Search Results for: Details

Wrestling With My Father

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Brian Gresko | Longreads | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

 

1.

When I was a child, it seemed my dad only touched to hurt. Hugs were scarce, and cuddles not an option for “big boys.”

My family ate dinner early, and when I was about 8 and my brother 4, we would beg Dad to wrestle after we cleared our plates. Most evenings he said no, choosing instead to do push-ups and sit-ups or, more often than not, watch the news. But occasionally, according to some calendar our childish minds couldn’t fathom, he agreed, and we’d take up position in the living room.

In our corner at the foot of the steps, my brother and I would huddle, ready to rush him. This was our only move. Swarm, then clasp our tiny bodies to his great one, hoping to drag him to the ground with our weight. A kind of violent embrace.

My dad, on his knees in sweats, gigantic mitts at his side, had a variety of assaults, which he would announce with monstrous growls.

The Scissors! Lying on his side with me between his thighs, he squeezed downward, crushing me in the middle. I was sure my insides were going to come out of my mouth or into my pants. My mom, dishes done, passing us on her way up the stairs, would chastise him. “You’re going to give them hernias!”

The Claw! With fingers splayed, he grabbed my chest, digging into the flesh as if he could rip out the heart, still beating. “No, Dad, no!” I screamed while my brother, tenacious as fuck, pummeled him from behind till Dad swatted him onto his ass. Then the claw would rain upon him, and I’d be at Dad’s back, trying futilely to rescue my wailing brother. Later, the bruises formed constellations around our nipples.

The Steamroller! Instead of pinning us, Dad would roll his whole body across ours, back and forth, again and again, the only time I recall touching parts of him like his thighs or his back or his hair. The force of his mass would mash us against the carpet, giving us rug burn, knocking the wind from our lungs.

Forget screaming“uncle”: with us trapped under his knees, Dad commanded we beg our mother for help. As the pressure built, we’d holler at the top of our lungs for her, the game no longer so fun. Sometimes she came to the top of the stairs, crying. “You’re hurting them!”

“Oh, lighten up,” he’d say. “We’re roughhousing.”
Read more…

Storytelling the Flood: Elizabeth Rush on Empathy and Climate Change

Allard Schager / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Bradley Babendir | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (4,357 words)

In Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Milkweed Editions), Elizabeth Rush visits people and communities made immediately vulnerable by the rising sea levels that are brought on by climate change. She interviews people who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and the world they once knew to flooding and other disasters. Some just want to be able to afford to leave, while others are willing to withstand everything to stay.

Rush pushes through the rhetoric around climate change to look closely at the consequences. Not the ones that will happen at some point down the road, but the ones that are happening now. She travels from Louisiana to Florida to California and elsewhere to see and try her best to understand what it is like to lose the ground beneath your feet.

We talked by phone about what led her to this book, what carried her through this book, and what comes next for her and her subjects. Read more…

We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

When Forensic “Science” Is Anything But

Blood spatter expert Duane Deaver testifies during a trial in Durham, N.C. in 2003. (AP Photo/Sarah Davis, Pool, File)

Part two of Pamela Colloff’s ProPublica/New York Times “Blood Will Tell” investigation into the faulty forensic “science” of blood spatter analysis came out today. It’s a sobering look at the reliability — or lack there of — of what has become an important crime scene investigation technique, and anyone who cares about criminal justice or understands forensics only via Dexter should read it. If you haven’t yet read part one, which details the unlikely arrest and conviction of Joe Bryan for the murder of his wife, Mickey, now’s the time:

When Robert Thorman settled into the witness box on the fifth and final day of the state’s case, it marked a turn in the prosecution’s fortunes. Thorman was the bloodstain-pattern analyst who was called to the Bryan home when investigators were still working the scene. As an interpreter of bloodstains, Thorman possessed a singular expertise, and the prosecution would use this to bring its hazy narrative into focus, lending a sense of scientific certainty to an otherwise equivocal set of facts…

The district attorney began by leading Thorman through a recitation of his credentials. The detective explained that he had served as a military police officer for 20 years before working his way up through the ranks of several small law-enforcement agencies and that he had been trained in bloodstain interpretation. The jury did not know that Thorman’s training was limited to a 40-hour class he took four months before Mickey was killed.

Bryan was convicted despite a complete lack of other forensic evidence (in fact, there was evidence that pointed away from him), an extremely improbable timeline, and no motive; there is zero evidence that he was anything other a supportive husband who was deeply in love with his wife. Then he got a re-trial, and was convicted a second time on the same shoddy evidence.

Thorman told the jury not only that the flashlight was in the bedroom at the time of the shooting but also that the killer, before fleeing the scene, had changed into clothes that were already in the Bryan home. He delivered his findings with the authority of an expert, stripping away the ambiguities of the state’s case. As he spoke to the jury, he grounded his findings in the certainty of science. “Based on my knowledge and experience in bloodstain interpretation,” he said, “the flashlight itself was right next to or near the source of energy, that being the gun.” By the time the guilty verdict came down on the last day of the trial, it seemed like a foregone conclusion. Joe was again sentenced to 99 years.

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Somewhere Under My Left Ribs: A Nurse’s Story

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Christie Watson | Excerpt from The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story | Tim Duggan Books | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,508 words)

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The landscape of theaters must be terrifying for patients, but it’s becoming normal for me. It’s amazing what you can get used to. Life wasn’t always like this.

The first operation that I watch is a heart-lung transplant. I am nineteen years old and still a student nurse. The operation takes so long: over twelve hours. It requires a team of surgeons to behave like a relay team; but instead of a baton, they pass between them a human heart and lungs. I’ve been looking after the patient waiting for the new set of lungs that day: a fourteen-year-old boy named Aaron suffering from cystic fibrosis, who is confined to bed, oxygen tubes inserted into his nose, with a tired, wet cough and sallow gray skin. I help him get ready for the operation. I rub cocoa butter onto his dry knees, take away his Game Boy and swear to guard it with my life. I wet his lips with a small salmon-pink sponge that I dip in sterile water, not wanting to risk the tiniest possibility of him being exposed to any germs.

Aaron’s room glows with lights in the shape of stars and moons surrounding his hospital bed and a journal is hidden under his pillow. There is a small corkboard next to his bed that his stepdad has Blu-tacked to the wall, covered in a mosaic of photographs of him with his friends, every single one of them smiling. It is a common thing for a child’s hospital room to be personalized. Aside from the oxygen piped through the wall and the suction canister with its thick transparent tubing, it could be a typical teenage bedroom. Read more…

‘Choose Marriage or Education’

(Juan Pelegrín / Getty)

Madhur Anand | Brick | Fall 2017 | 18 minutes (3,526 words)

May his head burn! Your words are rocks thrown at my forehead! I will peel her skin off! Threats and insults like these do not sound that bad in their native Punjabi. Even when they are directed at loved ones. Even when they come from your own mother. The pronouns are catalysts for combustion, a quick, irreversible reaction, with only ashes for proof. However, an English word like partition can sit in an Indian’s mouth for hours, or even for a lifetime, in motion toward something shapeless, and then melted, gone. Sometimes partition represents a noun (a broken door), sometimes it is a verb (to divide into parts), but it is never clear who is at fault. An Urdu poet once called partition a birthday party for anonymous and a funeral for unanimity. A mathematician saw it in his mind as a fractal, a Koch snowflake, a continuous curve without tangents. A political scientist speaks only of before-and-after maps, the thick red Radcliffe Line. Nobody ever truly understands one another. Translation is never simple.

***

Mother makes chapattis. They are perfectly round, a circumference entirely calculable by first measuring a tangent, thanks to the discovery of constants. The first one she makes is reserved for the Brahmin, who will come later in the day to pick it up. The last one she makes is for a crow or a dog, whoever comes first. The rest are for us, but there must always be one left over at the end of the day, reserved for nobody, for nothing. That is how Mother would define abundance if she knew the word in English. How she achieves it, on the other hand, is a mystery. I am already bathed, dressed in my salwar kameez, and outside, content to throw five nameless stones onto the cement floor. I grasp them in my fist in groups of one, two, three, and then four while tossing another straight up. That one will fall either where I want it to or where it will. I hope for intersection but do not worry too much about the outcome. The five of us are here now. Mother, father, sister, brother, and me. There will come a time when I will be the only one left of us. Still up in the air. Read more…

Stacey Abrams’ Historic Win in Georgia: A Reading List

ATLANTA, GA - MAY 22: Georgia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams takes the stage to declare victory in the primary during an election night event on May 22, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. If elected, Abrams would become the first African American female governor in the nation. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, former state representative Stacey Abrams won the Democratic nomination for Governor of Georgia, becoming the first black woman gubernatorial nominee of a major political party in U.S. history. She defeated her opponent handily, beating Stacey Evans with a three-to-one margin with a platform calling for Medicaid expansion, criminal justice reform, gun safety measures, affordable childcare, and universal pre-K.

Abrams faces a tough general election in November. Only four African-American politicians have served as governor in the U.S. ever, with none in the Deep South since Reconstruction. A run-off election will be held in July to determine the Republican nominee, and of the candidates likely to oppose Abrams, both support looser gun laws, tax cuts for high earners, and defunding sanctuary cities as part of a “crackdown on illegal immigration.” Abrams hopes to win by building a multi-racial coalition of progressives (including new voters) that taps into Georgia’s shifting demographics.

Abrams is part of a national wave of women running for office in record numbers, as well as a galvanizing energy among progressives partly inspired by opposition to President Trump. Her candidacy has drawn national attention; should Abrams win, one of the most populous red states could be in play for progressives seeking national office for the first time in decades. It could also signal a significant shift in values and priorities for the Deep South.

For a deeper dive, here are a few pieces that smartly contextualize Abrams’ victory, as well as what’s at stake in the fall.

On Stacey Abrams and the Georgia Primary

“Stacey Abrams Wins Democratic Primary for Governor, Making History.” (Jonathan Martin & Alexander Burns, New York Times, May 2018)

Martin and Burns consider the history-making moment of Abrams’ primary win and why the candidate has drawn support from Democrats at the federal level. The reporters also note other primary successes among progressive Democrats Tuesday night, especially women candidates like Amy McGrath of Kentucky.

“Stacey Abrams Makes History in the Georgia Primary.” (Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, May 2018)

Bethea talks to a cross section of conservative and progressive Georgia political insiders about Abrams’ chances in the general election.

“America Has Never Had a Black Woman Governor. Stacey Abrams Has Something to Say About That.” (Jamilah King, Mother Jones, April 2018)

Reporter Jamilah King profiles Abrams, capturing the candidate’s appeal to black women voters and her push to assemble a “rainbow coalition.”

On Change in the South

“Reverse Migration Might Turn Georgia Blue.” (Alana Semuels, Atlantic, May 2018)

Young, unmarried blacks and single women are moving to the South, especially Atlanta and its suburbs, in large numbers. Searching for lower housing prices and better quality of life, transplants tend to be more progressive than other residents. They could be instrumental in helping Abrams achieve victory.

“Racism is Everywhere, So Why Not Move South?” (Reniqua Allen, New York Times, July 2017)

Allen takes a closer look at why black millennials like her are flocking to southern cities.

“Slavery’s Southern Legacy.” (Sophia Nguyen, Harvard Magazine, May 2018)

Nguyen reports on a new book (by researchers Avidit Acharya and Matthew Blackwell), which claims that political attitudes in the South, especially on issues of race, can be predicted by how deeply individual counties relied on slavery prior to the Civil War.

 “’Please God, Don’t Let Me Get Stopped’: Around Atlanta, No Sanctuary for Immigrants.” (Vivian Yee, New York Times, November 2017)

According to Yee, “the regional ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) office in Atlanta made nearly 80 percent more arrests in the first half of this year than it did in the same period last year, the largest increase of any field office in the country.” The Republican contenders in Stacey Abrams’ race have run strident anti-immigration campaigns.

“When the South Was the Most Progressive Region in America.” (Blain Roberts & Ethan J. Kytle, Atlantic, January 2018)

Roberts and Kytle, both historians, discuss how the post-Civil War’s South created multi-racial democracies based on state constitutions that were more progressive than many in the North. Reconstruction era activists and politicians, the authors contend, “[provide] a blueprint for a liberal resurgence that may already be under way in the 21st century South.”

On National Trends

“Red State, Blue City.” (David A. Graham, Atlantic, March 2017)

Graham posits that U.S. politics are growing increasingly polarized along a rural/urban divide.

“A Progressive Electoral Wave is Sweeping the Country.” (John Nichols, The Nation, June 2017)

Nichols details the importance of down-ballot victories, across the country, that signal a rising tide of resistance to the policies of President Trump.

It Isn’t That Shocking

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | May 2018 | 22 minutes (6,055 words)

 

It is a truth not nearly enough disseminated — despite all the discussion about depression and the recourses for those who suffer from it — that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can work. I had it six times in the basement of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City in 2003 when I was 27 years old.

I’d awakened the morning before my first treatment in my mother’s apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. I remember staring into the mirror, mute. My mother said: “You look haunted.” What was my mother seeing? I remember seeing “it” too. My face was cradled in my hands, as though they held up its sagging contents. I looked captive, as though I were staring from behind prison bars.

For the previous six months, I had been unresponsive to a host of psychotropic drugs called in as a breakwater against a tidal wave of morbid depression. Who had I been? The details: I was a college graduate who had been a child actor. I was a chatty and expressive person, prone to melancholy moods but capable of romantic enthusiasm for life. I had been, simply, a human being, before illness descended and set off deterioration. Now, I was a clump of raw nerve endings.

It’s an old story. Much like prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, depression, I often think, is the world’s oldest ailment. But old or not, it is my story too.

Read more…

The High Price of Being a #MeToo Whistleblower

Seth Wenig / AP Photo, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Tricia Romano | Longreads | May 2018 | 7 minutes (1,770 words)

 

A few weeks ago I was at dinner in New York with an old friend, an editor at the New York Times. She thrust out her phone. “Oh my god, did you see? Tanya!”

Tanya was Tanya Selvaratnam, one of the four women who’d accused New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of physical abuse in a New Yorker story by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow. She and I knew Tanya well. I’d met Tanya 15 years ago when I was a nightlife reporter for the Village Voice. We were fast friends and gallivanted around town together. Now, we had a few bazillion mutual close friends and acquaintances. In fact, right after dinner, I’d be going to her apartment to sleep, as I often did when I came back to New York to visit from Seattle, where I now live. Until that moment, I had thought I would be meeting up with her. She had texted that morning that she’d be home late, as she was going to a party. “Cool,” I wrote. “See you then.”

Instead, my phone started blowing up with messages from our mutual friends.

“Holy cow. Just finished reading the Eric Schneiderman NYer story. What a psycho. Are there any NYC AGs who go after the ‘bad guys’ that aren’t totally twisted? It’s worse than an episode of ‘Billions.’ Glad Tanya is ok.”

“I’m really sorry this happened to her and think she’s seriously brave for talking.”

“Ugh.”

I wrote Tanya and asked if she was ok.

She replied: “I won’t be staying at home tonight. If anyone asks about me, don’t say anything. If the buzzer rings or someone knocks on door, don’t answer. I’ll explain later. At dinner now. I’ll call after. Sorry I didn’t tell you before what was going on xo.”

My dinner date and I sat at the table, our eyes glued to our phones, as we read through the New Yorker story and its horrific details.

“Oh my god,” she said, “I just got to Tanya’s section.”

“Same.”

Silence.

Over dinner, we tried to process it. Some things became clearer to me in retrospect. Tanya had always been a pretty guarded person, and when I asked her how the demise of her relationship with her high-profile boyfriend had come about, she offered vague comments: “I’m glad it’s over.” “Happy to be free.” “Never dating a politician again. Always on.” No sturm, no drang, and devoid of details.

It turned out she’d been staying quiet for a specific reason — and had been cooperating with the New Yorker for many months.

Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Four: The Gospel of Bundy

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 46 minutes (11,600 words)

Part 4 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The best way to get to Bundyville is to drive straight into the desert and prepare to never come back.

The ghost town that used to be home to the Bundy family is reachable only by deeply rutted roads covered with red quicksand so thick that it can suck in even the burliest 4×4 if you hit it wrong.

On the map, Bundyville is actually called Mount Trumbull. But back in the early 1900s, people started referring to it as Bundyville, because, according to one Arizona Republic article from 1951, “every single soul in the tiny village except one person answer to the name Bundy!” There was never electricity, no phones.

Abraham Bundy, Cliven’s great-grandfather established the town with his wife, Ella, in 1916. Their son, Roy, homesteaded there with his own family. And Cliven’s dad, David, was born in Bundyville — a place “perched atop a cold and forbidding plateau at an elevation of 5,200 feet,” according to the Arizona Republic article.

Before World War II, as many as 200 people — mostly Bundys — made their home in Bundyville, despite its remote location. Newspapers took six days to arrive. Four postmasters doled out mail twice a week. There was a school, a general store.

It was a Bundy utopia. A place that was all theirs, a place no one else wanted. And yet, still, it slipped right through their fingers. There wasn’t enough water to sustain them. By the 1950s, the place was mostly abandoned. Little had changed between the time the Bundys arrived and the time they left. “We heard the coyotes howl at night,” one Bundy resident once said, “but did not see a living soul.”

I want to stand in that place — where the family’s curse of loss began and where their anger at the government may have originated. I want to go to the middle of nowhere to see how far this family has been willing to go to live by their own code.

Bundyville still holds meaning for the family. Each year, hundreds of Bundys make a pilgrimage back for a giant Bundy family reunion. It’s like it’s not just a place in the desert, but a state of mind, too.

When Abraham Bundy and his wife arrived there, it must have seemed like it was the only place where they could fathom solace, calm. Far from civilization, far from the reaches of the federal government, the family tried to tame the landscape, farm, and raise livestock for themselves with little forage or water. To live by their own rules. To make an intractable place bend to their will.

I explain all this to a representative at the BLM’s Arizona Strip field office — that I’d like to go to the place the Bundy story started. And she clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me and my producer, Ryan Haas, to go there this time of year. It’s been raining recently, she tells me. I think, so what? I’m from Oregon. But rain is unusual in that part of the Southwest, and it turns the clay-like dirt on the roads into a silty paste known to suck up tires, stranding unprepared people in potentially deadly temperatures until someone can come with help.

I read about an old lady who got lost on the road to Mount Trumbull and almost died before anyone found her. Another article talks about some hikers who’d come across skeletons in the desert there.

The outdoorsy dude-bros at a Jeep rental place in Hurricane, Utah, were skeptical, too: Just before we pull out of the lot in the burliest Jeep they’ve got, one of them throws a shovel into the back for us. “Better than nothing,” he says with a shrug.

The next morning, we wake up at 3 a.m. The way we’re figuring, if we’re going to make it, we’d better go while the ground is frozen. Read more…