have learned its meaning especially for the occasion, and let it cycle through my mouth over and over again, the “eemmm” sound turning into a hum at the back of my throat. Last night, my mother explained that a lot of people didn’t like the idea of being put in a coffin and buried in the earth. Instead, she said, some preferred to be cremated, which turned out to be a fancy word for being burned into ashes. But the word seems slightly suspicious: too lovely to mean something so violent.

In bed the night before, I wondered where we’d visit Grandpa if he wasn’t lying in a cemetery next to Grandma — the two headstones side by side, their bones resting together underneath. “Cremation” made it sound like he would just disappear.

***

We arrive in L.A. in the afternoon. It is bright everywhere. Since I still feel a bit like throwing up again, the warm breeze feels good on my body. As we wait at an outdoor baggage claim, my mother yanks my long, thick hair into a tight ponytail, the tip tickling my spine. A little yellow stain, evidence of the unsettling flight, has dried on my pink-and-white striped T-shirt.

Even though she has a bad back, my mother drags our big beige bag off the carousel by herself, her red sundress riding up the back of her thighs. Once she takes hold of the handle, she yells for people to get out of the way, then drops it, the tiny wheels crashing to the cement. I stand a bit away, wishing Dad were here.

The four of us usually rent a car when we come to visit Grandpa in L.A., but since my father and older sister will arrive later in the week, we take a cab, my mother talking in a feverishly speedy tone all along the freeway. Once in the city, I roll down my window, and the familiar smell of L.A. — a cocktail of palm trees and dry grass — calms my stomach.
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I Entered the World’s Longest, Loneliest Horse Race on a Whim, and I Won

A horse flicks its tail for temporary relief from the persistently pestering flies on the Mongolian steppe. cookedphotos / iStock / Getty

Lara Prior-Palmer | an excerpt adapted from Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race | Catapult | May 2019 | 19 minutes (5,344 words)

It was May 2013 when I was cooped up in an attic in Austria, au pairing for a family with six Ferraris. They lived in a converted hotel in the jaws of an Alpine valley.

“Lara? Larah!”

Every morning the mother shrieked my name up the endless floors. “Time to feed the baby!”

I had taken the role to practice my German, but she only spoke in English. My jobs varied from sitting with the toddler to vacuuming up the dead skin that snowed from his father’s bottom.

The family never left their house except to get in their cars, which they kept tucked up in the garage. They viewed their valley through window frames as you would a photograph. So sedentary a lifestyle in such physical surroundings made me itch. At night I hatched plans to creep up the mountain and slide down the other side into Switzerland, yet the mother looked appalled when I so much as suggested running to the church and back.

By the time she sacked me a month later, my body was rusty and yearning for usage. I returned to the silent butterflies of an England on the brink of summer, seeking an experience unlike any I’d had before. In theory, this ought not to have been difficult. The most exciting moment in my eighteen years had been collecting chickens from Dorset on the train and wrapping them up in wine crates for Christmas presents. Read more…

If You Should Find Yourself in the Dark

Illustration by Wenting Li

Debbie Weingarten | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,460 words)

If your son cries in the night, begin a slow insistent hush. With your lips, make the sound of a snake. Even before you are fully awake, place your bare feet on the floor. Say, Mama is coming, and then creep past the purple glow of the nightlight to where he is a ball in his bed.

Lay your hand on his back.

If the covers have gone astray, or if his brother’s pinwheel feet are in his face, or if he has rolled onto the plastic toy he took to bed — fix it all. Place the covers back beneath his chin. Readjust the brother, put the toy on the shelf, kiss the forehead. Feel your way back through the darkness, over the sleeping dog.

***

Long ago, my parents were spelunkers. They would disappear into a hole in the ground, unsure of where the cave would lead, and pick their way along in the dark, their carbide lights illuminating the stalactites and stalagmites. They insist they felt excitement and possibility.

Once they brought my brother and me to a cave they remembered from college. It was supposed to be a family adventure. Together we would explore, and my parents would remember the way out.

What I recall is the surprising totality of darkness. And the terror I felt when we squeezed through the smallest of passageways. And the solidness — the unmoveableness — of the rock. If I breathed out or turned my shoulders in a certain way, I imagined I could be stuck there forever. If anything were to give, it would not be the rock; it would be my girl-sized bones.

Decades later, I still cannot relax into the dark.
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Mothers are the Backbone of the Revolution

Lizeth Dávila, 39, holds a photo of her murdered son Álvaro, 15, in her hands. All photos by Jacky Muniello.

Alice Driver | Longreads | May 2019 | 7 minutes (1957 words)

She will tell the story of her child’s murder as many times as needed. She will tell it until her voice breaks, until her eyes no longer fill with tears, until her demands for justice are met. She could be the mother of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or Alyssa Alhdeff in Parkland, Florida, or Álvaro Manuel Conrado Dávila in Managua, Nicaragua. The history of mothers as activists in the Americas is firmly rooted in the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, a group of hundreds of mothers who marched weekly in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires to protest the murder and disappearance of their children under the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983. These mothers, bound together by the private pain of witnessing a child’s murder or disappearance, turn their anguish and rage outward into public movements to demand justice, often at great risk to themselves.

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Take Me Out to the Ball Game: A Baseball Reading List

Getty Images

When I was a kid, the world appeared most vivid to me during the longest days of summer: grass sprouted greener than ever before, my grandparents’ neighborhood pool shimmered cerulean, wisps of white-feathered clouds trailed across the sky. I can’t quite put my finger on what steeped those moments so much in the sensory — whether it was because I was younger and could give myself over more easily to sound and color, or if it was because I was only a visitor. Every June, I would travel with my family from Indonesia, where I lived, to the United States. Far from my normal routine, summer memories from the sleepy towns of extended family left distinct impressions.

In North Carolina, my grandparents took me and my brother to minor league baseball games. I don’t ever remember which team won or anything remarkable happening, but I hold a particular fondness for the solid thwack of a bat against ball, ice-cold drinks sweating in the heat, sepia-toned sand, the low rumble of an announcer’s voice, sunflower seed shells discarded on concrete, and pinstripes. Something about going to the games felt quintessentially American to me. Perhaps it was because we usually visited around the fourth of July, so some nights fireworks would light the sky. Or maybe it was the scene that reminded me of where I was: a baseball diamond dotted with American flags for a sport called the national pastime, my hand held to my chest during the anthem, brands like Minute Maid and Dippin’ Dots within grasp. Still now, when I go to baseball games, nostalgia pulls me back so that I’m somehow 10 again, perched at the edge of my plastic seat, hair sweaty against my neck, waiting for someone to call the kids out for a run around the bases.

My perspective is largely rooted in these personal memories, which hasn’t always allowed me to see the full texture of the sport. The following essays complicate my relationship to baseball in productive ways by revealing gender disparities, different culture’s approaches to the game, hidden histories, parallels to the craft of writing, and moments of trauma on and away from the field.

1. The Hidden Queer History Behind “A League of Their Own” (Britni de la Cretaz, May 5, 2018, Narratively)

With many men deployed in World War II, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (A.A.G.P.B.L.) was formed, in which women were told to, “‘Play like a man, look like a lady.’” Britni de la Cretaz, by sifting through obituaries and interviewing players, uncovers a fascinating hidden history within the league.

She understands today that talking about being a gay athlete is a double-edged sword, in a way. There’s the stereotype that women athletes are all lesbians, which is both inaccurate and unfair. And yet, there’s also the truth that there are many athletes who are also lesbians.

2. The 9 Minutes That Almost Changed America (Kate Nocera and Lissandra Villa, May 14, 2018, Buzzfeed News)

While practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game, an annual bipartisan event that takes place every summer between Republicans and Democrats, a man “fired 62 7.62 x 39mm rounds through a lawfully purchased Century International Arms SKS-style semiautomatic assault rifle” at members of the Republican team. Kate Nocera and Lissandra Villa, in this harrowing piece, reflect on the act of terrorism and how close the event came to changing modern politics and life as we know it.

 

It occurred to a few of them then that maybe the dugout wasn’t really that safe after all. And if you go to the field, you can see bullet holes through the top of the dugout, sheds, and metal poles on the fence.

 

3. This is why baseball is so white (Alvin Chang, October 24, 2017, Vox)

In this powerful collection of personal memory and demographic information related to baseball from the 1980’s to 2016, Alvin Chang writes that even though baseball teams have slowly become more diverse, the culture surrounding baseball has not.

 

But only looking at who’s on the field misses something very important: Baseball is still very white. The people who are in power are almost all white — and the cultural forces behind baseball are too.

4. He Was the Best We’d Ever Seen: On Baseball, Greatness, and Writing (Seth Sawyers, Lit Hub)

High school baseball up in the Appalachians is a rough red sleeve wiped against the nostrils four dozen times. It’s a Dan’s Mountain wind whistling your batting helmet’s ear hole. It’s a dozen scattered parents, wrapped in four, five layers, large cups of Sheetz coffee long gone cold on the warped bleachers etched: Sentinels Rule Campers Suck.

 

In this personal essay, Seth Sawyers reflects on playing baseball against Walker Chapman, a baseball legend in his hometown, and what it means to seek greatness in both writing and sport.

5. The Art of Letting Go (Mina Kimes, writer, with illustrator Mickey Duzyj, October 4, 2016, ESPN The Magazine)

As Major League Baseball struggles to overcome its staid image and lure younger fans — according to Nielsen, most of the sport’s TV viewers are over 50 — the simple bat flip has come to symbolize the culture war being waged within its ranks.

While bat-flipping is seen as disrespectful during baseball games in the U.S., it’s a celebrated part of baseball in Korea. Why? After finding no satisfying answer from American and Korean sports writers and historians, writer Mina Kimes, accompanied by illustrator Mickey Duzyj, traveled to Korea to learn more about why bat flipping is an integral part of the game.

6. How to make the Team USA women’s baseball team (Natalie Weiner, August 22, 2018, SB Nation)

While women in Japan, Australia, and Canada are encouraged to play baseball, the same does not happen in the U.S.

 

In the U.S., not only are there are no reliable opportunities for women to play professional baseball, but the sport is still considered taboo for women — even though they’ve been playing it for over a century.

Natalie Weiner explores the various factors — sexist societal expectations, lack of financial incentive, an uninformed public, funding from universities that prompts women to switch from playing baseball to softball — that make it difficult for women baseball players to commit to their craft.

Related Read: The Old Ball Game: 100 Years After Amanda Clement, Baseball Still Can’t Recruit Female Umpires (Britni de la Cretaz, February 12, 2018, Bitch Magazine)

7. Home Field Disadvantage (Kelsey McKinney, November 2018, Longreads)

Because of lack of general support for women’s baseball, the U.S. team only had the chance to train together for five days before the 10-day 2018 Women’s Baseball World Cup — and even at the World Cup, there was barely an audience for their games. Each player on the U.S. team, remarkably talented, had overcome a lifetime of disparaging attitudes toward their participation in the sport, as Kelsey McKinney makes clear through her research and wide range of personal interviews in this piece.

 

According to a survey of high school athletics conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, almost half a million boys play baseball at the high school level. In the 2017–2018 school year, only 1,762 girls played baseball.

 

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

 

 

‘The Home Is a Place as Wild as Any in the World.’

Moose grazing in Cook Inlet with Anchorage Alaska in the background. Jonny No Trees / Getty

Alex Madison | Longreads | May 2019 | 13 minutes (3,462 words)

In the opening pages of Chia-Chia Lin’s gorgeous debut novel, The Unpassing, ten-year-old Gavin lays in the grass with his father, searching for meteors in an autumn sky. His father claims to see them, but Gavin is doubtful: “Either my eyes were not fast enough, or he willed those fragments of space debris into being. They flamed with the intensity of his wanting.”

We learn Gavin’s family has followed this flame of wanting from Taiwan to the U.S. and eventually all the way to Anchorage, where Gavin’s father feels “closer to the stars.” It’s 1986, and Gavin and his three siblings — Pei Pei, Natty and Ruby — eagerly anticipate the launch of the Challenger shuttle, hungrily gathering details about civilian astronaut Christa McAuliffe. Their world hums with yearning and potential. But before the first chapter ends, Gavin contracts meningitis and slips into a coma, only to awaken in a new world: a world in which the Challenger has exploded, and four-year-old Ruby has caught his illness and died. What follows is the unspooling of a new, lonelier life for each family member.

While Ruby’s death charges each of the novel’s movements, my experience of reading was filled with more wonder than sadness. Even as calamity shortens their childhoods, Gavin and his siblings remain vibrant. Their sorrow can’t erase the marvels of never-ending summer light or the joys of tromping among mysterious fauna with new friends. Grief also holds its own wretched beauty — peeling away surfaces and exposing raw feeling. The aura of grief hovers at the edges of Gavin’s experiences, but his observations are also threaded with strangeness and humor.

Chia-Chia Lin is heartbreakingly attuned to the nuance and depth of the children’s perspectives, and Gavin’s narration reflects an acute sensitivity to his family’s emotional weather. Her prose is unadorned but luminous, distilled to potent precision: “two punch holes” of Natty’s pupils in the night, “shredded clouds” announcing summer, a baseball cap that “sliced and resliced a line in the air.” Read more…